| Summary: | The context and inspiration of Charles Handy’s The Future of Work and its sequels, The Age of Unreason (1989) and The Empty Raincoat (1994), were provided by the emergence and persistence of historically high levels of unemployment, particularly in the UK, during the early 1980s. Briefly, during the post‑war period the industrialised West had been more or less free from the threat and actuality of unemployment which had blighted the lives of many working people during the inter‑war years. The long post‑war economic boom produced a generation of workers who had little fear of losing their jobs and, in the UK at least, were protected by a combination of the welfare state and dominant trade unions. Optimistic assumptions concerning economic stability and progress were broadly shared by economists, politicians and industrialists alike.
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