Work and the Person in the Pandemic: Towards a Generative Evolution

According to the results of The European Workforce Survey 2020, workers have adapted remarkably readily to the new and exceptional circumstances created by the pandemic and the corresponding containment measures, and shown themselves to be “a resilient workforce” able to draw upon personal ethical qualities such as self-organization, flexibility, responsibility, cooperation, and solidarity to face with individual and subjective resources the general disruption of the external, consolidated organizational system. How will it be possible to capitalize on this passage, so unexpected but at the same time so fundamental for restoring the full relationship between the personal dimension and work activity, and re-establish work in its true anthropological and cosmic value and sustainability? In this paper we will try to answer this question with the help of Max Scheler’s phenomenology of work. The hypothesis to be verified is that the evolution of the current form of work, initiated in response to the pandemic, can generate substantial anthropological improvements, if we stop settling ourselves into organizational automatisms and return to activating processes of ethical subjectivation even in the sphere of work.