Dominant narratives about the "future of work" overwhelmingly frame it as a technological inevitability driven by digitalisation, automation, and artificial intelligence. These framings have gained significant traction in organizational psychology and managerial discourse, often positioning psychologists as facilitators of smooth technological adaptation. Yet such accounts obscure the social, ecological, and geopolitical crises that shape contemporary work far more unevenly and unpredictably than technological trajectories. This contribution argues that the prevailing techno-centric focus narrows psychologists' ability to engage reflexively and ethically with the world of work at a time when crises—climate breakdown, democratic erosion, economic instability, war, and intergenerational precarity—are redefining what work is and what it can be.
By disentangling "the future" from linear narratives of technological progress, the presentation invites a repositioning of applied psychology within broader societal and planetary contexts. It highlights how current future-oriented discourses reproduce exclusions by assuming that all workers and forms of labour are equally shaped by digital transformation, while large segments remain structurally marginalized or untouched by it. Moreover, it foregrounds how future-of-work rhetoric carries affective contents, revealing societal anxiety, resignation, and a shrinking political imagination.
Through this critique, the presentation aligns with the symposium's call for a psychology capable of taking a principled, critical stance in times of deep crisis. Rather than acting as a neutral mediator of managerial agendas, psychologists can contribute by interrogating dominant imaginaries, attending to lived realities, and situating organizational interventions within complex, crisis-laden socioecological systems. A more contextual, plural, and crisis-attuned understanding of the "future of work" becomes analytically necessary and ethically imperative for the discipline's relevance.