We are living in a time of great uncertainty. There is an unsettledness in the political, economic and social climate of many countries in the so-called “developed” world that is unlike anything I can remember. Bauman (2001) talks about “liquid modernity” as a historical effect of the instability created by market-based, individualised and technologically-enabled environments. If this is what we are experiencing, then it isn’t just the shape-changing fluidity of a flexible and increasingly online (working) life; rather, it feels more as though we are trapped inside the liquid of one of those snow globes and someone is giving it a vigorous shake.
The signs have not been good for more than a decade. I first heard the word “austerity” when it was imposed by the International Monetary Fund and thereby triggered riots in Sudan where I was working in 1983. Overnight, the price of bread, sugar and cooking oil almost doubled. The Sudanese government were told to stop growing tomatoes, groundnuts and other food and concentrate instead on cash crops for export: cotton, sugar and tobacco (Brown 2008). Three years later there was a famine of biblical proportions just across the border in Ethiopia. So much for austerity.
