Is the fourth wave of industrialisation really just a return to the first?

It seems appropriate to use the metaphor of waves, because I spend most of my time at the beach these days. At night, if I open the doors at high tide, I can hear the waves crashing onto the sand. It never gets old.

After more than 25 years in recruitment, scrolling LinkedIn is practically hard-coded into my DNA. And recently, while doing exactly that, I noticed something had shifted.

The rise of entrepreneurship

Where once the majority of my network were senior PAYG employees, now a surprising number are founders or business owners. These are some very capable heavy-hitters; I’m not talking Uber deliveries or Amway on weekends. (To be clear, this sample is biased to my industry and experience. I’m not claiming that half the workforce has suddenly gone freelance.)

We all learnt about the cottage industry and the first wave of industrialisation in primary school (Spinning Jenny anyone?).

Then came electricity and mass production, followed by computers and automation. Today’s fourth wave brings connected systems, cloud technology, data and AI into almost everything we do.

Before the factories were built, the cottage industry functioned thus: merchants delivered materials which were turned into finished goods by people working in or near their homes. These finished goods were later collected by the merchant and sold to the paying customer.

Pretty much describes today’s creator economy. It could almost be on Etsy’s ‘how it works’ page.

The fourth wave of industrialisation

Today, if you are a self-employed consultant, designer, recruiter, developer, or advisor, your work style involves you:

• owning / controlling your own tools;

  
  

• working from a household;

  
  

• organising your own day;

  
  

• selling expertise rather than attendance; and

  
  

• collaborating with other specialists as needed.

  
  

We new-wave cottage industry workers operate in an environment of asynchronous and borderless collaboration, augmented by technology, continually upskilling ourselves.

In other words: work when and where you like but make sure you keep up with the latest tech advancements or you’ll be left behind.

The gig economy vs cottage industry

There are a couple of important distinctions between the 18^th century and today:

• at our best, we are not beholden to one merchant who dictates what we do and what we are paid. We can search the globe for clients, suppliers and collaborators. Of course, anyone relying on one customer or one digital platform may feel that the old merchant has not disappeared so much as acquired an app;

• the new “cottage industry” isn’t the whole economy. It is primarily knowledge workers: the portable, digitised chunk of the service economy. There will always be “IRL” jobs that can’t be done from our spare rooms; and

• there is a difference between working from home and working for yourself from home. Both are good, but they are not the same.

I, for one, will be forever grateful for the rapid digitisation that was accelerated by Covid. It has allowed me to do what I’m doing today.

The prodigal worker returns

So, what am I trying to say?

We spent two hundred years moving work out of the cottage and into the factory, office tower and corporate machine. Then somebody invented Wi-Fi, Slack and cloud accounting, and we took a big chunk of it home again.

And I’m not angry about it.