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Paper short abstract

This paper examines voluntary shifts from office work to gastronomy and food production in Poland, showing how manual labour creates meaning and imagined futures, while revealing class tensions over access to them.

Paper long abstract

As stated in the panel abstract, contemporary debates on the future of work often emphasise digitalisation and automation, while manual and craft-based labour is framed as residual or nostalgic. This paper explores a contrasting trajectory: voluntary career shifts from office-based work to gastronomy and food production, where making tangible products becomes central.

Drawing on qualitative research in Poland, I examine how participants narrate such transitions and articulate the value of manual labour. I focus on the material, temporal, and relational qualities of work with food: the tangibility and immediacy of outcomes, and interactions that produce recognition and affective feedback. These accounts reveal a paradox: physical effort is often downplayed, while the visibility and resonance of results are foregrounded.

By treating these practices as forms of productive engagement combining creativity, skill, and affective labour, the paper shows how manual work can become a site of meaning-making, self-expression, and connection, aligning with the affective-moral infrastructure of late capitalism rather than returning to pre-industrial modes. While my previous studies drew on Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance (Bachórz 2023), the argument remains open to alternative frameworks and further empirical material, contributing to broader debates on the value and potential of manual labour.

At the same time, the paper highlights tensions embedded in these hopeful, aspirational visions of manual labour: it is transformed, aestheticized, and partially disembodied, which may align with middle-class projects of self-realisation while marginalizing working-class experiences. The broadest question, then, is who has access to these hopeful ‘futures,’ and under what conditions.