The Future of Work Design: Revisiting Blackler and Brown’s (1975) “The Impending Crisis in Job Redesign” in a Relational, Meaningful, and AI-Driven World

This commentary, prepared for the virtual issue “Celebrating 100 years of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology,” revisits the seminal article, “The impending crisis in job redesign,” and reflects on its enduring relevance for contemporary work design scholarship. Blackler and Brown warned that job redesign research risked becoming conceptually ambiguous, methodologically weak, and overly aligned with managerial priorities while neglecting broader psychological and developmental consequences for workers. Drawing on developments over the past five decades, this commentary argues that work design research has evolved along three major trajectories: from static to dynamic work systems, from individualistic to relational perspectives, and from top-down approaches toward employee agency and proactive work design. The commentary examines how contemporary digital technologies and AI reshape not only work structures, but also relational experiences and meaning-making processes at work. Building on these developments, the paper outlines future directions for work design scholarship, emphasizing the need to integrate relational, technological, and meaning-centered perspectives while advancing more human-centered approaches to AI and digitally mediated work systems.