Structural unemployment has become the key problem of post-industrial societies, that is, societies in which more than half the workforce is in service jobs. To speak of unemployment as structural implies there is little point in looking at political responsibilities, at least not in the sense of party politics. In France, for example, 17 programmes to fight unemployment were implemented by three conservative and five socialist governments in the past 20 years but the rate of unemployment has constantly risen.

The consolation of theories saying unemployment is cyclical has gone: unemployment rises in recovery as well as recession. "Jobless growth" has become a hallmark of our time. This means that more and more people must see unemployment not as an unpleasant interruption of their career but an irreparable break in the course of their lives.

The German experience after unification has shown that unemployment can only be partially compensated for by money: if you lose your job, your social identity is also threatened because work, mostly in the form of jobs, is a central value of our societies.

Therefore attempts to create a new social contract between the working insiders and the unemployed outsiders in modern societies so that those who can work compensate those who cannot, will fail. The cohesion of our social arrangement depends on a feeling of basic justice shared by members of the group. Among its prerequisites are not only "rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth", the primary goods as political philosopher John Rawls has called them, but also the social bases of self-respect. If you lose your job and are unlikely to get a new one, the basis of your self-respect is destroyed. If this happens to too many people, social justice becomes a chimera and the social contract ceases to function.

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If we agree with the authors of a study entitled Working in America (edited by Robert Sessions and Jack Wortman, University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), that "to be without a job in our society is to be nearly invisible", we must feel more and more threatened by the invisible societies around us.

The question is not whether there is enough work to be done but whether there will be enough jobs, that is, "work which someone is willing but also able to pay for". Of course, new jobs are constantly created, but the problem is the ratio between one new job created by technological progress for 80 or 100 that are lost. The workforce of the automobile industry in the United States, for example, will halve in five years even if car sales exceed the previous high points of 1976 and 1977. It is not unrealistic to assume that half of all existing jobs could be soon eliminated altogether.

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It would be easy to use these figures and comparable ones to write a doomsday scenario of social change. But such a scenario is not inevitable.

First, we are not talking, at least not in this context, about poverty. The number of poor is constantly rising. We are now living in a poor society. We are talking about a problem of distribution not of production: we ought to be able to solve it.

Second, there is no need for anthropological pessimism, expressed in the view that humans must work and that homo sapiens as a species will not survive if this need to work is not fulfilled. Homo sapiens alias homo faber must work, he or she must do something. They are characterised by the besoin de faire quelque chose as a sociological classic, Vilfredo Pareto, said, but this does not imply that they must have a job.

Third, we should try to see the developments discussed so far not as a story of failure but of success. As US philosopher Frithjof Bergmann has suggested: "The last 200 years represented perhaps only a transition or rather a tooling-up period - which are notoriously wasteful and cumbersome - but now that full-grown technology has finally arrived there is no presumption whatsoever that 40 hours of work every week for 45 years of everybody's life should be filled by a job.

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"On the contrary: the basic purpose of technology from its first beginnings was the elimination of human labour. This is the common denominator that extends all the way back to the first wheel and from there forwards to the loom and the steam-engine and eventually to the computer. If there are not to be enough jobs in the future it will only mean that we at long last have succeeded!" This, perhaps somewhat over-optimistic, point of view should guide our anticipation of the society of the future. Since we do not seem to be able to think of a large fourth sector, after agriculture, industry and service, where people would find new jobs, we must assume that in the society of the 21st century individuals will have to organise their lives in novel ways.

To quote Bergmann once more: "We should turn away sharply from the parcelling out of both work and free time in small crouton-sized bits.

"Instead we should compress and pull together the chips of each until life would be structured into larger and more satisfying blocks. One could work intensely and concentratedly for six months for example and then have six months of work-free time; and for many it might be better to divide the time by years, or even into stretches of two or three or still more years."

Our value-system will change. We are back to the politics of mentalities: how can we succeed to change the normative fabric of our societies? How will we succeed to create a "culture after the elimination of labor" (Bergmann) As of today, we have not developed convincing scenarios on how to produce meaning for the work-free stages of adult life. That is the main reason why the future development of the media and their possible control is of such great importance.

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When we talk about value changes we are, as a rule, passive and rigorous. On the one hand, we think of them more as a process that we must endure than as something we can shape and direct ourselves. On the other, we mostly think of value changes as if switching on or off a light bulb.

We must develop instead what I should like to call a dimmer attitude, trying to use our social fantasy in pushing ahead change on a local basis, not with a bang but with a wink. We must develop regional utopias, sneak alternatives into mainstream thinking. In our societies we must at least create the legal framework that would make such experiments possible. What we need to develop is a culture of exceptions.

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Wolf Lepenies is rector of the Wissen-schaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany.