The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
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Power relations, welfare provision, labour rights, and neoliberal regulations and discourses lead to the social production of health inequalities. In this chapter diverse pathways are identified through which the precarization of the labour market affect the physical and mental health of young workers. Longitudinal retrospective data from the 2017 Catalan Youth Survey (n=1,247) are used to obtain typologies of youth labour trajectories. Three ‘types’, representing a continuum of precarity, are proposed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample (n=13) determined according to the typologies. Three pathways emerged through which precarious trajectories affected young workers health and wellbeing: (i) material deprivation; (ii) the limiting of their agency in the construction of future; and (iii) harmful psychosocial working conditions. Precarity and insecurity, understood, after Pierre Bourdieu, as a mode of domination that creates submissive dispositions and constrains workers to the acceptance of exploitation, shape a pathogenic eco-social environment that affects individuals’ health.
This chapter addresses the emergence of an abstract concept of time: time as disentangled from events. Stemming from late medieval to early modern times, this understanding of time has since been consolidated by the progress of industrialized production and the transformation of the concept of labour into abstract labour. Time calculated in working hours became a social relation measured by clock time. In the contemporary world those shifts operate across at least two dimensions and have had a profound social impact, experienced particularly through job insecurity. Firstly, humans tend to live their own relationship with time less and less as subjects with their own autonomy and, secondly, they do so more and more as objects of a transcendent and external time. The subject’s own time is increasingly vulnerable and powerless, while the time that socially regulates their existence is increasingly an imperturbable continuity outside of the order of events. This chapter aims to understand to what extent these two temporal aspects constitute and are incorporated in contemporary forms of labour precarization.
The words ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’ are widely used when discussing work, social conditions and experiences. However, there is no consensus on their meaning or how best to use them to explore social changes.
This book shows how scholars have mapped out these notions, offering substantive analyses of issues such as the relationships between precariousness, debt, migration, health and workers’ mobilisations, and how these relationships have changed in the context of COVID-19.
Bringing together an international group of authors from diverse fields, this book offers a distinctive critical perspective on the processes of precarisation, focusing in particular on the European context.
This chapter introduces the book collection. It outlines the manner in which ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’ have emerged as key terms in contemporary discussions of work, class, social conditions and subjectivities. Various prominent landmarks in discussions of these themes are identified, including contributions by Pierre Boudieu and Judith Butler, the broad sociology of work literature, debates around Guy Standing’s notion of a ‘precariat’ class, and views focused on novel forms of subjectivities. The book introduced by this chapter is based upon a series of critical interventions, without artificially attempting to shoehorn them into a common theoretical framework.
Precarious workers are widely considered too hard to organize, due to their fragmented workplaces and their intersection with other marginal statuses, including being women and migrant workers. This chapter considers disputes in Britain between 2015 and 2019, where, despite the lowest number of officially recorded strikes, some precarious groups of workers won stunning victories. These were achieved through differing strategies, often involving organizing through small independent unions, as well as large established ones. The focus is on three groups: low-paid women care workers, outsourced cleaners (largely from Latin America), and warehouse agency workers from Central and Eastern Europe. It is argued that the struggles of these groups of people need to be understood in their historical context in order to understand continuity and change in the economic and contractual nature of the work they undertake, as well as the specificity of the sectors in which they work.
In the context constituted by the pandemic crisis and the reconfigurations of work and employment that will follow, this chapter returns to the sociological issues raised by precarious work and precariousness, and the dynamics of alternative subjectivities. During the health crisis, care workers and those in contact with customers have been impacted by the pandemic. Teleworking, which combines professional duties with lockdown, and platforms, which perform a great number of supply functions, are replacing former commercial activities. This chapter asks how such forms of outsourcing and distancing reconfigure precariousness. There is a particular focus on platform capitalism, a deregulation process that has subverted employment, erased the frontiers of enterprises and transformed the markers of work. While wider discussion legitimately focuses on labour and social regulation, it has neglected social imagination and practices. Delivery riders’ recent struggles and their presence in grassroots mobilizations in deprived urban areas, the use of platforms for the creation of exchange networks between urban and rural activities and the reshaping of the urban environment through the farming of seasonal produce offer glimpses of possible new forms of social experimentation.
This chapter discusses how precarious workers engage in contentious collective actions outside the realm of institutional politics. It draws on the scholarly work of social movement studies to address three relevant dimensions of social movements: collective identity, organizational patterns and protest repertoire. In so doing, the chapter uncovers the challenges that precarious workers’ movements and the related movement organizations must face when organizing collectively to engage in contentious politics. Additionally, the chapter presents some reflections on how the three above-mentioned dimensions become relevant when considering an emerging yet growing type of precarious worker: platform workers.
This chapter addresses the issue of precarious work in the platform economy. The growth of digital labour platforms has created new forms of organization and outsourcing of labour that generate precariousness and worker insecurity. Online labour platforms transform work along several key dimensions: from full-time to unpredictable hours, from permanent to casual, from salary to piece rates, from local to remote. The chapter considers to what extent these developments represent a continuation of previous trends towards casualization of labour and shifting of costs and risk to workers, and what new elements are brought about by deployment of digital technologies and algorithmic management. The chapter contrasts the rhetoric of platforms with key research results covering issues such as income insecurity, temporal unpredictability, flexibility, regulatory avoidance, fragmented employment patterns and power relations asymmetry. The chapter concludes by outlining policy options and recommendations.
In 1989, the International Labour Organization commissioned a path-breaking report () to test the relevance of the term ‘precariousness’ (a presumed English equivalent of the French précarité). In parallel, French and British sociologists coined a neologism for their own use, namely ‘precarity’ (). Later, in various English-speaking forums, the term precarity was picked up and circulated unevenly. In 2022, it has actually become an accepted neologism in English and appears in various dictionaries as well as in mainstream labour market research (economics and sociology). When a second important cross-national research report was funded by the European Union in the early 2000s (the European Study on Precarious Employment, ESOPE), the researchers working on the report were deeply divided as to the interpretation of their data, qualitative and quantitative alike. Despite all these unexpected developments, the term precarity has now become well established in sociological and economic English-language literature. This certainly does not mean that the meaning of the new English term qua concept has been clarified in the process. Few users of ‘precarity’ are aware of this, and the term’s currency is hardly affected by it.
