Conceptualising Precarity and Insecurity
The aim of this chapter is to suggest coherent definitions of, and ways of measuring, employment precarity and insecurity, drawing on the literature of the sociology of work, employment relations theory, labour economics and related disciplines. On the ba
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3.1 Introduction The previous chapter focused on “grand narratives” of the transformation of class, work and employment relations. In these narratives, employment is seen as increasingly contingent and workers increasingly insecure, and this change is often associated with the period of neoliberalism. Yet the evidence presented in these narratives, particularly when it comes to quantitative measures of precarity and insecurity, is seldom convincing. This poses the question: how best to conceptualise and measure these aspects of the employment relation? The aim of this chapter is to propose an answer to that question, drawing on the literature of the sociology of work, employment relations theory, labour economics and related disciplines. While the literature examined here pays greater attention to grounding its insights empirically, and is generally far more cautious in its claims, compared to that of the theorists of transformation, it has nonetheless developed in the context of those discussions. Therefore, care will be taken to show where the academic literature adopts, explicitly or implicitly, the type of perspective outlined in Chapter 2. © The Author(s) 2019 J. Choonara, Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13330-6_3
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One problem that rapidly emerges is that precarity, a term relatively new to academic discourse, is not always defined and, where it is, there is no consistency as to how it is defined. Following a brief discussion of the relevant literature in Sect. 3.2, a parsimonious definition of precarity is derived and justified in Sect. 3.3. It is also argued that this can be measured through a study of the prevalence of non-standard forms of employment and changes to employment tenure. Insecurity, treated here as a subjective counterpart to precarity, has a more established range of usages, briefly discussed in Sect. 3.4. A working definition for two distinctive forms of insecurity—job tenure insecurity and job status insecurity (drawn from Gallie et al. 2017)—is then presented in Sect. 3.5. It is the first of these that is most accurately seen as the subjective counterpart to precarity in the sense that it is defined here. As with much of the literature, it is proposed that insecurity can be estimated through surveys of employees that ask them about their security in their work.
3.2 Visions of Precarity There are two tensions within the literature that make it especially hard to derive a clear definition of precarity. The first, already mentioned in Chapter 2, is that there is a pull between precarity conceived of in a narrow sense, focusing on employment relations, and precarity conceived of in broader terms—to describe poverty, the absence of welfare provision or an existential condition. The second tension is between accounts that seek to generalise about the labour force at large and those focused on narrow sections of the labour force and the specific issues they face. For instance, McDowell et al. (2014) study young South Asia
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