Theorists of Transformation
This chapter focuses on a range of what might be termed “grand narratives” of the transformation of employment. Specifically, it looks at broad accounts of changes envisaged as taking place during the neoliberal period that result, among other things, in
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2.1 Introduction This chapter focuses on a range of what might be termed “grand narratives” of the transformation of employment. Specifically, it looks at broad accounts of changes envisaged as taking place during the neoliberal period that result, among other things, in the disempowerment of workers through increasing precarity. In the light of the comment of Colin Williams, cited in the previous chapter, regarding the relative isolation from each other in which such theories are developed, some caution should be exercised in attempting to draw together these disparate approaches. For instance, the perspectives that have emerged from autonomist Marxism in recent years are at odds with the approach taken by the US sociologist of employment Arne Kalleberg or by those drawing on Guy Standing’s theory of the precariat. In addition, the relationship between these grand narratives and the more detailed accounts of precarity and insecurity, considered in subsequent chapters, are rarely straightforward. Instead, these
© The Author(s) 2019 J. Choonara, Insecurity, Precarious Work and Labour Markets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13330-6_2
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narratives should be seen as forming a broad theoretical backdrop in which the notion of precarity increasingly becomes part of the common sense. The chapter begins with a group of writers—Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Sennett and Manuel Castells—who produced pioneering accounts of an emerging precariousness of work in the neoliberal period. Section 2.3 explores the distinctive approach to the transformation of class adopted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in books such as Empire and Multitude, and by some in the autonomist Marxist tradition more broadly, which, while less focused on precarity per se, has become an important framework underpinning many contemporary writings on that theme. Section 2.4 looks at the work of Standing, for whom precarity leads to the emergence of a specific class, the precariat, distinct from the wider working class. Dissatisfaction with such an approach has led other authors to focus instead on the autonomist perspectives discussed in 2.3 or to seek to disentangle precarity from the precariat, as discussed in Sect. 2.5, which focuses in particular on the theoretical resources offered by the work of Kalleberg. Finally, two broader concepts that frame discussions of precarity need to be considered. The first is the notion of dual or segmented labour markets. This has sometimes been offered as a theoretical framework to explain the division of workers into precarious and non-precarious groupings at the level of the labour market. The second is the literature of flexibility and the flexible firm, which sees both functional flexibility and numerical flexibility as a necessary counterpart to the neoliberal restructuring of employment. A final section considers these approaches.
2.2 Apostles of New Capitalism Theories of the transformation of capitalism and employment have a long pedigree. For instance, from the late 1960s o
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