precarity Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Resource Management (3 ed.)
...precarity is a term used by sociologists to refer to the spread of contingent work and insecure employment within the labour market. The term is also used to refer to the subjective condition of those who experience insecure work. See also precariat ....
precarity Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
... A state of being defined by its insecurity and vulnerability. It is an expansive concept, used to apply to a wide variety of situations in which people feel precarious, but it tends to be used to refer to people who are unemployed, underemployed, or insecurely employed. It is also possible to distinguish between groups of people whose situation is more precarious than others—e.g. refugees are generally in a greater state of precarity than people who are unemployed but residing within the borders of a state in which they can claim citizenship. ...
precarity
precariat Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Resource Management (3 ed.)
...regarding income and job security . The word is a blend of ‘proletariat’ (the Marxist term for the working class) and ‘precarious’ (denoting the vulnerability of their labour market position because of its unpredictability and insecurity, sometimes also referred to as precarity...
grievable life Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...is not grievable is something living that is other than life. In wartime, for example, the enemy dead are often depicted as ungrievable—their lives only matter insofar as they are dead. Butler argues that the apprehension of grievability is a precondition of the perception of precarity (in war, the enemy, no matter how vulnerable to attack they may be, are never portrayed as existing precariously). Her aim is to provide a way of rethinking some of the key moral and ethical pillars in the debates that have emerged over the past couple of decades relating to...
Bauman, Zygmunt (1925–2017) Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...to the present situation of liquid modernity in which the strong social bonds of family, religion, and country, but also the economic certainty of full employment, social security, and public healthcare, have been dissolved by the deterritorializing effects of capital, and precarity has become the norm. This theme gave rise to a veritable stream of books: Liquid Modernity ( 2000 ), Liquid Love ( 2003 ), Liquid Life ( 2005 ), Liquid Fear ( 2006 ), and Liquid Times ( 2006 ). From liquidity Bauman progressed, logically enough, to disposability, in ...
flexible labour Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Geography
...is therefore a double-edged sword. For some workers it means greater control over conditions of employment and the possibility of balancing work and family. For others, it means greater levels of insecurity and exploitation. Precarious work (leading to a condition of ‘precarity’), is highly insecure and low paid. It is often associated with female and/or immigrant workers, those who are already in the least empowered position in the labour market ( see interpellation ; social polarization ). Trades unions and civil society organizations are...
Labor Politics in the Neoliberal Global Economy Reference library
Mahuya Pal
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...central capitalist agenda of cutting costs and maximizing profits and shareholder value ( Taylor & Bain, 2005 ). The different levels of difficulties bring forth precarity as a key phenomenon with respect to digital labor ( Brophy & de Peuter, 2007 ). Precarity is “the financial and existential insecurity arising from the flexibilization of labor” ( Brophy & de Peuter, 2007 , p. 180). Precarity marks the worker’s life with immense uncertainty, where the part-time worker is consumed by possibilities of being called for work at nonwork time, and the...
Asian American Feminist Performance Reference library
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns and Mana Hayakawa
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture
...secured.” 56 Lauren Berlant argues this point further, finding precarity to describe the human condition itself: “we are all contingent beings, and life proceeds without guarantees, just with more or less reliable infrastructures of continuity.” 57 However, as both Butler and Berlant have theorized, precarity is “differentially distributed,” with “the unequal distribution of conditions required for continued life.” 58 Following Butler and Berlant, other feminist scholars have linked precarity to gender norms and the threats imposed on those who act outside...
Informal Work Reference library
Mahima Saxena
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology
...( Kalleberg, 2009 ), or lack of stability, is a core feature of informal work. This can manifest in multiple ways. Precarity surrounding income, wages, and earnings is one of the main features of informal work ( Williams & Nadin, 2012 ), and one that makes such workers vulnerable to exploitation ( Maiti & Sen, 2010 ). Due to the lack of protections, informal work is subject to workload precarity ( Premji et al., 2014 ), work-opportunity precarity, and certainly precariousness in terms of earnings. Often, the term precarious work or precarious employment is...
Freelancing in Journalism Reference library
Brian L. Massey and Cindy Elmore
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies
...beyond a handful of summary demographics reported in a few of the global-sample studies. The story of freelance journalism will be incomplete so long as freelancers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other regions are understudied. Precarity. Among the essays and studies of them so far, there is a consensus that precarity darkens the lives of today’s freelance journalists. It is a centuries-old problem, but in the main, freelancers’ lives are not as dire as history reports for their Grub Street progenitors. In the “traditional view,” the Grub Street hack...
Work and Labor Movements in Latin America Reference library
Omar Manky Bonilla
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics
...discussions about this concept has been developed in Brazil by Ruy Braga ( 2018 ) , for whom precarity constitutes the reality of the less-qualified and poorly remunerated portion of the working class. Analyzing the Brazilian case, Braga shows that, even when the Workers Party was in power—a period during which many labor leaders gravitated to positions in public office—grassroots workers were discontented and ready to mobilize. The conditions in which precarity develops vary depending on each country’s political and economic traditions, yet Braga’s...
Queer(ing) Reproductive Justice Reference library
Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and Shui-yin Sharon Yam
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication
...both domestically in the United States and abroad due to homophobic laws and policies ( Baumle & Compton, 2017 ; Goodfellow, 2015 ; Mamo, 2007 ). Laws that govern adoption by LGBTQ+ couples in the European Union are inconsistent among member states and create legal precarity for transnational couples and families in particular. As scholars and activists have argued, because the barriers LGBTQ+ people face in adoption are structural in nature and disproportionately affect multiply marginalized communities, they are examples of reproductive injustices...
Service Economies and the American Postindustrial City, 1950–present Reference library
Patrick Vitale
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History
...material things usually occurs somewhere else. Like workers in the past, many of these service workers are immigrants. But unlike past workers, they often have long commutes, lack immigration status, and their primary job is to care for more privileged workers. In terms of the precarity of working-class labor and life, the postindustrial West Side is shockingly unimproved from a century earlier. The West Side of Manhattan is an exaggerated but emblematic example of a massive change to urban economies in the United States after 1950 . From New England mill towns...
Neoliberalism and Communication Reference library
Peter K. Bsumek
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies
...processes such as scapegoating, ridicule and rejection, and the manufacture of precarity. The manufacture of precarity is also referred to as the process of precaritization and involves the literal and figurative production of individuals as economically and socially vulnerable. This process further enables rhetorical processes such as the scapegoating of health, safety, and environmental regulations, social safety nets, and ethnic and racial minorities as the cause of precarity and as justifications for neoliberal reforms ( Johnson, 2017 ; Schneider et...
Human Rights and Asian American Literature and Culture Reference library
Crystal Parikh
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture
...or privileges they do out of charity and not as rights in themselves. 10 Insofar as their history in the United States prior to World War II has entailed systematic efforts to unmake their legal standing and cultural belonging in the nation, Asians have long inhabited the precarity that such exclusion occasions. This history further makes visible how profoundly American citizenship has been, and continues to be, riven by racial difference, despite the expansion during the 20th century of a racial liberalism that promotes the ideology of a colorblind...
Global Justice Movement Reference library
Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca
The Oxford Companion to Comparative Politics
...with its emphasis on the economic assets and social capital that facilitate activist mobilization. In contrast, individual involvement in more confrontational protests may be connected to rather less positive microstructural conditions, as hinted in the literature on “precarity” with its stress on the precipitating factors of unemployment, the casualization of labor, and the marginalization or exclusion of migrant labor from citizenship rights. Turning to the reasons why some individuals in such diverse circumstances are motivated to join the global...
Global Justice Movement Reference library
Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca
The Oxford Companion to International Relations
...with its emphasis on the economic assets and social capital that facilitate activist mobilization. In contrast, individual involvement in more confrontational protests may be connected to rather less positive microstructural conditions, as hinted in the literature on “precarity” with its stress on the precipitating factors of unemployment, the casualization of labor, and the marginalization or exclusion of migrant labor from citizenship rights. Turning to the reasons why some individuals in such diverse circumstances are motivated to join the global...
Minor Literature Reference library
Salah El Moncef
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...as an integral part of minority identity is not a derealizing projection of the precarity of the minor other as an ideal in itself. Rather, as a metaphoric-conceptual instrument of social critique, it signifies two key aspects of minor alterity as a whole. The first aspect revolves around representations of the minor other’s exilic experience primarily in terms of an interstitial mode of subjectivity that serves as a locus of identification with every form of precarity experienced by the marginalized (the Deleuze–Guattarian ethic of becoming-other at the...
Employment Conditions in Journalism Reference library
Mirjam Gollmitzer
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies
...Between Freedom and Constraints. A growing number of smaller empirical studies, which often rely on qualitative interviews with freelance journalists, foreground a seemingly paradoxical finding in the research on atypical journalistic labor: enjoyment of journalistic work amid precarity. For instance, freelance journalists in Germany acknowledge high stress levels and insufficient incomes but emphasize enjoyment of their work and the freedom from direct corporate supervision ( Gollmitzer, 2014 ). Most would make the same choice again—to work as...
