Conceptualising Precariousness. A Subject-oriented Approach

Recent decades have been characterized by the emergence of a vast body of literature on precarization processes (see Millar, 2017). More specifically, two main lines of inquiry have informed the sociological approaches towards precarious work. The first – here defined as studies on ‘precarity’ – has been developed primarily in the field of economic sociology and ‘has sought to identify the structural forces that have converged to erode the Fordist employment regime for a growing proportion of the workforce’ (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018: 5). This first approach to precarious work invites us to consider the objective conditions of contingent employment and their...