Abstract
In this paper, we explore the developmental challenges facing the academic profession in Europe and especially in some Western Balkan countries, Croatia and Slovenia. First, we look at how ...the higher education environment determines key changes to the academic profession: expectations to demonstrate professional expertise, internationalisation, segmentation, and precarity. While these processes are mainly considered from the above perspective, we also examine the work of academics from within. Second, we discuss aspects of academic tasks, challenges of synchronising academic work with performance measures, intensification of work and expansion of bureaucratic tasks. Building on these perspectives, we introduce a qualitative pilot study that tests how these general trends described in the literature may be applied to given situations in five countries of former Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo. Although these countries cover a relatively small geographical area, the differences among them with respect to the economy, society and politics are important. Our findings suggest that problems accumulating in academic work in Slovenia and Croatia were in almost all of the surveyed aspects less problematic than in the three other observed countries.
The aim of this article is to make a contribution to understanding platform work in a comprehensive and geographically situated way, and thus to consider comprehensive responses to its precarising ...character. The author proposes an analytical framework in which platform work is the result of the articulation of three dimensions: technological-organisational, institutional and ideological. In turn, this framework is applied in depth to a case study: delivery platform work in Argentina. To that end a mixed methodology is employed which combines in-depth interviews and surveys responded to by 401 delivery workers.
This article looks at the process of education-to-work transitions in female-dominated welfare professions within the Slovenian post-crisis context marked by a workfarist agenda. It departs from a ...scholarship that conceptualises precarity as a transitional vulnerability and disaffiliation exacerbated by workfarist policies to explore the contemporary experience of those trying to achieve professional integration under a volatile workfarist regime. The findings reveal a mismatch between established regulations for early career recruitment and professional licensing and actual chances in the labour market to meet these requirements through available workfarist non-standard, entry-level jobs/schemes designed for particular status and/or socio-demographic groups. It gives new evidence that European workfare regimes exacerbate precarity and a novel understanding of state-manufactured precarisation as an intersectional process of marginalisation and discrimination that not only hinders integration into welfare professions, but also downloads the costs of social reproduction on the next generation, causes precarious ageing and widens intersectional differences.
Much of the large literature on precarious work has largely tended to assume that precarity is shaped by job quality: that precarious work leads to precarious lives. This paper adds to the literature ...by questioning this line of causality and highlighting the broader range of influences shaping the lives of older workers who enter precarious work after retrenchment from secure, long-term careers. Drawing on a study of Australia’s automotive manufacturing industry, which closed in 2017, this article finds that for older retrenched workers, exposure to precarious employment sharpened life precarity for some but did not lead to precarious lives for others. Instead of a uniform transition from security to precarity, these workers’ life trajectories diverged depending on their household-scale financial security. Key issues influencing the likelihood of older workers’ lives becoming precarious were enterprise benefits and asset wealth accumulated through their previous careers.
Se discuten tres claves de lectura del sujeto laboral contemporáneo –sujeto precarizado, individualizado, empresarizado– a partir de los resultados de dos estudios cualitativos. El objetivo de dichos ...estudios fue comprender los procesos de construcción de identidades laborales de trabajadores de tiendas de grandes y modernizadas empresas de la industria del retail en Chile. Se realizaron entrevistas narrativas y grupos focales que abarcaron en total a 127 trabajadores, las que fueron sometidas a un análisis narrativo (entrevistas) y de contenido (grupos focales) buscando dar cuenta del modo en que los trabajadores del sector interpretan sus experiencias laborales y construyen una particular autocomprensión de si mismos. Se identificaron tres tramas de significación –precarización, individualización y empresarización– las que se imbrican entre sí, y se expresan de modos específicos dada las características de la industria del retail en Chile y las particulares y situadas experiencias de sus trabajadores. A partir de dichos resultados se discute el alcance, pertinencia y limitaciones del modo como se han utilizado habitualmente en los Estudios del Trabajo las tres claves de lectura del sujeto laboral contemporáneo señaladas.
We live in a historic period of heightened and intersecting uncertainties. This article draws on Bauman’s () metaphor of ‘liquid modernity’ to discuss the precariousness of family lives and child and ...family welfare provision in the context of austerity politics in contemporary England, before going on to consider the implications for research and researchers. Contexts of constant uncertainty have ethical and methodological implications for family research, particularly for studies concerned with services for children and families. When precarisation is an instrument of government, we need approaches to understanding ‘what works’ that are fit for liquid modern times: engaging with the complex contingencies of child and family lives and of the systems and services that they encounter, and actively resisting individualising and deficit-focused narratives in the study of child and family welfare. I focus my reflections on England because it is where I live and work, but the considerations I discuss have relevance for any context where the erosion of welfare provision coincides with growing inequality for children and families.
Intersectional studies are expanding and generating vital and much-needed theoretical debate in the discipline of feminist/gender studies. The aim of this article is to contribute to the debate ...through a critical reflection over the process of translation through which the concept has been introduced, interpreted and acted upon in Swedish gender studies. The purpose is also to bridge the concept of intersectionality and the notion of scholarships of hope, searching for forms of scholarly production that will fruitfully articulate academic knowledge with a political vision. The analysis acknowledges the relevance of an intersectional approach to understanding (and acting upon) the operations of power and the precarisation of life in these dangerous times of global exploitation and the multiplication of borders.
Contemporary capitalism presents us with multifaceted developments in the sphere of labour, trends leading to the precarisation of the workforce on a global scale, and also of moving towards greater ...intellectualisation of labour (the 'immaterial labour'). In discussion of the first facet, the destructive elements are emphasised. In the second, the emphasis is on attempts to prove the 'developments' that would finally arrive at computerised work endowed with greater 'cognitive features', etc. The central hypothesis of this article is that, when it comes to Marx's theory of value, far from diminishing in importance we are experiencing the expansion of this law. The growth of new mechanisms of extracting overwork, such as informality, precarisation and immateriality, are examples of this new morphology of labour.
At a time in which labour markets are becoming increasingly globalised and precarisation processes are altering young people’s working and living conditions, a whole network of public and private ...agencies are developing different entrepreneurship programmes as the main mechanism to deal with youth exclusion and unemployment. Grounded in two on-going research projects conducted in Europe and Australia, this article proposes a preliminary, thought-provoking engagement with the concept of global grammars of enterprise to examine how the truth regimes are framed and articulated in these networks. We argue that this concept enables us to identify, examine and analyse the shifting, unstable, but always strategic power relations between the governmental discourses on entrepreneurship and the enterprising behaviour and dispositions of persons and groups, and the particular «declensions» and local «translations» of the ideas of entrepreneurship that organisations and young people perform within a process of globalised precarisation.Al albur de la globalización de los mercados laborales, al mismo tiempo que ciertos procesos de precarización están alterando profundamente las condiciones de vida y de trabajo de las personas jóvenes, se despliega toda una red de agentes públicos y privados que buscan fomentar el emprendimiento como principal mecanismo para enfrentar la exclusión y el paro juvenil. Fundamentado en dos proyectos de investigación en curso en Europa y Australia, el artículo se involucra preliminar y provocativamente con el concepto analítico de gramáticas globales del emprendimiento para analizar cómo se enmarcan y articulan los regímenes de verdad de estas redes. Argumentamos que este constructo posibilita abordar las inestables y estratégicas relaciones de poder entre los discursos gubernamentales del emprendimiento y las disposiciones y los comportamientos; las declinaciones particulares y las «traducciones» locales que la juventud y algunas organizaciones afines realizan de ellos en el marco de un proceso de precarización globalizado.
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