0000000000270376
AUTHOR
Donatella Della Porta
The Precarization Effect
What’s in the name ‘precarization’? Such a question can always be asked when we are dealing with a highly contestable concept (Gallie, 1956) or a family of concepts — as is definitely the case here, where it is also customary to speak about ‘precariousness’, ‘precarity’, and even ‘precariat’. This is a family of concepts or terms that has been defined in so many different and often incompatible ways that the answer to the question seems to greatly depend on the perspective or approach adopted. This is not as big a problem in the case of ‘precariousness’, which can be used to describe a variety of situations and events quite generally; but it makes all the difference when one refers to ‘prec…
The Making and Unmaking of Precarity : Some Concluding Remarks
We live in societies in which the making and unmaking of precarity has a structuring power. In the labour market, precarity is created through laws and practices that reduce protections and benefits; but the labour market itself is also the place where precarity can be unmade through (at least partial) de-commodification and re-regulation. Precarity also penetrates people’s lives and mechanisms of identification, with practices of producing stigma but also of resisting it. Not by chance, the making and unmaking of precarity has become a central focus for contentious politics through the definition of the new subject of the precariat, and the struggles against precarity as a stripping of fun…