Giving up Farming as a Precarious Decision

‘Precarity’ is a novel noun that is widely recognized and applied in timely political discourses and socioeconomic diagnoses of the present. It refers to fixed-term, temporary, low-paid, insecure, unpredictable, and often risky work. The occupational position of precarious people has been characterized as flexible or flexploitative, informal, casual, intermittent, non-standard, exceptional, often outsourced, or subcontracted. ‘Precarity’ is typically seen to characterize young people, women, immigrants, and service sector workers; but particular segments of creative and immaterial ‘new labour’ are also identified with the ‘precariat’. However, in spite of all these groupings, lists, and clu…

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…

The Ghost of Politics in the Soft Machine

Politiikkaa on luettava luovuuden kielellä. Ilkka Heiskanen in memoriam

Tässä numerossa Politiikka haluaa erityisesti muistaa professori Ilkka Heiskasta  (1935–2019). Kunniotamme muistoa neljän kollegan yhteisellä muistikirjoituksella. 

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Kansalaisyhteiskunta ja populismin poliittinen logiikka

Rakkaalla lapsella on monta nimeä! Tämä kulunut sanonta tulee helposti mieleen ajateltaessa ehdotuksia toimintatiloiksi, joiden nähdään ottaneen kansalaisyhteiskunnan paikan. Paikan nähdään jääneen tyhjäksi jos kansalaisyhteiskunnan ei katsota enää jäsentävän ihmisten kanssakäymistä jälkimodernissa maailmassa. Sen katsotaan eroavan tyystin 1800- luvun ja jopa 1900-luvun ensimmäisen puoliskon elämänmenosta, puhumatta 1700-luvusta. Kansalaisyhteiskuntaa voitaisiin pitää eräänlaisena aikaisempien vuosisatojen ajatusmallina, joka on käsitteenäkin aikansa elänyt. Tarjolla olisi useita uusia ja osuvampana pidettyjä nimiä kuten hyväntekeväisyys, vapaaehtoistoiminta, voittoa tuottamaton toiminta ta…

Displacement of social policies