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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Precarization Effect

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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 ‘precariat’ as a particular group or class of people (Standing, 2011). However, even if we prefer using the terms ‘precarization’ and ‘precarity’ here, this problem does not disappear. In fact, this struggle over the concepts ‘precarization’ and ‘precarity’ is an expression of the discursive, and often ideological, controversies taking place between different schools of thought and their different theories, methods, motives, interests, and desires. There are, for example, those who emphasize the significance of precarization as the historical sign of the transformation of capitalism (Fumagalli & Mezzadra, 2010; Holmes, 2010; Marazzi, 2010), and there are those who want to challenge the self-evidence of the notion of precarization (Doogan, 2009) or its unwarranted generalization (Munck, 2013).