‘Not one of the family’: Gender and precarious work in the neoliberal university

Gender inequality within the university is well documented but proposals to tackle it tend to focus on the higher ranks, ignoring how it manifests within precarious work. Based on data collected as part of a broader participatory action research project on casual academic labour in Irish higher education, the article focuses on the intersection of precarious work and gender in academia. We argue that precarious female academics are non‐citizens of the academy, a status that is reproduced through exploitative gendered practices and evident in formal/legal recognition (staff status, rights and entitlements, pay and valuing of work) as well as in informal dimensions (social and decision‐making power). We, therefore, conclude that any attempts to challenge gender inequality in academia must look downward, not upward, to the ranks of the precarious academics.     

Social innovation and the autoimmunity of employability

The purpose of this article is to examine social innovation in the field of youth employment. It addresses both the shortcomings of supply-side approaches that are balanced towards issues such as employability and the impact of key demand side issues including low pay and precarity. The empirical analysis is based upon interviews with young people in employment or training with social innovations as well as interviews with senior policymakers and practitioners whose remit covers these issues. The study concludes by reflecting upon how the conduct of employability can operate as an autoimmune function.     

‘Surrounded with so much uncertainty’: asylum seekers and manufactured precarity in Australia

In Australia, nearly 30,000 asylum seekers have the legal right to work, but their temporary and conditional migration status exposes them to work-related precarity. This article draws on a small qualitative study that examined asylum seekers’ experiences of seeking work and achieving economic security. Over an 18-month period, 29 semi-structured interviews with asylum seekers who had work rights in Australia were conducted. It provides insights into how restrictive immigration policies manufacture precarity through short-term, conditional visas, resulting in employer risk aversion, segmentation into insecure work, and in-work instability and mistreatment. Asylum seekers manage their experiences and feelings of pervasive insecurity through individual coping and survival strategies.     

Working precarious careers trajectories: tracing neoliberal discourses in younger workers’ narratives

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to explore how, in the context of the post Global Financial Crisis (GFC), some Italian younger workers in a specific geographical region in Italy recount their work trajectories. Drawing on narrative interviews with ten participants (aged between 24 and 30) as part of a research project carried out in the Autonomous region of Aosta Valley in Italy, the article traces discourses closely associated with neoliberalism – the discourses of the entrepreneurial self, employability and self-responsibilisation – through which subjects’ work experiences take shape. Moreover, the analysis highlights how locality, one’s personal relation with the geographical territory, makes more complex the younger people’s negotiations in crafting themselves vis-à-vis precarious employment opportunities and wider socio-economic dynamics in respect of precarious employment opportunities.     

Dynamics of precarity among ‘new migrants’: exploring the worker–capital relation through mobilities and mobility power

ABSTRACT

This article conceptualises the role of mobilities within precarious working and living conditions, drawing on qualitative analysis of interviews (n = 52) and a policy seminar (n = 50) in North-East England. It focuses on refugees, asylum seekers, and Eastern European EU migrants, as policy-constructed groups that have been identified as disproportionately concentrated in precarious work. The article develops three ‘dynamics of precarity’, defined as ‘surplus’, ‘rooted’, and ‘hyper-flexible’, to conceptualise distinct ways of moving that represent significant variations in the form that precarity takes. The article concludes that understanding precarity through mobilities can identify points of connection among today’s increasingly heterogeneous working class.     

Precarious leisure: (re)imagining youth,transitions and temporality

ABSTRACT

The precarity of young people’s transitions to work has been a longstanding focus in youth studies. As Furlong and others have demonstrated, processes of social, political and economic restructuring have led to a pronounced instability for young people entering the labour market. While the notion of labour market precarity has gained attention, the ‘contamination’ of precarity into other spheres of life such as leisure has been less developed. This article seeks to extend these debates through interrogation of the concept of ‘leisure precarity’. Drawing on a qualitative study of youth leisure in Glasgow, it argues that temporal anxieties have reframed young people’s experiences and understandings of leisure such that young people have come to fear ‘empty’ or unproductive time. The pressures of juggling work and study, or looking for work, meant that most participants in our research had limited time free for leisure, and temporal rhythms became fragmented between past, present and future. The paper argues that these multiple and contradictory leisure dispositions reveal new forms of individualisation and uncertainty, as well as traditional patterns of inequality, thereby bringing youth transitions into dialogue with the study of precarity in the twenty-first century.     

Social workers: a new precariat? Precarity conditions of mental health social workers working in the non-profit sector in Greece

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, in western countries, the social work profession primarily has come into contact with issues of precarity through the lives of service users. This paper introduces precarity in the social work scholarly literature as a feature of social workers’ professional and personal lives. It draws from the findings of a qualitative small study of mental health social workers working in the non-profit sector in Greece. The findings reflect a picture of social workers experiencing precarious conditions as they have become part of the growing phenomenon of the working poor, surviving by loans, experiencing housing insecurity, reproductive insecurity, fuel poverty and unable to pay for their commuting expenses to and from work. Furthermore, the paper maintains that the expansion of the conditions of precarity to university-educated professionals, such as social workers, needs to be understood within an International Political Economy (IPE) perspective in order neoliberal capitalism which brings rising levels of inequalities to become a focus of intervention.     

The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of “Do What You Love”

If changes to the material structures of work have ushered us into a “new economy,” cultural scholars assume that there must also be changes to ideological structures of work. Extant scholarship on precarious professionals and on the role of emotions in 21^st‐century work find that passion may be an important cultural component of white‐collar work in the new economy. Using data from engineers, nurses, and graphic designers who work in either less precarious or more precarious contexts, this paper contributes the first emic definition of work passion as the experiences of attraction, enjoyment, motivation, and perseverance. Because I find overwhelming adherence and conceptual consistency among professionals in my sample, I argue that the pursuit of work passion constitutes a coherent ideology of work, which I call the passion paradigm. I argue that the passion paradigm is compatible with and protects structures of work in the new economy because its logic of hyper individualism motivates workers to work hard and work well as a practice of self‐care, shifting the locus of critique further away from institutions and more toward the self. Adherence to and institutionalization of the passion paradigm may have myriad consequences, opening up broad areas of future research.     

Liquid advocacy: Social welfare advocacy in neoliberal times

This article examines current inconsistent trends in social welfare advocacy literature. Some studies show evidence of widespread engagement in advocacy by nonprofit organisations, while other studies conversely offer evidence of limited advocacy activities. Another controversial aspect stems from the question whether governmental funding undermines the extent to which nonprofits engage in advocacy. We argue that these findings reflect the contradictory impact of neoliberal governance on social welfare advocacy. The article highlights and discusses three interrelated components of neoliberalism and their impact on current social welfare advocacy: marketisation, precariousness and commodification. Neoliberalism has propelled a model of market-driven civil society that has remade the practice of social welfare advocacy in contradictory ways. With its complex rationales, neoliberalism has simultaneously undermined the ability of nonprofits to engage in advocacy but in a paradoxical way has also created conditions that induce these organisations to practice advocacy. Implications for practice and research on social welfare advocacy are discussed.     

Brexit and precarity: Polish female workers in the UK as second-class citizens?

Immigration was a decisive factor in pre-Brexit-vote debates and it remains one of the most divisive topics globally; therefore, it is worthy of attention. Whilst the British people had an opportunity to have their say on Brexit, EU migrant workers have not. This article gives them a voice as it is based on original data from 40 qualitative interviews with female EU citizens to the UK, conducted before and after the Brexit-vote. This article further develops the notion of precarity in relation to EU migrants to the UK in light of Brexit and adds to debates on gender in migration. This paper provides wider policy implications for the British and other EU countries' authorities as it engages with debates on Brexit from the point of view of the UK labour force as voices of economic women migrants from Poland are presented.