The Pragmatics of Precarious Work: Security and Vulnerability in the Pandemic Economy [Hardcover]

Introduction: The Precarious End to Fordist Security

Part One: Being Contingent

1. The Consistency of Precarious Work

2. The Uncertainty of Precarious Job Offers

3. Denizens on the Contingent Landscape

Part Two: Filling In

4. The Certainty of Temporary Workplaces

5. The Face of Precarity: When a Temporary Job Stabilises

Part Three: Surfing

6. Transition as Norm: Surfing the Contingent Landscape

7. Continuing, Exit and Recursion: The Boundary of Precarity

Conclusion: The Pragmatics and Categories of Precarious Work

Drawing on data collected in Londons precarious labour market during the Covid-19 pandemic, this book explores how precarious work is pragmatically engaged with towards the production of simultaneous security and insecurity.

Drawing on data collected in Londons precarious labour market during the COVID- 19 pandemic, this book explores the pragmatic actions of precarious work that produce simultaneous security and vulnerability.

The analysis spans the full scope of precarious working: procedures of job searching and applying, conducting duties and becoming acclimatised to the workplace, and exercises of chaining precarious jobs together or planning an exit into permanent and full- time work. These are brought into discussion to show how the flexibility of job searching interacts with the confinement of workplace activity.

This book is a valuable contribution for scholars and students in the fields of sociology of work, and of social stratification, that has important implications for our understanding of employment in late modernity. Its ethnographic data regarding the practicalities of precarious work is highly relevant to sl31