The New Social Division

Making and Unmaking Precariousness

Donatella della Porta, Tiina Silvasti, Sakari Hänninen, Martti Siisiäinen, Donatella della Porta, Tiina Silvasti, Sakari Hänninen, Martti Siisiäinen, Donatella della Porta, Tiina Silvasti, Sakari Hänninen, Martti Siisiäinen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137509352
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume addresses issues of precariousness in a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, looking at socio-economic transformations as well as the identity formation and political organizing of precarious people. The collection bridges empirical research with social theory to problematize and analyse the precariat.

1

The Precarization Effect

Donatella della Porta, Sakari Hänninen, Martti Siisiäinen, and Tiina Silvasti

1.

Precarization as contestable concept

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).

The notions of precarity and precarization have a complex, decades-long European history (Cincolani, 1986; Barbier, 2005). Even if these terms have been variously used in different national and cultural contexts, they have typically been connected with insecure, volatile, or vulnerable human situations that are socioeconomically linked to the labour-market dynamics. Not only temporary, fixed-term work or unemployment, but also untypical, flexible, cognitive work has been defined as representing precarity. Processes of precarization start in the labour markets due to ongoing economic, social, political, and even cultural transformations of capitalism. Precarization is not, though, limited to the labour market but can penetrate entire life-worlds of individuals and groups of people (Butler, 2004; Lazzarato, 2004; Morini & Fumagalli, 2010; Ross, 2010). Processes of precarization can overturn existing habits of behaviour and conventions of human interaction. These structural transformations are sometimes sudden and rapid, as was the case after the collapse of the ‘socialist system of states’ and as is currently the case due to the global financial crisis and the crisis of the European monetary system followed by austerity measures. Sometimes they are, instead, much more gradual. This has been the case in European agriculture, where precarization has been a permanent process and has been ‘naturalized’ as a kind of side effect of development and progress. Recent events of the present crisis in Europe, especially when connected to migration, have made this kind of long-term precarization strikingly evident.

Precarization as a process is both virtual and actual. It involves highly complex and constantly evolving processes, the common denominator of which cannot be easily captured. As a process, precarization is also influenced by expectations and anticipations of its possible outcomes. Due to this aleatory effect, outcomes of precarization are often contingent, though not random. This makes it easier to understand why the meaning and significance of precarization cannot be directly deduced from the ends, means, and reasons of the relevant governmental policies in question since precarization is momentarily and situationally influenced in terms of anticipatory reactions to ongoing events. The aleatory nature of precarization has given its analysts endless possibilities of interpretation, of which they have also taken keen advantage. It is no wonder, then, that precarization, precarity, and precariat are concepts or terms that have been defined and described in multiple ways that are not at all congruent with each other. Precarization is a truly contestable concept in motion, which is constantly undergoing changes of meaning.

2.

Precarization as modality

The emphasis on precarization as a process, like approaching precariousness and precarity as a characteristic pattern of particular situations and events, makes it easier to understand why and how we are, here, dealing with circumstantial differences in the material and immaterial conditions under which people master their lives and manage their conduct. It is more often the structured quality of particular situations and events lived by people, rather than their personal characteristics, that determine what kind of risks and challenges they face and how they cope with them. Precarious situations and events are like rugged terrains: every step must be carefully preconceived and decisively taken and, even then, one can never be certain that s/he has firm ground under his or her feet. Precarious situations and events never open out to smooth avenues or easygoing pathways but are folded (Deleuze, 1993), transfixed, and knotted in such a way that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. In this kind of precarious situation, one just cannot follow Descartes’s advice that if one is lost in the forest, the best thing to do is simply to go straight ahead. Since precarization does not follow some uniform rational pattern but can be quite singular and even arbitrary – even if still structurally determined – the experiences of precariousness can also be complex, variable, fragmentary, and always quite particular.

Precarization expresses the environmental dynamics of the human condition and conduct, which can be approached in terms of the mode in which something takes place in the particular environment or neighbourhood. In these terms, we can speak of necessities, fatalities, opportunities, possibilities, occasions, fortuities, fortunes, contingencies, and so on. Precarization tells much more about the particular environment of the human condition and conduct than does any static representation of such an environment, in terms of propositional or hypothetical truth claims about (the background of) the object under examination.

Precarization takes place in a dynamic field of forces in which situations are intricately constituted and assembled and where actions, reactions, interactions, and transactions in the field must be understood as strategic and tactical moves in the ongoing games, the rules of which are constantly renegotiated among the strongest players. People in precarious situations often enter into their games with lousy cards in their hands, often without even knowing the rules, which have not been properly made clear to them or are constantly changing. In order to improve their odds and manage better than previously, people in such precarious circumstances have to be unusually clever in outsmarting their adversaries, making tactically imaginative moves that catch the ruling power-holders by surprise.

3.

Making and unmaking precariousness

In a traditional Marxist sense, the question about precarization would address the transformation of a class in se into a class per se, through reference to concepts such as grievances, cleavages, and historicity. In our book we have not, however, followed such a single-minded trajectory but have instead attempted to approach and analyse precarization as a multi-dimensionally complex process being shaped not only by the non-linear dynamics of capitalism, but also by the actions, activities, and resistance of people living in precarious situations themselves – without forgetting how these two spheres are institutionally mediated in the specific circumstances under study. Approaching and analysing precarization in different dimensions and from different perspectives makes it easier to understand that precarization always leaves some freedom for positive action for its subjects. This is also why we have subtitled our book Making and Unmaking Precariousness.

Since the precariat as a definite socioeconomic category presents more questions than answers, we think that it is more appropriate to use the notions of precariousness and precarity associated with the process of precarization, and, thereby, we speak about precarious human situations. Along these lines it is possible to speak about precarious events, decisions, experiences, movements, and even subjects without necessarily clinging to the term ‘precariat’ at the outset. This does not, however, mean that it would not be worthwhile to try to think and define more carefully what could be meant by precariat, even as a class category (Savage et al., 2013). The notion of ‘precariat’ must be, in any case, understood as an outcome of the process of precarization that is also subjectively structured by precarious experiences. For this reason, we can speak of the precarization effect. The possible formation of ‘precariat’ is, thus, made dependent on particular economic, political, cultural, gender, regional, ethnic and other discourses, which are often connected with particular social movements, associations, networks, and Internet-based communities.

4.

Is precariat a class?

The first part of the book analyses how the ongoing structuration of opportunities aggregated in particular opportunity structures can or cannot influence, accelerate, and even result in the formation of precariat as a class, as has been claimed, implied, and challenged in previous research. The chapters in this section range from quantitative class analyses to more circumstantially focused studies.

The precariat phenomenon, or the precarization effect, is a kind of prism reflecting the whole restructuration of the capitalist class structure from one angle. Present European class structures combine old classes, such as the elite (or bourgeoisie), the traditional working class, and the established middle class with new class groups, such as (technical) experts and ‘emerging service workers’ and the precariat (see Crompton, 2008; Savage et al., 2013; Melin and Blom, Chapter 2 in this volume). The study of precarization makes it possible to reveal differentiations between and among distinct classes. Precarization has been studied especially among the working and the middle classes, but it has also addressed certain sections of the peasantry that are absent in most of the recent class analyses. Alleged core groups of the precariat, such as students or those who have never worked, have posed a large, often neglected problem in standard class theorizations. For example, students have often been classified as middle class based on their expected future occupational class position. This kind of theoretical blindness is no longer possible in the case of precarious groups. New theoretical approaches must overcome the limitations of simple profession-based classifications and conceptions of class as economic category, in favour of multi-dimensional class concepts covering economic, cultural, and social dimensions (capitals) of inequality (see Crompton, 2008). In older class theorizing, it was common to draw a distinction between economic class position, on the one hand, and (class) experience, cultural and life-world profile, civic and collective action, on the other (or Klasse an sich – Klasse für sich). This holds true for both Marxist and non-Marxist approaches (Geiger, 1949; Weber, 1976). This division has tended to lead to more or less harmful juxtapositions between structurally oriented and culturally motivated approaches.

In explorations of ongoing structuration processes such as precarization, it is especially important to apply multi-dimensional class and stratification theories. Classes combine economic, cultural, and social resources, but their causal class power always develops in a space crisscrossed by political, cultural, symbolic, ethnic, gendered, regional, and other discourses and struggles. Class formation is a dynamic process whose nodal points and borders are a question of political and symbolic dispute and conflict.

The complex snarl of relations producing precariousness has generated different classifications for different groupings of precariousness. A great majority of researchers seem to regard precarization as a combination of multifaceted processes consisting of various groups under threat of being marginalized, excluded, or subjugated under new forms of deprivation, including poor people. On the other hand, there are researchers who see the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Precarization Effect
• Part I: ‘Objective’ Class Characteristics
• Part II: Precarious Experiences
• Part III: Precarious Collective Actions (Struggles)
• Index