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

Drawing on data collected in London’s 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 social work, social policy, management and business. The application of that data to debates over the nature of capitalism is relevant to theoreticians across the social sciences including sociology, geography, anthropology and organizational studies.

Krzysztof Z. Jankowski is a social theorist and ethnographer from Dunedin, New Zealand. His research interrogates the structuring of societal change through a range of focuses including global mobilities, global consumer culture, urban morphology, and in this text, the instabilities of employment.