Critical Sociology

The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. The selection of articles has the ‘politics of precarity’ as a frame of reference. It describes the political economy of neoliberal globalization producing institutionally embedded precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, but also resistance against the systemic structuration within which it is embedded.

Guy Standing’s description of the precariat in his 2011 book has revitalized the debate on what the precariat is, and what it is not. Although the book faced criticism from labour studies, Marxist approaches and others, it opened up a new discussion of precarity under neoliberal capitalism. This article draws on understandings that link the notion of the precariat (and processes of precarization) to practices and investigates links between immigration and precarity. It argues that the analysis of what precarity is should be supplemented by an inquiry into what it does. Precarity is here understood as a mode for analysing economy and for rethinking heterogeneous identities and group formations. The article uses two cases, Lampedusa in Hamburg 2013–2015 and the “Freedom Not Frontex” action in June 2014, to illustrate how processes of precarization play out in everyday life situations and the economic, legal and social system for immigrants.

Migrants with undocumented/irregular statuses constitute one of the most vulnerable groups in terms of living and working conditions. This paper critically engages with the discussions on precarity in relation to irregular migrant labour in Turkey. It addresses the living and working conditions of migrant workers as a particular form of work and life, who can be seen as representing the new precariat of Turkey. The number of immigrants has grown in Turkey since the late 1980s, and with the mass influx of Syrian migrants since 2011 the public visibility of migration and associated precarity has increased as well. Deriving from such a context, the article adopts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between precarity and migration in the Turkish context by critically evaluating migrant workers’ work and life experiences (including migrants’ contestations of their everyday life).

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among what Lian Si (2009) has called China’s ‘ant tribe’, referring to the millions of unemployed Chinese college graduates who live in the outskirts of Beijing and to some extent share the predicament of China’s migrant workers. Education has been the main route to social mobility for centuries in China, but today college graduates are outnumbering jobs in China’s large cities. I focus on the relationship between the fantasy of education as a route to social mobility and the actuality. By narrating the biographies of two university graduates, Jing Jing and Bai Gang, who attempted but partly failed to transcend the boundary between rural and urban China, I show how their quests for social mobility and a more fulfilling life were tied to economic, legal and cultural constraints. I argue that the quest for a better life through educational migration may lead to physical mobility, but that existential mobility is lacking and this sometimes leads to instances of suicide, just as is the case for Chinese migrant workers who feel trapped in appalling working conditions.

Exploring the relations between different migrants who meet in Spain, this article discusses issues of mobility, the globalization of care and service work, and precarization of labor and livelihoods, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work and retirement conditions in Europe. A mélange of migratory processes are scrutinized along a Swedish-Spanish North-South axis. It analyzes longstanding conditions on the Spanish labor market combined with neoliberal de- and reregulation of work and welfare with a bearing on spatial and social inequalities across the European Union. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of the workers and entrepreneurs who provide care and services for them. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to organization of migration as well as work and services. Some of these workers, especially third country migrants, occupy precarious, and sometimes informalized, low skilled jobs in an ethnically segmented and gendered labor market.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has positioned itself as a modernising country (re)built on the profits of its energy boom and the efforts of, currently, over four million labour migrants, the majority from Central Asia. Far too many migrants endure an extremely precarious everyday as they are forced to live in what this article describes as a citywide state of exception, within which legal frameworks protecting migrants are ignored or misinterpreted to the benefit of the market. Many migrants who desire ‘legality’ are forced into ‘illegality’ by their employers and landlords refusing to register their documents correctly, increasing their vulnerability. Such abuses are facilitated by the state construction of migrants as diseased and criminal, which in turn becomes embedded into cultural imaginations. Employing Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper theorises how these constructions position migrants as superfluous and that they can be ‘let to die’. The research demonstrates that migrants are simultaneously visible and invisible to the state; with the latter, the legal uncertainty denies migrants access to welfare and a voice within the city, but they are visible for exploitation both in terms of their labour and the political capital gained from their presence.

This article explores the constructions and dynamics of subaltern migrant subjectivities in three arrival cities, Athens, Istanbul and Nicosia. The paper draws on empirical research in three cities geopolitically located in the most south-eastern part of the Mediterranean basin and the boundary triangle connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. This is essentially a process where the will, agency and praxis of subaltern migrants in the context of social struggles are interwoven with precarious spaces. Precarity is at the core of their daily existence: precarious labour, precarious stay and precarious lives. The generation, maintenance, evolution, even erosion of mobile commons are consequential of social processes and struggles driven by subaltern and precarious subjects, migrants and non-migrants alike. The article explores how the generation of claims to rights is restructuring Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, as new forms of commons through mobility, resistance and digital materialities are contesting the sovereign governance and surveillance technologies in Europe and beyond. The paper contends that such perspectives from the borders of Europe, that is, in and out of Europe, are not only crucial to the understanding of what is happening in Europe, but are an advanced glimpse into potentialities of the world ahead.

The article focuses on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It discusses the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralized management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by ‘flexploitation’. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a duality of flexibility linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly flexible. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of hegemony confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor. The argument revolves around precarity as representing a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition.

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives. Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up. The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest.

Through a review of public speeches, media declarations and interviews by French government officials and influential intellectuals, this paper examines the language used and the measures taken by the French government during the 2005 ethnic riots. Particularly, this essay argues that the government’s response to the riots shows that (1) by applying a white racial frame on the riots and the rioters, the state was able to denigrate the rioters and deny any legitimacy to the riots themselves; and that (2) by applying color-blind racist labels to the rioters, the state was able to discredit the revolt so as to rationalize and justify a set of repressive tactics and racist measures without ‘sounding racist’. Furthermore, this study reveals that the French government ultimately normalized a racial frame about the riots through color-blind rhetoric and practices. This essay concludes that the rhetoric used by the French government signals the rise of a legitimized racism, becoming a dominantly accepted and supported view in the political arena and society in France.

The article focuses on the relationship between capitalism and religion through an allegorical double reading of social theory and fiction. Theoretically it discusses capitalism as religion. Empirically it analyses Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq’s is a late modern world in which capital tends to replace, like a map, the actual experience of life, the territory. A world in which everything is modelled on the logic of businesses and capitalism has taken the place of religion. However, The Map and the Territory distils the relationship between religion and capitalism anew, and this relationship, together with the political questions it invites, is the leitmotiv for the considerations here.

This research examines the ways in which Ohio Works First (OWF) program managers respond to the bureaucratic constraints of implementing welfare-to-work programs. Using qualitative data collected from telephone interviews with program managers in 69 of Ohio’s 88 counties, we build on prior research that examines caseworker identity and case management (Watkins-Hayes, 2009) by investigating how managers view the challenges and program barriers to self-sufficiency for cash assistance clients in Ohio. We find three distinct manager identities and responses to these challenges and barriers. First, following Watkins-Hayes (2009), we find ‘social work’ identified managers are more holistic in their approach and focused on structural barriers to self-sufficiency. A second type of manager – ‘efficiency engineers’ – are far more rules-minded and focused on clients’ individual barriers. Third, similar to existing research (Taylor and Seale, 2013), we find support for another category of managers – ‘conflicted’ – who discuss both structural and individual-level barriers to self-sufficiency.

Research recognizes both a tension between standardized work and employee participation as well as the fact that management and labor negotiate both formally and informally over the reorganization of work. Through a comparison of the lean production systems being implemented at three General Motors assembly plants, this article demonstrates the tension between standardization and participation to be socially constructed due, in part, to workplace historical context. Workplace history shapes the attitudes of actors as they negotiate change and can become a significant obstacle to implementing teamwork and employee participation schemes, while perceptions of the future may determine whether or not those obstacles are overcome.

The movements against the Vietnam and Iraq wars gave rise to analogous resistance efforts, in the form of draft resistance and counter-recruitment, respectively. Despite their many similarities, the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements emerged in distinct historical eras marked by very different ‘state imaginaries’ or assumptions about the nature of the state and people’s relation to it. Drawing on original archival work, this paper excavates these state imaginaries and examines how they conditioned activists’ subjectivities in each era. More specifically, this paper argues that the 1960s were marked by an imaginary of the state based on consent, which positioned draft resisters as complicit citizens and engendered a sense of personal responsibility for the war. This state imaginary was displaced in the neoliberal era by an imaginary of the state as an alien and invasive force, which positioned counter-recruitment activists (or their children) as potential prey and impelled efforts at self-defense.

This article will argue that the concepts of repression and militarization are inadequate tools for a radical critique of the targeted and selective application of coercion and consent in efforts to (re)produce a liberal capitalist order. The article will first of all show how liberal social control is best understood as uneven processes of pacification targeting specific individuals, groups and populations through a combination of coercion and consent. Secondly, the article will examine historical and current efforts to control protest through the lens of pacification. The analytic of pacification will then be applied to broader trends in US social control. Last but not least, the article will show that the apparently technical distinctions that allow for the targeted application of coercion and/or consent frequently reflect and reinforce existing societal divisions along the lines of race, class and gender.

In cities around the world, environmental concerns have spurred urban activists to organize alternative forms of settlement. Here, we assess efforts by one ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest to change their lifestyles in accordance with ecological principles. Drawing from the concepts of restitution and the political-economic opportunity structure (PEOS), we find that ecovillagers intend to mitigate the antagonism between humans and nature, but they face limitations from the larger urban and political-economic contexts. As such, this study describes the routine practices and experiences of urban ecovillagers as an example of the micro-level dynamics and tensions implied in metabolic rift theory.