Organization

This Special Issue draws on intersectionality to explore how interlocking forms of discrimination and marginalisation culminate to produce, structure and sustain precarious subjectivities within and beyond neoliberal workplaces, and how subjects cope with or resist them. This collection brings together studies across diverse time-space configurations and social groups/labouring bodies – queer NGO activists in China, middle-class women writers during post-first-wave feminism, individuals facing endometriosis and sexual harassment in contemporary workplaces, as well as digital freelancers in India and essential workers in Poland. Doing so, we articulate the temporalities and situatedness of precarious labour alongside political and organisational pressures, while also uncovering the micro-political resistances in the everyday lives of workers across the Global North and South. Methodologically, these articles show the power of biographical and historical approaches to unpack the affective and material experiences of social differentiation and marginalisation at work, moving beyond monolithic accounts of precarity and precariousness as generalised conditions and experiences, towards more nuanced understandings of how precarious subjectivities are shaped, experienced and contested in specific historical and organisational contexts. Together, these contributions deepen critical understandings of precarious subjectivities by emphasising their affective, embodied and relational dimensions as shaped by intersecting forms of inequality. Bringing critical management and organisation studies into dialogue with labour studies, the Special Issue foregrounds pathways for transformative organisational practices that challenge intersectional inequalities and reimagine possibilities for dignity and justice in precarious life-worlds.

Drawing on interview and diary data from 21 women in the UK, this paper focuses on how endometriosis, a long-term gynecological condition, is lived and navigated alongside paid employment. It discusses the intersectional dynamics of gender, disability, race, and ethnicity to explore how certain bodies are precarized across space and time by the rigid temporal organization of work. We advance existing discussions of precarity by showing how, in the absence of supportive interventions, the embodied precarity of a widely misunderstood and gendered condition with highly variable symptoms can paradoxically make precarious work more suitable because of its purported flexibility. But this creates a double bind of its own, given the well-documented insecurity and lack of clear employment rights which characterizes such work. Theoretically, we develop the concept of endo time as a non-normative temporality located within crip time to highlight its radical divergence from normative ableist and androcentric time and neoliberal labor logic for those working with endometriosis. Endo time advances feminist theorizing of precarity by shedding additional light on bodies at and not at work, those which can and cannot work regularly and consistently; long-term gendered health conditions; and the discursive representation of women’s bodies as leaky, unpredictable, and fragile.

The article explores how essential workers in health, social care, education and logistics in Poland coped with precarity during the COVID- 19 pandemic in relation to their intersectional identities and experiences of inequality. Inspired by Fritz Schütze’s biographical sociology and intersectional research on work organisations, it develops a concept of biographical resources, understood as the tacit knowledge and skills that individuals use to pursue their life strategies. Based on the narrative sequential analysis of a collection of biographical narrative interviews with precarious essential workers, a typology of life strategies is proposed that reflects the biographical relevance of social ties and the types of worker agency. The in-depth analysis of four exemplary cases illustrates how workers have coped with precarity, taking into account both individual (biographical resources) and social factors (work organisation, intersecting inequalities and social crises). Even though the pandemic has not reversed the trend towards individualised coping, in some cases it has stimulated a shift towards solidaristic strategies, reflecting the combination of workers’ biographical resources (including those related to intersectional identities), organisational resources (workplace ties) and the intervention of social and labour movements. Overall, the theoretical, methodological and empirical considerations presented in the article provide novel arguments for combining biographical and intersectional approaches to the study of precarity in organisations.

The NGO sector is not only a contentious site in which global and national politics materializes, but also where precarity manifests itself unevenly in the gendered, racialized, and classed bodies that inhabit those spaces. In China, NGOs have become the major forms through which feminist and LGBT grassroots organizing take shape since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. This paper examines how state repression and the neoliberal logics of professionalization within NGOization politicize and precaritize feminist and LGBT rights-based work. Building on critical scholarship bridging analysis of precarity as a labor condition with the notion of ontological precariousness, this paper explores how feminist and LGBT activist-workers in China negotiate labor/work along the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, urbanity/rurality, and seniority. I argue that precarity is both material and affective, manifesting in the differential devaluation and exploitation of activist workers’ emotional and physical labor, particularly for those facing compounded forms of oppression due to their intersectional identities, as well as the silencing of difficult feelings by hierarchical relations within movement spaces. I suggest that the feelings that fuel the resistance—such as hope, desire, and camaraderie—often lead to structurally unrealizable aspirations and reproduce racial, class, and age disparities within NGOs. It produces unintended and contradictory affective consequences of mental fatigue, frustration, and feelings of betrayal that further perpetuate precarity. This paper contributes to advancing not only state-centered studies of feminist and LGBT activism but also global aid and development literature from perspectives of labor precarity, affect, and intersectionality.

While the gig economy is widely associated with increasing precariousness, previous studies have mostly focused on structural working conditions rather than diverse subjective experiences, treating platform work as a homogenous phenomenon. However, what gig work means for workers varies widely, depending on local contexts and types of work. In this paper, I draw on concepts of affective labour and intersectionality to study the everyday practices of freelance designers who are based in India and connect to overseas clients via digital freelance platforms. Using methods from digital ethnography, I ask: How do remote freelancers negotiate dimensions of difference as they work on forging connections with clients through digital platforms? I find that digital freelancers negotiate intersectional identities as they relate to others, adapting what they share about themselves online. Being ‘Indian’ emerges as a central but ambiguous dimension of social difference, which is negotiated along the lines of five axes of differentiation: work ethic and skill, economic value, language, time and visuality and aesthetics. By tracing how affective labour is part of processes of subjectification and differentiation, I aim to contribute to intersectional, process-based perspectives on precarious platform-mediated work.

Consistent with the call for papers, this study adds to the body of work on processes of precaritization using a micro-historical/biographical approach to examine the subjective, embodied experiences of two female authors who lived through a dramatic transformation in institutionalized conditions, i.e., the partial dismantling of institutionalized patriarchy in the UK in the early 20th century precipitated by first wave feminists. By moving beyond the focus on the “standard employment model” to include institutional structures that affect marriage, women’s control over their bodies and care and guardianship of children, this study examines how this transformation of the male breadwinner model precaritized middle class women who had previously been actively discouraged, both legally and culturally, from working. While Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were two women born into the same conditions of legal patriarchy in Britain in the 1890s, differences in their embodied correspondence with patriarchal notions of female attractiveness produced very different expectations and life experiences. The availability of letters and autobiography offers a rare window into the subjective, embodied experiences of these two women as they struggled to navigate this sudden “emancipation” and the new expectation that they should be economically independent as it unfolded over their lifetimes. Finally, the body of writing they left as authors of detective fiction offers some insight into how, even though they distanced themselves from the feminist movement of the time, they also subtly resisted by ventriloquizing alternatives to patriarchal gender regimes in their fiction.

While scholarship has explored the limitations of programs to address sexual harassment at work, this article highlights how these limitations have a disproportionate impact on the youngest and most precarious workers. Taking the specific case of interns in France—meaning students who must engage in temporary and underpaid work to validate their diplomas—we demonstrate how these precarious workers both disproportionately face sexual harassment and are under protected by the organizations that are legally supposed to shelter them from these forms of harassment (namely schools and workplaces). Drawing from various sources of data (testimonies, interviews, judiciary archives, surveys, etc.), we show different ways in which the organizational flaws in corporate responses to harassment are particularly detrimental to workers who are young, dependent on schools and workplaces, have precarious and temporary employment statuses, and lack professional experiences, resources, and networks in organizations. This article contributes to showing how intersectionality matters in capturing the unequal impact of organizational programs on groups at the intersection of different forms of oppression. In addition, this article contributes to refining our understanding of class-based domination in inequality regimes, highlighting the multiple reasons why precarious workers are disproportionately affected by flawed compliance structures.