Suchergebnisse

This article discusses conditions, properties and consequences of life strategies of young people in Poland in the context of the rise of precarious, low paid and uncertain employment. The analysis is developed against the background of the debates about three transitions, to adulthood, flexible and precarious labour market and changing political-economic regime. Based on the tentative analysis of 45 biographical narrative interviews with young people, aged 18–30, in various forms of temporary, low-paid jobs, and unemployed, a typology of coping with the three transitions is proposed, including four types: proletarian, postetatist, projectarian and entrepreneurial. The typology reflects the logics of stories' told by young people, the desired relationships between the world of work and world outside work, as well as the relevance of resources and reflexivity for the transitions among the types of life strategies in coping with precarity. The authors conclude that the "normalization of precarity," manifested into the emergence of institutional action schemes which define insecure employment as an expected pattern of occupational careers, encounters its biographical limits within each types. It is suggested that these "gaps and cracks" in the institutionalization of insecurity might represent important sources of young people collective mobilization in various spheres of political and social life despite an overarching individualization of their life strategies.

This article explores the relational and moral aspects of the perception of class structure and class identifications by young people in objectively vulnerable labour market conditions in Poland and Germany. Drawing on 123 biographical interviews with young people in both countries, it demonstrates that young precarious Poles and Germans tend to identify themselves against the 'middle class' – understood variously in the two countries – and attribute the sources of economic wealth and social status in their societies to individual merits and entrepreneurship. Positioning oneself in the broad middle and limited identification with the precariat is explained by the youth transition phase, country-specific devaluation of class discourses and the effects of individualisation.

The article aims to explore the relationship between biographical work and the strategies of managing precarity (low-paid and unstable employment) and precariousness (insecurity and insta­bility of life conditions in general) in Poland's new capitalism. Poland witnessed the rise of precarity during the entire capitalist transformation after 1989, while the expansion of precarious, temporary, and non-standard employment accelerated in the first two decades of the 21st century. The main the­oretical framework of the article is based on concepts deriving from biographical sociology and was elaborated during a joint workshop with German biographical researcher, Fritz Schütze, within the PREWORK project. The case of a young female shop assistant, Helena, with a difficult family and work background was selected from a larger sample of 63 biographical narrative interviews with precarious young workers in Poland. Based on the case study and the broader context of the research project, it is argued that biographical work may have the potential for questioning and challenging precarity; yet, without necessary biographical and social resources, such a process is hard to be completed. As a result, the paper questions the macrosocial vision of "precariat" as the "class in-the-making" and instead offers a detailed account of the microsocial ways of dealing with precarity by a representative of the most disadvantaged group of precarious young workers.