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Building on an inductive, qualitative study of independent workers—people not affiliated with an organization or established profession—this paper develops a theory about the management of precarious and personalized work identities. We find that in the absence of organizational or professional membership, workers experience stark emotional tensions encompassing both the anxiety and fulfillment of working in precarious and personal conditions. Lacking the holding environment provided by an organization, the workers we studied endeavored to create one for themselves through cultivating connections to routines, places, people, and a broader purpose. These personal holding environments helped them manage the broad range of emotions stirred up by their precarious working lives and focus on producing work that let them define, express, and develop their selves. Thus holding environments transformed workers’ precariousness into a tolerable and even generative predicament. By clarifying the process through which people manage emotions associated with precarious and personalized work identities, and thereby render their work identities viable and their selves vital, this paper advances theorizing on the emotional underpinnings of identity work and the systems psychodynamics of independent work.

This qualitative case study adopts a labour process analysis to unpack the distinctive features of capital’s control regimes in the food-delivery segment of the Australian platform-economy and assesses labour agency in response to these. Drawing upon worker experiences with the Deliveroo and UberEATS platforms, it is shown how the labour process controls are multi-facetted and more than algorithmic management, with three distinct features standing out: the panoptic disposition of the technological infrastructure, the use of information asymmetries to constrain worker choice, and the obfuscated nature of their performance management systems. Combined with the workers’ precarious labour market positions and the Australian political-economic context, only limited, mainly individual, expressions of agency were found.

Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers’ health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the U.S. workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal that exposure to routine instability in work schedules is associated with psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. Low wages are also associated with these outcomes, but unstable and unpredictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Precarious schedules affect worker well-being in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, yet a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of well-being.

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring-with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring-with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of \"caring with\" as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring-with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring-with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co-constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring-with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring-with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research.

The past several decades have seen a decline in employment rates and labor force participation, particularly among low-skilled, minority men living in poor areas. As low-skill jobs disappear from poor places, how do marginalized job seekers navigate this landscape? Using over 8,000 daily measures of search and work collected from smartphones distributed to 133 men recently released from prison, this article presents the concept of work as foraging, where people work a variety of extremely precarious opportunities that span across job types. Sequence analysis methods describe distinct patterns of search and work that unfold over time, where most people cease their search efforts after the first month and maintain a state of very irregular and varied work. Although there is substantial heterogeneity in patterns, foraging is a common strategy of survival work.

Precarious work is increasingly considered the new ‘norm’ to which employment and social protection systems must adjust. This article explores the contradictions and tensions that arise from different processes of normalisation driven by social policies that simultaneously decommodify and recommodify labour. An expanded framework of decommodification is presented that identifies how the standard employment relationship (SER) may be extended and flexibilised to include those in precarious work, drawing examples from a recent study of precarious work across six European countries. These decommodification processes are found to be both partial and, in some cases, coexisting with activation policies that position precarious work as an alternative to unemployment, thereby recommodifying labour. Despite these challenges and contradictions, the article argues that a new vision of SER reform promises greater inclusion than alternative policy scenarios that give up on the regulation of employers and rely on state subsidies to mitigate against precariousness.

This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration, which we define as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and destination, produce the itinerancy of low-skilled migrant workers. We offer a holistic analysis of the migration process of temporary labor migrants, shifting away from a singular focus on the process of emigration, integration, or return and toward an examination of each stage as a co-constitutive step in the migration cycle. Our analytic approach enables us to illustrate the state of precarity and itinerancy that follows low-wage migrant workers across the various stages of the migration cycle and produces serial migration patterns among migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.

While social distancing measures are essential in limiting the impact of a pandemic, such measures are often less feasible for low-income groups such as precarious workers who continue to travel on public transit and are less able to practice social distancing measures. In this paper, based on in-depth remote interviews conducted from April 2020 through June 2020, with more than 130 gig and precarious workers in New York City, we find that precarious workers experience three main hurdles in regard to accessing unemployment assistance that can be broadly categorized as knowledge, sociological, and temporal/financial barriers. Drawing on worker interview responses, we have named these responses: (1) Didn't Know, (2) Didn't Want, and (3) Can't Wait. These challenges have led workers to turn to gig and precarious work, further highlighting the inequities of the pandemic. As a result, for some workers, so-called \"side hustles\" have become their primary social safety net.

We introduce the concept of places of social inclusion—institutions endowed by a society or a community with material resources, meaning, and values at geographic sites where citizens can access services for specific needs—as taken-for-granted, essential, and inherently precarious. Based on our study of an emergency department that was disrupted by the threat of the Ebola virus in 2014, we develop a process model to explain how a place of social inclusion can be maintained by custodians. We show how these custodians—in our fieldsite, doctors and nurses—experience and engage in institutional work to manage different levels of tension between the value of inclusion and the reality of finite resources, as well as tension between inclusion and the desire for safety. We also demonstrate how the interplay of custodians’ emotions is integral to maintaining the place of social inclusion. The primary contribution of our study is to shine light on places of social inclusion as important institutions in democratic society. We also reveal the theoretical and practical importance of places as institutions, deepen understanding of custodians and custodianship as a form of institutional work, and offer new insight into the dynamic processes that connect emotions and institutional work.

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the attachment styles of 3- to 6-year-old children to their married or single mothers and the attachment styles of these children\\'s mothers to their own parents. The study was conducted through a relational screening model, which is a quantitative research method. The population of the study consisted of a total of 80 children all attending public kindergartens in Ankara and their mothers, 40 of whom were married and 40 of whom were single. The data were analyzed through descriptive, correlative, and comparative tests conducted via SPSS. According to the results of the study, 48% of the children of married mothers had a secure attachment style and 52% of them had an insecure attachment style, while 70% of the children of single mothers had a secure attachment style and 30% of them had an insecure attachment style. There was a significant correlation between the marital status of the mother and the attachment styles of the children. A moderately significant negative relationship was found between the secure attachment of married mothers and their own mother\\'s care/control. On the other hand, a moderately significant positive relationship was found between the secure attachment of single mothers and their own mother\\'s care/control.