The New Social Division ─ Making and Unmaking Precariousness

This volume addresses issues of precariousness in a broad perspective, examining socio-economic transformations as well as the identity formation and political organizing of precarious people. Bridging empirical research with social theory, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how structural constraints and agency combine in the struggles over precariousness. The book approaches precarization as a globally orchestrated process which has deep impacts on human socio-economic conditions, living experiences and civic action. The category of the precariat is not taken as given but is comparatively problematized as an effect of processes of precarization which proceed in distinct patterns in different contexts.

This contextual knowledge is important in order to understand the life experiences of people in precarious situations. The analysis of particular precarious situations, events and processes helps to capture the precariat's motives and aptitude for action. In the final section of the book, civic action by people in precarious positions is presented as a definite and novel political outcome of the precarization process. Linking these different analytic levels, The New Social Division offers both a detailed and a wide-ranging interpretation of precarization as a multifarious but unique process, which is too often either reduced to the static class notion of precariat or totally dismissed as a chimera.

Donatella della Porta is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Italy, where she directs the Centre on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos). She also directs a major ERC project, Mobilizing for Democracy, on civil society participation in democratization processes in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

Sakari Hanninen is a Research Professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland. As well as articles in scientific journals he has written or edited twenty books (mainly in Finnish) on political theory, power analytics, welfare politics, social law and social exclusion studies.

Martti Siisiainen is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. He has been involved in and led various research projects dealing with social movements, voluntary associations, participation, forms of capital, hegemony and political sociology.

Tiina Silvasti is a Professor of Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. She has studied the social consequences of structural change in agriculture, and her current research interests focus on food system studies, particularly First World hunger.