Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-being in Rich Democracies

Arne Kalleberg is among the few Anglophone scholars who have the capacity to write with exceptional authority on issues of employment, labor market flexibilization, and contemporary change in work regimes. In the past two decades or so, Kalleberg has authored quite a number of thoughtful contributions on how work and workers are affected by neoliberal transformation within and across advanced societies. Among his contributions that took the form of a book, one can find the already seminal Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s (2011). Kalleberg’s deep commitment in analyzing and critically theorizing the rise of precarious work is, then, by no means new or ephemeral. His interest is renewed, luckily for us, through the new Precarious Lives, an outstanding monograph. Departing from what is commonly acknowledged as fact, that precarious work is on the rise, Kalleberg sets forth to explain how and why people experience precarious work differently in (rich) countries with dissimilar institutions and cultures. The book’s coverage is wide and thought provoking, including four parts and eight chapters plus introductory and concluding sections. In part I the theoretical foundations of the book are presented along with a multilevel conceptual model that facilitates the examination of cross-national differences in precarious work and its consequences (chapter 1), and a very useful synopsis of how countries differ in their welfare regimes and labor market (re-)activation policies (chapter 2). The latter chapter introduces the reader to the six case study countries (i.e., Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the US) and their institutional, macroeconomic, and demographic differences. The countries of the group, which belong to different modes of capitalism, have been carefully selected by Kalleberg in order to permit a precise and generalizable assessment of the role of institutions vis-à-vis precarious work expansion. In the substantive part (II), the book offers an in-depth look at how countries differ in the expansion of precarious work, presenting various relevant indicators of nonstandard or flexible employment arrangements and useful metrics of objective or subjective job insecurity (chapters 3 and 4, respectively). Part III puts workers’ well-being under scrutiny by analyzing country differentiations in terms of economic insecurity, transition to adulthood, and subjective well-being (in chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively), while paying appropriate attention to the difficult realities that young people face when seeking a stable rewarding job or trying to establish their own family. Kalleberg’s analytical coverage is remarkable in this part, since he focuses on a wide variety of state-of-theart dimensions, including a whole subchapter that discusses the highly relevant role of young people, Not in Employment Education or Training (NEETs), in rich democracies. The final part (IV) summarizes the responses to precarious work expansion discussing agency from below and policies enacted from above, while also outlining the prerequisites of a new social contract that will protect precarious workers and their interests. Below I offer a brief subjective account of some points that might have enriched Kalleberg’s otherwise inclusive treatment. At first, a more comprehensive theorization of the role of multiple geographic scales, other than the national one to which the book 524 BO O K R EV EW