Over the last four decades, the nature of employment arrangements have become more precarious. By precarious we mean work that is insecure, unstable and uncertain, and where the social risks of such work have been shifted from businesses and governments to the employees. These changes are due to the gradual changes to the organisation of work in contemporary societies, driven by the changing globalised market conditions and the digital revolution, which subsequently created a need for flexibility in the productive sphere. Yet, despite public concern about the decline in security of employment, the lack of a clear uniformly defined concept of precarious employment has dampened the enthusiasm for empirical research into the phenomenon and its wider social implications. Through a process approach to the phenomenon of precarious employment, the dissertation set out to address these aspects in ‘a mixed methods examination of precarious employment and its effects on wellbeing’. Throughout the dissertation, we: 1) evaluate the most frequently used and dominant indicator of precarious employments, in non-standard employments; 2) identify distinctions in job and operationalise an alternative indicator of precarious employment; 3) followed by testing of the established precarious employment typologies and their effects on three dimensions of wellbeing, the material, the relational and the subjective wellbeing; and finally, 4) we explore how wellbeing is entirely individual, as are the individuals’ capabilities to deal with the difficult social situation of precarious employment. The main findings of the dissertation is that precarious employment is as much, if not more, a subjectively experienced phenomenon, than one that can be observed in objective social structures. Following that perspective, we find that precarious employment has a substantial negative effect on wellbeing that, arguably, surpass the effects identified in previous research on precarious employment, in both severity and range of social implications.
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