Seeing the "Changing Nature of Work" through a Precarity Lens

Abstract

This article reviews the concept of precarity and offers critical reflections on its contribution to thestudy of contemporary labour and livelihoods. A stock-take of key and recent literature suggeststhat, despite conceptual ambiguity and overstretching, “thinking with precarity” continues to provea valuable and worthwhile exercise – so long as that thinking is carefully articulated. This involvesunderstanding precarity as: 1) rooted in concrete labour market experiences but also connected tobroader anxieties over social and political life; 2) a process-focused concept rather than end-statedescriptor; and 3) speaking to longer histories and wider geographies than its commonplace statusas a residual term or category implies. The analytical advantages of thinking in such a way areillustrated through a critical analysis of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019 on the“changing nature of work”, and in particular its handling of digital labour.KEYWORDS: precarious work; politics of precarity; livelihoods; digital labour; gig economy

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