Intersectionality and precarious subjectivities: Within and beyond labour and organisational perspectives

Abstract

This Special Issue draws on intersectionality to explore how interlocking forms of discrimination and marginalisation culminate to produce, structure and sustain precarious subjectivities within and beyond neoliberal workplaces, and how subjects cope with or resist them. This collection brings together studies across diverse time-space configurations and social groups/labouring bodies – queer NGO activists in China, middle-class women writers during post-first-wave feminism, individuals facing endometriosis and sexual harassment in contemporary workplaces, as well as digital freelancers in India and essential workers in Poland. Doing so, we articulate the temporalities and situatedness of precarious labour alongside political and organisational pressures, while also uncovering the micro-political resistances in the everyday lives of workers across the Global North and South. Methodologically, these articles show the power of biographical and historical approaches to unpack the affective and material experiences of social differentiation and marginalisation at work, moving beyond monolithic accounts of precarity and precariousness as generalised conditions and experiences, towards more nuanced understandings of how precarious subjectivities are shaped, experienced and contested in specific historical and organisational contexts. Together, these contributions deepen critical understandings of precarious subjectivities by emphasising their affective, embodied and relational dimensions as shaped by intersecting forms of inequality. Bringing critical management and organisation studies into dialogue with labour studies, the Special Issue foregrounds pathways for transformative organisational practices that challenge intersectional inequalities and reimagine possibilities for dignity and justice in precarious life-worlds.

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