La précarité : un analyseur des chantiers dans les sciences sociales critiques

Abstract

For researchers and social scientists willing to produce critical knowledge about the contemporary transformations of work and social groups, the notion of precariousness is unavoidable, but it is also very problematic.

In this introduction, before presenting the papers present in the issue, the authors offer a brief inventory of the different meanings of the notion of precariousness, both in the academic field and in the vast halo of journalistic and political discourses. Indeed, at the end of the 1970s, straight from the very first occurrences of the notion, the latter did diffract into various meanings that can refer to a way of hinting at particular forms of employment in connection with the development of new forms of poverty, at the emergence of a new political subject in a context of changing capitalism, or even at marginal lifestyles inspired by the refusal of work. The notion of precariousness, definitely the object of an international circulation in social sciences and militant fields, has been re-appropriated in many countries and has now returned to us laden with manifold meanings, at the origin of this issue of Émulations.