ESRI Annual Geary Lecture: Precarious Lives - Insecurity, Exclusion and Well-Being in Advanced Capitalist Democracies
The ESRI’s annual Geary Lecture was held on 16 November. This year, the lecture was delivered by Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The lecture slides can be found here.
Information on Arne L. Kalleberg's book Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies can be found here.
Speaker: Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lecture Topic: Precarious Lives: Insecurity, Exclusion and Well-Being in Advanced Capitalist Democracies
Precarious work (i.e., work that is insecure and uncertain, often low-paying, and in which the risks of work are shifted from employers and the government to workers) has emerged as a serious concern for individuals and families and underlies many of the insecurities that have fueled recent populist political movements. The impacts of precarious work differ among countries depending on their labor market and welfare system institutions, laws and policies, and cultural factors. My talk examines how people in six advanced industrial countries representing different welfare and employment regimes—Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States—differ in both their experience of precarious work and in outcomes of precarious work such as job and economic insecurity, entry into the labor force, and subjective well-being.
Speaker Bio
Arne L. Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published extensively on topics related to the sociology of work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor markets, and social stratification. He is the author of Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s–2000s (Russell Sage Foundation 2013) and, more recently, Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies (Polity Press, 2018). Other current projects include studies of the processes of mobility out of low-wage jobs in the United States and the politics of precarious work in Indonesia, Japan, and Korea. He served as the President of the American Sociological Association in 2007-8 and is currently the editor of Social Forces, an International Journal of Social Research.
Geary Lecture Series
More information on this annual lecture series is available here.