Atipici o flessibili? San Precario salvaci tu!

The changes occurred in the fordist model of production have involved a progressive transformation of workers’ professional and personal conditions, making working forms not classifiable within the traditional dichotomy between dependent and autonomous work. In the Italian academic debate, the idea of atypical work is object of different criticisms because of the crisis of a typical job that does not represent anymore a univocal model of reference. Thus, the limited explanatory extension of dualistic categories related to work (typical/atypical, standard/non-standard, flexibility/precarity) has emerged and the debate has put forward the need to elaborate analytical perspectives able to describe the complexity of social dynamics related to contemporary occupational forms. From a sociological point of view, in fact, the more interesting aspects of different occupational forms do not concern workers’ fiscal or juridical positions, but the social dynamics that allow them to stabilize and to make sustainable the discontinuity and fragmentariness of job trajectories. In this article, we propose a further dimension for the analysis of contemporary occupational forms and conditions, focusing attention on the symbolic imaginary enacted around this phenomenon and on the practices of auto-representation of the subjects involved. In order to understand the social dimension of contemporary occupational forms, and referring explicitly to the social and political phenomenon of San Precario, the article shows the importance of expanding the boundaries and the meanings of work categories and working practices to the sphere of social dynamics.

Attila Bruni, Annalisa Murgia, Atipici o flessibili? San Precario salvaci tu! in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO " 105/2007, pp 64-75, DOI: