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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
Job insecurity is the term used to describe a situation in which individuals feel themselves exposed to the risk of losing their job. It can, on the one hand, be associated with objective work conditions of greater exposure to such risk with respect to peers, for example because you have a fixedterm contract. On the other hand, it can come in the form of a feeling, a subjective perception of the individual about her/his job situation. In both cases, no matter whether objective or subjective, job insecurity influences individuals’ present and future choices in life, slowing down or hampering some important transitions in the life course of individuals (such as employment entry, home-leaving or family formation). At the same time, it may influence individuals’ future choices with respect to savings and retirement decisions. The relevance of studying the two dimensions of job insecurity is further supported by the fact that job security is one of the most valued features individuals rate in a job. As an example, the most recent wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on Work Orientations show that 95 per cent of individuals in the 27 current countries of the European Union (EU27) consider security in a job to be important or very important, and the result is consistent across different age groups (ISSP, 2017).
For such reasons, this book addresses the issue of job insecurity from a holistic point of view, considering both the objective and subjective dimension and the whole life course of individuals. The interplay between the objective and subjective dimension has often been overlooked in sociology, with studies mainly focusing on one (for example, objective) or the other dimension (for example, subjective) or competing to demonstrate which of the two, objective or subjective, can have the largest influence (see Chapter 1 for a review). Analyzing the dichotomy between objective conditions and subjective perception is key to reaching an encompassing understanding of complex social phenomena that are particularly consequential for individuals’ life courses, such as job insecurity (or as another example, income inequalities, Weisstanner and Armingeon, 2021).
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