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100 _aGriesbach, Kathleen
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245 _aPositioning Sstories: Accounting for insecure work
260 _aAmerican Sociological Review
300 _a90(3), Jun, 2025: p.493-520
520 _aHow do structural features of work shape workers’ interpretations of precarity, or the stories they tell? This article draws on 120 interviews with four groups of workers who confront temporal and spatial instability: Texas-based agricultural and oilfield workers and NYC-based adjunct instructors and delivery workers. I find that rather than adopting one dominant individualizing story, as previous research suggests, workers instead move between what I call positioning stories: narratives that interpret their work’s particular structural features. In doing so, workers combine individualistic and structural frames to cope with their positional uncertainty. Depending on the specific tempo and geography of their work, workers account for spatial instability in stories about sacrifice and self-improvement; they interpret temporal instability in stories about addiction and the burden of time passing without progress. Workers combine these with stories highlighting meaning and exploitation in their labor process. These findings reveal how structural precarity impedes a cohesive narrative by disrupting identities and life projects, but it also undermines the credibility of individualistic accounts. The resulting narrative fragmentation may inspire a wide range of responses, from resignation to contestation.- Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224251328393
650 _aWork, Time, Space, Proclarity, Narratives.
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773 _aAmerican Sociological Review
942 _cAR