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SOR0010.1177/0038026119858209The Sociological ReviewSchilling et al.
The
Sociological
Article
Review
The Sociological Review
Working precarity: Urban
2019, Vol. 67(6) 1333–1349
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
youth tactics to make sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0038026119858209
https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119858209
livelihoods in instable journals.sagepub.com/home/sor
conditions in Abidjan,
Athens, Berlin and Jakarta
Hannah Schilling
Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Talja Blokland
Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
AbdouMaliq Simone
ICOSS, University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Globally, conventional understandings of work no longer have much purchase for the efforts of
most people to sustain minimally viable existences. This article critically expands on Bourdieu’s
theory of practice by looking at the making of livelihoods of urban youth in as diverse places as
Abidjan, Athens, Berlin and Jakarta, affected by transformations of work coined with the term
‘precarity’. This article discusses instability as one aspect of the set of experiences of ‘precarity’.
Instability challenges how individuation and sociation work upon each other; what Bourdieu
has described with the concept of habitus. Drawing on empirical material from the four cities,
we explore practices of accruing value in a context of instability and conceptualize them as
‘detaching’ and ‘gathering’. We suggest that a rethinking of practices in relation to dispositions
and habitus may enable us to better grasp the improvisations and more fluid forms of social life
that characterize the contemporary urban life of many, and can help to address social inequalities
today in a refined way.
Keywords
comparative urbanism, global youth, habitus, precarity, social practices
Corresponding author:
Hannah Schilling, Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu,
Berlin, 10099, Germany.
Email: schillha@hu-berlin.de
,1334 The Sociological Review 67(6)
Introduction
Instability and unpredictability of livelihood has long been situationally normal in post-
colonial cities undergoing rapid urbanization, as in cities as divergent as Jakarta and
Abidjan. But everywhere, fewer people work in formalized wage labour (Bazin, 2014).
From Athens, affected by the financial crisis, to Berlin, still relatively welfare-state pro-
tected, especially young Europeans can also no longer assume livelihood stability. In the
first decades following the Second World War, work in European cities meant fixed
hours, contracts, wages, benefits – securities disrupted by deindustrialization but still
common for those who kept or found new jobs. With the developing late capitalist mar-
ket model (Bazin, 2014), such work for life lost its normalcy. Nursing assistants work on
zero-hour contracts, academics face output-based assessments without tenure, schoolbus
drivers freelance: a generation emerges which can no longer assume that doing every-
thing right – the right education, networks and soft skills – provides similar or better,
stable positions to what their parents had.
The nuclear family household model with male breadwinner and housewife (or female
domestic unpaid labour) implied gendered dependencies and inequalities. Its supportive
policies discriminated against other cohabitations and partnerships but promised stabil-
ity. New gender divisions of labour opened new possibilities, with less fixity (Crompton,
2006; Jamieson, 1998; quoted in Smyth, 2016, p. 679). We focus, however, on those
transformations not as (gendered) emancipation, but as a challenge for youth. Instable
work affects other resources like housing, property, citizenship and partnership. For bet-
ter or worse, this has been summarized under ‘precarity’ (Breman, 2013; Castel & Dörre,
2009; Standing, 2011).
Conventional, often rigidly defined understandings of work no longer mean much for
sustaining a viable existence for most people in cities – especially not for young urban-
ites. Changes in work affect cities, with particular challenges and possibilities to make
livelihoods in ways different than in the hinterlands. As in the city also precarious labour
and the pressures to continuously retrain often prolong the duration of being a ‘youth’,
young urbanites everywhere must weave their existence (Simone, 2018) – and make the
urban through such tactics. This forms an urban experience that is shared, no matter in
which city (Simone, 2010, 2018).
This instability is not a working class phenomenon. As sociologists we generally see
inequality reproduction through class-based mechanisms of economic, cultural and
social capital as they worked in (Western) Europe over the last century. We define these
capital forms often through indicators of fixed exchange value (Behtoui, 2016; Borlagdan,
2015; Farrugia, 2013; Sullivan, 2001; Verhaeghe, van der Bracht, & van de Putte, 2015;
Werner, 2004). And we have not yet fully included increasing precarity into sociology’s
analyses of youth inequalities. This article empirically discusses instability as one aspect
of such ‘precarity’.
We have two theoretical aims. First, feminist scholars critically using Bourdieu urge
us to understand the making of classes as both socio-cultural differentiation and socio-
economic disparities (Adkins & Skeggs, 2004; Huppatz, 2012; McCall, 1992; Skeggs,
1997). As Skeggs (2004, p. 6) shows, class is made through position and perspective: ‘To
take a position is dependent upon the knowledge to which we have access, the ways we
, Schilling et al. 1335
can interpret, and the ways in which we can articulate it and put it to use’ (see also
McCall, 2005; Skeggs, 2011). Reflections on the production of capital and the interac-
tions between capital forms tend to – importantly – focus on habitus, dispositions and
fields (Silva, 2016a, 2016b). They address less the acquiring of the habitus ‘in and for
action’ (Wacquant, 2016, p. 65) as empirical processes of sociation and individuation
(Wacquant, 2016, p. 68). We take this point further. We define habitus as:
… the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, [which] produces
practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the
production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective
potentialities in the situation... (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78)
We explore sociation and individuation empirically through a focus on practices unseen
when using standard indicators of cultural, social and economic capital. A ‘practice’ is:
… a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things
are described and the world is understood. (Reckwitz, 2002, pp. 249–250)
Second, this article conceptualizes practices under instability from the standpoint of
global sociology (Bhambra, 2014; Bhambra & Santos, 2017; Burawoy, 2001, 2016;
Munck, 2016; Patel, 2014). It confronts shortcomings of Bourdieu’s framework by
developing ‘minor theory’ through a ‘way of working with material’ (Katz, 1996, p. 489)
that starts in cities which have not commonly been a starting point (Robinson, 2016).
So, if positions from which European young urbanites make livelihoods become less
predictive, then what knowledges from elsewhere can be employed for understanding
their tactics? How do they give skills, relations and practices value for livelihoods? What
can be learnt from work practices of youth in places where structures are more explicitly
and visibly not fixed? What conceptual adjustments may be needed to fold the un-fixity
of their contexts into our analysis? Are the social processes that maintain inequality, so
central in studies following Bourdieu (Calhoun, Gerteis, Moody, Plaff, & Virk, 2012, p.
237), still the same? In order to theorize through the empirical (Bourdieu, 2001, in
Calhoun et al., 2012, p. 325) we explore these questions with youth in four cities.1
Methodology
We draw on 114 interviews conducted collaboratively and multi-lingually in Abidjan (44
interviews), Athens (16), Berlin (27) and Jakarta (27 ) with urbanites aged 15–32. The
research design did not compare cities as cases. We started from the idea that ‘the city in
the making’ (Simone, 2010) is importantly done by youth, as a status of transition, and
the largest population in many cities. We wanted to highlight the precarity in that transi-
tion, the ways in which suspense into adulthood emerges, and, not reported here, the
beliefs and hopes for the city yet to come (Simone, 2004a).
We set out to collectively find concepts, pointing to homologous ways of dealing with
instability amongst youth in different geographical contexts – experiences that traverse
the North–South divide while being managed tactically in singular ways. Conditions
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