Good post, but some of the comments on terms strike me as wrongheaded. First, the implied argument by John (“If you look it up you’ll find that “precarity” isn’t a word in English”) is that the contents of the dictionary are the contents of the language. That doesn’t hold. Lexicography is a descriptive practice that follows behind the practice of other language users. The same goes for ‘precaritization.’ Granted, the terms are clunky and one can make objections to them, but to solely fixate on the clunky terms to the exclusion of addressing the contents of ideas is not in any way a laudable practice. Nor does a complaint about a term imply anything about the utility or validity of the concept garbed in an awkward phrasing.

All that aside, Grant, I don’t think the aim is to make life not be precarious. The aim is to eliminate specific forms of precarity, like that which holds when labor law is liberalized – precarious access to work and wages – and when state provisioning of health and other welfare polices are liberalized – precarious access to healthcare, housing, etc. One could also add precarious access to or certainty of relatively safe environmental conditions. Some people in Europe, in Italy I think, were at one point talking about this via the neologism flexicurity, combining flexibility of arrangements with security of access to needed goods and services (usually defined as a set of rights). I don’t know if the term’s still in parlance as I haven’t followed the precarity stuff as closely recently.

If folks want more on precarity, the wikipedia entry on it is reasonably good, and provides information on some of the different groups using and defining the term. It’s here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity

The entry has one inaccuracy that I know of, though, which is that it pegs the term’s beginning to the year 2000 in France. I know it was under discussion in activist circles in Spain in 1998, and I think probably sooner since documents tend to come after conversations begin.

Best regards,
Nate

Tom, which is not to say, as you point out very well, this is not a real problem for which some response is necessary. Thanks, Grant

John, exactly, where would postmodernism and certain political discourses be without these big powerful nouns pulling a great line of box cars behind them. Thanks, Grant

Susann, as long as this doesn’t turn into another, “oh what an injustice the world has done me” I welcome it. We are living in a world of growing dynamism. There have to be better ways of thinking about thinking about it. Thanks! Grant

The always informative Grant McCracken minds the intersection of anthro and econ, duly noting the offbeat traffic passing that way. Grant has found a new word, precarity, that he says might point to the Next Bg Umbrage. Per Wikipedia, precarity

No one said it had to make sense.