Contingent Employment, Workforce Health, and Citizenship By Marc ...

on the standpoint of the particular researcher or parties who are involved (e.g., a management perspective versus a worker’s perspective). Methodologically, these studies generally employ a deductive/quantitative approach, which cannot adequately capture the complexities of differences in work arrangements and workers’ experiences.

I wanted to help cast light on these discrepant health-related findings by examining contingent work from the perspective of workers—specifically through a study of how they experience and understand this form of work and how these experiences and understandings might affect their health. During the course of the study, I found that there was a strong discursive aspect to workers’ experiences. Therefore, their discourses about contingent work are the focus of this book. Following a constructionist theoretical perspective, the book describes (a) the different kinds of discourses workers use to portray their experiences of contingent work and (b) how these discourses are related to the common evaluations of contingent work as inferior or stigmatised work as well as to broader sociopolitical and economic contexts. A theoretical premise of this study is that experience is inseparable from discourse. That is, the language in which workers articulate their experiences both constitutes and reflects those experiences. The ways in which they experience their work are embodied in their discursive practices for talking about it. Thus, their experiences can be understood, at least in part, through an analysis of the discourses of which they avail themselves.

Another assumption of this study is that discourses are inseparable from the broader sociopolitical contexts in which they are constructed; indeed, they exist in a recursive relationship with these social contexts. The findings reveal how individual-level discourses about contingent work shape and are shaped by neoliberal rationalities. That is, the ways in which individuals