Precarized Society

It has been observed that precarity and social insecurity do not refer any longer only to certain groups of the society such as unemployed people or to those ones who are 'traditionally' more in need of social benefit etc. but it accompanies and affects greater parts of the society, particularly those sections of the middleclass who conceive their social identity merely via their work ethics. The enhancement of the qualification profile of the professionals, the rising of competence of the employees and the fact that the actors relate their independence and existence to employment, such kind of job-orientation shows that on the one hand there is a 'firm intention to work' which on the other hand is being boycotted potentially by the restrictions on the labour market. If those structural elements are not deciphered and considered adequately there will the danger that these social restructurings will be understood in such a way that integration measures and programmes will mainly focus only on the insufficiencies and problems of the individual actor regarding his/her ability to adjust to these new circumstances. All this shows that insecurity and precarity have found their way even into the centre of the society because the re-organisation within the labour market doesn't only affect unqualified employees but penetrates into the qualified segments of the labour market as well, thus devaluating know-how and expert knowledge, as a result even qualified employees are affected by this downturn as well. That means that these changes don't affect only those people who are supposed to be the classical precarious groups but also those persons with higher education who are supposed to play key roles in the society . Consequentially new forms of social exclusion are being producing taxing the traditional social cohesion in European societies due to the demand of new forms of flexibility and mobility from the working people. This process can be termed with the notion 'Hyperprecarisation'. This Hyperprecarity is enforced through other spcial transformation processes such as digitalisation, Migration and demographic change. This book provides international and transdisciplinary perspectives on Hyperprecarity and and Social Structural Transformations in European Societies, covering aspects like