Positioning Stories: Accounting for Insecure Work
基于对德克萨斯州农业和油田工人、纽约市兼职讲师和配送工人的120次访谈，研究发现工人会根据工作的时空结构特征，在个体化和结构性框架之间切换叙事，以应对不稳定性。
How 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.