Beyond the “Proper Job:” Political-economic Analysis after the Century of Labouring Man
2018. The PLAAS Working Paper 51. Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape.
Abstract
This programmatic article proposes an approach to global political-economic inquiry in the wake of the failure of long-established transition narratives, notably the narrative centred on a universal trajectory from farm-based and “traditional” livelihoods into the “proper jobs” of a modern industrial society. The prevalence and persistence of “informal”, “precarious”, and “non-standard” employment in so many sites around the world, it suggests, requires a profound analytical decentering of waged and salaried employment as a presumed norm or telos, and a consequent reorientation of our empirical research protocols. The authors seek to further such a reorientation by identifying a set of specific political-economic questions that are in some sense portable, and can profitably be applied to a diverse range of empirical contexts around the world. But it is the questions that are shared, not the answers. By generating a matrix of difference and similarity across cases, the paper points toward a research agenda capable both of finding answers to concrete questions that arise in specific settings, and of generating comparative insights and the identification of large-scale patterns.