Social Quality and Precarity: Approaching New Patterns of Societal (Dis)Integration.

Herrmann, Peter and van der Maesen, Laurent J.G.

Societal practice is the main challenge this concept tries to address. However, the danger is to introduce a new term, yet maintaining a discussion on traditional problems as poverty, marginalisation and exclusion. Our thesis is that these problems, far from being sufficiently tackled, are currently going along with and being adjunct to another challenge, namely precarity. Although the Œold problems¹ are not problems of individuals and expression of their Œpersonal failure¹, precarity ­ seen in the context of the theory of social quality ­ means a new stage of socialisation of the problems by further individualisation of the victims.
In principle, we can say that this understanding of precarity is an expression of a further erosion of society, characterising especially periods of transformation of economic systems. - Download attachment for this article

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