Book Review: Manos Spyridakis, The Liminal Worker. An Ethnography of Work, Unemployment and Precariousness in Contemporary Greece, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013
Κοινωνική Συνοχή και Ανάπτυξη (Social Cohesion and Development) 2014 9 (2), 161-168
2 Pages Posted: 26 Apr 2018
Date Written: November 6, 2014
Abstract
Book review: The newly appeared book by Dr Manos Spyridakis, The Liminal Worker, is about the experience of work, employment, employment insecurity and precariousness, from an anthropological point of view and in a context of high unemployment and crisis in the welfare state of contemporary Greek society. Spyridakis places particular emphasis on how workers conceive of their condition in the workplace, their job deprivation and employment precariousness and on how they attempt to deal with the effects these processes bring upon their daily lives. In this view, Liminal Worker points to the fact of a constant condition of liminality as a lived experience of workers in a post-Keynesian and de-industrialised framework, within which they are forcefully detached – in symbolic and pragmatic terms – from their former roles of supposed affluence, as well as from their former secure working trajectories and instead undertake a steady course of de-standardisation, coupled with feelings of ambiguity and bewilderment for their future.
Keywords: Liminal Worker, Ethnography of Work, Unemployment, Precariousness, Contemporary Greece
JEL Classification: L6, J24, L41, J6
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation