Reduced ontological security

Beyond the individual employment relationship, and beyond the workplace, there are numerous controls moulding people's behaviour as workers and would-be workers. Most obviously, we have seen over recent years workers’ basic (ontological) security retreat and an associated change in the role of work in relation to one's core sense of identity, self and wellbeing.

The arguments of Sennett (1998), Bauman (1998), Beck (1992; 2000) and others, are important here. Ontological security (Giddens, 1991) is something that arises from continuity, stability and order in one's life. During the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s there was a strong sense in which work provided this ontological security, at least in the developed world, and thus acted as an anchor for wider society. With the onset of neoliberalism and associated flexible forms of capitalism, continuity and stability in employment became undermined. Fewer workers now seem to be able to expect commitment and loyalty in their work contract and, as a result, are also unable to derive ontological security from their employment. Put another way, from the 1970s, something happened with respect to the employer–employee covenant and this change occurred at a structural level. It has affected almost all workers.

Numerous academics have sought to capture the changing nature of work and the way in which employment, at all levels, seems to be providing less and less security. Ulrich Beck (2000, 3) has argued, for instance, that: ‘One future trend is clear. For a majority of people, even in the apparently prosperous middle layers, their basic existence and lifeworld will be marked by endemic insecurity.’ This endemic insecurity means that work can no longer provide most people with a stable basis to plan over the medium to long term. It also means that workers are much more reticent, and even unable, to commit to their employer and so traditional career-path identities related to elongated achievement in and through work have been eroded (Sennett, 1998). In short, the employer now seems to care less about the employee and the employee has had to respond to this new reality of indifference and alienation.

Bauman (1998, 27) characterises the situation as follows: ‘A steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly-structured working career is no longer a widely available option.