The Society of the Federal Republic of Germany

(Last modified May 2011)

The study Precarious Employment Biographies began in December 2006 and will end in January 2012 as part of an ongoing joint project, Unemployment and Participation, funded by the German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and coordinated by the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit [Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency] in Nuremberg. The Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung München [Institute for Social Science Research Munich] is a further project partner.

The research project was designed as a qualitative panel study and as such entered new territory in the analysis of social structure and the labor market. Surveys were completed by the end of March 2011. Research focused on biographical narrative interviews, repeated each year, with people in precarious, insecure, and transitory employment situations. Interviews were conducted in seven field-study regions of Germany exhibiting different structural characteristics and labor market conditions.

The joint project’s sample was comprised of 152 persons. The study began in January 2007 with 106 cases; during the course of the project another 46 people were added to the panel. The dropout rate over the entire five-year period of the survey (2007–2011) was extremely low at just under 20 percent. More than half of the people involved were in the study sample from the beginning and were therefore interviewed four times at intervals of one year. More than one-third of the interviewees participated in at least two or three of the interview waves. Altogether a good 450 biographical narrative interviews were conducted in four interview waves with unemployed and employed people who at one time or another shared the experience of receiving welfare payments from the state.

Findings of the project so far show that the boundaries between secure and insecure zones in the world of employment are becoming increasingly blurred. As a result, the question of how paid employment plays a role in integrating individuals in society must be reassessed, since the once clear-cut divide between employed and unemployed is no longer the sole determining factor. Categories of exclusion versus belonging that have been applied in the sociology of work no longer seem to do justice to the empirical realities of the world of labor. Instead, the preliminary evaluation of data from this study indicates that a gray zone has emerged in which biographically vulnerable and fractured forms of employment predominate. Such employment offers access to working life but only periodically, at irregular intervals, and with no long-term commitment of employers. The people interviewed in this sample shuttle back and forth between mini-jobs, temp work, internships, short-term contracts, and welfare or other public benefits. These changes present a challenge to sociologists, beyond issues related to the world of employment. New inequalities become apparent. A new zone of instability is now becoming entrenched, shaping biographies and changing people’s perspectives on society.