Ny teori om utanförskap

För tio år sedanbörjade Fredrik Reinfeld, Anders Borg och Sven Otto Littorin utveckla begreppet ”utanförskap.” Det gav ett nytt focus för stors delar av svensk socialpolitik och blev en hörnsten i Alliansens valsegrar. Akademiska intellektuella som specialiserat sig på arbetsmarknaden, till exempel vid SOFI på Stockolms universitet och Sociologiska institution vid Göteborgs blev akterseglade i den allmänna debatten av dessa moderatpolitiker.     
Det är arbetsamt att regera. Det är inte så egendomligt att regeringskansliets ekonomer, statistiker och andra socialvetare inte utvecklat begreppet utanförskap och dess metodik särskilt mycket, och att ingen påtaglig ansträngning har gjorts att anknyta det till utländsk samhällskunskap. Debattörer på den borgerliga sidan har inte heller brytt sig on att ta ”prekariatet", den mycket omtalade engelska vänsterns utveckling av vad som ingår i utanförskapet och dess konsekvenser (Standing, 2011). Nästan ingen samhällsvetare har fördjupat sig i den franska forskningen om våld i utanförskap som lett till upplopp i förorter, I vårt land stod vi ganska handfallna inför Husby. Inte heller metodproblemen att mäta utanförskapet (Uddhammar, 1997) har utvecklats till adekvat nivå av Statistriska Centralbyrån.   
I den nya upplagan (senare i år) av Band 2 min bokserie om det allsidiga samhället, The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice of Symbols, har jag försökt fylla denna lucka av teori och metod. Jag utgår inte från någon ekonomisk teori utan från en sociologisk analys av sporadiska sociala relationer och deras sentida historiska utveckling.

From The Many-Splendored Society, Chapter 6 in 3rd edition. "Social Life and its Leaders" © Hans L Zetterberg

Perhaps the simplest classification of both human positions and social relations is in terms of their time span, i.e. the 'actual duration' or the ‘socially expected duration’, of the position or relation. Some relations are lasting, like a marriage until death or divorce us do part; some are short, like most flirtations.
Duration in social life may be the same as duration in physical science, i.e. measured in clock-time. Thus “punctually” has been a widespread modern virtue, matching clock-time of two or more individuals. However, in social science, duration is usually ‘socially expected durations’ (Merton, 1984), sometimes abbreviated ‘SED’. This duration is long for classmates in college, and is short for participants in an alumni reunion. SED is very human, and has the extraordinary attribute of having the future imbued in the present!
A major shift has taken place in the occupational structure of the past few centuries. The majority of the jobs in the agricultural generations lasted a lifetime; in due course, they were passed on to the new generation. The choice of jobs in the industrial, urbanized generations, were more varied. The degree of industrialization and urbanization in the place where you grew up became the frame for occupational choice (Lazarsfeld, 1931). A place of work and an occupation for lifetime was harder to achieve, but remained an ideal and in big industries often a realistic ‘socially expected duration’ (SED). The emerging labor unions adopted this ideal, and they have not yet abandoned it. In the postindustrial society, however, changes in places of work and occupation, are routine among the youngest, and are becoming significant events in the mainstream of life in older generations on a scale unknown to their parents.
During this radical change in the duration of jobs, human life expectancy has increased so that the actual job change in the past century is modest, when counted in years. In the same period the divorce rate increased markedly. However, taking account of the increased life expectancy, the average length of marriages changed only modestly; in earlier days, marriages had early ended by the death of partners.
Nevertheless, many longer-lasting positions and social relations are sporadic, such as the voting by citizens in democratic elections. To hold office in a democracy may also be sporadic, since after an election the opposition candidate may take over. 'Sporadicness' stands for the extent to which the relation is inactive for any reason. Many medical writers use other words, such as scattered instances, rather than endemic ones. Everyday sporadicness in a relation may appear when you fall asleep, become temporarily disinterested, when associates become absent, or are interrupted because of other tasks that are more urgent, and so forth.
Sporadicness may be structured and predictable in society. To vote for a President every fourth year is a regular sporadicness, a stable fact of American society. Sporadicness occurs at the end of every workday or the arrival of the weekend that automatically interrupt the relations with coworkers that you have in your job. This is a ‘regular’ sporadicness. “Irregular sporadicness” occurs at intermittent intervals. To have a cold every now and then is an irregular sporadicness. To shoplift every now and then is also an irregular sporadicness, but unlike having a cold, it is not socially acceptable.
Table 6.3 shows the patterns of sporadicness, regular and irregular, socially acceptable and unacceptable. The two blocks of shaded areas indicate where social life becomes ‘precarious’ because of irregular sporadicness. By then end of the 1990s, a famous French sociologist noted that most everything in his society and the modern world had become more sporadic (Bourdieu, 1998).

Table 6.3. Durability of Positions and Social Relation and the Social Problem of Precariousness. (N=no, Y=yes)

It is a common but inadequate argument that deviance, even criminal behavior, occurs due to irregular social relations. One often cites, for example, the marriage market with consequences of break-ups, and the labor markets with consequences of unemployment, and the housing markets with consequences of homelessness, all resulting in the sporadicness of relations. As causes of deviancy, these are half-truths. If duration is short and the level of sporadicness is low, most people are able to cope with some irregular episodes. However, with long duration and/or high sporadicness, people enter into the zone of ‘precariousness,’ where life may be solitary, nasty brutish and short for other reasons than those Hobbes advanced.
The zone of precariousness easily becomes a zone of hopeless pessimism. This happens when a difference between chronological duration and socially expected duration emerges. Think of people who enter their local labor market -- or move to a new city with better employment chances -- trying a few different regular jobs to find out what best suits them. They can stay in a good mode. The jobs they try out have a reasonably long socially expected duration, and they enter them with the prospect of a long engagement. However, their future dims into pessimism if the going is tough, and they only catch a few temporary jobs, i.e. jobs with low socially expected duration.        
The labor markets in the advanced industrial society of the twentieth century offered a variety of attributes of stabilizing kinds: regular working hours, regular income, protection against arbitrary dismissal, right to education on the job, seniority privileges, job security or tenure, pensions, et cetera, including the right to unionize to protect it all. The labor markets of the advanced (read digitalized) countries of the twenty-first century are different, with fewer industrial workers and fewer unionized jobs, particularly in the private sector. In the new and future service economy, programmers of services, communication, and robots set up the production, and not in traditional factories and offices but in any neighborhood where their prototyped 3D-printing is possible, as well as in any location at any diversified distance from the neighborhood.
Guy Standing, a British economist with long experience at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, writes about the new situation, which she calls “precariat.” 
Although we cannot give anything like precise figures, we may guess that at present, in many countries, at least a quarter of the adult population is in the precariat. This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who saw themselves as belonging to the industrial proletariat of the salariat had come to expect as their due (Standing, 2011, p. 24 italics supplied).
The assumption that at least twenty-five per cent of the population of modern societies is living in a precarious zone may be true for the younger generation of the 2009-2014 economic crisis, but is probably an exaggeration for the entire adult population. A common misperception affixes all statistics collected at a specific point in time about sporadic behavior. Multiple longitudinal case studies would be the proper databases for such studies. Unfortunately, they are rare outside psychology. By cluster analysis or by simple inspection, they reveal common patterns.
Every social scientist knows that an average is rather meaningless if the standard deviation is very large. What most social scientists do not know is that presentations of averages and percentages describing life in precarious zones give readers a wrong and exaggerated impression about any phenomenon of irregular sporadic behavior. This misleads even top politicians, top civil servants, skilled journalists, most writers of PhD-theses. You may learn many bits and pieces about life in a precarious zone, for example, Watts in Los Angeles. Without studying a series of life histories, however, you will not be aware of the nature of the precariousness of Watts, nor that that half the people born there have moved out of the area. Unfortunately, many central statistical offices lack the expertise to deliver and analyze case histories. A way to handle this is demonstrated in a monograph by Emil Uddhammar (1997) in a study of doles in the Swedish welfare state. 
Guy Standing’s book has started an international discussion about the precariat. The precariat appears as a new lower class. Some say it replaces Marx’s proletariat. However, also higher classes may contain precarious zones, not only for “black sheeps” on their way to be degraded. Let us recall what Professor Standing said about the precariat as the new proletariat: 
The precariat is not a class-for-itself, partly because it is at war with itself. One group in it may blame another for its vulnerability and indignity. A temporary low-wage worker may be induced to see the ‘welfare scounger’ as obtaining more, unfairly and at his or her expense. A long-term resident of a low-income urban area will easily be led to see incoming migrants as taking better jobs and leaping to head the queue for benefits. Tensions within the precariat are setting people against each other, preventing them from recognizing that the social and economic structure is producing their common set of vulnerabilities. Many will be attracted by populist politicians and neo-fascist messages, a development already clearly visible across Europe, the United States and elsewhere (Standing, 2011, p. 25).
Standing’s conclusion is that the fears, insecurities, and aspirations of the precariat make it a dangerous class. She recommends a ‘politics of paradise.’ This is a code word for the utopia of work-free wages, so called “citizen wages,” nowadays mostly a favorite of the political left.
Of course, governments and others may hand out money for survival of people in acute circumstances. However, such relieves are not a substitute for removing bulks of social relations of irregular sporadicness, the core of the problem. The latter is a job of community organization, and carried out by community organizers, be they public, private, or concerned citizens in the civil society.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, P. (1998). La précarité est aujourdhui partout. Countre-feux, 96-112.

Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1931). Jugend und Beruf. Kritik und Material. Jena: G. Fischer.

Merton, R. K. (1984). Socially Exped Durations: A Case Study of Concept Formation in Sociology. In W. Powell, & R. Robbins (Eds.), Conflict and Consensus: In Honor of Lewis A. Coser (pp. 262-283). New York, NY: Free Press.

Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury.

Uddhammar, E. (1997). Arbete, välfärd, bidrag: en analys av folkets välstånd och välfärdsforskningens missförstånd . Stockholm: City university press.