Job Insecurity and Life Courses. By Sonia Bertolini, Valentina Goglio, and Dirk Hofäcker, Bristol: Bristol University Press. 2024

In recent years, sociological debates on work and inequality have increasingly converged around a shared diagnosis: employment uncertainty has become a defining condition of contemporary capitalism. Concepts such as precarity, destandardisation, and risk have been mobilised to capture the erosion of stable employment trajectories and the weakening of institutionalised life-course scripts. Yet much of this literature continues to treat insecurity either as a labour market outcome observed at a given point in time or as a subjective psychological state detached from broader biographical processes. Job Insecurity and Life Courses intervene in this debate by insisting that insecurity must be understood as a life-course phenomenon, one that accumulates, stratifies, and reshapes social inequalities over time.