Precarious futures: Future-making and employment management in freelance work

Abstract

Synthesising the sociology of futures and the literature on employment management, this article examines how precarity disrupts workers’ senses of futures and their responses. Using interview data with online freelance workers in Japan – a context characterised by strong cultural expectations of linear and stable time but undergoing condensed precarisation of labour – the article argues that workers’ strategies to navigate precarity and secure employability are shaped by their perceptions about the future. Three forms of future-making in response to precarity are identified, revealing how workers’ varied temporal beliefs mapped onto the strategies of managing employability and enactment of futures: entrepreneurial propelling, reactive retaining and alertive guarding. The workers’ emphasis of the need to ‘think ahead’ and roll out prospective strategies to secure employability is particularly striking. The findings underscore how future-making operates as a mechanism that normalises and reproduces precarity, reinforcing the wider neoliberal imperatives of the individualisation of futures.