Qualities and Configurations of Insecurity in the United States and Spain

Abstract

In recent decades, socioeconomic insecurity—encompassing employment precarity and economic instability—has become increasingly widespread. However, insecurity manifests differently across contexts. How do people interpret the insecurity in their own contexts? Drawing on 164 crossnational interviews with young college graduates, most facing insecurity, in the U.S. and Spain, I find that respondents in each national context perceive insecurity as having starkly different qualities. While Spanish respondents perceive insecurity as narrow, unambiguous, and transitory, American respondents perceive it as broad, ambiguous, and recurrent. I develop a framework that illuminates, first, how these perceived qualities of insecurity are underpinned by people's understandings of the structural conditions of insecurity in each context— or “configurations of insecurity”— and second, the consequences of these perceptions. This study examines the meanings ascribed to structural conditions of insecurity, reveals the multidimensionality of perceived insecurity, and develops a framework that elucidates the sources and consequences of those perceptions.