Labour, space, time and place: transforming lives across transforming geographies of late capitalism
This Thesis is about Labour in an increasingly liquid social and economic reality, about time and the formal ”freedom” to allocate it, and about well-being as captured by the neoclassical notion of utility in contemporary capitalism.
Crucially, these transformations are spatially uneven: they are mediated by place-based labour-market structures and territorially embedded institutions, producing distinctive geographies of insecurity, time pressure, and wellbeing. In condensed form, across four main empirical chapters, this dissertation explores how labour-market regimes and related social institutions shape the distribution and lived experience of labour - in terms of employment security, time allocation, and subjective wellbeing - across different social groups, households, and countries.
It asks how systematically discriminatory labour-market regimes, socially reductive conceptions of time use or of peer effects, and collective institutions give rise to, interact with, and help structure processes of precarisation of labour and, more broadly, of life.