Rolf-Dieter Hepp - Böcker

This book provides international and transdisciplinary perspectives on Hyperprecarity and Social Structural Transformations in European Societies, USA and Russia enforced through other special transformation processes such as digitalisation, migration and demographic change. It has been observed that precarity and social insecurity do not refer any longer only to certain groups of the society such as unemployed people or to those ones who are ‘traditionally’ more in need of social benefit etc. but it accompanies and affects greater parts of the society, particularly those sections of the middleclass who conceive their social identity merely via their work ethics. Consequentially new forms of social exclusion are being producing taxing the traditional social cohesion in European societies due to the demand of new forms of flexibility and mobility from the working people. This process can be termed with the notion 'Hyperprecarisation'.This book contains contributions from scientists all over Europe, Russia and the USA, who are members of the SUPI network “Social Uncertainty, Prequarity, Inequality”.PD Dr. Rolf Hepp teaches at the Institut for Soziologie at the FU Berlin and coordinates the S.U.P.I.-Network.Dr. David Kergel teaches at Universität Siegen, Medienwissenschaftliches Seminar.Dr. Robert Riesinger, (Prof. a.D., FH Joanneum Graz) is author and researcher for sociology in Steyerberg.

In the pandemic, the state in Germany reacts in lockdown with restrictions within the private sphere of a shutdown of the leisure and cultural sphere, while the work contexts are only peripherally affected. Out of this crisis, new techniques of leadership are intensifying. Discipline and norms are no longer suitable enough to ensure productivity in today's world, which is why there is a shift towards self-directed processes and mechanisms such as flexibility, motivation and goal setting. The actors are therefore no longer assigned a fixed place in the sense of discipline, but are encouraged to surrender to the new control mechanisms and to adapt themselves again and again with a high degree of self-control. The realistic fear of contagion reinforces the actors' willingness to submit to these forms of mobilization.