Abstract

Changes in the categories of employment and unemployment are linked not only with their resemantisation but also with the transformation of their category boundaries and the emergence of new boundaries. This chapter discusses the main conclusions put forward by the authors contributing to this collective volume and identifies various patterns in this process of semantic transformation: changes in the criteria on which the establishment of categories is based; reshaping of the semantic boundaries of categories; dismantling of the semantic boundaries between categories; diversification of occupational statuses within each category, and reshaping of the enunciation framework. This semantic process has performative effects: the crisis of the categories of employment and unemployment pushes workers into depoliticising frameworks, so that central issues with which we have denounced vulnerability—conflict, heteronomy and interdependence—are lost to view.