Annalisa Murgia
Biographic Data
| ID | 152000 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annalisa Murgia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annalisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Murgia |
| SIGNATURE | MURGIA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9740-4532 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Representing and organising the solo self-employed in Europe: The emergence of a ‘relational representation’ from the combination of prefigurative and contentious politics
Collective representation is traditionally associated with employees, while solo self-employed (SSE) workers, in both regulated and unregulated professions, are usually considered to be autonomous and therefore not in need of representation. However, in recent years, the SSE have increasingly represented their interests collectively, although often outside traditional representative organisations such as trade unions, employer organisations, and …
Intersectional (in)visibility and forms of (de)professionalization: The case of migrant domestic platform workers in Italy
This paper adopts a feminist and intersectional perspective to investigate platform-mediated domestic work in Italy. While existing scholarship has extensively analysed classed, gendered and racialized hierarchies in traditional domestic labour, the growing role of digital platforms in mediating these work arrangements deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. Focusing on the experiences of migrant cleaning workers in Milan, this stud…
Hybrid Labour: Measuring, Classifying, and Representing Workers at the Boundaries of Employment and Self-employment
International audience
Intersectionality and precarious subjectivities: Within and beyond labour and organisational perspectives
This Special Issue draws on intersectionality to explore how interlocking forms of discrimination and marginalisation culminate to produce, structure and sustain precarious subjectivities within and beyond neoliberal workplaces, and how subjects cope with or resist them. This collection brings together studies across diverse time-space configurations and social groups/labouring bodies – queer NGO activists in China, middle-class women writers dur…
It’s labour exploitation, but fortunately there is a lot of solidarity’. A qualitative case study with cleaning platform workers in Berlin
International audience
Is there a European ‘Great Resignation'? The case of technicians in the entertainment sector in Italy
The article examines the debates on the ‘Great Resignation' during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe focusing on the case study of technicians in the entertainment sector in Italy. In this passion-driven sector, workers are particularly exposed to processes of precarisation. Drawing on a web survey carried out by the Centro Studi Doc Foundation in November 2021 and interviews with key informants, the impact of the pandemic on labour trajectories and …
Dissenting and innovating: Freelancers' emerging forms of organising in the Netherlands
This article investigates precarious workers' organising by considering the case of freelancers, a category between the self-employed - usually represented by employer organisations - and employees - whose interests are traditionally defended by trade unions. Drawing on a 6-month ethnography conducted in the Netherlands within two freelancer associations, our study shows their capacity to exercise collective forms of 'critical agency' - on the on…
Beyond borders: Trans-organisational and transnational alliances among gig workers in the United Kingdom and Italy
This article examines the activities of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and Deliverance Milano (DM), the main collective actors that are currently organising food delivery platform workers in London and Milan, respectively. Both IWGB and DM seek to encourage and support alliances across organisational boundaries as well as across national borders, albeit in different ways. Drawing on a combination of participant observation…
From exception to pioneering: Insights on combining professional autonomy and social rights from the Syndicat National des Artistes Plasticien·nes
This article contributes to the limited research on solo self-employed (SSE) workers, who strive to collectively address social and labour rights issues while preserving their autonomy. It examines a unique case within the French context, the Syndicat National des Artistes Plasticien·nes (SNAP), a trade union created in 1977 within the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) to represent self-employed visual artists. Through extensive ethnographi…
We Have Two Engines, and We Must Keep Them Both Running: The Combination of Institutional and Symbolic Resources in the "Socio-Emotional Organizing" of Solo Self-Employed Workers
The rise of solo self-employment has led to the emergence of increasingly broad categories of workers in search of collective representation, who find no support either in trade unions or in employer organizations. Based on the case of Redacta, an informal group founded in Italy and composed of solo self-employed (SSE) workers in the publishing industry, the article contributes to the debate on Resource Mobilization Theory and New Social Movement…
Pour une ontologie précaire. Une approche orientée vers la subjectivité
Les dernières décennies ont été marquées par l’émergence d’une vaste littérature sur les processus de précarisation. Deux grands axes de recherche ont marqué les approches sociologiques. Le premier - développé principalement dans le domaine de la sociologie économique - s’est concentré sur la “précarité” du travail étudiée dans les dimensions structurelles qui ont progressivement érodé le régime d’emploi fordiste pour une partie croissante de la …
Representing Solo Self-Employed Workers: The Strengthening of Relations between Traditional and New Collective Actors in Industrial Relations
To date, the emergence of representation of hitherto under-represented workers has mainly been analysed in terms of strategic choices of traditional industrial relations actors. This study - focused on solo self-employed workers (SSE) - instead analyses the interactions between unions, employer organisations and new collective actors, namely SSE associations. More specifically, drawing on a comparative ethnography conducted in three European coun…
Conceptualizing Precariousness: A Subject-oriented Approach
Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries
This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organiz…
In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations
This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both compani…
Faces of Precarity: Critical Perspectives on Work, Subjectivities and Struggles
This chapter argues for a perspective on the study of precarious work which draws from earlier critical labour studies and feminist analyses of the role of domestic labour in the reproduction of capitalism in order to focus on the (micro-)social foundations of the (macro-) structural changes in the collective institutions, operations and outcomes of labour markets under neoliberalism. Especially, we point to the challenges that the fading away of…
High-skilled platform jobs in Europe: Trends, quality of work and emerging challenges
This article focuses on high-skilled jobs performed through digital labour platforms (DLPs) in Europe. First, it discusses the main typologies developed in recent years to classify DLPs according to the level of skills required of workers. Second, it pro-vides an overview of the available data and attempts to measure this growing phenomenon. Third, it focuses on the quality of high-skilled platform jobs in com-parison to both low-to-medium-skille…
Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment
In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-emplo…
Work-family conflict in Europe. A focus on the heterogeneity of self-employment
This article aims at analysing how subjective work-family conflict is experienced by different self-employed men and women in comparison to employees and informal workers in Europe. Firstly, it focuses on how job-related resources and demands characterise traditional and emerging types of self-employment affecting the perception of work-family conflict. Secondly, it explores both gender-related institutional and societal dimensions, by analysing …
It Started with the Arts and Now It Concerns All Sectors: The Case of Smart, a Cooperative of ‘Salaried Autonomous Workers’
This chapter aims to analyse how new forms of collective organisation can be developed to counteract the ongoing process of precarisation and individualisation of labour. In particular, attention is paid to the Smart cooperative, an interesting laboratory exploring new forms of solidarity within a general trend characterised by the lack of trade unionisation and labour organisation. Smart is a cooperative of ‘salaried autonomous workers’ created …
Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions
The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "h…
Covid‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By di…
Gender and Precarious Research Careers: A Comparative Analysis
The literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised – albeit with important differences among countries – by strong gender discriminations, especially in more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. \n \nGender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education a…
Tracking the sociomaterial traces of affect at the crossroads of affect and practice theories
Purpose Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This pa…
Mapping Precariousness, Labour Insecurity and Uncertain Livelihoods: Subjectivities and Resistance
The precariousnesses of young knowledge workers: A subject-oriented approach
Over the past decades, a number of EU member states have recorded large rises in the use of temporary employment. Young people are far more likely than other groups to be employed in precarious jobs, independently of their education and skills. In the midst of the global economic-financial crisis, in fact, the assault on the conditions of knowledge workers goes on, according to the different lines of the neoliberalistic logics, which juxtapose wi…
Covid‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By di…
Fathers' Stories of Resistance and Hegemony in Organizational Cultures
This article focuses on the practices of resistance and hegemony that oppose change in gender cultures in organizations. It suggests that analysis of the narratives produced by organizational actors is a fruitful method with which to deal with issues of this kind. In particular, the analysis concentrates on how resistance and hegemony practices may affect the implementation of changes promoted at a normative level — as in the case of the Italian …
Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions
The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "h…
Representations of Precarity in Italy: Collective and Individual Stories, Social Imaginaries and Subjectivities
This contribution is focused on collective and individual stories of precarity in Italy. At the present time, when work and the imaginaries socially constructed around it are more and more individualised and fragmented, imaginaries and collective references – whether they be social movements, trade unions or professional groups – have given way to ever more particularistic and singular experiences, which hinder the construction of a coherent iden…
Representing Solo Self-Employed Workers: The Strengthening of Relations between Traditional and New Collective Actors in Industrial Relations
To date, the emergence of representation of hitherto under-represented workers has mainly been analysed in terms of strategic choices of traditional industrial relations actors. This study - focused on solo self-employed workers (SSE) - instead analyses the interactions between unions, employer organisations and new collective actors, namely SSE associations. More specifically, drawing on a comparative ethnography conducted in three European coun…
Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment
In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-emplo…
Work-family conflict in Europe. A focus on the heterogeneity of self-employment
This article aims at analysing how subjective work-family conflict is experienced by different self-employed men and women in comparison to employees and informal workers in Europe. Firstly, it focuses on how job-related resources and demands characterise traditional and emerging types of self-employment affecting the perception of work-family conflict. Secondly, it explores both gender-related institutional and societal dimensions, by analysing …
It’s labour exploitation, but fortunately there is a lot of solidarity’. A qualitative case study with cleaning platform workers in Berlin
International audience
What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories tol…
Staging precariousness: The Serpica Naro catwalk during the Milan Fashion Week
The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates…
Flexible narratives” Discursive Positionings of Gender and Identity in Precarious Times
Studies concerning the transformations of work have long stressed how flexible work has affected the lives and identity-setting processes of individuals. A salient aspect of the current changes consists of the gender issues concerning the reality of work and its representations. The aim of this paper is to stress gender-identitary positionings in the context of the stories of women and men in non-standard employment. The specific question that th…
Challenging Hegemonic Masculinities: Men's Stories on Gender Culture in Organizations
The article emphasizes the importance of storytelling in helping or hindering a change in organizational practices brought about by the entry into force of a legislative measure. It concentrates in particular on the introduction of a normative change intended to reshape the dominant gender order by giving fathers the same rights to parental leave as mothers. Whilst storytelling can be an instrument of change, it may also be perceived and used as …
Flexible narratives” Discursive Positionings of Gender and Identity in Precarious Times
Studies concerning the transformations of work have long stressed how flexible work has affected the lives and identity-setting processes of individuals. A salient aspect of the current changes consists of the gender issues concerning the reality of work and its representations. The aim of this paper is to stress gender-identitary positionings in the context of the stories of women and men in non-standard employment. The specific question that th…
Stories of work/life transitions from the Italian public sector
Purpose The aim of this article is to overcome an endogenous view of work, as a category isolated from the other existential spheres, and to identify an alternative approach to understanding how (paid) work and other life domains interweave. Biographical transitions between work and non‐work are analysed, paying specific attention to the processes of gender positioning. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on the analysis of 60 narra…
Fathers' Stories of Resistance and Hegemony in Organizational Cultures
This article focuses on the practices of resistance and hegemony that oppose change in gender cultures in organizations. It suggests that analysis of the narratives produced by organizational actors is a fruitful method with which to deal with issues of this kind. In particular, the analysis concentrates on how resistance and hegemony practices may affect the implementation of changes promoted at a normative level — as in the case of the Italian …
The precariousnesses of young knowledge workers: A subject-oriented approach
Over the past decades, a number of EU member states have recorded large rises in the use of temporary employment. Young people are far more likely than other groups to be employed in precarious jobs, independently of their education and skills. In the midst of the global economic-financial crisis, in fact, the assault on the conditions of knowledge workers goes on, according to the different lines of the neoliberalistic logics, which juxtapose wi…
Staging precariousness: The Serpica Naro catwalk during the Milan Fashion Week
The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates…
Présentation. Quand passion et précarité se rencontrent dans les métiers du savoir
Initialement associées aux programmes de recherches sur la précarisation des parcours de chercheurs post-doctorants et du personnel temporaire de la Commission européenne, nous avons initié une réflexion sur les rapports complexes qui se créent entre deux des caractéristiques actuelles des formes de subjectivation dans le capitalisme contemporain : l’intériorisation des compétences créatives et relationnelles d’une part, et les processus de fr…
What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories tol…
Representations of Precarity in Italy: Collective and Individual Stories, Social Imaginaries and Subjectivities
This contribution is focused on collective and individual stories of precarity in Italy. At the present time, when work and the imaginaries socially constructed around it are more and more individualised and fragmented, imaginaries and collective references – whether they be social movements, trade unions or professional groups – have given way to ever more particularistic and singular experiences, which hinder the construction of a coherent iden…
The precariousness of knowledge workers: Hybridisation, self-employment and subjectification
In knowledge-based industries, work is circumscribed by the cognitive frames of creativity in the representations of subjects, but simultaneously demands adaptability, in a context in which deregulation and individualisation are now normal. The ethics of self-activation are therefore inextricably intertwined with the demands of intensification, standardisation and self-commodification. The first volume of this Special Issue – which is made up of …
Mapping Precariousness, Labour Insecurity and Uncertain Livelihoods: Subjectivities and Resistance
Mapping precariousness: Subjectivities and resistance
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to offer different perspectives on the phenomenon as it gives rise to a variety of responses and interpretations that are shaped by the historical trajectories and geographical locations of the subjects affected by it. It explains an accent on subjectivity and how it intersects the ongoing transformation in the experiences a…
The precariousness of knowledge workers (Part 2): Forms and critiques of autonomy and self-representation
This article introduces the second of a two-part Special Issue of this journal on the precariousness of knowledge workers. It aims to explore the ambivalences and liminal relations among autonomy, identification and task orientation, which – for knowledge workers – represent both a source of self-realisation and a generator of multiple and distinctive forms of precariousness. In particular, we focus on the forms and critiques of autonomy and self…
Mapping Precariousness, Labour Insecurity and Uncertain Livelihoods
Gender and Precarious Research Careers: A Comparative Analysis
The literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised – albeit with important differences among countries – by strong gender discriminations, especially in more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. \n \nGender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education a…
Tracking the sociomaterial traces of affect at the crossroads of affect and practice theories
Purpose Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This pa…
It Started with the Arts and Now It Concerns All Sectors: The Case of Smart, a Cooperative of ‘Salaried Autonomous Workers’
This chapter aims to analyse how new forms of collective organisation can be developed to counteract the ongoing process of precarisation and individualisation of labour. In particular, attention is paid to the Smart cooperative, an interesting laboratory exploring new forms of solidarity within a general trend characterised by the lack of trade unionisation and labour organisation. Smart is a cooperative of ‘salaried autonomous workers’ created …
Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions
The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "h…
Covid‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By di…
High-skilled platform jobs in Europe: Trends, quality of work and emerging challenges
This article focuses on high-skilled jobs performed through digital labour platforms (DLPs) in Europe. First, it discusses the main typologies developed in recent years to classify DLPs according to the level of skills required of workers. Second, it pro-vides an overview of the available data and attempts to measure this growing phenomenon. Third, it focuses on the quality of high-skilled platform jobs in com-parison to both low-to-medium-skille…
Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment
In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-emplo…
Work-family conflict in Europe. A focus on the heterogeneity of self-employment
This article aims at analysing how subjective work-family conflict is experienced by different self-employed men and women in comparison to employees and informal workers in Europe. Firstly, it focuses on how job-related resources and demands characterise traditional and emerging types of self-employment affecting the perception of work-family conflict. Secondly, it explores both gender-related institutional and societal dimensions, by analysing …
Conceptualizing Precariousness: A Subject-oriented Approach
Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries
This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organiz…
In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations
This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both compani…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (26 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (18 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (15 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Public relations (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works)