Polycrisis: chronicity, normalisation, familiarisation and resistance in the world of work

We are interested in the relevance of polycrisis to productive and reproductive labour. Crises provide opportunities for the reconstruction of expectations and changes in labour policies. An important context of such policy reforms is war – the one raging beyond our borders and the threat of war appearing in political discourse. Although research on the Polish economy in the context of militarisation is still scarce, a number of studies of other war contexts have shown that war and preparations for it cause profound shifts in the economy and lead to different decisions regarding cuts in public spending. We are therefore interested in what consequences war and crisis treated as an excuse have for the wider world of work. At the same time, we want to look at issues of coping with crises, including the crisis of war: the mechanisms of institutionalisation, normalisation and familiarisation. A special case of the above might be the search for opportunities to profit from the crisis, following the rules observed by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.  In the area of social dialogue, an example might be the systematic bypassing of tripartite mechanisms due to a peculiarly permanent state of emergency requiring rapid action. We ask the question to what extent the war crisis is a component of the other observed crises, or perhaps all these crises (climate, pandemic, inflationary) are part of something bigger, and we are observing  parallel turning points in various areas. To what extent are these crises, also known as polycrisis, independent, and to what extent is it a cumulative, multidimensional crisis of liberal democracy, the convulsions of neoliberalism. Colin Crunch has written about the peculiar death of neoliberalism. Perhaps we can now speak of a ‘zombie neoliberalism’?

For the sociology of work it is not only the multidimensionality of the crisis that is important, but also its chronicity. We are keen to look at the persistence of the state of crisis in, for example, public services and how successive external crises reinforce their malfunctioning. In particular, in this context, we are interested in how the crisis is experienced and dealt with by groups and categories that are in many ways underprivileged and for whom the crisis is an everyday experience. A particularly important context that reinforced the polycrisis was the pandemic – seemingly already replaced in public discourse by the war narrative, while not fully overcome in individual experiences. It significantly affected the organisation of work, for instance by the introduction of hybrid solutions that were quickly tamed and became a new normality. What are the new expectations, what is future for the labour market?

We also assume that in order to be able to discuss fully about the contexts of polycrisis and its consequences for social reality, a methodological broadening of the research field is desirable. During the discussion a particular attention will be paid to the biographical method and its application to research on workers’ experiences (both in industries essential for social reproduction in crisis such as health care, education, social assistance or logistics and other spheres of the labour market). Including biographical experiences in the reflection makes it possible to link the level of macro-processes (the impact of chronic crises or sudden crises of exogenous nature, as well as more widely perceived social changes such as the transformation and post-transformation processes after 1989), with the level of micro-phenomena: experiences of everyday life, ways of interpreting and assigning meanings to phenomena affecting individuals, mechanisms of building individual and collective resourcefulness and ways of coping with the consequences of the polycrisis.

During the symposium, we want to discuss the results of research on the intertwining of sudden and chronic crises, with a particular focus on the individual and biographical perspective and the role of intersecting social inequalities. We will consider what new theoretical insights can be gained from research on the polycrisis? Is this a new phenomenon, or has it been with us for years, particularly in the spheres of work, production and reproduction? How does the creeping polycrisis translate into biographical experiences? What new insights does war/remilitarisation bring to such analyses? We also want to reflect together on methodological issues. How can such a chronic and sudden multi-crisis be studied? What are the limitations and possibilities of biographical research on crises? Or perhaps it is worth supplementing it with additional methodological and theoretical perspectives?