Non-standard Employment: Prospects or Precarity?

Non-standard employment – employment with a non-permanent contract – is currently in the heart of economic and political debate in Europe. This project uses a new longitudinal approach to examine the role of non-standard employment by treating careers as ‘process outcomes’ where the whole employment trajectory matters, and not as ‘point-in-time transitions’ where only the outcome of a single episode matters, as previous research has done. By applying sequence analysis on a unique Dutch dataset, we aim at solving the theoretical and empirical controversies on when non-standard employment constitutes precarity or offers prospects in the career of workers.