Martine D’Amours

Highly Skilled Workers and Employment Risks Role of Institutions

This paper analyzes the construction of risk and its effects on three groups of highly skilled professionals doing project work (video game designers, freelance journalists, and performing artists). Our results reveal that high qualifications are not a universal protective factor in the risk society. They suggest, rather, that the political economy of the various markets in which knowledge workers offer their services, as well as the institutions that structure these markets—or do not—is at least as important in determining the fate that awaits them when they are old or sick and that these other factors help create, among these highly skilled workers, a variety of risk societies.