PRECARITY AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY IN THE CONTEXT OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Precarity has become a significant feature of our society. This paper focuses on the problem of precariatization from an institutional perspective which emphasizes factors of institutional transformation, technological change and influence of regulative mechanisms. Education is viewed as the important institution affecting labour market. Increased duration of education is a sign of modern social orders. In developed countries, higher education is becoming increasingly accessible to the majority of young people; as a result, a shift occurs from its professional orientation towards general cultural training. Disequilibrium, or redundancy of young people with higher education in the labour market, cannot be investigated irrespective of the social context - first of all, processes of socialization and building of civil society. Institutions are inertial by its very nature, and this inertia is much more strong than those immanent to the regulation mechanisms. As a result, an asynchrony takes place between institutional change and change in regulation mechanisms. This asynchrony can be viewed from the Veblen's dichotomy perspective. New quality of institutions, along with their non-complementarity to the regulation mechanisms, have much to do with the instability and lack of social guarantees which are the features of precariat as the new modern social class. The response of society to the swift changes that take place in material and social technologies is addressed in the context of the new Luddites movement. Rapid institutional changes are discussed in the context of professional identity, emergence of new professions and forms of employment. "The trap of precarity" could become further resistant to change and hard to break away from, due to misalignment between the employees' expectations and perceptions regarding their career prospects, on the one hand, and existing regulative mechanisms and social technologies, on the other hand.