The antecedents of Job Insecurity: a theoretical model and a cross-cultural comparison

7 Introduction This thesis is about the phenomenon of job insecurity and its antecedents. My generation is the first one to experience the risk of living a worse situation, within a working optic, than its parents’; to regress instead of progress. The working scenario of nowdays is disarming and it aroused my interest. Job Insecurity is a very actual topic, especially in Italy. It has been studied by many authors, although often in a quantitative optic and from an economic point of view. On the contrary, this thesis aims to deal witht the phenomenon in a qualitative optic and from a psychological point of view. The starting point of my work is to try to briefly illustrate the phenomenon in all its aspects, by making a general international literature review in the first two chapters of the thesis. In particulr, the first chapter will discuss why the phenomenon happened to rise and how it evolved during the past years (together with the development of the new forms of jobs and contracts), while the second chapter will focus on how job insecurity is defined by the main authors who wrote about it, and which are the gaps that, in my opinion, can be found in the literature. Reviewing the literature, I realised that there is a strong interest for this topic. It is often described as strongly related to the kind of contract someone has: many authors point out an important relationship between an insecure kind of contact (i.e. the fixed-term contract) and the perception of Job Insecurity. The aim of my work is also to show that there is so much more, beside this relationship (which is real and strong, but not the only factor that matters), between the two variables. In fact, the most recent papers, regarding the phenomenon of Job Insecurity, start to introduce other social, economic and cultural factors as equally determinant on the perception of insecurity: the phenomenon turned out to be defined as the fear of losing the job, and it touches the employees who have a secure working position, in terms of kind of contract, as well (Bosio, Graffigna, Libreri, Lozza, 2009). We will see why and how job insecurity occurs, by defining and discuss a qualitative model of the antecedents of job insecurity.