• See Pok Loa Department of Sociology, University of Oxford

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

Previous studies on global capitalism and gender argue that the expansion of labor precarity and underemployment have brought about a “crisis of masculinity”. Less attention is paid to how the construction of masculinity adapts to shifting economic contexts. Using data from interviews with young men working on non-regular jobs, this study looks into the experiences of precarious workers in Japan, a place where job stability, gender norms, and family formation are tightly coupled. Specifically, it shows how precarious work redefines the ways workers understand masculinity and the way they imagine marriage in the future when they have failed to achieve the dominant form of the breadwinner model and the economic foundations required by marriage, given the growing structural uncertainties in the economy.

See Pok Loa is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Oxford. His research interests include the sociology of gender, work, economic sociology, personal life and families, globalization, and inequality. Overall, his research seeks to understand how global economic processes and broader inequalities reshape personal life.