The current study is a shortened version of a longer study. The original study published in Csoba Judit: Labour Market flexibility and precarity in Hungary // Herrmann P., Bobkov V., Csoba J. Labour Market and Precarity of Employment Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Data from Hungary and Russia Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung Bremen, 2014. Р. 67–150.
1. Appearance of the terms ’flexibility’ and ’precarity’, and the development of their meaning
The social inequalities that already received a lot of criticism in the West, and that were also present in socialist societies, as well as the spread of deviant behaviour that appeared along with these problems, were becoming too serious to be ignored by the politics of that time. At the end of the 70s a new governmental research programme was launched, under the control of the state ideology, with the goal of researching types of deviance. The phenomena under examination included suicide, alcoholism and mental disorders, which the authors tried to explain with individual reasons. By contrast, poverty and social exclusion did not belong to the range of areas that were allowed to be researched openly, although there were individual studies that concentrated on just these topics. These included, for example, the studies on the sociology of housing by Iván Szelényi and György Konrád at the end of the 60s (1969), the results of which triggered a considerable professional debate. This research made it obvious that the reasons behind the arising problems had been structural rather than individual. At this point we also have to mention the sociographic publications in the series «Magyarország felfedezése» (The discovery of Hungary), e.g. the study «Erdőháton, Nyíren» by Antal Végh (Végh 1972), which described in detail the undeniable deep poverty present in villages, or the book «Nagykőrös» by István Márkus, which documented the results of a study started in 1973 on the transformation of farming communities and their standard of living which was often below that of the rest of society. (Márkus 1979)
