ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests some markers which may be able to help to understand the contemporary changes taking place in the forms of employment, changes which are at the source of a great many of the new forms of social vulnerability. One of the main contributions of post-war social and cultural anthropology is to have shown that no society is safe from history, power struggles, conflicts and forms of inequality to have highlighted one of the great myths of historical societies. The growing importance of assignation practices and numerical flexibility encourages organisations to have more and more recourse to part-time, temporary or fee-based work, and to make greater use of a series of subcontractors. The new economy appears to be at the centre of a redefinition of the nature of work and of the forms of employment. The chapter describes the use of the term flexible assignation to indicate the concurrent presence of all of these forms of flexibility in companies.
