Adverse Employment Histories: Conceptual Considerations and Selected Health Effects

The world of work and employment underwent profound changes during the past 50 years, with the growth of new forms of employment that differ to traditional standard employment as one of its key features. Research on associations of psychosocial work environments with health produced new knowledge, but its theoretical models were largely focused on standard employment, specifically working conditions of a long-lasting full-time employment that is assumed to define a person’s working life. In this chapter, we aim at transferring key stress-theoretical notions of prevailing stress models to entire employment histories by describing six dimensions of emerging trends with relevance to health, and how these can be used to describe entire employment histories. The recurrent experience of threat induced by conditions of unpredictability, instability, and discontinuity of employment histories is a common element underlying these dimensions. Along these lines, we identify three types of adverse employment histories, labeled as “precarious,” “discontinuous,” and “chronically disadvantaged.” In a subsequent section, selected empirical findings are displayed, demonstrating associations of adverse employment histories with indicators of health functioning and with allostatic load. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks.