Research Question 1
Is it possible to determine the semantic area of 'entreprecariat' through the tools of distant reading? Is it possible to declare if it is a positive or negative phenomenon?
Last updated
Is it possible to determine the semantic area of 'entreprecariat' through the tools of distant reading? Is it possible to declare if it is a positive or negative phenomenon?
Last updated
By means of the Word2Vec model provided by Gensim, we could make inferences of similarities between words. It emerges that the word entreprecariat has a strong connection with the word youth and a weak connection to the word work. Furthermore, by querying our model we found out that the ten words most similar to "enterprecariat" are the following:
The code with the queries is available on our Github repository or you can download it from there:
Answer: we can confirm our expectations, declaring that entreprecariat is a different condition compared to the traditional concepts related to the labour market. It is related to the concept of "precariaty" and "precariousness", but also to some negative adjectives as panic and inability.
Insights: since it is a phenomenon that our corpus relates strictly to the youth, what is not present are the adults, and even more the elderly. There is a higher probability that, since elderly started to work in previous circumstances, they had permanent contracts or a even if they are precarious, they change company and not the kind of job, out of the flexibility requested by the current market. They still relate to the old concept of 'precariat' as 'intermittent employment', while entreprecariat is more similar to a lifestyle. It is not related anymore to the kind of contract (fixed-term, permanent etc.) but to the fact that it permeates every aspect of the life of the worker.
