ABSTRACT

Speculation has become a normalized occupational strategy and quotidian economic rationality that extends throughout society. Although there are many contemporary articulations of speculation, this article focuses on contract labor as a domain of financialization. Seen through this lens, contract labor can be understood as a speculative investment strategy wherein individuals leverage whatever assets they have at their disposal – savings, time, bodily health – to capture economic advantages. In particular, we explore the speculative practices of healthy individuals who enroll in pharmaceutical drug trials as their primary or critical source of income. Mobilizing speculative logics to maximize the money they can earn from their clinical trial participation, these contract workers employ what we term a future-income-over-immediate-pay calculus. This speculative calculus valorizes fictional projections of significant long-term future income over present financial opportunities. For the economically precarious individuals in our study, we argue that rather than effectively increasing their income, speculation on contract work serves a compensatory function, providing an important – but ultimately inadequate – sense of control over market conditions that thrive upon workers’ economic insecurity.

摘要

投机已经成为一种常态化的职业策略和遍及整个社会的日常经济理性。尽管有许多当代的投机表述，但本文将合同劳动作为金融化的一个领域。从这个角度来看，合同工可以被理解为一种投机性投资策略，个人可以利用他们拥有的任何资产——储蓄、时间、身体健康——来获取经济优势。特别是，我们探索了参加药物试验作为其主要或关键收入来源的健康个体的投机行为。调动投机逻辑以最大限度地提高他们从参与临床试验中获得的收益，这些合同工使用我们所说的未来收入高于立即支付的计算。这种投机性的演算将重要的长期未来收入与当前财务机会的虚构预测相匹配。对于我们研究中经济不稳定的个人，我们认为，对合同工作的投机并没有有效地增加他们的收入，而是起到了一种补偿作用，提供了一种重要的——但最终是不够的——对市场状况的控制感，而这种控制感会因工人的经济不安全感而蓬勃发展。