Fragmented Times: Youth, Work, and the Organization of Everyday Life in Digital Capitalism

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Open Topic on Children & Youth

Abstract

This paper examines how young people organize their time and structure everyday activities in contemporary Argentina under conditions of economic instability and digitalization. Drawing on the sociology of youth transitions and the literature on social temporalities, the study argues that the expansion of digital capitalism has profoundly altered the temporal organization of young people’s lives, reshaping educational trajectories, labor market participation, and future expectations.
In a context characterized by low economic growth, widespread labor informality, and the expansion of platform-mediated work, young people increasingly face fragmented and unstable schedules. The difficulty of sustaining continuous educational or occupational trajectories produces forms of temporal disorganization that are experienced as uncertainty, stress, and exhaustion, with concrete effects on well-being and health. Rather than representing individual failure, these experiences reflect structural transformations in labor markets and the erosion of standardized life-course patterns.
The analysis adopts a threefold temporal perspective that connects past trajectories, present time use, and future projections. This approach allows us to examine how everyday routines—or their absence—are embedded in biographical paths and generational frameworks. Particular attention is paid to gendered patterns of labor market participation. While young women often associate paid work with economic and residential autonomy, young men’s labor trajectories tend to be shaped by expectations of economic provision rooted in the sexual division of labor. These differences intersect with class-based inequalities and family strategies of social reproduction.
The paper also explores young people’s engagement in multiple jobs and platform work, questioning whether pluri-employment is primarily a response to insufficient income or an adaptation to new labor logics marked by flexibility, unpredictability, and blurred boundaries between work and personal time. By foregrounding time as a central analytical dimension, the study contributes to ongoing debates within ASA on precarious work, inequality, and the changing organization of everyday life under digital capitalism.

Author

• Ana Miranda, FLACSO Argentina