Work of relations, but which ones? Reciprocity effects on dual precarious knowledge workers couples

The article discusses how the side bet is discursively constructed the side bet (Becker, 1960) of precarious knowledge workers, which consists of a series of mechanisms generating both use values and workers subjectivities. In the free work regime (Beverungen et al., 2013) in fact the lines of demarcation, not only the physical and temporal ones but also those related to the sense making, between productive and reproductive spheres, vanish. Towards this direction, the article, through the analysis of the discursive practices adopted by respondents, investigates the reciprocal links, in Simmel's terms, which inevitably are working at the couple level between the productive and reproductive practices. These practices constrain and in turn are bound by social structures, primarily that of gender. The analysis sheds light on the contradictions underlying these forms of reciprocity and, from a critical point of view, observes the implications along the analytical dimensions of dis-alienation (Fisher, 2012) and self-alienation (Costas and Fleming, 2009).