Abstract
Unemployed Americans overwhelmingly describe their predicament as an individual and private challenge, and not as a public issue with structural causes and political solutions. This case study utilizes participant observation and in-depth interviews at a support organization for unemployed white-collar workers to explore the concrete dynamics that render the structural and political dimensions of unemployment beyond discussion. Whereas the existing literature focuses on the role of ideology in shaping subjective understandings of unemployment, my ethnographic data indicate that the lived experience of job searching is critical to understanding why individualist ideologies resonate with unemployed job seekers. Engagement in the process of job searching is analyzed as a type of work that generates an absorbing “work–game.” Playing this game depoliticizes unemployment by channeling the players’ practical energies towards strategic decision-making and individual level maneuvers and away from larger structural contexts. The depoliticizing effects of the game endure even after job seekers cease to play. For job seekers who encounter obstacles to finding employment in the labor market and become discouraged, the process of playing the game generates the experience of being a loser, and thus reinforces individualized understandings of unemployment.
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Notes
By “depoliticization” I mean the understanding and articulation of an issue as private, as opposed to public, and therefore not amenable to collective political solutions. Politicization is a necessary but not sufficient precondition to any political mobilization or collective action.
In a study of unemployed managers, Newman (1999) likewise attributes the managers’ individualist understandings and self blame to a powerful ideology of meritocracy.
In a study of a workfare program, Deborah Little (1999) finds elements of resistance. Little claims that welfare reliant women deflect the blaming implications of individualist discourses to their own situation, by framing “others,” such as men who use public assistance to buy drugs, as the “real” lazy dependents. However, this resistance does not ultimately question the dominant ideology but only its application to particular cases.
With some notable exceptions (Smith 2001; Newman 1999), studies of the unemployed tend to focus on the experience of job loss and the negation of the former worker status, and either ignore the experience of job searching or conflate it with job loss (e.g. Schlozman and Verba 1979; Cottle 2001; Uchitelle 2006). My ethnography suggests that after a brief initial period, the salience of the past job loss recedes and the ongoing process of job searching largely generates the present lived experience.
I entered JP in a dual capacity. I was open about my research agenda but I also asked to participate in the program as a job seeker. As such I went through the trainings, attended all meetings, and became a member of a “Success Team.”
Based on a survey of JP members conducted at the midpoint of my year of participant observation, 17% of JP members do not have a college degree, while 34% have a college degree, and 47% have some kind of graduate or professional degree. Salaries at the most recent job broke down as follows: (1) 10% earned less than $35 k/year, (2) 30% earned between $35 k–$50 k/year, (3) 30% earned $50k–$75 k/year, (4) 16% earned $75 k–$100 k/year, and (5) 14% earned more than $100 k/year.
JP members’ positions at their most recent jobs fell into these broad catergories: 19% were executives or senior level managers, 20% were senior level engineers or technical workers, and 42% were mid-level or junior managerial or technical workers. Twenty percent of JP members did not fit any of these categories.
JP members identified themselves as 72% white, 15% African-American, 10% Asian-American, and 3% fell into other categories. JP members’ ages broke down as follows: 3% were 20–30, 13% were 31–40, 40% were 41–50, 35% were 51–60, and 9% were over 61.
JP receives enough funding from the state to support one employee. Since it has no funding to pay speakers, the “experts” are mostly private coaches who come to JP hoping to find clients. The initial week of training is performed by JP members who volunteer for this position. Volunteer trainers are given a specific curriculum with discretion to use personal stories to illustrate the points made in the trainings.
To fulfill this obligation I volunteered to fill the position of “peer-to-peer coach.” This role involved meeting with job seekers individually to discuss their job search and brainstorm about strategies.
The dominance of this self-help paradigm can be seen in the remarkable consistency of its application across varied contexts. For example, the essential elements the self-help discourse for professionals at JP mirrors the discourse for welfare recipients at welfare-to-work trainings (Korteweg 2003). In both cases the focus is on learning job searching skills, maintaining a positive attitude and ignoring structural constraints. As Lafer (2002, p. 213) notes, programs for both welfare recipients and skilled workers “have moved toward a focus on worker’s attitudes.”
The average number of interviews members obtained after joining JP increased by an average of 0.17 per month. This represents an average increase of less than one additional interview per five months and is therefore so slight as to be nearly negligible. I note that comparing job seekers’ performance before and after joining JP is more reliable than comparing JP members to other white-collar workers who are not in JP because it avoids the issue of self-selection. It could be argued that JP members form a subset of white-collar job seekers who are more motivated to find a new job and therefore voluntarily take the initiative to join JP. Alternatively, it may be that JP members consist of job seekers who have a harder time in the labor market and therefore feel the need to join JP.
My data on the initially galvanizing effect of the self-help paradigm is at odds with views that see self-help as meaningless. Lafer (2002, p. 205) describes self-help classes as “hokey motivation seminars” that are “content-less.” It is true that they do not impart content in the sense of traditional job skills, but as I argue in this paper, at least in the context of white-collar unemployment, these trainings are taken seriously by participants and powerfully frame the experience of job searching.
This is not to say that gender and other demographic differences play no role in the unemployment and job searching experience. The prevalence of discrimination on the basis of sex, age, race and ethnicity are well documented and are presumably an important part of the structural obstacles that different job seekers encounter.
For example, one important question is whether and to what extent the job search work–game cuts across class lines. As previously noted, the application of the self-help paradigm is not limited to white-collar professionals and has striking resemblance to the model used in welfare-to-work trainings. Yet, it remains to be researched whether in non-white-collar contexts these practices and discourses generate a similar lived experience.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Michael Burawoy, Jennifer Chun, Malcolm Fairbrother, Linus Huang, Hwa-Jen Liu, Thomas Medvetz, Michele Murphy, Gretchen Purser, Jeffery Sallaz, Jennifer Sherman, Sandra Smith, Vicki Smith, Cinzia Solari, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Ana Villalobos, Kim Voss, Michelle Williams, and Kerry Woodward, for invaluable feedback at various stages of this paper. For generous funding that made this research possible I thank the Labor and Employment Research Fund.
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Sharone, O. Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching. Qual Sociol 30, 403–416 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9071-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9071-z