Constructing Unemployed Job Seekers as Professional Workers: The Depoliticizing Work–Game of Job Searching

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.

我国失业率统计指标变化对测度失业的影响分析

我国长期以来缺乏一个和国际接轨的失业率统计数字,就业与失业的真实状况并不能通过科学的统计指标反映。目前中国正处于急剧的社会转型过程中,失业人口规模不断扩大。可是,2005年我国统计年鉴上公布的城镇失业率4.2%,它实际上很难反映中国真实的失业水平,因而不能准确、及时地反映国民经济的运行状况。国家统计局从2005年11月开始进行“调查失业率”的抽样统计。本文阐述国际上其他国家是如何测度失业率的和对比两种测试失业方法的经济影响。