The experience of unemployment, in context

This introduction to the Handbook on Unemployment and Society describes the major themes of the volume and connects key takeaways from individual chapters. A critical component of the experience of unemployment, we argue, is how jobseekers come to understand their difficulties in finding work. Such understandings may reflect various forms of internalized stigma and self-blame, which are cultivated by state institutions and cultural contexts. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, disconnection from secure and dignified employment can severely undermine well-being, challenge one's fundamental identity and sense of meaning and purpose, and cause strains in families and close relationships. The research collected here captures the intensely personal experience of work insecurity, showing how one's location along a continuum of precarity has repercussions that are not only financial and material, but also social and emotional. In different ways, the authors identify the institutional machinery and dynamics that underlie these patterned experiences.