The Experience of Unemployment in Europe: The Debate

When the social status of individuals depends primarily on their participation in the systems of economic production and exchange of their society, there is a high probability that unemployment will lead to a loss of status and a feeling of failure, especially if it extends for any length of time. It involves more a process of what might be termed ‘social disqualification’ than a static state. It brings about a sharp drop in living standards, a weakening of social life, and marginalization with respect to those in work—effects which can become cumulative and lead to a situation of intense poverty and, at the extreme, of social rupture. It is notable that the first major sociological enquiries on the unemployed date from the 1930s (Lazarsfeld et al. 1933; Bakke 1940a), at a time of economic crisis and unprecedented levels of unemployment. It was an issue that drew the attention of researchers much less in the period of economic prosperity after the war. Research focused much more on the effects of technical, social and cultural change on the social structures of Western societies. It was only towards the end of the 1970s that there was a renewal of research on unemployment by sociologists, economists and social-policy analysts. Our knowledge has expanded considerably over the 1980s and 1990s, but it remains highly fragmented since there was little co-ordination between the research carried out in different countries. Comparisons across countries in Europe are very rare, not least because they have had to confront the technical difficulty of the lack of standardization in the way data has been collected. In the absence of genuine comparison, the tendency has been to fall back on the mere juxtaposition of national monographs. This book seeks to advance our understanding by drawing on a research programme that has made an intensive effort to achieve a high level of comparability of data. The research, which lasted over a three-year period, brought