Centering the Complexity of Long-Term Unemployment: Lessons Learned from a Critical Occupational Science Inquiry

Abstract

Inquiries that rely on temporal framings to demarcate long-term unemployment risk generating partial understandings and grounding unrealistic policy solutions. In contrast, this four-phase two-context study aimed to generate complex understandings of post-recession long-term unemployment in North America. Grounded in a critical occupational perspective, this collaborative ethnographic study also drew on street-level bureaucracy and governmentality perspectives to understand how social policies and discursive constructions shaped people’s everyday ‘doing’ within the arena of long-term unemployment. Across three phases, study methods included interviews with 15 organizational stakeholders who oversaw employment support services; interviews, participant observations, and focus groups with 18 people who provided front-line employment support services; and interviews, participant observations, time diaries, and occupational mapping with 23 people who self-identified as being long-term unemployed. We draw on selected interviews and mapping data to illustrate how participants’ definitions and experiences of long-term unemployment reflected and moved beyond dominant temporally based framings. These findings reinforce the need to expand the dominant conceptualizations of long-term unemployment that shape scholarly inquiries and policy responses. Reflections on the benefits and challenges of this study’s design also reinforce the need to use multiple, flexible methods to center the complexity of long-term unemployment as it is experienced in everyday life.

Who is safe at work? Problematizing employment volatility during the 2008-2018 Spanish socioeconomic crisis from a critical occupational perspective

“…This fact responds to the neoliberal socio-cultural values of Western society, taken for granted and invisible in a society in which the constant pressure to "produce" and work to achieve economic income is a priority, placing a responsibility on the workers to remain "active" to respond to social expectations (Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016). This aspect is consistent with the findings of Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich (2016) and Aldrich et al (2020), where workers are in a continuous and active job search, or Asaba et al (2021) who show the challenge of not individualizing the social problem of unemployment.…”

“…Considering neoliberal policies as an articulator of the various forms of employment that coexist in the world, this study problematizes job insecurity as an occupation located in a changing sociopolitical and economic context, characterized by the crisis experienced in the last decade and that affects the human and labor rights of people, which provides a different and novel nuance than in previous studies. Thus, the context as an articulator of the occupational rights of the population has already been seen in similar studies (Aldrich et al, 2020;Asaba et al, 2021;Ferreira-Marante et al, 2017;Huot et al, 2020;Veiga-Seijo et al, 2017). Thus, this research reflects on how this globalized society in which we currently live generates volatile employment situations.…”

“…Recently, OT/OS researchers have shown interest in advancing the understanding of the various forms of employment that coexist in today's societies. However, this research focuses on approaching the situation of job insecurity, which differs from recent research in the discipline, which is mainly focused on unemployment, job search, government policy analysis (Aldrich et al, 2020;Asaba et al, 2021;Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016) or job insecurity (Ferreira-Marante et al, 2017;Rivas-Quarneti et al, 2018;Veiga-Seijo et al, 2017). Therefore, this study highlights a reality of employment that has not been explored so far and contributes to broadening the conceptualization of work as well as understanding the occupational negotiations that workers do to resist performing an unstable or insecure occupation.…”

“…In this way, more flexible or volatile employment relationships arise, which negatively influence the perception of job security among workers (Sora et al, 2010). Aldrich et al (2020) continued their line of work on the long-term unemployment during the post-recession phase in North America from the perspective of governmentality; or long-term unemployment in older people who have the option of extending their working lives (Laliberte-Rudman & . These studies situate the occupation of work within neoliberal policies in which remaining active is an individual responsibility, mainly due to workers' concerns associated with economic aspects.…”

“…In this sense, the authors have been aware of how critical OS (Farias & Laliberte-Rudman, 2016;Laliberte-Rudman, 2018) has been a valuable tool for analyzing volatile employment situations in different parts of the world (Aldrich et al, 2020;Asaba et al, 2021;Huot et al, 2020;Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016) to address the structural, sociopolitical and economic conditions that situate employment as an occupation. In this work, this theoretical position has made it possible to question and problematize tensions about employment as an occupation, to analyze the possible situations of inequality and occupational injustice in which workers may find themselves, as well as to understand how employment is negotiated in the Spanish labor reforms in which the culture of productivity is taken for granted (Laliberte-Rudman & Aldrich, 2016;Laliberte-Rudman, 2018).…”