Constructing Unemployment: Britain and France in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Unemployment emerged as a specific social issue in the late-19th century, but the nature of the threat it posed and the governing instruments available to address it varied widely. Using Britain and France as strongly contrasting cases, this article demonstrates the variable and historically contingent constructions of unemployment as a problem, and demonstrates how policy to address it was developed using administrative agencies that embodied specific, normative visions of how society and employment should operate. The different governing trajectories through which the issue was tackled is analyzed in terms of the context within which the problem of unemployment originally emerged. The article demonstrates the socio-political nature of unemployment's construction and, with reference to recent labour market change, questions its utility as a means of assessing economic or social well-being.

“La donnée n’est pas un donné”: Statistics, Quantification and Democratic Choice

“…Regarding unemployment, the UK has thus implemented contradictory conceptions of the state, valid at certain levels and for some organizations, but not at others: interventionist for constructing from the top the perfect market, but in competition with local autonomy and professional diversity which would have been best taken in charge by a "situated" state. Several principles of justice are in competition to define and observe unemployment, presumably in some unstable compromises even today, based on, respectively: the deserving poor, the acknowledgement by peers, the morally regular worker (Whiteside, 2014).…”

Convergence from below? The reform of minimum income protection in France and the UK

“…These contrasting policy approaches in the minimum income sphere indeed seem to fit with the two countries' broader socio-economic adjustment trajectories in recent decades (Hemerijck, 2013, pp. 172-182), as well as with historical differences in the conception of the role of social security in labour market regulation (Whiteside, 2014). While the UK has increasingly sought to emulate the US model of combining deregulated labour markets, targeted social benefits and various work-first social policy approaches to combat unemployment by promoting the growth of a low-wage sector, France has maintained or even tightened labour market regulation, endeavoured to uphold employment quality and largely protected the value of insurance benefits, though arguably at the cost of limiting lower productivity employment growth and thus job opportunities for those with the weakest position in the labour market.…”

Benefit dependency: The pros and cons of using “caseload” data for national and international comparisons

“…From one perspective it illustrates a form of risk re‐categorization (Clasen and Clegg, ) and new orientation within unemployment protection, potentially signalling a shift from unemployment to “employability” as the more appropriate caseload category in the future. Alternatively it could be argued that the social, political and administrative category of “unemployment”, which during the onset and development of the industrial era was increasingly restrictively applied (Whiteside, ) is currently undergoing a major revision. It is these types of processes which cross‐national research based on benefit caseload data need to take account of.…”