Why Do Unemployed Americans Blame Themselves While Israelis Blame the System?

Abstract

This article provides a new account of American job seekers' individualized understandings of their labor-market difficulties, and more broadly, of how structural conditions shape subjective responses. Unemployed white-collar workers in the U.S. tend to interpret their labor market difficulties as reflecting flaws in themselves whereas Israelis tend to perceive flaws in the hiring system. These different responses have profound individual and societal implications. Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed job seekers and participant observations at support groups in the U.S. and Israel, this article shows how different labor market institutions give rise to distinct job search games, which I call the chemistry game in the U.S. and the specs game in Israel. Challenging the broad cultural explanations of the unemployment experience in the existing literature, this article shows how subjective responses to unemployment are generated by the search experiences associated with institutionally rooted job search games.

Unemployment and Subjective Well-being: Comparing Younger and Older Job Seekers

“…In an unemployment context, self-responsibility is manifested as self-blame (Sharone, 2013). Contemporary labour markets are increasingly characterized as 'precarious' (Standing, 2011) and it seems that when the responsibility for unemployment is largely placed on the individual, what is in the individual's own control is exactly the lowering of expectations or the increasing of flexibility.…”

“…Consulting the literature, however, in particular Sharone (2013), shows how subjective responses to unemployment largely depend on the hiring systems in a given context. Comparing Israeli and American job seekers experience with unemployment, Sharone concludes that while Americans seem to blame themselves, Israeli job-seekers instead feel powerless.…”

“…The work of Sharone (2007Sharone ( , 2013) also offers insights into the timely challenges associated with unemployment during and after the Great Recession. Sharone (2013) conceptualizes subjective responses as answers to concrete institutional settings and he identifies self-blame as the dominating vulnerability for unemployed people in the US (see also Newman, 1988).…”

“…Sharone (2013) conceptualizes subjective responses as answers to concrete institutional settings and he identifies self-blame as the dominating vulnerability for unemployed people in the US (see also Newman, 1988). Here, hiring systems emphasize personality and interpersonal skills rather than professional skills, and this finding has to some extent been replicated in a Danish context (Pultz and Hviid, 2016).…”

“…The negative representation of unemployed people has been deemed important in relation to well-being in qualitative research (Bakke, 1933;Sharone, 2013) but to our knowledge this has not been studied in quantitative studies. We begin here to fill in this gap by also developing a scale for unemployment shame and by measuring the level of shame and its relation to well-being.…”