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Flawed System / Flawed Self
Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences
By OFER SHARONE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07336-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Unemployment Experiences
The widespread layoffs of white-collar workers accompanying the Great Recession that began in 2008 made dramatically visible a trend that had been growing since the 1970s: the erosion of white-collar job security. While the bursting of the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium served as a wake-up call to high-tech workers, the Great Recession sounded a loud and unmistakable warning to all white-collar workers around the world: No one is immune to unemployment.
Despite its increasing prevalence, little is known about the day-to-day experience of white-collar unemployment. Most scholarly studies of unemployment use survey data to trace macro-patterns. These studies are important for understanding the rates and composition of unemployment, but they do not reveal the world of job searching and unemployment that lies behind the statistics. This book delves into that world.
One of the central findings of this book is that the experience of unemployment is largely shaped by the structure of the labor-market institutions in which job searching takes place. Where others have studied the role of individual-level factors, such as a job seeker's psychological makeup, I take a sociological approach. I show that the experience of unemployment varies systematically across societies and, within societies, across classes. Variations are ultimately rooted in different labor-market institutions that give rise to different job-search "games"—sets of discourses, practices, and strategies—that job seekers use in trying to find work. Different games generate very different experiences of unemployment.
In the United States, white-collar job seekers are engaged in what I call the job-search "chemistry game." In this game, hard skills are understood to be important for getting one's foot in the door but not ultimately determinative. The real key to getting a job is establishing one's fit with a particular employer. More than presenting your skills, landing a job requires effectively presenting yourself—the person behind the skills. In this book, I explore the institutional foundations of the chemistry game, how it structures the practices of American white-collar job seekers, and its profound consequences for their distinctive experience of unemployment.
The most striking effect of the chemistry game is to make American job seekers highly vulnerable to self-blame. This turns unemployment into a double crisis: in addition to the financial crisis of wondering how one will keep paying the bills and not lose one's home, there is the personal crisis of wondering, "What's wrong with me?" In turn, self-blame generates equally important secondary effects, including a profound sense of discouragement about the use of further job searching and the widespread understanding of unemployment as an individual and private issue as opposed to one that is public and political. These effects have consequences for society as well as for individuals.
One appreciates the unique character of the chemistry game only through comparison with white-collar job searching in other countries. Among industrialized countries, Israel provides a particularly interesting comparative case because, as will be explained below, it shares important economic and structural characteristics with the United States that would lead one to expect similar unemployment experiences. Yet in Israel a very different set of labor-market institutions generates a very different experience of job search and unemployment—a different game altogether. The Israeli "specs game" does not focus on interpersonal chemistry but on depersonalized and objectified skills and credentials, and a rigid set of characteristics—such as the applicant's age or the existence of an unexplained gap in their résumé—that are taken to be proxies for qualifications.
These distinct games emerge from institutional differences. Although employers in both countries sift potential candidates using varied filters that to some extent consider both objective specs and subjective chemistry, the way in which hiring is mediated by labor-market institutions makes the specs filter more salient to Israeli white-collar job seekers and the chemistry filter more salient to American white-collar job seekers.
A pair of examples will highlight some of the differences between the chemistry and specs games:
When Beth lost her job as a technical writer in a large high-tech company in San Francisco, she blamed her company's corporate restructuring, which came in the wake of a global economic downturn. At first, her lay-off seemed like a blessing in disguise; she had been feeling pretty burned out from her long work hours. She eagerly plunged into her job search, putting a lot of time into crafting her cover letters and résumés and doing a lot of networking. Whenever she applied for a job, she tried to convey not only her professional skills but also her passion for technical writing and her unique fit with that particular company. After a month of intense searching, she was thrilled to be invited to an interview. Yet despite her expressions of enthusiasm for the company and her efforts to present herself as a good fit for its culture, the interview felt awkward. "There was no chemistry," she recalled. She analyzed and reanalyzed how she had "blown it" and what she could have done or said differently. She began to wonder if there was something wrong with her self-presentation or, even worse, something wrong with her that interviewers could see even if she could not. After four months of unsuccessful job searching, Beth was virtually paralyzed with self-doubt. She explained that she had stopped searching because the process made her feel that she had a "character defect," that she was "flawed in some way."
Across the ocean, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Eldad was laid off from his marketing position. He, too, understood this to be fallout from the general economic downturn. Working in a region that is home to many of the same multinational corporations found in the San Francisco Bay area, Eldad, like Beth, witnessed many companies responding to the economic downturn with layoffs. Eldad shot off a résumé for every job opening that appeared to demand his skills and was encouraged to get several interviews at staffing agencies that screen applicants on behalf of employers. On his résumé and in his interviews, Eldad tried to convey how well his skills and experience matched the employer's needs, but he could not get past the screening interviews, which focused on whether he met a checklist of very specific requirements. He became increasingly frustrated at the rigid structure of the hiring system, which did not allow him to showcase his underlying strengths. "The system here does not look at you as an individual," he fumed. "You are just a collection of buzzwords." Nevertheless, he continued sending out résumés. While he was no longer as hopeful about his prospects, he figured he had "nothing to lose" if he kept trying.
Caught up in the same global economic downturn, Beth and Eldad both experienced more difficulties in finding work than they had initially expected. Yet the strategies they used to find work, how they understood their difficulties in finding work, and the degree to which they were willing to keep trying were strikingly different. My cross-national investigation reveals that the differences between Beth and Eldad are not reflections of different personalities, genders, or occupations, but of systematic patterns of differences in job searching and unemployment experiences across white-collar job seekers in the United States and Israel.
The comparison raises three questions that go to the core of unemployment and job searching as a social phenomenon:
What are the job-search strategies of white-collar workers and why do they vary cross-nationally? For example, why do American job seekers emphasize their enthusiasm for—and fit with—particular employers while Israeli job seekers emphasize their particular skills? What are the consequences of this difference for the experience of unemployment?
Why—despite searching for work under similar economic conditions—do unsuccessful American job seekers blame themselves while unsuccessful Israeli job seekers blame the system? Job seekers in both countries tend to understand their job loss as a product of structural forces outside their control. Yet when a new job proves hard to find, American job seekers generally shift their focus to individual factors and blame themselves, as exemplified by Beth's feeling of having a "character defect," while Israelis tend to grow angry at the system, as exemplified in Eldad's sense of being reduced to "buzzwords." More broadly, why do unemployed workers in some societies come to see unemployment as a structural and public issue, while those in other societies come to see it as an individual and private matter?
Since the Great Depression, researchers have been puzzled by American white-collar workers' tendency to focus on individual-level factors in understanding their own continued unemployment. This book provides a new perspective on that phenomenon by using a cross-national comparison to a society whose job seekers typically focus on structural explanations of their own unemployment. I theorize a previously unrecognized link between unemployment experiences and the labor-market institutions that structure job-searching practices. Different subjective responses to unemployment arise from playing different job-search games: The chemistry game produces self-blame. The specs game generates system-blame.
What are the effects of these different unemployment experiences? One particularly important effect is the relationship between unemployment experiences and job-search discouragement. At the heart of the unemployment policy debate in the United States is the question of why job seekers lose their momentum and, in some cases, cease searching (the so-called "discouraged workers"). While finding a job usually requires keeping up the intensity of your search, millions of Americans consistently report that they want a job but are not actively looking. As this book will show, such discouragement among American unemployed white-collar workers has much to do with the specific nature of the chemistry game.
Before delving into the specifics of the chemistry game, we will look back at the recent history of white-collar unemployment and job insecurity in the United States. While there is a lively debate on its causes, there is no mistaking the overall decline in white-collar job security.
The Rise of White-Collar Insecurity and Unemployment
Over the past thirty years, white-collar employment relations in the United States have been transformed from secure and stable to contingent and precarious. The post–World War II era was characterized by white-collar job security. While blue-collar workers were typically subject to layoffs during economic downturns, white-collar workers, particularly at large companies, were implicitly promised lifetime employment and were rarely laid off even during hard economic times. For white-collar workers, the firm was often understood as a large family with long-term attachments and a web of mutual obligations, famously captured in William H. Whyte's 1956 book, The Organization Man. White-collar workers would enter the firm at the bottom and move up. The worker invested in the firm, and the firm invested in the worker.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the implicit bargain of loyalty for security began to collapse. The new heroes of the business world were CEOs like Jack Welch of General Electric, who instituted the practice of annually ranking all of the company's managers along a forced bell-shaped curve and, regardless of economic conditions, purportedly fired the bottom 10 percent. Another CEO who came to symbolize the demise of the postwar era was "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who had this to say about corporate loyalty: "If you want a friend, get a dog."
White-collar precariousness is but one manifestation of the transition to a neoliberal political economy, which has also brought a steep decline in the percentage of American workers who are in labor unions, the stagnation or decline of most American workers' wages, and soaring levels of economic inequality unseen since before the New Deal.
The root causes of this neoliberal transformation are the subject of a spirited debate. Some theories emphasize the role of economic forces, technological changes, and globalization, while others focus on the role of institutions and states. Illustrative of this debate are the diverging analyses of two of the most well-known American public intellectuals on economic matters: Robert Reich, professor of public policy and former secretary of labor, and Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and professor of economics. In Supercapitalism (2007), Reich argues that the postwar era of job security, wage growth, and strong labor unions was rooted in the particular economic conditions of mass manufacturing. These conditions led American businesses, acting collectively through organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers, to prioritize predictability and stability. Reich argues that, in this context, gaining a competitive edge required high-volume production, which in turn demanded enormous initial investments. To minimize the risk of such large investments, employers wanted predictability—in the form of barriers to entry for new competitors—which were achieved through government regulations. Employers also needed a cooperative workforce that would not disrupt the flow of production. To minimize worker disruptions, American business agreed to cooperate with unions, which, together with government regulations, contributed to job stability.
Reich claims that this era of stability began to crumble when the economic underpinnings changed. By the 1970s, computers, communication devices, and other technological changes made it feasible to manufacture on a smaller scale and to globalize production around the world. This, in turn, rendered the size of firms and the amount of their initial investments far less significant barriers to entry. The intensified competition arising from these technological changes led firms to focus on cutting labor costs, first and foremost by aggressively busting unions, but also by lobbying the government for deregulation. According to Reich, it is this intensified competition, and the de-unionization and deregulation that came in its wake, that ushered in the present neoliberal era during which white-collar job security collapsed.
Reich's theory is challenged by scholars who claim that it overstates the role of technological and economic forces and that greater emphasis should be placed on institutional changes and the role of the American state. Krugman (2007) traces the same transformation to different causes. In Krugman's story, the relatively strong postwar wage growth, labor unions, and job security reflected the institutional transformation brought on by the New Deal. Correspondingly, the dramatic changes of the past thirty years, in which levels of inequality have returned to pre–New Deal levels, are the result of institutional changes that have unraveled the New Deal. Krugman's analysis focuses on the rise of "movement conservatives," who rose to power with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and rolled back the New Deal through tax cuts for high-earners, cuts in social programs, and a de facto repeal of protective labor laws through lack of enforcement. Krugman's focus on the role of institutions, as opposed to technology and globalization, finds support in studies comparing work conditions in the United States and western Europe. Although western Europe is subject to the same forces of technological change and globalization as the United States, these forces have not led to the same precipitous rise in inequality, collapse of unions, or erosion of job security.
While the Reich-Krugman debate usefully elucidates some of the different approaches to explaining the dramatic changes in the world of work over recent decades, most scholars agree that both economic and institutional factors have played important roles. Regardless of the causes, one dramatic effect of the rise of neoliberal capitalism is the decline in white-collar job security. Since the 1970s, the job-loss rate has increased more steeply for college-educated white-collar workers than for blue-collar workers or workers who have not graduated from college. As a result, the class composition of the unemployed has changed. While the vast majority of unemployed workers in the postwar era were those with the least education, in 2008 there were more unemployed workers with a college degree than without a high school degree. College-educated workers' vulnerability to job loss has continued to increase, reaching a historic high in 2009.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Flawed System / Flawed Self by OFER SHARONE. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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