Being Unemployed in Northern Ireland: An Ethnographic Study

Age-old ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor are still pervasive in our society. Stereotypes of the scrounger and the malingerer, and the widespread belief that much joblessness is voluntary, continue to constitute the ideological basis of conservative social policy on unemployment and poverty. In this study of unemployment in Belfast, Dr Howe successfully refutes some of the widely held myths about the black economy, the welfare benefit system and the so-called culture of depende...