Life Without Work: Understanding Social Class Changes and Unemployment Through Theoretical Integration

an article by Saba Rasheed Ali, Kevin Fall and Tina Hoffman (University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA) published in Journal of Career Assessment Volume 21 Number 1 (February 2013)

Abstract

Unemployment is a stark reality in today’s economic climate, and many Americans report a fear of loss or decrease in social status as a result of unexpected unemployment.

Despite vocational psychology’s emphasis on work as a domain of life, very little exploration on how social class shifts impact workers has been conducted.

One way to rectify the current gaps in the literature is to consider the integration of multiple theories that address different aspects of social class identity and the role of work in people’s lives.

Intersectional approaches, the Social Class Worldview Model, and the Psychology Working perspectives are discussed in this article as applicable to life without work, particularly in relation to unemployment among under-served populations. Multidisciplinary literature is highlighted and integrated to inform the current understanding of these problems.

Implications for psychologists and career counsellors conducting research, practice, and public policy are discussed.

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Individual employment, household employment and risk of poverty in the EU: a decomposition analysis

by Vincent Corluy and Frank Vandenbroucke published as Working Paper no 12/06 (June 2012) by the Centre for Social Research, Antwerp University

Abstract

In this paper we explore missing links between employment policy success (or failure) and inclusion policy success (or failure), relying on the EU Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) and the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC).

At the inclusion side of the equation, our focus is on the share of individuals at risk of poverty in the 20-to-59 age cohort.

The analysis proceeds in two steps.

The first step considers the distribution of individual jobs over households, thus establishing a link between individual employment rates and household employment rates. Following the work by Gregg, Scutella and Wadsworth a ‘polarization index’ is defined in terms of the difference between, on the one hand, the hypothetical share of individuals living in jobless households assuming that individual employment is distributed randomly across households, and, on the other, the actual share of individuals living in jobless households. Actual changes in household joblessness are decomposed in:
(i) changes due to changes in polarization and
(ii) changes due to changing individual employment rates and changing household structures.

The second step in the analysis decomposes changes in the at-risk-of-poverty rates on the basis of
(i) changes in the poverty risks of jobless households, and
(ii) changes in the poverty risks of other (non-jobless) households;
(iii) changes in household joblessness due to changes in individual employment rates and changing household structures (changes one would expect if no changes in polarization would occur) and
(iv) changes in polarization.

The proposed technique does yield interesting insights into the trajectories that EU welfare states have followed over the past ten years.

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Two sides to every story: measuring polarization and inequality in the distribution of work

an article by Paul Gregg (University of Bristol, Her Majesty's Treasury, London, and Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Jonathan Wadsworth (Royal Holloway College University of London, Egham, Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn) in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) Volume 171 Issue 4 (2008)

Abstract

Individual- and household-based aggregate measures of joblessness can offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. The paper introduces an index that can be used to measure both the extent and the sources of divergence between non-employment rates calculated at the two levels of aggregation. Built around a comparison of the actual household joblessness rate with that which would occur if work were equally distributed, the index conforms to basic axioms of consistency and can be decomposed and applied to any binary variable of interest measured at two different levels of aggregation. Applying these measures to data for Britain, we show that rising inequality in the distribution of work is mostly within group, largely unrelated to changes in size of household or the principal characteristics that are associated with individual joblessness.
© 2008 The Royal Statistical Society and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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