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: 978-0-226-07353-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixCHAPTER 1. Introduction: Unemployment Experiences……………………..1CHAPTER 2. The American Chemistry Game……………………………….21CHAPTER 3. The Chemistry Game Experience and Self-Blame………………..51CHAPTER 4. A Cross-National Comparison: The Israeli Specs Game………….86CHAPTER 5. The Specs Game Experience and System-Blame………………….114CHAPTER 6. A Cross-Class Comparison: The Blue-Collar Diligence Game……..142CHAPTER 7. Conclusion: Job-Search Games and Unemployment Experiences…….165Appendix A: Methodology…………………………………………….181Appendix B: Notes on Social Games……………………………………186Notes…………………………………………………………….191References………………………………………………………..211Index…………………………………………………………….223

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Unemployment Experiences

The widespread layoffs of white-collar workers accompanying theGreat Recession that began in 2008 made dramatically visible a trendthat 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 millenniumserved as a wake-up call to high-tech workers, the Great Recessionsounded a loud and unmistakable warning to all white-collar workersaround the world: No one is immune to unemployment.

Despite its increasing prevalence, little is known about the day-to-dayexperience of white-collar unemployment. Most scholarly studies of unemploymentuse survey data to trace macro-patterns. These studies areimportant for understanding the rates and composition of unemployment,but they do not reveal the world of job searching and unemployment thatlies behind the statistics. This book delves into that world.

One of the central findings of this book is that the experience of unemploymentis largely shaped by the structure of the labor-market institutionsin which job searching takes place. Where others have studied the roleof individual-level factors, such as a job seeker’s psychological makeup,I take a sociological approach. I show that the experience of unemploymentvaries systematically across societies and, within societies, acrossclasses. Variations are ultimately rooted in different labor-market institutionsthat give rise to different job-search “games”—sets of discourses,practices, and strategies—that job seekers use in trying to find work. Differentgames generate very different experiences of unemployment.

In the United States, white-collar job seekers are engaged in what I callthe job-search “chemistry game.” In this game, hard skills are understoodto 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 particularemployer. More than presenting your skills, landing a job requireseffectively presenting yourself—the person behind the skills. In this book,I explore the institutional foundations of the chemistry game, how it structuresthe practices of American white-collar job seekers, and its profoundconsequences for their distinctive experience of unemployment.

The most striking effect of the chemistry game is to make Americanjob seekers highly vulnerable to self-blame. This turns unemployment intoa double crisis: in addition to the financial crisis of wondering how onewill keep paying the bills and not lose one’s home, there is the personalcrisis of wondering, “What’s wrong with me?” In turn, self-blame generatesequally important secondary effects, including a profound senseof discouragement about the use of further job searching and the widespreadunderstanding of unemployment as an individual and private issueas opposed to one that is public and political. These effects have consequencesfor society as well as for individuals.

One appreciates the unique character of the chemistry game onlythrough comparison with white-collar job searching in other countries.Among industrialized countries, Israel provides a particularly interestingcomparative case because, as will be explained below, it shares importanteconomic and structural characteristics with the United States that wouldlead one to expect similar unemployment experiences. Yet in Israel a verydifferent set of labor-market institutions generates a very different experienceof job search and unemployment—a different game altogether.The Israeli “specs game” does not focus on interpersonal chemistry buton depersonalized and objectified skills and credentials, and a rigid set ofcharacteristics—such as the applicant’s age or the existence of an unexplainedgap in their résumé—that are taken to be proxies for qualifications.

These distinct games emerge from institutional differences. Althoughemployers in both countries sift potential candidates using varied filtersthat to some extent consider both objective specs and subjective chemistry,the way in which hiring is mediated by labor-market institutionsmakes the specs filter more salient to Israeli white-collar job seekers andthe chemistry filter more salient to American white-collar job seekers.

A pair of examples will highlight some of the differences between thechemistry and specs games:

When Beth lost her job as a technical writer in a large high-tech companyin San Francisco, she blamed her company’s corporate restructuring,which came in the wake of a global economic downturn. At first, her lay-offseemed like a blessing in disguise; she had been feeling pretty burnedout 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 doinga lot of networking. Whenever she applied for a job, she tried to conveynot only her professional skills but also her passion for technical writingand her unique fit with that particular company. After a month of intensesearching, she was thrilled to be invited to an interview. Yet despite herexpressions of enthusiasm for the company and her efforts to present herselfas a good fit for its culture, the interview felt awkward. “There wasno chemistry,” she recalled. She analyzed and reanalyzed how she had”blown it” and what she could have done or said differently. She beganto wonder if there was something wrong with her self-presentation or,even worse, something wrong with her that interviewers could see even ifshe could not. After four months of unsuccessful job searching, Beth wasvirtually paralyzed with self-doubt. She explained that she had stoppedsearching 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 marketingposition. He, too, understood this to be fallout from the generaleconomic downturn. Working in a region that is home to many of the samemultinational corporations found in the San Francisco Bay area, Eldad,like Beth, witnessed many companies responding to the economic downturnwith layoffs. Eldad shot off a résumé for every job opening that appearedto demand his skills and was encouraged to get several interviewsat staffing agencies that screen applicants on behalf of employers. On hisrésumé and in his interviews, Eldad tried to convey how well his skillsand experience matched the employer’s needs, but he could not get pastthe screening interviews, which focused on whether he met a checklist ofvery specific requirements. He became increasingly frustrated at the rigidstructure of the hiring system, which did not allow him to showcase hisunderlying 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 hopefulabout his prospects, he figured he had “nothing to lose” if he kept trying.

Caught up in the same global economic downturn, Beth and Eldadboth experienced more difficulties in finding work than they had initiallyexpected. Yet the strategies they used to find work, how they understoodtheir difficulties in finding work, and the degree to which they were willingto keep trying were strikingly different. My cross-national investigationreveals that the differences between Beth and Eldad are not reflectionsof different personalities, genders, or occupations, but of systematicpatterns of differences in job searching and unemployment experiencesacross white-collar job seekers in the United States and Israel.

The comparison raises three questions that go to the core of unemploymentand job searching as a social phenomenon:

What are the job-search strategies of white-collar workers and whydo they vary cross-nationally? For example, why do American job seekersemphasize their enthusiasm for—and fit with—particular employerswhile Israeli job seekers emphasize their particular skills? What are theconsequences of this difference for the experience of unemployment?

Why—despite searching for work under similar economic conditions—dounsuccessful American job seekers blame themselves while unsuccessfulIsraeli job seekers blame the system? Job seekers in both countries tendto understand their job loss as a product of structural forces outside theircontrol. Yet when a new job proves hard to find, American job seekersgenerally shift their focus to individual factors and blame themselves, asexemplified by Beth’s feeling of having a “character defect,” while Israelistend to grow angry at the system, as exemplified in Eldad’s sense of beingreduced to “buzzwords.” More broadly, why do unemployed workers insome societies come to see unemployment as a structural and public issue,while those in other societies come to see it as an individual and privatematter?

Since the Great Depression, researchers have been puzzled by Americanwhite-collar workers’ tendency to focus on individual-level factors in understandingtheir own continued unemployment. This book providesa new perspective on that phenomenon by using a cross-national comparisonto a society whose job seekers typically focus on structural explanationsof their own unemployment. I theorize a previously unrecognizedlink between unemployment experiences and the labor-market institutionsthat structure job-searching practices. Different subjective responses tounemployment arise from playing different job-search games: The chemistrygame produces self-blame. The specs game generates system-blame.

What are the effects of these different unemployment experiences? Oneparticularly important effect is the relationship between unemploymentexperiences and job-search discouragement. At the heart of the unemploymentpolicy debate in the United States is the question of why jobseekers lose their momentum and, in some cases, cease searching (the so-called”discouraged workers”). While finding a job usually requires keepingup the intensity of your search, millions of Americans consistently reportthat they want a job but are not actively looking. As this book willshow, such discouragement among American unemployed white-collarworkers has much to do with the specific nature of the chemistry game.

Before delving into the specifics of the chemistry game, we will lookback at the recent history of white-collar unemployment and job insecurityin the United States. While there is a lively debate on its causes, thereis 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 theUnited States have been transformed from secure and stable to contingentand precarious. The post–World War II era was characterized bywhite-collar job security. While blue-collar workers were typically subjectto layoffs during economic downturns, white-collar workers, particularlyat large companies, were implicitly promised lifetime employment andwere rarely laid off even during hard economic times. For white-collarworkers, the firm was often understood as a large family with long-termattachments and a web of mutual obligations, famously captured in WilliamH. Whyte’s 1956 book, The Organization Man. White-collar workerswould enter the firm at the bottom and move up. The worker invested inthe firm, and the firm invested in the worker.

In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the implicit bargain of loyalty forsecurity began to collapse. The new heroes of the business world wereCEOs like Jack Welch of General Electric, who instituted the practiceof annually ranking all of the company’s managers along a forced bell-shapedcurve and, regardless of economic conditions, purportedly firedthe bottom 10 percent. Another CEO who came to symbolize the demiseof the postwar era was “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, who had this to say aboutcorporate loyalty: “If you want a friend, get a dog.”

White-collar precariousness is but one manifestation of the transitionto a neoliberal political economy, which has also brought a steep declinein the percentage of American workers who are in labor unions, the stagnationor decline of most American workers’ wages, and soaring levels ofeconomic inequality unseen since before the New Deal.

The root causes of this neoliberal transformation are the subject ofa spirited debate. Some theories emphasize the role of economic forces,technological changes, and globalization, while others focus on the role ofinstitutions and states. Illustrative of this debate are the diverging analysesof two of the most well-known American public intellectuals on economicmatters: Robert Reich, professor of public policy and former secretaryof labor, and Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and professor ofeconomics. In Supercapitalism (2007), Reich argues that the postwar eraof job security, wage growth, and strong labor unions was rooted in theparticular economic conditions of mass manufacturing. These conditionsled American businesses, acting collectively through organizations suchas the National Association of Manufacturers, to prioritize predictabilityand stability. Reich argues that, in this context, gaining a competitiveedge required high-volume production, which in turn demanded enormousinitial investments. To minimize the risk of such large investments,employers wanted predictability—in the form of barriers to entry for newcompetitors—which were achieved through government regulations. Employersalso needed a cooperative workforce that would not disrupt theflow of production. To minimize worker disruptions, American businessagreed 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 economicunderpinnings changed. By the 1970s, computers, communicationdevices, and other technological changes made it feasible to manufactureon a smaller scale and to globalize production around the world. This, inturn, rendered the size of firms and the amount of their initial investmentsfar less significant barriers to entry. The intensified competition arisingfrom these technological changes led firms to focus on cutting labor costs,first and foremost by aggressively busting unions, but also by lobbyingthe government for deregulation. According to Reich, it is this intensifiedcompetition, and the de-unionization and deregulation that came in itswake, that ushered in the present neoliberal era during which white-collarjob security collapsed.

Reich’s theory is challenged by scholars who claim that it overstatesthe role of technological and economic forces and that greater emphasisshould be placed on institutional changes and the role of the Americanstate. Krugman (2007) traces the same transformation to different causes.In Krugman’s story, the relatively strong postwar wage growth, laborunions, and job security reflected the institutional transformation broughton by the New Deal. Correspondingly, the dramatic changes of the pastthirty years, in which levels of inequality have returned to pre–New Deallevels, are the result of institutional changes that have unraveled the NewDeal. Krugman’s analysis focuses on the rise of “movement conservatives,”who rose to power with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 androlled back the New Deal through tax cuts for high-earners, cuts in socialprograms, and a de facto repeal of protective labor laws through lack ofenforcement. Krugman’s focus on the role of institutions, as opposed totechnology and globalization, finds support in studies comparing workconditions in the United States and western Europe. Although westernEurope is subject to the same forces of technological change and globalizationas the United States, these forces have not led to the same precipitousrise in inequality, collapse of unions, or erosion of job security.

While the Reich-Krugman debate usefully elucidates some of the differentapproaches to explaining the dramatic changes in the world of workover recent decades, most scholars agree that both economic and institutionalfactors have played important roles. Regardless of the causes,one dramatic effect of the rise of neoliberal capitalism is the decline inwhite-collar job security. Since the 1970s, the job-loss rate has increasedmore steeply for college-educated white-collar workers than for blue-collarworkers or workers who have not graduated from college. As a result, theclass composition of the unemployed has changed. While the vast majorityof unemployed workers in the postwar era were those with the leasteducation, in 2008 there were more unemployed workers with a collegedegree than without a high school degree. College-educated workers’vulnerability to job loss has continued to increase, reaching a historic highin 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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