Unemployment From the Perspective of the Psychology of Working

Abstract

Unemployment is a ubiquitous problem that is a complex of cultural, economic interpersonal, physical, and psychological dimensions. Whereas the pernicious negative outcomes of unemployment are empirically established in the literature, there is a need to better understand the psychological experiences of unemployment so as to inform interventions that ameliorate its impact. The present research is based on archival interview data and uses the psychology of working theory to understand 32 individuals’ experiences of unemployment. The findings include themes that are consistent with the hypothesized predictors posited in the theory, including marginalization, economic constraints, volition, career adaptability, proactive personality, critical consciousness, social support, and economic conditions. The research findings affirm the conceptual precepts of the theory with regard to its predictors; thus, this contribution to the literature on the psychology of working and unemployment opens new perspectives on a perennial problem.

The Psychology of Working in Practice: A Theory of Change for a New Era

“…Research has begun to build substantive empirical evidence for the utility of PWT (e.g., Autin, Duffy, Jacobson, Dosani, & Bott, 2018;Douglass, Velez, Conlin, Duffy, & England, 2017;Duffy et al, 2018;Kossen & McIlveen, 2018;Tokar & Kaut, 2018). Additionally, PWT tenets rest on a foundation of previous empirical work linking contextual variables, work volition, career adaptability, and well-being (e.g., Duffy et al, 2012;Zacher, 2014).…”

Decent work in Switzerland: Context, conceptualization, and assessment

“…on the PWT on blue-collar workers (Koekemoer, Le Roux Fourie, & Ilyna Jorgensen, 2018), racially and ethnically diverse workers (Duffy et al, 2018), people with chronic health conditions (Tokar & Kaut, 2018), sexual minorities (Allan, Tebbe, Bouchard, & Duffy, 2018;Douglass, Velez, Conlin, Duffy, & England, 2017), unemployed people (Kossen & McIlveen, 2018), and working adults (Allan, Autin, & Duffy, 2016;Kim, Fouad, Maeda, Xie, & Nazan, 2017). Such research generally confirm that marginalization and economic constraints negatively predict the access to decent work and that work volition plays a key role in this process.…”

Emerging Job Precariousness: Work Experiences and Expectations of Low-Qualified Young Workers in Switzerland

“…Qualitative studies based on the PWT as a theoretical framework are then scarce (e.g. Kossen & McIlveen, 2018;Kazimna, Holu, Alfa, Tchonda, Pari, & Masdonati, 2020), and little is known about how people describe, perceive, and try to cope with precarious work.…”

“…To date, these experiences were essentially observed through a quantitative lens, for example, using the Decent Work Scale (Duffy et al, 2019). Qualitative studies based on the PWT as a theoretical framework are then scarce (e.g., Kazimna et al, 2020; Kossen & McIlveen, 2018), and little is known about how people describe, perceive, and try to cope with precarious work. More research is needed to extensively understand decent work issues “from the inside” and to investigate whether and how precariousness in the present spreads over individual agency in the future (Schoon & Lyons-Amos, 2016), for example, in terms of career plans.…”