Masthead * Contact * Submissions * Conference series
Endangered Scholars Worldwide * Journal Donation Project * New School for Social Research
 |
UNEMPLOYMENT
Volume 54 No. 2 (Summer 1987) Arien Mack, Editor Alexander Keyssar, Guest Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
As this issue of Social Research goes to press, more than 7 million Americans are officially unemployed. An additional million are "discouraged workers," that is, they are jobless and want to work but have stopped looking because they believe that no jobs are available. And there are probably several million more men and women who would be considered unemployed if the government used less-restrictive definitions. Unemployment rates have fallen since the Reagan recession of 1982-83 (when they reached their highest levels since the 1930s), but they appear to have stabilized in the vicinity of 7 percent-a figure that was once considered recessionary.
The phenomenon is not uniquely, or particularly, American. In Western Europe, where there has historically been less recorded unemployment than in the United States, the incidence of joblessness has been relatively high for more than a decade, and in several nations unemployment rates have risen above the figures reported on this side of the Atlantic. Australia has had a similar experience, while alarm bells have recently been sounded in Japan by an increase in the official rate to 3 percent-low by Western standards (although the Japanese statistics are biased downward), yet high by the norms of postwar Japan.
Thus fifty years after the Great Depression unemployment remains a significant economic problem throughout the capitalist world. Almost by definition, sustained or rising unemployment constitutes a failure of economic policy; often it constitutes a threat to established political regimes as well. The persistence, and perhaps worsening, of the problem poses a major challenge to policymakers and analysts who are trying to manage national economies and international trade.
Relatedly, although less visibly, unemployment is also posing a significant intellectual challenge to various branches of the social sciences. The events and developments of the past twenty years have made clear that we understand far less about the phenomenon than we ought to--or than we thought we did. Long gone are the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s when economists were convinced that they had the problem licked (except perhaps for some fine tuning) and when sociologists and social psychologists could bask in the glow of the pioneering, monumental studies that had been conducted in the 1930s. As we move toward the end of the twentieth century, there is little agreement among economists about the causes of unemployment; nor is there a shared understanding of the reasons why unemployment is so unevenly distributed among different social groups. Sociologists and psychologists have only begun to tease out the individual and institutional variables that shape the consequences of (and responses to) spells of joblessness. The links between unemployment and symptoms of social disorder, such as crime, have become the subject of considerable debate. Historians and political scientists know remarkably little about that role that unemployment has played in the institutional and public life of the United States--or any other country.
The essays presented in this issue will not definitely resolve any of these questions; nor do they represent anything approaching a single school of thought. What these essays do have in common is that they emerge from an awareness not only of the significance of the problem of joblessness but also of the inadequacy of the received wisdom and the need to conduct basic research and collect new data, to take fresh looks at a phenomenon thought to be familiar and understood. It is for this reason perhaps--rather than simply biases and proclivities of the guest editor--that all of these essays tend to be historical either in focus or perspective. The changes that have occurred in the past twenty or thirty years--the appearance of stagflation, the deinductrialization of parts of the Northeast and Midwest, and rising unemployment rates for teenagers, to cite three of many possible examples--have underscored the shortcomings of ahistorical theories and analysis. Acquiring a more solid understanding of the causes and consequences of unemployment seems--to many researchers, at least--to demand the posing of historical questions, or, at a minimum, the erection of an historical backdrop against which the present can be viewed.
This collection is undeniably an eclectic one, shaped in the end by the particular research interests of the contributors. It attempts neither a thorough canvass of the terrain nor a single-minded focus on one particular question or issue. Nonetheless, there are certain central themes or problems that recur throughout the volume. Several essays offer direct discussions of the causes of unemployment, while others treat an important related topic: the evolution of economic thought about unemployment and its causes. The development of policy and institutional responses to the problem constitutes another key theme, as does also the widely varying impact that unemployment has--and has had--upon particular groups within the labor force. The social and psychological consequences of joblessness are examined at length in two essays and evoled with uncommon vividness in the interview with Dick Hughes, an unemployed worker in Buffalo, New York.
Two pecularities of the collection warrant some introductory mention. First, neither the essays written for this issue not the idea off assembling a volume on the subject of unemployment was prompted by a depression. This runs counter to a pattern that has prevailed for more than a century: as a rule, neither researchers nor readers have been much concerned with unemployment except in times of crisis, and during crises, almost inescapably, attention tends to get focused on the most immediate and pressing dimensions of the problem. That this volume is appearing at all, thus, may bode well for the cause of sustained, nonurgent, scholarly interest in the subject.
Second, the collection is, by design, multidisciplinary. Contributors to the volume are drawn from the fields of economics, economic history, sociology, psychology, political science, and history. This too runs counter to prevailing patterns and norms. In recent years, most scholarship dealing with unemployment--like most scholarship dealing with most subjects--has been embedded in narrow disciplinary frameworks: sociologists write for sociologists, economists for economists, specialists on the United States for other specialists on the United States, etc. Dialogues occur within, but not across, disciplines, and scholars often do not (sometimes cannot) read the work of other scholars who are exploring the same terrain from different directions, using different tools. The essays written for this volume are all shaped, in part, by these disciplinary dialogues. But they have been prepared with a broader audience in mind, and it is hoped that gathering them together into a single volume may encourage a cross-disciplinary discourse, a traversing of boundaries that can isolate as well as refine scholarly inquiry. There just may be things that we can learn from one another as we try to deepen our comprehension of one of the twentieth century's most fundamental and important social problems.
Alexander Keyssar
Guest Editor
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is The Gold Standars in Theory and History (1985).
Michael Frisch is Professor of History and American Studies at the State University of New York--Buffalo. He wrote Town into City (1972).
Andrew Gordon Associate Professor of History at Duke University, wrote The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan (1985).
David M. Gordon is Professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He is a coauthor of Beyond the Waste Land (1983).
Alexander Keyssar is Associate Professor of History at Duke University and author of Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (1986).
Ramsay Liem is Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston College.
Enrico Pugliese is Professor of Sociology at the University of Naples.
Paula Rayman is Research Program Director of Stone Center, Wellesley College. Her Skidding: Unemployment in the 1980s will be published by Temple University Press.
Peter Seixas is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Los Angeles.
Margaret Weir Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, wrote (with Ira Katznelson) Schooling for All Classes: Race and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal.
