This is a paper on how young long-term unemployed people manage their identity as job seekers in semi-structured interviews about their experiences of unemployment. The paper draws on discursive psychology to highlight some of the patterns of common sense reasoning about their predicament in the context of UK's third wave neoliberalist welfare provision and philosophy of 'personalised conditionality'. In contrast to studies that tend to consider the individual psychological impact of unemployment, particularly with regard to mental health issues, or resilience, this paper shows how a discursive approach can be a fruitful avenue to understanding how people account for their experiences of unemployment. The analysis shows how the thesaurus of everyday psychological states is used as a rhetorical tool for managing accountability for actions and motivations. The situated uses of psychological states allow speakers to engage with the tension between constraint and self-determination, and that between a 'desirable' (based on institutional priorities) and individually 'desired' future (based on subjective 'choice' and 'preference'). In describing their experiences of unemployment, participants talk into being the contradictory themes lodged at the heart of neoliberal ideologies of employment.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
International Journal of Education and Psychology in the Community
Volume
4
Issue
1&2
Pages
7 - 33
Citation
GILBERT, K, TILEAGA, C. and CAHILL, S., 2014. Dilemmas of long-term unemployment: Talking about constraint, self-determination and the future. International Journal of Education and Psychology in the Community, 4(1&2), pp. 7-33.
Publisher
IJEPC
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2014-07-10
Publication date
2014
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Journal of Education and Psychology in the Community and the definitive published version is available at http://ijepc.blogspot.co.uk/p/volume.html