The Productivity of Unemployment and the Temporality of Employment-to-Come: Older Disadvantaged Job Seekers

Jessica Gerrard and Juliet Watson
Additional contact information
Jessica Gerrard: The University of Melbourne, Australia
Juliet Watson: RMIT University, Australia

Sociological Research Online, 2023, vol. 28, issue 1, 21-36

Abstract: This article demonstrates how unemployment is made productive through workfare activities for older disadvantaged job seekers. We suggest that the requirement to look for work, engage in education and training, and participate in voluntary work blurs the boundaries between employment and unemployment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with older disadvantaged job seekers, we demonstrate how this obligatory productivity is lived and felt, characterised by shame and frustration and framed by the temporality of waiting and searching for work. We suggest that this experience of ‘productive’ unemployment can be described as a dissonant state of ‘transitional stasis’, whereby job seekers are expected to transition out of unemployment and poverty while experiencing the long-term and ongoing effects of immobility.

Keywords: mutual obligation; older job seekers; productivity; temporality; unemployment; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13607804211009534 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:28:y:2023:i:1:p:21-36

DOI: 10.1177/13607804211009534

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().