‘You’d Die if You Didn’t Have Fun’: Interpreting the Experiences of Long-Term Unemployed Men as Bakhtinian Death–Rebirth

Helen Tracey
Additional contact information
Helen Tracey: Northumbria University, UK

Work, Employment & Society, 2025, vol. 39, issue 3, 748-767

Abstract: Death is a well-established metaphor for how individuals experience and cope with change: from organisational restructuring to job loss. However, the critical potential of death metaphors, particularly relating to job loss and unemployment, has not been fully realised. Drawing on dialogues between long-term unemployed men and their case workers at a Work Club in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, this article addresses a lack of theorisation of situated relational jobseeker resistance. Interpreting these experiences through Bakhtin’s concept of death–rebirth, metaphorical death can be understood as a feeling induced by stigmatising unemployment discourse. Rebirth represents the temporary resistance of this death through carnivalesque laughter, parody and grotesque humour. It is concluded that the men resist the stigma of blame for their own unemployment by using humorous carnivalesque reversals between death and rebirth as a form of relational jobseeker resistance.

Keywords: Bakhtin; blame; carnivalesque; jobseeker; laughter; resistance; stigma; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170241295680 (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:woemps:v:39:y:2025:i:3:p:748-767

DOI: 10.1177/09500170241295680

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().