Unemployed: White-Collar Job Searching After the Great Recession

Abstract

A burgeoning literature on white-collar unemployment and job searching has sought over the past two decades to explain why white-collar workers embrace neoliberal labor market restructuring, and why they often blame themselves for the failure of labor markets to provide stable, secure employment. Recent work, especially Sharone, has shown how neoliberal ideology is rooted in the details of American labor market institutions. More recently, however, U.S. employment relations have undergone a reconfiguration, punctuated by the Great Recession, raising new questions about self-blame and system-blame among white-collar job seekers. In this article, the authors draw on a unique data set of 43 white-collar job seekers interviewed in 2012 and 2013 and argue that, in the post-Great Recession period, what Sharone calls the chemistry game is now experienced as unwinnable, unplayable, and rigged. As a result, the authors find white-collar job seekers questioning neoliberalism in important ways and largely blaming structural factors—especially what they perceive as employers’ betrayal of the social contract—for negative labor market outcomes. The anger, disillusionment, and sense of betrayal among white-collar workers that the authors find in the post-Great Recession labor market, the authors suggest, has implications for Burawoy’s influential theory of employment games as well as relevance for the widespread decline in trust in American institutions.

Keywords

unemployment white-collar work job searching Great Recession ideology neoliberalism

Scholars of work, labor markets, and stratification have discovered a new interest in unemployment in recent decades, both as a phenomenon that transcends social class in the new economy (Brand, 2015) and as a matter of interest specifically to white-collar workers (Gabriel et al., 2010; Lane, 2011; Raito & Lahelma, 2015; Sharone, 2013). Contemporary research on unemployment focuses not only on economic consequences but also on consequences for social–psychological and physical health, family dynamics, and communities. Most recently, scholars have begun to take up a new set of questions about the ideological and political consequences of unemployment for white-collar workers. Specifically, scholars have been puzzled by the quiescence of white-collar workers in the face of mass unemployment, in contrast to the collective protests and political demands of blue-collar workers in response to plant closings and corporate downsizing in the 1980s and early 1990s (McCoy, 2016).

Scholars like Lane (2011) and others argue that white-collar workers’ responses to mass unemployment in the postindustrial economy are best explained by the rise of neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism, these scholars contend, gives white-collar workers a way to understand the world as within their individual control even as it directs them away from collective responses to the changing balance of power between employees and employers. Sharone (2013) offers a useful corrective to scholars of neoliberalism, who sometimes present neoliberal ideology as a free-floating ideological formation. In his justly praised and influential book, Flawed System/Flawed Self, Sharone shows how neoliberal ideology is not free floating but rather firmly rooted in lived experiences of specific labor market institutions. U.S. white-collar labor-market institutions, he shows, lead job seekers to play what he calls a chemistry game. Sharone’s concept of the chemistry game, we contend, is a useful way to conceptualize the relationship between white-collar job seekers and American labor market institutions. For Sharone, the importance of the in-person job interview in the U.S. context leads white-collar job seekers to market and sell “the person behind the skills” (p. 24) in an effort to find a chemistry-based “fit” with a prospective employer. Sharone convincingly demonstrates how the chemistry game induced self-blame rather than system-blame in the white-collar job seekers he studied in the mid-2000s.

Sharone (2013) presents the chemistry game as a relatively static feature of American labor markets for white-collar employment. But there is emerging evidence that the Great Recession coincided with deeper and more far-reaching reconfigurations of U.S. labor markets (Gershon, 2017; Katz & Krueger, 2016). What effects have these post-recession changes in U.S. labor market institutions had on how white-collar workers experience the labor market? Do such job seekers still play the chemistry game, and with what results? In this article, we explore these questions, drawing on 43 extended interviews with white-collar job searchers interviewed in 2012 and 2013. We find, first, that white-collar job seekers in the post-recession period do continue to play the chemistry game, and that it continues to produce self-blame. We also find, however, that the chemistry game itself broke down in important ways in the post-recession period, leading job searchers to conclude the game was unplayable, unwinnable, and rigged. In other words, a new rupture has emerged between American labor market institutions and white-collar workers’ expectations.

This breakdown of the chemistry game, we find, leads white-collar job seekers in the post-recession period to articulate a surprising level of system-blame. Before the Great Recession, the chemistry game may have worked well enough for most job seekers that its individualizing, atomizing effects could lead overwhelmingly to self-blame rather than system-blame for those who experienced labor market difficulties. But its rules, game-play, and broader efficacy are not historically fixed. As Burawoy (1979) showed, employment games are not features of national culture but, rather, are historically contingent. However, Burawoy also argued that playing games always generates consent, and that “one cannot both play the game and at the same time question the rules” (p. 81). In contrast, we demonstrate how, in the post-Great Recession period, playing the chemistry game does not reinforce neoliberal ideology but, rather, undermines individualistic, neoliberal experiences and explanations of labor market outcomes. Thus, we suggest, recent changes in U.S. labor markets, and the breakdown of the chemistry game, are generating important cracks and fissures in neoliberal ideology. These threats to the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, we believe, have important implications for social relations, such as declining trust in American institutions.

White-Collar Workers, the Changing Employment Bargain, and Neoliberal Ideology

The employment bargain for workers in the United States has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Whereas employees could once expect stable work careers, especially in core sectors, and even lifetime employment in many large organizations, employment relations have become far more precarious and insecure. During what some commentators have referred to as the “age of security” in the 1950s and 1960s (Mandell, 1996), a core workforce of unionized blue-collar workers enjoyed collective bargaining rights and job security and, equally important, raised employment standards for nonunion workers (Kalleberg, 2011; Silver, 2003). At the same time, managerial control over large, vertically integrated corporations (Fligstein, 1991; Ho, 2009) allowed for the growth of well-paid, secure white-collar employment. Blue-collar layoffs during business cycles were orderly and organized (see Jacoby, 2004), and mass white-collar layoffs were nearly unheard of.

Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s, however, these arrangements were eroded and then superseded by a new set of marketized employment relations with fewer protections and far less security for workers. De-unionization, especially in the context of sectoral changes in employment, and the reorganization of firms away from vertical integration and toward a set of interfirm relationships involving outsourcing and increased contracting out of processes, fundamentally changed the nature of the employment bargain (Appelbaum & Batt, 1994; Farber, 2010; Harrison & Bluestone, 1988; Rosenfeld, 2014; Viscelli, 2016; Whitford, 2006). During the first decade of this transformation in employment relations, white-collar workers often assumed that only blue-collar workers would be affected, viewing the rise of insecurity for hourly workers as a just punishment for their failure to adapt by pursuing education as a strategy for personal upward mobility (Dudley, 1994). By the opening decades of the 21st century, these processes of rising insecurity had spread to the work force as a whole, throwing huge numbers of white-collar workers into the same maelstrom of anxiety and stress that blue-collar workers had been experiencing since the late 1970s (Capelli, 1999; Beck, 2000; Fraser, 2002; Hacker, 2008; Newman, 1999; Smith, 2003).

As it became clear that job insecurity was now the order of the day for all workers, sociologists began to focus on white-collar workers’ adaptations to these new arrangements, and especially on the newly discovered problem of white-collar unemployment. An existing literature on unemployment and plant closings had long focused attention on the plight of laid-off blue-collar workers (see, e.g., Dudley, 1994; Leana & Felman, 1992,), but until the 1990s there had been little attention to white-collar experiences of unemployment. Newman (1988, 1999) was the first study of middle-class displacement and downward mobility to gain widespread attention, but the downward mobility among white-collar workers during the 1980s and 1990s was not widely seen as a general problem; indeed, Newman’s book cast the problem as one of downward mobility amidst general prosperity. By the early 21st century, the study of unemployment itself shifted away from assumptions about unemployment as a problem of the working classes, toward recognition that mass unemployment had now become a problem that transcends class (see Brand, 2015 for a recent review). This burgeoning literature on unemployment focuses on the economic, social–psychological, health, family, and community impacts of unemployment (Brand, 2015), with many studies now focusing explicitly on the effects of unemployment on, or coping strategies of, white-collar workers (e.g., Gabriel et al., 2010; Raito & Lahelma, 2015).

Recently, scholars have also begun to ask a different question: Why have white-collar workers accepted mass unemployment so quiescently? After all, during the wave of blue-collar layoffs in the 1980s, a collective plant-closing movement emerged to try to defend communities and workers against mass unemployment. Affected communities saw mass demonstrations and political demands for economic democracy (McCloy, 2016). White-collar workers in the early 2000s recession, by contrast, responded to layoffs, not with collective action and political demands, but with individualized labor market strategies, indeed turning away from collective action decisively as a solution to their problems. Why?

In A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White Collar Unemployment, Carrie Lane (2011) argues convincingly that white-collar workers’ individualistic, market-oriented responses to unemployment result from a newly hegemonic neoliberal ideology. Her respondents insist that they, and only they, are responsible for their careers, and that their former employers owed them no long-term loyalty (Lane, 2011). Lane documents how this ideology helps laid-off white-collar workers feel empowered while simultaneously, and perversely, encouraging them to accept their fates as natural and just. Lane presents this neoliberal ideology, in some ways, as a free-floating set of ideas that has come to dominate the culture for reasons that are unclear. As Burawoy (1979) and others have noted, however, ideology is never free floating but, rather, is always connected to material conditions: ideologies provide plausible and believable explanations of real social relations.

In his book Flawed System/Flawed Self, Ofer Sharone (2013) links the hyperindividualistic, antipolitical neoliberalism of unemployed American white-collar job searchers in the new economy to a set of labor market institutions that cultivate, encourage, and sustain this set of understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions. Comparing Israeli and American white-collar job seekers in the early 2000s, Sharone shows how divergent labor market institutions produce not only different job search strategies but also different ideological responses to unemployment. Israeli job searchers submit their resumes to a set of intermediary labor market institutions—staffing agencies and testing centers—which connect job seekers to jobs on the basis of qualifications. As a result, Israelis play what he calls a “specs game”: Job searching is an impersonal, qualifications-based process in which the key is to apply for as many jobs as possible in a highly standardized way. In contrast, American job seekers play a “chemistry game,” in which they first seek to “discover and express their authentic and passionate selves” (Sharone, 2013, p. 23), and then sell “the person behind the skills” (p. 23), marketing themselves directly and creatively to individual employers. Much like seeking out a potential romantic partner, Americans personalize every application and emphasize personal connection, whether through networking or during the interview process, in hopes of finding a good fit. Sharone emphasizes that, even in the United States, specs are important—but chemistry and “fit” matter more.

When Israeli job seekers are unsuccessful, Sharone finds, they often blame the system rather than themselves. Job searching in Israel is a dehumanizing and opaque process that leads to anger and resentment of an inhumane system. Unlike Israelis, however, American job seekers who experience labor market failures and setbacks blame not the system, but themselves. Because the onus is on the job-searcher’s creativity, the need to express passion and unique attributes, and to convince each prospective employer that the job seeker represents a perfect fit with the employer’s organizational culture and goals, the failure to find work is experienced as an individual failure rather than a systemic one.

We regard Sharone’s (2013) notion of the chemistry game as a singularly important contribution to understanding both the experience of white-collar unemployment and job searching and the ideological responses decried by Lane (2011) and others. Neoliberal ideology is, indeed, not culturally free floating, but instead rooted in lived experiences of specific material conditions. However, Sharone presents a somewhat static picture of both institutions and ideological responses, portraying the chemistry game as rooted in longstanding American labor market arrangements. But U.S. labor market institutions are of course not static, and much has changed just since the early and mid-2000s. First, the Great Recession was a discrete event that destabilized the labor market: Unemployment reached new heights and historic durations as job openings plummeted, and several white-collar industries that demonstrated robust job growth during past recessions suddenly faced employment declines (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012). American labor market institutions in times of economic growth or even moderate, “normal” postwar recessions may be experienced quite differently than they are in the context of an unprecedented, extended economic crisis. Beyond this, the Great Recession and the lengthy depressed labor market that followed may have coincided with more fundamental and long-lasting transformations in the labor market institutions themselves. Since the early 2000s, when both Lane and Sharone conducted their fieldwork, the commodification of individuals in white-collar U.S. labor markets has deepened further in several ways.

As Gershon (2017) details, white-collar labor markets now not only require job seekers to submit resumes and job applications online and to network via sites like LinkedIn but also require job seekers to craft consistent “personal brands” across proliferating and multiple social media platforms, which are always accessible in the smartphone era: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, a personal blog (Gershon, 2017, pp. 45–47). Thus, American white-collar job seekers are not only “in” the labor market when they apply for jobs, or via specifically labor-market oriented sites like LinkedIn, but via the very platforms through which we carry out our social lives more generally. Moreover, job applications themselves are now online, which is a very different way to organize the application process. As Gershon (2017) notes, “job seekers and career counselors describe the online form of application as a black hole” (p. 91). Job seekers increasingly understand that online applications and resumes are being parsed, not by human hiring managers but by software algorithms for keywords (Hu, 2018). And finally, between 2005 and 2015, there was a striking increase in temporary, on-call, and contract work, with growth in these forms of employment accounting for an incredible 94% of total employment growth (Katz & Krueger, 2016). Such a shift away from traditional jobs is itself a striking and very recent change in labor market institutions.

In sum, while we agree with Sharone that the details of labor market institutions matter for the kinds of employment games that get played, U.S. employment institutions in the post-Great Recession era are actually quite different from the early and mid-2000s. We contend, therefore, that the confluence of a lengthy and unprecedented economic slowdown with the ongoing evolution in U.S. labor market institutions themselves are likely to have consequences for the chemistry game, raising a crucial question: How did the chemistry game fare in the wake of all these changes? What is the connection between the chemistry game and ideological responses during this more recent period? And what do the answers mean for the future of neoliberal ideology among white-collar workers?

In this article, we provide some provisional answers to these questions, drawing on extended, semistructured interviews with 43 unemployed white-collar workers in 2012 and 2013. In what follows, we begin by showing that Sharone’s (2013) chemistry game is still being played by white-collar job searchers in post-Great-Recession America. Next, we demonstrate that, just as it did before the Great Recession, the chemistry game induces self-blame. However, we then go on to show that lived experiences of the chemistry game after the Great Recession were dramatically different from those found by Sharone in the early 2000s. Our respondents experience the chemistry game as broken, unwinnable, and unplayable. As a result, they articulate both self-blame and system-blame, in the form of widespread anger at conventional politics and institutions, which exposes cracks and fissures in the neoliberal orthodoxy described by Lane (2011).

Our findings hold significance for understandings of more general processes associated with games and consent (Burawoy, 1979, 2008). Burawoy (1979), in his foundational work on employment games, famously argued that “the very act of playing the game generates consent to its rules,” and claimed “one cannot both play the game and at the same time question its rules” (p. 81). Much of the emerging literature on employment games inspired by Burawoy’s work (cf. Sallaz, 2009; Sharone, 2004; Sherman, 2007) accepted these claims as self-evident, but recent work by Sallaz (2015) undermines them. In particular, Sallaz showed how playing the “learning game” on the shop floor of a post-Fordist call center produces “effort but not consent,” leading to high attrition among call center employees. We concur with Sallaz that games do not automatically generate consent, and that it is perfectly possible to continue to play a game while questioning its rules. Indeed, we think that anyone who has ever played Monopoly with a child, watched children playing games in the street (or participated in an adult recreational ice hockey game!), will agree: People often continue to play, even as they dispute rules, question rules, or even become angry about rules.

Why, then, did Burawoy associate game-playing so firmly with ideological consent? Arguably, it may be linked to the context of his research. In Burawoy’s Fordist factory, shop-floor games were generally understood as mostly playable and, even when they were not, there were specific forms of withdrawal available within the framework of the rules (i.e., “goldbricking,” a slackening of effort and an acceptance of the base pay rate when bonus rates were perceived as unattainable). Since withdrawals were consistent with the rules (specifically, contractually guaranteed bonus rates), they acted to support and legitimate the game. In other contexts—such as the contemporary white-collar labor market—withdrawals from the game are far less tenable. White-collar workers can, of course, withdraw from the labor force entirely, but at far greater cost. Thus, contra Burawoy, our respondents continued to play, even as they questioned the rules. Playing a broken labor market game in this context, we argue, does not produce consent in the same way that playing shop floor games did in the Fordist factory (even when the games did break down).

What, then, are the consequences? Much of the discussion of neoliberal ideology and white-collar workers (see, e.g., Lane, 2011) assumes that if workers could only see their labor market problems in structural, systemic terms, they might favor collective solutions. Our interviews do not support this view. Indeed, as Burawoy (2008) also suggested, moving from individual to structural understandings of our situations is not necessarily liberating: “in addition to sociological imagination we also need political imagination” (p. 369). In the absence of such political imagination, our interviews suggest, the rising anger and sense of betrayal that comes from playing a game that feels unwinnable and broken, a game that feels rigged, can actually lead people to feel more hopeless, more isolated, more fatalistic, and more powerless.

Data and Methods

This study is based on in-depth, semistructured interviews with 43 white-collar job searchers in a major metropolitan area in the Midwestern United States. ¹ The interviews were conducted in 2012 and 2013. All 43 respondents had been stably employed (or full-time students) prior to experiencing a period of unemployment lasting at least 3 months. Some of the respondents had been out of work for several years, and some had taken temporary, lower wage, or even informal work while unemployed, but all sought reemployment in white-collar work. Most interviews lasted between an hour and an hour and a half; a few were shorter than an hour and several were more than 4 hours long.

These interviews were conducted as part of a broader study of downward mobility in the Great Recession and its aftermath; the full sample comprises 86 extended, semistructured interviews that include manual and service workers as well as white-collar workers. Respondents for this broader study were recruited through a variety of channels, including job fairs, trade unions, churches, immigrant organizations, networking groups, nonprofit organizations serving in-need populations, resource fairs, and public online resume sites. Job fairs proved to be the best recruitment pathway, yielding about 80% of our respondents. Consequently, our sample is biased toward unemployed workers who are actively and agentically pursuing reemployment.

Our orientation toward the field and toward the data in this article, particularly with respect to our view of the relationship between theory and data, reflected the extended case method [henceforth, ECM] approach (Burawoy, 1998a). While the limitations of the interview method made it impossible to fully embrace “the ethnographic condition” (Burawoy, 1998a, p. 7), we endeavored to follow the four principles of “reflexive science”: intervention, process, structuration, and reconstruction.

In our recruitment procedures, we were forced to balance the principle of treating research interventions and the perturbations they create as data, with the necessity of recruiting respondents who actually had the experiences we were interested in studying. Potential respondents were approached by a member of the research team and given a brief description of the study. Those who fit the study criteria and were interested in participating were asked for contact information for later scheduling. After they provided contact information, potential respondents were informed they would receive $30 upon completing an interview. Respondents were made aware of this incentive during recruitment because some respondents’ precarious financial situations may have limited their ability to travel for and participate in an uncompensated interview. At the same time, leaving the incentive unstated until the respondent was determined to be qualified and interested reduced the possibility that respondents might feign interest, or feel pressured to participate, because of the compensation.

Interviews typically took place in private conference rooms reserved at local public libraries, although a small number were completed elsewhere or over the phone. All interviews were audio recorded. Given the semistructured, open-ended nature of the interviews, researchers prompted respondents in relatively uniform ways across a broad range of predetermined topics; however, interviews were not conducted using a detailed interview guide with specific, sequential questions. This format ensured consistency and direction while allowing researchers to explore important topics and themes that emerged during particular interviews. Thus, rather than attempting to standardize the interview, we followed the ECM by “proceed[ing] through dialogue, reducing distortion but at the expense of reactivity, reliability, replicability, and often representativeness” (Burawoy, 1998a, p. 13). Interviews thus reflected the ECM’s emphasis on the interview as intervention into the lives of respondents. Our interview procedures also reflected ECM’s focus on process: While we were unable to follow our participants through time and space directly as in an ethnographic study, we consciously viewed the interviews not as an opportunity to take a snapshot of current attitudes and experiences but, crucially, as an opportunity to understand how current experiences fit into respondents’ life narratives. And third, we did not see our interviews as taking the measure of our respondents’ attitudes or experiences in a narrow sense; rather, we followed the ECM principle of structuration by allowing our respondents to situate themselves in their own broader contexts as they understood them.

Therefore, topics covered during every interview included (a) brief employment and life histories; (b) how the respondent became unemployed; (c) immediate consequences of unemployment for finances, housing, and health (including access to health care); and (d) respondents’ behavioral, relational, and attitudinal responses to unemployment including coping strategies, consumption patterns, and time use; relationships with family and other members of respondents’ networks; and respondents’ views and beliefs about the meaning of their unemployment experience in the context of their life stories. In addition, at the conclusion of the interview, basic demographic information was recorded about each respondent. The breadth and depth of our interview questions allowed interviews to move beyond discussion of the immediate financial consequences of unemployment, uncovering in more detail the meaning of extended unemployment in respondents’ lives.

With regard to sampling procedures, our broader research strategy was not aimed not at statistically representative sampling but, rather, toward a diverse sample of job seekers, defined in terms of major sociological categories: gender, race, age, education, and occupational type (blue-collar/hourly employment vs. white-collar employment). We aimed, from the outset, to populate these major categories in a roughly equal way. Thus, our sampling strategy was not driven by a specific set of theoretical expectations, but rather by a broader assumption that major and longstanding sociological categories should matter.

Our sampling strategy is also consistent with the extended case method. Many observers have misunderstood ECM as requiring researchers to adopt a strong theory prior to entry into the field, but as Burawoy (1998b) explains, this is actually not a requirement of the method:

We can focus on an empirical phenomenon that commands our interest, searching for theories for which it is an anomaly, theories we consider worth developing, elaborating, revising, or reconstructing. Alternatively, we can commit ourselves to a theory … that directs us to anomalies that compel the program’s development. Whichever approach we take, the goal is no longer to confirm but to discover anomalies. (p. 14, emphasis added)

This article emerges from the first of these two approaches within ECM. We were broadly interested in post-Great Recession job-searching experiences, and as we read and discussed interview transcripts we noticed that there seemed to be a great deal of system-blame among our white-collar respondents. This reminded us of Sharone’s theory of the chemistry game and its relation to self-blame. Did our case constitute an anomaly worthy of theoretical reconstruction (the final principle of ECM and the one for which it is best known)? The only way to answer that question was through rigorous coding and analysis of our data.

The first task we faced was deciding which respondents in the broader sample were white collar. The definition of white-collar work is inherently somewhat fuzzy; we defined it as office work that entailed significant responsibility, special skills, or managing others. Therefore, we excluded low-level clerical or customer service workers, even when those workers made more money than some of the managers in our sample. We identified white-collar workers in the larger sample based on a combination of occupation, education, and income, supplemented where necessary with detailed job information collected in the interviews. Since we had detailed information about exactly what each respondent’s previous jobs had entailed, we were able to reasonably classify workers as white-collar even when their level of education or income might have led to a different conclusion. Also, since the focus of this article is on job search experiences, we excluded a small number white-collar workers who did not have significant job-searching experiences, either because they had not yet started searching in earnest, or because their downward mobility experiences consisted in loss of pay or changing fields rather than extended unemployment.²

The composition of the white-collar job searcher subsample is summarized in Table 1. There are basically equal numbers of men and women. The subsample overrepresents middle-aged workers and Black workers; almost one third of the subsample is Black and only 20% of the subsample is younger than 35 years. In terms of education, about 20% of our white-collar respondents had Master’s, Ph.D., or professional degrees; 42% had bachelor’s degrees, and a little over one third had at least some college. Given the nature of this article’s engagement with Sharone’s (2013) exploration of the American chemistry game, it is worth noting at the outset that (a) our sample does not appear to be significantly older than Sharone’s U.S. sample (his median age was 48) and it is not too different in terms of the proportion of White respondents (his sample had a higher proportion of Whites).

Table 1.

White-Collar Job Searcher Subsample Demographics.

	Number	Percent
Gender
Male	21	49
Female	22	51
	43	100
Race
White	26	60
Black	15	35
Other	02	05
		100
Age
Under 35	09	21
35 to 49	19	44
50 and older	15	35
		100
Education
High school or less	01	02
Some college or associates degree	15	35
Bachelor’s degree	18	42
Advanced or professional degree	09	21
		100
Personal income before job loss events
Less than $25k/yr	04	09
$25k–$49.9k/yr	21	49
$50k–74.9k/yr	12	28
$75k–$99.9k/yr	01	02
More than $100k/yr	05	12
		100

Analysis of interview transcripts proceeded in stages, using NVivo10 qualitative data analysis software. First, as described earlier, we identified the subsample of 43 white-collar job searchers. Second, we coded the full interviews for job search strategies as well as for self-blame and system-blame as defined by Sharone (2013). In order to do that, we first used an initial code, “job,” to identify broadly relevant text. Then, reading the “job” material closely, we narrowed the material down to discussions of job-searching experiences (excluding discussions of how and why respondents lost their initial job). Next, we conducted “focused coding” (Lofland & Lofland, 1995) of this job-searching-experience material, looking for indications of self-blame and system-blame. Following Sharone, with respect to self-blame, we looked for indications that respondents’ failure to find a new job led them to “end up feeling like there is something wrong with them” (p. 52) because they interpreted their labor market failures as evidence that they were personally flawed, not worthy, or doing something wrong. We only coded explicit references to individual shortcomings, inadequacies, failures, and mistakes as self-blame. With respect to system-blame, we again followed Sharone in coding for instances in which respondents express the idea that “something is wrong with the system” (p. 127) as an explanation for their failure to find new work. Here too, we only coded for system-blame in cases where respondents explicitly invoked structural, external forces—properties of the employment system—to explain their failure to find new work. In order to arrive at valid interpretations, we did not analyze texts in isolation but, instead, read each block of text in the context of the original interview and the demographic data for each respondent. Thus, we interpreted individual texts as part of a case-oriented (Ragin, 2000) analysis rather than as decontextualized textual data.

Finally, it is worth noting that, initially, we attempted to follow Sharone by classifying respondents as either “self-blamers” or “system-blamers.” This classification scheme broke down under the weight of the number of respondents who clearly invoked both self and system explanations for their continued unemployment, sometimes in the same utterances. As we wrestled with the implications of this, we were then drawn back to Burawoy’s (1979) original claims about games and consent, ultimately realizing that our case represented an important anomaly with respect to this broader theory as well.

Playing the Chemistry Game in the Great Recession

Just as Sharone’s (2013) respondents from before the Great Recession described, the white-collar job seekers that we interviewed continued to play the chemistry game. The core of the chemistry game is the idea that finding a job involves selling yourself, which starts with resumes and cover letters that must be tailored to sell oneself to different kinds of employers. Colin, a 33-year-old B.A.- level researcher at a university research institute who had been unemployed for over a year, was typical in this regard:

I’ve been very systematic. I have different types of cover letters, different types of resumes for different job postings. I tailored each one when I apply which was initially very time consuming. Journalistic writing is very different from cover letter writing, obviously. And so [I’ve been] just starting from scratch on some of this stuff, and rewriting the resume, and really working on some of [those] things.

Self-selling also involves working one’s networks, and our respondents did this assiduously because they believed it was an important key to finding a new job:

I have had more coffee with more strangers in the past 3 months than [laughs] I ever thought possible… . When I’m not having that coffee I’m arranging my schedule for next week or the week after to schedule those coffee dates with strangers.

How do you meet these strangers then?

Through friends, colleagues, old ex-colleagues. It’s a bit of a mystery to me [laughs] because it’s not always easy to see all of the connections. I’ve been keeping really detailed notes because I feel like many plates are spinning that I can’t remember you know where I’ve met and how I’ve been introduced to each individual. So it’s kind of an interesting challenge to keep all my facts straight. (Colleen, 44, graphic designer, unemployed less than 6 months)

Ultimately, the purpose of self-selling in the chemistry game is to find a “good fit”—to get in front of an interviewer with a chance to convince them that the job seeker has exactly the right personal and professional qualities for the position (Sharone, 2013). Our respondents talked about the process in exactly these terms:

Hopefully I’ll end up with a job. I know I’m gonna find a job. I’m not the kind of person that doesn’t; I’m not a quitter. I’m not negative, I try not to be. There’s days you can’t help it, you get a little down because nothing’s happening right now, but overall I’m not, I’m not walking away from unemployment with a negative outlook, you know? I think I’m gonna find a good job with a good fit. Just got to struggle through what I’ve got to struggle through now. (Jerry, 39, manager, unemployed between 6 months and 1 year)

Our respondents also cast failures in terms of fit, as an explanation for not getting a job. Colin’s (the 33-year-old former university researcher quoted earlier) comments about a job he did not get are a good example of using fit to explain job search failure:

They made it sound that I was overqualified or I just did not have the administrative skills. Like I did not know how to answer a phone properly or I didn't have enough skills. That’s what they made it sound like in the interview, it just wasn’t gonna be a good fit.

Other respondents, meanwhile, agonized over fit while describing the ongoing dramas of interviews that they hoped might pan out. Kelly, a 41-year-old insurance sales analyst who had been unemployed less than 6 months, told us such a story, describing how she tried to glean hints from every communication about whether she had made the right kind of impression, even going so far as to share emails and voicemails with her mother, who had worked in human resources, to see if her mother thought it sounded like she had created the right kind of fit:

I went in for a second interview with [the partner of the person I’d be working with] and he even made the comment when I walked in, “Oh well obviously [name] really likes you.” … I thought she did, but I did not know… .The emails she would send, and then the voicemails she would send, I would actually list—I include mom in a lot of this stuff because mom used to work in HR … —so I just wanted her to get a take. Am I really into this a little bit more than I should be? She’s like, no, it sounds like they really like you and want you.

Kelly ultimately did not get that job, which she describes as a bewildering experience. “I really thought I had that job,” she said ruefully, “and then they picked somebody else.” Confusingly, she did not know why she had not been a good fit. Had she asked for too much money? Had they found someone they liked better? She had no way of knowing, and her frustration was palpable.

The Chemistry Game and Self-Blame

As Sharone (2013) notes, an important feature of the chemistry game is that the initial optimism and enthusiasm of the job search is difficult to sustain in the face of repeated rejections over time. If you are not getting offers, it must be because are not selling yourself properly. There is something wrong with you, the job seeker. Ongoing job search failure led nearly half of our white-collar job searchers—20 out of 43—to express self-blame. For some of our respondents, self-blame meant agonizing questions that they could not answer to their own satisfaction:

I know one person told me that I was unfocused. And I don’t understand how I was unfocused so then it’s like I sit there and think about it. And I dwell on what did I do wrong. It’s like, you know then you try to change yourself for the next one and you’re the exact opposite on the next one and I’m just like, oh my gosh, what am I doing wrong? (Patti, 46, accountant, unemployed less than 6 months)

I’m not used to sitting there and applying for 6 jobs online and getting no callbacks. And it’s, “okay, what have I done wrong? What can I do better? Is it my resume?” (Barry, 60, executive chef, unemployed less than 6 months)

Consistent with Sharone’s (2013) findings, these respondents accept the terms of the chemistry game enough to believe that their lack of success says something about them. They are doing something wrong, they lack some quality that they need—but they are not sure what it is and they do not know what to change.

Others we interviewed articulated more specific personal shortcomings that they felt hampered their ability to succeed at the chemistry game. For example, Corinne, a 52-year-old who had spent 24 years managing IT in the insurance industry and who had been unemployed for more than a year, reflected on this, saying “I want to be able to sell myself, but I’m not into sales, so that’s part of my problem.” Corinne gets the rules of the chemistry game—sell yourself. But what if you are not, by nature, a good salesperson? That is not what she does professionally, so she imagines that other, better salespeople are naturally going to be better at it than she is, even if they are not more qualified for the job.

Some respondents engaged in yet another form of self-blame: ruing mistakes and past choices that, in their estimation, led or contributed to their current straits. Sometimes these reflections were delivered with a dose of bleak humor, as with 48-year-old bank manager Dave, who had been unemployed for more than a year:

What is your degree in?

(laughs) Uhh, job hunting. History, BA in history—I was going to be a teacher. Mistake number 1: I gave up the education classes and just finished the degree as history. Mistake number two: moving to California. Mistake number 3: moving back to Ohio.

Dave wishes he had not dropped his double minor in education and history and that he had followed his original plan of becoming a teacher. He now believes he would have had more job security that way. He moved to California to pursue a job opportunity that did not work out, and he came back to Ohio to look for work and take care of an ailing parent. Playing the chemistry game leads to this sort of second-guessing.

All these kinds of self-blame lead to profound feelings of failure and shame. Not working for an extended period, even in the midst of the Great Recession and the long “jobless” recovery that came after it, was experienced by many of our respondents as deeply shame-inducing. This was as true for younger respondents as older ones. Consider Jeannette, for example. Jeannette was 24 years at the time of interview. She had graduated from college from a good school the year before but had not been able to find any kind of job and had been employed for more than 6 months. She had been forced to move back in with her parents. Her feelings of shame were so strong, she said, that she could not even bring herself to tell friends or members of her church that she actually did not have a job:

I’m just kind of like, I think [members of my church] have the perception, and I think it’s my fault, that I actually have a job. I’ve let them think I do. And probably it’s because of the shame I have, or because I feel like someone from college should have, in my mind, should have at least a job. So, I just do not talk about it, or I just let them think that I do. Or, if they do ask me I just try to switch the subject. Right. And, with some other friends of mine, I’ve, I’m not gonna lie, I’ve totally lied about it. I totally, I never say specifically what I do, but I just act like my days busy and I have like an 8-5 thing like them. But, I just, I know it’s a lie, but at the end of the day feel like ‘til I’m secure, or actually come out and say it, it’s just not gonna happen. I think it’s just the shame of me not having it; it just leads me sometimes to not being truly honest. But, technically, I’m not saying what I’m doing. So technically I’m thinking to myself well, technically I’m just gonna let them think I do [have a job].

Many of our interviews are just suffused with shame. Even when respondents do not come out and say it directly—and at times even when the interviewer did not realize it during the interview, as we reread transcripts, we realized that many details, stories, and narratives were about shame. The shame of having to move back in with family (for older as well as younger workers), the shame of not being able to provide for dependents (for both men and women), the shame of losing a home, the shame of feeling unwanted, and the shame of losing the chemistry game.

But as we will see later, this is where the similarities to the findings of other qualitative studies of white-collar job searching, whose fieldwork was conducted before the Great Recession, ends. Our respondents played the chemistry game, and just as Sharone (2013) argues, that game directed at least some of their feelings of failure inwards, toward themselves. But that is not the end of the story, because labor market institutions in the post-Great Recession political economy are so different. In contrast to Sharone’s respondents, or those of Lane (2011), our respondents described how the chemistry game itself was broken, unwinnable, and unplayable—an ideological rupture linked to the changing material conditions associated with the Great Recession.

The Post-Recession Labor Market: The Chemistry Game Is Broken

It is difficult to sustain the idea that one is playing a game when nobody shows up with a ball. The post-recession job market was like that for our white-collar respondents, who reported that, while they were willing to do whatever they could think of to find a job from 2010 to 2013, there often simply were not jobs being posted that they could apply to. These respondents articulated that their ability to successfully play the chemistry game bore little or no consequence for their ability to find employment. A new set of material conditions existed—whether due to the recession, broader labor market transformation, or both—for which old ideologies were not well-suited.

Kelly, the 41-year-old insurance sales analyst who agonized about every detail of finding chemistry with prospective employers, also talked at length about her networking efforts, but confessed: “There just were not that many postings out there. There were not even postings out there where I could bug my contacts with.”

Other respondents reported that the reason they did not get some jobs was that the jobs themselves were pulled during the recruiting process.

Cameron, a 60-year-old banker unemployed for more than a year, had this experience:

I mean, I talked to everybody, and we had great conversations. They all said, “this is really good.” We talked and we laughed, and I was getting a call every day from HR which is always a good sign. When they call you every day for something, you know an interview or just to ask you a question, it shows that They are really interested in you. So I was getting that and I felt really good. I had my final interview and then I get a call saying, “hey, they just pulled the job.” Okay, wow, okay. You know?

Cameron had played the chemistry game correctly. He had marketed himself, taken responsibility for his own career, sold himself successfully—and then the job went up in smoke. It was, he says, a crushing blow:

I know my family is really supportive of me, but then I have to think about, I have to be positive to them as well, no matter how bad I feel about it. You gotta feel strong to your family as well. And I’m sure my wife knows that I was hurting. I think what happened was she could see the number and she knew who it was. And it took me about 15 minutes before I went up and told her.

After getting the call telling him that the position he had just nailed had been canceled, Cameron sat by himself for 15 minutes before he could gather himself to go upstairs and tell his wife the news. Cameron talks about hurting—but he does not talk about self-blame here, because when nobody is hiring, it is not his fault. There is pain, but it is not directed inwards.

Colleen, the 44-year-old graphic designer who talked about having coffee with so many strangers as part of her networking strategy, also reflected on the absence of opportunities in the post-recession labor market. Colleen left no stone unturned in her job search:

There are a lot of advertising and marketing agencies in [Midwestern city] and I’ve researched a lot of them as well and just sort of blindly sent my resume and cover letter to them just on an off chance that they might happen to need someone at that time.

She continued:

When I was driving one day in [municipality] I saw this building with a sign that said [company name] marketing… So of course I had to look them up and found that they were a small advertising agency and sent them mail completely out of the blue saying: “You seem like really interesting people. I would love to sit down and talk with you.” And I was really shocked to see on Christmas Eve a response that said: “Hey can you come by Wednesday morning at 9:00?” It was this absolutely wonderful conversation and the company is 8 people big and they do not need anyone right now. But [laughs] you know it was still a lovely conversation. They said, “I would really like to have you on our team but we do not have room for you right now and let’s just keep talking.” And so that was nice to have this… just sort of random experience and just said “Hey, you seem like really interesting people doing interesting work.”

Experiences like this one actually do not send the message that there is something wrong with the job seeker; they send a different message. What Colleen reports here is undeniable chemistry. Lack of chemistry is not the problem. Colleen does not conclude from this that she is playing the game wrong or that she is to blame for her unemployment. Rather, she concludes, in a different economy, this firm might well have been able to hire her.

Another dimension of the post-recession labor market that several of our respondents reflected on is the existence of fake opportunities—things that seemed like white-collar job opportunities but turned out to be something else entirely. Jerry, the 39-year-old manager who talked above about retaining his optimism that he would find a good fit, discussed this:

There are a lot of strange opportunities out there right now for companies that are just looking for bodies. There is a company that handles in-store marketing, which is basically a person just standing handing out samples at a store, and they try to sell that hard like it is a real job. It is not; it is really just they send you to stores with a … a package of samples you pass out, you make very little money.

Indeed, some of our white-collar respondents took such low-wage jobs. Derrell, a 62-year-old tech entrepreneur who had owned companies with hundreds of employees and who had been unemployed for more than a year, was one of these. He took a job in a call center, labeling it a “survival job,” thinking that he would be very different from the other employees, only to discover that he was not alone:

About half of the people were in the same boat I was in. They did not really want to be there, but they do not have any other choice. There were a lot of people there that were fairly talented, and I met some of them. I’m in this thing where you do not—you can’t feed your family and you can’t find any job and somebody will offer you a job for 12–13 dollars an hour to be on a phone all day, you’ll go do it. And it does not matter what job you’ve had in the past or what kind of skill set you have, you have to do what you have to do.

Sharone (2013) discusses the decision to take a low-wage job or to hold out for white-collar employment as one of the dilemmas of white-collar unemployment his respondents struggled with as they played the chemistry game. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, however, even willingness to take a low wage job did not necessarily mean that our respondents could find employment. Corinne, the 54-year-old IT manager discussed earlier, was one of those people. Corinne told us that she was willing to clean houses—but could not find work doing that either.

Because one of the things that I need to do [to my resume] is dummy it down because it is got so much information on it and I’m willing to for example, clean houses. There was an ad in the paper and I applied and the president, like president, called me and asked me if I could come in. I went in the next day for an interview—or actually just to fill out an application, but he took the time to talk to me. I mean, I’m not willing to do nothing. I’m willing to work.

Corinne did not get the house-cleaning job.

One recurring theme relative to the state of the economy as it impinged on our respondents’ job searches was their sense that as politicians and the media reported or took credit for an improving economy, these establishment figures were actually blind to the way that labor markets continued to be in crisis. As Sharon, a 54-year-old executive assistant unemployed for more than a year, put it,

Well, I read the paper every day. They are talking about how The Great Recession’s over, how the unemployment rate is steadily decreasing, there is jobs out there; and the thing about it is, [t]hey do not look at the number of people that are underemployed. All of a sudden they lost that high paying job, or higher paying job. Now all of the sudden to make ends meet They are having to work two or three jobs, maybe cut back on some things, but you know like I said all the politicians are like “oh the economy is increasing; jobs are out there.” Looking around, I do not feel like that is the case.

In sum, material conditions changed so monumentally during the Great Recession era that the self-blame created by the chemistry game was counteracted to some extent by the realization that the problem was bigger than the job seeker as an individual. Lora, a 60-year-old income-tax preparer unemployed for more than a year, put it this way:

I do not feel alone. I mean, I do not feel alone. Um … I’m not real familiar with the employment status of my neighbors and I do not particularly care to have them aware of my employment status, but at the agency where I have been un … involved with over the last few weeks, I recognize that all of us in there are in there for the same reason. So, no I do not feel alone; I’ve never felt alone in this. I mean, you can look at the news and see that-there was an employment problem. Uh … the government is uh … you know, things … a lot of somewhat shaky, not as bad as they are in some of the European countries, and so that’s a positive for us, and situation are getting better in this country, but um … I do not feel the least bit alone, no.

In other words, while our respondents played the chemistry game, even many of those who did experience self-blame as a result of its dynamics began moving past self-blame as they realized that their inability to find new work was structural, not simply the result of personal failings. The ideology of total individual responsibility for labor market outcomes began to break down.

Listen to Colin, the 33-year-old researcher, in this regard:

So then as each job … the numbers started to build, then the doubts started creeping in more and more and basically I did not deal well with rejection at first because I wasn’t used to it, so I had gotten into everything whether it was education or whether it was a job situation… . So getting, “No you are not qualified,” or like especially for an internship. I think that was, when I heard I was not qualified for an internship, like a 6-month internship, a research internship, research assistant internship, that was a shocking sort of …it was clearly there is something wrong with the situation.

Here, Colin takes us through an initial period of self-doubt and self-blame as the number of rejections he experienced began to climb. During this period, he focused on whether his labor market failures were the result of his only having a BA, or lack of fit for specific jobs. But then he applied for a 6-month internship and was told that he was not qualified. That shocked him. For the first time, he concluded, “there is clearly something wrong with the situation.” Not something wrong with Colin, but with the labor market.

Realizations like these are not necessarily liberating or protective of self. If you believe that an outcome is within your control, it is a problem you can solve. If the labor market is broken, you are helpless. Thus, the realization that the problem is structural rather than personal can be an absolutely terrifying one. Here is Cameron again:

I wake up at three o’clock in the morning thinking about it and I think about what it does to my wife and she’s sleeping. And she does not know all that stuff because you do not want to share all that stuff with everybody all the time ‘cause that’s just really depressing. But you say, okay … for me, I think what keeps me going is I think of different ways I could do it or find out different angles that I could do it. And so I keep thinking to myself, as long I can think of different ways to approach it and different things to do, then I’ll be okay. But what happens when you wake up and you say, “well geez I got nothing.” That is the really scary part because then you got nothing. What do you do now? You tried everything you could.

Similarly, Denise, a 44-year-old IT professional unemployed less than 6 months, talked a good deal in her interview about gaps in her employment record and the lack of a specialized degree as barriers to reemployment. Much of her interview, in other words, sounded a lot like a story of self-blame in the chemistry game. But then, toward the end of the interview, when asked if there was anything else she would like us to know about her experience of job loss, Denise said this:

The economic crisis it is like you never really … you do not really feel it as an individual when you are going through something. You can only just understand as you are what you are going through at that moment. You do not know how big it is, you do not know how bad it is, until people tell you exactly what it is. So, you turn on the news and people tell you oh, the economy is down and unemployment is up 10% and you are like well, I’m a part of that 10%. As an individual you do not really know. Am I a victim of my own shortcomings or things that I can control, or am I victim of things that are bigger out there—forces that I can’t even identify, recognize, and go up against? You can only do things … do something that you know about that you can control but to the extent that you can’t control whatever else is out there, that’s what’s big and scary.

Who Is to Blame?

As shown in Table 2, nearly three quarters of our white-collar, job-searching respondents (31 out of 43) made structural arguments about their inability to find reemployment. Interestingly, almost half (14) of these 31 respondents also discussed self-blame. Self-blame and system-blame, for our respondents—as could be seen in Denise’s comments above, for example—were not necessarily alternative ways of understanding the world. Like Denise, many of our respondents had nuanced and thoughtful things to say about where their responsibilities lay and what the limits of their responsibilities were.

As shown in Table 3, system-blaming was widespread among members of all demographic groups in our sample.³ Some of our respondents, like Denise above, gestured toward big but amorphous external forces but provided little in the way of specific analyses. This was the case, for example, with Colin, the 33-year-old researcher unemployed more than a year:

Table 2.

Distribution of Blame Among Respondents.

	Number	Percent
Self-blame only	6	14
System-blame only	17	39.5
Self- and system-blame	14	32.5
No blame	6	14
	43	100

Table 3.

Distribution of System-Blame Among Respondents by Demographic.

	Sample demographics		Express system-blame
	Number	Percent	Number	Percent
Gender
Male	21	49	15	71
Female	22	51	16	73
	43	100	31	72
Race
White	26	60	21	81
Black	15	35	08	53
Other	02	05	02	100
		100
Age
Under 35	09	21	04	44
35 to 49	19	44	13	68
50 and older	15	35	14	93
		100
Education
High school or less	01	02	00	00
Some college or associates degree	15	35	11	73
Bachelor’s degree	18	42	14	78
Advanced or professional degree	09	21	06	67
		100
Personal Income before job loss events
Less than $25k/yr	04	09	01	25
$25k–$49.9k/yr	21	49	16	76
$50k–74.9k/yr	12	28	09	75
$75k–$99.9k/yr	01	02	01	100
More than $100k/yr	05	12	04	80
		100
Total time unemployed
Less than 6 months	12	28	07	58
6 months to 1 year	8	19	06	75
More than 1 year	23	53	17	74
		100

I think that’s important for me on a political level with political consciousness, is not to sort of say “everything has gone bad for me, everything is terrible for me, it is all about me.” Well this is about something much broader that’s happening. This is about something about what’s being called the Great Recession. I’ve been cognizant of that throughout. And thinking about what’s been going on abroad and economic dislocations that we’ve … and what’s happened in places like Greece and Spain. Making those connections.

In Colin’s account, the global economic crisis is an external shock with no clear causes, almost like a natural disaster. It is not clear to Colin who exactly is to blame, even if it is clear that the problem goes beyond his success or failure at selling himself in the labor market.

Cheryl, a 57-year-old accountant who had been unemployed less than 6 months, also situated herself historically, painting a picture of an economy now subject to unsustainable booms and looming austerity that would ruin any chance at a dignified retirement:

Well, I think that given what’s happening at least in my lifetime, I think my retirement’s going to be harder than my parents’. My parents had pensions. They have a Medicare that provides for them. I’m not so sure I’m going to have that at my age, at their age when I’m retired. Especially with the talk about these vouchers, you know these vouchers, as a possible remedy, I do not know that that’s the solution to it, but it is clear that something has to be done with Medicare and health care costs. But I think it is going to be harder because I’m not going to have a pension like they did. I think we oil and China, India, Brazil, Russia, all those countries just sucking up the oil, oil is not going to get any cheaper, so cost of living is not gonna get really any cheaper. So, I think I’m gonna have to prepare more than what my parents did. I can’t rely on the value of my home to do it like they were able to do it… . You might, you’ll get [economic] booms, you will, but they’ll be, they won’t be sustainable ones. And I think there is probably going to be at least one more of this kind of recession in my lifetime.

Cheryl sees that her generation of workers no longer gets a pension, and she believes that cuts are coming to Medicare. And, she says, instead of sustainable economic growth she foresees unsustainable booms and more episodes like the Great Recession. It is not clear from Cheryl’s account why these things are happening or exactly who is to blame for them; nevertheless they are large structural transformations that change the equation for ordinary workers like her.

And of course, it is true that older workers faced a specific systemic barrier to reemployment: age discrimination among employers (see also Lassus, Lopez, & Roscigno, 2015). Indeed, numerous respondents were highly qualified for the jobs they applied for after several decades of work in a particular field; however, they believed that employers preferred to hire younger applicants due to biases that were ultimately unfounded and unfair. Derrell, our 62-year-old tech entrepreneur who took a survival job after being unemployed more than a year, put it succinctly:

The demand for skills are such that people could be selective and if you got a ton of people that are my age and you got a ton of people that are in their early twenties-late twenties, early thirties, and people say, “I can pick either one,” if you are equal on paper and one of them is 62 and the other one is 25, which one do you hire? There is a bias. There is nothing you can do and I understand it. Okay? But the thing is though that it is bad judgment ‘cause here I am at 62—I’m in bad enough financial shape that I know I’m never going to retire so, they can probably get an 8 or 10 years out of me and I just would really like the stability. The guy that they hire that’s 28 is only going to stay 2 years and then job-hop so, it is a better decision to hire me, but how do I convey something like that?

But beyond vague gestures to structural changes on one hand, or grievances specific to groups like older workers who experienced open age discrimination, respondents across all demographic groups articulated a sense of betrayal by employers and a sense of anger and bitterness at a social contract betrayed.

The Social Contract Betrayed

A recurring theme in these interviews was that employers (and the country) have betrayed workers; employers want something for nothing, they expect employees to invest in their human capital but then do not value those investments, and they expect loyalty from employees while offering no loyalty in return.

One channel this anger over such betrayal takes is pushback against employers who claim to value job seekers’ investments in their own human capital. This sentiment was expressed by Jeanette, the 24-year-old college graduate, unemployed more than 6 months, who felt so much shame about her unemployment. Reflecting on her experiences, Jeannette began talking about her older sister:

I was just shocked that for her, she’s got way, way, way more experience than me and a lot of different background and she can’t even find anything… . So you think about you having a criminal justice degree and most job offers they tell you “oh you know, we would love for you to have a degree” and then you have it and you still do not have the requirements. So, I’m like okay and then I’m thinking to myself “okay, so if I get a Master’s and then I get a PhD am I over-qualified then?” Like what is this?

“What is this?” is Jeannette’s incredulous recognition that employers’ implicit and explicit promises are not worth much in the contemporary period, and her labor market problems are not only about her—Jeannette’s sister is also unemployed despite having much more experience. Jeanette does not articulate the level of bitterness that Patti does, but she does articulate bewilderment at employers who tell you that you need a degree, then do not hire you when you have it. She is wondering what they will tell her if she gets an MA or Ph.D.—that now she is overqualified?

Lora, the 60-year-old income tax preparer unemployed more than a year, goes even farther in her critique by explicitly warning against higher education altogether. When asked what advice she would give to young people today, she opines:

My advice to young people … do not focus so much … on going to college. When you go to college, the goal is to get a good education so you can get a good job. That has betrayed us. My suggestion would be instead of focusing on trying to go to college, instead learn a trade. Um … If you can do … blacktop. If you can do roofing, plumbing, electrical work, do hair, funeral home, the-the-the mortician; those are the things that um … cannot be taken away. Those are the things that um … we’re um … employment cannot-where the job cannot rob you. People will always need their roofs shingled. They will always need um … plumbing, electrical work. Learn a trade. Something you can do regardless of the market cuz if a person’s toilet is stopped up, if a person’s pipes have burst, the-the-the economy is absolutely totally irrelevant. If they have to go sell the car to fix the plumbing, They are gonna do that. So … my advice … think … um … uh … not so much college as getting a trade.

The promise employers have made to reward investments in education, Lora is saying, are lies. Young people who believe these lies will find that the job will “rob you.” The only solution is to pursue skills that can easily and directly find a market—things like plumbing, electrical work: “something you can do regardless of the market.”

Lora goes on to connect this critique to a broader critique of a country that has “betrayed its citizens”:

A lot of people who have been independent and made all of the right choices have found themselves in a position they never bargained for, and found themselves out here looking for a job like a 22 year old graduating from college, and they may be 55-60 years old, and so, that’s an uncomfortable position to be in. It is almost like the country has betrayed its citizens because it used to be if you were committed, if you made the right moves, if you did the right things, then it paid off, but somewhere along the lines the whole market, the whole employment thing, job thing has changed, you know? They want the employee to be committed to the company, but the company has no commitments to the employees. You find companies that are stealing the retirement benefits, or They are moving jobs overseas, or They are automating everything, you know? They get a machine to do what 7 people did. And so that commitment to the employees no longer exists.

Here Lora begins with something other respondents also spoke about—the fact that doing all the right things, “making the right moves,” does not mean labor market success in the current economic environment. But she does not simply blame abstract economic forces, she squarely blames employers for demanding a loyalty from their employees that they do not reciprocate.

Patti, the 46-year-old accountant unemployed less than 6 months, also blamed employers for not being willing to pay wages commensurate with education and experience:

I’ve been called for jobs making $36,000 a year on the south end of [metropolis]. I live near [suburb] so its 30- to 45-minute drive. At $4 a gallon I can’t do it. It is really sad that they tell you when you go on and look at the wanted ads and how much They are going to pay, they want someone with a 4-year degree and with experience and They are only going to pay $40,000 a year. I’ve got 25 years of experience. I’ve got a 4-year degree. I have all but finished my master’s degree and I’m about to sit for my CPA exam. So you want to pay me $40,000 for my experience? I do not think so.

Implicit in Patti’s comments is the idea of a social contract, a bargain in which workers who invest in their professional educations and gain decades of experience are rewarded for their qualifications and experience with middle-class wages. And it is important to understand that Patti is not haughtily dismissing the idea of working for $40,000 per year—she has actually taken contract jobs at $18 per hour after being laid off from her staff accountant position. She is not saying that she will not work for the money offered—she will. She is saying that the money offered does not compensate her for her qualifications and experience. Working for such a salary allows employers to get more than they pay for—to (although she did not use this word) exploit her.

This kind of bewilderment, anger, and bitterness toward employers was not rare among our respondents. This comment from executive chef Barry, unemployed less than 6 months, outlines another dimension of the one-sidedness and exploitativeness of the relationship between employers and employees as perceived by some of our respondents:

But you see it so many times … the work ethic in the country is totally different than what it was 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago. You come to work, you do your job, and you go home. You knew that your company was gonna back you. If you were sick, they were gonna cover you and that. These days, you get any kind of illness they try to figure out a way to dump you so it does not go on the books. So it does not go against the bottom line. … It happens. But the way it is affected my attitude and that is really … it is bad… ..It is totally turned in this country and like I said, the almighty dollar took over everything. And I realize you have to make a profit in business and everything, but you do not have to take it out on employees to be able to make a profit. That employee’s giving you hours of his life, you know?

Barry begins by talking about changes in the “work ethic”—but he is not talking about the work ethic of workers! He is talking about the work ethic of employers who see employees not as an asset but as an expense to be avoided wherever possible. Barry, the executive chef—a manager in a nonunion industry essentially—articulates the classic pluralist industrial relations viewpoint, in which profits are a legitimate goal of business but must be balanced against voice and justice considerations (Budd, 2011).

Many of our respondents reported finding contract opportunities instead of traditional employment arrangements in the job market they faced. Taking a temporary contract position was very common for our respondents as part of their strategy for getting through the crisis. None of our respondents, not a single one, saw contract work as a solution. They wanted full-time permanent employment, with benefits and good pay. But as Kelly, the 41-year-old insurance sales analyst, explains, employers prefer contract hires precisely because they have to make fewer commitments to them. Unlike some of Lane’s (2011) respondents, Kelly was not defending these arrangements: To her, the rise of nonstandard employment is part of what has gone wrong. Companies want to pay less and they do not want to train workers.

I tried to get employment within the company elsewhere but the problem is They are taking contractors versus employees. That is what I’m running into problems nowadays is that, if they can get contractors that they pay less money, they’ve got to know the programs and the data or whatever They are working with, the phone systems whatever. The product, one, in my opinion they can pay them less money when they hire them, and two they do not have to train them when there is people out there already. And I’m finding that in other companies, too. It is just They are pulling from a pool of contractors.

Chris, a 29-year-old IT guy who had been unemployed for over a year before taking to contract work, elaborates on the shift to contract work further, emphasizing how uncertain it is, how impossible it is to have a stable life around it, and how untenable it is to make long-term plans for the future:

Because of the underemployment, because of the sporadic nature of contract work, yeah it is been tough. Once a job starts, you can’t really stop it until, you know, it is done because that’s part of the contract. But this contract, it was supposed to be seamless, like I was supposed to end with one department and go pretty much straight into another, but it is been delayed, and it is been delayed, and it is been delayed. So you know, instead of like a week gap between paychecks, it is 2 weeks, and it is a month, and it is 2 months. And currently right now it is at the 3-month mark. So it is tough dealing with that as well because that’s supposed to be, you know, my steady job, that’s supposed to be my income, you know, that’s supposed to give us a better life, not just to pay bills, but to be able to do what we wanna do. Because, you know, I’m almost 30, I gotta think about retirement too. You know, that’s a serious thing. So anything long term, can’t really plan around that when you do not have a reliable short-term gig.

The shift toward contract work, in other words, shows up in our interviews as one of the dimensions of betrayal.

White-collar job searchers we interviewed also expressed bitterness about the way that employers penalize the unemployed for their unemployment. Charlie, a 31-year-old former dispatch manager for an energy company unemployed more than 6 months, highlighted the effects of this in compounding people’s suffering:

But the people that’s losing these jobs is professionals. They got degrees, they been with the company for twenty/thirty years ….By that time, you get behind. But you can’t get jobs because, you know, some employers look at your credit. (Mimicking employer:) “He’s not responsible. He do not pay none of—he hasn’t paid his bills in 6 months.” And when you are out of work they look at you like “Oh you been outta work for 5, 6 months …” It just looks bad when you are out of work. They assume that you are lazy. They assume that’s lazy. It is not even a double edged sword, it is just … I do not know what to call it. Whatever you do you screw up and you get behind on bills. You ruin your reputation which hinders your future work. It destroys you all over the place.

Lora, the income tax preparer, was even more vitriolic in her condemnation of employers for discriminating against the unemployed in hiring on the basis of bad credit:

I mean, it does not matter how good you are, you know? And that’s another thing where this country has failed its citizens. If you are working, if you are trying, you are supposed to be able to pull yourself up by your shoelaces and … excuse me-but now it is where, if you have bad credit, the company does not want to hire you. That does not even make sense. … If you have bad credit, you can’t get a job. What kind of sense does it make, now you are applying for a job and they check your credit score? That does not even make sense! If you had great credit score … it means that you were not in a financially destitute situation, or you were not in need of a job. They should want to hire the people that need the job! It does not make sense! It is like only the people who do not need the jobs can get the jobs. I do not know. It does not make sense. You have bankruptcy-I mean, bankruptcy is worse than bad credit. Bankruptcy is like busted credit in this society (laughs) It is bad!

Our respondents also excoriated the job-search industry itself for preying on the unemployed rather than actually helping them. Cameron, the 60-year-old banker, had this to say about it, and it is worth quoting him at length:

I’m thinking okay, so people are not even calling me back. Because they look at my resume, they see I have all this experience … so people are not even calling me back… . So what I decided to do was reengineer myself. I took 3 different insurance, I got my insurance license, life, health, property, causality, invariable life insurance licenses. And you know, that’s fine if that’s who you are. But I was a banker, you know, I was a guy that came out of corporate life. But I had to make myself continue to believe that I was going to add some value and go wherever I could and I wanted to become more marketable. I wound up, the other impact of being unemployed that happens is that you get a lot of people in different industries or out in the world that try to take advantage of you. For some reason, people think people who are unemployed have money to spend, or to just do whatever they want to do. It is really odd to me. You get calls every day about how we can help you do your resume, how we can help put you in front of people, but it all costs you tons of money. I mean thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, I mean, who has that? So now you are sitting there, and what happens on these job boards is you get the garbage jobs, but if you really want the good jobs and jobs that fit your skills, then you need to pay us $40 a month so that you can look at it. And that’s not even a guarantee you get a job. So you get into this whole thing of trying to redo yourself and try to find jobs and get in front of the right people, but it all costs money. So the business of finding a job is expensive to people who are unemployed.

Here Cameron repeats the standard line about recognizing the need to change one’s position in the labor market, to try to change fields, and how as part of that, although he identified as a banker, he pursued three different insurance licenses in order to try to make himself more marketable. And what he discovers is that there is a whole industry that purports to help people find employment but which really exists to make money off of the unemployed.

What are we going to do as a society about this new model of unstable and insecure employment, Cameron goes on to wonder:

And so I think we need to have more people … we need to be more of a society that … this is not an anomaly anymore. People get laid off. This is a fact of our generation. This is what happens. People get laid off and we need to build … I do not know what the objective … how do we meet the need, you know? ‘Cause I do not think that we’re ready to meet the need. We talked about how many people are out of jobs, 23 million people, but do we have an infrastructure to support that? And then we talk about all those people who are not even looking anymore. The 23 million are the ones that are just getting unemployment, but what about the ones like me getting kicked off of it? I’m done. So what’s the infrastructure … what do we plan to do about that?

Having been in the labor market for several decades, Cameron offers a firsthand account of growing job insecurity, which he believes to be a now permanent feature of the American economy. In noting the lack of “infrastructure” in place to address this reality, he is lamenting that the government does not adequately “meet the need” of its citizens.

In sum, a broken employment bargain was a central strand of blame among respondents who articulated structural arguments about why it was so hard for them to find work. Neoliberal labor market arrangements broadly speaking, of course, are not new. But as we have suggested, in the pre-recession economy most white-collar workers could imagine that they will be able to win at the chemistry game if they figure out how to play it better—even if they are having trouble right now. The post-recession economy, featuring even more neoliberalized institutional arrangements, undermined the sense for individual job seekers that the game is winnable at all.

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to demonstrate both the continuing use and the changing nature of the chemistry game (Sharone, 2013) to describe white-collar job searching in the United States. We showed that, perhaps due to path dependence and a dearth of alternative games, white-collar American job seekers are gamely attempting to play the chemistry game in the post-recession environment. And we confirm, too, that playing the chemistry game continues to create self-blame. However, we showed, lived experiences of the chemistry game are now quite different from what they were in the early 2000s, when Sharone conducted his interviews. Instead of feeling that they have lost at a playable game, unsuccessful job searchers experience the post-Great-Recession labor market as an unplayable, unwinnable game—a game that is rigged and therefore cannot be won even when skillfully played. And, we have shown, these more contemporary experiences of the chemistry game produce a great deal of system-blame alongside self-blame. Self-blame and system-blame, in other words, are not alternative and ahistorical outcomes; rather, they are historically contingent, potentially overlapping outcomes of lived experiences of labor market institutions in context. Thus, our findings are consistent with Burawoy’s (1979) seminal argument about the nature of employment games as historically contingent.

But what historical changes are driving the rise in system-blame that we found? Earlier, we outlined two sets of changes that might be relevant to our findings: the confluence of a severely depressed economy and deeper long-run shifts in labor market institutions themselves. Our interviews do not allow us to draw definitive conclusions, but as our analysis above reveals, our respondents talked about two big things: an 8-year jobless recovery that dwarfed all recessions since the Great Depression and the rise of contract work in lieu of standard employment. Our respondents did not talk about other shifts identified by Gershon (2017)—such as the use of AI bots to evaluate resumes (which, ironically, might push the U.S. employment system more in the direction of a more Israeli-like“specs” game?), or the difficulty of managing a consistent personal brand across multiple social media platforms. These may be important changes, but they were not salient for our respondents. For our respondents, the experience of playing the game well in a jobless economy, coupled with the experience of getting the interview only to find themselves interviewing for contract work instead of real jobs, was at the heart of the breakdown in the chemistry game. Would the 2-year Great Recession and the following 6-year jobless “recovery” have produced system-blame without the shift to contract work? We cannot say for sure. But what we do know is that our respondents expressed anger about both of these changes.

What does this mean for Sharone’s (2013) theory of the way the chemistry game produces self-blame? On one hand, our results confirm his analysis of the chemistry game and self-blame. The chemistry game, even as broken as it was in the depths of an 8-year globally depressed economy, continued to produce self-blame. Sharone’s theory of the chemistry game is correct about how an employment process organized around “the personal interview” produces self-blame when it is unsuccessful. On the other hand, our findings reconstruct Sharone’s theory by showing (a) that self-blame and system-blame are not alternatives but, rather, things that people can engage in simultaneously; (b) that the chemistry game can ALSO produce system-blame when it breaks down; and (c) that the impact of labor market institutions on ideology is not impervious to labor market conditions.

Further, our findings show clearly that, contrary to the literature on employment games originating with the work of Burawoy (1979), it is indeed possible to continue to play a game while questioning the rules. Of course, as Sallaz (2015) suggests, games that do not create consent do not give people intrinsic reasons to keep playing. Thus, Sallaz’s study of call center labor process games finds that the “learning game” leads to high turnover. But while extending the logic of shop-floor games to labor markets, as Sharone (2013) does, is a worthwhile endeavor, it is important to recognize that labor markets are different from the shop floor. After all, it is a defining feature of capitalism that while workers can quit any employer, the penalties for renouncing wage-work altogether are much more severe. Despite this, we know that millions of workers did drop out of the labor force after the Great Recession; the employment-to-population ratio in 2018 is still historically low as a result (Sherman, 2018). Our study did not follow workers out of the labor market but, rather, examined the experiences of those who stayed in. We found these workers trying—over long periods of time—to play a broken game, vociferously questioning the rules (often with great anger) without giving up completely.

What are the consequences of feeling forced to play an impossible game, whose rules one no longer accepts? Our interviews do not support the idea that questioning the rules of the game leads in any direct way to liberatory politics. As Burawoy (2008) notes, in addition to a sociological imagination, a political imagination is needed to connect grievances to collective action. In the absence of such a political movement, we think the experiences we document here likely contribute to a broader undermining of trust in American institutions. As Harvey (2005) and others have noted, the post-Fordist political economy is a particularly unstable iteration of capitalism, within which the Great Recession represents arguably the greatest rupture. And, the recent ascendance of alternative work arrangements (Gershon, 2017; Katz & Kreuger, 2016) suggests that contemporary labor market institutions are ever-evolving toward the full realization of neoliberalism. Given the link between material conditions and ideology, it is unsurprising that trust in American institutions has been on the decline for several decades, reaching several historical troughs during the Recession period and failing to fully rebound in the several years since (Dalton, 2005; Norman, 2016; Pew Research Center, 2015; Smith & Son, 2013; Twenge, Campbell, & Carter, 2014).

Indeed, many of our respondents articulated a strong sense of governmental and employer betrayal that seemed unlikely to abate once they became reemployed. Their unemployment experience had seemingly permanently changed their worldview. While scholars like Harvey (2005) have justifiably critiqued the contemporary political economy and scholars like Sharone (2013) have raised valid concerns about its resultant white-collar ideologies, our research points to a more tentative conclusion about prospects for change: Although current material conditions and ideologies may appear deeply flawed, uncontrolled breakdowns in these systems, coupled with the more complete realization of marketized employment relations, risk further destabilizing American society as a whole as white-collar workers feel trapped in an employment system that they no longer fully believe in.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the American Sociological Association’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-0822215.

Notes

Author Biographies

Steven H. Lopez is an associate professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on trade unionism, service and care work, unemployment experiences, and experiences of low-wage work.

Lora A. Phillips is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the temporal and spatial dynamics associated with inequality and insecurity. She has published on these issues in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, The ANNALS, and City & Community.

References

Appelbaum

, & Batt

(1994). The New American workplace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Beck

(2000). The brave new world of work. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Brand

(2015). The far-reaching impact of job loss and unemployment. Annual Reviews of Sociology, 41, 359–375.

Burawoy

(1979). Manufacturing consent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Burawoy

(1998a). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16, 4–33.

Burawoy

(1998b). Critical sociology: A dialogue between two sciences. Contemporary Sociology, 27(1), 12–20.

Burawoy

(2008). Open letter to C. Wright Mills. Antipode, 40(3), 365–375.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2012). The recession of 2007–2009. Washington, DC: Author.

Capelli

(1999). The new deal at work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.

10.

Dalton

R. J.

(2005). The social transformation of trust in government. International Review of Sociology, 15(1), 133–154.

11.

Dudley

(1994). The end of the line. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

12.

Fligstein

(1991). The transformation of corporate control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

13.

Farber

(2010). Job loss and the decline in job security in the United States. In K. G. Abraham, J. R. Spletzer, & M. J. Harper (Eds.), Labor in the new economy (pp. 223–62). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

14.

Fraser

(2002). White-collar sweatshop. New York, NY: WW Norton.

15.

Gabriel

Gray

Goregaokar

(2010). Temporary derailment or end of the line? Managers coping with unemployment at 50. Organization Studies, 31(12), 1687–1712.

16.

Gershon

(2017). Down and out in the new economy: How people find (or do not find) work today. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Hacker

(2008). The great risk shift. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

18.

Harrison

Bluestone

(1988). The great U-turn. New York, NY: Basic Books.

19.

Harvey

(2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

20.

(2009). Liquidated. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

21.

(2018). “Three Things You Should Know About The Robots Reading Your Resume, But Don’t.” The Muse.com. Retrieved from https://www.themuse.com/advice/3-things-you-should-know-about-the-robots-reading-your-resume-but-dont

22.

Jacoby

(2004). Employing bureaucracy. London, England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

23.

Kalleberg

(2011). Good jobs, bad jobs. New York, NY: Russell Sage.

24.

Katz

L. F.

Alan

B. K.

(2016). The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015 (NBER Working Paper No. 22667). Boston, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

25.

Lane

(2011). A company of one. Ithaca, NY: Cornell ILR Press.

26.

Lassus

L. A. P.

Lopez

Roscigno

V. J.

(2015). Aging workers and the experience of job loss. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 41, 81–91.

27.

Leana

, & Feldman

(1992). Coping with job loss. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

28.

Lofland

, & Lofland

(1995). Analyzing social settings: A guide to qualitative observation and analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

29.

Mandell

(1996). The high risk society. New York, NY: Crown.

30.

McCloy

(2016). Resisting rust: Campaigns against plant closings and the call for economic democracy in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. Retrieved from http://socialhistoryblog.com/resisting-rust-campaigns-against-plant-closings-the-call-for-economic-democracy-in-the-u-s-during-the-1970s-and-1980s-by-austin-mccoy

31.

Newman

(1999). Falling from grace. Berkeley: University of California Press.

32.

Norman

(2016). Americans’ confidence in institutions stays low. Washington, DC: Gallup.

33.

Pew Research Center. (2015). Beyond distrust: How Americans view their government. Washington, DC: Author.

34.

Ragin

(2000). Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

35.

Raito

Lahelma

(2015). Coping with unemployment among journalists and managers. Work, Employment and Society, 29(5), 720–737.

36.

Rosenfeld

(2014). What unions no longer do. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

37.

Sallaz

(2009). The labor of luck: Casino capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

38.

Sallaz

(2015). Permanent pedagogy: How post-Fordist firms generate effort but not consent. Work and Occupations, 42, 3–34.

39.

Sharone

(2004). Engineering overwork: Bell-curve management at a high-tech firm. In Epstein

C. F.

Kalleberg

A. L.

(Eds.), Fighting for time: Shifting boundaries of work and social life. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

40.

Sharone

(2013). Flawed system, flawed self: Job searching and unemployment experiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

41.

Sherman

(2018). Sure, unemployment went down—Because more people left the workforce. Forbes, May 5, 2018.

42.

Sherman

(2007). Class acts: Service and inequality in luxury hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press.

43.

Silver

(2003). Forces of labor. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

44.

Smith

T. W.

Son

(2013). Trends in public attitudes about confidence in institutions—NORC. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

45.

Smith

(2003). Crossing the great divide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

46.

Twenge

J. M.

Campbell

Carter

N. T.

(2014). Declines in trust in others and confidence in institutions among American adults and late adolescents, 1972-2012. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1914–1923.

47.

Viscelli

(2016). The big rig. Berkeley: University of California Press.

48.

Whitford

(2006). The new old economy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.