Category Archives: Unemployment

Unemployment

What is unemployment?

During the last decade, anthropologists have made an important and distinctive contribution to the comparative social science of what sociologist E. Wight Bakke once called “making a living without a job.” Articles, monographs, and edited volumes have captured the ways that people lose employment, grapple with the economic and social consequences of that loss, and seek new jobs—or alternative livelihoods. In the process, the concept of unemployment has been interrogated and recast as a category that masks far more than it reveals when examined globally: the processes, effects, rhythms, rewards, sanctions, and stigma associated with losing a job are, anthropologists show, so various that they resist quantification and demand ethnographic engagement.

In this fourth collection of Mergers and Acquisitions episodes, Kelly McKowen is joined by leading figures of the new anthropology of unemployment. Together, they revisit the arguments and origins of landmark ethnographies, map the unique perspectives of an emergent anthropological subfield, and reflect on how both unemployment and employment are evolving in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unpacking the “Moral Economy of Work”: A Conversation with Liz Fouksman

Is work (as we know it) on its way out? Some certainly think so, and they have not hesitated to envision the kinds of lives and societies that would be possible in a world that is founded not on formal wage labor but something like universal basic income. But here is the thing: ethnographers in different parts of the world have found that many of the people who would benefit the most from such a shift are still very much committed to employment—they want money, but they would prefer that it be a wage and not a cash transfer. In this episode, Kelly chats with Dr. Liz Fouksman about enduring attachments to formal wage labor and what she calls the “moral economy of work” in South Africa and Namibia.

Liz Fouksman is a Lecturer in Social Justice at the Centre for Public Policy Research in the School of Education, Communication, and Society at King’s College London. Her scholarship has appeared in various outlets, including Economy and Society, World Development, and Africa.

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Revisiting Anthropologies of Unemployment: A Conversation with Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie Lane

In this episode, Kelly catches up with Jong Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane about their landmark 2016 volume, Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence. Pulling together disparate threads of an emergent anthropological interest in unemployment, Kwon, Lane, and their contributors helped define a critical subfield in the wake of the global financial crisis. Revisiting the volume from the perspective of 2021 reveals a remarkably prescient book with questions and theoretical interventions that have only become more illuminative with time.

Jong Bum Kwon is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Webster University. His scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and Critique of Anthropology, and he is the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).
 
 
 
 
Carrie M. Lane is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her scholarship has appeared in various journals, including American Ethnologist and the Anthropology of Work Review. She is the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press) and the co-editor of Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and its Absence (Cornell University Press).

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Neoliberalism, Unemployment, and the Post-pandemic Workplace: A Conversation with Ilana Gershon

In this episode, Kelly chats with Ilana Gershon about unemployment and the post-pandemic workplace in the United States’ knowledge economy. Nearly five years after the publication of Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today, Gershon revisits the genesis of that project, reflects on the endurance of the neoliberal conception of the self, and shares that her post-pandemic project points toward a rethinking of the American social contract.

Ilana Gershon is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research on neoliberalism and new media has been published in the discipline’s leading journals, including Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Ethnologist. She is also the author of the three monographs, including most recently, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (2017).

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