The mosaic of unemployment / O mosaico do desemprego

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

This thesis is a study of the experience of living in the condition of unemployment. It seeks to analyze the perceptions and the practices which emerge in such a situation and how the subjects who live with a lack of employment assign new meanings to their identities in this moment of profound transformation in the working world. From interviews of workers who are seeking jobs at the offices of the National Employment System (Sistema Nacional de Emprego: SINE), in the cities of Salvador and Vitória da Conquista, Bahia state, Brazil, and with coordinators or intermediaries who contract manual laborers in these two cities, we sought to comprehend the various ideas, the experiences undergone, and the mediations which are established between the subjects of the study. The study has as its starting point a brief historical overview of the representations concerning labor that have constituted, over the years, a "labor culture," an "employment culture," and currently a discourse on "employability" and on "entrepreneurialship," from which follows contextualization and analyses of unemployment and current changes in the working world. Various perceptions arising from the situation of unemployment are discussed from the point of view of those who experience the phenomenon, whether as an institutional representative of intermediation agencies or as an unemployed individual. We also analyze how men and women, youngsters and adults, qualified/schooled and poorly qualified/schooled give meaning to their experiences and how they translate them into new subjectivities. The excerpts used in the analyses reveal complexity and heterogeneity among the individuals studied and indicate the relevance of constructing the four different identity forms in order to explain and comprehend the phenomenon sociologically: the identity of survivors, the hopeful, the anxious, and the optimist. Finally, we were able to reiterate, from the data obtained during field work, based on the theoretical foundation, that unemployment cannot be understood as an unequivocal category because, as a social construct, it is directly linked to the context in which it was produced and experienced

ASSUNTO(S)

perception percepção unemployment identidade subjetividade mercado de trabalho identity subjectivity desemprego labor market

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