Re-Thinking Unemployment: A Challenge to the Legacy of Jahoda et al

Abstract

The research of Jahoda et al. in the Austrian town of Marienthal in the 1930s had a formative influence over the future of unemployment research in the social sciences. This article contends that that research was predicated on a tacit set of beliefs about a gendered relationship between `human nature' and `work'. One consequence of this was that a moral discourse of human nature as fundamentally a working or labouring nature firmly anchored the trajectory of subsequent research into unemployment. This article presents a detailed critique of the moral discourse of human nature that underpins the Marienthal study and its theoretical elaboration into staged theories of psychological response to unemployment, and in so doing argues the necessity for freeing the sociological imagination from the types of belief reproduced by Jahoda et al. as to what human beings, and therefore human societies, are for.