Respectable Everyday Life. An Ethnography of Unemployment

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My dissertation "Respectable Everyday Life" is an ethnography of long term unemployment. It aims to understand what action abilities so called Langzeitarbeitslose have to deal with poverty and social exclusion. Examples come from ethnographic fieldwork in the industrial city of Wittenberge in Brandenburg. By analyzing the phenomenon of unemployment empirically and from the perspective of practice theory, my study contributes to the understanding of the cultural system of postindustrial society, its strategies of legitimization and its symbolic articulation and internal contradictions.There is a tension between the hegemonic definitions of unemployment on the one hand, and the agency of unemployed persons on the other concerning defining and resolving unemployment. My ethnographic study provides results from publicly observable, collective and conflicting practices in two places. I focus on a job-creation measure at a food bank and on a training program for addictive unemployed persons. I create five portraits of unemployed welfare recipients that attempt to provide a closer understanding of possibilities and differences in coping practices. The portraits represent the views of the interviewees and their unconscious and strategic coping practices. The portraits show how the individuals organize their daily activities in order to live a respectable life. This qualitative study demonstrates how the situation of unemployed welfare recipients is characterized by a shortage of material resources. The unemployed perceive their circumstances more as the product of their own incapacities as opposed to economic forces. Unemployment benefits secure the material existence of unemployed, however most interviewee’s feel they have failed within the social order.My analysis illustrates how the interviewee’s oppose hegemonic views of unemployment in media, politics and small talk. Notwithstanding, these interviewee’s found it difficult to establish their own alternative self-image. Each of their self-images remained fragile. Depending on the interviewee’s work ethics, they could not replace their former work, neither materially nor symbolically.