Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health

Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health

Author: Dawn R. Norris

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-06-13

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0813573823

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Our jobs are often a big part of our identities, and when we are fired, we can feel confused, hurt, and powerless—at sea in terms of who we are. Drawing on extensive, real-life interviews, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health shines a light on the experiences of unemployed, middle-class professional men and women, showing how job loss can affect both identity and mental health. Sociologist Dawn R. Norris uses in-depth interviews to offer insight into the experience of losing a job—what it means for daily life, how the unemployed feel about it, and the process they go through as they try to deal with job loss and their new identities as unemployed people. Norris highlights several specific challenges to identity that can occur. For instance, the way other people interact with the unemployed either helps them feel sure about who they are, or leads them to question their identities. Another identity threat happens when the unemployed no longer feel they are the same person they used to be. Norris also examines the importance of the subjective meaning people give to statuses, along with the strong influence of society’s expectations. For example, men in Norris’s study often used the stereotype of the “male breadwinner” to define who they were. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health describes various strategies to cope with identity loss, including “shifting” away from a work-related identity and instead emphasizing a nonwork identity (such as “a parent”), or conversely “sustaining” a work-related identity even though he or she is actually unemployed. Finally, Norris explores the social factors—often out of the control of unemployed people—that make these strategies possible or impossible. A compelling portrait of a little-studied aspect of the Great Recession, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health is filled with insight into the identity crises that unemployment can trigger, as well as strategies to help the unemployed maintain their mental strength.


The Oxford Handbook of Job Loss and Job Search

The Oxford Handbook of Job Loss and Job Search

Author: Ute-Christine Klehe PhD

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 0190903503

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Job search is and always has been an integral part of people's working lives. Whether one is brand new to the labor market or considered a mature, experienced worker, job seekers are regularly met with new challenges in a variety of organizational settings. Edited by Ute-Christine Klehe and Edwin A.J. van Hooft, The Oxford Handbook of Job Loss and Job Search provides readers with one of the first comprehensive overviews of the latest research and empirical knowledge in the areas of job loss and job search. Multidisciplinary in nature, Klehe, van Hooft, and their contributing authors offer fascinating insight into the diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives from which job loss and job search have been studied, such as psychology, sociology, labor studies, and economics. Discussing the antecedents and consequences of job loss, as well as outside circumstances that may necessitate a more rigorous job hunt, this Handbook presents in-depth and up-to-date knowledge on the methods and processes of this important time in one's life. Further, it examines the unique circumstances faced by different populations during their job search, such as those working job-to-job, the unemployed, mature job seekers, international job seekers, and temporary employed workers. Job loss and unemployment are among the worst stressors individuals can encounter during their lifetimes. As a result, this Handbook concludes with a discussion of the various types of interventions developed to aid the unemployed. Further, it offers readers important insights and identifies best practices for both scholars and practitioners working in the areas of job loss, unemployment, career transitions, outplacement, and job search.


Losing Your Job- Reclaiming Your Soul

Losing Your Job- Reclaiming Your Soul

Author: Mary Lynn Pulley

Publisher:

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780615333311

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A positive, practical, and empowering new model of career resilience for everyone who has lost, fears losing, or is thinking of leaving their job in today's downsized, restructured workplace.


The Gift of Job Loss

The Gift of Job Loss

Author: Michael Froehls

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780983119203

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Michael Froehls, PhD, a former McKinsey consultant and successful global executive, turns conventional wisdom upside down - he suggests that you should overcome your reflex to immediately look for the next job after losing one. Don't miss out on your chance to do things you never had time for while being employed. Why not pursue a few activities that really matter to you before continuing your hard 30- to 40-year-long working life? What not realize some lifelong travel dreams, improve your health, invest in family and friends, fire up your love life, acquire new job skills, or check out a different location for a better career?In this book, you will find practical advice on how to take advantage of your opportunity without regret. Written from a business perspective with philosophical underpinnings, enriched by personal stories and serious thought-provoking questions, The Gift of Job Loss will help you:* - Understand the "Job Seeker Industrial Complex" and its influence on you* - Revitalize your life via 7 no-regret and up to 8 optional activities* - Identify personal and professional strategic options hitherto unavailable* - Optimize your "game of life" - living now vs. living in the future* - Analyze the implications of an economic recession vs. boom for your time off* - Plan your own step-by-step course of action - whether you are about to be let go, just got laid-off, or are still "safely" employedAfter losing his corporate job, Michael decided to sidestep the recession by doing what he advocates in this book. Headhunters, former colleagues, and friends called his move and timing one of the smartest decisions anybody could make - though few would dare because of convention and apprehension. If you face job loss, reading this book should help you overcome any despair and make you see your situation in a much more positive light.


Two Economists' Musings on the Stability of Locus of Control

Two Economists' Musings on the Stability of Locus of Control

Author: Deborah A. Cobb-Clark

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 43

ISBN-13: 9780734042408

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Empirical studies of the role of non-cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame. We analyze the change in a specific non-cognitive skill, i.e. locus of control, in order to directly assess the validity of this assumption. We find that short- and medium-run changes in locus of control are rather modest on average, are concentrated among the young or very old, do not appear to be related to the demographic, labor market, and health events that individuals experience, and are unlikely to be economically meaningful. Still, there is no evidence that locus of control is truly time-invariant implying that the use of lagged measures results in an errors-in-variables problem that could downward bias the estimated wage return to locus of control by as much as 50 percent. Those researchers wishing to analyze the economic consequences of non-cognitive skills should consider (i) restricting their analysis to the working-age population for whom there is little evidence of systematic change in skill levels and (ii) accounting for error in the skill measures they employ.


The State of Working America, 2000-2001

The State of Working America, 2000-2001

Author: Lawrence R. Mishel

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780801486807

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Prepared biennially since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, this work includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, taxes, unemployment, wealth and poverty, allowing the authors to examine the effect of the economy on the living standards of the American people.


Crunch Time

Crunch Time

Author: Aliya Hamid Rao

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-06-23

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0520298608

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In Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviors are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.


The Cost-Benefit Revolution

The Cost-Benefit Revolution

Author: Cass R. Sunstein

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0262538016

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Why policies should be based on careful consideration of their costs and benefits rather than on intuition, popular opinion, interest groups, and anecdotes. Opinions on government policies vary widely. Some people feel passionately about the child obesity epidemic and support government regulation of sugary drinks. Others argue that people should be able to eat and drink whatever they like. Some people are alarmed about climate change and favor aggressive government intervention. Others don't feel the need for any sort of climate regulation. In The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Cass Sunstein argues our major disagreements really involve facts, not values. It follows that government policy should not be based on public opinion, intuitions, or pressure from interest groups, but on numbers—meaning careful consideration of costs and benefits. Will a policy save one life, or one thousand lives? Will it impose costs on consumers, and if so, will the costs be high or negligible? Will it hurt workers and small businesses, and, if so, precisely how much? As the Obama administration's “regulatory czar,” Sunstein knows his subject in both theory and practice. Drawing on behavioral economics and his well-known emphasis on “nudging,” he celebrates the cost-benefit revolution in policy making, tracing its defining moments in the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama administrations (and pondering its uncertain future in the Trump administration). He acknowledges that public officials often lack information about costs and benefits, and outlines state-of-the-art techniques for acquiring that information. Policies should make people's lives better. Quantitative cost-benefit analysis, Sunstein argues, is the best available method for making this happen—even if, in the future, new measures of human well-being, also explored in this book, may be better still.


The Wolf at the Door

The Wolf at the Door

Author: Michael J. Graetz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674980883

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“Deep, informed, and reeks of common sense.” —Norman Ornstein “It is now beyond debate that rising inequality is not only leaving millions of Americans living on a sharp edge but also is threatening our democracy...For activists and scholars alike who are struggling to create a more equitable society, this is an essential read.” —David Gergen We are in an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what, exactly? And how do we get out of it? In a follow up to their influential and much debated Death by a Thousand Cuts, Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making or the government is taking from them but their own insecurity. Americans are worried about losing their jobs, their status, and the safety of their communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but better jobs, higher wages, greater protection for families suffering from unemployment, better health insurance, and higher quality childcare. And it turns out those goals are more achievable than you might think. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that doesn’t just diagnose our problems, it shows how to address them. “This is a terrific book, original, erudite, and superbly well-informed, and full of new wisdom about what might and what might not help the majority of Americans who have not shared in our growing prosperity, but are left facing the wolf at the door...Everyone interested in public policy should read this book.” —Angus Deaton, Princeton University “Graetz and Shapiro wrestle with a fundamental question of our day: How do we address a system that makes too many Americans anxious that economic security is slipping out of reach? Their cogent call for sensible and achievable policies...should be read by progressives and conservatives alike.” —Jacob J. Lew, former Secretary of the Treasury