In many (Western) European countries, unemployment rose sharply in the 1970s and 1980s. This “mass unemployment,” which characterized the lives of thousands of (Western) Europeans, became—and this is the starting point of Wiebke Wiede’s study—a “sign of the years ‘after the boom’” (p. 13). In her book, which is also her habilitation thesis, Wiede examines how unemployed people in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany were turned, and turned themselves, into unemployed subjects. To do so, she adopts the approach of a history of the subject, the advantage of which is its capability to link social and cultural structures of addressing and producing subjects with the subjects’ everyday experiences. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, but occasionally also beyond, Wiede reconstructs the production and self-production of unemployed subjects in five detailed and empirically rich chapters, first as objects of knowledge, then at the labor office and in court, and finally in their own spaces of action and the explanations they gave regarding their unemployment.

In the 1970s and 1980s, knowledge about unemployment was mainly produced by economics, statistics, and social sciences. Wiede argues that while macroeconomic theories largely neglected the problem of unemployment during the twentieth century, the neoliberal supply-side economics that gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s had a significant social impact, particularly in terms of the new focus on individuals and their entrepreneurial qualities. Unemployment statistics, which were still seen as a guarantee of political stability in the 1970s, especially in the FRG, became a much-discussed political issue in the 1980s. In Great Britain, repeated changes to the method of counting led to a fall in the unemployment rate but at the same time culminated in the (justifiable) accusation of political manipulation of the figures. Sociological, psychological, and pedagogical interpretations of unemployment changed in parallel with the methodological changes in social science research. Wiede shows that while in the 1970s the thesis of the psychosocial burden of unemployment dominated, the shift toward individualistic methods in the 1980s led to new patterns of interpretation, such as seeing the unemployed as “entrepreneurs of their own labour” (a forerunner of today’s much-discussed “entrepreneurial self”). Wiede points out, however, that these changed models of interpretation, which emphasized the autonomy and agency of the unemployed, were based on social differentiation. The figure of the “strong entrepreneurial unemployed” only emerged when academics and white-collar workers, i.e. the “white” middle class, were also affected by unemployment and their mental robustness was rated higher than that of unemployed workers in the 1970s.

Wiede depicts the labor office as the central location for the social construction of the unemployed subject, which she uses to examine changes in West German and British labor market policies in the 1970s and 1980s. While they were initially dominated by preventive instruments to avoid unemployment, such as the promotion of mobility and qualifications, approaches shifted more and more toward curative instruments to reduce unemployment. This meant an increase in activating measures, such as proof of active job search and, in Great Britain, a shift in job center services away from individual support toward self-information and self-service. Activation went hand in hand with tighter restrictions on benefits, which were reflected in sanctions for alleged misbehavior. According to Wiede, unemployed subjects found themselves in the “crosshairs of control and activation policies” (p. 116).

In the 1980s, a growing number of lawsuits were filed by unemployed people. Wiede focuses on the controversial legal concept of “reasonable work,” because from the mid-1980s at the latest, unemployed people were urged by labor offices to accept any job offered. The requirement of accepting reasonable work restricted the scope of action of unemployed subjects. Social and professional decline, enforced spatial mobility, increasing working hours, and deteriorating working conditions increased, albeit in a socially classifying manner. As Wiede emphasizes, this raises the crucial question of who was expected to accept social decline due to unemployment. To help the unemployed, assert their rights before the authorities and courts, various legal counseling initiatives were founded in Great Britain and the FRG, some of them coming from trade union and civil rights circles. The establishment of such unemployment initiatives was also due to the fact that more well-qualified people and academics were affected by unemployment.

In the 1970s and 1980s, self-help initiatives and protests by the unemployed increased, ranging from street protests and demonstrations to collective interest groups, as well as escapes from unemployment into pop-culture pleasures and radical-autonomous practices. Doing nothing was promoted in anarchist and alternative scenes, which distanced themselves from the employment-orientated positions of the trade unions and left-wing parties by, for example, staging themselves as the “happy unemployed” or by advocating abuse of social benefits as a utopian escape into alternative ways of life. Although the forms of action in Great Britain were more offensively minded than in the FRG and sometimes even violent, a “defensive basic trait of the unemployed initiatives” (p. 290) was evident in both countries, as Wiede makes clear. There should not be any unemployed, at least not in the long term, and this widespread attitude was reflected in the lack of participation of the unemployed in unemployment initiatives.

Rising educational standards posed particular challenges for young people with few qualifications. Wiede analyzes their experiences with unemployment as a form of self-positioning within the social sphere, revealing gender-specific differences as well as differences depending on whether they had a migration background or were people of color. While young unemployed men accepted their situation in the lower social spectrum as “loyal losers,” or even saw it as an opportunity to position themselves as “self-made types,” young unemployed women presented themselves as “modest realists” or were entangled in “hopeless dependencies.” Older unemployed people were often forced into early retirement to avoid redundancy among younger workers and to cushion the social consequences of company closures and rationalization measures. They assessed this situation differently depending on their financial situation and state of health. Impoverishment processes due to unemployment were socially staggered, as Wiede shows, with groups with a weak labor market position (ethnic minorities, women, and young people), but also the long-term unemployed and families with an unemployed head of household, being particularly affected by the risk of impoverishment.

In the concluding chapter, Wiede emphasizes the experience of unemployment as a “basic process” (p. 425) of the post-boom years, which unfolded a social dynamic “as a sorting machine of social opportunities changing the ways in which the self was governed” (p. 427). Unemployment could affect anyone, but it did not affect everyone equally, and it had very different impacts depending on the life and social situation of the unemployed, thus driving “socially structured processes of subjectification” (p. 427).

Beyond the important findings in the individual chapters, Wiede’s study is characterized by two strengths in particular. One of these is the comparison between the FRG and Great Britain, which runs through the entire book. This comparison not only highlights the national differences in dealing with unemployment and the design of the welfare state but also shows how similar discourses and practices were prevalent in both countries based on the same political intentions, even if they had to be adapted to their different administrative-political and socioeconomic contexts. International developments on the part of the OECD, the EEC, and the ILO played an important reinforcing role here, for example, in the adoption of active labor market policies. The self-attributions of the unemployed subjects were also characterized by national circumstances and national traditions, with Wiede revealing remarkable sociocultural differences between Great Britain and the FRG in this respect.

A second strength lies in the fact that Wiede includes the perspectives of the unemployed in the subjectivation processes she examines and is thus able to show how the unemployed subjects acted in relation to the demands and impositions of unemployment. To this end, Wiede draws largely on contemporary social science studies as sources. She uses these in a fruitful way to allow the unemployed subjects to have their say, without uncritically adopting the interpretations of social scientists of the time.

Overall, Wiede’s book makes an important contribution to the social and labor history of the post-boom period. It elucidates the socioeconomic structural break of the 1970s and 1980s and offers many stimulating points of reference for further research both in the FRG and in Great Britain.