Research on unemployed people's employment commitment: towards a greater focus on diversity and choice

In concluding that unemployed people are strongly committed to employment, British social policy accounts draw upon empirical studies of their attitudes to work (e.g., Gallie and Vogler, Reference Gallie, Vogler, Gallie, Marsh and Vogler1994), their views on conditionality in welfare policy (e.g., Dwyer, Reference Dwyer2000), their job search behaviour (e.g., McKay et al., Reference McKay, Walker and Youngs1997) and their values (e.g., Dean and Taylor-Gooby, Reference Dean and Taylor-Gooby1992). All of these findings are based on responses given by unemployed people themselves (Murray's criticism of this approach, referred to earlier, is left to one side in the discussion that follows). The following extract is taken from an accurate and typical summary of this body of literature's main conclusions (Surender et al., Reference Surender, Noble, Wright and Ntshongwana2010: 205–06):

Yet even readers who accept that unemployment is essentially a structural problem might argue that all the findings reported in the above extract are counterintuitive. More precisely, if all other relevant variables are held constant, the findings only seem plausible if hardly anyone prefers being unemployed to undertaking even the most badly paid, unpleasant, inconvenient or unsuitable jobs. If, on the other hand, the popular assumptions that some people prefer living on benefits to doing jobs they consider unattractive and that people differ considerably in their preferences are both true (my earlier research suggests they are – Dunn, Reference Dunn2010), then unemployed people's commitment to employment will be less, on average, than employed people's, because those who are choosiest in the jobs they are willing to undertake will be more likely (than the least choosy) to become and remain unemployed. This applies even if, as in the above quotation, they have a broadly similar ‘work orientation’ to ‘the mass of the population’. Furthermore, with some preferring being on unemployment benefits to undertaking jobs they consider unattractive, it follows that, where welfare benefits are most generous, more people will be tempted to opt for unemployment instead of these unattractive jobs. In short, if we assume there is significant diversity in preferences around being employed and being unemployed (instead of assuming that practically everyone strongly prefers employment to unemployment), the extract's findings appear to require further explanation.

But further explanation has not been provided. When unemployment was last a major academic topic, conservative authors made empirically unsubstantiated claims that significant numbers remained on unemployment benefits because they were unwilling to do jobs that, while unattractive or badly paid, provide workers with self-respect and valuable experience (Murray, Reference Murray and Lister1996b; Marsland, Reference Marsland1996). But these authors were not responded to in detail by mainstream social policy authors because they were considered beyond the pale (Deacon and Mann, Reference Deacon and Mann1999). As Deacon (Reference Deacon2002: 22–26) noted, left-dominated British Social Policy academia's strong emphasis on structural explanations of social problems had extended into a ‘denial of agency’, whereby any focus on sub-cultures or the actions of individuals when explaining poverty was castigated for ‘blaming the victim’. Furthermore, as Mead (Reference Mead1988: 48) observed, these left-of-centre authors typically consider the question of whether or not unemployed claimants are avoiding unattractive jobs irrelevant because, unlike conservatives, their overriding concern is for social justice, so they only insist that claimants apply for jobs that are ‘attractive as well as legal’. These traits persist strongly in British social policy writing (e.g., Shildrick et al., Reference Shildrick, MacDonald, Webster and Garthwaite2010) so there remains little discussion of diverse work attitudes or choosiness in job search behaviour. I now offer a critical examination of some existing findings relating to diversity and choosiness and suggest that further investigation is worthwhile.

Diversity and the ‘dependency culture’ thesis

A neglect of differences in values, attitudes and preferences in British studies of social security claimants and their labour market behaviour has been noted elsewhere (Smith, Reference Smith2005). Even authors who lamented the treatment of the unemployed as a homogenous group (McLaughlin et al., Reference McLaughlin, Millar and Cooke1989; White, Reference White1991) went on to recommend examining categories like age and gender, not differences in values or preferred lifestyles. Indeed, social policy authors have instead been inclined to highlight the homogeneity of preferences around employment and unemployment, due to their preoccupation with opposing claims made mainly by Conservatives that a ‘dependency culture’ exists among benefit claimants (e.g., Moore, Reference Moore1987) or, more boldly, that a morally distinct ‘underclass’ was developing (Murray, Reference Murray and Lister1996a, Reference Murray and Listerb). The ‘dependency culture’ thesis is similar to Murray's controversial ‘underclass’ except that it stops short of proclaiming the existence of a separate social class and rarely mentions crime. McGlone's (Reference McGlone, Savage and Robins1990: 171) summary of the ‘dependency culture’ thesis – ‘the government believes that the payment of certain types of social security encourages people to become dependent on benefit and lowers their desire to find work or behave in a responsible manner’ – was expanded upon by Dean and Taylor-Gooby in what became a widely accepted description. They suggested the thesis connects the following three ideas (see Dean and Taylor-Gooby, Reference Dean and Taylor-Gooby1992: 3–4):

1. 1. An economistic assumption that ‘people respond to financial incentives in a simple economistic calculus of cash benefit against effort’.

2. 2. A sociological assumption that people's choices are influenced by the ‘values of significant others and of the neighbourhood’, just as is the case for ‘clothes, holidays, children's forenames’, etc. As it is a ‘culture’, values are transmitted through generations.

3. 3. A ‘moralistic edge’ – claiming benefits is an ‘affront to the cherished values of right-thinking people’.

The first idea applies to an initial phase in which generous social security provision encourages more people in poorer neighbourhoods and households to avoid employment. This precipitates a decline in their subscription to the paid work norm so that eventually, when the culture has taken hold, the second idea becomes crucial in explaining employment decisions.

Empirical work has given no support to the dependency culture thesis. Dean and Taylor-Gooby's (Reference Dean and Taylor-Gooby1992: 155) research found that the ‘mainstream cultural orientation which social security claimants share is one which values employment’, as did other studies (notable examples include Gallie, Reference Gallie1994). Yet the picture is arguably less clear-cut if we look beyond this broad cultural homogeneity and instead focus on diversity by starting from the premise that all individuals, whether currently unemployed or not, possess unique, complex and changeable sets of attitudes towards all kinds of jobs and towards being unemployed. These unique sets of attitudes are inevitably socially patterned. After all, the second idea Dean and Taylor-Gooby identified – that people's choices in various domains of life reflect socially patterned values that are passed from generation to generation – is well established empirically (see, for example, British qualitative studies of socio-demographic groups’ educational choices – Reay et al., Reference Reay, David and Ball2005). Therefore, with unemployment known to be concentrated in certain groups and locations, it seems unlikely that people who have grown up amid widespread joblessness will generally consider being outside employment and reliant on state benefits for the bulk of their income to be no more normal and morally acceptable than those socialised in more affluent communities and households in which unemployment is rare. At the very least, their attitudes might be expected to generally differ in some way. So some further exploration of the social pattern of attitudes and values around employment and unemployment seems worthwhile.

Choosiness in job search behaviour

‘Choosiness’ is defined here as being selective in the jobs one is willing to apply for in order to avoid reliance on benefits for the bulk of one's income – it therefore relates to the flexibility and intensity of job search. In fact, all job searchers are choosy in that they do not apply for all available jobs, and choosiness can be viewed positively as it facilitates a mutually beneficial match between employer and employee. However, if people are too choosy in relation to their employment chances, this can arguably lead to their unemployment persisting. Yet major British surveys have demonstrated that choosiness in job search plays no part in explaining why some people remain on unemployment benefits longer than others (Daniel, Reference Daniel1990; White, Reference White1991; McKay et al., Reference McKay, Walker and Youngs1997). Daniel (Reference Daniel1990: 150), for example, found that unemployed men who said they were ‘looking for a specific type of job’ stayed unemployed for an average of fifty-five weeks, whereas those who reported ‘looking for anything going’ averaged seventy-two weeks. Importantly, the studies found that choosiness in job search did not associate with remaining unemployed even when measures of individuals’ chances of finding a job were held constant. Authors attributed the success of choosy job searchers to their wisdom in adopting a more ‘focused’ strategy (White, Reference White1991: 132; McKay et al., Reference McKay, Walker and Youngs1997: 142).

But again, these findings appear counterintuitive because, unless job searchers are generally severely pressed for time, ‘focused’ job seekers who, in addition, also apply for several low status jobs each week will stand a better chance of swiftly entering employment than those who do not (holding other relevant factors constant). Perhaps the authors would have been more sceptical about their findings if they had been confronted with them in the mid-2000s, when hundreds of thousands of JSA claimants coexisted with a similarly sizeable number of unfilled vacancies for unskilled jobs (Hutton, Reference Hutton2006). They might have instead suggested that their quantitative work's lack of detailed information about individuals’ job search behaviour and employment chances meant that the significance of choosiness had gone undetected. Indeed, as well as the problem of a lack of detailed information, the role choosiness plays in determining an individual's employment status is hard to isolate because it is obscured by their employment chances for two reasons: (1) because employment chances (and not choosiness) is the key determinant of a person's employment status (for example, people with no formal qualifications face a considerable risk of unemployment); (2) because people's choosiness tends to closely shadow their employment chances (highly employable people tend to apply for the best jobs while the least employable tend to apply for the worst). Hence, the most employable people are generally very choosy yet successful in job search, while the least employable often want low status jobs but cannot find them. Crucially, this should not lead us to conclude that choosiness has no influence at all in deciding individuals’ employment status. Indeed, choosiness occasionally surfaces in British qualitative work as a possible explanation of why some people remain on JSA (Dunn, Reference Dunn2010), including some research involving activation workers (Millar, Reference Millar2000).

What percentage of long-term JSA clients did not want employment at all?

The following two questions are crucial in understanding how these percentages were arrived at (the answer to the second question is relevant to the entire results section):

1. How was ‘not wanting employment’ measured?

I asked respondents to include all clients who they believed did not presently make any serious attempt to apply for jobs which might be considered attainable (i.e., jobs which they felt a client had some chance, however small, of getting), except people with positive attitudes to work who did not look for work only because they held a realistic belief that they had no chance of finding jobs paying enough to increase their net income. In fact, respondents almost always said the latter group was very small, and no respondent said they knew any client who was only applying for jobs that were certainly out of their reach, so therefore ‘not wanting employment’ almost always simply meant those ‘they believed did not presently make any serious attempt to apply for jobs’. The focus on attainable jobs means the measure has the drawback that individuals are categorised as ‘not wanting employment’ even though they might accept an extremely lucrative job, or one they considered enjoyable, if it was offered. Moreover, the measure risks wrongly portraying those chronically lacking employability as more ‘work shy’ just because the jobs that can be considered ‘attainable’ for them are relatively unattractive. But all available measures are imperfect, and this was considered the best available, not only because it reflects the expectation – found in both JSA regulations and debates about unemployment – that claimants should attempt to find an attainable job, but also because it is sensitive to the financial circumstances individual claimants face.

2. How did respondents decide whether or not their clients ‘wanted employment’?

I asked respondents to base their answers on their experiences in the presence of clients. Respondents often said their clients felt able to be more honest than they were with Jobcentre Plus (JCP) staff (who deal with JSA claims), but not completely honest because they could be sanctioned for openly admitting they were not actively seeking employment. Thus, respondents usually said they based their accounts on clients’ actual job search behaviour, which often did not match their expressed attitudes:

For this reason, respondents often argued that they had a better vantage point than JCP staff for judging whether JSA claimants were really looking for employment: ‘They just take their piece of paper [to JCP], making up jobs totally freely . . . in my role, I need evidence, that's what shocks them when they come here’ (female, fifties, employer liaison, medium-prosperity large town). Nevertheless, respondents’ accounts were inevitably perception-based, and some even referred to TV programmes when defending viewpoints.

As Table 1 shows, respondents tended to report that around one-third of the long-term JSA claimants they dealt with did not presently want employment. While answers were widely dispersed, twenty-two out of thirty-nine gave a figure between a quarter and a half. Older respondents (though not respondents with more experience working with JSA claimants) tended to give higher percentages. The eleven under thirty years had a mean of 31 per cent, and the twenty-nine over thirty had a mean of 39 per cent, which is perhaps symptomatic of older respondents’ often-stated belief that younger people were less committed to employment than past generations. The only other noteworthy finding about types of respondent was that men had a higher mean (men, 43 per cent; women, 33 per cent), but it is unclear why.

When asked which ethnic, gender, social class, age, household type and ‘former occupation’ groups tended to not want employment, respondents often said it was ‘across the board’. Only eleven mentioned the most frequently cited group – young people. The reasons given for naming this group match existing qualitative studies of young British adults which found they are more likely than other groups to favour unemployment because they usually have no dependents, are less accustomed to employment, have friends who are also unemployed and often enjoy parental financial support (see Pahl, Reference Pahl, Bryson and McKay1994). Nevertheless, younger clients were often, though not always, considered the most ‘workable’ – meaning easily influenced by activation workers’ intervention. The next most cited group was older people. Six mentioned people in their late-forties, or in their fifties or sixties who ‘feel they've maybe done their time’ in employment (male, sixties, employment liaison, large poorer industrial town). Again, this matches published British research, which has found that older people often feel they have ‘done their stint’ in employment and are therefore absolved from negative moral judgment when unemployed (Westergaard et al., Reference Westergaard, Noble and Walker1989; White, Reference White1991) – except that in these studies the ‘older’ clients were all nearing sixty-five. However, as the next section shows, there was a clear consensus that the most difficult client group to encourage towards employment was one known as the ‘third generation’.

The ‘third generation’

Thirty-six respondents supported the view that a ‘dependency culture’ existed among some of their clients, and none of the other four disputed the culture's existence. No-one called it a ‘dependency culture’ – they instead used the industry buzz-phrase ‘third generation’ (or occasionally ‘second’ or ‘fourth’ generation), meaning people who had grown up in households reliant on state benefits for the bulk of their income for several generations, and who, therefore, unlike British citizens generally, saw claiming out-of-work benefits long-term as normal and morally acceptable. People from these families – particularly younger generations in whom the culture's values were considered particularly well entrenched – were said to hold very negative attitudes towards employment and were the least likely to meet employment's typical behavioural demands, notably around punctuality, social etiquette and accepting authority.

This culture was seen to be reinforced by the peer groups of these deprived young adults, in this case male:

Some of the thirty-six who made claims about this ‘third generation’ acknowledged they were not well positioned to witness the supposed connections between parental joblessness and subsequent attitudes towards employment and unemployment. Furthermore, while evidence suggests there is a strong intergenerational correlation in worklessness across Britain, only about 15,000 households have two or more generations who have never been employed (see Harkness et al., Reference Harkness, Gregg and MacMillan2012: 18–21). Thus, while respondents might have been correct on occasions when they said that there were some families in which three adult generations were all usually outside employment, they were almost certainly wrong on occasions when they claimed they had come into contact with significant numbers of families in which three adult generations had never had a job. Some said they based their belief in the culture's existence on behavioural and attitudinal differences between clients who identified themselves as ‘third generation’ and those with employed parents and grandparents. Others said they noticed similarities among members of the same family – such as a tendency to dispute ‘benefits calculations’ which showed they would be better off economically in employment. A common theme was that ‘third generation’ clients’ considerable welfare rights knowledge and an ability to ‘play the game of keeping the job centre happy’ (female, forties, employability coach [same as employment adviser], small prosperous town) contrasted sharply with their overall competence level.

While respondents were relatively well placed to judge whether these clients really wanted employment, and even whether or not they considered reliance on benefits normal and morally acceptable, their vantage point was arguably more limited in its ability to decide if some of the apparent manifestations of a ‘culture’ might in fact be understandable (even predictable) human responses to adverse circumstances. In fact, respondents were, at times, so sympathetic and understanding towards the ‘third generation’ that their accounts lent support to that view. Respondents routinely spoke of ‘third generation’ clients’ defeatism (about the chances of finding a job or a better life) and cynicism (about the JCP and welfare-to-work schemes) in a way that made these feelings seem understandable, given their general lack of success in the education system and subsequently in the labour market. While these clients were categorised as ‘not wanting employment’, the jobs they could realistically obtain were limited both in quantity and quality, and their apparent belief that claiming benefits is ‘normal’ might just have stemmed from them becoming increasingly accustomed to claiming.

Furthermore, respondents’ descriptions of the reasons why this ‘third generation’ chose to remain on benefits made them seem understandable. They were seen to ‘fear’ coming off benefits, thus failing to act in their longer-term economic interests. Given their lack of employability, and their high propensity to have had negative past experiences in jobs, it seems understandable that they worried that if they found a job (and therefore forfeited benefits) they might hate it, or lose the job and have to make a new JSA claim which might be unsuccessful. Furthermore, respondents also sometimes noted that clients would suffer financially while waiting for the first pay cheque (this disincentive is well known – e.g., Shaw et al., Reference Shaw, Walker, Ashworth, Jenkins and Middleton1996). Some respondents said that clients were even under pressure from family members to avoid employment because it might jeopardise their own benefit claim – a finding which illustrates the difficulty of deciding whether these ‘third generation’ traits are symptomatic of a culture that rejects mainstream work values, or simply a sensible reaction to dire circumstances. In fact, with Mead's earlier observation in mind, this decision is likely to be influenced by one's political beliefs and hence how one believes unemployed benefit claimants should react to these circumstances.

According to respondents, an important consideration in understanding employment decisions was that many of their clients were ‘comfortable’ living on benefits – especially younger, ‘third generation’ clients who had lived on a low income from a young age and were, as yet, unaccustomed to full-time wages:

Yet even respondents who said they believed that some JSA claimants lived in material ‘comfort’ did not advocate severe benefit reductions for those not seeking employment. The reason was usually that such cuts might damage their employment chances further, by reducing their ability to fund job search (this is consistent with in-depth research on unemployed people – McLaughlin et al., Reference McLaughlin, Millar and Cooke1989, which also finds that economic incentives have very limited overall employment effects) or possibly pushing them into crime. While there was no widespread agreement on what policies were best, the most popular was compulsory work placements (supported by five), mainly because they would develop long-term JSA claimants’ skills and work habits while making them contribute to production.

Choosiness

All forty respondents agreed that significant numbers of long-term JSA claimants they worked with were being too choosy in the jobs they were willing to apply for (this layer of choosy job searchers is in addition to people who did not want employment at all). Clients were said to be unwilling to apply for jobs they considered inadequately paid, uninteresting, unpleasant, inconvenient (mainly in terms of distance from home) or unsuitable.

The phrase ‘unrealistic expectations’ was popular – it referred to clients searching only for jobs respondents considered them unlikely to obtain. Employment advisors often saw persuading their clients to apply for lesser jobs as an important part of their role, as it was widely believed that the longer clients’ stayed on benefits, the more their employment chances diminished. Respondents often said clients ‘unrealistically’ believed they had a strong chance of finding a job similar to the one they lost immediately prior to their current JSA claim. This was considered unrealistic for two reasons in particular: (1) six months or more of unemployment had scarred their CV and (2) the recession had damaged people's employment chances generally.

However, much of what respondents called ‘unrealistic expectations’ (a phrase well established in the welfare-to-work literature – Millar, Reference Millar2000), was in fact ‘choosiness’ in the way I defined the term above. ‘Unrealistic expectations’ implies something akin to a delusion of grandeur – so it is really a reason for choosiness. Yet respondents often used the phrase when referring to people who were being choosy for reasons other than having unrealistically high expectations, or when the reason for their choosiness was unknown. Furthermore, respondents’ accounts were not consistent with a view that clients’ expectations were unrealistically high – they were often considered defeatist and lacking in self-confidence.

Respondents were asked which categories of client were most choosy in relation to their employment chances. This is problematic, as assessing someone's employment chances inevitably involves guesswork – e.g. how useful are particular educational qualifications in their local labour market. Furthermore, categories of client with fairly normal levels of choosiness can be singled out just because their employment chances are deemed to be particularly dismal. This might account for former construction workers often being heavily criticised for being unwilling to consider other jobs. Likewise, respondents in large, isolated towns that had experienced industrial decline were particularly heavily critical of clients for being reluctant to travel to neighbouring towns or cities, when similar reluctance among people in more favourable labour markets might have gone unnoticed. In fact, this criticism is arguably unfair anyway because excessive transport costs are one of the few factors (along with childcare costs and the costs of moving into employment) which can still make people worse off financially in employment than on benefits (see Spicker, Reference Spicker2011: 206–07). Yet other findings seemed more noteworthy. Working-class males’ reluctance to do what they sometimes considered to be ‘women's jobs’ and those requiring interpersonal skills was widely noted, and chimes with some existing research (McDowell, Reference McDowell2003; Lindsay and McQuaid, Reference Lindsay and McQuaid2004). Furthermore, people with recently acquired qualifications – particularly degrees and NVQs – who nevertheless lacked on-the-job experience were often considered to be aiming too high in their job search.

But was choosiness seen as an important reason for clients remaining on benefits so long? I asked respondents: ‘In your opinion, what percentage of your long-term JSA claimant clients would find employment in the next two months if they were willing to apply for a range of badly paid and low status jobs?’ (I acknowledge that if all adopted such a zealous approach to job searching simultaneously, labour supply would increase dramatically making such jobs harder to obtain). Most respondents said that most of their clients would make a swift return to employment if they adopted this strategy (see Table 2).

Despite the recession, a popular phrase was ‘there are jobs out there’, and the following quotation sums up many respondents’ feelings about their clients’ choosiness: