Race, Identity and Work

Ethel L. Mickey, Adia Harvey Wingfield, Ethel L. Mickey, Adia Harvey Wingfield

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787695030
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Discrimination & Race Relations

This volume examines the connections between race and work, focusing on three key themes. First, contributors consider how racial minorities deal with questions of identity in the workplace. This is especially important as ideas about professionalism often hinge on implicitly racialized criteria, to an extent that racial identity may pose a challenge to meeting occupational requirements. Secondly, contributors address ways racial exclusion occurs in jobs in the new economy: while organizations can no longer legally segregate or discriminate on the basis of race, exclusion processes still occur in the contemporary workplace. Finally, this volume considers the strategies that minority workers use to combat and change patterns of workplace inequality. In the new economy, where workers arguably have limited power relative to organizations, the techniques of the past may not be as effective.
Providing valuable insight on a growing segment of the labor force, this book considers the US's rapidly changing racial demographics and how this phenomenon fundamentally alters many aspects of work, providing an in-depth understanding of how race affects work for people of color across occupations, workplaces, and industries.

PART I
IDENTITY AND IDENTITY WORK

“COMING BACK TO WHO I AM”: UNEMPLOYMENT, IDENTITY, AND SOCIAL SUPPORT*

Lindsey M. Ibañez and Steven H. Lopez

ABSTRACT

Job loss and long-term unemployment can have pervasive negative impacts on well-being. At its most extreme, unemployment is accompanied by feelings of shame, humiliation, insecurity, and worthlessness, as well as damage to cherished identities and narratives of self. Scholars have investigated how the unemployed attempt to repair these damaged identities, but little is known about how network members participate in the identity reconstruction process. Social support has been shown to ameliorate the negative psychological effects of unemployment, but studies have also found that the unemployed are reluctant to ask for assistance and often perceive network members as a source of stress rather than as a source of support. To understand why social support can be experienced both positively and negatively by the unemployed, we draw upon 84 in-depth qualitative interviews with men and women who experienced unemployment during the extended economic downturn associated with the Great Recession. We find that social support ameliorates unemployment when it bolsters identities important to recipients, and exacerbates unemployment when it undermines such identities. We also show how the unemployed respond to identity-threatening support: by avoiding it, rejecting it, or reframing it as reciprocity. Our analysis contributes new insights into the relationship between social support and identities, as well as a deeper understanding of the noneconomic costs of the slow economic recovery following the Great Recession.

Keywords: Job loss; unemployment; social support; identity; social networks; Great Recession

“COMING BACK TO WHO I AM”: UNEMPLOYMENT, IDENTITY, AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

Job loss and long-term unemployment can be devastating to those who experience it (McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, & Kinicki, 2005; Paul & Moser, 2009; Ranzijn, Carson, Winefield, & Price, 2006; Young, 2012). Even beyond the financial hardship that unemployment can generate, job loss harms individuals by threatening important identities, such as competent worker, breadwinner, independent adult, or generous person (Cottle, 2003; Leidner, 2006; McFadyen, 1995; Norris, 2016; Parris & Vickers, 2010). Unemployment is a stigmatized status that calls into question one’s employability and worthiness, even when job loss is involuntary and due to structural factors (Newman, 1988; Sharone, 2013; Sherman, 2013; Smith, 2001). Thus, the unemployed engage in strategies to reconstruct their identities, exercising agency in coping with misfortune (Garrett-Peters, 2009; Norris, 2016). However, they cannot do it alone. The self is constructed through social interaction (Callero, 2003; Goffman, 1959); so it follows that the unemployed enlist network members in their “identity work” (Snow & Anderson, 1987) processes.

Social support from network members can alleviate the negative impact of stressful events, including job loss (Gore, 1978; Gottlieb, 1981; House, Umberson, & Landis, 1988; Thoits, 1995, 2011; Ullah, Banks, & Warr, 1985). Network members provide instrumental support such as housing, transportation, and loans; informational support such as advice and job leads; and emotional support such as companionship and encouragement (Thoits, 2011). While a few scholars have called for greater attention to the way that social support impinges on identities broadly speaking (e.g., Hirsch, 1981; Swann & Brown, 1990), studies of social support and unemployment have, as yet, failed to heed this call. In this chapter, we suggest that attending to the relationship between social support and identity work among the unemployed can help us to resolve an important puzzle. Despite extensive quantitative evidence demonstrating that social support benefits the unemployed, equally extensive qualitative evidence finds that the unemployed are often unwilling to seek assistance from network members (Newman, 1988; Sherman, 2013; Smith, 2007), and moreover, they experience network members as a major source of stress (Cottle, 2003; Lane, 2011; Newman, 1988). If social support unambiguously enhances the well-being of unemployed people, why do they often view it with such ambivalence?

Our answer is that social support is a double-edged sword. Drawing on 84 in-depth qualitative interviews with workers who experienced unemployment during the Great Recession and the long recovery period that followed, we show that social support offered by network members can be perceived by recipients as bolstering or threatening their cherished self-views. In the former case, social support helps unemployed people cope positively with the negative experience of unemployment. In the latter case, however – when social support undermines valued identities that are already damaged by the experience of unemployment – social support can itself be experienced as yet another negative consequence of unemployment. Moreover, these identity-salient perceptions of social support are important for understanding how unemployed people respond to offers of social support. By focusing on how support networks help (or hinder) the efforts of the jobless to rebuild their identities, we add to what is known about the experience of unemployment in the contemporary United States and contribute new insights into important and potentially long-lasting noneconomic costs of the Great Recession and its aftermath.

UNEMPLOYMENT, IDENTITY, AND SOCIAL SUPPORT

Job loss is viewed by scholars as a major life event that generates both material and emotional crises by causing financial deprivation, relationship strain, and identity loss. As such, job loss has a pervasive negative impact on well-being (McKee-Ryan et al., 2005; Paul & Moser, 2009), and its “scarring effects” can linger even after reemployment (Young, 2012). Unemployment has been linked to deteriorating mental health (Ezzy, 1993; Paul & Moser, 2009) and can even generate symptoms of grief, akin to losing a loved one (Papa & Maitoza, 2013). At its most extreme, unemployment is accompanied by feelings of shame, humiliation, and worthlessness (Cottle, 2003; Newman, 1988; Norris, 2016; Parris & Vickers, 2010; Sharone, 2013; Smith, 2001). Unemployment carries stigma – the perception by others that the unemployed person is different, unfavorably so. Moreover, work is essential to identity and self-esteem for many people (Cottle, 2003; Garrett-Peters, 2009; Norris, 2016), so much so that some proudly describe themselves as “workaholics” (Sherman, 2013, p. 421). Thus, the loss of a job denotes the loss of a cherished identity (Ezzy, 1993; Norris, 2016).

Although job loss most directly threatens workers’ occupational identities, unemployment also has broader implications for self-views. According to Cottle, employment lies at the heart of what it means to be a “good citizen”: “The good citizen contributes to his community and country … He contributes his competence, his time, his services, his money. The foundation of all four contributions of course is steady work” (2003, p. 26). Adults want to see themselves – and be seen by others – “as a self-sufficient person, dependent on few, and known to one’s family and friends to be dependable” (Cottle, 2003, p. 51). Given the psychological harm that unemployment can cause, and the role of identity in mental health (Simon, 1997; Thoits, 2013), sociologists have called for a more systematic investigation of the role of identity in coping with job loss (Norris, 2016). According to Ezzy’s (1993) status passage theory, job loss entails not only the loss of needs met by work, but also the loss of meaning that work provides. People are constantly engaged in strategies to build positive self-concepts, or identities, and job loss disrupts these strategies.

More recently, scholars have investigated how the unemployed attempt to repair these damaged identities. Garrett-Peters (2009) shows how support groups help unemployed professionals repair their self-concepts; Ezzy (2001) explains how the unemployed construct narratives of themselves as the triumphant hero or tragic victim; and Norris (2016) reveals how the unemployed engage in identity work to cope with job loss. Norris finds that when faced with threatened identities, her unemployed respondents “shifted” to alternative identities such as mother or mentor, or they “sustained” their worker identities by treating their job search activities as work. When these strategies failed, respondents experienced “identity void” – a highly distressing sense of nonexistence. These qualitative accounts of the unemployment experience have convincingly and compassionately documented the negative effects of job loss and the coping strategies used by the unemployed to repair damaged identities.

When facing financial or emotional crises, people turn to their personal networks for tangible and intangible support. This has led researchers to examine the role of social support networks in alleviating the harmful effects of unemployment. Although several typologies of social support exist (Song, Son, & Lin, 2011; Tardy, 1985; Wellman & Wortley, 1990), recent scholarship examines social support in terms of emotional, informational, and instrumental support. According to Thoits’s (2011, p. 146) definition,

Social support typically refers to the functions performed for the individual [by network members] […] The most frequently mentioned functions are emotional, informational, and instrumental assistance […] Emotional support refers to demonstrations of love and caring, esteem and value, encouragement, and sympathy. Informational assistance is the provision of facts or advice that may help a person solve problems … Instrumental support consists of offering or supplying behavioral or material assistance with practical tasks or problems.

The beneficial effects of social support for the unemployed are well documented (Bjarnason & Sigurdardottir, 2003; Ensminger & Celentano, 1988; Gore, 1978; Maddy, Cannon, & Lichtenberger, 2015). However, despite the salience of identity as an object of loss for the unemployed, the connection between social support and identity has received little attention in studies of social support and unemployment. Swann and Brown identify “identity support” as “feedback that confirms [recipients’] identities and self-conceptions” (1990, 151), and identity support has been found to play an important role in stress coping among the elderly (Wellin & Jaffe, 2004), college students (Weisz & Wood, 2005), and LGBT populations (Beals & Peplau, 2005). Few studies, however, have explored processes of identity support among the unemployed. Those that do focus on specific sources of support are as follows: Norris (2016) focuses mostly on interactions with colleagues and supervisors; Garrett-Peters (2009) emphasizes interactions among support group members and facilitators; and Amundson (1994) addresses the role of employment counselors. In order to better understand the relationship between social support and unemployment experiences, we need to better understand identity support processes involving the broader social networks of the unemployed.

While we follow Swann and Brown (1990) in viewing identity support as an important and understudied aspect of social support, however, we depart from their assumption that identity support must consist of feedback confirming recipients’ identities. We know, of course, that people’s interpersonal networks can be an important source of distress as well as support. Within the social support literature, a growing body of work on “negative social interactions” attends to the ways that network members can be unsupportive (see Lincoln, 2000, for a review).¹ In this chapter, we do not focus on such unsupportive interactions. Instead, we distinguish between identity-bolstering social support, which helps the recipient sustain or repair a favored identity, and identity-threatening social support, which impedes the recipient’s identity work by ascribing unfavorable characteristics to the recipient. In all cases, these are interactions and exchanges that are understood by recipients as intended by the giver to be supportive. That is, support is support in the eyes of both the giver and the receiver, even if support is not always experienced positively by the recipient. Scholars have long observed that the most supportive relationships can also be the most conflictual (Eckenrode & Gore, 1981; House et al., 1988; Vaux, 1988; Wellman, 1981). And as Coyne, John, and Smith (1990) observe, attempts by network members to be helpful and supportive may themselves be upsetting to recipients – and, conversely, recipients may see network members as “supportive” even when they are not providing objective, unidirectional “support.” Moreover, attempts to provide support can fail by being heavy-handed or by being perceived as inappropriate (Lehman, Ellard, & Wortman, 1986; Wortman & Lehman, 1985). These findings raise the question: Why is social support experienced as beneficial at some times and as humiliating at others?

In our view, the answer to this question is connected to a painful conundrum of unemployment: At the very moment when a person’s self-concept as a competent, self-sufficient person is called into question by job loss, the unemployed must draw upon their network relationships for material and emotional assistance, further undermining their identity. Cottle vividly describes this paradox as the “quintessential ache of unemployment” (...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Identity and Identity Work
• Part II: Racial Exclusion at Work
• Part III: Challenging Racial Exclusion
• Index