Worklessness, Unemployment and Globalisation

If the previous lessons examined the nature and organisation of work, this final lesson turns to its absence and its transformation by global forces. Worklessness and unemployment are not merely the lack of a job; given the centrality of work to income, identity and worth established earlier, their loss carries profound economic, social and psychological consequences — and is patterned, like poverty, by class, region, age, ethnicity and gender. At the same time, the entire world of work is being reshaped by globalisation: the global division of labour, the migration of manufacturing to lower-wage economies, automation, and the rise of the gig economy and Standing's precariat. This lesson draws together the threads of the whole option — connecting unemployment to poverty and welfare, and global economic change to the deskilling, insecurity and in-work poverty examined in earlier lessons. It is the capstone of the Work, Poverty and Welfare course.

Key Definition: Unemployment is the condition of being without paid work, available for work and seeking it; worklessness is a broader term capturing households or individuals detached from paid employment, including those classed as economically inactive. Globalisation is the process by which economies, societies and cultures become increasingly interconnected across national borders, profoundly reshaping the location, security and nature of work.

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Spec Mapping (AQA 7192 — Paper 2, Topics in Sociology, Section A: Work, Poverty and Welfare)

This lesson addresses the specification content on work and its global context:

• Worklessness and unemployment — the patterns, causes and consequences of unemployment; and the impact of globalisation on work, including the global division of labour, deindustrialisation, automation and the rise of insecure, "flexible" work.
• It connects the work strand to the poverty and welfare strand — unemployment is a major route into poverty, and the welfare system is society's response to worklessness — and develops the precariat and labour-market explanations met earlier.

Paper 2 is a single essay paper (2 hours, 80 marks across two options): one 10-mark "applying material from the Item, analyse two…" question and one 20-mark "applying material from the Item, evaluate…" essay. Paper 2 essays are worth 20 marks, not 30.

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Synoptic Links

• Poverty (Paper 2): Unemployment is a major cause of poverty, but the rise of in-work poverty (Lesson 3) shows worklessness is no longer its only source — a crucial qualification.
• Welfare (Paper 2): The welfare state is society's organised response to worklessness; the New Right "dependency culture" debate (Lessons 4 and 7) is fundamentally about how welfare responds to unemployment.
• Nature of work (Paper 2): Globalisation drives the deskilling, insecurity and casualisation (the precariat) examined in the work-organisation lessons.
• Theory (Paper 1/3): Globalisation links to debates on postmodernity and late modernity; unemployment is read oppositely by Marxists (the reserve army) and the New Right (voluntary, welfare-induced).
• Stratification (Paper 2): Unemployment and precarious work are patterned by class, region, age, ethnicity and gender, reproducing inequality.

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Patterns of Unemployment

Unemployment is not randomly distributed; like poverty, it is patterned by social group and region. Described qualitatively (the accurate approach), the well-established picture is:

Dimension	The pattern of unemployment risk
Class	Manual and lower-skilled workers face higher unemployment risk and longer spells than professionals; deindustrialisation hit the manual working class hardest.
Region	Unemployment concentrates in regions stripped of their industrial base — former coal, steel and manufacturing areas — producing a marked geographical patterning.
Age	The young (entering the labour market) and sometimes older workers (displaced and struggling to re-enter) face elevated risk.
Ethnicity	Some minority ethnic groups experience higher unemployment, reflecting discrimination and labour-market disadvantage, with significant variation between and within groups.
Gender	Patterns are complex and have shifted as manufacturing (more male) declined and services (more female) grew; women's unemployment is also obscured by movement into economic inactivity through caring.

Sociologists also distinguish types of unemployment — cyclical (rising and falling with the economic cycle / Marx's reserve army in action), structural (caused by the long-term decline of whole industries, e.g. deindustrialisation), frictional (short-term, between jobs), and technological (displacement by automation). Structural and technological unemployment are the most sociologically significant because they reflect deep, lasting changes in the economy rather than temporary fluctuations.

Exam Tip: Distinguishing structural and technological unemployment (lasting, caused by deindustrialisation and automation) from cyclical and frictional (temporary) lets you argue that much modern worklessness is imposed by economic restructuring, not chosen — directly countering the New Right "voluntary unemployment" view.

Measuring unemployment

As with poverty, measuring unemployment is methodologically contested (a Methods link). Official figures depend on definitions — who counts as "unemployed" (actively seeking and available) versus "economically inactive" (e.g. those who have given up looking, or are caring) — and different measures (claimant counts versus survey-based measures) produce different figures. Critics argue official counts can understate worklessness by excluding "discouraged workers" and the hidden unemployed, so the figures are socially and politically constructed, not simple facts.

Youth Unemployment and the NEET Debate

Young people warrant particular attention because their labour-market position has become increasingly precarious. The UK policy concept of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) captures young people detached from both work and learning, and is the subject of the same cultural-versus-structural dispute that runs through the option:

• The cultural/behavioural reading. Echoing the underclass thesis (Lesson 4), some present young NEETs as lacking aspiration, work ethic or "employability" — a problem of values and individual deficiency.
• The structural reading. Against this, structural sociologists argue youth worklessness reflects the collapse of the youth labour market — the disappearance of the secure, entry-level manual jobs and apprenticeships that once absorbed school-leavers, the lengthening of transitions into adulthood, and the spread of insecure, low-paid entry work. Young people increasingly face a "scarring" effect, where early unemployment damages long-term prospects.

Exam Tip: The NEET debate is a focused, contemporary application of the cultural/structural argument. Framing youth worklessness as the structural effect of a collapsed youth labour market — rather than a deficiency of aspiration — directly reprises the option's central debate and counters behavioural accounts.

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Explaining Unemployment: Competing Accounts

Why are people unemployed? As with poverty, the explanations divide along the cultural/structural and left/right lines that run through the whole option:

• The New Right (voluntary/welfare-induced unemployment). Echoing the dependency-culture thesis (Murray, Marsland), the New Right argues that much unemployment is effectively voluntary: over-generous benefits and the unemployment trap make claiming preferable to taking low-paid work, so unemployment reflects choices and welfare incentives. The remedy is to cut and condition benefits and "make work pay".
• The Marxist (reserve army) account. For Marxists (Lesson 5), unemployment is a structural necessity of capitalism: the reserve army of labour keeps wages down and disciplines the employed. Unemployment is imposed by the system, not chosen, and is functional for capital.
• Structural/labour-market accounts. Unemployment is caused by deindustrialisation, the decline of whole industries, regional economic collapse, automation, and the mismatch between the skills workers have and the jobs available. On this view, worklessness reflects the structure of the economy, not the willingness of individuals to work.

Exam Tip: The decisive evaluative point mirrors the poverty debate: the patterning of unemployment (concentrated in deindustrialised regions and among lower-skilled workers) and the existence of structural and technological unemployment point strongly towards structural rather than voluntary/cultural causes — undermining the New Right account.

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The Consequences of Unemployment

Because work is so central to income, identity and the structure of life (Lesson 8), its loss has consequences far beyond lost wages — a point that connects unemployment directly to the poverty and welfare strands.

• Poverty and material hardship. Unemployment is a major route into poverty: loss of earnings, reliance on (often inadequate) benefits, debt and the risk of the poverty/unemployment trap.
• Psychological and health impacts. Because the work ethic (Weber, Lesson 8) makes work central to identity and worth, unemployment is associated with loss of self-esteem, identity, routine and social contact, and with poorer mental and physical health — the loss is of much more than income.
• Social exclusion. Long-term unemployment can lead to social exclusion (Lesson 1) — detachment from the social networks, activities and status that work provides — and feeds the spatial concentration of disadvantage in deindustrialised areas.
• Intergenerational and community effects. Concentrated worklessness in particular communities is read by the New Right as breeding a "culture of worklessness" (a cultural account) but by structural sociologists as the predictable effect of the collapse of local labour markets — the same cultural-versus-structural dispute met in the poverty lessons.

A classic framework for understanding why unemployment is so damaging beyond lost income comes from Marie Jahoda, whose research (including the pioneering Marienthal study of an unemployed community) led her to argue that employment provides crucial latent functions as well as the manifest function of income. These latent benefits include a time structure to the day, regular social contact beyond the family, a sense of collective purpose and contribution, status and identity, and regular activity. On this account, unemployment is harmful not merely because it removes wages but because it strips away these latent functions — leaving the unemployed without structure, social contact, purpose or a valued identity, which helps explain the documented links between unemployment and poor mental health. Jahoda's framework thus gives sociological substance to the claim that work matters far beyond money, complementing Weber's account of the work ethic.

Exam Tip: Jahoda's "latent functions of work" (time structure, social contact, collective purpose, status/identity, activity) is a high-value framework for explaining why unemployment damages well-being beyond lost income. Pair it with Weber's work ethic and social exclusion (Lesson 1) for a rich, synoptic account of the consequences of worklessness. The "culture of worklessness versus collapsed local labour markets" framing directly reprises the cultural/structural debate.

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Globalisation and the Transformation of Work

The single most important force reshaping work is globalisation. The growing interconnection of economies has transformed where work is located, how secure it is, and what kind of work is available in advanced economies.

The key mechanisms are:

• The global division of labour. Production is increasingly organised across national borders: manufacturing and routine work migrate to lower-wage economies, while advanced economies specialise (unevenly) in services, finance and knowledge work. Transnational corporations (TNCs) locate different stages of production wherever costs are lowest.
• Deindustrialisation. As manufacturing relocated abroad, advanced economies lost large numbers of secure, relatively well-paid working-class jobs — the structural unemployment and regional decline noted above, and the spatial concentration of poverty (Lesson 3).
• Heightened competition and "flexibility". Global competition pressures firms to cut costs, encouraging the spread of low-paid, insecure, "flexible" work — the casualised periphery of the flexible firm (Lesson 9) and the precariat (Lesson 5).
• Automation and technological change. Technology displaces routine jobs (technological unemployment) while creating new high-skill ones — a key driver of the polarisation of work into "good" and "bad" jobs.

Exam Tip: Present globalisation as the engine behind several earlier concepts: deindustrialisation (regional poverty), the precariat and in-work poverty (insecure flexible work), and the polarisation of work (automation). Showing that globalisation ties the option together is exactly the synoptic command examiners reward in the final topic.

The chain of effects from globalisation through to poverty and welfare can be visualised:

flowchart TD
  A["Globalisation: global division of labour and competition"] --> B["Deindustrialisation: manufacturing migrates to lower-wage economies"]
  A --> C["Automation displaces routine jobs"]
  B --> D["Structural unemployment and regional decline"]
  B --> E["Growth of insecure, low-paid service and gig work"]
  C --> E
  E --> F["The precariat and in-work poverty (Standing)"]
  D --> G["Worklessness, social exclusion, pressure on welfare"]

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Standing: The Precariat

The concept that best captures the human consequence of these global changes is Guy Standing's precariat (The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, 2011), introduced in Lesson 5 and central here. Standing argues that globalisation and labour-market flexibilisation have produced a growing class-in-the-making characterised by chronic insecurity.

The defining features of the precariat are:

• Unstable, casual work. Short-term, temporary, zero-hours and gig work, with no security of employment.
• Unpredictable income and hours. The inability to plan or build security even when working.
• No occupational identity or career. The precariat lacks the stable work-based identity and progression that secure employment once provided.
• Loss of benefits and protections. Minimal entitlement to sick pay, pensions, holiday pay and the protections attached to standard employment — risk is shifted from employer to worker.

Standing's concept is powerful for this option because it shows that insecurity, not just unemployment, is the contemporary problem: the precariat may be in work yet still poor, anxious and excluded — the structural root of in-work poverty (Lesson 3). It also reframes the cultural debate: the precariat's "present-time orientation" (living week to week) is, as Lesson 5 argued, a rational adaptation to structural insecurity, not a transmitted "culture of poverty" — the same behaviour, opposite explanation.

Exam Tip: Standing's precariat is the key contemporary named concept for this lesson. Use it to argue that globalisation has shifted the problem from unemployment to insecurity — the precariat works but cannot achieve security, generating in-work poverty and reframing the "culture of poverty" as a situational response.

Globalisation and the "Race to the Bottom" Debate