The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed

Date: 4 November 2024, 10:15
Location: English Park, 2-K1023
Type: Seminar
Lecturer: Ofer Sharone
Organiser: Deparment of Sociology
Contact person: Malcolm Fairbrother

Ofer Sharone is a professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts—Amherst, and founder of the Institute for Career Transitions. He is the author of an award-winning book about job searching and his research has received wide attention from media including the New York Times, the BBC and the PBS Newshour. Professor Sharone received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD from Harvard Law School. An award-winning teacher, he offers courses and workshops to college and high school students about the social forces affecting their career and life aspirations.

This book shows how the unemployment stigma renders all workers, including workers who are highly experienced and hold advanced degrees from elite universities, precarious and vulnerable to being trapped in long-term unemployment. Stigma is an invisible but ubiquitous force that is powerful enough to erase the significance of past educational and professional achievements. Drawing on interviews with workers, recruiters, and career coaches this book analyzes the ways that the unemployment stigma distorts how employers view jobseekers. But it is not only employers. The same stigma of unemployment can rear its head when an unemployed worker tries to network with former colleagues, receive support from a coach, or even turn to a close friend or a spouse. With stigma reflected back from all directions it can be internalized and appear when one looks in the mirror. In short, this book shows the subtle and profound ways that the unemployment stigma sets a trap that is difficult to escape. It also provides a sociological approach to supporting unemployed workers, and to countering this stigma and the institutions that underlie it.