Constructing Unemployment

As the longest economic boom in history has given way to leaner times, unemployment has re-emerged as a major issue. This theoretically and empirically sophisticated book examines how unemployment takes on widely different political meanings and explores the ways in which governments act to change their own accountability for unemployment. It contributes to the comparative political economy literature that analyzes political responses to economic problems. Baxandall reverses a conventional application of comparative research by using an Eastern European case to reveal political dynamics that are mirrored in the West - as demonstrated with American and Western European cases. Using interviews and previously unexplored archives to consider a dramatic transformation in the meaning of unemployment in Hungary, he demonstrates how the politics of economic change depend crucially on the political re-crafting of economic categories.'This is the view of the social construction of scientific categories at its most subtle and most elegant. Through a detailed reading of public policy debates in Hungary, the book weaves a rich and complex story of how notions of employment, unemployment and labor force participation are revised and reconstructed as the terrain of public policy shifts over time.' Professor Michael J. Piore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA