The Unemployed and Unemployment in an International Perspective

Abstract

In each national situation, unemployment is analyzed as an interdependent chain between institutional actors and individual actors, as a combination of structural processes and subjective processes, as an intricacy composed of collective regulations and individual strategies, institutional norms and subjective worlds, codified rules and life experiences. These coherences can be considered as national configurations, rather than as models, because they are both structured and dynamic, precisely because permanent tensions are present between structural phenomena, themselves submitted to macro-social changes, and subjective phenomena, which are in their turn submitted to micro-social changes.