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The making of a category of economic understanding in Great Britain (1880–1931): ‘the unemployed’

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Date
2020
Dewey
Sociologie économique
Sujet
Severance Pay; Plant Closings
JEL code
J.J6.J65; J.J6.J60; J.J0.J01
Journal issue
Cambridge Journal of Economics
Volume
44
Number
6
Publication date
2020
Article pages
1181-1196
Publisher
Oxford University Press
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cje/beaa018
URI
https://basepub.dauphine.fr/handle/123456789/21464
Collections
  • IRISSO : Publications
Metadata
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Author
Lagneau-Ymonet, Paul
1008489 Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales [IRISSO]
Reynaud, Bénédicte
1008489 Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales [IRISSO]
Type
Article accepté pour publication ou publié
Abstract (EN)
Evidence-based policy relies on measurement to trigger actions and to manage and evaluate programmes. Yet measurement requires classification: the making of categories of understanding that approximate or represent collective phenomena. In 1931, two decades after implementing the first compulsory unemployment benefits in 1911, the British Government began to carry out a census of out-of-work individuals. Why such an inversion, at odds with the exercise of rational-legal authority, and unlike to its French or German counterparts? To solve this puzzle, we document the making of ‘the unemployed’ as a category of scientific analysis and of public policy in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Our circumscribed contribution to the history of economic thought and methodology informs today’s controversies on the future of work, the weakening of wage labour through the rise in the number of part-time contracts and self-employed workers, as well as the rivalry between the welfare state and private charities with regard to providing impoverished people with some kind of relief.

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