Social Construction of Unemployment In France, Japan and Brazil

This is an attempt to associate the constructivist position with the comparative approach, and demonstrate the pertinence and interest of such approach with the concrete example of comparison of unemployment carried out between France, Japan and Brazil. Three research methods were combined in this comparison, both quantitative and qualitative. However, the authors rely on the device of open and in-depth interviews to argument their method in this paper. They show how it is possible to analyze subjective significations of unemployment anchored in institutional and normative framework in each national space without falling into typology. For this purpose, they use a matrix composed of four poles of tensions in which the symbolic forms of interviews are mapped. They then proceed to examine dominant national configurations and cross-national characteristics according to gender, age and class relations. They conclude in the interest of the comparison of national configurations of an interdependent chain between institutional actors and individual actors, as a combination of structural processes and subjective processes. In this conclusion, the authors strongly insist on the dynamic character of national configurations of unemployment in which these processes are agents of change