A well-researched study that should interest job seekers of all varieties.
A cogent argument against the “myth of meritocracy.”
Sociologist Sharone, founder of the nonprofit Institute for Career Transitions, examines the social, financial, and emotional consequences of long-term unemployment, drawing on research with 539 college-educated, white-collar job seekers, ranging in age from 40 to 65, along with career coaches, network colleagues, and recruiters. Sharone’s interviewees “had had long and successful careers and assumed that employers would value and recognize their qualifications and they would be hired quickly.” Like many workers who attended top schools and filled upper-level positions, they believed that skill, education, and achievement would reap rewards—which left them stunned when they failed to find another job. Instead, once they were unemployed, “regardless of their level of education or past professional achievements,” they were “stigmatized in the eyes of potential employers,” recruiters, and colleagues from whom they sought referrals. “The core experience of both unemployment and networking,” writes the author, “is a series of rejections.” In addition, their situation generated feelings of shame, self-blame, and ongoing anxiety, especially when financial pressures worsened. Even family and friends, buying into the meritocracy myth, assumed there was something wrong with an unsuccessful job seeker. Traditional coaching rhetoric, Sharone found, underscores the message that finding a job is “primarily a matter of strategy and attitude,” but this “exaggeration of jobseekers’ individual control only distorts empirical reality and overlooks real obstacles. It is a harmful fiction because it reinforces stigmatization.” With three out of four American workers likely to become unemployed at some point in their careers, and the experience of long-term unemployment increasing, Sharone calls for collective action and advocacy to counter the meritocracy myth and widespread stigma: policies to address discriminatory employer hiring practices, expanded unemployment benefits, the possibility of universal basic income, and sociologically based support from coaches.
A well-researched study that should interest job seekers of all varieties.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780190239244
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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