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Abstract
Despite searching for work under similar economic conditions, white-collar unemployed workers in Israel and the United States engage in different job search practices, and ultimately come to distinctive subjective understandings of their difficulties in finding work: Israelis ultimately blame the system, while Americans blame themselves. Drawing on in-depth interviews with job seekers and participant observations at support groups for unemployed white-collar workers, this dissertation explains how these diverging practices and subjective understandings arise as a result of local labor market institutions, which generate distinct job search "games" and demand different kinds of emotional labor. In the United States it is a game of self-subjectification, which demands the emotional labor of packaging one's inner-self to project requisite internal qualities such as "passion." This game ultimately produces self-blame and discouragement of further job searching, and facilitates the reproduction of its underlying structures. The Israeli game, by contrast, is one of self-objectification, which requires the emotional labor of suppressing the inner-self and presenting oneself as a work-object with the requisite external "specs." This game ultimately generates anger at the "system" and spurs collective action aimed at its transformation. In the process of analyzing these differences, the dissertation develops the theory of sociological games by demonstrating how under certain conditions games produce consent and reproduction, while under other conditions games generate dynamics of resistance and forces for the transformation of their underlying structures.
