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The Social Dimension European Developments in Social Psychology Edited by Henri Tajfel Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511759154 Online ISBN: 9780511759154 Hardback ISBN: 9780521239783 Paperback ISBN: 9780521283878
Chapter 20 - The historical dimension of social psychology: the case of unempl oyment pp. 405-424 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511759154.003 Cambridge University Press
20. The historical dimension of social psychology: the case of unemployment1

PETER KELVIN
There are any number of species of social animal; only man is also an historical animal, in that history is both a product and a cause of his social behaviour. My purpose is to explore this most important aspect of social psychology, which has been wholly neglected. I do not count the fleeting controversy over whether social psychology should be regarded as 'history' (Gergen 1973) or as 'science' (Schlenker 1974). That was fundamentally sterile: it rested on Gergen's misconceptions about the nature of science, which were elegantly corrected by Schlenker. I shall return to this shortly. Neither Gergen nor Schlenker, however, actually looked at, or used, historical material. I shall do so here: not in order to ' decide' between social psychology as history or as science, but to make articulate and to demonstrate the relevance of historical evidence as an integral part of basic scientific concerns of social psychology. It is relevant to consider why social psychologists have ignored historical evidence. The fundamental reason is our identification of social psychology as a science, and our concept of' science' as concerned with the formulation of' universal laws' which underlie particular phenomena: by comparison, the events of history are contingent. At one level of analysis this is quite valid. We are not only 'social' and 'historical', we are indeed also 'animal', and in that respect, objects of scientific enquiry. Our gifts are aspects of us as biological systems, whose characteristics provide both the bases of our potential and the bounds to our achievement. As biological systems, therefore, our behaviour is determined by our physical properties and the ' laws' which regulate how these function: bodies are subject to gravitational forces; animals need food for energy - and so on. Less obvious but no less ' universal' are basic processes such as adaptation, information-processing, language acquisition. From within social psychology one might cite attitude formation
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The preparation of this chapter was assisted by Grants HR 6182 and HR 6717 from the Social Science Research Council, London.
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and change, compliance and acceptance as modes of conformity and socialization, eye contact in social interaction. These are ' universal' in that the language to be acquired, or the attitude being formed, may indeed vary, but the processes as such take the form they do because the biological equipment which enables us to do these things also determines how we do them: but only the 'how', not the 'what'. The failure to distinguish adequately between underlying general processes and their particular manifestations is one of the two main misconceptions which led Gergen to claim that social psychology is essentially history. Fundamentally, he failed to recognize that the 'stabilities' of the world of nature (as he calls them) are not the precise stabilities of actual events, but theoretical assumptions. The velocity of falling bodies (which he cites) varies considerably according to the conditions in which they fall. What the physical sciences, as distinct from 'nature', can offer are statements of the conditions of theoretically ' pure' cases, which provide the theoretical templates against which we may measure and calculate real phenomena. The natural sciences have reached this stage precisely because they came to distinguish between particular occurrences and the general (' universal') processes which underlie them. Which brings us to Gergen's second, and related misconception, that Man's capacity to react in terms of what he knows of himself 'liberates one from their behavioural implications' (Gergen 1973: 313). I have some sympathy with that:'.. .the discovery of factors or laws in the social sciences may itself lead to a modification of the conditions to which those laws apply' (Kelvin 1970: 297). This looks like a matter of logic (Gergen's indicative ' liberates'), but it is actually an empirical question (my' may'). Logically there is a class-of-all-classes problem here, a la Russell: is the law of our reactivity to 'laws' about ourselves itself subject to that reactivity? The much more important question, however, is the one whose answer would validate or falsify the law: to what extent do we, can we, use what we know of ourselves to change ourselves? I look at myself (I ask the reader to do the same); at friends and acquaintances who have had psychological help; at conflict between groups whose members know they are prejudiced; at the host of Man's admitted political, social and economic absurdities and cruelties; I am not unduly depressed; but neither am I greatly impressed by the revolutionary liberating consequences claimed for self-awareness. The real issue here is not the logical status of laws whose very formulation invalidates them: it is the empirical problem of establishing the limits of our capacity to use our knowledge of ourselves: the factors which create these limits; and the processes which would enable us to make the most of such scope as we have. On this ground, too, we need to distinguish between universal and historically
The historical dimension: unemployment
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contingent aspects of social behaviour: for our limits will be set by our 'universal' characteristics as a species, while what we do with our scope within them will be 'historically contingent': and unless we accept, but also disentangle, both these facets of our nature, we shall not be able to go beyond the manifestations to their underlying processes. In old-fashioned but very useful language, our biological make-up provides the forms but not the contents of our acts. The content is, in the main, historically contingent. That, of course, is also true of individual members of other species: what distinguishes us is the nature of the contents which are available through our capacity to use symbols, and our consequent ability to transcend our own immediate space and time. Herein lies the significance of history for social psychology. History is a product of social behaviour, not only as a record in symbols of concerted human actions, but also because the transmission of this record is itself a social process. That process, because it is social, may itself distort the record, perhaps inevitably distorts it: the burden of historiography is to disentangle histories as the social construction of historians. History is a cause of social behaviour, because the past helps to shape the physical, social and psychological conditions of any given present. Within this it is essential to distinguish between the effects of the 'past' as such, of' history' as its reconstruction, and of' myth' as evocative invention only loosely grounded in fact. Rather than discuss these in the abstract as methodological problems, I shall leave them to the end: by then we shall have encountered them all in the substantive case of the social psychological effects of unemployment. 1. The social psychological effects of unemployment Social psychological research on unemployment begins, for all practical purposes, in the early 1930s (Bakke 1933; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld & Zeisel 1933). Since then, this research has consistently identified two principal psychological effects of unemployment: the unemployed individual suffers from a lack of structure in his life, and from a sense of the social stigma of being unemployed. In Goffman's sense, unemployment 'spoils' the unemployed individual's identity: he perceives his situation as discreditable, himself as discredited by it (Goffman 1962). There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern: there are individuals whose lives remain structured by their own purposes; there are whole communities and subcultures where unemployment is too common a fate to be a source of personal stigma (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld & Zeisel 1933; Triandis etal. 1975). Nevertheless, with only rare exceptions the generalization is valid; and the lack of structure of the lives of the
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unemployed and their sense of stigma, and the awareness of the unemployed of these things, has been a constant theme of the literature (e.g. reviews by Eisenberg & Lazarsfeld 1938; Harrison 1976, and case-studies by Bakke 1933; Beales & Lambert 1934; Gould & Kenyon 1972; Hill 1978; Marsden & Duff 1975; Pilgrim Trust 1938). The phenomena persist: they continue to run through the research on which my colleagues and I are currently engaged. I cannot, however, pursue both the problems of structure and of stigma within a single chapter: problems of structure arise in various realms of discourse and at various levels of analysis: I shall here confine myself to the unambiguously social psychological phenomena and problems of stigma. The basic fact is that the United Kingdom has a very long tradition of stigmatizing the unemployed. The historical evidence for this is quite incontrovertible (much more so than most experimental evidence), and I shall cite some of it later. The current version of this is the concept of the ' welfare scrounger', the individual who is seen to prefer to live on welfare benefits rather than earn his living from work. Until recently, the media, Parliament and the public were little short of obsessed with the idea that most of the unemployed were scrounging, and that ways must be found to stop them. The details of this are exceptionally well documented by Deacon in 'The scrounging controversy' (1978): he concluded that there was far more concern with what should be done to the unemployed, than what can be done for them. Scrounger-hounding still flourishes. For example, on 4 March 1981 that most liberal of British newspapers, The Guardian, carried a large heavy headline 'One in Twelve Cheats Benefit Men', and quoted a report that up to 8 per cent of claimants might be receiving benefit while working. Two days earlier, under a small, most discreet heading of' Tax Collectors Ask For More Staff To Tackle "Black Economy'", The Guardian cites a report from no less than the Board of Inland Revenue: '82 per cent of the businesses examined were found to have underestimated their profits...it is not always easy to detect payments [to directors] or other benefits...' (The Guardian, 2 Feb. 1981; my italics). It is an old, popular song which ends: It's the same the whole world over, It's the poor what gets the blame, It's the rich what gets the pleasure: Isn't it a blooming shame.
(She was poor but she was honest. Publ. Faber, 1942: 156)
Scrounger-hounding is not in itself a particularly special social psychological phenomenon: psychologically it is a milder equivalent in an economically oriented society of primitive witch-hunting in a religious one. Scroungerhounding is psychologically significant because it co-exists with an extent of
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sympathy for the unemployed, and of understanding of the causes of unemployment, which should by now have brought it to an end. Over several years of deepening recession and growing unemployment, all the media have produced a multitude of objective and compassionate accounts of the problems of the unemployed, and some have set up practical schemes to help them. There is widespread recognition that unemployment is mainly due to economic factors and, especially in our time, to the consequences of new technologies. From this has grown the more fundamental argument that we are undergoing a very radical industrial revolution, the outcome of which will be a permanent reduction in the demand for labour. That in turn, it is argued, implies that we shall have to change not only our ideas about the unemployed but also about work and leisure as a whole. Such views have been put for some years by social scientists (e.g. Weiss & Riesman 1963); and more recently by trade unionists (e.g. Jenkins & Sherman 1979), and may be found in all political parties: they were indeed stated most concisely by a distinguished Conservative spokesman on employment: It may well be that in the next 10, 15 or 20 years we will have a new philosophy towards unemployment. We may have to move away from the Protestant Work Ethic We had to pass on the benefits of increased productivity 'reasonably equally' not just to the work-force, but also to the work-force that no longer worked. (James Prior MP, in Opposition, reported in The Guardian, 22 March 1979) In practice, however, the only truly serious effort and investment on behalf of the unemployed is to find work, or at least 'work-experience', for unemployed youth - to ensure that they are socialized into the work ethic. And scrounger-hounding continues. Considered as a whole, the pattern of our reactions to unemployment and the unemployed is one of confused and contradictory beliefs, feelings and behaviour. We are aware of this even as we persist in it, and are troubled by it. Herein lie some of the most fundamental problems at a social psychological level of analysis. We attribute the difficulties of our society in these respects to two main factors: first, to the extraordinary industrial revolution which we are undergoing; and second, to the pervasive influence over centuries of the Protestant work ethic, now outdated by the revolution (for various standpoints, cf. Abrams 1978; Anthony 1977; Arendt 1958; Hayes & Nutman 1981; Jahoda 1979; Jenkins & Sherman 1979; Sinfield 1981). When I first became concerned with the social psychological aspects of unemployment I accepted these assumptions myself (Kelvin 1980), and they do have a certain validity: but they are also seriously inadequate, and therefore misleading. They give the appearance of an historical perspective, but the evidence is never presented, nor explored. When I did pursue it, it failed
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to support the assumptions: we are much too simplistic in our view of our present industrial revolution; and we cannot invoke the tenacity of the Protestant work ethic to account for social psychological problems in coping with it. In effect, the social psychological questions which we have been asking are incompetent, and the domain in which we have looked for the answer is inappropriate. The process of examining the historical evidence will itself help to identify some of the main social psychological issues with which we need to become concerned. 2. The industrial revolution of the 1980s It is quite clear that by all accepted standards we are passing through an industrial revolution. The century...witnessed...an industrial revolution due to scientific discoveries and changes in technology; a revolution which brought poverty, unemployment and discontent to certain old centres of [the] industry, but wealth, opportunity and prosperity to the country as a whole, and which was destined to alter the face of medieval England. (Cams-Wilson 1966: 41; my italics) Similarly Nef (1958) points out that the rate of change of industrial development, from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and through the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, was scarcely less striking than during the late eighteenth century. Scientific discoveries, rapid technological and industrial change, economic dislocation, unemployment - our own conditions certainly meet the criteria of industrial revolution. What we have ignored is that by the same criteria, economic historians have pointed to industrial revolutions in the thirteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - well before the ' (first) Industrial Revolution' of the late eighteenth century. These were followed by those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Barraclough 1964) till we reach our own time and, according to Jenkins & Sherman (19 79) the' Third Industrial Revolution'. Not surprisingly, historians have become somewhat wary of the notion of 'industrial revolutions': the fact is that if we add them all up, there have been industrial revolutions major technological developments accompanied by socio-economic dislocation - in
six out of the last seven-and-a-half centuries. The exception is a relatively dormant period from the mid-fourteenth to the late fifteenth century: this is the time which followed the ravages of the Black Death in 1347; as a result, the working population fell by around one-third, and did not recover until the end of the fifteenth century. I shall return to this. Although we may be in the midst of an industrial revolution, that, in itself, is historically nothing new. The social psychological question is therefore not
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'How do we cope with the unique problems of our time?', but 'Why do we still have almost exactly the same problems in coping with industrial change as earlier centuries?': for inasmuch as these problems are so old, it is unlikely that they all arise only from new causes. Nor is the explanation that only we, or perhaps our parents, were the first to recognize the nature of the difficulties. The basic ones - resistance to innovation, counterbalancing but unequally distributed gains and losses of jobs, redundancy - have been known and understood for many generations. Four examples must suffice. First, the thirteenth century saw the innovation of the horse-plough, which was much faster than the ox-plough. Walter of Henley, writing at the time, assessed its actual cost-effectiveness, and noted: The ox-plough shall till as much in the year as the horse-plough shall, because the malice of the ploughmen do not allow that the horse-plough shall break pace more than the ox-plough. (Trans. Oschinsky 1971: 319) On gains and losses of jobs, there is this from the substantial nationwide survey The state of the poor, by Sir Frederick Eden, published in 1797: one third or perhaps one fourth of the hands which were required twenty years ago would now be sufficient... however, with regard to the interest of the nation, and not the particular parish, I much doubt if the wool now produced from the Leicestershire enclosures does not employ more hands (though perhaps not in Leicestershire) than its arablefieldsdid formerly. (Eden 1797: 383-4) The attendant problem of redundant workers was recognized by, for example, a Parliamentary Committee on the Poor Law in 1817. It reported on: The impossibility of always providing employment for all who may be in want of it... to hold out to the labouring classes that all who require it shall be provided with work at adequate wages is therefore to lead them to false views of their position... (Nicholls 1854, vol. 11: 174) The moral, social and political implications were set out simply but powerfully by John Stuart Mill: There cannot be a more legitimate object of the legislator's care than the interests of those who are thus sacrificed to the gains of their fellow-citizens and of posterity. (Quoted by Beveridge 1931: 12-13; source not given) For several centuries, therefore, it has been widely understood that unemployment is essentially 'a problem of industry' (Beveridge 1931, containing lectures given in 1909 and 1930), that it is not normally the fault of the unemployed worker. Largely in recognition of this, there has been a very marked improvement over the last hundred years in the material lot of the unemployed: nevertheless, socially and psychologically, the unemployed individual continues to have a sense of stigma and, in innuendo and
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scrounger-hounding, continues to be stigmatized. To explain this, social psychologists and social scientists, and indeed a wide variety of people, have invoked the pervasive influence of a deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic. 3. The Protestant work ethic At first it may seem that to trace reactions to unemployment to the Protestant work ethic is to use precisely the kind of historical evidence which I have said social psychologists neglect. It is not to do anything of the sort. Reference to the Protestant work ethic does not reflect historical research but has become a substitute for it: it uses the authority of Weber as a short cut for looking at the evidence itself. Yet The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1904/5) was 'a fragment...much shorter and less detailed than Weber's other studies of "world religions'" (Giddens 1976); and although the concept of the Protestant ethic has clearly been very important in the recent history of Western thought, its own historical soundness has been substantively challenged (e.g. Tawney 1936). It cannot be validly invoked as an explanatory concept. I take it as axiomatic that the concept of' ethic' refers to a system of values which the members of a group, sect or society have internalized - so that actions based upon it may be regarded as acts of choice. In the language of conformity and socialization, acts based on an ethic stem from the private acceptance of its requirements, not from mere public, forced compliance with them. Indeed the concept of 'ethic', as an explanatory concept at a psychological level, rests precisely and only on the implication that an ethic is a basis of motivation. It is from this standpoint that I shall consider the historical evidence. Divers artificers and labourers waste much part of the day in late coming to work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and...long sleeping after noon. (Quoted Coleman 1966: 303) This refers not to the alienated de-skilled workers on a car assembly line of the 1970s or 1980s, but to that most prestigious of skilled trades, the masons, working on Canterbury Cathedral in 1495. Strictly speaking, of course, this was a little before the rise of Protestantism. Well after the Reformation, well into the reign of Elizabeth I: The labouring man will take his rest long in the morning... then he must have his breakfast, though he has not earned it [and] will cast his burden in mid way, what ever he is in hand with. At noon he must have his sleeping time, then his bever in the afternoon...and...at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools... (Pilkington, Bishop of Durham 1585: 426)
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For higher up the social scale we have Harrison's Description of Britain, published in 1558: Whosoever... can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the... countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by the heralds. (Quoted Laslett 1977: 33; my italics) The Protestant ethic may have been based on 2 Thessalonians 3:8' if any would not work neither should he eat'; but, as far as a gentleman was concerned, not work such that it might be said ' in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread' {Genesis 3:10). Weber, of course, attached particular importance to the Puritan elements within British Protestantism, and to its fundamental asceticism: the profits from work were not to be used for luxury and indulgence, let alone to absolve one from further work, but to provide more work, more opportunities for work. This puritanism is essentially a phenomenon of seventeenth-century England: indeed two writers in whom Weber was especially interested, Baxter and Barclay, reached prominence after the Restoration. This was also the age of Dryden's Marriage a la mode and The maiden queen, in which the part of Florimel was played by Nell Gwynn; and when an early economist, Thomas Manly, complained of wage rises in 1669: 'The men have just so much more to spend in tipple... they work so much the fewer days by how much they exact in wages' (quoted Coleman 1966: 303). Few of these presumably became capitalists. They belong to another tradition, exemplified by this petition to Parliament in 1721: The journeymen tailors... to the number of 7000 and upwards have lately entered into a combination to raise their wages and leave off working an hour sooner than they used to [which is] dangerous to the public and a very ill example to journeymen in all other trades... (Fisher & Jurica 1977: 214-15) It might, of course, be argued that the Protestant ethic was a seed which only reached maturity with the' Industrial Revolution' and the nineteenth century. Early in that century, soon after the Napoleonic wars, Lord Castlereagh gave evidence to that committee on the Poor Law from which I have already quoted: for if no means could be found' of inspiring the population with the wish to live rather on their own labour than what they could draw from the poverty and labour of others', hefirmlybelieved that the English people would not in future ages be what they had been in the past. (Nicholls 1854, vol. 11: 168) A pretty example, that, of the age-old tendency to appeal to an idealized past, but scarcely a tribute to the contemporary efficacy of the work ethic. Castlereagh's complaint referred primarily to the lower orders. Essentially the
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same point might have been made in relation to the very entrepreneurial class which had created the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of the century, when these entrepreneurs had succeeded in their enterprise, they sought to establish themselves, and particularly their children, in landed society: and most of them very happily accepted that society's patterns and rules of leisured country delights (Jones 1967). Later, at the very height of Victorian industriousness, at least as it has been conveyed to us, between i 8 6 0 and 1870, and from its very centre, we hear this: In Birmingham, however, and more or less throughout the district, an enormous amount of time is lost, not only by want of punctuality in coming to work in the morning and beginning again after meals, but still more by the general observance of St. Monday...one employer has on Monday only 40 or 50 out of 300 or 400. (Parliamentary Papers 1864; quoted Royston Pyke 1967: 88) As regards the 'masters', we have, for example, the detached but sympathetic observations of Hippolyte Taine's Notes on England, 1860-1870. Writing about that other most important Victorian city, Liverpool, he comments: After dinner, Mr. B, a great merchant, remains at table with his guests, and they all drink port for 3 hours at a stretch without saying anything. Another of these wealthy businessmen goes to the country as soon as he can get away; he is deeply absorbed in breeding pigs... And he quotes a local author: I never make even a short railway journey of an afternoon without being exposed to an encounter with at least one drunken gentleman snoring in hisfirstclass carriage. (Taine 1957: 224-5) Taine did not seem to have recognized that the breeding of pigs was almost certainly in pursuit of status as ' landed': most English entrepreneurs aspire to the condition of gentry. Almost all the evidence that I have cited has come from editions of primary sources or from quotations from primary sources in the writings of distinguished historians. The parallel for this kind of evidence in psychology is the analysis of case histories, not of variance. There are, however, two sets of quantitative findings which are germane to these matters, and which may comfort those who prefer the precision of numbers to the meaning of words. The work ethic has been presented as the product of the precepts of religion, and, especially of Protestantism. There was a unique census of church attendance in England and Wales in 1851, which covered all denominations. In the large cities and some mining and iron areas, attendance was less than 25 per cent (Hobsbawm 1968). 'In a score of the largest towns in England
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fewer than one person in ten... attended any place of worship on census Sunday' (Inglis 1964: 2). 'Of the industrial areas, Lancashire, the most important was also the least religiously minded' (Hobsbawm 1968: 27, my italics). Liverpool was the exception, because of its large Roman Catholic (Irish) population. During the early 1880s, Andrew Mearns examined working-class church attendance in London even more precisely: Of the 2,290 persons living in consecutive houses at Bow Common, only 88 adults and 47 children ever attended... one street off Leicester Square contains 246 families and only 12 of these are ever represented at the house of God...Often the numbers given of those who do attend include such as only go once or twice a year. (Extract in Keating 1976: 94) Social and religious historians cite evidence after evidence of the profound indifference of the English working class to religion, and of the deep concern, of all denominations, at their inability to reach the artisan and the labourer: most contemporaries also had grave reservations about the sincerity, as distinct from the conformity, of most middle-class attenders. Writing of the nineteenth-century working man, Chadwick (1975) commented: In becoming a church goer a man (less so a woman, though partially so) became an oddity in his social station... if you became a church goer or chapel goer, you hardly seemed any longer a member of the working-class. (Chadwick 1975: 102) These people were not positively atheist either: they were indifferent; religion was simply not a facet of their own reference group. It is therefore sheer nonsense to believe that the productivity of the ' Industrial Revolution' was grounded in the religious zeal of church- and chapel-going workers seeking to fulfil their calling and the will of God. Religion was neither the inspiration of the people nor, for that matter, their opium. In the familiar world of our continuing empirical research, and of the discussion of the theories we build on it, we would not use scientific concepts without testing their validity, without establishing their limits. Because individuals and societies have an historical dimension, however, every so often problems arise whose explanation involves recourse to history and historical concepts. Consequently, in as much as we, as social psychologists, make use of explanatory concepts which are essentially historical, we are quite as much under an obligation to check these as our own more esoteric ones. The notion of a work ethic, deeply rooted in and permeating our culture, does not survive such scrutiny. Two sets of phenomena have to be kept distinct in relation to the Protestant work ethic. First, throughout the last several centuries there have certainly been a small number of individuals, groups or sects who were truly inspired to their work by religious teaching, and perhaps
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especially so by Protestantism. Of these it may validly be said that they were motivated by an ethic: for them work was an integral part of their concept of the purpose of their lives; they worked from choice; and there are some like them today. Second, millions of people have for generations worked long and arduous hours, often in appalling conditions and for little pay; they have done so, and many continue to do so, because they had and have to make their basic living: that, however, is not the manifestation of an ethic, it is compliance with the demands of economic necessity. The concept of the Protestant ethic, or its generalized secular version, the work ethic, has had considerable, though essentially superficial, intellectual appeal; not least, perhaps, because intellectuals, like the academics and professional people to whom it appeals, usually work on tasks which they enjoy and which satisfy them: and, as Maritain said of Luther, they tend to make their own souls' progress into a universal law. In the vast majority of cases, however, the concept of the work ethic is profoundly inadequate as an explanation of reactions to unemployment; and the uncritical use of it obscures more valid and constructive alternatives. For the phenomena, such as the stigma and stigmatization of the unemployed, do remain to be explained; and that explanation does have its roots in history. 4. The language and conceptualization of unemployment I can, of course, only consider the language of unemployment in the United Kingdom, but the chances are that this has had its effects throughout the English-speaking world. The connotations of that language stem from its administrative origin, which was very long ago. The psychologically determining event was the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349, in the reign of Edward III: And because so many sturdy beggars, so long as they can live by begging, refuse to labour, living in idleness and sin..., no man, under the aforesaid penalty of imprisonment, shall presume under colour of pity or alms to give anything to such as shall be able profitably to labour... so that they may be compelled to labour for the necessities of life. (Bland, Brown & Tawney 1914: 166) This was determining psychologically because it shaped the way in which the unemployed came to be conceptualized ever after. The ordinance made it an offence to give alms to those who did not need them through their infirmity: it thereby institutionalized in law the distinction between ' the deserving poor' and the 'sturdy beggar' - that is, between the 'infirm' and the 'able-bodied' poor, whom we would call the unemployed. Henceforth it became the constant policy of English administrations that there should be no support
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for sturdy beggars. We find it in the important body of Poor Law of Elizabeth I, for instance in the order that parishes must provide money: to the intent that youth may be accustomed and brought up to labour and work, and thus not like to grow up to be idle rogues, and to the intent also that such as are already grown in idleness, and so be idle rogues at this present, may not have any excuse ...(18 Eliz. I c. 3, 1575, Bland, Brown & Tawney 1914: 373) The intention of this act was certainly in the spirit of the Protestant work ethic - and finds its echo in the ' work-experience' schemes of our time. However, to provide work costs money. To resolve the conflict between cash and conscience, the enlightened age of, say, Newton, or of Locke, therefore produced this Act of William III: that the money raised only for the relief of such as are as well impotent and poor, may not be misapplied and consumed by the idle, sturdy and disorderly beggars... every such person upon relief... and the wife and children of any such person... shall upon the shoulder of the right sleeve of the uppermost garment... in an open and visible manner, wear such a badge or mark... a large Roman P, together with the first letter of the parish... cut in blue or red cloth. (8 & 9 Will. Ill c. 30. 1697, cited Eden 1797: appendix clxxvi) To shame the poor is cheaper than to create work for them. The Act also stipulated that failure to wear the badge was to be punished by whipping and hard labour; that overseers who did not enforce wearing it were to be fined; and that half the fine would be paid to the informant. A century later, Sir Frederick Eden provided these comments on the continued stigmatization of the poor - that is, of those without work: Badging the poor is supposed to have been of service in reducing the rates (Bradford, Wiltshire, 1796; in Eden 1797: 145). Many distressed families prefer the chance of starving among friends...to the mortifying alternative of being well-fed, well-lodged, and well-clothed in a Poor house, the motley receptacle of idiots and vagrants. (Carlisle, Cumberland 1795, in Eden 1797:57-8) The pattern was nationwide: The parish generally insists on [the poor] going into the work-house; by which expenditure is much reduced: not because the poor are maintained at a cheaper rate in the house than they could be in their own homes, but because apprehension of being obliged to intermix with the various descriptions of indigent people usually found in a large Poor-house, deters many from making applications for relief.. .it seems to bear hard upon the modest poor, who are the most deserving of national charity. (Portsmouth, 1795; in Eden 1797: 228) The important Poor Law of 1834 brought significant administrative changes, but maintained most rigorously the distinction between ' the infirm' and ' the
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able-bodied'. The Commission which preceded the act was quite explicit that the able-bodied should only be supported under conditions which made their lot worse than that of the poorest labourer (i.e. in a work-house): otherwise relief would be 'a bounty of indolence and vice' (reprinted, Young & Handcock 1956: 698). In the event, much of the act became unworkable: it was difficult to implement in industrial, as distinct from agricultural, areas; and it was resisted on grounds of humanitarian principles, and by violent action. Jeremiahs of our own times might note that at Huddersfield, for instance, in 1837, 'police officers and special constables.. .underwent many personal injuries from the crowd' trying to protect the ' Guardians' who were to enforce this law. For connoisseurs, at Todmorden, around the same time, 'police were stripped naked and driven from the parish', the proceedings having been orchestrated by the local Tory Member of Parliament (Young & Handcock 1956: 717, 688 respectively). There is a historical dimension to the social psychology of violence. The 1834 Poor Law became increasingly inappropriate to both the practical requirements and social attitudes of the later nineteenth century. A further important factor was the growth of the trades unions, not only as a source of potential power, but also as a source of actual financial help to their unemployed members. In 1905 came the Unemployed Workmen Act: this explicitly recognized that people may want to work, but be unemployed for reasons beyond their control; and it regulated provision for such people, explicitly outside the existing Poor Law. That should have been the end of the distinction between the 'sturdy beggar' and the 'deserving poor', whereby only the infirm were deserving and the rest just idle scroungers. Yet the unemployed themselves still have a sense of inadequacy and stigma, and in practice they are treated ambivalently, at once with compassion and as suspect. Faced with phenomena such as these, the reaction of psychologists, and others, is to postulate some 'deep' underlying processes, where by 'depth' we have in mind the complex activities of a dark unconscious: the deep, unconscious effects of a work ethic, for example; but that, I hope I have shown, is untenable. In fact the problem does not lie in what we cannot express but, quite the contrary, in how we do express ourselves. Ancient concepts have given rise to a language which has itself perpetuated them; and although they are most damagingly inappropriate, the habit of that language blocks the revision of the concepts. It perpetuates the dichotomy between those who are sturdy but 'idle', and therefore undeserving, and the deserving cases, those too young, too old, too sick to work. In effect, only those
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who for personal reasons cannot cope are truly ' deserving': honest use of provisions for welfare therefore implies the inadequacy of those who resort to them. It may rarely be put quite so bluntly, but the implication of inadequacy permeates the terminology of the arrangements we have made for the unemployed. They used to receive 'relief, 'assistance' (until quite recently 'National Assistance'),' allowances'. Currently they receive 'benefits', a very ambiguous term. As 'perks' or 'fringe benefits', for instance for company directors, 'benefits' are generally seen as 'fiddles' for avoiding tax. In relation to the unemployed, 'benefit' means 'pecuniary assistance' (OED) or 'assistance' (COD): the word 'allowance' is itself used in two senses, as 'limited supply' in' mitigating circumstances':' supplementary' benefits or allowances are 'added to remedy deficiencies' (OED). Beyond the official jargon, which is itself part of common parlance, there is the even more common term 'the dole': this is a Middle English word for the distribution of charitable gifts, which, in 1919, became specifically applied to 'relief paid to the unemployed' (OED). In one of its senses, therefore, the word 'benefit' has become a euphemism for fiddling the state, whether in avoiding taxes or by 'living off benefit' instead of working: in this sense it maintains the concept of the unemployed as 'sturdy beggar'. Alternatively, there is the connotation of 'relief, 'assistance', 'allowance', and 'the dole' - all redolent with images of charity to the inadequate. I can only point briefly to the implications of all this for our account of the social psychological effects of unemployment. We do not have to postulate a demanding Protestant work ethic to explain the effects of unemployment. There is the basic fact that most unemployed people do indeed, sooner or later, become dependent on 'benefits'; this manifest dependence lends apparent validity to the language of unemployment, which in turn reinforces the concept of the legitimate claimant as 'needy'. We also know from a variety of social psychological research that people are much inclined to assume that ours is a 'just world', where individuals usually deserve the situations in which they find themselves. A variation of this is the 'derogation of the victim', whereby an individual's suffering is itself taken as evidence of an inferiority which justifies it (Lerner, Miller & Holmes 1976; see also Chapter 28). At the level of society at large, the language of unemployment combines with the hypothesis of a 'just world' to prepare the 'derogation of the victim' - the stigmatization of the unemployed. At the level of the self-concept of the unemployed individual, the images of inadequacy of that language merge with awareness of the emptiness of days: if we see ourselves as others seem
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to see us (Mead 1934), and as we describe ourselves in terms of what we do (Bern 1972), that will account for most of the sense of stigma and of failure of the unemployed. It may seem that the unemployed individual's economic dependence on the state must inevitably suggest his inferiority. Yet as Mill maintained more than a century ago, the unemployed are mostly unwitting and unwilling sacrifices to the profits of others. It would therefore be economically and socially more appropriate, and morally much more justifiable, to have a language which reflects compensation for unemployment, rather than reluctant charity for its relief. That, however, would require a fundamental reorientation of the way in which we conceptualize the problems of unemployment - and in this we are profoundly hampered by the social psychological consequences of an historical event. Although we have had 'industrial revolutions', and all the socio-economic dislocations associated with them, for most of the last eight hundred years, we are still locked in a language which reflects the situation, problems and concepts of the one period which was the exception to that general pattern. The Ordinance of Labourers, which institutionalized the concept of the ' sturdy beggar', and all that flowed from this, belongs to 1349, one year after the worst of the Black Death. It opens: ' Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants has now died in this plague...' (Bland, Brown & Tawney 1914: 164). In effect, the dichotomy between 'sturdy beggars' and 'deserving poor' arose in the context of a quite exceptional shortage of labour; exceptional though it was, that shortage lasted long enough to establish the distinction; and it survived, virtually unchanged, into much more typical times when agrarian or industrial developments have repeatedly produced shortages of work. From this has arisen a classic variation on Heider's theme of attribution (Heider 1958). A language grew up related to the help needed by - and given to - those who could not work because they were, in some ways, inadequate-as-persons: the weak of mind and body, the very young, the very old. The same language came to be used in relation to those who had no work because of, as it were, inadequacies-in-their-situation: enclosures had deprived them of land; machines had replaced their skills; guilds, unions, and employers blocked their opportunities. This way of thinking has become automatic and self-perpetuating: the most recent term in that language, for instance is 'redundant'; yet although redundancy is clearly a function of the situation, it is the individual who carries the label 'redundant'. And so this person-oriented, rather than situation-oriented, language continues to imply that the unemployed individual is at best superfluous and/or inadequate; or, at worst, that he is a scrounger, sponger, 'idle rogue'.
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The addition of an historical dimension to social psychology is more than a mere academic refinement: in many instances it is not only essential in order to identify the full nature of a problem, but also points to practical solutions. Consider the present case. The language of unemployment certainly has profound psychological effects; historical evidence, however, shows that this language does not itself reflect profound psychological causes, such as motivation derived from a deeply ingrained work ethic: it stems, rather, from the persistence of an ancient administrative distinction, whose terminology, precisely because most of it is' official', could quite easily be changed by decree - and therefore transform the ways in which we conceptualize the unemployed. That would not solve the social psychological problems of unemployment, but it is the general prerequisite for many more particular solutions. There remain the problems of the nature of the historical dimension itself. As I said at the outset, it is essential to distinguish between the past, history, and myth. We have encountered them all. The language of unemployment is a product of the effects of the past as such, unreconstructed by historians. When we see ourselves as undergoing an industrial revolution, we are applying an historical construct to our own situation. The Protestant work ethic is a myth: it is an invention, an hypothesis, which caught the imagination much beyond any justification in terms of fact. In distinguishing between these three, there are few problems about recognizing the effects of the past as such, provided we do the work of tracing them. The difficult problem is the distinction between history and myth, yet that distinction is of the most fundamental importance. The trouble with myths is not that they are wholly false but, on the contrary, that they contain elements of truth and fact. These truths and facts give myths their credibility: but the truths are partial, the facts highly selected, and the result is therefore a distortion. This, of course, also applies to some extent, though very much less so, to history as we construct it. The difference between them, however, is not merely quantitative: it lies in the motivation at the roots of history and myths, and in their psychological functions. The essential aim of a history is to understand the events with which it is concerned, in their own right, and as part of the sequence in which they are embedded. The aim of myth is to create an idealized version of the past, which can be invoked as a model for the present and the future: workers always worked harder in the past; ordinary folk were morally more upright, regular church-goers; the family was extended but close and supportive; and so forth. The function of history is to give understanding; the function of myth is to provide inspiration. Though a history, say of the Industrial Revolution, may be selective, it remains fundamentally an ordering and interpretation of facts: a myth, say of the
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Protestant work ethic, is inherently an expression of values and an exhortation. The social psychologist cannot ignore either history or myth, but neither can he afford to confuse them. Such confusion is a real danger, because as social psychologists we must indeed concern ourselves with the often very significant impact of myths precisely because they are expressions of values, rather than records of facts. To mistake myth for history, however, or, even worse, for a true account of the past, is to mistake what we would like to have happened in order to inspire us, for what actually happened to bring us to our present. The historical dimension of social psychology inevitably has to encompass the subtleties of a species whose members are conscious of, as well as affected by, their histories.
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Gergen, K. J. 1973. Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, (2), 309-20. Giddens, A. 1976. Introduction to Max Weber's The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin. Goffman, E. 1962. Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gould, T. & Kenyon, }. 1972. Stories from the dole queue. London: Temple Smith. Harrison, R. 1976. The demoralising experience of prolonged unemployment. London: Department of Employment Gazette, 339-48. Hayes, J. & Nutman, P. 1981. Understanding the unemployed: the psychological effects of unemployment. London: Tavistock. Heider, F. 1958. The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley. Hill, J. 1978. The psychological impact of unemployment. New Society, 19 January. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1968. Labouring men: studies in the history of labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Inglis, K. S. 1964. Churches and the working classes in Victorian England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jahoda, M. 1979. The impact of unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 32, 309-14. Jahoda, M., Lazarsfeld, P. F. & Zeisel, H. 1933. Marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community. London: Tavistock, 1972 edn. Jenkins, C. & Sherman, B. 1979. The collapse of work. London: Eyre Methuen. Jones, E. L. 1967. Industrial capital and landed investment: the Arkwrights in Herefordshire, 1809-43. I*1 E. L.Jones & G. E. Mingay (eds.) Land, labour and population in the industrial revolution. London: Arnold, pp. 47-71. Keating, P. (ed.) 1976. Into unknown England, 1866-1913: selections from the social explorers. London: Fontana/Collins. Kelvin, P. 1970. The bases of social behaviour: an approach in terms of order and value. London: Holt, Rinehart. 1980. Social psychology 2001: the social psychological bases and implications of structural unemployment. In R. Gilmour & S. Duck (eds.) The development of social psychology. London: Academic Press, pp. 293-316. Laslett, P. 1977. The world we have lost. London: Methuen. Lerner, M. J., Miller, D. T. & Holmes, J. G. 1976. Deserving and the emergence of justice. In L. Berkowitz & E. Walster (eds.) Advances in experimental social psychology,
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20. The historical dimension of social psychology: the case of unemployment1

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

The historical dimension: unemployment

vol. 9. pp. 134-62.

Prior, J. 1979. The Guardian, 22 March.

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