introduction for unemployment research paper

Search Theory and Unemployment: An Introduction

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• Carl Davidson 4 &
• Stephen A. Woodbury 5  

Part of the book series: Recent Economic Thought Series ((RETH,volume 76))

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The first part of this introductory chapter offers a brief historical survey of job search theory. The goals are to give the reader a sense of how search theory arrived at its current state, to point out some of the roadblocks that search theory has encountered, and to suggest how search theoretic models have evolved so as to overcome those roadblocks. The second part of the chapter offers a brief description of each chapter in the book. Eight chapters follow the introduction, with three devoted to job search theory itself, three to estimating job search models, and two to applying job search theory to public policy.

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Davidson, C., Woodbury, S.A. (2002). Search Theory and Unemployment: An Introduction. In: Woodbury, S.A., Davidson, C. (eds) Search Theory and Unemployment. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 76. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0235-6_1

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OPINION article

Future directions in the research on unemployment: protean career orientation and perceived employability against social disadvantage.

• 1 Department of Economics and Management, University of Parma, Parma, Italy
• 2 Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Cultural Industries, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

Introduction

The level of uncertainty and fear introduced by COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the relationships, work and meanings of existence.

From the point of view of the labor market, the COVID-19 crisis has undermined the illusion of security at work, leading to a massive career shock and accentuating the existing inequities in the labor market, with severe economic and societal implications in terms of career experiences, job opportunities and career paths ( Akkermans et al., 2020 ). During a pandemic, the loss of employment opportunities represents a source of fear which aggravates the intense concerns and anxieties about health and death.

According to a preliminary report from the International Labor Organization ( ILO., 2020 ) estimating between 5.3 and 24.7 million unemployed, the most negative impact will be felt by low-wage and low-skill employees. Jobless individuals tend to be those who have had precarious jobs in fields that typically do not offer long-term contracts, decent wages, and health benefits ( ILO., 2020 ).

Since the individuals' work-lives represents a source of motivation, expression of personal believes and high-quality interpersonal interaction ( Crayne, 2020 ), reconstructing life after this pandemic will need to consider a new perspective of work as a core value in creating decent and decorous work, which has been limited by COVID-19 crisis ( Blustein and Guarino, 2020 ).

This situation has leading researchers to ask questions about the processes by which individuals cope with a job loss experience and the mechanisms triggering attitudes of resilience and exploration of sustainable careers that would imply seeing oneself either in a constantly evolving path, or developing additional skills, or retooling for other jobs and building new career networks ( Hite and McDonald, 2020 ). Studying these aspects will help direct active labor policy interventions aimed at promoting and supporting the employability of people looking for work.

The Literature on Unemployment

Most literature has focused on the negative effects of job loss on well-being, such as physiological symptoms, depression and suicide ( McKee-Ryan et al., 2005 ; Paul and Moser, 2009 ; Wanberg, 2012 ), limited to the examination of the influence of stress, response, and coping with the results of one's job loss ( Gowan, 2014 ). This is also reflected in the social negative evaluation of being unemployed and the stigmatization of personal weaknesses of the unemployed, which in turn lead to less sympathy, and finally to disadvantaged hiring decisions ( Monteith et al., 2016 ).

In fact, from the point of view of the dominant outgroup represented by employed persons, the stigmatization of unemployment status influences recruiters, hiring managers, and interview panelists in the decision to not hire an unemployed worker. Unemployment status as a social identity is shamed, as with other stigmatized social groups, and psychological processes associated with social identity and stigma contribute to the discrimination ( Norlander et al., 2020 ). Particularly, people who possess system-justifying beliefs are more likely to judge unemployed and their deservingness negatively. Beliefs in a just world are likely to affect negative judgments of an unemployed person's competences ( Monteith et al., 2016 ).

From the point of view of the unemployed themselves, the social stigma of the unemployed as being unmotivated, depressed and without professional abilities or personal resources can generate feelings of weakness and blushing on jobless people, and may in turn negatively impact social connections ( Grimmer, 2016 ). McFadyen (1995) argued that the coping processes used by unemployed people to face this stigma could be influenced by whether they categorized themselves as unemployed or adopt some other categorization.

The social identity approach sustained that social image that arises from group memberships has important consequences for how people view and feel about themselves, and also how they are viewed and evaluated by others. If social identities do not provide positive resources for group members, this negatively reflects on individual self-esteem and well-being ( Jetten et al., 2017 ).

The researches that have focused on the attributional processes used by jobless individuals to explain their condition are heterogeneous and also COVID-19 crisis seems to have altered these processes.

On the one side, unemployment is an undesirable and uncontrolled event and there is an ample literature focused on this view. In this sense, from the unemployed person's point of view on his/her perception of social disadvantage, some studies showed that jobless individuals generally show a greater empathy with unemployed people and attribute unemployment to environmental, rather than personal, factors ( Furåker and Blomsterberg, 2003 ; Van Oorschot and Meuleman, 2014 ). They seem to justify their situation as a painful experience beyond their control. Consistent with a social identity theory perspective, some authors underlined that jobless individuals use both intragroup and intergroup comparisons and these processes were related to their self-esteem. In period of very high unemployment, like the current one where the stigmatization is less pronounced because external causes are attributed to unemployment, the perception of being similar to the unemployed group (at the intra-group level) enhanced feelings of self-worth. However, greater perceived differences between unemployed people and employers were associated with reduced self-esteem ( Sheeran et al., 1995 ). This finding supports the view that feelings of self-worth are contingent, at least in part, on the perceived status of one's own group relative to other groups ( Sheeran et al., 1995 ).

On the other side, there is also evidence that unemployed people do not share similar experience of unemployment ( Creed et al., 2001 ). ( Creed and Evans, 2002 ) highlight the importance of individual differences when considering the psychological impact of unemployment. In fact, some researchers have found that jobless people hold a stronger prejudices and stigma on unemployed individuals than do employed individuals, especially regarding overall value, ability, motivation, and mental health ( Takahashi et al., 2015 ).

In addition, a few studies on the process of in-group identification showed that the unemployed identified little with their own disadvantaged category, which was perceived as a group to distance themselves from ( Wahl et al., 2013 ). In this sense, unemployed could carry out a process defined by literature as self-group distancing that represents an individual mobility response to dissociate from their stigmatized in-group and avoid the negative experience of being stigmatized ( Van Veelen et al., 2020 ).

Other studies have underlined that the process of in-group identification seemed to be more related to the personal stress one experienced ( Ybema et al., 1996 ), or to family-extended employment ( Curtis et al., 2016 ), or to length of time they are unemployed ( Cassidy., 2001 ), rather than to a comparison between social categories characterized by different statuses. In terms of effects of self-categorization on social support, locus of control and problem-solving, previous experience of unemployment plays a crucial role ( Cassidy., 2001 ). In a Danish study ( Pultz and Mørch, 2015 ), researchers showed that some jobless individuals challenge the traditional representation of the unemployed and describe them as innovative, skilled and able to cope with economic insecurity even though it is stressful. These authors take up the concept of strategic self-management, which refers to a pro-active career orientation.

The identity of “unemployed” can be perceived as flexible and transient, and how person adopts this identity has implications for the person's core cognitive beliefs that influence person's ability to adapt to career events ( Thompson et al., 2017 ). The possibility of perceiving one's unemployment status only as a phase of one's working career and not as a condition of a stigmatized social group could be due to the perception of the permeability of the boundaries between groups of unemployed and employed people. Probably even today, in a situation of large-scale emergency crisis, the boundaries between employed and unemployed people are still much less clear and the perception of failings, poor competencies and welfare stigma previously attributed to the unemployed has changed consistently. In fact, from the out-group point of view, in the HR selection process evaluators tend to have less bias toward unemployed individuals because unemployment has become today a vast and global scale phenomenon ( Suomi et al., 2020 ).

Also from the in-group perspective, unemployment is now much more seen as a temporary phase of the career path rather than a fixed social category. Rather than justifying the system that excluded them from the productive world, which is an attributional process that usually characterizes employed workers in their perception of unemployed category ( Monteith et al., 2016 ), some employees who have lost their job seem to be more engaged in coping with the resulting change and the discontinuity of their working life.

The framework of a career planning concept and career paths over time ( Wanberg, 2012 ) could be considered as yet another approach through which it is possible to examine job loss, by pointing out the dynamic career planning activities over the course of one's unemployment. Furthermore, research focusing on career exploration during the unemployment conditions following a job loss, has the potential to reconsider and change the meaning of job loss to individuals ( Zikic and Klehe, 2006 ).

Our contribution moves in this direction, as it explores some constructs that can influence the perception of unemployment directly from people experiencing job loss, and could be the precursor to a more realistic interpretation of the condition of social disadvantage, thus promoting a more proactive attitude toward job reintegration.

Particularly, we will focus on protean career orientations that play a pivotal role in the search for growth opportunities within the job loss transition and that help people to face, not only the negative factors associated with their situation of uncertainty in connection with the crisis of their professional project, but also to re-evaluate their wider life goals and career paths ( Waters et al., 2014 ).

The protean career concept is strictly related to the employability that refers to “individual's beliefs about the possibilities of finding new, equal, or better employment” ( De Cuyper et al., 2011 ). It arises from a combination of knowledge, practical skills and abilities that individuals develop over the course of their working life in order to achieve their career path, allowing them to make sense of their previous professional experiences and to explore new opportunities ( Fugate and Kinicki, 2008 ).

The Protean Career Orientation and Perceived Employability as Key Strategies for Work Reintegration

Current literature on unemployment emphasizes how the success of one's job search depends on the sense of individual responsibility and the desire for self-fulfillment in guiding one's career choices, as well as individual beliefs about the possibility of achieving one's goals. In this sense, the concept of Protean Career Orientation (PCO) refers to one's attitude toward career choices, based on the search for self-realization. This attitude implies that an individual is responsible for managing his/her own career and for making career-related decisions shaped on personal values, rather than labor market demands ( Briscoe and Hall, 2006 ).

The two aspects of a protean career orientation are: being self-directed and being value-driven. Self-direction refers to the degree to which an individual has control over his/her own career ( Mirvis and Hall, 1994 ). The aspect of value-driven places career decisions as closely linked to one's own personal values, rather than one being driven by categories of the social system ( Briscoe and Hall, 2006 ). As underlined by Lysova et al. (2015) , the sense of meaning that workers derive from work, however, is impacted by work values, understood as the end states people desire and feel they ought to be able to realize through working ( Nord et al., 1990 ). People who show a high level of intrinsic values, as freedom and self-growth, has an higher protean career orientation and defines career success in terms of psychological factors as compared with traditional career; protean career orientation is also focused on continuous learning in professional development ( Hall, 2004 ).

One of the critical aspects connected with the state of unemployment is the perception of uncontrollability, which can lead one to focus on external factors and to feel closer to other social disadvantaged groups ( Bukowski et al., 2019 ), rather than to focus on internal motivational resources. On the other hand, in the context of unemployment, the protean career orientation activates a reverse process of reworking one's career path, offering a different interpretation of one's social condition, because the person focuses on his/her aspirations and goes back to feeling like he/she still has the personal resources to invest in a new professional project. The prerequisite for a protean career attitude is the overcoming of the categorization and evaluation imposed by the external social world, because those values are founded on the notion of career actors—as opposed to organizations—who take responsibility of their own careers ( Hall, 2002 ). Protean people seem to have more internal control over their career path and this is in line with unemployment research, that underlined the role of internal LOC in predicting reemployment ( Meyers and Houssemand, 2010 ). Applying the perspective of the social determination theory to unemployment, some authors ( Vansteenkiste et al., 2005 ) found that perception of being forced to search for a job, moving by controlled motivation accompanied by stressful and pressuring experiences, negatively predicted their general health. On the contrary, if unemployed perceive the search for a job as an autonomous and personal choice because employment is seen as an opportunity to develop their skills, they have an internal motivation that enhance behavioral effectiveness, greater volitional persistence, and enhanced subjective well-being. This motivational process is the basis of the perception of controllability of the protean orientation. Also social cognitive career theory highlighted the importance of self-regulatory efficacy, which involves beliefs about controlling motivational aspects of the job search, and personal goals, as behavioral intentions to act in ways that produce desired outcomes, in predicting reemployment success ( Thompson et al., 2017 ).

In this sense, when considering re-employment, Waters et al. (2014) emphasized that a protean career orientation helped individuals to clarify and express their goals during unemployment and to find a sense of positive identity ( Zafar et al., 2017 ).

Secondly, another core aspect is related to the loss of self-esteem ( Kanfer et al., 2001 ), that represents a psychological consequence of unemployment. During unemployment PCO may help unemployed people to maintain a positive self-esteem. Protean orientation could be interpreted as a mechanism through which unemployed feel much more similar to people who belong to the world of work and activate a self-group distancing process also for the type of careers that characterize working life. In fact, there were disruptive and macroeconomic factors in the labor market that have changed how individuals conceptualize their careers more fragmented and discontinuous compared to the past ( Briscoe et al., 2012 ).

People who manage their careers from a protean orientation do not link their career identity to the organization and loss. This perception does not lead to the lack of the sense of identity that sometimes occurs after the job loss ( Waters et al., 2014 ). Instead, people with low PCO levels will be less proactive in finding resources for the enhancement of their skills, and their level of self-esteem will likely be lower during the period of unemployment. This can discourage people from looking for a new job, as it affects the belief that they can find it ( Hirschi et al., 2017 ).

Thirdly, people with a high protean career level become more independent and flexible in managing their career opportunities in response to social changes in work organization ( Wiernik and Kostal, 2018 ). In the literature, the concept of protean career has been associated with the concept of boudaryless career which refers to a career characterized by different levels of physical and psychological movement among organizations ( Sullivan and Arthur, 2006 ), which metaphorically recalls the permeability of the boundaries between workers and unemployed. Consequently, high-PCO individuals are in charge of their own career development ( Hall et al., 2018 ) and can adjust to the current dynamic labor market. People with a high PCO tend to: be more learning-oriented; have high self-esteem and clearer goals; and formulate specific career plans ( Li et al., 2019 ).

This proactive attitude translates to a more effective job search during unemployment ( Waters et al., 2014 ). In fact, adopting a protean self-directed approach may lead individuals to regularly explore the situation of work environment in order to increase their chances of finding a job that will help them achieve their personal projects.

Self-managing one's career leads people to become more aware of their acquired professional skills but also increases the knowledge and competencies required in the labor market ( Bozionelos and Bozionelos, 2015 ).

In this sense, recent studies have shown that people oriented toward a protean career are likely to have a high level of perceived employability ( Baruch et al., 2019 ; Cortellazzo et al., 2020 ).

The perceived employability is the second key construct that plays a central role in managing one's work history in unemployment conditions.

When considering changes in career development and paths, increasing one's employability is an important task for both the unemployed and those seeking new employment, as their career may depend on perceived employability.

Employability has been studied mainly from three perspectives. Fugate and Kinicki (2008) proposed a dispositional approach to employability which identifies a range of traits (for example, openness to change, proactivity, and resilience), that facilitates proactivity in adapting to work and career environments. Van Der Heijde et al. (2006) elaborated a competence-based conceptualization of employability, in which the dimension of occupational expertise is complemented with four general competences: anticipation and optimization, personal flexibility, corporate sense and balance. The authors distinguish between two different types of adaptation to changes in the internal and external labor market, the first one that is referred to as anticipation and optimization, and one more passive variant entitled personal flexibility. The concept of corporate sense refers to participation and performance in different workgroups, such as the department, working teams, occupational community or other networks. Finally, balance is defined as compromising between opposing employers' interests as well as one's own opposing work, career and private interests. Finally, the third perspective focuses on perceptions of employability which Vanhercke et al. (2014) define as the individual's perceptions of possibilities of obtaining and maintaining employment.

In the field of unemployment, we refer to the third perspective concerning external perceived employability, that has been also defined by Berntson et al. (2006) as the subjective individual perception of the ability to evaluate one's skill at getting a job. In this sense, employability represents the perception of employment opportunities with the current employer or with another employer ( Rothwell and Arnold, 2007 ; De Cuyper and De Witte, 2008 ). The subjective perception, in fact, of being able to relocate to the professional world had a strong motivational impact, which in turn affected the implementation of realistic assessments of one's actual possibility of relocation and the use of functional strategies to achieve one's professional goals ( Van den Broeck et al., 2010 ), such as skill development ( De Vos et al., 2011 ; Vanhercke et al., 2014 ).

Furthermore, perceived employability increases the feelings of control over careers and job search activities, and it is related to a minor duration of unemployment, and to re-employment ( Consiglio et al., 2021 ).

Research also showed that perceived employability could help mitigate the negative effects of job loss, such as emotional implications ( Hodzic et al., 2015 ; Consiglio et al., 2021 ).

In the context of job loss, individuals who are more employable will perceive less impairment from the job loss, will engage in more job search activity and will achieve higher quality reemployment ( Fugate et al., 2004 ). Koen et al. (2013) showed that employability also increased long-term reemployment opportunities ( McKee-Ryan et al., 2005 ; Paul and Moser, 2009 ; Lim et al., 2016 ; Lo Presti and Pluviano, 2016 ). Perceived employability could represent an individual's belief that reduces the differences with the people who are in the job market because it focuses on the perception of one's personal skills and opportunities for change affecting proactive behaviors and cognitive reinterpretation of job loss. According to social identity theory, especially if boundaries between groups are perceived more permeable, protean career orientation and perceived employability could be seen as an individual mobility strategy to distance from a devalued social group and achieve more positive social identities.

Protean individuals who see themselves as more employable are less likely to feel as they are part of a stigmatized category allowing to protect themselves from social stigma, even if the stigma consciousness of employment does not always have negative consequences in terms of proactivity ( Krug et al., 2019 ) especially in in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis. A high levels of protean career orientation and perceived employability allow to evaluate the experience of unemployment differently and this approach leads jobless individuals to believe in the future. In fact, their perception of available opportunities in the labor market may be selective and more engaged in targeted research ( Zakkariya and Nimmi, 2021 ).

As a career shock, the COVID-19 crisis has led us to develop new studies to identify and implement targeted actions that could contribute not only to improving the general well-being of unemployed persons, but also to increasing their likelihood of finding work.

In the actual socio-economic context characterized by a general lack of job opportunities, and considering the diffusion of new career paths characterized by frequent work changes and transitions, our question is: “Are the unemployed still stigmatized or do they perceive themselves to be a disadvantaged category today?”.

Following the economic consequences of the pandemic, the social perception of unemployment has changed, limiting prejudices against jobless people by employed individuals. This could have an impact on the unemployed perception of their work condition. Unemployed people should therefore suffer a lesser loss of the sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy and rely on their own proactivity to find a new job. To be successful in finding employment a person must believe they have the skills and abilities to do so. In this sense, gaining deeper understanding of the role of a protean career orientation and of perceived employability can offer unemployed people new ways to create change for themselves. In fact, people with a high level of protean career and employability are less likely to feel that they are part of a disadvantaged category, have a high self-esteem and self-efficacy, as they evaluate their experience of unemployment differently and this approach activates proactive behavior in preparatory and active job search.

Even in the case of unemployed individuals seeking guidance and advice to support their return to the labor market, protean people with a high level of perceived employability tended to better estimate their skills and better define their professional goals by identifying possible perspectives for getting out of the unemployed group in which they do not recognize themselves.

In terms of career counseling, working with unemployed clients should focus on building positive perspectives in connection with the clients' career goals and their sense of self direction and responsibility in order to promote control over their career paths. In fact, people with high levels of PCO are less identified in a disadvantaged social category, and this aspect could be used during the counseling to modify the cognitive interpretation of the unemployment status and promote proactivity and agency. In this sense, a counseling centered on protean career orientation and perceived employability should be compared to the develop of proactive coping strategies. Counselors should help people to evaluate the period of unemployment as an opportunity to redefine professional goals in a flexible way and develop a plan for achieving them. For example, starting by the reflection on the pandemic situation in terms of changed traditional working methods and roles, counseling can be viewed as a chance to invest in training and updating one's skills, to respond to a significantly changed labor market, especially from the point of view of digital skills. High PCO and perceived employability represent a great motivational and emotional investment in job search that can help to reach job goals, but it may happen that unemployed have to face difficulties and failures in job search. In this sense, a high PCO allows people to collect informations and reflect about their skills, and make plans based on realistic and objective opportunities. Through this step of research and evaluation, people should gain self-awareness and define achievable goals and evaluate alternatives in case of failure, protecting themselves, partially, from emotional negative consequences.

Furthermore, when the protean career orientation is adopted, employability is more effectively used in job searching, because unemployed become more aware of their values, projects, technical and soft skills and develop proactive career strategies ( Panari et al., 2020 ). This perspective can maintain a positive sense of personal professional identity whilst focusing on solutions to get out of the social disadvantage, rather than on the causes of the unemployment situation.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: unemployment, protean career orientation, employability, career planning, job search strategies

Citation: Panari C and Tonelli M (2022) Future Directions in the Research on Unemployment: Protean Career Orientation and Perceived Employability Against Social Disadvantage. Front. Psychol. 12:701861. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701861

Received: 28 April 2021; Accepted: 30 December 2021; Published: 24 January 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Panari and Tonelli. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Chiara Panari, chiara.panari@unipr.it

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Analysis of the COVID-19 impacts on employment and unemployment across the multi-dimensional social disadvantaged areas

This is the study of economic impacts in the context of social disadvantage. It specifically considers economic conditions in regions with pre-existing inequalities and examines labor market outcomes in already socially vulnerable areas. The economic outcomes remain relatively unexplored by the studies on the COVID-19 impacts. To fill the gap, we study the relationship between the pandemic-caused economic recession and vulnerable communities in the unprecedented times. More marginalized regions may have broader economic damages related to the pandemic. First, based on a literature review, we delineate areas with high social disadvantage. These areas have multiple factors associated with various dimensions of vulnerability which existed pre-COVID-19. We term these places “ multi-dimensional social disadvantaged areas ”. Second, we compare employment and unemployment rates between areas with high and low disadvantage. We integrate geospatial science with the exploration of social factors associated with disadvantage across counties in Tennessee which is part of coronavirus “red zone” states of the US southern Sunbelt region. We disagree with a misleading label of COVID-19 as the “great equalizer”. During COVID-19, marginalized regions experience disproportionate economic impacts. The negative effect of social disadvantage on pandemic-caused economic outcomes is supported by several lines of evidence. We find that both urban and rural areas may be vulnerable to the broad social and economic damages. The study contributes to current research on economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak and social distributions of economic vulnerability. The results can help inform post-COVID recovery interventions strategies to reduce COVID-19-related economic vulnerability burdens.

1. Introduction: social disadvantage

Pandemics create severe disruptions to a functioning society. The economic and social disruptions intersect in complex ways and affect physical and mental health and illness ( Wu et al, 2020 ). Additionally, loss of jobs, wages, housing, or health insurance, as well as disruption to health care, hospital avoidance, postponement of planned medical treatment increase mortality, e.g., premature deaths ( Kiang et al., 2020 ; Petterson et al., 2020 ). The COVID-19, misleadingly labelled the “great equalizer” implies everyone is equally vulnerable to the virus, and that the economic activity of almost everyone is similarly impacted regardless of social status ( Jones & Jones, 2020 ). We set out to answer whether economic vulnerability is equally distributed during the COVID-19-caused economic recession or whether is it based on structural disadvantages? Is the social distribution of economic vulnerability magnified in regions with pre-existing social disparities, thus, creating new forms of inequalities? Knowledge of what areas experience the greater economic burden will help identify the most economically vulnerable communities relevant to post-COVID recovery interventions ( Qian and Fan, 2020 ).

Current studies on the impacts of COVID-19 largely focus on medical aspects including the COVID diagnosis and treatment ( Cai et al., 2020 ; Kass et al., 2020 ; O’Hearn et al., 2021 ; Price-Haywood et al., 2020 ). Non-medical urban research primarily concentrates on the impact of COVID on cities by studying factors related to environmental quality including meteorological parameters, and air and water quality ( Sharifi and Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020 ). COVID-related socio-economic impacts on cities are relatively less well studied, especially during the later stages of the recession.

Many pre-pandemic disparities unfold during COVID-19. To illustrate, residents of Black and Latino communities are suffering disproportionately higher unemployment rates, greater mortality due to the COVID-19 ( Thebault, Tran, & Williams, 2020 ; Wade, 2020 ), higher hospitalizations ( O’Hearn et al., 2021 ) and financial troubles. In contrast, some attributes make persons and communities more resilient. In China’s context, these include higher worker education and family economic status, membership in Communist Party, state-sector employment, and other traditional markers. These factors protect people from the pandemic-related financial stress and diminish its adverse economic effects ( Qian and Fan, 2020 ). Building on these recent studies on economic impacts, this social justice research focuses on areas with pre-existing social disadvantages. We study the role of social disadvantage and its impact on labor market during the COVID.

The distribution of economic vulnerability may potentially be related to COVID-19 conditions including those of economic burdens for people living in the pandemic epicenters ( Creţan and Light, 2020 ). Similarly, socio-economic disruptions create “a characteristic mosaic pattern in the region” ( Krzysztofik et al., 2020 , p. 583). The disruptions are strongly correlated with the spatial distribution of the COVID-19-related health effects. This study is set in Tennessee which is part of coronavirus “red zone” states of the US southern Sunbelt region. It is among the U.S. states with the highest rates of cases per capita, with 137,829 cases per 1 million people, or the 6th highest as of August 13, 2021 ( Worldometers, 2020 ; https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ ). The study seeks to explore the impacts of social disadvantage on economy. The impact is measured by employment and unemployment in unprecedented times in the US context of prolonged disruptions to the health system, society, and economy intersecting in complex ways ( Kiang et al., 2020 ). We answer the following questions: (1) Do communities with high social disadvantage already burdened pre-COVID-19 by the lack of income, healthcare access, lacking resources, have less jobs available during the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) Do these areas simultaneously experience higher unemployment compared with other areas in the context of the pandemic?

The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 introduces the topic, provides the background information on social disadvantage and a brief description of the study implementation. It further discusses the links between employment and unemployment, and coronavirus, respectively, and introduces the study area. Section 2 describes in detail materials and methods used in the study. Section 3 provides the theory and calculations. Section 4 reports the results, and Section 5 offers a discussion. Finally, the paper concludes with conclusions found in Section 6 .

1.1. Background

Certain socio-economic and demographic conditions burden some communities more than others including racial and ethnic minorities, lower-income groups, and rural residents. The conditions include lacking economic opportunities and other inequalities ( Petterson et al., 2020 ) caused by social environment. Prior to the pandemic, it was challenging to live in areas with high social disadvantage where residents already have increased vulnerability to poor health due to greater psychosocial stress such as discrimination, unhealthy behaviors, and poorer health status ( Hajat et al., 2015 ). This is true for poor, marginalized communities elsewhere as spatial segregation of disadvantaged and marginalized communities decreases life opportunities for their members who have limited relationships with broader communities ( Méreiné-Berki et al., 2021 ). Within the context of studying disadvantaged urban communities, a recent work by Creţan et al. (2020) focused on the everyday manifestations of contemporary stigmatization of the urban poor using the case study of the Roma people who have been historically subject to state discrimination, ghettoization, inadequate access to education, housing, and the labor market for many decades in the past in multicultural urban societies of Central and Eastern Europe. The inequalities may persist and even increase if left unaddressed during pandemics ( Wade, 2020 ) leading to stark COVID-19-related health and economic disparities. Indeed, during the COVID-19, economic impacts of the pandemic disproportionately affect marginalized groups. The impact of coronavirus was harsh for those people as many of the already existing disparities unfold during COVID-19: black communities in the United States are disproportionately affected by higher death rates due to the COVID-19 virus ( Thebault et al., 2020 ), unemployment, and financial stress. Other growing COVID-19 research similarly suggests that elsewhere outside of the United States, areas that were disadvantaged prior to the pandemic with high rates of poverty and unemployment tended to be affected the strongest by the COVID-19 with the largest concentration of cases, while other spatially segregated ethnicity-based communities (e.g., the Roma) that have been vulnerable decades prior to COVID-19, saw an increase in the existing discrimination and stigmatization experiencing greater marginalization even during the current COVID-19 pandemic period ( Crețan & Light, 2020 ).

To achieve greater economic stability, and secure a dynamic labor market, countries in the global north and south for several decades have been increasing service employment much of which is low wage. The recent book Corona and Work around the Globe ( Eckert and Hentschke, 2020 ) describes the tremendous impact of the pandemic on human life and livelihoods as it sheds light on various experiences of workers during COVID-19 in various countries. Among the dramatically different cases worldwide, Germany which for decades has been promoting the low-wage sector to combat unemployment, provides a good example. The official approach to handling a disease differed substantially depending on whether the infected individuals were working people from the low- or upper-wage sector of the economy: applying a strict lockdown to the entire high-rise building where ethnic workers lived and preventing them from going to work in the former case and granting permission to work from home in the latter ( Mayer-Ahuja, 2020 ). The plight of the agricultural migrant workers who come to Germany from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, subjected during the pandemic to low wages or no payments and poor working and living conditions, however, is shared among the workers of low-wage sector across all countries who are more likely to get infected due to higher exposure and direct contact, but often experience unfair treatment based on ethnicity, migration and class status.

In yet another case set in the U.K., disadvantaged households have experienced intensified disadvantage during the COVID-19 as they could not access vital necessities, already stretched for resources pre-COVID-19. As provision of services or employment was discontinued due to their closure, disadvantaged households had significant impacts on their income level, mental health and wellbeing, education, nutrition, and domestic violence. In the absence of the key support of public institutions including schools, community centers, and social services, care for the most vulnerable members such as elderly, children, the disabled, have been absorbed by households ( Bear et al., 2020 ).

Another aspect experienced by workers during the pandemic is the total loss of earnings which is especially harsh in places with precarious employment even under normal circumstances. Informal workers in India who represent the vast majority of working population (over 93%), with no social security benefits and absent job security, experienced prolonged periods of time of no work due to lockdown and suspended transport services preventing them from getting to their workplaces, many on the verge of starvation ( Banerjee, 2020 ). This study looks into this aspect of COVID-19 economic impacts and confirms the findings of the growing COVID-19 research.

However, not only the poorest and marginalized people, but also marginalized regions are more likely to suffer from broader social and economic damages related to the pandemic compared with more privileged areas ( Creţan and Light, 2020 ; Krzysztofik et al., 2020 ). When disadvantages combine, it may lead to environment-driven COVID-19-related disparities in health. Besides a direct health effect, disadvantaged communities are disproportionally experiencing other side effects of COVID-19 such as negative labor market outcomes including forced unemployment, loss of income and social isolation. Studies found the extreme vulnerability of cities and urban areas exposed during the global pandemic ( Batty, 2020 ; Gössling et al., 2020 ). We argue that rural areas may be equally vulnerable to the broad range of social and economic damages if there is a spatial concentration of factors related to various dimensions of vulnerability.

This study is situated in the context of social disadvantage. Prior studies developed the methodology of the delineation of disadvantaged residential communities proxied by low-income workers ( Antipova, 2020 ). Disadvantaged low-income workers can be defined as those with inadequate access to material and social resources in the study area. However, this is a narrow approach which uses only a single dimension of a disadvantage, that of worker low earnings and misses other social inequality indicators. Accordingly, an approach adopted in this study identifies areas where socio-economic and demographic attributes each associated with multiple dimensions of social disadvantage are spatially co-locating. Spatial segregation of disadvantaged and marginalized communities decreases life opportunities for their members who have limited relationships with wider communities ( Méreiné-Berki et al., 2021 ). We identify these attributes based on a thorough literature review. Thus, we simultaneously consider multiple factors associated with disadvantage capturing a multi-dimensional social disadvantage. To meet the objective, we integrate geospatial science with the exploration of predictive geographic and social factors associated with disadvantage across counties in TN. The geospatial analysis includes point interpolation within the Geographic Information System (GIS) environment for the generation of a surface from a sample of social disadvantage values. This allowed us to visualize the spatial extent of disadvantaged communities. The focus is on labor market outcomes which are important indicators of society well-being. We study the association between pre-existing inequalities and COVID-19-related employment and unemployment rates. Thus, we identify the role of social disadvantage on labor market conditions in the context of the ongoing pandemic-caused economic recession.

Prior research determined the key metrics of social disadvantage. Conditions contributing to various aspects of disadvantage include poverty, occupations with low earnings, low rent, segregation and discrimination-related residential concentrations of minorities, and exposure to poor air quality ( Bullard, 2000 ). The recent COVID-19-related literature focuses on the separate effect of minorities, Hispanics, crowded households, dense areas, obesity, poverty, air pollution exposure and identifies those as important COVID-19 health risk factors ( Finch & Hernández Finch, 2020 ; Golestaneh et al., 2020 ; Han et al., 2020 ; Millett et al., 2020 ). These community-level variables result in neighborhood disadvantage comprising sub-standard housing quality, crowded conditions, poverty- and violence-caused stress which combined increase the risk of disease and other negative outcomes in life among socially disadvantaged groups ( Malhotra et al., 2014 ). The demographic and socio-economic attributes selected to represent the various aspects of social disadvantage in this research include minorities and ethnicities, poverty, housing crowdedness, educational attainment, underlying population health conditions, and pre-COVID-19 unemployment which may collectively drive a greater vulnerability to the COVID-19 infection and mortality as well as loss in employment and higher unemployment. It is challenging to isolate the separate effects of the multiple risk factors. By “critically analyzing the theoretically intended meaning of a concept” ( Song et al., 2013 ), a composite variable can be created to logically represent a multi-dimensional social disadvantage .

The following subsection briefly describes study implementation. First, we locate areas of disadvantage where multiple factors associated with various aspects of disadvantage co-locate spatially and term these places “multi-dimensional social disadvantaged areas”. Then, we examine how employment and unemployment were impacted in these already socially vulnerable areas. We map geographical inequalities in employment and unemployment rates during the period of COVID-19-related economic recession. For the first objective, we identify socially disadvantaged counties within TN which is part of coronavirus “red zone” states of the US southern Sunbelt region applying consistent criteria. For the second objective, we compare employment and unemployment outcomes between areas with high and low disadvantage.

1.1.1. Employment and coronavirus

This subsection discusses the role of employment and how it was impacted by the COVID-19-caused economic recession. The literature recognizes the complex interrelationship between employment and overall health and well-being. Negative COVID-19 impacts on urban economy include loss of citizens' income, while movement restrictions and ‘stay home’ measures adversely impacted tourism and hospitality and small- and medium sized businesses due to the closure of markets, food outlets and social spaces ( Wilkinson et al., 2020 ).

Millions of essential or blue-collar workers are still doing their jobs out of necessity and because they cannot telecommute and work jobs that cannot be done from home and have higher exposure to the virus. Some racial groups disproportionally have jobs that do not allow them to work from home and where social distancing is a challenge. Prior studies find that workplaces of low-income individuals tend to be close to their residential spaces, and disproportionately concentrated in lower-wage industries such as hospitality and retail services ( Antipova, 2020 ). These industries commonly represent essential services experiencing higher exposure to the COVID virus through workplaces. At the same time, minorities and lower-income groups often live in inner-ring suburbs with older housing and aging infrastructure ( Antipova, 2020 ) in multiunit structures and in multigenerational households which inhibit the ability to practice social distancing increasing the risks of disease occurrence and deaths ( Qualls et al., 2017 ). In addition, minorities and lower-income groups have fewer options for protecting both their health and economic well-being ( Gould and Wilson, 2020 ). Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic people (64.5%) considered at high risk for coronavirus live with at least one person who is unable to work from home, compared to 56.5% of black and less than half (47%) of white Americans, according to a recent study ( Selden and Berdahl, 2020 ).

Despite the pandemic-induced layoffs, job hires have occurred by major retailers such as Walmart and e-commerce giant Amazon, and takeout and delivery-based services such as Domino’s Pizza and Papa John’s which may become permanent positions. These workplaces may match the job skill sets of low-income residents of vulnerable communities. However, oftentimes many low-income workers benefitted less, even when jobs were created during the COVID-19. To illustrate, big technology companies (i.e., communication services: Netflix, Tencent, Facebook, T-Mobile; information technology: Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Zoom Video, PayPal, Shopify; consumer discretionary: Amazon, Tesla, Alibaba, etc.) prospered in the pandemic with the financial success measured by equity value added ( Financial Times, 2020 ). Workers who lost jobs in low-income segment such as hospitality sector may be hired by retailers such as Kroger or CVS. However, many others from the communities with high social disadvantage may not have a skill set needed at technology firms that benefit from the working from home trend and hire skilled workers including software engineers and product designers. Cross-industry employment shifts plays a minor role in total job creation, while employer-specific factors primarily account for job reallocation ( Barrero et al., 2020 ).

1.1.2. Unemployment and coronavirus

This subsection discusses how unemployment was impacted by the COVID-19-caused economic recession. An economic recession occurs when there is a substantial drop in overall economic activity diffused throughout the economy for longer than a few months. While past recessions were driven by an inherently economic or financial shock, the current recession is caused by a public health crisis ( Weinstock, 2020 ). COVID-19 caused a drop in consumer demand across all industrial sectors resulting in economic recession and massive unemployment where not only hourly workers but salaried professionals lost their jobs ( Petterson et al., 2020 ). A range of factors contributed to the spatial variation in economic damage including the share of jobs in industries delivering non-essential services to in-person customers ( Dey and Loewenstein, 2020 ), declines in personal consumption caused by individual fears of contracting COVID-19 ( Goolsbee and Syverson, 2020 ), and the implementation of social policies including stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns ( Gupta et al., 2020 ).

Unemployment rate is defined as a percentage of unemployed workers in the total labor force. The rate is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which uses both the establishment data (captured by the Current Employment Statistics program) and household surveys (Current Population Survey) to generate the labor market data ( Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2020b ). A person is unemployed if they were not employed during the survey’s reference week and who had actively searched for a job in the 4-week period ending with the reference week, and were presently available for work ( BLS, 2020b ).

Caused by the COVID-19, the unemployment rate reached a peak in April 2020 at 14.7% nationwide, an unprecedented joblessness amount since employment data collection started in 1948. It exceeded the previous peaks during the Great Recession and after ( Falk et al., 2020 ). The official unemployment rate may have been over 20%, since the actual level of joblessness could have been understated due to local unemployment rate measurement errors ( Coibion et al., 2020 ). In addition, the unemployment rate was understated due to a geographically widespread misclassification of those who was not at work but considered employed and non-inclusion of labor force non-participants who still counted as employed ( Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2020a ). Further, the COVID-19 caused the rapid rate of change in unemployment at the national level challenging accurate forecast of the monthly unemployment rate ( Weinstock, 2020 ).

Overall, current unemployment (using the most recently available county-level data at the time of writing for December 2020) is still elevated and is almost twice as high as it was back in February 2020 which represented the business cycle peak with the peak of payroll employment. March 2020 was the first month of the subsequent current economic recession as declared by The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, 2020) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which turned out the worst downturn after the Great Recession. As Fig. 1 shows using the Current Population Survey data (Series ID: LNS14000000) from the BLS, during the prior recessions the unemployment rate rose gradually reaching its peak, and in the pandemic-caused recession it increased unprecedentedly to its peak over one month, from March 2020 to April 2020 by 10.3% (from 3.5% in February 2020 to 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.7% in April). After that, the rate declined as workers continued to return to work to 6.3% in December 2020.

U.S. Historical unemployment rate for workers 16 years and over, January 1948 to December 2020, % (seasonally adjusted).

Some communities can absorb the impact of economic downturns due to more favorable economic and social factors protecting residents from adversity. Yet other communities are witnessing the effect of rising unemployment in the time of COVID-19. Loss of income and livelihood has further effects: as wages drop, more people are forced into poverty while simultaneously people's health is impacted. Unemployment impacts all-cause mortality. Fig. 2 presents the dynamics of unemployment distribution across counties in TN for the selected months. Shown are pre-COVID-19 unemployment rates as of August 2019 ( Fig. 2 a), followed by May 2020 ( Fig. 2 b) where even the lowest levels of unemployment exceed the highest rates of the pre-pandemic period even in wealthy counties around Nashville (seen in the legend entries), August 2020 ( Fig. 2 c), and September 2020 ( Fig. 2 d). The overall unemployment abates somewhat during the later stage, and the general spatial pattern resembles that of the pre-COVID-19 period with higher unemployment concentrated in the southwestern corner of the state around Memphis.

Dynamics of unemployment rate across counties in TN for selected months: (a) August 2019, (b) May 2020; (c) August 2020; (d) September 2020.

1.1.3. Study area

Tennessee is home to large cities including Nashville (the county seat), Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga. Despite urban diversified economy, there was a steep decline in the number of international and domestic tourists impacting urban economy. Among cities listed above, Memphis, located in Shelby County, is a shrinking city with a declining population base. Urban shrinkage makes cities more vulnerable due to very negative impacts on urban economy. Shrinking cities are characterized by higher unemployment rates, depopulation (as people with higher economic and social status leave elsewhere), and a higher share of older people (increasing a share of individuals with underlying health conditions) ( Haase et al., 2014 ; Hartt 2019 ; Hoekveld 2012 ; Krzysztofik et al., 2020 ). The shrinking cities have higher exposure to extreme socioeconomic phenomena, including financial stress due to the decreases in the city’s budget. Decreasing budget in its turn has further urban development implications since implementation of some plans deemed of lesser priority such as environmental and cultural may be delayed and cancelled altogether ( Kunzmann, 2020 ; Sharifi and Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020 ).

Tennessee is one of the US southern Sunbelt states which had infection surges since summer 2020 due to the aggressive push for economy opening by then-President Trump administration. The pandemic has affected unemployment for every state in the United States ( Falk et al., 2020 ). Fig. 3 portrays selected industries impacted by the economic recession in Tennessee using seasonally adjusted data on employees on nonfarm payrolls for November 2019 (as a base period), September–November 2020. Unemployment rates concentrate disproportionately in sectors providing in-person non-essential services where some demographic groups are overrepresented. This results in substantially higher unemployment rates for those workers ( Cortes and Forsythe, 2020 ; Fairlie, 2020 ). Accordingly, it can be seen in Fig. 3 that in Tennessee, among the reported industries, leisure and hospitality has suffered the most, followed by jobs in government, education and health services, professional and business services, and trade, transportation, utilities. There was a slight increase in jobs in financial activities from 2019 to 2020 ( Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2020a ). The hardest hit industries tend to employ demographic groups such as women, minorities, low-income workers, and younger workers who have experienced greater job losses ( Murray and Olivares, 2020 ).

Employees on nonfarm payrolls by selected industry sector, seasonally adjusted, in TN.

2. Materials and methods

In the absence of fine-scale monthly data on employment and unemployment, we sourced county-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to track monthly changes in employment and unemployment in Tennessee (retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/lau/ ). Labor force data were extracted from this official primary source.

We used a comparative assessment approach to analyze the COVID-19-based labor market outcomes including the rates of COVID-19-related employment and unemployment attributable to social disadvantage conditions. For this, we stratify data based on community disadvantage status, and combine data in a comparative assessment framework. We proceed and identify disadvantaged communities using the methodology described below. Next, we test the hypothesis that in areas with high social disadvantage where more essential workers are more likely to reside, the unemployment is higher while employment opportunities are lower by comparing unemployment and employment rates within these communities to those of more privileged communities.

3. Theory/calculation

We focus on the areas where the multiple risk factors identified in the recent literature co-locate spatially and term these places “ multi-dimensional social disadvantaged areas ”. We carried out a rigorous literature review of the variables to stand in for social disadvantage in this research. The following demographic and socio-economic factors have been selected to represent community’s vulnerability: (1) Minorities and ethnicity; (2) Crowded households; (3) Poverty; (4) Education; (5) Underlying medical conditions (obesity); and (6) Unemployment. For the 1st variable, minorities and ethnicity , we used percent minority population and Hispanic ethnicity as studies commonly use race and ethnicity as vulnerability metrics (as explained in Section 2 Background information). For the 2nd variable, crowded households , we used percent households that are multigenerational as an indicator of crowdedness, and thus, indicating area’s disadvantage with a high share of such households. For the 3rd variable, poverty , we chose percent of households below 100% of federal poverty level which is also known as the poverty line. It is an economic measure of income. The poverty guidelines are updated annually by the US Department of Health and Human Services to indicate the minimum income needed by a family for housing, food, clothing, transportation, and other basic necessities and to determine eligibility for certain welfare benefits. This measure was used because less affluent and less privileged households have fewer means and less access to various resources to cope with the effects of financial crises ( Pfeffer et al., 2013 ). Low-income households may be especially vulnerable to wage losses during the outbreak ( Qian and Fan, 2020 ). For the 4th variable, education , we used percent of population with less than high school diploma since lower educational attainment is an indicator of poverty and thus captures social disadvantage, while workers with better education have higher economic resilience when challenged with a large-scaled social shock ( Cutler et al., 2015 ; Kalleberg, 2011 ). For the 5th variable, underlying medical conditions , we used percent population with obesity as the top risk for COVID-19-related hospitalization. Supported by several lines of evidence, both domestically and internationally, obesity may predispose to more severe COVID-19 outcomes ( O’Hearn et al., 2021 ). Finally, for the 6th variable, unemployment , unemployment rate (averaged from August 2019 to January 2020 to adjust for seasonality) was used as a marker of overall vulnerability as it is linked to overall mortality. Further, regions with higher unemployment are more susceptible to business-cycle fluctuations, and thus, are more socially and economically vulnerable.

These socio-economic and demographic attributes (minority population, Hispanic ethnicity, federal poverty level, crowded households, adult obesity, lower educational attainment, and unemployment) have been used in this research to create a composite variable to represent a multi-dimensional social disadvantage (also referred to as vulnerability). Due to different variances in the original variables, we standardized them to prevent a disproportionate impact which may be caused by any one original variable with a large variance. The z-score transformation was applied by averaging the original variables and computing z scores with a mean of 0 and values ranging from negative to positive numbers ( Song et al., 2013 ).

Thus, the original variables were converted to z-scores to preserve the distribution of the raw scores and to ensure the equal contributions of the original variables. Next, we created a composite variable capturing a multi-dimensional social disadvantage. It was calculated by summing standardized z-scores of the original risk factors. The higher value can be interpreted as higher disadvantage while the lower value means more privileged communities. Based on the frequency distribution of values of the composite variable, we established a cut-off value for the composite variable to designate communities with high or low exposure to social disadvantage. We used the following method to determine the cut-off value of the composite variable. The values greater than 3.38 correspond to 1 standard deviation above the mean (or, the 88th percentile in the value distribution) indicating communities in the top 12 percent of social disadvantage and therefore, a higher share of factors contributing to disadvantage. This value was used to differentiate communities according to their disadvantage status. We identified twelve counties with high social disadvantage (N high  = 12), and other counties represent more privileged communities (N low  = 83). To test whether the taken approach correctly identifies disadvantaged communities, we conducted a Wilcoxon two-sample test for the variables of interest ( Table 1 ). We report the results of the estimates in the following section. The above socio-economic and demographic population characteristics come from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data, an annual nationwide survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, available for various geographic units and applied for areal units within the study area ( U. S. Census Bureau, 2020 ).

Descriptive statistics.

The basic descriptive demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the TN population are shown in Table 1 . It includes the summaries for communities with high and low social disadvantage allowing to compare the variables of interest between these communities. The following variables are reported: percent African American, percent Hispanic, median income, percent of people over 25 years who are less than high school graduates, estimated percent of obese adults, percent households below 100% of federal poverty level, and percent of multi-generation households. The factors comprising social disadvantage were statistically significantly different than those extant in more privileged counties. Compared with the general TN population, the disadvantaged cohort was generally more likely to be of non-Hispanic Black race; more impoverished; with less educational attainment, more obese, and had more households with crowded conditions.

To visualize social disadvantage and show how it varies across the space, we used our sample of social disadvantage measurements and created a surface of social disadvantage within the study area using the Geographic Information System (GIS). The interpolated surface was derived from an Inverse Distance Weighted technique ( Watson and Philip, 1985 ). Fig. 4 presents the surface illustrating that both urban and rural counties in Tennessee are subject to social disadvantage.

Social disadvantage within the study area.

We examined how unemployment changed from August 2019 to December 2020. Currently, all counties have substantially higher unemployment compared with that prior to COVID. Fig. 5 presents the results of the Nonparametric One-Way ANOVA test showing the distribution of Wilcoxon scores for unemployment rate for all counties in Tennessee combined, regardless of social disadvantage status, for 17 months. A statistically significant difference is found for unemployment rates between the pre-COVID period and the period since April 2020, with current unemployment rates although decreased but still significantly higher compared with those prior to the recession.

Nonparametric One-Way ANOVA and distribution of Wilcoxon scores for unemployment rate for all counties combined for 17 months (August 2019–October 2020), regardless of social disadvantage status.

We compared employment and unemployment rates for Tennessee counties stratified by the type of social disadvantage separately for each month. Fig. 6 presents the average employment and unemployment rates by community disadvantage from August 2019 to December 2020 in a graphical form. The results of the non-parametric Wilcoxon test for employment and unemployment rates are presented in Table 2 . Pre-COVID and before the unemployment peak in April 2020, communities with high social disadvantage consistently had less jobs and greater unemployment, which we tested statistically and found a significant difference for both outcomes of the labor market between communities by their disadvantage status ( Table 2 ). Shown in Table 2 , in April and May 2020, during the peak of unemployment and immediately after, unemployment rates observed in both types of communities were high with no statistical difference. In June, the differences again became prominent, when there were more jobs available in more advantaged areas and employment rate remained consistently greater in areas with less disadvantage. Also in June, unemployment rate remained consistently greater in areas with higher disadvantage. This month saw the greater difference in both outcomes since the COVID-19 than pre-pandemic (supported by higher p-values). Compared with all TN population, residents of disadvantaged counties had less jobs available and were more likely to be unemployed during all periods except for April and May.

Mean employment and unemployment stratified by community disadvantage status.

Wilcoxon Two-Sample Test: Distribution of Wilcoxon scores in employment and unemployment rates by community disadvantage status by month (August 2019–December 2020).

We examined the percent change in both labor market outcomes. Fig. 7 presents the percent change in mean employment ( Fig. 7 a), and mean unemployment by community disadvantage ( Fig. 7 b). The percent change in employment and unemployment was relatively small in both types of community during the pre-COVID period. However, the overall fluctuations in both conditions were greater in communities with high social disadvantage (evidenced by a greater range between ups and downs for disadvantaged communities shown with the black-colored symbols). On the other hand, employment and unemployment were more stable in more privileged communities (shown with the grey-colored symbols in the Fig. 7 ). During the unemployment peak in April 2020, the change in percent employment was −11.5 points from the previous month even in more advantaged counties, while the unemployment in April increased by 10.42 percentage points in disadvantaged counties.

Percent change in (a) mean employment; (b) mean unemployment by community disadvantage.

We show how various factors of social disadvantage intersect and combined impact economic vulnerability measured by unemployment rate. Fig. 8 reports the link between unemployment and social disadvantage pre-COVID (unemployment rate was averaged over August 2019–January 2020 in Fig. 8 a), and during COVID (unemployment rate for November 2020 is shown in Fig. 8 b). During the COVID pandemic, its impact is even stronger as evidenced by a greater slope of the line of fit, larger coefficients, and a greater R-squared value ( Fig. 8 b). The strong relationship between these factors of social disadvantage and economic outcomes in COVID-19 might inform post-COVID recovery intervention strategies to reduce COVID-19-related economic vulnerability burdens. For example, in the light of findings on socio-economic and demographic subpopulations at a higher risk for economic damages, prioritization of economic relief distribution might be based on community disadvantage status targeting individuals from areas with existing inequalities to increase economic resilience of marginalized communities.

Unemployment and Social disadvantage: (a) pre-COVID (averaged August 2019–January 2020); (b) during COVID (November 2020).

5. Discussion

Current studies on the impacts of COVID-19 tend to focus on medical aspects while non-medical urban research mostly analyzes the role of environmental quality. To better understand the full effects of pandemics on communities and minimize the various impacts as well as to improved response, other aspects need to be examined. This includes studying less researched themes including socio-economic impacts consisting of both social impacts and social factors making individuals and communities less resilient and more vulnerable to the effects of the COVID. Additionally, economic impacts of the pandemic-caused recession so far remain relatively underexplored and need to be investigated ( Sharifi and Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020 ).

Communities are often severely segregated along wealth and social lines in developing and developed world ( Wilkinson et al., 2020 ). We study the role of social factors and the impact of the COVID on labor market conditions in Tennessee. Specifically, we studied the impacts of social environment on employment and unemployment through the concept of a multi-dimensional social disadvantage by using geospatial science.

A recent study identified factors which can make a community more vulnerable to the pandemic’s effects using as a case study the province of Silesia in Poland, one of the largest industrial and mining regions in Europe. Specialized functions such as mining-oriented industries, large care centers, polycentricity, and urban shrinkage make communities most at risk due to very negative impacts on urban economy ( Krzysztofik et al., 2020 ). Since vulnerability is always very context-specific, we found a combination of different causal factors of social disadvantage captured by a composite variable making communities most at risk during the COVID reflected in broader social and economic outcomes. In creating a composite variable to capture social disadvantage logically and meaningfully, the following variables were used: % African American, % Hispanic, % below 100% federal poverty level, % population with less than high school diploma (an indicator of poverty), % multi-generation households (an indicator of crowdedness), % estimated obese adults reporting to be obese with the BMI 30 or greater, % unemployed. The proposed method can be generalized beyond the study area and used as a tool by policy makers using consistent criteria for the delineation of areas carrying a greater risk for the more severe impact by the pandemic due to co-existence and co-location of the multi-dimensional social disadvantage factors which are more likely to experience further socio-economic disruptions.

Current urban research on COVID economic impacts found that some cities are more vulnerable than others and are most at risk. Cities with an undiversified economic structure with industries where a large number of workers are shoulder-to-shoulder share cramped spaces for a prolonged time and where social distancing is challenging (e.g., meat-packing and poultry processing plants), cities relying on tourism as well as cities that have large care centers, polycentric cities, and shrinking cities are the most vulnerable to negative impacts on urban economy. The urban hotel market, city tax revenues, citizens' income, tourism and hospitality, small- and medium sized firms, urban food supply chain, and migrant workers are all impacted ( Krzysztofik et al., 2020 ). Other recent studies similarly concluded that the COVID has revealed the extreme vulnerability of cities and urban areas disrupting tourism and affecting supply chains in cities ( Batty, 2020 ; Gössling et al., 2020 ). We support this statement but also find that rural areas can experience a broad range of social and economic damages related to COVID.

Before and during the COVID-19 period, money laundering, limitations of economic development, environmental pollution and uncontrolled deforestation, population displacement, institutional incompetence, and corruption of political elites have been debated including corruption and conflagration in Bucharest before the pandemic ( Creţan & O’Brien, 2020 ), as well as other contestations on selling masks and different medical products highlighted in different countries during the pandemic period. Following catalytic events, the affected community may respond to long-held concerns with demands to address these problems bringing about important changes to the systems. Marginalized stigmatized minorities may effectively overcome discriminatory laws, higher poverty and other constraints and influence public opinion and politics in their favor through collective action via various strategies including protests against corruption and the inaction of the political leaders in Romania in 2015 forcing the resignation of the Government, and protests in the US in the aftermath of police violence against black people have been documented ( Creţan & O’Brien, 2020 ; Fryer, 2019 ). During the COVID-19, the non-payment of wages and poor working and living conditions caused seasonal workers in Germany to protest against this unfair treatment, however, generating low coverage in the national press ( Mayer-Ahuja, 2020 ).

6. Conclusions

Some socio-economic and demographic conditions consistently and significantly impact some communities more often than others, particularly based on ethnic minority status, low income, and rural location. The conditions include systemic issues such as fragmented health care system (within which some individuals do not get health care in a timely fashion), racism and structural disparities in education, income, wealth, a consistent lack of economic opportunity, environmental factors, transportation and housing ( Petterson et al., 2020 ). These factors interact in complex ways resulting in persisting social environment-driven health and other inequalities which if left unaddressed will only increase.

Respectively, among policies goals across the Global North enhancing wellbeing and social mobility for disadvantaged and marginalized families, creating socially mixed, heterogeneous neighborhoods (that is, desegregation) is promoted to avoid spatial segregation based on racial and ethnic membership and class while supporting social cohesion ( Méreiné-Berki et al., 2021 ). Importantly, a marginalized community is not a homogeneous group as the lived experience of disadvantage within the communities is variegated: respectively, policies to improve socio-spatial integration and addressing the various causes of extreme poverty including social, economic, and cultural that improve social equity have been suggested since desegregation on its own is insufficient (( Méreiné-Berki et al., 2021 ). Sustainable planning may mitigate consequences of urban sprawl noted in the urban studies literature including urban blight which is the greatest in poorest areas entrapping the low-income residents in the inner city where they have only limited regional mobility and access to job opportunities at the urban edge. Understanding the links between a development of a metropolitan-wide blight remediation strategy toward a sustainable urban form and welfare enhancing among the disadvantaged populations needs to be further investigated.

During public health crises, the importance of the central role of the community has been highlighted especially when some state-based social services may be less available due to lockdown. Rather than inventing new solutions, voluntary informal social networks that have been generated by communities utilize local assets and resources ( Bear et al., 2020 ). Community-based initiatives may rely on the voluntary sector, faith- and charities-based organizations, and social enterprises for various services including help with visiting housebound people, or using them as a distribution hub for food distribution to families in need.

In conclusion, in this study, we situated the research on economic impacts of the COVID in the broader context of social disadvantage with findings both domestically and from other countries in line with those in our study. The earlier misleading view of the global epidemic representing a systematic disadvantage that may affect and limit everyone’s economic activity, with any socioeconomic status or from any geographic location, was rejected. Our finding indicates that certain factors may increase people's vulnerability to the financial stress related to COVID-19. We find support that the social distribution of economic vulnerability is magnified in regions with pre-existing social disparities, creating new forms of disparity ( Qian and Fan, 2020 ).

This work was supported by the UTHSC/UofM SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 Research CORNET (Collaboration Research Network) Award.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Anzhelika Antipova: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Chapter 21. Unemployment

Introduction to Unemployment

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Candidates

Nearly eight million U.S. jobs were lost during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, with unemployment peaking at 10% in October 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That is a huge number of positions gone. During the tepid recovery, some positions were added, but as of summer 2013, unemployment had remained persistently higher than the pre-recession rate of less than 5%. Some economists and policymakers worried the recovery would be “jobless.” With the economy growing, albeit slowly, why wasn’t the unemployment number falling? Why were firms not hiring?

Peter Cappelli, noted Wharton management professor and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, does not believe the job search process is akin to what he terms the “Home Depot” view of hiring. According to him, this view “basically says that filling a job is like replacing a part in a washing machine. You simply find someone who does the exact same job as that broken part, plug him or her into the washing machine and that is it.” The job search, for both the prospective employee and the employer, is more complex than that.

In a hiring situation, employers hold all the cards. They write the job descriptions, determine the salaries, decide when and how to advertise positions, and set the controls on employment application screening software. Advertising for positions has increased as the economic recovery progresses, yet here’s the kicker: Employers say there are no applicants out there who meet their needs. While the unemployment rate is now below 6% as of the beginning of 2015, many economists and policymakers (including the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen) are still concerned about “slack” in the labor market. So the question arises: where are the job candidates?

That question leads us to the topic of this chapter—unemployment. What constitutes it? How is it measured? And if the economy is growing, why isn’t the pool of job openings growing along with it? Sounds like the economy has a case of “missing” candidates.

Chapter Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• How the Unemployment Rate is Defined and Computed
• Patterns of Unemployment
• What Causes Changes in Unemployment over the Short Run
• What Causes Changes in Unemployment over the Long Run

Unemployment can be a terrible and wrenching life experience—like a serious automobile accident or a messy divorce—whose consequences can be fully understood only by someone who has gone through it. For unemployed individuals and their families, there is the day-to-day financial stress of not knowing where the next paycheck is coming from. There are painful adjustments, like watching your savings account dwindle, selling a car and buying a cheaper one, or moving to a less expensive place to live. Even when the unemployed person finds a new job, it may pay less than the previous one. For many people, their job is an important part of their self worth. When unemployment separates people from the workforce, it can affect family relationships as well as mental and physical health.

The human costs of unemployment alone would justify making a low level of unemployment an important public policy priority. But unemployment also includes economic costs to the broader society. When millions of unemployed but willing workers cannot find jobs, an economic resource is going unused. An economy with high unemployment is like a company operating with a functional but unused factory. The opportunity cost of unemployment is the output that could have been produced by the unemployed workers.

This chapter will discuss how the unemployment rate is defined and computed. It will examine the patterns of unemployment over time, for the U.S. economy as a whole, for different demographic groups in the U.S. economy, and for other countries. It will then consider an economic explanation for unemployment, and how it explains the patterns of unemployment and suggests public policies for reducing it.

Principles of Economics Copyright © 2016 by Rice University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Anti-semitic attitudes of the mass public: estimates and explanations based on a survey of the moscow oblast.

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JAMES L. GIBSON, RAYMOND M. DUCH, ANTI-SEMITIC ATTITUDES OF THE MASS PUBLIC: ESTIMATES AND EXPLANATIONS BASED ON A SURVEY OF THE MOSCOW OBLAST, Public Opinion Quarterly , Volume 56, Issue 1, SPRING 1992, Pages 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1086/269293

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In this article we examine anti-Semitism as expressed by a sample of residents of the Moscow Oblast (Soviet Union). Based on a survey conducted in 1920, we begin by describing anti-Jewish prejudice and support for official discrimination against Jews. We discover a surprisingly low level of expressed anti-Semitism among these Soviet respondents and virtually no support for state policies that discriminate against Jews. At the same time, many of the conventional hypotheses predicting anti-Semitism are supported in the Soviet case. Anti-Semitism is concentrated among those with lower levels of education, those whose personal financial condition is deteriorating, and those who oppose further democratization of the Soviet Union. We do not take these findings as evidence that anti-Semitism is a trivial problem in the Soviet Union but, rather, suggest that efforts to combat anti-Jewish movements would likely receive considerable support from ordinary Soviet people.

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Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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Unemployment

After dropping in 2020, teen summer employment may be poised to continue its slow comeback.

Last summer, businesses trying to come back from the COVID-19 pandemic hired nearly a million more teens than in the summer of 2020.

Most in the U.S. say young adults today face more challenges than their parents’ generation in some key areas

About seven-in-ten say young adults today have a harder time when it comes to saving for the future, paying for college and buying a home.

Some gender disparities widened in the U.S. workforce during the pandemic

Among adults 25 and older who have no education beyond high school, more women have left the labor force than men.

Immigrants in U.S. experienced higher unemployment in the pandemic but have closed the gap

With the economic recovery gaining momentum, unemployment among immigrants is about equal with that of U.S.-born workers.

During the pandemic, teen summer employment hit its lowest point since the Great Recession

Fewer than a third (30.8%) of U.S. teens had a paying job last summer. In 2019, 35.8% of teens worked over the summer.

College graduates in the year of COVID-19 experienced a drop in employment, labor force participation

The challenges of a COVID-19 economy are clear for 2020 college graduates, who have experienced downturns in employment and labor force participation.

U.S. labor market inches back from the COVID-19 shock, but recovery is far from complete

Here’s how the COVID-19 recession is affecting labor force participation and unemployment among American workers a year after its onset.

Long-term unemployment has risen sharply in U.S. amid the pandemic, especially among Asian Americans

About four-in-ten unemployed workers had been out of work for more than six months in February 2021, about double the share in February 2020.

A Year Into the Pandemic, Long-Term Financial Impact Weighs Heavily on Many Americans

About a year since the coronavirus recession began, there are some signs of improvement in the U.S. labor market, and Americans are feeling somewhat better about their personal finances than they were early in the pandemic.

Unemployed Americans are feeling the emotional strain of job loss; most have considered changing occupations

About half of U.S. adults who are currently unemployed and are looking for a job are pessimistic about their prospects for future employment.

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