Proactive behaviour in unemployment: findings and implications

Abstract The widely accepted but little scrutinized explanatory framework for documented effects of unemployment, the deprivation hypothesis, is based on the claim that unemployment deprives one of, and employment imposes on one, experience within five crucial categories, quite apart from financial impoverishment. In this study we describe a qualitative empirical examination of 11 unemployed people who are experiencing material but not psychological deprivation and who have adopted a very proactive stance towards unemployment. Proactivity is characterized by a person choosing to initiate, intervene in or reperceive situations in a way which allows the person (agent) to act in valued directions rather than respond passively to imposed change. The deprivation framework is discussed in the light of this study, and an alternative framework based on the assumption of personal agency as characterizing both employed and unemployed people is commended. Implications for research on unemployment and leisure are drawn.