Youth unemployment and the risk of social relationship exclusion: a qualitative study in a Chinese context

Abstract

This paper explores the impact of unemployment on young people's social relationships. Based on data obtained from interviews with 19 unemployed young persons in Shanghai, China, the present study shows that unemployment diminishes their social contacts and results in their social networks being characterised by strong peer ties but emerging segregation from society. This in turn results in less effective social support. Accordingly, this paper argues that social policy for unemployed youth should aim at helping them build social networks and counter social relationship exclusion.

Keywords:

• youth unemployment
• social exclusion
• qualitative study

Introduction

Similar to many other countries, China has witnessed growth in youth unemployment over recent years. According to the Report on Supply and Demand Analysis in the First Quarter of 2011: Public Labor Force Market in Selected Chinese Cities issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the People's Republic of China, in the 101 selected Chinese cities, the unemployed group accounts for 55.7% of all job seekers, of which 24.7%, the highest percentage, are young people unemployed for the first time (not including those who experienced unemployment experiences) (China Human Resources Market Information Monitoring Center, 2011). Given that unemployment can affect the unemployed, especially their social networks, in order to make effective social policies to support them, it makes sense to study the impact of unemployment on young people's social relationships. Although social relationships and jobs are important topics in sociology, traditional research has focused on the significance of relationships for job seeking (e.g. Bian, 1997; Granovetter, 1995). The study of the consequences of unemployment will benefit knowledge building in this sociological topic. Using the grounded-theory method, this study explores not only the influence mechanism of unemployment on the social relationships of unemployed youth in a Chinese context but also presents policy recommendations to tackle the issue.

Literature review

Academic study of the effect of unemployment on the individual's social relationships can trace its roots to the 1930s, when a large number of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression. During this decade of severe economic recession, Jahoda studied the consequences of chronic unemployment with ‘sociography’, which focused on the effects of long-term unemployment on an individual's social contact. She found that unemployed people loosened their social ties and attended fewer community activities (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, & Zeisel, 2002). Bakke (1933) pioneered the social study of unemployment and discussed the impacts of unemployment on the individual's family life, entertainment, social contact and political attitude. Bakke later (1969) focused on the effect of unemployment on people's social contacts and found that the frequency of social contacts decreased due to unemployment.

After the 1970s, the oil crisis led to economic recession in the Western world, and another unemployment disaster occurred. The study of unemployment again became of interest. Jahoda (1982) put forth the unemployment deprivation theory inspired from her studies in the 1930s. The theory pointed out that work not only explicitly brings in a salary but also implicitly helps to establish social ties in addition to family and neighbourhood. Unemployment removes the potential function of the job in building social ties. The deprivation theory led unemployment studies in this domain from the 1970s to 1990s. For example, Coffield, Borrill, and Marshall (1986), Furnham (1994) and Wallace (1987) all applied deprivation theory in their studies of unemployment and the social relationships of youth.

Since the 1990s, the new ‘social exclusion’ concept has entered the field and become popular. For example, Gallie and Paugam (2000) referred to the effects of unemployment on the individual's financial condition, labour market engagement and social relationships as ‘social exclusion’. In research on unemployed youth, two large studies also applied the social exclusion concept in analysing the effects of unemployment on young people's social relationships: Youth Unemployment and Social Exclusion: Dimensions, Subjective Experiences and Institutional Responses in Six Countries of the European Union (YUSEDER, Kieselbach et al., 2001) and Youth Unemployment and Social Exclusion in Europe: A Comparative Study (Hammer, 2003).

Three brief conclusions can be drawn from the above review of studies in the three stages. First are the effects of unemployment on frequency of social contacts. The 1930s study found that, after losing his or her job, the individual's social contacts drastically declined (Bakke, 1969). However, more recent studies showed that the difference in frequency of social contacts between employed and unemployed people was not very big (Gallie, 1999). Second are the effects of unemployment on the structure of social relationships. Unemployed people (especially women) have social activities mainly at home and most also with unemployed people (Gallie, 1999; Morris, 1992; Nordenmark, 1999; Russell, 1999). This is called social segregation or social isolation. Third is the effect of unemployment on the quality of social relationships. Due to social segregation or isolation, social support for unemployed people is limited (Gallie, 1999; Russell, 1999; Wilson, 1987).

Research questions and methodology

The literature reviewed above is a solid foundation for further study but leaves much to be desired. First, no detailed classification of social relations is presented, resulting in a lack of in-depth probing of the effect of unemployment on diversified social relations. However, when it comes to research in the Chinese context, detailed social relationship categories are a prerequisite for drawing reasonable conclusions. For Chinese, there is a relationship hierarchy ranging from family members and close friends to mere acquaintances. This is called the ‘relationship stratification pattern’ (Fei, 1998), wherein Chinese people's principles of communication differ in accordance with different relations (Hwang, 1987), and as such the effects of unemployment on different social relations are diversified. Second, due to the limitation of research design, most quantitative studies, for example, Gallie and Paugam (2000) focus on the ultimate impacts of unemployment on social relationships but ignore the process of being affected. In contrast, the qualitative school, represented by Wallace (1987) and Kieselbach and his associates (2001), overemphasises the classification of the effects of unemployment and does not fully apply the strength of qualitative methods to illustrate the processes. Third, previous studies confined explanations to the deprivation theory, rendering other explanations superficial. Additionally, studies in China require consideration of local factors for explanations. Fourth, the agency of unemployed individuals was ignored. Previous studies focused on the effects of unemployment but paid little attention to the possible active responses of the unemployed.

In light of this analysis, the research questions of this study are as follows: What are the effects of unemployment on unemployed Chinese youth? Do the effects vary in accordance with different social relations? Which factors contribute to the process of being affected? How do unemployed youth cope with their unemployment?

Because the research questions are on unemployment and its associated processes of social exclusion, so-called ‘process problems’ (Maxwell, 1996), the present study does not proceed according to regular research methodology following hypothesis-deductive logic. Instead, it applies the grounded theory method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). This method aims not to examine existing theories but to explore and develop theories through data. Instead of proceeding from a set of hypotheses drawn from existing theories, the grounded theory method first sets an extensive subject or topic and then collects related data from people's lived experience for analysis and conducts theoretical sampling based on the concepts emerging in data analysis. This is followed by collecting more data to analyse and to compare them with the existing data. This process should be done continually until theoretical saturation in data collection and analysis is achieved.

The study employed the grounded theory method to analyse qualitative data obtained from in-depth individual interviews. In the data collection stage, 19 Shanghai-born unemployed young persons aged between 16 and 25 were interviewed face to face at least once (four were interviewed twice) from June 2004 to February 2005. Additionally, five parents of unemployed youth were interviewed. The time of each interview with the unemployed youth was at least 45 minutes, and all interviews were transcribed with the interviewees' permission for coding and analysis.

Results

Instrumental ties and the risk of social isolation

Based on the work of Hwang (1987), this paper classifies the social relationships of unemployed youth in China into two main categories, instrumental ties and expressive ties. The study shows that unemployment changes young people's instrumental ties. Unemployed youth have fewer instrumental ties when they are out of work and are more exposed to social isolation. In this process, unemployment deprivation theory makes sense to some degree. First, as previously mentioned, work potentially functions to provide individuals with social contacts beyond their families, and normal daily routine is the major way for the youth to have social contacts (Roberts, 1997). Therefore, losing a job indicates the possibility of being deprived of social contacts (Wallace, 1987). Second, young unemployed people have no salary, and their financial status may prevent them from having frequent social contacts. Especially in China, eating dinner together is a part of people's social activities, and the participants have to pay for the ‘social contacts over dinner’ (Bian, 2004). The following story is from the author's interview with Ming about whether he has been in contact with his middle school classmates after graduation. From his answer, it can be seen that financial status is one reason for preventing Ming (who is from a lower-income family) from frequent social contact.

Ming: I don't contact my classmates as frequently as before. For example, last week I was informed of a party of my middle school classmates. I declined with the excuse that I was occupied with studying that day because I was hesitant about the cost. They will have lunch in Dagama [a South American-type buffet restaurant in Shanghai], which costs RMB58 each and drinks are extra. The truth is not that I can't pay for the meal, but I don't think it's necessary.

Furthermore, two local factors are involved. The first one is about losing face. In answering the question of whether there is any difference before and after unemployment, an interviewee named Jie said that ‘it's pretty much different! I am a girl with a deep sense of self-esteem, so when I am out of work, if I am with my friends I am ashamed and feel I lose face because they all have jobs but me’. However, not all unemployed youth regard unemployment as shameful. For example, one interviewee named Pang said he would not feel ashamed in front of his neighbours if he lost his job, because there are many unemployed people in his neighbourhood. He told the author that in his community, a new estate for working-class people, there are on average seven or eight young men out of work in each building, which all the neighbors know so ‘it wouldn't be embarrassing’. This shows that the unemployed youth's feeling of losing face comes from comparison with employed people but not from unemployment itself. As Hwang (1998) stated, the self constructed by Chinese people is the ‘self in relationship’. Face is the ‘situated self’ one perceives in a particular situation. Therefore, if unemployment is not a minority phenomenon in a person's living environment, unemployed youth will not necessarily feel ashamed; but if unemployment is rare in a person's environment, unemployed youth will feel they have lost face if they lose their job and so deliberately cut contact with working people.

The second factor is parental supervision. An interviewee called Shan, who received the punishment of detention because of petty theft, plays Internet games at home all day and ‘seldom meets some of his friends now’. Shan's mother told the author, ‘we only hope that he can behave himself and not make trouble. If only he doesn't make trouble and doesn't associate with bad guys, we will give him whatever he wants’. So Shan's parents keep him home and meet as many of his desires as possible. This case shows that parental involvement is likely to influence the social contacts of some unemployed youth. Shan's parents believe that they have the right and obligation to supervise their child. They think that, to prevent their child from ‘doing evil’ and ‘making trouble’, which is highly likely for an unemployed young person, they need to separate their child from the ‘bad guys’ who ‘do evil’, that is, to build a less permeable ‘boundary’ (Ma, 2001) between family and the outside world. The parents choose to fulfil the child's material requirements and keep the child home. When the child complies with parental control in view of the parents' authority or financial protection, he or she reduces or loses some social contacts.

Unemployment and expressive ties

However, these factors have little effect on the expressive ties of the unemployed. For example, one interviewee called Yan, unemployed after expulsion from college, told the author that he has ‘eight close classmates’ from high school. When asked whether he feels embarrassed about his dismissal and connects less with his close friends from high school, Yan gave the following answer.

Yan: Never ever! They understand my situation now, and we have kept in touch with each other during the last four years in college. They know that I am not good at academic work. And when I had to quit, I told them frankly and they didn't look down on me. They understood and we are truly good friends. That's fine.

Moreover, Yan's high school classmates still often ask him out and treat him.

Yan: They know my family's financial difficulty [Yan's father passed away and his mother is retired with a monthly income of RMB800], so when they ask me out, they won't ask me to pay but will pay for me.

The relationship between Yan and his friends can be defined as ‘expressive ties’ in which unemployment has less effect. First, expressive ties are established on genuine emotion. Both parties in expressive ties will not care too much about cost and even support each other financially. Second, face does not matter. Yan's case shows people with expressive ties understand each other well and the individual naturally surrenders to open frankness, so there is no need for ‘face-saving’ within the tie. Financial limitation and problems of face do not work in expressive ties; unemployment here makes the other party contact and care about the unemployed more.

The previous analysis shows that unemployment has little effect on contacts in expressive ties; in fact, the other party in expressive ties can provide emotional and financial support to the unemployed. Hence, the unemployed in expressive ties are not completely socially isolated. But expressive ties can rarely provide all the support unemployed people need. For example, when asked whether his high school classmates give him job recommendations, Yan said that ‘they haven't done that. My friends have just entered [the labour market]; they have few resources and little capability to recommend me.‘ Bian (1999) noted that ‘strong ties’ are key for finding a job in China if people in strong ties are the employer or involved in employment decision making. This is not the situation for Yan's ‘strong ties’, as he has said, and thus his classmates cannot find him a job. Unemployed youth like Yan usually have expressive ties or strong ties with their peers who are fresh labour market entrants, and they themselves have limited ‘social resources’ or ‘social capital’, which requires long-term network building. Therefore, unemployed youth cannot obtain many resources from their peers. These unemployed youth can have a social network of expressive ties or strong ties that can offer them some emotional and financial support but not necessarily enjoy networks offering rich social resources that can find them a job.

Shared unemployment experience and social network segregation

The previous analysis demonstrates that unemployment can cause financial uneasiness and face-losing problems, which can lead to fewer social contacts. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that unemployment can not only separate the group from connection but also can draw them into relations: the shared unemployment experience can often bring the group together where new emotional relations tend to become established.

For example, due to financial uneasiness and fear of losing face, Ming contacted his middle school classmates less frequently after he lost his job. However, it is interesting that he made friends with the brother of one of his classmates, Chang, who had been unemployed for six years. Ming told the author that he met Chang at his classmate's home, and gradually they became good friends because ‘we understand each other and have experienced a similar situation’. Ming said apart from his girlfriend, he chatted with Chang most. When Ming was asked about his relationship with the neighbours who grew up with him, he said they were occupied with studies or work and stressed that ‘birds of a feather flock together! The working guys are busy with their own business and leave unoccupied men like Chang and me together all day’. Ming's ‘birds of a feather flock together’ remark explains his relationship with Chang. However, in addition to being unemployed, are there other factors that ‘bring the unemployed together’?

Ming told the author that Chang explained to him the government re-employment training programme, often shared with him information about job openings listed on the Internet and went to interviews with him. Something similar happened to an interviewee called Liu. After graduating from a vocational school, Liu keep in touch with only one classmate, because ‘she is unemployed like me’. Liu said once her classmate found the government's internship programme, she told her and together they took the computer clerk training course subsidised by the government. Now they are considering job seeking through a job centre. In addition, for entertainment, they read together in the Xinhua Bookstore. D'Ercole (1988, cited in Williams & Popay, 1999) showed that a single mother gains more support from other single mother colleagues other than from family members and neighbours, and the supportive exchange happens not in unilateral obligation relations but when there is mutual help and shared experience. Social policy and its practice constructs a shared identity of ‘single mothers’, which constitutes the basis for recognition and support for each other. From this point of view, policy and its practice, like the government re-employment training and internship programmes, help to build the common identity of Ming and Liu with their friends, ‘unemployed youth’, which is the basis of them ‘grouping together’.

Therefore, unemployment can integrate just as it can separate people. The possibility of emotional communication and mutual support among unemployed youth is born from their shared unemployment experience. And separation and integration changes their social networks. For example, Ming was separated from his classmates and kept in close contact with Chang, who was also out of work. That shows the members of his social network are aligned mainly with the unemployed, which resulted in social segregation. Though unemployed youth can get emotional support and mutual help in their segregated social networks, they are confined to a vulnerable group. Granovetter (1995) pointed out that successful job seekers obtain job vacancy information not only from advertisements or job centres but also from their social networks. For example, an interviewee named Chu told the author that he would call his middle school classmates who work in fashion stores and ask them for help finding him a job. Fashion stores will not advertise; instead, the vacancies are usually filled by employees’ referral of friends. In the second interview with Chu, the author was told that he was waiting for a job interview, arranged by a former classmate working at a fashion store. It can be seen that social relationships which help to provide information about job openings are very important for unemployed people. However, if the individual's social networks are segregated and confined to an unemployed group that has no information about job openings, the chance of obtaining information from social contacts is lower, as it was for Ming, than for those who have not been segregated, such as Chu.

Positive coping: developing social networks

Fortunately, some unemployed youth cope positively with the risk of social isolation they face. For example, Chu mainly contacted an unemployed group, including his childhood friends Liang and Jin. However, in order to get job information, he also took the initiative to make connections with employed classmates. In this aspect, one interviewee called Lee may be a more typical case. When Lee was unemployed and could not make ends meet, he would stay at home and play electronic games alone, but when he had some money, he would treat his old colleagues.

Lee: Now I treat you to this meal that may cost me RMB100. I don't mean to earn my RMB100 back from you, but I want to use my money to strengthen our relationship. I don't mean to use you in future, but I can ask you for help when I am in difficulty. When I'm treating you, I tell you I'm unemployed and ask for your help and to remember me when you have a good job in future. I will not waste the money only to eat and play, which has no returns. If I had a job, I wouldn't be that calculating about spending money, and I can use my money at will just for fun. But when I am out of work, all the money I spend is to earn money.

Lee's story illustrates how he takes the initiative to keep social contacts, and he has his own way of doing this. Lee's logic shows that if the money spent cannot create value, it is wasted. This indicates that Lee has a sense of investment. He invested through treating others, which he thought could help to strengthen their relationship or guanxi (Hwang, 1997), which was important for him to acquire information about job openings. As there are some ‘hidden regulations’, Lee did not make clear the degree to which the treat can help strengthen the guanxi and how much a deeper guanxi if any can pay him back. Bian (2004) noted that treating others is an important way for Chinese people to keep contacts and strengthen relations. As a Chinese saying goes, people will naturally feel you owe others if you are treated or given something; if you are treated by someone, you will owe him or her of a favour or renqing (King, 1989). You should find a way to pay people back; otherwise, you will be regarded as unschooled in the way of world, for you break the consent principle of reciprocating the favour or pao (L.S. Yang, 1987; M.M.H. Yang, 1994). Lee was likely to think his treat would be paid back in future. We can see that Lee took the initiative here and practiced by using cultural regulations, although he may do this unconsciously.

The parents of unemployed youth also use their resources to help their children build social relationships. For example, the father of one interviewee, Tai, was a private enterprise owner and had ‘a big friend pool’ as Tai described it. Tai wanted to start his own business after he lost his job. His father took him to many social events and introduced him to people because his father believed that knowing people is necessary for doing business.

Tai: My father took me to his circle and activities, and he wanted me to know more people and gradually acquire social experience. This is very important. It will benefit me in future if now I know more people and keep contact with them. If you don't keep regular contact, even if you tell them that you are a son of their friend, people will not always help you, though maybe they have to do so the first time.

Tai's father used his established ‘circle of friends’ to help his son build new social relationships. These new relationships started from ‘emotional contacts’, that is, they ‘try to establish connections’ (Hwang, 1987), not directly for practical business purposes, which may annoy others. In doing so, Tai and his father believed that current, regular but not intentional emotional contacts would serve their business purposes in future.

This explains the way in which the parents of some unemployed youth actively help their children to develop social networks through investment in social relations and establishing relations with someone useful. From this standpoint, the impact of unemployment on the social network of youths is not necessarily negative, and it may to some degree bring out hidden social resources and encourage social network-building. However, that effect requires certain conditions. First, as Lee's case shows, the unemployed youth and his or her family should be willing to develop the network and take action. Jie is the opposite case. She regarded losing her job as shameful and was reluctant to connect with people in her established networks. Second, some resources should be in place to support the initiatives. The family of the unemployed youth should have sufficient financial capacity to cater to ‘social contacts over dinner’ in China. In addition, the unemployed youth's family should have social resources, a paradoxical factor in building up social relations. As shown in Tai's case, new social relations are likely to be born from established ones. Therefore, individuals who are impoverished of social relations cannot build up new ones although they need more social support and resources. Take Jie as an example. Her parents were ‘educated youth’ assigned to leave the city to go to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and had been living in Anhui Province until Jie went to Shanghai at 16. She told the author that all her former friends and classmates were in Anhui, she did not have many friends in Shanghai. She said that her friendship in the city is not as ‘pure’ as that in Anhui. Though Jie's mother returned to Shanghai, Jie said that ‘my mother doesn't have any friends in Shanghai for she didn't grow up in Shanghai but lived in the countryside when she was a teenager. All her relations are in Anhui.’ Hence, when Jie was asked whether she had asked her friends or acquaintances to find her a job, she answered, ‘I wish I had friends here, and I would have asked them for help earlier.’

Discussion

This study shows that unemployed youth are at risk of social relationship exclusion in their daily life. First, the unemployed youth decrease the frequency of social contacts quantitatively as a result of unemployment: limited income, loss of face and parental over-supervision. Second, although unemployment has less effect on expressive ties among peers, a shared unemployment experience may increase the peer group's internal contacts with each other but limit the group's social network, which leads to social segregation. This type of network may not enjoy rich social resources but can support the youth emotionally and financially; however, it cannot necessarily find the individual in such networks a job. Some unemployed individuals take the initiative to develop their circle through exploring their established resources or their parents’ social relations. However, unemployed individuals with weak financial capability or who lack social resources can suffer a vicious circle of social network poverty. Briefly, the unemployed youth are more likely to experience social exclusion.

As these findings are from a Chinese context, they serve to enrich the extant literature on unemployment and social relations. Furthermore, the findings of this study will benefit the practice of social policy. Normal social contact is an important part of an individual's social integration, which is also a significant aim for social policy. Also, good social networks can provide emotional and financial support and foster the ‘network of opportunity’ that can uncover more social resources and ultimately help individuals shake off poverty and unemployment (Perri 6, 1997). This is what was illustrated earlier: Expressive ties can provide emotional and financial support, and information about jobs flows in non-segregated social networks.

Enhancing the function of social networks is an important new trend in recent social policy study (Phillipson, Allan, & Morgan, 2004; Rodger, 2000). This is particularly true for China, because family and social networks are the main welfare pillars in Chinese society (Huang-Li, 2001). Therefore, under the current Chinese government welfare system, it is important to study what social policy can help family and social networks come into effect where government welfare is weak. Previous studies show that social policy can play this role. For instance, Perri 6 (2004) pointed out that governmental policy can work on individuals' social networks and promote their social integration, while at the same time social policy implementation can result in social isolation. These case studies support his argument that government-subsidised training and internship programs can solidify the trainees' identity as the unemployed, which will advance internal communication and mutual help and lead to their social segregation. Therefore, it is the social policy mechanism that determines the force and effect of social policy on the individual's social networks. Government can train unemployed youth to improve their working capabilities and at the same time put them in touch with the employed group (especially employers). This will help to establish integrated social networks in which the unemployed group can build up their social resources and find more information on positions within, to increase early employment possibilities (Meijers & Riele, 2004; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1999).

Finally, the present study has several limitations that should be noted. First, rather than presenting conclusive findings, the study is limited to its exploratory nature. The study only relied on interviews with a number of unemployed youth in Shanghai. It does not claim to achieve representativeness and adequate comparisons both with others and among the interviewed youth. The finding about the nexus between deprivation and social segregation and exclusion is tentative. It has not formulated a substantive grounded theory to delineate deprivation, social exclusion and most importantly their linking mechanisms. Such limitations definitely present an impetus for further research to elaborate on and verify the findings. The study nevertheless provides current ideas that are reasonably congenial with the literature, to offer a basis for stimulating further research.

Acknowledgements

This paper is adapted from parts of the author's doctoral dissertation. The author would like to thank Professor Ngan-pun Ngai, Department of Social Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, for his supervision. The author is also grateful for Miss Yuyu He's assistance in translation.