Unemployment: what kind of problem is it?

This paper uses poststructuralist ideas to describe aspects of the battle to retain personal power of one mother of four late adolescent children, when she became unemployed during the restructuring of the New Zealand economy, which began in 1984 and continues in the present. A deconstructive analysis of the text of unstructured interviews with Sonya shows how agencies of the State, including the Welfare, gradually increase their practices of surveillance over her domestic life and reduce her options for agentic action in public life. These practices are linked to an analysis of discourses of economic rationalism and liberal humanism to show that this insidious exclusion and regulation is underpinned by ‘possessive individualism’—a model of the person/citizen who has rights to speak in the public sphere insofar as he/she owns property. It is argued that this model of personhood, which pervades much community psychology, at the same time devalues both the traditional work of women and forms of non‐material productivity which can be characterized as human service. The paper claims that the discursive approach can help to avoid disrespectful implications of deficit in people whose voices are silenced by dominant discourses, including those which dominate much psychological theorizing. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.