Experiencing unemployment: The roles of social and cultural capital in mediating economic crisis

The paper offers an engagement with economic issues, via an exploration of the recent crisis in Northern Portugal, to discuss the roles of social capital and cultural capital in the configuration of diverse experiences of unemployment. It focuses on changes over time and on contemporary everyday relations to identify such experiences. By means of a multiple correspondence analysis, patterns of sociability are discerned. Ethnographic material enables these patterns to be qualified and three main types of unemployment experience are identified, all centred on the idea of unemployment as a space of sociability. The case study elaborates on and qualifies research inspired by Bourdieu on methodological and theoretical grounds. It demonstrates the need to qualify statistical patterns emerging from MCA with refined qualitative material and indicates specific ways in which social and cultural capitals interact with the economic sphere in a particularly severe economic crisis.

► The modes of social reproduction in an industrialised region of the North of Portugal facing economic crisis are analysed.
► Inspired by Bourdieu on methodological and theoretical grounds, patterns of sociability are discerned.
► The impact of unemployment in the use of time is clarified.
► Three main types of unemployment experiences are identified and their social and symbolic properties are analysed.