Didier Demazière
email: didier.demaziere@sciencespo.fr

Marc Zune
email: marc.zune@uclouvain.be

2021, à paraitre

Keywords: Unemployment, job search, checks, sanction, activation

Job search is a central element of activation policies, which aim to transform unemployed people into active jobseekers who are subject to checks. We examine a neglected aspect of activation: sanctions. To do so we analyse, through biographical interviews with formerlyunemployed people whose benefit payments have been stopped, what it means when a job search is deemed insufficient. Although these formerly-unemployed people have failed to present enough written and tangible evidence of their job search during checks, they have pursued a different type of job search comprising more informal activities that are difficult to convert into written documents. So, we identify a twin-stranded job search -prescribed and alternative. We also point out that the gap between institutionally-framed job search and experience-based job search widens among unemployed people having low employability attributes, so that ever-stricter checks penalize those who are most vulnerable.

Introduction

Increasing conditionality in access to social benefits, particularly unemployment benefits, is a strong trend at the heart of the evolution of welfare states [START_REF] Dean | The Ethics of Welfare: Human Rights, Dependency and Responsibility[END_REF]. The watchword is the activation of benefit recipients, which implies boosting both their sense of personal responsibility and their ability to work (Serrano Pascual and Magnusson, 2007). This principle has become predominant in socio-economic and political debate (Eichhorst et al., 2008) as well as in labour market reforms [START_REF] Clasen | Beyond activation reforming European unemployment protection systems in post-industrial labour markets[END_REF][START_REF] Van Berkel | Review article: the governance of activation[END_REF]. Activation has become a political slogan, supporting the promotion and establishment of an active social state [START_REF] Handler | Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality[END_REF]Beer and Shils, 2009).

Activation policies combine two logics known as "carrot and stick" (Serrano Pascual, 2004;Van der Klauw and Van Ours, 2013). "Carrot" refers to the provision of services such as professional advice, dissemination of vacancies, vocational training, assistance with writing CV and job search, targeted employment subsidies, etc. "Stick" includes obligations relating to registration at employment offices, conducting an active job search, responding to letters about mandatory appointments, accepting job offers, entering training schemes, etc. These obligations are subject to checks -now an important component of contemporary policies [START_REF] Deeming | Rethinking social policy and society[END_REF]. In such a context, job search becomes the central aspect of unemployment, as summarized in the formula: "the death of unemployment and the birth of job seeking" (Boland and Griffin, 2015). Indeed, not only must the unemployed search for a job, they must do so "actively". They are also subject to interviews (checks) designed to monitor this "active search", conducted at varying intervals in each country [START_REF] Anderson | Monitoring and assisting active job search[END_REF]. Claimants whose job search is deemed insufficient are sanctioned. These sanctions are graduated -in some countries (particularly Belgium) going as far as disbarring the jobseeker and definitively abolishing their entitlement to benefits [START_REF] Venn | Eligibility criteria for unemployment benefits, quantitative indicators for OECD and EU countries[END_REF].

In the main, analysis of job search control and sanction mechanisms has been confined to microeconomic and econometric evaluations [START_REF] Parent | Le contrôle de la recherche d'emploi et les sanctions[END_REF], which measure the effects of control on both the return to employment and the acceptability of lower quality jobs [START_REF] Wright | Activating the unemployed: the Street-level implementation of UK policy[END_REF][START_REF] Aurich | Activating the unemployed -Directions and divisions in Europe[END_REF]Van Berkel et al., 2017). However, job search as such has been little studied, other than through intensity metrics. Some evaluations show, however, that control mechanisms can influence job search methods, since the unemployed tend to favour formal search channels, to the detriment of informal channels (Van den Berg and [START_REF] Van Den Berg | Counseling and Monitoring of Unemployed Workers: Theory and Evidence from a Controlled Social Experiment[END_REF]. This is because monitoring operations often entail evaluating the paper trail left by the job searchdocuments collected and produced by unemployed people [START_REF] Dubois | Institutional Order, Interaction Order and Social Order: Administering Welfare, Disciplining the Poor[END_REF][START_REF] Boland | Seeking a role: disciplining jobseekers as actors in the labour market[END_REF][START_REF] Clouet | Contrôle des chômeurs, un modèle allemand?[END_REF]. The unemployed thus have a dual obligation: to look for a job and to provide evidence in the form considered credible by the controllers. And from this perspective, it is probably easier to provide copies of applications, responses to job offers and emails sent to companies, than it is to gather evidence of exchanges with acquaintances, requests made within relational networks, and direct contacts with potential employers. Not all job search methods are equally amenable to checks, and this is the fact that invites us to explore what is meant by 'insufficient' job search, deemed and sanctioned as such. This study allows consideration of the job search within the context of a) articulation of the standards used during monitoring interviews, and b) practices included in the experiences of the unemployed. In order to analyse this articulation, we conducted an interview-based study of unemployed people who had lost their right to benefits. Our hypothesis is that loss of entitlement to benefits punishes failure to conduct a job search in accordance with its institutional definition, rather than failure to conduct a job search per se. In other words, steps taken by those unemployed people removed from the register may have been beyond the bounds of the control framework -and as such, neither recognised nor legitimated. Nevertheless, the steps taken were those considered relevant to their own experience, and do constitute an alternative job search, whose characteristics we will explore.

Active job search

The obligation to look for work is what is demanded in exchange for receiving unemployment benefit. In the 1920s and 1930s, payment of unemployment benefits implied that jobseekers were "genuinely seeking work" [START_REF] Denman | Unemployment statistics from 1881 to the present day[END_REF]. This classic job-seeking obligation, which has now become an injunction to actively seek employment, is not theoretical. Activation policies have transposed this obligation into the area of administrative monitoring of the unemployed, though the combinations of work incentives, income support and coercive control vary across OECD countries [START_REF] Immervoll | Activation and employment support policies in OECD countries. An overview of current approaches[END_REF]. Since activating the unemployed is a general objective [START_REF] Demazière | The boundaries of unemployment. Institutional rules and real-life experiences[END_REF], job search requirements tend to increase. However, the concrete consequences of activation policies for the unemployed depend strongly on how they are implemented in practice. Harshness of legislation is thus not a reliable indicator of its actual impact on job-search behaviour, especially given that professionals in public employment agencies have a great deal of discretion in the local application of legislation [START_REF] Martin | What works and for whom: A review of OECD countries' experiences with active labour market policies[END_REF][START_REF] Senghaas | Street-Level Judgements about Welfare Deservingness: How Jobcentre Advisors Decide about Individual Mix 'Support' and 'Demand' in the Delivery of Activation Policies[END_REF].

Although concrete translations of the active job search standard have been the subject of many studies, these have tended to focus more on supporting the unemployed than on the control aspect, that is on the carrot rather than the stick, on the "enabling" rather than the "demanding" component of activation (Eichhorst et al., 2008). Studies conducted in training, coaching, jobsearch assistance or skills development organisations show how methods and advice are provided and inculcated to produce active and dynamic job seekers (e.g. [START_REF] Dean | Governing the unemployed self in an active society[END_REF][START_REF] Divay | L'aide à la recherche d'emploi. Des conseils pour sauver la face[END_REF] for pioneering work, and more recently [START_REF] Garrett-Peters | If I don't have a job anymore, who am I?: Job loss and collaborative self-concept repair[END_REF][START_REF] Gabriel | Job loss and its aftermath among managers and professionals: wounded, fragmented and flexible[END_REF][START_REF] Van Oort | Making the neoliberal precariat: two faces of job searching in Minneapolis[END_REF]. The unemployed are thus trained to become active job seekers, mastering job search techniques, developing their own networks, reviewing their requirements and expectations. This activation is a conversion process that convinces them both of their own responsibility for the situation they find themselves in [START_REF] Uchitelle | The Disposable American: Layoffs and their Consequences[END_REF][START_REF] Smith | Enhancing employability: human, cultural and social capital in an era of turbulent unpredictability[END_REF], and that access to employment depends on them [START_REF] Sharone | Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences[END_REF][START_REF] Boland | Job-seeking: making a self for the labour market[END_REF]. The production of a belief in the effectiveness of the active job search standard is a powerful mechanism for both internalizing and adhering to it. These studies show, then, that job search becomes "the work of unemployment" (Griffin, 2015: 123).

Monitoring and sanctioning activities serve to relay these obligations, assessing unemployed people's compliance with the active job search model. However, in the analysis of checks and sanctions, active job search -the backbone of these schemes -remains a black box [START_REF] Parent | Le contrôle de la recherche d'emploi et les sanctions[END_REF]. Analyses assess the impact of checks on return to employment or the quality of jobs found, and show that the consequences of sanctions on job-seeking behaviour are more closely related to "threat effects" (ex ante) than to the application of sanctions (ex post) -all the more so when these are limited in duration and intensity. [START_REF] Van Den Berg | Punitive sanctions and the transition rate from welfare to work[END_REF][START_REF] Lalive | The effect of benefit sanction on the duration of unemployment[END_REF][START_REF] Boone | Modelling financial incentives to get unemployed back to work[END_REF]. On the other hand, how job search is assessed in the checks is not described, so that the reference frame -active job search -remains abstract. However, some of this analysis does shed light on the relationship between this reference norm and the behaviour of the unemployed. For example, the realignment effects of job search triggered by checks are weaker for the least-employable unemployed [START_REF] Cockx | Is the notification of monitoring a threat to the unemployed? A regression discontinuity approach[END_REF] or when job opportunities are few [START_REF] Cockx | Monitoring, sanctions and front-loading of job search in a non-stationary model[END_REF], that is, when the likely yield of job search is lower. Checks can have exclusion effects, from unemployment to health insurance, disability status or various forms of inactivity, and this is truer still of sanctions.

The few qualitative analyses that are focused on strong sanctions provide additional knowledge about their consequences. An investigation in the UK on the impact of severe sanctions (suspension of benefit for 26 weeks) for refusal to participate in an active labour market instrument shows that those facing significant barriers to returning to work (transport, childcare, employability, learning difficulties, illiteracy, criminal record, drug or alcohol problems) did not intensify their job search [START_REF] Adler | Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment? Benefit sanctions in the UK[END_REF]. For these vulnerable unemployed people, sanctions result in feelings of shame and loss of self-confidence, which are detrimental to job search. Another UK study of unemployed people applying for Jobseeker's Allowance highlights the suffering caused by welfare conditionality and sanctioning, including the demoralising effect of the "futile job-search treadwheel" [START_REF] Wright | Punitive benefit sanctions, welfare conditionality, and the social abuse of unemployed people in Britain: Transforming claimants into offenders?[END_REF]. However, these users develop a variety of responses including acceptance, resistance, adaptation and disengagement -thus expressing their autonomy, albeit in a limited way.

While these studies offer information about unemployed people's experiences with checks and sanctions and concrete mechanisms for evaluating behaviour and sanctions, they do so without placing job search at the heart of the tensions between the two. Our contribution focuses specifically on job search, which we consider both a major component of the lived experience of the unemployed and a central dimension of evaluation and checks. In this framework of analysis, rather than implying an absence of job search, the sanction highlights discrepancies between the normative requirements of the control services and the actual practices of the unemployed, which are nourished by their experiences. Belgium is a particularly apt location for such an analysis because job search controls there were tightened, institutional requirements increased and sanctions enhanced in the 2000s.

Checking procedures in the Belgian context

In Belgium, where we carried out our fieldwork, entitlement to unemployment benefit is not limited in duration; however, the control of job search is particularly well-developed. While international comparisons admittedly place this country in an intermediate position with regard to job search requirements and monitoring, the requirement that job search activities be documented in a detailed and verifiable way is high (Immervoll & Knotz 2018: 34). Above all, Belgium has two particularities. "Carrot" and "stick" are dissociated because until 2018 checks were entrusted to a dedicated agency (the National Employment Office -ONEM). Moreover, sanctions applicable in the event of insufficient job search can go as far as definitive abolition of entitlement to benefits, which is particularly burdensome in view of the generally unlimited nature of these rights. Monitoring is based on periodic individual interviews with frontline staff known as 'facilitators'. A reform brought in by the Liberal government in 2014 has systematised the half-yearly evaluation of 'active availability' and 'sufficiency of job search efforts' and tightened the applicable sanctions. Two types of sanctions are now combined: a contractualisation of job search obligations and the suspension or cancellation of benefits.

The work of these (so-called) facilitators is governed by general guidelines, though it is their responsibility to translate into practice what "actively seeking employment" and "making sufficient effort" look like [START_REF] Beuker | La gestion différenciée des dilemmes moraux entre pairs chez les conseillers professionnels[END_REF]. The central evaluation criterion is the number of steps completed; no indicative or minimum gauge is set. These steps must also be both regular and consistent with the unemployed person's personal situation and occupational goals. When facilitators conclude that a job search is insufficient, they must raise requirements in the new contract with the unemployed person. Frequency of checks is also increased, so that the level of pressure on the unemployed person rises. If three successive interviews result in a negative assessment, the unemployed person at fault is automatically excluded from unemployment benefit. Restoration of these rights then entails working for (on average) at least 18 months within a 24-month period. In the Brussels-Capital Region where our fieldwork was carried out, the rate of sanctions applied during the third interview (following two negative assessments) was 22% in 2015 (ONEM, 2016), and the number of sanctions applied tripled between 2012 and 2015 (Ibid).

While the work of facilitators is thus framed, the monitoring and sanctions that may result are based on the job search assessment activity. Here, facilitators are in the typical situation of street-level bureaucrats [START_REF] Lipsky | Street Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services[END_REF], which opens up room for the exercise of discretion, as also highlighted in other contexts [START_REF] Galligan | Discretionary Powers. Legal Study of Official Discretion[END_REF][START_REF] Brodkin | Work and the Welfare State. Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics[END_REF]. The job search evaluation is based on the examination of written and concrete evidence of the job search. And the ONEM asks the unemployed to compile job-search files containing proof of their job search. Observation of facilitator practice [START_REF] Beuker | Le rôle des facilitateurs dans la diffusion de normes d'emploi: le cas d'un bureau de chômage belge[END_REF] shows that they do indeed rely on written documents and are suspicious of unemployed people's narratives, which they may neglect -or even disqualify. Moreover, not all written documents are treated equally. Among the documents in the file, they differentiate between those that are "solid" and those they consider "fragile" or "suspect". Simple statements made by the claimant indicating that they have contacted a company arouse suspicion -all the more so when this type of document dominates the records. The checks are de facto tightened on examination of the acceptability of the documents provided, which leads to the definition of a perimeter of practices identified as valid and legitimate job-seeking approaches in the eyes of the facilitators. However, certain methods are easier to encode in writing: job offers collected and responses to them, application letters, electronic messages, publication of advertisements, interview invitation documents, etc. This type of job-search method is more easily valued, and therefore enhanced, in the checking systems.

This leads us to hypothesise that exclusion from unemployed status and loss of entitlement to unemployment benefits as a result of a check does not imply an absence of job search; rather, it means that the job search carried out fails to conform to normative expectations and has thus not been recognised as such. On this basis, we argue this perspective empirically, by analysing the job-search characteristics of unemployed people who have been sanctioned as a result of it being established during assessment interviews that they were not seriously looking for work. We show that there are twin strands to their job search; the first of which is certifiable via the rulebook and has been found wanting, and the second of which is not a good fit for the monitoring framework and whose characteristics, foundations and justifications we will seek to capture.

Methodology

In the Brussels-Capital Region, we conducted in-depth interviews with 55 people who, though still unemployed, had been stripped of both their official unemployed status and their unemployment benefit. The analysis presented here is based on 31 interviews with unemployed people sanctioned for insufficient or failed job search (the remaining 24 cases concern other administrative sanctions or rights restrictions). These interviews were conducted in 2016, eight to twelve months after deregistration. The retrospective nature of these interviews raises the problem of reliability of respondent answers and memory failure [START_REF] Dex | Life and Work History Analyses[END_REF]. Because starting with a salient event favours greater reliability of responses [START_REF] Shattuck | Retrospective Reporting of first Employment in the Life-courses of U.S. Women[END_REF], we deliberately placed the deregistration episode at the centre of our approach from the outset. The interview therefore began with this event, providing a consistent biographical anchor for developing a narrative of the job search at this period and earlier. The interview structure focused more broadly on biographical backgrounds, the consequences of being sanctioned, and its effects on relationships to work and employment, etc. The purpose of the interviews was to generate narratives combining accounts of events and activities conducted by the unemployed with the meanings and interpretations they attributed to them [START_REF] Bruner | Life as narrative[END_REF][START_REF] Ezzy | Fate and agency in Job loss narratives[END_REF].

The 31 interviewees had varied profiles, in terms of gender (seventeen men, fourteen women), age (four were aged under 30, five were aged between 30 and 39, thirteen were aged between 40 and 49, nine were aged 50 or older) and ethnic origin (sixteen were of Belgian origin, seven were newcomers to Europe, eight were from outside Europe). However, what they had in common was being fairly distant from employment, in terms of having characteristics which (in the Belgian context) indicate relatively low employability, in the sense of "the individual's employability skills and attributes" [START_REF] Mcquaid | The concept of employability[END_REF]. All had been unemployed for more than eighteen months, and eleven had been unemployed for more than three years. Their educational levels were low, with sixteen not having begun high school, eleven not having completed high school, and only four having started higher education. Their professional careers were strongly marked by instability -the duration of their last job was in most cases less than five months, and exceeded ten months only in rare cases. Finally, they had held positions (as labourers, commercial or service employees) requiring few or no qualificationsthough three had been supervisors, four had been managers and three had been artists. Given their backgrounds, these formerly-unemployed people had, in all likelihood, faced significant obstacles on the road to employment. Their job search had therefore been particularly difficult, exposing them to a high risk of discouragement. They also appeared potentially vulnerable with regard to job search monitoring procedures.

Our empirical research was difficult to conduct, because this population was no longer registered with a welfare state institution. We were unable to obtain a list of the names of unemployed people who had been excluded from unemployment benefits. So, in a dozen municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, we contacted more than fourteen organisations (charities, community centres, trade unions, lawyers, shelters, local groups) likely to be in contact with our target population. We asked people working in these organisations to disseminate information about our study to their users, and distribute flyers explaining it. We launched calls for people's accounts of their own experiences in places likely to be frequented by formerly-unemployed people, and through a social media page dedicated to the investigation. To diversify the sample, it was necessary to vary the approaches and intermediaries involved. As soon as an approach yielded good results, we abandoned it, to minimize the risk of sample distortion through over-representation of a single category of users. Interviews were most often conducted at interviewees' homes or in coffee shops, and lasted between 90 minutes and 2 hours [START_REF] Demazière | Enquêter auprès de chômeurs exclus pas décision administrative : repérer les invisibles, écouter les inaudibles, restituer les expériences[END_REF].

A thematic analysis was applied to the transcribed interviews, with the focus on describing and understanding what job search activities had been conducted in the period leading up to disbarment. We wanted to understand not only what these unemployed people had been doing, but also why they had been doing it, as well as the constraints and resources of their living environments. We therefore paid close attention to the evaluative and argumentative dimensions of job search narratives [START_REF] Ezzy | Narrating Unemployment[END_REF]. In order to guarantee the anonymity of the interviewees, we use pseudonyms when quoting from interviews.

Job search as evidence production

Respondents had received three negative assessments, and their job searches had been judged insufficient. Our study shows that they had tried to both meet the requirements and integrate them into their job search. In light of the resulting exclusion, these adaptations are recounted as the result of using tactics [START_REF] De Certeau | L'invention du quotidien[END_REF], i.e. practices of hidden resistance to a system that imposes its rules and stratagems, aimed at displaying 'conformity'. This game remains playable for as long as the job search is defined as a collection of tangible evidence.

The main challenge may then become the production of a paper trail -evidence. This results in a range of practices: ticking off obligations in a very short time, to avoid being caught off guard; sending the required number of applications without even examining the offers; drawing up lists of companies to send CVs to in line with the terms of the contract, etc. Job search thus becomes routine, reduced to the collection of evidence, as explained by both Ousmane and Yasmina.

"Once a week I would do my CVs, so I would all have my five or six CVs a month, four unsolicited cover letters for applications, three from the newspaper and one from the Internet and then I was safe" (Ousmane, aged 42, no qualifications). "I ended up applying for anything to reach my target numbers (...) that's what the ONEM asks for, they don't care about the rest. And I thought it was unfair. I think smart people soon understand that the goal is to meet the ONEM requirements, rather than to get a job" (Yasmina, aged 34, qualified social worker).

Following each negative evaluation, ONEM facilitators exert increasing pressure, raise the level of requirements, and set higher objectives in contracts. This demands more intensive investment in a practice (already devoid of meaning) intended only to save face and preserve entitlement to benefit. The gap between two conceptions of job search widens: the one requires collecting evidence yet does not lead to results, while the one that does give meaning to the condition of the unemployed, allowing hope to be maintained, does lead to some casual work -as Louis explains.

"I still don't understand why they ask you to do all this at the ONEM. Unless the point is to break you -otherwise it's pointless. You don't get anywhere by applying online. It's just bullshit. It's not how I used to get jobs. Because my tactic is to not do things that don't work. (...) If it's just applying for the sake of applying, I don't see the point" (Louis, aged 44, vocational secondary school).

Unemployed people disregard this job search on the grounds that is seems to them false, fictitious -carried out for the sole purpose of maintaining rights, without any hope of it helping them escape unemployment. Indeed, the stages involved in formalizing an application (in a CV or covering letter) serve to highlight shortcomings that become easily perceptible in the course of the selection process: lack of qualifications, age, periods of professional inactivity, or indeed discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. Insistence on use of the written word adversely affects their applications by revealing the weakness of the skills that can be attested to. This argument is expressed in various ways, including by Najet who symbolically challenges the interviewer to recruit her on the basis of her CV, and by Faruk, who believes he has no particular asset to put forward. "This is bullshit, these resume stories, the classifieds and all that claptrap. Frankly, I don't have a trade, I don't even know what to put on my CV, and I haven't even mentioned my name yet. Look at my CV, would you consider… with all the others who are also after the same jobs? Would you pick me? Definitely not, right?" (Najet, aged 51, did not complete secondary school). "I got two replies, out of about 120. I understand that my wife gets to the point of saying, "Okay, but do at least try looking". But I say, "You just don't get it -it's a game, it's all a joke." (...) I carry on applying, but I'm well aware that for every job offer, there are 170 people. And then, there's in nothing in my CV to grab anyone's attention -on the contrary" (Faruk, aged 44, did not complete vocational secondary school).

Ultimately, the formerly-unemployed interviewees had made efforts to comply with the requirements, but over time their commitment to this diminished. As we have pointed out, their employability is low, and they have accumulated numerous job search failures over long periods of unemployment. Here we find the time-worn effects that the most-vulnerable unemployed are exposed to [START_REF] Cottle | Hardest times: the trauma of long-term unemployment[END_REF]. Beyond that, experience has taught these people that formal job search methods are not only ineffective, but also leave them at a disadvantage and fragilize their applications. Their significance is thus limited to avoiding deregistration. There are several reasons why these unemployed people have found this goal increasingly difficult to achieve. Belgium's activation reform strongly and brutally changed the basis of checks, with requirements (fulfilled until then) were increased; each negative control raised the pressure through the signature of a contract; the reinforced obligations became more unbearable the more ineffective they proved, and the radical sanction of deregistration was unimaginable in a traditionally-protective system. In other words, the sudden and significant change in the rules of the game has made the least-employable unemployed more vulnerable still. This is why they find it increasingly difficult to maintain a 'prescribed' job search based on collection of written evidence and therefore on formal channels that tend, in their experience, to devalue their applications. Yet at the same time, they do engage in a different kind of job search that has contrasting characteristics.

An alternative (albeit illegitimate) job search

All respondents stated that they had taken alternative steps to the collection of written evidence. They had therefore been engaged in an alternative job search to the model underlying the checks, but which made sense to them and fit their own perspectives well. Being based on direct solicitation to potential employers -often small companies located in close and familiar localities, or part of inter-knowledge chains, these approaches are different, less formal. They are also iterative, based on maintaining a presence within these narrow networks -as if it were a matter of waiting your turn, or being there at the right moment. "That's how it works. I've been a road sweeper, a gardener, a refuse collector too, a tiler. Everything really. (...) And you do have to search. Ah, they need you -perfect. But if they don't have work, it's 'Thank you, goodbye.' That's it, that's it, it's important to be aware" (Adrian, aged 29, no qualifications). "I've had to make my name in the small restaurants around here. I've managed that, but I still come by to see what there is to do, and stay in the loop" (Esther, aged 35, completed secondary school).

The outcome of this type of job search is often informal, too. Far from leading to an employment contract, it demands an acceptance of working trial shifts (sometimes declared, sometimes not), responding to as-and-when needs, and fluctuating activity levels. It is more about improving your situation marginally or temporarily than moving directly from unemployment to employment, as both Emmanuelle and Jacques say. Moreover, because it leaves few tangible, written traces, it is very difficult to provide evidence of this type of job search, which comprises oral exchanges, direct contacts, verbal promises and handshakes. Further, such a job search can hardly be accountable, because it is as likely to lead to informal (and in certain cases, clearly illegal) jobs, as it is to "official" jobs. Respondents thus concealed this aspect of their activities and commitments during interviews at the ONEM, out of fear that they would be punished. And if Aubin (unlike Jean-Claude) did throw caution to the wind, it was because he knew he was going to be excluded. "I always managed the checks. You have to know how to keep quiet, there are some things that won't be okay. That's the rule -say as little as possible because there's no reason to be naive" (Jean-Claude, aged 52, completed high school). "When I show up for a job in the kitchen, people ask me: "What can you do?" That's all. They're not going to ask for papers, documents, and so on. These formerly-unemployed interviewees were not inactive. Despite having been deprived of unemployed status, they were still engaged in job search -albeit one that transgressed the norms underlying the checks. This alternative job search is far from the institutional requirements and cannot be neither recognised nor explained, for several reasons. First, it is based on oral and informal approaches that leave no paper trail and are difficult to provide evidence of, but which the unemployed people themselves consider better suited to their poor employability. Second, it directs them towards odd jobs and even undeclared activities that unemployed people -in view of the difficulties they encounter -do consider as work. The 'twin-stranded' job search therefore expresses a contradiction between institutional norms and lived experience, between the requirements formalized in the request for evidence and practical activities that remain both invisible and illegitimate.

Discussion

Our analysis shows that what the disbarment suffered by the unemployed people interviewed served to sanction was failure to search for a job in line with institutional expectations, rather than a lack of job search. Indeed, these unemployed persons deemed ineligible for benefit as a result of insufficient job search were not at all bothered by talking about their job search activities. They produced consistent narratives reminiscent of the results of surveys of those officially recognized as unemployed: they combined various methods [START_REF] Bachmann | How do the unemployed search for a job? Evidence from the EU Labour Force Survey[END_REF]; they formulated questions and doubts [START_REF] Sharone | Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences[END_REF], and expressed reasoning and arguments [START_REF] Demazière | Job search success among the formerly unemployed: paradoxically a matter of self-discipline[END_REF]. However, because the harshest of sanctions (permanent disbarment and the loss of their unemployment benefits) has been imposed upon them, the study of these formerly-unemployed people provides new insights into both job search and checks and sanctions.

This study underlines the importance of considering the institutional categorisation of job search within an activation context. Because it is inseparable from evaluations, judgements and checks that record (or fail to record), validate (or fail to validate), and recognise (or fail to recognise) these behaviours and experiences, job search must not be reduced to a set of behaviours that can be described by statistical surveys, or to individual experiences that can be observed by qualitative fieldwork. This analytical framework has enabled us to highlight the fact that a formalised job search is more easily translated into a paper trail, facilitating accountability. It has also enabled us to identify an alternative component of job search, both downgraded and illegitimate, used as a fallback by unemployed people who feel disadvantaged by formal procedures and prescribed job search.

This alternative job search is based on informal rather than formal channels [START_REF] Rees | Information networks in labor markets[END_REF][START_REF] Holzer | Search method used by unemployed youth[END_REF][START_REF] Huffman | Job search methods: consequences for gender-based earnings inequality[END_REF]. Often both types of channel are combined, although relational networks are considered more effective [START_REF] Granovetter | The strength of weak ties[END_REF][START_REF] Holzer | Job search and black youth unemployment[END_REF]. Yet the decisive feature of alternative job search is that, rather than adding to the prescribed job search, it becomes a refuge for unemployed people unable to meet institutional requirements. Such an alternative job search is hampered in several respects: the scope of job search narrows because direct contacts are few and far-between, and targets deteriorate because informal work and activities gradually take over from formal employment. As a sign of a drift away from employment and a weakening of employability [START_REF] Mcquaid | The concept of employability[END_REF], alternative job search is problematic in relation to institutional job search standards and monitoring procedures, especially if not balanced by prescribed job search in accordance with the checks requirements.

Relationships with potential employers are verbal, made up of promises and eventualities yet to come, and can hardly be attested to in writing. The work secured is agreed orally, and rarely transcribed into contracts. This kind of job search cannot withstand exposure to the monitoring institutions. The job search that really counts for these unemployed people is thus stripped of probative value, becoming both invisible and illegitimate.

Our results also reveal that exclusion from unemployment benefits is much more than a sanction for a failure to seek employment: it invalidates the experiences of those unemployed people who occupy lower positions in the labour market, and lower ranks in the unemployment queue.

In this sense, it is similar to "carelessness", observed among other unemployed people in difficulty [START_REF] Bowman | Activation and active ageing? Mature-age jobseekers' experience of employment services[END_REF]. However, the twin-stranded nature of the unemployed respondents' job searches appears to be an adjustment to difficulties they have encountered -a product of their job search experiences [START_REF] Mcdonald | Right place, right time: serendipity and informal job matching[END_REF]. They prefer methods that allow them to highlight their informal and uncodified qualities and (until they are sanctioned) limit their involvement in approaches that tend to highlight their weakness in terms of the usual employability signals. In so doing, they moderate their career aspirations, falling back on narrow segments of the labour market where employment opportunities amount to a combination of precarious contracts, informal work, trial periods and vague promises. Ironically, these sanctioned unemployed people follow an approach described in the economic literature as rational -that of lowering their occupational expectations [START_REF] Devine | Empirical Labor Economics: The Search Approach[END_REF][START_REF] Manroop | Job Search: A Multidisciplinary Review and Research Agenda[END_REF].

The study also shows that the aim of checks and sanctions is not to activate unemployed people who would have little investment in job search (whether as a result of discouragement or calculation); the unemployed people deprived of unemployed status for insufficient job search that we met were not inactive. Their job search was persistent [START_REF] Wanberg | Job-search persistence during Unemployment: A 10-wave Longitudinal Study[END_REF], and they were not in search of a substitute status (social assistance, disabled status, etc.). These were unemployed people facing significant difficulties in accessing employment who had adapted their job search behaviours accordingly, and were critical of the 'absurd' treatment they had received from the ONEM. In this respect, the literature has shown the relatively weak effect of sanctions on the return to work within the framework of activation policies [START_REF] Cockx | Le contrôle de la recherche d'emploi est-il efficace?[END_REF][START_REF] Busk | Sanctions and the exit from unemployment in two different benefit schemes[END_REF]. Moreover, our investigation underlines the fact that such sanctions accelerate downward movement towards the most precarious and informal segments of the labour market -in which these people are trapped. This movement only becomes more pronounced as the formerly-unemployed invest in an alternative and un-monitorable job search (Van den Berg and Van der Klauw, 2006), thus swelling the ranks of an invisible working population.

Conclusion

At a time when monitoring of the unemployed and their job search is rising on both political and institutional agendas, it is worth recalling, in the light of our research, that this notion of job search is not at all straightforward. There are many ways of conducting a job search, as shown by both statistical surveys and qualitative fieldworks, some of which are very old [START_REF] Bakke | The Unemployed Worker. A Study of the Task of Making a Living Without a Job[END_REF]. Monitoring job search entails defining (even implicitly) what job search is, what falls within its scope and what does not. However, our fieldwork in Belgium shows that evaluation via paper trail -produced by unemployed people and examined by facilitators -leads to invalidation of alternative job searches and sanctioning those unemployed people who have fallen back on it. Therefore, any monitoring operation (and more broadly any measurement of job search for knowledge purposes) should be attentive to both the limits of current categorisation and the actual practices of the unemployed. From this point of view, it seems necessary to revise the control referential, making job search evaluation via paper trail more flexible, and to modulate checking practices by category of unemployed person, so as to avoid penalizing those who sit on the most peripheral and downgraded fringes of the labour market.

  It's almost impossible to get a contract in the restaurant sector. (...) I told them clearly [at ONEM], it's undeclared work, they need to understand how things are." (Aubin, aged 44, NVQ Level 1).

"

  Well, when I go to apply for a job, it's to work, not to search. Do a little something, anything. Show you're ready. And then, easy does it. You have to work hard, arrive on time, don't count your hours, you have to smash it. (...) Then the boss calls you or sends you somewhere else too" (Emmanuelle, aged 28, NVQ Level 1). "I'm not picky, as long as I have a small salary to improve my everyday life. I hope to get something more solid, of course. But what matters is showing that I'm available, that I can be trusted" (Jacques, aged 45, NVQ Level 1).Working provides an opportunity to show what you can do. And this can open up other opportunities, because it is through the exercise of work that uncoded qualities (far removed from what is recorded on CVs) are able to emerge: reliability, speed, availability, trust, network dependency, docility, etc. These qualities, and their value at work, refer to fragile, subordinate positions in the world of work: jobs that are often temporary (with occasional or atypical working hours), sometimes undeclared, and low paid. This search for informal employment can therefore develop on unskilled and deteriorated labour markets.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Brussels Employment Observatory. The fieldwork was carried out by a team comprising the two authors and Elise Ugeux. We appreciate the constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers.


H Yang

J Bucalossi

G Ciraolo

H Bufferand

N Fedorczak

P Tamain

G Falchetto

N Rivals

J Gunn

Y Marandet

B Pégourié

S Vartanian

Impact of leakage under divertor baffle on detachment onset in WEST with SOLEDGE3X modeling

Keywords: detachment, SOL, divertor baffle closure, leakage effect

The WEST (W-tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) is the transformation of the Tore Supra tokamak from a carbon limiter to a tungsten divertor configuration. In recent experiment campaign C5, the divertor pumping capability has been improved by the sealing of the space between the divertor baffle and the vacuum vessel. This modification leads to an interesting question about how the leakage below the outer baffle will influence the plasma in WEST. To investigate this question, we made simulations of three leak cases and one no leak case with the help of SOLEDGE3X-EIRENE transport code. Through the analysis of the simulation results, we work out the impact of leakage under the outer baffle and explain the physics behind some phenomena observed.

We investigated the density regimes analyzing how parameters like density, temperature, particle flux, and neutral pressure evolve as functions of gas puff rate and electron density at the outer midplane separatrix comparing among the cases with and without leak. The results show that the case without leak has better performance than the cases with leak in trapping the neutral particles and has higher neutral pressure near the baffle by more than 35%, which can lead to greater power dissipation in the divertor, thus lower the detachment threshold in upstream separatrix density by more than 10%. At the same time, the operational gas puffing range becomes broader by a factor from 1 to 5 in the case without leak with respect to the three cases with leak. Simulation results are confronted with experimental data from the configurations with and without leak under the baffle in order to get further insight on the neutral particle circulation in WEST.


Didier Demazière
email: didier.demazière@sciencespo.fr

Job search success among the formerly-unemployed: paradoxically, a matter of self-discipline

Keywords: Getting a job, experience, institutional standards, job search, self-discipline, unemployed people

At a time when activation is an essential cog in the fight against unemployment, looking for a job is top priority in the life of the jobless, and becomes their professional occupation. Job search experience is studied here in the light of the institutional norms and prescriptions that frame it. Our fieldwork has focused on the supposed correspondence between these two, since our interviewees were formerly-unemployed people who have managed to land relatively long-term positions. Three results were identified: first, their experiences espouse a self-help model; second, in spite of compliance with this model, the search is jeopardized by its uncertain outcome, and third, an alternative model has emerged, characterized by job search limitations in the emotional, temporal and behavioral registers. These adjustments deviate from institutional standards yet are nonetheless the result of thoughtful and personal management, i.e. of applying a principle of self-discipline that is paradoxically in line with the institutional model of job search.

Introduction

The experience of unemployment has been amply researched ever since the 1930s. Many qualitative and comprehensive studies describe the negative consequences of joblessness, yet the job search itself has not been significantly documented [START_REF] Demazière | Sociologie des chômeurs[END_REF]. In recent decades, however, unemployment has become inseparable from looking for work because unemployed people are increasingly forced to search for a job. This consequence of the dynamics of welfare regimes has been characterized by what is known as "advanced liberalism' [START_REF] Dean | Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society[END_REF]. Social policies have increasingly been shaped by logics of activation [START_REF] Clasen | Beyond Activation Reforming European Unemployment Protection Systems in Post-Industrial Labour Markets[END_REF] and responsibilization (MacDonald and Marston, 2005), reinforcing the process of making welfare recipients more active and autonomous in improving their situation. For the unemployed, this means that they are driven into the role of job seeker (Boland and Griffin, 2015a). The job search is the crux of the relationship connecting the unemployed to the welfare state that registers, checks, and supports them. So, we suggest that the unemployed are defined by the job search, i.e. by the injunction to look for work. The job search is the hub of both the jobless condition and public policy targeting the unemployed.

In our view, sociological analyses of the ways in which unemployed people conduct a job search have not fully appreciated the importance of legal norms, institutional injunctions and administrative control procedures. Indeed, job search is often studied in a decontextualized way, one step removed from institutions and social policies. One dominant approach involves measuring research intensity [START_REF] Benhabib | Job Search: The Choice of Intensity[END_REF], which leads to the comparison of such population categories as men and women [START_REF] Kulik | Jobless Men and Women: A Comparative Analysis of Job Search Intensity, Attitudes toward Unemployment, and Related Responses[END_REF]. Then, the focus is placed on individual behaviors, taking little account of the normative and institutional context in which they are embedded. The same is true when it comes to measuring the impact of unemployment on job search, including growing discouragement as unemployment duration lengthens [START_REF] Wanberg | Job-search Persistence during Unemployment: A 10-wave Longitudinal Study[END_REF]. This article focuses on the job search and how it is experienced by job seekers within the normative context that frames unemployment. It is not a matter of comparing individual behavior patterns with institutional demands, nor of considering the latter as a benchmark by which to evaluate the compliance of unemployed people's activity. Ethnographic studies on the welfare state have already detailed the concrete practices through which the unemployed and jobseekers are controlled and disciplined [START_REF] Dubois | Towards a Critical Policy Ethnography: Lessons from Fieldwork on Welfare Control in France[END_REF][START_REF] Boland | Seeking a Role: Disciplining Jobseekers as Actors in the Labour Market[END_REF]. Extending these critical approaches, our analysis concerns the job-search experiences of the unemployed, which are, in our opinion, a major component of public policy toward the unemployed. We define lived experience as a combination of practical acts, interpretation of events, making sense of things, and reflective thinking [START_REF] Mack | Employment Experiences of Those Living with and Being Treated for Hepatitis C: Seeking Reasonable Adjustments and the Role of Disability Legislation[END_REF] that can be captured through in-depth interviews. This approach makes it possible to question job search standards (which are part of social policies) from a new perspective, focusing on their appropriation by the unemployed. The literature on employment services suggests that in job seeking, the unemployed are not allowed to neglect the institutional norms that are at once both resources for action and supportive of control and sanctions. And our hypothesis is that, at the same time, they are unable to simply comply with the institutional program which sets unattainable standards, so they have to define and follow specific rules so as to achieve the intended goal.

Scholars have recently analyzed the job search experience by highlighting what the institutions responsible for spreading norms, distributing roles and governing behavior do. Such studies underline the potency of the obligations that weigh on the unemployed, transforming the job search into "the work of unemployment" (Griffin, 2015: 123). These studies also show that such work implies, first and foremost, working on oneself, which in turn involves a considerable amount of personal discipline, the outcome of which is put down to individual responsibility [START_REF] Boland | Seeking a Role: Disciplining Jobseekers as Actors in the Labour Market[END_REF]. These investigations describe how institutions offering the unemployed support and guidance (such as job search clubs and state-funded organizations) frame the job search experience [START_REF] Sharone | Flawed System / Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences[END_REF][START_REF] Van Oort | Making the Neoliberal Precariat: Two Faces of Job Searching in Minneapolis[END_REF]. On an empirical level, the present article rounds out those contributions, since we interviewed formerly-unemployed individuals having managed to land a job, rather than currently-unemployed individuals participating in these programs. Their job search can, then, be considered to have been both active and consistent, since the end result was a return to employment. But does this in-a-way-successful-job-hunt mean the person acted in line with institutional norms and frameworks? Or does it point to a capacity to adapt, and a mindset that allowed them to distance themselves somewhat from the normative model? On a theoretical level, this paper supports the thesis that the job search is institutionally framed (and job seekers' behavior monitored) by pinpointing a paradoxical logic: normative prescriptions were transgressed, but this was as a consequence of the remarkable regulation of the job search by the job seeker themselves. The article's main argument is that a successful job search entails distancing oneself from institutional norms, though at a cost of self-discipline that, though different, is equally strong. And this transgression makes it possible to achieve the goal shared by the unemployed, and the institutions, namely: getting a job.

The article begins with a discussion of the current literature on unemployment experience and the place devoted to job search within it. It continues with a presentation of the methodology, data and the French context in which the fieldwork was conducted (based on in-depth interviews with formerly-unemployed people who have succeeded in getting a job). Next, the results are developed in two steps, corresponding to the two identified facets of the job search experience. First, we observe that, since looking for work is organized round the norms that govern individual activity, being in charge of one's own future and taking personal responsibility for results, it is bound to reflect institutional injunctions. Yet the activities undertaken by unemployed people in order to get a job reveal the limitations of those norms, which instill discouragement, confusion and doubt at the heart of the experience. Consequently, tensions arise between the strategies implemented and the ordeals endured. Second, we argue that these tensions are contained and overcome by keeping the job search in check, which entails people limiting their own emotional involvement, as well as the amount of time devoted to it and the corresponding tasks. A successful job hunt thus appears to be both moderate and mitigated, keeping the activation norm at one remove. But these moderations in turn are the result of rules that not only distort but also mirror institutional norms, forming what we call a model of self-discipline.

Job search experience and unemployment

For sociologists seeking to analyze the experiences of the unemployed, the job search remained peripheral, barring a few notable exceptions (Bakke, 1940b). This strong trend was initiated in the 1920s by the famous investigation carried out in a small town hit by a wave of massive unemployment [START_REF] Jahoda | The Sociography of an Unemployed Community: Marienthal[END_REF]. The authors deciphered people's reactions to losing their jobs and registered the negative consequences: loss of self-confidence, shrinking social networks, weakened collective memberships, disruption of daily schedules, etc. Described as a "weary" or "resigned" community, the unemployed were seen as apathetic. Later on, several studies served to enrich our sociological knowledge of the effects of unemployment by showing the breakdown of self-esteem [START_REF] Tiffany | The Unemployed. A Social Psychological Portrait[END_REF]; the destabilization of family life [START_REF] Fagin | The Forsaken Families. The Effects of Unemployment on Family Life[END_REF]; damaged social relations (Bakke, 1940a); economic pauperization [START_REF] Gallie | Unemployment, Poverty and Social Isolation. Is There a Vicious Circle of Social Exclusion?[END_REF]; deregulated life styles [START_REF] Burman | Killing Time, Losing Ground. Experiences of Unemployment[END_REF]; psychological or emotional imbalance [START_REF] Hayes | Understanding the Unemployed: The Psychological Effects of Unemployment[END_REF]; health hazards [START_REF] Wilson | Unemployment and Health". A review[END_REF] and eroded social position (Procoli, 2004).

These powerful empirical studies provide an overall picture, where unemployment is portrayed as a set of privations that undermine (or even paralyze) the jobless, the process of looking for a job received very little attention. Sociological research seems to have been shaped by a "deprivation theory of unemployment" (Boland and Griffin, 2015a), which was as much a presupposition [START_REF] Cole | Re-thinking Unemployment. A Challenge for the Legacy of Jahoda et al[END_REF] as it was a result. Yet the jobless are also forced to look for work. And nowadays, that activity has become indissociable from their status and occupies an everlarger place in their daily life. These people are considered, and treated, as jobseekers rather than unemployed [START_REF] Demazière | The Boundaries of Unemployment. Institutional Rules and Real-life Experiences[END_REF].

The development of the welfare state and its array of institutions, systems and professionals responsible for supervising the unemployed is reason enough to pay more attention to the job search. In the mid-20 th century, it became a major criterion in the statistical codification of unemployment. Above all, with the development of activation policies [START_REF] Barbier | The French Activation Strategy in a Comparative Perspective[END_REF]Van Berkel et al., 2012), the job search has become a crucial aspect of the role assigned to the jobless. Their daily life is increasingly monitored: they must actively look for work, are under supervision and subject to punishment [START_REF] Dubois | Towards a Critical Policy Ethnography: Lessons from Fieldwork on Welfare Control in France[END_REF], as are other populations experiencing social insecurity [START_REF] Wacquant | Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity[END_REF]. Jobless status is based not so much on the lack of a job as on a job search that has to be both active and evidenced. This explains why both the "death of unemployment" and the "birth of job seeking" figure in the framework of activation policies (Boland and Griffin, 2015a). Henceforth, the unemployment experience is to a large extent a matter of looking for work -a search inseparable from the institutional norms that frame it. Also, the job search cannot be reduced to a combination of techniques in which the unemployed must invest in various ways, for example by studying job adverts, applying for jobs, making calls, visiting firms, asking around among friends and relations, updating their résumé. The search is the subject of institutional framing, through prescriptions and control. And we believe that its consequences, far from being limited to activating the unemployed, run deeper, affecting the job search experience as a whole, which is comprised of a combination of meaningful activities -events, situations, acts, and real-life episodes, including the interpretations, interrogations, projections and evaluations that make them significant [START_REF] Demazière | Does unemployment still have a meaning? Findings from a comparison of three conurbations[END_REF].

The job search experience has been documented in fieldwork carried out within the institutions that are in charge of the unemployed. In the wake of Michel Foucault's work, those institutions are often looked upon as cases of "governmentality" -that is, because their aim is to socialize and mold individuals into compliance with normative requirements, they go beyond control and punishment. Reflecting Foucault's neo-liberalism, offering the job seeker guidance and support is then viewed as the "strategic programming of an individual's activity" (2008: 223). Piloting the experience of joblessness and transforming it into the experience of looking for work has also been described in fieldwork carried out within organizations specializing in adult education, coaching, and competence enhancement [START_REF] Garrett-Peters | If I don't have a Job Anymore, Who am I?: Job Loss and Collaborative Self-concept Repair[END_REF][START_REF] Gabriel | Job Loss and its Aftermath among Managers and Professionals: Wounded, Fragmented and Flexible[END_REF]Boland and Griffin, 2015b). A finding emerges that is true across all these fields with regard to various categories of jobless people (managers, white collar workers, and professionals): everything serves to keep the problem of unemployment and its solutions at a strictly individual level. As a result, the job search now means working on oneself and exercising personal discipline; rather than finding work, it means transforming oneself to become recruitable, attractive and employable. It becomes a "governance of the self" (Boland, 2015: 146) that comes in several varieties, each of which amounts to no more than a preceptstay positive, build connections, know how to sell yourself, make new contacts, etc. All of which implies that you will take charge of your own destiny, becoming the entrepreneur of your own self. Much of the fieldwork demonstrates this conversion, a process that consists of convincing yourself that you are both on top of, and responsible for, your own situation, and that finding a job depends on you alone, in other words a conversion to a "self-help paradigm" (Sharone, 2007: 406).

The institutions and systems that target the unemployed are therefore places in which people are socialized toward finding a job, where methods and techniques are learned, and above all where a new self is manufactured, in line with the logics of individualization and responsibilization that dominate current social policy [START_REF] Ferge | The Changed Welfare Paradigm: The Individualization of The Social[END_REF][START_REF] Hamilton | The 'New Social Contract' and the Individualisation of Risk in Policy[END_REF]. It is all about producing active (and indefatigable) jobless people (or, to be more precise, job seekers) whose to-do list endlessly grows, who are autonomous and responsible, who are convinced that their future depends on the effort they put in, and who are willing and able to believe in their own capacity to be transformed into the ideal candidate for a job. Learning self-government and self (personal) work can be more or less successful, more or less long-lasting. Doubts can undermine both the job search and the belief in personal work, and even distort its meaning: "from boost to bust" (Sharone, 2007: 416). Such a reversal has often been noted among the long-term unemployed, who are easily discouraged [START_REF] Cottle | Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long-term Unemployment[END_REF]. In contrast, fieldwork carried out at career counseling firms underlines the extent to which institutional norms influence the job search experience and conclude that, to quote Foucault once again, any force that promotes self-discipline and self-transformation is "productive". However, these analyses fail to examine precisely the extent of the effects of these institutional actions on the unemployed. Focused on institutional logics, they consider the unemployed to be converted, more or less acutely, to activation and self-responsibility. But, in terms of the experiences of the unemployed, what happens to the institutional prescriptions? Are they followed? Or are they adjusted or transgressed?

Thus, in order to analyze job search experiences, we performed an empirical switch. Instead of targeting the long-term, discouraged, unemployed, whose behavior disregards established norms, or jobless people registered in training periods, who take part in institutional activities, we ventured into virgin territory: that of formerly-unemployed people who had landed a job. This made it possible to generate job-search narratives unshackled by the need for selfjustification, because, whatever else they may have done, these unemployed people had succeeded. This allowed us to question the experience of looking for work from the perspectives of those who have been through it [START_REF] Bruner | Life as Narrrative[END_REF][START_REF] Ezzy | Fate and Agency in Job Loss Narratives[END_REF]. Which is not to say that normative models were excluded from their narratives or our analysis. We argue, however, that this empirical switch can lead to the assignment of a different meaning to the gaps that separate the experiences from the norms. Rather than boiling down to a lack of compliance with institutional norms, these experiences are the expression of a counter-model that is based on several self-limitations: in terms of job search, emotional involvement, and time devoted to job search.

Methodology: in-depth biographical interviews

Our fieldwork was carried out in France in 2015, when the ILO unemployment rate was at a high of 9.9%. The situation of the unemployed had considerably deteriorated, with rises in the duration of joblessness (over one year, for 43% of unemployed people); the number of people wanting to work but classified as inactive (1.5 million to add to the 2.8 million ILO unemployed), and the sort of work they obtained (fewer than 15% landed open-ended contracts). In such a setting, the end-of-unemployment experience of the population we interviewed was relatively positive: these were unemployed people who got jobs and were still in the post a year later. Formerly-unemployed people, then, whose work situation has become fairly stable. The French context combines activation policies that are fairly soft, in comparison with other countries having high unemployment levels [START_REF] Barbier | The French Activation Strategy in a Comparative Perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Serrano-Pascual | Activation Regimes in Europe: A Clustering Exercise[END_REF]. In France, unemployed people are registered with a public employment office (Pôle Emploi), then supported and monitored by the agents of this institution. Since the 2000s, the persistence of mass unemployment has led to advisers spending less time with the unemployed. Thus, those considered most employable (and perceived as autonomous) are rarely seen, whereas those experiencing most difficulties are seen monthly, for varying amounts of time. Those who fall between these two extremes are seen for 30 minutes at least every six months [START_REF] Clouet | Le chômeur et le chronomètre. Course contre la montre à Pôle Emploi[END_REF]. As a result, the impact of Pôle Emploi support on job seekers' careers is limited, and unemployed people's confidence in the institution has weakened [START_REF] Lavitry | Flexibilité des chômeurs, mode d'emploi. Les conseillers à l'emploi à l'épreuve de l'activation[END_REF].

For those who have successfully escaped unemployment, job search can be deemed active and effective from the outset, allowing analysis to concentrate on personal logics and rationales. Our hypothesis is that this active job search reflects an adaptation and adjustment to the prescribed standards, rather than a simple alignment with them. However, since each formerlyunemployed person has a specific career path, we diversified the sample so as to avoid a concentration of profiles that were favorable to finding work. Pôle Emploi provided us with a list of candidates, from which we selected a sample of formerly-unemployed people who, having secured a job in January 2014, had not returned to Pôle Emploi one year later, varying their sex, age, qualification and unemployment duration. The profiles of our 38 formerlyunemployed interviewees, including the professional positions they obtained, are diverse (Table 1).

TABLE 1 here

Our method sought to break with the requirement of justifying the job search that is imposed on unemployed people by the services in charge of advising/controlling them. Conversely, it does risk collecting heroic stories that highlight individual ability to cope. Yet this risk appears theoretical, since what the material collected shows is self-limitation of the job search. Nevertheless, in the future we plan to compare narratives collected from different categories of unemployed people: those who got a job, who have been excluded after a check, and who are still looking for work. In any case, building trusting relationships was of particular importance, since being jobless is often synonymous with being made to feel worthless [START_REF] Burman | Killing Time, Losing Ground. Experiences of Unemployment[END_REF][START_REF] Ezzy | Narrating Unemployment[END_REF]. The interviews were carried out in locations chosen by interviewees -often within their homes. They were conducted in a conversational mode that was marked by interactive reciprocity. The interview length (often almost 2 hours) and the gratitude expressed by some of the interviewees indicate that a climate of mutual trust had indeed been nurtured. The protocol was neither exclusively aimed at the job search, nor a fortiori at their present occupation; it also sought to elucidate their experience of unemployment, their professional careers, living conditions and ways of life. We frequently picked up on, or returned to, what interviewees had said, because we wished to obtain and encourage detailed accounts of their activities and behaviors while they were unemployed in order to trigger the reflective processes that can generate meaning and interpretation. The people contacted were of course informed that they were free to refuse to answer, and that their anonymity was strictly guaranteed.

Thematic analysis was applied to the transcribed interviews, so as to describe the forms of unemployment experience (Huberman and Miles, 1994: 245s). Here, we focus on the job search experiences per se. For each interview, several consecutive methods were then combined for analysis, paying special attention to the evaluative dimensions of the narrative [START_REF] Gergen | Narrative and the Self as Relationship[END_REF]: pinpointing passages relating to recent job search experience; making an inventory of the activities actually performed; listing the arguments associated with initiatives that were either acted upon or rejected; recalling outstanding episodes; identifying intervening changes; distinguishing ways of doing things, and characterizing the actors involved. Comparison of these analytical accounts allowed us to identify the most striking features that most had in common. Beyond differences in approach (reflecting the diversity of occupations, skills and sectors of activity), close or similar meanings and interpretations emerged. The points of convergence (that is, how institutional norms are kept at a distance) are sufficiently blatant to be foregrounded. The results show, however, that these differences have varying intensities, so we shall return to this point in our conclusion. Choosing to position job search narratives at the heart of our analysis, we have sought to understand the relationships between successful job-search behaviors and institutional norms and prescriptions.

Tensions in the job search experience

It comes as no surprise to learn that the formerly-unemployed people we interviewed put their success down to their own efforts; such an attitude is coherent with the self-government and personal work model. Yet, in the light of the difficulties and obstacles that had shaken their self-confidence, this claim must be taken with a pinch of salt. What emerges from their narratives is that job search is difficult to maintain over time, while remaining a highly-valued priority. This tension is apparent in the main dimensions of the "self-help paradigm" (Sharone, 2007: 406) that frames the job search as active and continuous, masterfully controlled and skillfully conducted, a commitment supported by the belief in its effectiveness.

Between being active and being discouraged

The people interviewed claimed to have sought work very actively, counting both the number of steps they took and measuring the intensity of their efforts. They stressed the amount of time spent on the search: "a full-time job", "long weeks", "I didn't count the hours", "more timeconsuming than work", "always on the go" 1 . Their daily schedule was organized around the job search, and they also set deadlines for it: "no more than six months", "before my daughter's birthday", "after this summer, it'll be sorted". The conjunction of these two temporalitiesmaximizing temporal expenditure and minimizing the period of time necessary -reveals the centrality of the job search. It is a concrete translation of the command to search actively, expressed by imperative formulas used by interviewees such as "you must" followed by such expressions as: "get a move on", "get a hold of yourself", "act", "go for it", "react", "stay with it", "stay strong", "move forward", "be realistic" and "make an effort". This imperative does not refer to any external source, or the fear of being checked up on or punished. Rather, it is presented as stemming from a personal need, self-imposed by the unemployed person (and sometimes forcefully relayed by their entourage). They describe it as a self-imposed obligation.

However, multiplying attempts to land a job also means accumulating disappointments and setbacks. In that sense, beyond being an established norm, searching actively is also an experience that exposes the unemployed to exhaustion that is equal to their exertion. The narratives show that the job search moves forward in a rough, ragged manner, alternating moments of high and low intensity, periods of activism and lethargy. Most interviewees spoke of times when they lost heart, were depressed, or stopped looking for variable periods of time. The longer the period of unemployment last, the more pronounced and difficult these events become -or else, they occur suddenly following unexpected failure. Searching actively also means becoming discouraged, due to the uncertainty of outcome and disillusionment that follows shattered expectations. Discouragement is therefore an intrinsic part of the active job search. It surfaces when the search becomes unbearable, and points to a loss of control due to a loss of meaning:

The job search is a trip, but nobody tells you where you're going (laughs). You think you've got a chance but then nothing happens. At one point I couldn't go on, I just couldn't, that's all, I lost faith. I was worn out (…) Little by little, I bounced back, but I don't know how it all happened. It had just become impossible (man, 56, university degree, sales manager, following a 20-month period of unemployment).

Between control and confusion

Interviewees claimed (with varying levels of insistence) to be competent job seekers. Yet not all had received specific job-search training -and those that had, were both the youngest and most highly-skilled. Competence is defined here as the ability to manage the job search, and to do so in a way that is compliant with your own professional goals. The job search is defined less as mastery of techniques than being capable of applying them in an appropriate manner. The variety of techniques (both applied and rejected) is therefore considerable. This selection process is a sign of attempts to improve an already good, reflective and flexible job search.

Each interviewee thus places their job search within specific sub-spaces of the labor market, aligning it with local characteristics by giving precedence to the methods they consider most pertinent.

My CV, I tried a bit at first, but it ended up in the trash can. As for the want ads, I know they're rigged (…) I know my sector well, I've just got to adapt. The basis is easy. Afterwards, it gets horrid. An avalanche of emails and ringing them after. Be a prospect, catch their eye. That's it, they've got to remember who you are. I stepped back and took stock but it's hard, very hard. But you'd be a fool to do it differently, because that's how it works, so that's how you must do it (woman, 52, two years of university, communications manager for an association, following a 21-month period of unemployment).

However, the power these people claim to have over the job search comes up against the difficulty of anticipating the outcome. In that sense, their ability to manage the process is strongly challenged by the unreliability of results. This throws them off kilter, creating confusion. Certain events clearly bring that tension to the fore, e.g. when interviewees are unable to explain why they were taken on, given their previous, fruitless attempts at landing similar positions. But the experience most often reported is that of the inexplicable failure, highlighting a huge gap between the hope of being appointed to a post that matches your profile and skills and then being turned down after a series of interactionswith recruiters. These episodes reveal the fragility of expectations and cause people to lose their bearings, destabilizing a job search that had seemed under control. I was sure I'd get it, it had all gone so well. An excellent, high-quality encounter. And then they took on somebody else (…) I didn't understand what was happening. It was a nightmare. I'd done everything right; the job was tailor-made for me. I felt like everything I'd ever done had been swept away. There was nothing left, everything I'd set up, down the drain (woman, 47, Master's degree, employed in care work, following a 9-month period of unemployment).

Between responsibility and doubt

Responsibility for one's own future is another theme that crops up in job search narratives. The argument is less concerned with the fact of having landed a job than it is with the belief that it is worth trying. This belief expresses the self-confidence that comes from personal work, three components of which can be identified: these correspond to the three demands made of the job seeker. You must have a positive attitude so as to act with your whole being: "believe in it", "go the whole hog", "get rid of the negative vibes", "stop going around in circles". You must also be open and ready to take full advantage of every situation, "be on the lookout", "keep your eyes open", "stay awake", "grab your chance". But you must also reflect on how your job search can be improved, "understand what went wrong", "listen to others", "learn from your mistakes", "find that little something that will carry the day". Certain incidents in the course of the search force job seekers into intensive periods of soul-searching, and these contribute to maintaining their belief and faith in their own chances of success. That is the case, for example, with job interviews, which have been obtained after having overcome several hurdles in the selection process. Being hired, then, seems to depend on your personal ability to clinch a deal -confirming the feeling of personal responsibility for what happens next.

The worst is being called in for an interview. The pressure is unbelievable! I was already going crazy, especially at first. You prepare like mad, because it's your own life that's on the line. You know it's going to hang by a thread. The pressure -that's what gives you the adrenaline (man, 46, low-level vocational qualification, franchised shop-keeper, following an 11-month period of unemployment).

Nevertheless, claiming responsibility is dampened by actual experience as well as by the repeated let-downs that make so many dents in a person's belief that results depend on their own actions. This leads interviewees to express doubts as to their own ability to carry out an effective job search. They mull over their behavior, laying blame on the amount or suitability of the efforts they put in: "How can you be sure you did everything you could?' "Shouldn't you have spent more time doing it?" "Were you responsive enough?" "What more could you have done?" And so it goes on. Their belief in their own ability to remain in charge of their job search, and get results, is thus counterbalanced by the impression of not having many hits, or having exhausted their resources. Everybody will tell you I'm pretty self-confident. But although I say I did everything right, it's hard to always believe it. At one point I didn't see what more I could do. I began doubting everything, maybe I should go about it differently, that sort of thing. But I saw that -no, I had done everything I could. That's when you go crazy. In fact, I thought I was finished (woman, 45, high school diploma, sales-person, following a 15-month period of unemployment).

Job search as self-discipline

The story of a successful job search is told as the ability of unemployed people to undertake personal work, persevere, gain control of their own destiny and feel responsible for their own situation. But this claim of self-improvement is contradicted by the frustrating events that breed discouragement, confusion and doubt. To reduce anxiety, these people resort to various forms of "DIY", which, when combined, create an alternative type of job search. Backed up by the claim that their control of the search is strategic and well thought-out, this model entails putting limitations on that search. Emotional involvement is kept as low-key as possible, and the amount of time spent looking is restricted, so that people manage to step back somewhat from the role they have been ascribed. We refer to this as the self-discipline model.

Setting the emotional limits

Formerly-unemployed people having landed a job repeatedly argued that their job search was central for them. Not only was it what filled their days, but it was the only thing that opened a window onto the future: "My last hope", "I saw that and only that: search, search, look, look", "All my energy went into that", "My only chance to come out on top". These words show that the job search is the object of an intense, subjective investment. It helps them get moving and make an effort. But it can also become an obsession -one that is difficult to channel or frame. In this event, looking for a job becomes all-pervasive, and knows no limits. Rather than triggering action, it risks becoming deadly -like a serious and invasive illness whose development can no longer be curbed. I lived through that; it was terrible. A sort of frenzy I couldn't get rid of. It gnawed away at me inside. I couldn't sleep, in fact it was like a sickness (…). But when I realized it was eating away at me like a cancer, I thought, I must get rid of it. That was the turning point, catching on to the fact that the job search can do you in (man, 39, two years of university, real-estate employee, following a 16-month period of unemployment).

In the end, this subjective investment is kept in check by "little tricks", techniques aimed at mitigating (and thus sustaining) their commitment. Interviewees spoke of principles that suggest some sort of psychological or mental preparation: "avoid talking yourself into believing in the existence of any "tailor-made" job offers; "be prepared to fail", "show you believe in it but don't fool yourself", "keep a cool head", "be clear about the drawbacks of the job". For these people, it was a matter of controlling their emotions and limiting their enthusiasm while remaining self-sufficient and self-contained. Such an attitude boils down to taking a hard look at one pillar of the self-help model, since it means accepting that failure depends on many factors. Forcing yourself to admit this means taking better charge of the job search by maintaining a critical stance -so that the inevitable setbacks and disappointments are less painful.

Once you've been slapped down a few times, there are two options: either you're a masochist and you keep doing it, or you know you have to get a grip. That's how I figured it out, it was very simple. I couldn't go on as I was, so I forced myself to slow down. Control the energy. The first thing to do is tell yourself that it doesn't all depend on you. It's not surprising that it doesn't work. You have to learn to be humble, otherwise you drown (woman, 51, MA, manager in a public service, following a 24month period of unemployment).

Setting temporal limits

Unemployment leaves you with time to kill, empty time that the job search can fill and even colonize. Many interviews revealed a temporal dynamic specific to the job search, fueled by a range of elements, depending on the situation: being unsure of how much time to give it; feeling guilty for being jobless; the urgency to put an end to it; the pressure put on you by friends and family and the internalization of a moral obligation. It is a vicious circle: the "never enough" syndrome. Though it is variously expressed, this shapes the job search experience. It reveals the other facet, the negative aspect of the active search: an aberration in which the job search devours all your available time, becoming an obsession. It was my duty. I had to do my duty, to the best of my ability of course. That's what doing your duty means, inherited from the work ethic and all. Except there's no schedule. No limit. How can you know if you did well? (…) As long as you have nothing, there's no way of knowing. Because I thought to myself it's not enough, I'm not enough, well, not active enough, I mean (woman, 42, high school diploma, supervisor in the social services sector, following a 23-month period of unemployment).

The pressures imposed on your time by the job search are heavy, and the longer it lasts, the harder they are to bear. At some point, fatigue sets in, a prelude to deterioration of the job search. To overcome this difficulty, formerly-unemployed people experimented with temporal arrangements that sustained the job search by setting limits. They decided on time slots, diversely defined: "a maximum of four 8-hour days", "nine-to-one, and that's it", "one fourday week and one two-day week", "I counted 20-hour weeks, no more". Though diverse, all of these temporal frameworks shared a similar objective: to channel the job search, that is, to reserve set time-sequences capable of supporting individual commitments, while at the same time imposing limits allowing an escape from that all-pervasive activity.

Organizing is primordial. When you're not working, everything disappears. It's impossible to go on as you were, schedules and all that. You no longer… To look for work, you have to go about it differently. I did four days a week, maximum, until early afternoon. You've got to know how to set limits on yourself, if not you get swallowed up, you go around in circles (man, 47, high school diploma, office worker in a small firm, following a 15-month period of unemployment).

Compensating through personal activities

When the time allotted to looking for job is self-restricted, interviewees develop activities unconnected to the search. These are the "off-work" of unemployment and constitute the third aspect of the self-discipline model. These activities vary considerably: family life, private breaks, DIY, sports, cultural practices, diverse leisure activities, or, more rarely, volunteer work. The amount of time given over to these activities also varies from regular and often to more irregular and seldom. Yet this diversity is subsumed in a common meaning: the idea is to counterbalance the job search with activities that both have value and give you value in return, bringing pleasure and personal satisfaction. These activities are often a return to old habitsduring periods of employment -yet they compensate for the ordeal of unemployment by letting you "forget your problems", "do something else", "clear your head", "put yourself on hold", "be yourself again".

At the same time, they can also be interpreted as an extension of looking for work by other means. Though independent of the search, they support and back it up. What interviewees were pointing out by declaring that they are "observing the rules of life", "aiming for a healthier existence", "applying survival principles", "maintaining a balance", "inventing a viable environment", is an overall organizational mode. What is at stake here is a day-to-day pattern aimed at staving off the pressures of the job search, at channeling it in order to sustain their enthusiasm. In this way, the two types of activity -the job search specific to unemployment and the personal activities that delineate a sort of off-work pursuit -are kept clearly separate, and any potential for rivalry between them is neutralized by the fact that they occupy different time slots and can bolster each other. Being active in the job search also means being active on the side, according to a dual-activity model in which the role of the second element is to sustain and preserve the first element. I made up my mind to use some of the time for myself. Well, so as not to be down in the dumps all the time, let's put it that way. I went out a lot (…)I went to the library a lot. It's an escape, well -not to bury your head in the sand but to get some fresh air. After that, it's easier to be in shape to tackle the firms that don't want you (laughter) (woman, 57, low-level vocational qualification, office worker in an association, following a 28-month period of unemployment).

If you want to make it, you need a whole system. Everything in its own time (…) Look for a job and give yourself to it whole-heartedly. But you've got to take a break, you can't stay with it fully all the time. What I like is getting out of the house, taking a walk … without any specific destination, just a walk, that's all. In this case I forced myself, I wrote it down in my agenda, I got off my a… If you don't do that, there's no life anymore, you don't feel like doing anything anymore, not even looking for a job (man, 30, high school diploma, restaurant employee following a 9-month period of unemployment).

Discussion

Analyzing the narratives of formerly-unemployed people who have landed a job and durably exited unemployment illustrates how paradoxical the hold of the institutional job search model can be. Indeed, we observed a strong correspondence between their behavior and the normative prescriptions documented in a number of previous studies: these unemployed people were active, on the ball, involved and responsible, autonomous and self-disciplined. They consented to doing personal work, managing to become the main protagonists in their own job search, mastering it and keeping it under control in their lives. As a result, they conducted job searches in line with overall institutional norms (activation and responsibility paradigms) and with more precise prescriptions (identification of targets, use of appropriate methods, maintenance of positive approach and flexibility, etc.). Yet this compliance is ambiguous in that it is eroded by repeated failure, which instils discouragement, confusion and doubt. This weakening is not the consequence of having lost faith or letup on the amount of effort made. It is neither a sign of resistance to the public employment service nor the beginnings of a withdrawal into inactivity. Rather, it is the result of well-thought-out management of personal behaviors. The job search experience leads the unemployed to distance themselves from institutional norms, inventing different rules that tinker with these norms. So, the limitation of the job search we have highlighted converges with the self-help paradigm, becoming a sign of personal discipline. At the same time, by instilling emotional, temporal and behavioral moderation into the job search, it creates a distance from it.

These results enrich existing analyses of how the behaviors of the unemployed are monitored. They show that the job search experience can be perceived differently, depending on whether fieldwork was conducted close to or distant from the institutions responsible for supporting them. Where it was close to these institutions, what stands out is the powerful effect of having been socialized according to a self-help model. Where it was distant from them, what emerges is the ambiguous nature of that socialization. These two kinds of observations do not contradict one another, because our fieldwork confirms the importance of being trained and socialized to respect the discipline necessary to securing a job. The fact that our study was carried out outside of, and distant from, those institutions in which the jobless are converted into potential job seekers, allowed us to enrich the analysis of the gaps between norms and experiences.

One important finding is that these gaps do not indicate inadequate compliance, showing for example that unemployed people have internalized job search norms and prescriptions to a greater or lesser extent, or could apply them well, or less well, or were more or less convinced of their relevance. It is true that the events punctuating the job search made adjustments necessary in order to deal with the pitfalls encountered. The experience of the formerlyunemployed people interviewed here does not boil down to a lack of compliance with the normative model disseminated and instilled by the institutions in charge of them. Rather, it charts a different model, a counter-model, a transgressive model that is based on self-limitation: of the job search and the emotional involvement; of the time given over to it, and the steps actually taken. These limitations aim to preserve the job search during a period that is marked by pitfalls and obstacles. Far from being indicative of a loss of control, these people have personally taken things in hand, demonstrating self-control. Because it is framed by a high level of self-discipline, this transgression is closely linked to rise in compliance. The transgression thus paradoxical, because it ultimately leads to getting a job. Contravening institutional norms can therefore be considered functional, since its result contributes to the institutional objectives of escaping unemployment and getting into work, albeit by deviating from the prescriptions. Yet this self-discipline (a pillar of the institutional model) aims to master the tensions inherent in the job search experience, rather than being oriented toward a general norm of activation.

In the end, the exercise of self-discipline means that, despite repeated failures, these formerlyunemployed people were able to find in themselves the resources necessary to keeping the personal work associated with the job search alive. This is just one more example of the power inherent in governing the behavior of job seekers, leading to new questions and new research directions, and underlining the breadth and influence of this model of self-discipline. In particular, the experiences of the unemployed should be cross-referenced with institutional actions. It would be necessary to design an inquiry cross-referencing the work of front-line advisers with adjustments in the job search of the unemployed. This would also allow us to question the Foucauldian theoretical framework that inspires many studies, and confront the concept of "governmentality" with other concepts, such as "domestication of the dominated" (Bourdieu, 2012: 565), or "relations of ruling" that regulate the everyday world [START_REF] Smith | Institutional Ethnography. A Sociology for People[END_REF], etc.

Our investigation has focused on a specific sub-population: formerly-unemployed people having managed to find relatively stable and lasting professional positions. Does this mean that the model is limited to this specific population? Or that it is necessarily connected to a successful job search? As for how the model is disseminated and what the conditions (both favorable and unfavorable) in which it might spread might look like -this is an open question. Exploring internal differences was tricky, due to sample size. The narratives suggest that some respondents adopt self-discipline attitudes earlier and strongly, especially among those who have higher levels of education, are relatively young, and are white-collar or intermediary professionals. This observation converges with other results showing that unemployed people having these characteristics are also more confident in their own job-finding abilities, more able to organize their job search methodically, and see themselves as competent job seekers [START_REF] Schnapper | L'épreuve du chômage[END_REF][START_REF] Demazière | Does unemployment still have a meaning? Findings from a comparison of three conurbations[END_REF]. We can also hypothesize that these categories of unemployed are more embedded in social worlds in which standards of autonomy and responsibility are powerful, and which bring them closer to institutional norms, than certain others. For other unemployed people, groups and socialization spaces convey different or contradictory norms. The results obtained thus argue for complementary qualitative research, considering two sources of heterogeneity together: socio-demographic profiles of the unemployed, and the relational entourages in which variable conceptions of job search circulate. This would make it possible to test and refine the hypothesis that the unemployed are pressured -or better yet, self-propelled -into both self-help and self-discipline.

Table 1 . The Sample

 1

	Number	Percentage

The short expressions between inverted commas were borrowed from interviewees. Where excerpts are longer, we indicate the characteristics of the interviewee.

Funding

This research was funded by the French Agency for Employment (Pôle Emploi) and by a French national non-profit organization offering aid to the unemployed (Solidarités Nouvelles face au Chômage).