Getting Back "Face": Self-Esteem Maintenance Among Laid-off Workers

How could a social group of people sustain their self-esteem when suffering a stark decline in status? This paper attempts to answer this question by elaborating strategies of self-esteem maintenance devised by laid-off and unemployed workers employed by the state-owned enterprises in the past, the former quasi-middle class and the current underclass. The data were collected from field work of in-depth interviews with fourteen laid-off and unemployed workers, as well as second-hand interviews with forty laid-off workers. A variety of strategies devised by these people to retain their dignity are articulated, involving social comparison and social memory at the intergroup level, intragroup comparison and personal memory at the intragroup level, as well as information control, distancing, accounts and occupational rhetorics at the interpersonal level. In the last chapter, this thesis indicates that in different phases of post-layoff period, the workers employ distinct techniques to cope with their threatened dignity; besides, it also points out diversity in strategy adoption among workers in different situations. Finally, the article puts forward some factors affecting the strategy's effectiveness, like family support, mattering, and gender.