ABSTRACT
Becoming unemployed typically changes a person's life story. Narrative theory provides a philosophically sophisticated framework for understanding the self-concept. Paul Ricoeur's seminal work Time and Narrative examines how people turn historical events into stories. Ricoeur's hermeneutics emphasises the reality of lived experience, of acting in the world, as foundational to any attempt to understand the interpretative process. Integrative passages usually entail a transitional period followed by integration into a clearly delineated new status entered through a ceremonially specified process. On the other hand, divestment passages emphasise separation from a status and often contain extended transitional phases of uncertain duration. Job loss leading into unemployment is typically a divestment passage rather than an integrative passage. Failure or success in the attempt to sustain a central life plan has a very direct effect on self-evaluations. While two people may experience a very similar set of events, they can narrate them in very different ways.
