Conceptualizing Un employment in a Period of Atypical Em ployment: A Critical Realist Perspective

An adequate conceptualization and measurement of unemployment should express the reality of employment. Designing theoretical concepts that adequately express reality requires appropriate methodological foundations. This paper uses critical realism to demonstrate that the deductive method encourages the construction of theoretical concepts in such a way as to reduce the multidimensional, qualitative reality of employment and unemployment to the quantitative, single dimension of variables, whereupon they cease to be adequate expressions of the reality they are designed to investigate. Part-time employment is used to exemplify atypical employment and to illustrate how the latter differs from typical employment in a number of dimensions, most of which are qualitative in nature.