Measuring Unemployment in the Netherlands, 1900-1940 : The Operationalisation of an Elusive Concept

This paper investigates i) the two measurement procedures of unemployment – one based on trade union unemployment insurance records and the other on labour exchange data – that were established by the Dutch official statistical office in order to measure the elusive concept of unemployment in the pre-Second World war era (1900-1940), and ii) how these measurement procedures helped to understand unemployment as a social concept.The paper argues that, since there were no operational definitions of unemployment prior to measurement, statistical thinking about what constitutes unemployment was intrinsically connected with the very way unemployment was measurement and, in addition, developed along the way, as measurement of unemployment took place. Measurement and conceptualization of unemployment, therefore, were not different stages in a measurement process but measurement and conceptualization went hand in hand and turned out to be mutually constitutive