The making of a category of economic understanding in Great Britain (1880–1931): ‘the unemployed’
研究了英国在1931年才开始对失业者进行人口普查的原因，探讨了‘失业者’这一范畴在19世纪英国如何成为科学分析和公共政策的概念，对理解当前工作形态变化和福利国家争议有参考价值。
Abstract Evidence-based policy relies on measurement to trigger actions and to manage and evaluate programmes. Yet measurement requires classification: the making of categories of understanding that approximate or represent collective phenomena. In 1931, two decades after implementing the first compulsory unemployment benefits in 1911, the British Government began to carry out a census of out-of-work individuals. Why such an inversion, at odds with the exercise of rational-legal authority, and unlike to its French or German counterparts? To solve this puzzle, we document the making of ‘the unemployed’ as a category of scientific analysis and of public policy in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Our circumscribed contribution to the history of economic thought and methodology informs today’s controversies on the future of work, the weakening of wage labour through the rise in the number of part-time contracts and self-employed workers, as well as the rivalry between the welfare state and private charities with regard to providing impoverished people with some kind of relief.