{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.037054409005628515, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009849906191369606, 'mean_word_length': 5.182608695652174, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Andrew Dunn (2014), Rethinking Unemployment and the Work Ethic: Beyond the ‘Quasi-Titmuss’ Paradigm . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. £65.00, pp. 240, hbk.

There is a risk that scholarly communities become inured to a particular intellectual orthodoxy. Challenges to such orthodoxies are therefore to be welcomed. In Social Policy, one such orthodoxy was once identified by Alan Deacon as the ‘quasi-Titmuss paradigm’ (2002: 22). And it is to this that Andrew Dunn in his recent book mounts a challenge. However, in borrowing a term coined by Deacon, Dunn reduces it to something of a caricature: he applies it as a label for supposedly closed-minded, left-leaning academic mainstream. The focus of the book is on labour market activation (LMA) policy, in relation to which Dunn is an articulate disciple of Lawrence Mead’s neo-conservative ‘work first’ approach (e.g. 1997). The book’s argument is constructed around four pieces of original UK-based research, each of which has some intrinsic merit, albeit that their findings might arguably be capable of interpretations other than those offered by the author. The problem constructed and addressed by the book is that of ‘voluntary unemployment’. The opening chapters consider, on the one hand, the substantial body of research by ‘mainstream’ Social Policy academics, demonstrating that unemployment results primarily from socio-economic and structural factors; and on the other, the critiques of neo-conservative thinkers who suggest that unemployment results primarily from individual behavioural or moral factors. While rendering a generally fair account of both sides in this debate, Dunn’s central argument is that the academic mainstream has failed sufficiently to address two elements of the neo-conservative critique: on the one hand, the ‘choosiness’ of unemployed people and their reluctance to take ‘unattractive’ jobs; and, on the other, the fact that legitimate evidence from professionals with first-hand experience of LMA work calls into question the plausibility of evidence obtained directly from unemployed people. The four projects reported in the book are: