TY - BOOK ID - 69241835 TI - Unknotting the heart : unemployment and therapeutic governance in China PY - 2015 SN - 0801453755 0801456606 0801456177 0801456185 PB - Ithaca, New York ; London, [England] : ILR Press, DB - UniCat KW - Counseling psychology KW - Labor policy KW - Psychology, Industrial KW - Unemployed KW - Unemployment KW - Joblessness KW - Employment (Economic theory) KW - Full employment policies KW - Labor supply KW - Manpower policy KW - Underemployment KW - Jobless people KW - Out-of-work people KW - Unemployed people KW - Unemployed workers KW - Persons KW - Business psychology KW - Industrial psychology KW - Psychotechnics KW - Industrial engineering KW - Personnel management KW - Psychology, Applied KW - Industrial psychologists KW - Labor KW - State and labor KW - Economic policy KW - Government policy KW - Psychological aspects. KW - Political aspects KW - Counseling of KW - Changping Qu (Beijing, China) KW - Changping Xian (China) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:69241835 AB - Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, "counseled," and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal "counselors" in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and "hearts" of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination. ER -