“In Flawed System/Flawed Self, Ofer Sharone develops a cogent, timely, and compelling account of why American employees blame themselves for their failure to secure employment and why their Israeli counterparts engage in system blame instead. Sharone moves the discussion well beyond global generalizations about the role of culture to make an important contribution to the literature of joblessness.”

Steven Vallas | author of Work: A Critique

 “Imagine two men drawn from Ofer Sharone’s highly insightful and important study of how jobless people search for work. One approaches a job interview as he might a  first date, and the other, as he would an oral exam. The first offers who he is, the second, what he has. As we learn from this book, the first man is likely to be a white-collar American, and the second, his Israeli counterpart. After encountering  a series of ‘no, no, no’s,’ it is the open-hearted American who is likely to blame himself, feel shame, and give up, while the pragmatic Israeli is more likely to shrug it off and keep trying. Here Sharone articulates a central ‘got-ya’ moment of American market individualism. Called to try to feel personally empowered in the face of a merciless market he cannot control, the jobless man recoils in heart-felt defeat and feels stripped of a dignity—and power—he might otherwise enjoy. Realizing this, Sharone notes, is a first step in mobilizing for social change.”

Arlie Hochschild, author of The Outsourced Self

 “One of capitalism’s achievements is to turn unemployment into perhaps the hardest work of all. Such is the startling argument of Flawed System / Flawed Self, which compares the work of re-entering the labor force in the US and Israel and the toll it takes on the individual.  A brilliant analysis of how we get sucked up into games of self-deception.”

Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley

“Sharone examines the experience of unemployment with great insight and deep empathy…. At once clear and theoretically sophisticated, compassionate and scientifically systematic, Flawed System/Flawed Self gives readers an in-depth understanding of the experience of unemployment and the social institutions that structure it.”

ILR Review

“Flawed System/Flawed Self is a strong contribution to scholarship on work and occupations, organizations, institutional analysis, and economic sociology . . .  The book’ s value transcends its academic worth, as it shows just how hard unemployed people must work to get a job.”

American Journal of Sociology