Managing the Disappointment of Job Termination: Outplacement as a Cooling-Out Device

Abstract

As termination has become common among high-status workers, an industry has evolved that purports to assist in their reemployment. Advocates of outplacement have emphasized to employers, however, that the industry's service primarily functions as a self-protective device, minimizing the problematic reactions of job losers and bystanders. The particular strategy articulated by advocates for orchestrating the emotions, energies, and goals of terminated workers is described, and is interpreted as being analogous to that used by confidence game operators in "cooling-out" those they defraud.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.