The article aims at reflecting on the links between the phenomenon of employment and unemployment in an intense made flexible work context as well as the institutional and normative reconstruction of the standards of workers' protection. In doing so the arguing unfolds in three directions: Firstly, it studies the movement to redefine the notion of "unemployed," pursuing, using the recent sociological literature, the constitution and social legitimacy making of the new idea of the "long-term unemployed." Secondly, it compares theoretical developments that have tried to understand such phenomenon with the efforts made by the Brazilian labor sociology to interpret the problem unemployment. Finally, it claims the heuristic value of contextualized comparisons to test, for the Brazilian case, hypothesis developed by the so-called unemployment sociology in Europe, above all, France.
Unemployment; Occupational Trajectories; Brazil