Introduction: What to Expect

We often associate job search with job loss, an adverse and often traumatic experience with dire consequences to individuals, their families, and societies overall. Yet job search happens far more often in better circumstances, such as when people start out on their careers, move between jobs, or follow less traditional career paths. In either case, this self-regulatory behavior is worth investigation from many different perspectives. The current handbook thus offers the first comprehensive overview of the literatures on job loss and job search, discussing the antecedents and consequences of job loss as well as different situations besides job loss that may call for an intense job search. Further, the handbook discusses the diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives from which job search has been studied, the situation of special populations, and the types of interventions that have been developed when job search proves unsuccessful in the face of unemployment.