The job market is based on the supply and demand of certain skills that employees bring to a job. When a company downsizes, they flood the market with certain types of skills. When a company is looking to fill a vacancy, it is also looking for a certain set of skills. The jobless people may not have the skills that the hiring companies are seeking.
Another possibility is that the jobs that are open pay a low wage that will not support the families and lifestyle of the people who lost their jobs due to downsizing. The minimum wage in the United States is designed to support a single person, not a family with children or older workers trying to save for retirement.
Finally, the jobs available may be in a different geographical area than the positions that were eliminated. There are very high personal and financial costs attached to moving long distances. It may be that the compensation, benefits, and security of the available jobs are not sufficient to entice workers to live in a new area.
Physics, statistics, and other "hard" sciences are based upon laws that are always true. Social sciences such as organizational behavior rarely produce such laws since the subject of their study, human beings, are not uniform. Thus they cannot be expected to always act in the same way. This leaves some to question whether "science" is the proper term to use for such areas of research.
To call organizational behavior simply "common sense", however, is erroneous. The social sciences use the same scientific method that physical and mathematical sciences do, and with the same results. It is "common sense" that a larger object will fall faster than small one. Yet physical scientific testing has shown this to be a false hypothesis.
Organizational behavior has proven many beliefs about running a business to be incorrect. For example, common sense dictates that the fear of losing one's job is sufficient to motivate most peopl...