Jobseeking as pilgrimage: trials of faith in the labour market

ABSTRACT

Jobseeking is increasingly frequent within contemporary labour markets characterised by temporary contracts, flexible projects and precarious ‘gig-work’ – with economic shocks such as the Financial Crash and COVID-19 pandemic creating waves of redundancy and mass unemployment. How individual job-changers and jobseekers make sense of their experiences and shape their own conduct is explored here, drawing inspiration from the emergent turn to ‘economic theology’ to consider the continued influence of Christian legacies of pilgrimage. To supplement Turner’s understanding of pilgrimage as liminal ritual, the article adapts Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis and Foucault’s later works on ‘modes of veridiction’, forms of tests and trials which ‘tell the truth’ about the subject. Thus, jobseeking pilgrimages are less seasonal collective religious ritual than a continuous individualised ethic; contemporary jobseeking involves pilgrimages of constantly deciphering signs, putting oneself to the test via the market and self-purification and transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Jobseeking
• economic theology
• pilgrimage
• genealogy
• Weber

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.fish4.co.uk/article/how-to-handle-a-job-rejection/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Boland

Tom Boland is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at University College Cork. His recent publications include articles in anthropology, philosophy, sociology and theology, and his 2019 book The Spectacle of Critique was published by Routledge. His main interests are the sociology of culture and critique, and the governmentality of welfare and unemployment. With Ray Griffin he is author of The Sociology of Unemployment 2015, and The Reformation of Welfare, 2021 – the present article develops and extends on chapter six of that volume.