Genres are the drive belts of the job market

ABSTRACT

Many job applicants spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the task of fashioning the most appealing biography of the increasingly skillful self out of interwoven genres that can also circulate individually. These struggles are most frequently articulated as questions of how best to manage different genres’ chronotopic expectations. Under neoliberalism, how workers are expected to represent their previous work lives has shifted significantly from earlier moments of capitalism: they are now expected to represent themselves as entrepreneurial selves. Over and over again in various workshops about job applicant genres, participants’ concerns over how to represent their employment history via different genres became the focus of the workshop. The focus on mastering a genre’s chronotopic expectations stood in for job applicants’ anxieties over representing themselves as the ideal neoliberal employee. The standardization and abstraction of time and the neoliberal expectations now linked to these genres has led to predictable conceptual quandaries for job applicants about how to connect oneself in appropriate ways to previous contexts that become articulated as dilemmas surrounding the pragmatics of producing genres’ chronotopes.

KEYWORDS:

• Hiring
• job applications
• genre repertoire
• chronotopes
• resumes
• LinkedIn

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For readers who might find a definition of chronotopes handy at this point, Blommaert’s definition is especially apropos for this article’s focus: ‘In Bakhtin’s analyses, chronotopes invoke and enable a plot structure, characters or identities, and social and political worlds in which actions become dialogically meaningful, evaluated, and understandable in specific ways. Specific chronotopes produce specific kinds of person, actions, meaning, and value’ (Blommaert 2015, p. 109).

2 In my fieldwork, innovation might be signaled by the choice of medium for submitting a resume – occasionally using a layer cake to submit a resume was mentioned. Typically, expressing the gap between ones lived experiences and the demands of a job application genre was not viewed as indexing innovation but rather a signal of incompetence.

3 Much to my chagrin, I did not come across many instances of overt resistance or rejection of neoliberal presumptions in my fieldwork.

4 For a parallel discussion of how the historical legacy of different documentary genres interweave to produce inconsistently compatible figure of personhood, albeit in socialist Vietnam, see Leshkowich 2014.

5 In the case of hiring, these are expert readers because their job roles involve evaluating these genres in an effort to winnow down possible applicants on behalf of imagined others in an organization. That is, as they read, those involved in hiring are always anticipating how other specific people in an organization will potentially interpret and respond to the documents in question.

6 LinkedIn profiles, unlike resumes, are ambiguously part of job seeking repertoire and as a result, LinkedIn as a genre might offer an undesirable signal to one’s workplace when one moves from being a rare user to a heavy user.

7 In an exception to this, in one workshop I saw a high-end waitress asking a panel of recruiters and HR people how to negotiate getting a job at various restaurants in the area. The experts were clearly at a loss, and kept encouraging her to rely on techniques she had used in the past successfully. This was one of the rare moments in the 54 workshops I attended in which someone was asking for advice for a job not located in an office and in which the experts encouraged the participant to rely on her own experience.

8 Viewing these documents as sales pitches or marketing tools has been a common theme in US job seeking advice books since the 1920s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ilana Gershon

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Halls professor of anthropology. An anthropologist of work and neoliberalism, her book on corporate hiring is Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today.