Hailing the US job-seeker: origins and neoliberal uses of job applications

ABSTRACT

In every US city or college campus, it is possible to attend workshops designed to teach job seekers how to fashion the genre repertoire required to apply for a job. Over the past 15 years, these workshops are arenas for hailing the neoliberal subject, teaching different genres as forms that interpellate job applicants as authors of their own ever improving and quantifiable chronological achievements. These workshops condense three paradoxes that neoliberal logics compel practitioners to grapple with. First, the workshops exist because of the presupposition that job seeking has changed radically in the past five or ten years, that job seeking in itself is a skill that one must always learn anew. That is, the very act of entering into an alliance involves a set of skills that must be regularly enhanced. Second, that it is possible to create a standardised genre repertoire demonstrating employability that will be successful regardless of the specific requirements of different types of jobs and workplaces. Third, the self that is being interpellated is also an ever-failing one, creating a veritable army of experts who provide a plethora of advice on how to perfect one's standardised genre repertoire so as to be employable.

Acknowledgments

Bonnie Urciuoli has consistently made my life better in countless ways through her generosity since the day we met in 1985. I owe her so much more than the labour congealed in a special issue. My thanks to my two anonymous reviewers and my careful editor, Chaise LaDousa. I also want to thank participants in University of Chicago's Semiotic Workshop for their expansive questions, especially Rachel Howard. I also want to thank Summerson Carr, Constantine Nakassis, Kaushik Rajan and Michael Silverstein for the directions they sent me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Hall professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She has published a book on hiring in corporate America, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today (University of Chicago 2017), and edited a volume on jobs around the world, A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs (Cornell University Press).

ORCID

Ilana Gershon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0447-0694

Notes

1 See Ganti (2014) for a survey of anthropological explorations of this continual teaching.

2 I rely on Richard Bauman's (2000: 85) definition of genre as ‘a routinized vehicle for encoding and expressing particular orders of knowledge and experience’. These routinised vehicles for organising knowledge and action always exist in contrast with each other, every genre is always already part of a web of genres. Sometimes however, a bounded set of genres are unified repeatedly through social interactions, or are mobilised purposefully as a unit to accomplish complex social tasks. In these moments, genres become part of a genre repertoire. Genre repertoire is an analytical term coined by Orlikowski and Yates (1994: 542): ‘the set of genres that are routinely enacted by members of the community’.

3 In anthropology, semiotic ideologies refers to the beliefs, strategies and attitudes people have about signs, language and media that refers to actual semiotic practices but does not determine these practices (Keane 2018).

4 Media ideology is a semiotic ideology, much like a language ideology, a set of beliefs, strategies and attitudes about media that shapes its default norms and interpretability but does not determine media practices (see Gershon 2010).

5 This is in contrast to LinkedIn profiles, which were considered to be a stand-alone genre.

6 Within the context of these workshops, personal branding is presented as one performance genre among many that is necessary for job-seekers. This is one of the more recent additions to the job-seekers genre repertoire, and the origin of this genre is commonly attributed to Tom Peters’ 1997 article. (see Gershon 2014, 2017 for expanded discussion of personal branding)

7 Job candidates were supposed to adopt the regimen of Problem-Solution-Result when responding to a job interview questions. In other regions of the United States, the model is called the SHARE model or the STAR model.

8 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. For most workshops, participants were tacitly encouraged to forget all that they have learned about hiring through their own previous work experiences.

9 Steve is himself a job-seeker, and in a programme in which the more experienced job-seekers train the less experienced ones. His deferral of authority may be a result of his status.

10 In most other workshops I attended, participants argued less with the instructor.

11 Some of these organisations were so effective at teaching job searching as a skill set that some of the more active clients decided to make career counselling their new career path. Some even found contract jobs with a large outplacement firm, Lee Hecht Harrison.