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

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 interpe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Culture, theory and critique theory and critique, 2019-01, Vol.60 (1), p.84-97
Main Author: Gershon, Ilana
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Employability
Experts
Job applicants
Job hunting
Neoliberalism
Teaching
Workplaces
Workshops
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1473-5784
1473-5776
DOI:10.1080/14735784.2018.1548299