Seeking a role: disciplining jobseekers as actors in the labour market

Introduction

Conceiving society as a ‘market’ within which freely acting individuals rationally follow their self-interest has been subject to scholarly contestation for decades. The ‘market’ has been criticized as a political ideology of neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2010), as a fiction (Polanyi, 2001), as an imposition (Wood, 1999) and historicized (Foucault, 2008). Following Foucault and the ‘governmentality’ perspective (Dean, 2010) this article approaches the ‘market’ as constituted through institutional arrangements and power/knowledge that shapes subjects. This article will examine ‘job-seeking advice’ as offered by Jobcentres and popular websites as discourses which shape subjects into ‘jobseekers’.

While many individuals may switch between jobs – ‘job-changers’ in the parlance of career advice – generally job-seeking advice conceives ‘jobseekers’ as the unemployed. Interestingly, contemporary welfare policies such as Pathways to Work scarcely use the term ‘unemployment’, but refer mainly to ‘jobseekers’; there is no longer any ‘unemployment benefit’ – only ‘jobseekers’ benefit’. This shift, since the introduction of Pathways in the UK, reproduced in Ireland in 2012 and, similar to ‘welfare reforms’ in the EU and the OECD, has often been termed ‘neo-liberal’ and certainly inserts the ‘market principle’ into government policy, by insisting that most social transfers should be conditional on labour market participation. The increased pressure and surveillance in the system amounts to something very like coercion – accept any job offer or be made destitute – so this ‘liberalism’ is peculiarly authoritarian.

Beyond this critique, the insight of governmentality studies is that power is productive; the discourse of job-seeking advice is not just a series of orders backed up with threats. Rather, it constitutes subjects as jobseekers through enticing and up-beat advice which encourages readers to control any negative feelings emerging from unemployment, re-invent themselves through discovering their skills and aptitudes, sell themselves through sparkling applications and CVs and perform brilliantly in interviews. If they are unsuccessful, they should repeat the process, for whatever jobs are available, as a shape-shifting entrepreneur of the self. Following Agnew’s (1986) work on the historical conjunction of the market and the theatre, this article explores the ways that jobseekers are disciplined as theatrical actors, self-controlled performers, within a labour market conceived as a stage for scrutiny and impression management.

The governmentality approach focused on analysing textual advice has limits, most obviously that individuals may negotiate and resist being ‘subjectified’ as jobseekers in various ways. Recent research into the experience of unemployment and new welfare regimes do tend to suggest that the underlying conceptions of job-seeking as an individualized enterprise tend to be reproduced by individuals (Boland and Griffin, 2015; Brodkin and Marston, 2013; Vallas and Cummins, 2015; Van Oort, 2015). The modern conception of the subject as an actor involved in impression management is scarcely limited to the arena of job-seeking and is widely found in orientations towards career building (Grey, 1997), personal branding (Wee and Brooks, 2010) and enterprise (Rose, 1992). Indeed, Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology (1990) and Hochschild’s classic study of ‘emotional labour’ (2003) indicate that ‘acting’ and ‘impression-management’ are widespread – confirming Agnew’s insight into the theatricality of capitalism.

Herein, while expanding upon these theoretical concerns and empirically substantiating this reading of job-seeking advice as re-constituting its readers as performing subjects, the aim is not to expose theatrical job-seeking practices as ‘false’, but to interrogate the discourses which shape unemployed subjects and orient them as ‘actors’ towards the ‘labour market’. This is a contribution towards understanding how the unemployed are governed and suggests that job-seeking advice fulfils governmentalizing objectives: firstly, by inculcating self-control, which means the negative psychological consequences of unemployment are minimized and do not result in costs to the state; and secondly by encouraging constant personal re-orientation towards any job whatsoever, ensuring a large pool of labour competing for any job, no matter how precarious. Thus, these job-seeking manuals are part of the diverse apparatus of power governmentally creating the ‘labour market’, one of the most central institutions of modern society.

Governing labour market actors

Governmentality studies focuses on the intervention of the state through organizations, procedures, rules and categories, but including non-state forms of institutional control; for instance, factories. Another focus is on social policies, expert discourses and the instrumental deployment of knowledge, that is, how governors think about the arts of governing, their potential subjects and the ends of governance – typically the maximization of utility among a sustainable population with increased productivity (Dean, 2010). While governmentality is often concerned with regulation and control, it also conceives power as productive, managing populations, cultivating subjects and optimizing outcomes. Broadly, advice to jobseekers can be considered ‘discourse’, which exerts a powerful effect in governing their conduct and forming them as ‘subjects’, particularly through prescribing certain exercises of self-assessment, control and presentation which amount to ‘techniques of self’ (Foucault, 1988).

Governmental interventions do not just manage pre-existing individuals, but shape subjects, through inculcating certain forms of conduct. Outside influence has its limits; crucially the self must learn to conduct the self (Allen, 2008). Furthermore, ‘subjects’ are imagined or constructed by particular discourses; the soul in the confessional, the psyche in the analyst’s chair, the jobseeker in the welfare office. In Foucault’s (2002) archaeological approach to the production of knowledge, discourses, emergent paradigms and even ‘quasi-sciences’ are not self-contained, obvious or logically coherent theories; and they do not present a fixed perspective on pre-existing objects or analyse them into ‘real’ elements from a politically ‘neutral’ perspective. ¹ For Foucault, knowledge is always produced and paradigms are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (2002: 48).

Similarly, job-seeking advice is a form of knowledge-production, a discourse which has powerful effects within society and disciplinary institutions. The texts analysed here are varied and hybridized, articulating multiple discourses and values, in different registers, from many positions. Together, they represent something of a ‘quasi-science’, drawing from the authority of disciplines such as economics, education, personnel management and psychology, backed by the institutional weight of states, universities and human resources departments. While this is a loosely assembled constellation, it effectively constitutes an ‘order of discourse’ which addresses and imagines a series of inter-related ‘things’; (jobseekers, opportunities, motives, skills, talents, labour markets, competition, networks, etc.) and recommends certain actions (searching, applying, self-examination, presentation, interviewing, CV-writing, networking, etc.). In speaking of these things, the discourse of job-seeking effectively – performatively even – constructs them as real, with consequences for individuals. Certainly, such power/knowledge has political dimensions, but rather than critique it as ‘ideological’ and therefore ‘false’ – as though that would instantaneously negate its power (Allen, 2008) – instead the focus is on how it governs subjects.

Foucault’s governmentality (see Foucault, 2010) is a diagnosis, capturing a particular relationship of emergent European states to their population and subjects. Real historical figures, statesmen, politicians, officials and civilians become increasingly concerned from the sixteenth century onwards with knowing the population, its number, health and moral conditions; with understanding the demographic, economic and social processes which animate the population; and with seeking to maximize or optimize the economic resources and embodied qualities of these individuals in line with strategic or even moral plans for the state (Foucault, 2008). This knowledge prompts governmental interventions, regulations, categories and new institutions which form each individual member of the population as subjects; the management of ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1976). Modern ‘governmentality’ emerges from Christian conceptions of ‘shepherd’ and ‘flock’ and the complete care of the pastor for the souls of his congregation, particularly those who go astray (Foucault, 1981). Knowledge and power intersect in governmentality; for instance, the policing of the poor emerges from humanists like JL Vives but also from city regulations, for instance at Ypres (Michielse and Van Krieken, 1990).

Subsequently, 19th-century liberal thinkers made critical interventions to limit the scope of governmentality, setting up the ‘market’ as a domain of freedom. Yet, modern markets depend on the state monopoly of violence, legal frameworks, monetary policy, civil infrastructure and a variety of regulations on production, exchange and consumption – all intermeshed with taxation and technology. For liberals, ‘the economy is a game and the legal institution which frames the economy should be thought of as the rules of the game’ (Foucault, 2008: 173). Thus, governmental power sets up spaces wherein market processes are possible and required, and the resultant prices or values are taken as ‘knowledge’ of the ‘truth’ of society. The market is, like the confessional or the clinic, a site of ‘veridiction’, a place where knowledge or truth is produced. This ‘truth’ is not moral or eternal, but a test of reality, the market price reveals ‘real’ value. For states, the market truth is increasingly important: ‘…we have been living in an age in which the problems of utility increasingly encompass all the traditional problems of law’ (Foucault, 2008: 44). Thus, the labour market is governed less in accordance with customs or legal rights and more in terms of interventions and regulations which render it productive.

Herein, markets are taken as regulative spaces subject to power and knowledge, especially the labour market. Thus, advice to jobseekers is disciplinary discourse constituting them as ‘market actors’. It draws from wider economic discourses on market processes in general and on ‘psy-sciences’ which address the conduct and formation of the self. Governmentalizing discourses are composed of four interrelated elements (Dean, 1995); discourse defining those subjects or objects to be governed, techniques and processes for shaping their conduct, delineations of the rules or values by which they are governed and lastly, setting the ends or goals which are sought in the whole process. Regarding the labour market, the values and ends of market engagement are much the same as that for markets in general, but the subjects and objects imagined and the sorts of conduct recommended are distinctive and ‘fictive’ (Polanyi, 2001).

Job-seeking advice addresses and constitutes a subject labelled ‘jobseeker’; generally, someone without current employment. Furthermore, the subject is implicitly an already disciplined subject who can take themselves as an object of reflection in order to guide the conduct of their own job search; their aptitudes, talents and experiences can be ‘leveraged’ for market value; their reflexivity about themselves becomes commodified (Wee and Brooks, 2010). Additionally, the job-seeking subject is envisioned as desiring labour, not just sustenance; without work and drawing welfare benefits, these subjects are considered to suffer ‘deprivation’ (Jahoda, 1982). Such ‘jobseekers’ do not naturally exist but are constituted by discourse and practices, as required by institutions and encouraged by advice. Finally, the crystallization of the category of jobseeker occurs in the wider context of neo-liberal welfare policy (Boland and Griffin, 2015; Brodkin and Marston, 2013).

The procedures and techniques of job-seeking are varied. They include relentless and creative searching coupled with the management of negative emotions around unemployment and repeated failures in job-seeking. Furthermore, jobseekers must engage in intensive ‘self-work’ involving assessing the usefulness and relevance of their skills and experience and presenting these as potential assets to employers. In application forms or the constantly updated CV, these attributes are welded together to ‘sell’ the individual as the ideal candidate. Jobseekers, like employees, are enjoined to forge their existence into a ‘personal brand’ to sell to employers (Vallas and Cummins, 2015). This self-work constitutes a sort of rehearsal for interviews, where the subject must create a good impression or a convincing performance; effectively the jobseeker must continuously put on an ‘act’ in a theatrical sense.

The term ‘actor’ has been appropriated and re-used widely in sociology, often to avoid methodological individualism and point out the agency of groups or institutions. Furthermore, Goffman’s (1990) dramaturgical sociology provides a framework for understanding society as woven from performances. Goffman uses theatre as metaphor to understand the reproduction of social life, roles and power-relations in everyday encounters, but also interrogates the ways in which individuals deliberately cultivate and craft performances and engage in ‘impression management’. This approach reflects the ways in which modernity forms subjects as internally self-controlled and able to generate performances in a theatrical manner (Elias, 2000) and job-seeking advice inculcates such conduct. Self-presentation is strenuous. ‘A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time’ (Goffman, 1990: 32). In job-seeking this is especially the case, as the ‘stage’ provided by applications and interviews is not neutral but pits individuals against each other in a competitive labour market; and this structurally favours employers who scrutinize the performer and can question the reality of their self-presentation.

How much do individuals identify with their roles? Are they ‘subjectified’ or merely playing? Hochschild (2003) analysed how economic institutions demand, coach and reward certain sorts of performances, particularly emotional labour. ‘To the extent that emotion management actually works […] something like alchemy occurs’ (2003: 118). Butler’s work on performativity (1999) suggests that any distinctions between ‘appearance’ and the ‘true’ self are continuously constructed. Certainly, individuals may change their ‘front’, but what matters is that they become ‘acting’ subjects: ‘In other words, the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and manifested norms of intelligibility’ (Butler, 1999: 23). Thus, society and governmentality require ‘jobseekers’ to constitute themselves as actors, repeatedly offering performances; they probably identify durably with roles only after finding employment.

Effectively, job-seeking advice, like much career advice, disciplines the subject to become something of an ‘actor’. The concept of career is disciplining; and ‘the pursuit of career pervades even the most intimate forms of social relations’ (Grey, 1997). Likewise, job-seeking advice constitutes all social relations as a ‘network’ to be mined for useful connections. Life itself becomes a project to be managed and self-management exists to facilitate successful performances (Hancock and Tyler, 2004). Jobseekers entrepreneurially sell themselves; ‘Homo Economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault, 2008: 226). Curiously, while the labour market ‘actor’ must have concrete experiences which function as resources to generate performances as labour markets require, jobseekers have at best a minimal identity, a trait shared by the ‘entrepreneur’, the idol of contemporary economic discourse, which is strikingly void of character (Jones and Spicer, 2005).

Theatrical metaphors for subjectivity have a long history in Western Europe, and are especially pronounced at the end of the 18th century. Szakolczai’s (2013) genealogy of comedy suggests that modern society was gradually ‘theatricalized’ between the 16th and 19th centuries. Distinctions between the ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ of social life only make sense in modern contexts and emerge from renaissance courts (Elias, 2000). The construction of the modern subject as an actor, with interiority, motive and character development, capable of self-control, presenting a ‘face’ and managing impressions is very generalized, but it cannot be taken as human nature. Rather, the ‘actor’ is produced through power/knowledge, disciplined to know and regulate their ‘inner’ state, cultivate appearances and rehearse their identity until it is seamless or authentic.

Agnew’s work on the historical conjunction of the market and the theatre in England points out that these institutions emerged in and often occupied the same highly regulated space. The legitimacy of market transactions was guaranteed by their theatricality and visibility (1986: 40). The market self who buys and sells for the best price became suffused with the theatrical self, whose self-representations were always fabricated and changing. Beyond ‘theatre proper’, 17th century conduct books enjoined their readers to be suspicious of appearances, but also to dissimulate their own situation to gain advantage.

Together players and playwrights improvised conventions of performance that deliberately acknowledged the fabricated character of the play world and that, in doing so, mooted the authority of all appearances. (Agnew, 1986: 112)

Agnew argues that these conventions increasingly spread throughout society, especially as clear distinctions of rank receded and ‘market’ distinction through wealth and class emerged. The ‘social mobility’ which characterizes modernity is not only connected to education and skills but the capacity for deliberately cultivated performances for the labour market; or ‘selling yourself’.

Genealogically, the influence of theatre should not be overstated; this article is an exploratory analysis of governmental interventions into job-seeking which address ‘actors’, demand good ‘presentations’, within a ‘theatrically’ conceived labour market, for the purpose of a ‘performance’; not only does the jobseeker put on a good show, but they become, performatively, the right kind of worker for the role. In the USA Vallas and Cummins (2015) demonstrate the incorporation of ‘personal branding’ among jobseekers (despite widespread ambivalence) and underlying adoption of strategies of ‘selling the self’. By ethnographies of different sites where jobseekers are governmentalized, Van Oort (2015) suggests that the type of governed job-seeking varies, sometimes even idealizing precarity. The following analysis of job-seeking advice in the UK contributes to this field, with special emphasis on theatricality.

Methodology

Governmentality attends to discourse over lived experience, perhaps neglecting resistance and negotiation. Job-seeking advice is negotiated and perhaps scorned by jobseekers just as management texts are read and resisted by managers (Brodkin and Marston, 2013; Dallyn, 2014). While many jobseekers may be sceptical of such advice and only employ it strategically, the labour market is nonetheless constituted as a theatre of self-presentation; and interviews as something like an audition, a site where strategy and scepticism are deployed. Although applications and interviews may well be widely considered a site where self-flattering performances are routinely expected, jobseekers are nonetheless disciplined as labour market actors. Evidently, many actors consider the labour market as an arena of self-presentation (Vallas and Cummins, 2015; Van Oort, 2015), upon which personal reflexivity is commodified (Wee and Brooks, 2010).

The following analysis draws on documents from Jobcentres in the UK and popular websites which include job advertisements and advice, particularly:

These sites were selected because of their high page-rank on Google searches; around six on average. Comprehensive reading within the sites yielded over one hundred webpages of advice, ranging from 200 to 1000 words per page, much of which is quite repetitive, indicating a saturation sample. Authorship is rarely attributed within the websites, but where an author is named, this has been included, even though there is no discernible qualitative difference between generalized ‘anonymous’ advice and that given by a ‘qualified’ and personally identified ‘expert’. These sites were all visited during November 2014, and generally carried advice which had been digitally published since 2012.

Within the sample there is a variety of ‘how-to’ practical advice, ‘self-help’ exercises and motivational discourse. Further elaboration of the ideas found in minutiae in such brief advice was occasionally drawn from job-seeking advice books. Of course, this advice is updated frequently, perhaps reiterating standard ‘common sense’, but also responding to changes in the social welfare regime, particularly Pathways to Work and the new pressures in Jobcentres to take any offer of employment or face sanctions (Grover, 2012). Material from Jobcentres places a greater emphasis on rules and regulations, but is broadly compatible with advice on less ‘official’ websites about self-examination and impression management. As this article seeks to develop a qualitative thesis around the governance of the unemployed as ‘jobseekers’ rather than offer a survey of the literature, the analysis herein will draw from the 2010 Jobkit distributed nationally (Jobcentre Plus, 2010), although there is a profusion of other documents and leaflets. This corpus was analysed interpretatively, identifying elements that emerged repeatedly and centrally. Indeed, the foregoing theoretical discussion emerged only after this analysis.

The analysis follows Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’, taking texts as discursive formations which constitute the subjects and objects of their own discourse. This methodological stance means the texts are not assessed as ‘ideological’, but as part of the ‘production of truth’. The texts were re-read multiple times to grasp qualitatively how they construct the objects of their own discourse; terms such as ‘jobseeker’, ‘market’, ‘curriculum vitae’, ‘network’ or ‘interview’ are not taken as settled. Instead, the texts are taken as discourses which marshal an assemblage of definitions of reality, prescribe certain forms of conduct and express particular values and goals.

Such texts are inevitably varied and paradoxically rich in their banality; bland statements of common sense define reality, admonish and cajole their audience and incite them to action. The focus on the ‘subject’ within the texts is crucial, as these texts are intended to be read and rely on the jobseeker to subsequently conduct their conduct, to ‘subject’ themselves to the interrogation of self and conduct implied in the texts. Similarly, the corpus constructs special spaces of the labour market; applications, CVs, networks and interviews. Finally, although these texts are collected together as an ‘order of discourse’, it is not necessarily coherent, even or unvaried; different emphases emerge in different texts. Implicitly, the disciplining of the jobseeker as a performer occurs through these texts, within the institutional spaces of seeking work and very often under the pressure of increased monitoring and threats of sanctions from the social welfare system.

Unemployment as job-seeking

Shakespeare’s phrase ‘All the world’s a stage’ was echoed by many pieces of job-advice, for instance, ‘The term “life is a stage and you’re on it” has never been spoken truer than at a job interview’ (www.redgoldfish.co.uk). Interestingly, in 1582 Guazzo offered the phrase ‘…this world was nothing but a very mercate [market]’, characterized by buying, selling and spectatorship (Agnew, 1986: 17). Conceptualizing society as theatre is seen in the performative turn, while conceiving society as market is clear in many varieties of economics (Wood, 1999). Yet this imperative to perform exists within the context of new welfare policies based on monitoring, pressure and sanctions.

Straightforward disciplinary governmentality was found mainly within literature produced by Jobcentres: ‘If you are receiving jobseeker’s allowance while you’re out of work, then you have to prove that you’re actively seeking work’ (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 17). This statement briefly tells readers that their activities are monitored and assessed by an institution. Yet, while the verb ‘prove’ here has something of a legal connotation, it allows a performative logic – jobseekers must convince the office they are actively seeking work. Elsewhere this document addresses the unemployed as a problematic population who are necessarily the target of interventions; for instance, by raising the possibility of a temporary job: ‘This would be helpful if you do not have recent work experience’ (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 13), implicitly addressing the long-term unemployed. The institutional pressure to accept any job or face sanctions is referenced implicitly: ‘It may be because there is not enough of the type of work you want and you might want to think about other types of work you are willing to do’ (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 16). Clearly, this is prescriptive discourse, exhorting subjects to work, whatever the circumstances of the ‘labour market’. Yet, even here, the subject is posited as mutable and flexible, capable of interrogating themselves privately and thereafter attempting an alternative performance.

Within websites, the difficulties of unemployment are occasionally referenced. Indeed, career books in the 1990s increasingly addressed the psychological impact of unemployment as a problem to be managed by jobseekers: ²

As time passes, the rejections mount up and budgets get tighter, it’s easy to become disheartened. However, this is exactly the time when you need to dust yourself off and put in more hard work than ever. (http://career-advice.monster.co.uk)

If your job search is taking longer than you’d like, it’s easy to let the fire in your belly fizzle out. But putting to work a few positive steps will help you stay focused. (http://www.fish4.co.uk)

These statements acknowledge the financial and emotional difficulties of unemployment, but define these as personal difficulties, rather than systematic economic problems, rendering job-seeking an individual responsibility. Each of them directs readers to manage their negative experiences; indeed the phrase ‘it’s easy’ may indicate that readers are likely to experience negative feelings, but also imply that personal resolution is required to combat and control these feelings. Like many discourses, these quotes imply and prescribe psychological interiority; ‘disheartened’ or ‘fire in the belly’. Genealogies of the modern subject (Elias, 2000; Foucault, 1976) suggest that this construct is generated, maintained and refined by social practices. In particular, these texts not only refer to the interior self, but require that the reader engage in self-work – assessing aptitudes, reflecting on experiences, locating transferable skills – effectively preparation for further job-seeking.

Selling labour

The market logic of job-seeking advice is entirely plain and continuously reiterated, so that skills, experiences and aptitudes are worthwhile only if they might be valuable to employers. Searching for a job, which in many circumstances means a struggle to acquire basic subsistence or a decent standard of living, is often completely submerged within the logic of markets:

Imagine you’re selling a product. We often find it hard to sell ourselves, so imagine you’re selling a product or service and then apply the same rules to yourself. (www.fish4.co.uk)

It all comes down to one thing and that is getting a stranger to believe in you, and/or your product. (www.redgoldfish.co.uk)

Such statements normalize the institution of the market, wherein value is established through the intersection of supply and demand; employers need labour and offer wages in exchange. Peculiarly, jobseekers are represented as the ‘product’ – effectively a sort of object – which the job-seeking subject who reads the advice must ‘sell’. Such an operation involves taking oneself as an object of reflection, so that experiences and skills may be correctly evaluated. The job interview or market is posited as a place where a ‘stranger’ must be convinced, resonating with the theatre.

The language of ‘selling’ implies that jobseekers will be involved in promotion, sales and even branding:

So when you think about it, you too can become a brand.

1. Develop a point of difference: Having a point of difference is at the heart of any brand – so you need to demonstrate what your point of difference is. (http://career-advice.monster.co.uk)

This text combines an informal address with a purportedly critical or creative approach, wherein the concept of ‘brand’ is transferred from the arena of commodities to the labour market. Readers are enjoined to ‘realize’ this possibility, to develop and demonstrate their ‘point of difference’. Firstly, this involves self-work, assessing the value of the self in terms of potential worth for various imaginary employers, reducing the complexity of a life into a brand. Secondly, it requires theatrical self-presentation, wherein the person who ‘becomes’ a brand should give a performance which articulates their ‘point of difference’ – and this focus on difference implies the attempt to distinguish oneself amidst a multitude of other candidates. Thus, the strategy of self-branding is an attempt to weld the actor with their role, howsoever temporarily.

The incitement towards performing a role in job-seeking advice was not always explicit and was sometimes tempered by other discourses, for instance, the ideal of authenticity. Yet, this too must be performed:

It may well be that the ‘real you’ is exactly the person that the employer is looking for […] do not appear to be a two-dimensional business automaton that lives to work and has no outside interests or passions. (www.jobs4.co.uk)

This excerpt is ‘common-sense’ yet exhibits some peculiar tensions. Perhaps the reference to the ‘real you’ implies a genuinely authentic selfhood, but it might also indicate that readers understand the ‘real you’ as a performative mode, whereby they can prove their value to employers through depth, quirkiness or idiosyncrasy. Indeed, the second sentence makes it clear that whatever the ontological status of the ‘real you’, its value can only be realized within a world of appearances; there is no point in having hidden depths if employers don’t notice them. The value of the ‘real you’ can only be its difference from ‘business automatons’; thus, authenticity is material for performances.

Applications and CVs

All texts addressed applications and CVs; indeed many websites and books position themselves as technical ‘how-to’ guides. Generally, the advice was to concentrate on positive elements – having already ‘overcome’ the negative feelings associated with unemployment. Jobseekers should:

Be positive and emphasize why you are perfect for the job. (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 21)

use positive action words, for example ‘consulting’, ‘negotiating’, ‘managing’ […] make a good impression; this means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 27)

The inverted commas around active verbs suggest that while the reality of previous experience may be complex, it should be distilled into buzzwords. This art of self-presentation is not billed as falsehood, but as impression management, characterized by clarity. While this is practical advice, it is interesting that all jobseekers were advised to always represent themselves as suitable for all jobs, which indicates that the labour market is less a place where labour supply meets demand, than a theatre of constant performance:

You should also tailor the statement to the requirements of each job that you apply for, so you make it clear to the employer that you’re the right person for the job. (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 28)

Rather than railing against this practice as dishonest, the point here is to observe how the text incites readers to condense their self into a recognizable archetype, whose primary characteristic is employability. Indeed, the self should also perform ‘tailored’ roles for different audiences. The application form provides the possibility for imagining a new role, a sort of rehearsal for an embodied performance at an interview.

All internet sites carried similar advice for tailoring application forms and also suggested that readers should create and constantly update a CV. Effectively, a CV makes job-seeking continuous; even when there were no application forms to fill out, websites demanded, ‘Keep your online CV current […] Never stop networking’ (www.fish4.co.uk). Many highlighted the importance of ‘creating an impact’ or ‘making an impression’ with a very brief personal profile. This profile should be tailored for each separate application, as should cover letters:

Generic cover letters say all kinds of negative things about a jobseeker […] probably most damning of all, it suggests a lazy and un-driven person who can’t be bothered to write 500 or so personalized words to get a job. (M Talabi, cited on www.fish4.co.uk)

Within this disciplinary injunction to write personalized cover letters or face rejection, the idealized subject of the labour market is a serial performer, willing and able to tweak and vary the persona they present to employers on an ongoing basis. Internal self-control and work ethic exist here primarily to facilitate the work of acting.

The stage for these performances is scarcely transparent; real power rests with employers. While this is usually acknowledged within these texts, the art of performance is generally posited as the key to success:

If you go well prepared then you are able to manipulate an interview to your advantage and get across your strengths. (www.redgoldfish.co.uk)

The recruitment process is like a courtship ritual, and there are rules to be aware of and follow […] Like the appetizer in the restaurant, the CV is just the starter, not the meal itself. (www.jobs.co.uk)

These rather queasy metaphors, where jobseekers become the prospective spouses or nourishment to be consumed by employers, suggested that readers must perform convincingly and decipher the peculiar stages controlled by employers. More prosaically, they are instructed to study advertisements with care to tailor their applications and CVs, yet by positing the labour market as opaque or inscrutable, job-seeking becomes centred on individual performance, forestalling criticism or resistance against labour market processes.

Interviews

The central institution of job-seeking is the job interview. Indeed, this purportedly natural ‘labour market’ has a long genealogy, including the hiring-fair and the labour exchange (Burnett, 2002). Such institutions expose workers to the scrutiny of employers, who assess their skills and talents and adduce their work ethic and flexibility based on candidates’ ‘performance in interview’. Cultural differences exist around the meaning of interviews; Sharone (2013) suggests that interviews in the USA are understood as assessments of personal worth, whereas in Israel they are seen as an attempt to fit skills with requirements – thus, failure at interview may be either personalized or considered as weak market demand.

Some job-seeking advice instructed readers in self-control, with instructions about preparation, dress and lists of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ for body language. Impression management through presenting a positive disposition is incited:

Then take a deep breath, summon your self-belief and wow them with a strong handshake, genuine smile and plenty of eye contact. (www.fish4.co.uk)

These could almost be standard instructions for actors. Here they direct readers to overcome the negative emotions connected to unemployment, to conjure up a positive incantation of the self and create a performance which is convincing to the audience. The transformation of negatives into positives is explicitly prescribed by some advice:

The secret is being able to manipulate and control your frame of mind, use that adrenalin to your advantage and not let it take over completely.

You can convince yourself of anything if you want to and this can have a negative as well as positive outcome. (www.redgoldfish.co.uk)

Clearly, success depends on self-discipline, or in Foucault’s phrase ‘the conduct of conduct’. Although this excerpt contained fairly unexceptional pop-psychology, it exemplifies the peculiar turn of the self upon the self, so that the reading subject should ‘manipulate and control’ their reactions to unemployment and job-seeking. Like a ‘method actor’ preparing for a role, jobseekers are instructed to rehearse their performance until it becomes convincing, or even ‘real’.

Much advice on interviews centred on self-presentation and impression management, including ‘dressing above the rest’, by being more formal or smarter than the typical level within the firm, or changing one’s appearance:

It’s almost as if they [jobseekers] want their appearance to be part of an overall change that includes a new professional role. It’s like a shift in identities, even if it’s quite subtle. (S North, [Career Ignition Club] cited on www.fish4.co.uk)

Cultivating a winning appearance is close to the theatrical act of donning a costume, but the dual meaning of ‘performance’ is helpful here; performative speech acts create the entities or situations they describe, so unemployed people performatively become ‘jobseekers’ (Butler, 1999). Thus, self-presentation or impression management within interviews can move beyond theatrical performance to a performative re-constitution of the self – the jobseeker may ‘become’ a worker. Indeed, unemployment is discursively figured as a transition, within which the subject can be transformed; jobseekers are advised to attempt multiple performances ‘tailored’ for different employers, de-emphasizing any fixed character. The jobseeker is like a palimpsest, or a blank slate ready to performatively take on any role.

Concurrently, interviews are sites of interrogation, whereby the ‘truth’ of the jobseeker can be assessed. Employers principally ask questions and applicants answer them, although job-seeking advice – even from Jobcentres – provides lists of strategic and relentlessly positive answers. Additionally, jobseekers are advised to have examples ready to support their assertions of ability or aptitude:

Have lots of examples prepared. Recruiters always want concrete examples to demonstrate your skills and experiences. (www.fish4.co.uk)

Provide examples to prove your skills and achievements. (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 38)

Insofar as the interview produces truth for employers regarding the qualities of candidates, these examples are a mode of ‘veridiction’, demonstrating the ‘reality’ of the candidates’ worth. Yet, jobseekers are incited to prepare these examples, so that they don’t just ‘demonstrate’ or ‘prove’ skills, but emerge through a confident and convincing performance. A well rehearsed tale of concrete events is encouraged. Thus, job-seeking advice enjoins jobseekers to package their work experience or general life as anecdotes which prove their mettle, always positively as labourers ready to contribute and certainly never as exploited or alienated citizens.

Jobseekers

While the readers of job-seeking advice are concrete individuals, defined by many things – gender, family, location, ethnicity, political allegiance, subculture – they are addressed as ‘jobseekers’. Just as invented categories such as insanity or delinquency serve to discipline the population, the contrast of good jobseekers and the ‘unemployed’ or ‘unemployables’ serves to shape subjects (Rogers, 2004).

How is the jobseeker imagined? They are afflicted by unemployment yet overcome it. They scour past experience for useful skills and talents. On this basis they re-train, up-skill or accept less appealing work. They relentlessly seek work and learn from rejection. Each application they send presents a different facet of their protean personality. In interviews they are confident impression managers, adjusting their performance to the exigencies of the moment. They are disciplined performers.

While this portrait may seem apposite to higher-skilled jobseekers who may have more choices within the labour market, it is recapitulated in Jobcentre advice for manual or unskilled workers. Consider ‘Mark Sample’ whose imaginary CV is offered as a model:

I am a keen, conscientious, hard-working and reliable person. I am a good timekeeper and enjoy meeting people. I get on well with people and can work well either on my own or as part of a team. I can adapt to any environment and would like to use my skills to contribute positively to any work situation. (Jobcentre Plus, 2010: 31)

This imaginary jobseeker is both average and ideal. He possesses the Protestant ethic of hard work and reliablility and the new projective ethic of flexibility, team-work and sociability (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). He is disciplined, desires work and promises to perform howsoever required.

This unremarkable sample jobseeker is a fiction of the Jobcentre, yet, such presentations are always quasi-fictional, crafted representations of the self, performed for employers on the stage of the labour market. Job-seeking advice frequently demanded that such personal profiles should be performances:

The personal statement is your chance to shine. You get to show off your strengths, shout about your achievements and share your career aspirations. But clutter it up with boring business speak and you end up sounding like everyone else. (http://www.fish4.co.uk/article/yj-cv-advice/)

The value of ‘Mark Sample’ or any other jobseeker is not just the qualities espoused in a brief personal statement, but their willingness to perform, to become whatever is necessary, for whatever employer, no matter how many rejections they have endured. Individuals are required not only to critically assess themselves but also the entire field of the labour market, in order to ‘stand out’ through a creative performance. Unsuccessful jobseekers are implicitly insufficiently critical, creative or self-transformative. The ideal jobseeker overcomes unemployment through a relentless enterprise of selling their self through complete self-control and chameleon-like performances.

Conclusion

Exposing the theatrical nature of job-seeking or the connivance of employers in setting up interviews as a quasi-theatrical stage is unnecessary; most ‘actors’ are reflexively aware of these dimensions. Instead we have examined how the labour market is discursively constituted as a theatre of performances and its job-seeking subjects as actors. Although analysing discourses cannot encompass how different social groups or individuals react to and resist this governmentality, all newly unemployed people and all ‘new entrants to the labour market’ are exhorted to become ‘enterprising selves’ (Rose, 1992), or even to take themselves reflexively as a product or commodity for sale, implicitly a brand. This mixture of market and theatre logic may even extend beyond applications, CVs and interviews to permeate everyday life, turning society into a ‘network’ and life into ‘experience’ which is more or less useful for potential employers.

Job-seeking advice is just one discourse among a multitude of disciplinary forces and the emphasis on disciplining the self for quasi-theatrical performances is just one element within it. Yet it is important to consider the wider consequences: job-seeking advice does not exist independently of social policy, which increasingly monitors, pressurizes and sanctions the unemployed in the name of ‘labour market activation’ (Brodkin and Marston, 2013; Webster, 2014). Clearly, welfare applicants are subjected to disciplinary gazes which assess them and inculcate the conduct of ‘good’ job-seeking, through the micro-physics of a variety of interventions and procedures, backed with the threat of sanctions (Grover, 2012). Furthermore, positing the labour market as the site of individual performance legitimizes outcomes through the logic of competition and implicitly stigmatizes the unemployed as personally culpable, while constantly urging them to re-invent themselves for new opportunities.

Despite the well-known caustic psychological consequences of unemployment, a central feature of job-seeking advice is that individuals are expected to regulate and control their emotions, thereby avoiding placing potential healthcare costs on the state. Relentless exhortation to self-transformation also combats the possibility of individuals becoming ‘detached’ from the labour market or ‘discouraged workers’ who do not contribute increased taxes or extra consumption or offer competition on the labour market. Furthermore, in an economy increasingly characterized by precarious employment leading to rapid turnover of staff and changing work practices, jobseekers are required to continuously ‘re-invent’ themselves for employers. The ability of jobseekers to switch quickly between roles decreases the lengths of time for which citizens will draw benefits. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the urge towards theatrical self-work in these texts serves a clear governmental purpose, the constant provision of new and enthusiastic workers as a large pool of labour for unsatisfactory and insecure work.

If the labour market were simply a place where skills and time were purchased for wages, success or failure would be impersonal. By contrast, in a quasi-theatrical labour market, the process of ‘veridiction’ which assesses the ‘worth’ of jobseekers based on their performance means failure is personal. The well known subjective consequences of prolonged unemployment (Jahoda, 1982) may be compounded by discourses which emphasize individual responsibility. Far from being empowering, discourses positing job-seeking as intense self-control which can generate convincing performances may be subjectively and psychologically injurious; the consequences of repeated failure or exhaustion through constant self re-invention have yet to be seen.

Finally, decrying this individual as an ideological construct or an illusion is counter-productive; such critiques simply reiterate that there are no stable persons and all appearances are theatrical. Indeed, the historical emergence of such individuals is actually intertwined with critiques; scientific, rationalistic or economistic critiques of traditional working practices, liberal critiques of customs and beliefs as fetters to enlightened self-interest, counter-cultural or post-modern critiques of the stability or authenticity of personal identity (Boland, 2014). Rather than reproach the subject emergent from the labour market, the approach here is to interrogate the institution of the market itself as a disciplinary mechanism, interconnected with ‘liberal’ welfare policy, which re-creates citizens as jobseekers. The reformation of these institutions, even the instatement of a simple ‘market’ mechanism of matching supply and demand would mitigate the pressure of job-seeking. Concurrently, social welfare needs to be reoriented towards unconditional care and support rather than pressurizing individuals through contractualization and sanctions towards ‘activation’ in the absurd theatre of the job market.