Abstract
Reviewed by: Angèle Christin, Stanford University, CA, USA DOI: 10.1177/0730888418793489
How does one find a job today? Since Mark Granovetter’s classic Getting a Job, published in 1974, much has changed in the employment landscape, from the development of so-called “gig” or “on-demand” labor to the rise of nonstandard work and the imperative to engage in personal branding, online and offline. In Down and Out in the New Economy, anthropologist Ilana Gershon provides an in-depth examination of the consequences of these transformations on the labor market in the United States. Drawing on a mix of interviews and observations conducted in the Bay Area and other locations with job seekers, career counselors, recruiters and hiring managers, as well as quantitative data, Gershon offers an insightful analysis of the hopes, difficulties, and contradictions surrounding job searches in the contemporary economy.
The book starts by analyzing how the main metaphor for understanding the employment relationship has changed. Until the 1980s, Gershon argues, employment was primarily conceptualized in terms of what she calls the “self-as-property” analogy. This paradigm, whose roots she traces back to the political theories of Locke and Hobbes, saw employment as a social contract in which employees “rented” their labor and promised loyalty in exchange for wages and protection on the part of the employer. Since the 1980s, however, a new metaphor came to dominate how we understand employment: the “self-as-business” paradigm, which describes workers as “bundles of skills” that can be put to use to solve companies’ issues, in a relationship akin to a business-to-business transaction.
This “self-as-business” paradigm, in turn, is not without contradictions. Gershon shows that there is a necessary tension between the decontextualization intrinsic to the business metaphor and the idiosyncrasies of individual careers, jobs, and companies. As she brilliantly demonstrates, job seekers, career counselors, and recruiters alike struggle to reconcile what Viviana Zelizer would call the “hostile worlds” of the marketplace and selfhood. For instance, career counselors encourage job seekers to engage in personal branding, explicitly drawing on the “self-as-business” metaphor when asking individuals to present themselves as attractive brands for prospective employers. Yet job seekers have trouble framing their careers and presenting themselves in ways that are standardized yet creative enough to be both recognizable to a broad range of employers and distinctive enough to get hired. Similarly, job seekers are asked to engage in systematic networking—as it turns out, many career counselors draw on Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” when giving advice about how to find jobs. Yet job seekers often struggle with the nature of the social ties thus engineered: how meaningful is it to “connect” with someone one barely knows on LinkedIn? What kind of signal does the number of a person’s online contacts send to employers?
Throughout the chapters, Gershon pays close attention to the technologies that sustain, embody, and often engineer the “self-as-business” paradigm. She analyzes the complex assemblages and interactions between job seekers (hoping to control their public image) and recruiters (trying to get more information on job candidates) through social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. Particularly interesting are the interviews she conducted with start-up founders aiming to transform the recruiting process through technological innovation. Some offer services for specific niches of workers (advertising teams and blue-collar workers), others sell new measurements of job seekers’ profiles and skills (psychological fit and personal qualities) to recruiters. As Gershon demonstrates, these digital platforms form the essential infrastructure of the “self-as-business” paradigm. Such a fine-grained analysis of the role that technology plays in sustaining these new conceptions of work and self is a rare and valuable addition to existing studies of labor and employment.
One mystery remains, however. Gershon convincingly demonstrates the power of the “self-as-business” paradigm in shaping the experiences of job seekers, but she does not say much about how this specific metaphor came into being. Without reaching too far outside of the book’s purview, one could imagine several causes. Is the ideology of the “self-as-business” necessity made virtue, following the decline of the full-time jobs with benefits and pension plans that previously sustained the “self-as-property” paradigm? Could it be traced to the new ideologies of market fundamentalism that took hold after the neoliberal wave of the 1980s (Gershon would probably agree with this—after all, the book is dedicated to Friedrich Hayek)? More modestly, could it also be related to the development of new categories of jobs and workers—career counselors and motivational speakers—faced with the impossible task of providing enthusiastic and neatly packaged advice to unemployed job seekers in an endless variety of situations? Such a historical genealogy would nicely complement the vivid and insightful overview that Down and Out in the New Economy provides of the central dilemmas characterizing job searches in the contemporary economy.