Abstract
In recent years, sociologists have examined unemployment and job searching as important arenas in which workers are socialized to accept the terms of an increasingly precarious economy. While noting the importance of expert knowledge in manufacturing the consent of workers, research has largely overlooked the experts themselves that produce such knowledge. Who are these experts and what kinds of advice do they give? Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted at three job search clubs, the author develops a three-fold typology of “unemployment experts”: Job Coaches present a technical diagnosis that centers mastery of job-hunting techniques; Self-help Gurus present a moral diagnosis focused on the job seeker’s attitude; and Skill-certifiers present a human capital diagnosis revolving around the job seeker’s productive capacities. By offering alternative diagnoses and remedies for unemployment, these experts give job seekers a sense of choice in interpreting their situation and acting in the labor market. However, the multiple discourses ultimately help to secure consent to precarious labor markets by drawing attention to a range of individual deficiencies within workers while obfuscating structural and relational explanations of unemployment. The author also finds that many unemployment experts themselves faced dislocations from professional careers and are making creative claims to expertise. By focusing on experts and their varied messages, this paper reveals how the victims of precarious work inadvertently help to legitimate the new employment regime.
The forty unemployed professionals who made it to this meeting at Jump Start Job Club are prepared to chant. Arranged in folding chairs with Styrofoam cups in hand, their eyes are fixed on their lines, projected on a PowerPoint slide: “I’m not over-qualified, I’m absolutely qualified!”
The bubbly presenter orchestrates: “Let’s say it all together!”
The crowd looks like a twenty-year reunion of the characters in the movie Office Space: not its scheming anti-work hero, but the background cast, the characters who decided to stick with the company until the layoffs came around. We chant together in drab, office-birthday-party tones: “I’m not over-qualified, I’m absolutely qualified!” “I’m not over-qualified, I’m absolutely qualified!”
As she tells us at the start of her presentation, Amy knows a few things about getting a job. Before becoming a professional “Job Coach,” she worked for two decades in corporate human resources and recruiting, hiring hundreds of candidates. In her talk today she is sharing insider secrets with job seekers about what recruiters and interviewers are really thinking.
We also learn in the presentation that Absolutely Amy has been on the other side of the table, too. Amy became a Job Coach after she herself went through repeated layoffs. She is now supplementing part-time recruiting work by selling coaching services and her self-published book to unemployed professionals. She is living out of an RV while she gives talks to job clubs across the country.
To the assembled job seekers, Absolutely Amy is a new kind of professional whose expert knowledge they desperately need − she is an unemployment expert.
As employment has become increasingly unstable for workers throughout the class spectrum, sociologists of workplace inequality have turned attention to the exercise of power beyond the shop floor. In particular, scholars have come to see unemployment experiences and the process of job searching as important sites where workers’ consent to precarious work is secured. Researchers highlight the many “Labor Market Intermediaries” that shape employment practices and norms – from temp agencies (Smith & Neuwirth, 2012), to workfare programs (Broughton, 2002; Purser & Hennigan, 2017), to job search clubs (Sharone, 2014; Smith, 2001) – and they critically examine cultural configurations such as “personal branding” to show how these symbolic systems shape workers’ expectations and ambitions for employment (Gershon, 2017; Lane, 2011; Vallas & Christin, 2018). Together, this literature has expanded the scope of the sociology of work and specified new mechanisms of worker control in precarious labor markets.
While these studies illuminate how expert knowledge is being deployed to control workers, the experts themselves who produce and disseminate such knowledge have been largely overlooked. Who are these experts and what kinds of advice do they give? With few exceptions (see Gatta, 2014), prior literature has relegated unemployment experts to the background of analysis and treated them as passive agents, mere carriers of official discourses about the new economy. The tendency to overlook the experts has limited our understanding of how power is being exercised in the job market today.
In this paper, I center unemployment experts as key actors shaping contemporary labor markets. I focus on experts that cater to professional workers because professional jobs represent an idealized form of employment (Kalleberg, 2011). How these workers respond to workplace transformations has an outsized influence in legitimating new employment regimes more broadly. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic field work at three job search clubs, I find that many unemployment experts have themselves been victims of layoffs and career turbulence. They have reinvented themselves as experts offering guidance to others also trying to navigate the treacherous new world of work.
These experts are not all the same. This article develops a three-fold typology of unemployment experts that highlights the different diagnoses and solutions to unemployment that they present to job seekers.
This article’s focus on experts can help deepen sociologists’ understanding of how workers come to accept precarious employment. It shows that discourses of personal responsibility in the new economy are developed and distributed by creative actors who are themselves responding to labor market transformations. Although not the central focus of this paper, the experts’ proximity to the dilemmas of unemployment – the fact that they themselves were recently out of work – helps them to tune their discourses to resonate with job seekers’ experiences. These experts become unlikely boosters: themselves evicted from stable, salaried work by fraying employment contracts, they assume the role of street preacher, evangelizing for the ideological infrastructure of the new regime.
This article highlights the variations in expert advice because this variation is an important mechanism for securing workers’ consent to increasingly precarious employment. The array of expert advice on offer provides job seekers with an empowering sense of choice in interpreting their situation and acting in the labor market. However, this choice is circumscribed. All three experts tell the same deep story – that unemployment is your fault. They all promote the idea that it is the individual worker’s sole responsibility to find and keep a job, thus taking employers off the hook for treating workers as disposable and imposing what some have called the “one way honor system” (Pugh, 2015).
Power, Unemployment, and Job Searching
The rise of precarious work in the post-Fordist production regime has led scholars to look beyond the worksite itself to understand how work-based inequality is being produced (Halpin & Smith, 2019; Vallas & Hill, 2012). Specifically, scholars have looked to unemployment experiences, job hunting, and the many ways workers are matched to jobs. These moments of labor market liminality are high-stakes concerns for workers. As the job market polarizes into “good” and “bad” jobs (Kalleberg, 2011), unemployed workers face risk, uncertainty, and – at times – even opportunity when searching for employment (Smith, 2001). As researchers have documented, a range of organizations, discourses, and experts have emerged that intervene in this vulnerable moment to shape new employment relationships.
Studies of unemployment and job searching have taken two theoretical approaches to conceptualizing how power is exercised in the labor market, one focusing on organizations and the other on discourse and ideology.
Organizational accounts focus on the ways that Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) facilitate the employment relationship. Research on LMIs that directly connect employers and employees finds that such organizations exercise power by directly shaping the terms of employment. For example, studies of temporary help and staffing agencies illuminate their multiple impacts on work. Historical accounts argue that the industry has disempowered workers by casualizing employment relationships and freeing employers from long-term obligations to workers (Hatton, 2011) while ethnographic projects show how temp agencies manage expectations on both sides of the employment equation, sometimes helping to protect or empower workers (Barley & Gideon, 2006; Smith & Neuwirth, 2012). Studies of subcontracting firms in the trucking industry (Viscelli, 2016), day laborer hiring halls (Purser, 2009), and head-hunting agencies (Finlay & Coverdill, 2007) examine other ways that organizations shape the conditions under which employers and employees meet.
Some scholarship has focused on a subset of LMIs referred to as “job search organizations” (JSOs). JSOs are organizations that do not directly connect workers to employers, but teach the unemployed the ever-changing, unofficial rules of how to get a job (Smith, 2010). Research finds that these organizations stratify employment by providing different services and advice to workers depending on their race, class, and gender. JSO programs for low-wage job seekers, for example, are condescending, hierarchical, and unreliable; they train workers to be submissive to employers and push them into degrading, dead-end employment (Gatta, 2014; Purser & Hennigan, 2017; Smith et al., 2006). In contrast, JSOs for middle-class job seekers operate in a more horizontal manner, support workers in building and maintaining a professional identity, and provide resources to help them find their way towards well-paying jobs (Sharone, 2014; Smith, 2001; Van Oort, 2015). As Smith et al. (2006, p. 398) summarize, JSOs “sort, categorize, and confirm or deny power to people trying to make their way through the occupational structure.”
Sharone (2013, 2014) theorizes that, in addition to shaping contracts and sorting workers, there is an additional mechanism by which JSOs exercise power. He argues that these organizations present job seekers with “games” about how to find a job. American LMIs for low-wage workers teach a “diligence game” in which workers need to constantly and persistently show up for all kinds of job opportunities, and a “chemistry game” for white-collar workers, in which they need to cultivate interpersonal connections with potential employers. Drawing on the “work games” literature, Sharone argues that as workers play these games, they lose their ability to question the arrangement and thus quietly consent to its rules and to their broader disempowerment in the labor market. While more recent work suggests that the power of the “chemistry game” may be eroding (Lopez & Phillips, 2019), Sharone’s study presents a compelling case for how JSOs help to build consent to precarious job markets.
A second strand of research focuses less on specific organizations and more on the role of ideology and discourse in job searching. 2 These projects study the cultural constellations surrounding the new economy and how they work to enable and legitimate increasingly unstable employment regimes. For example, Lane (2011) identifies an ideology of “career management” among high-tech workers that disavows an old employment ethic of loyalty and paternalism and supplants it with an ethic of unfettered individualism and market fundamentalism. In this logic, workers are fully responsible for their own fates and should be ready to have their employment “disrupted” at any given time (Snyder, 2016). Similarly, scholars have identified an ascendant “enterprise culture” in which workers are taught to think of themselves as businesses rather than workers, and to consider every employment relationship to be a business-to-business kind of contract (Gershon, 2017). A sub-theme in this ideological construct has focused on “personal branding” as a technique of self-commodification that workers learn to strategically deploy while navigating the labor market (Pagis & Ailon, 2017; Smith, 2001; Vallas & Christin, 2018).
This second strand of literature demonstrates how such discourses provide the key concepts and metaphors through which workers understand, come to terms with, and plan action in precarious labor markets. Workers learn the profile of the “ideal worker” that they should be trying to approximate (Acker, 1990; Halpin & Smith, 2019; Neely, 2020) including the mindsets and attitudes towards work that they ought to embody. With some exceptions [see Vallas & Christin (2018)], the overwhelming consensus from this literature is that workers are buying into these ideas: declaring themselves CEO of Me Inc., decrying “dependency,” and constantly preparing to be disrupted.
Experts in Unemployment
The literature cited above advances several different theoretical models of how work-based power is being exercised outside of the workplace. In this paper, I do not try to adjudicate between these models and mechanisms, but rather seek to flesh out and unite them by examining the central, but largely un-theorized role of experts across these settings. I argue that unemployment experts are important nodes shaping the labor market: they create and disseminate a variety of discourses that govern how job seekers interpret and act amidst the uncertainty of unemployment.
Experts and expert knowledge animate much of the action in the studies cited above. The leaders of job clubs and temp agencies draw up and disseminate official expert advice for the unemployed who are trying to find their way back into work. And behind popular discourses of entrepreneurship and personal branding stand armies of self-proclaimed experts writing career advice books, giving TED talks, and running motivational seminars.
There are theoretical reasons to pay attention to these experts. Experts shape public behavior by defining social problems and their solutions. The Foucauldian tradition has been most attentive to this dynamic. Modern forms of power, this tradition argues, are exercised more through formal, expert knowledge than through the coercive discipline of the state. The behavior of modern subjects is governed “at a distance” (Rose & Miller, 2008) as people learn to monitor and discipline themselves to meet normative expectations outlined by experts. Scholars following Foucault’s later writings have specifically illuminated the ways experts create economic subjects that align with flexible labor regimes (Fridman, 2016; du Gay, 1996; Rose & Miller, 2008; Vallas & Hill, 2012). In short, experts matter because they deploy discursive power, building and disseminating discourses that define what it means to be a good worker.
Despite their theoretical importance, experts appear only intermittently in the literature on unemployment and job searching. They pop up in the background of studies of LMIs and are gestured to as the authors of career-success self-help books. When unemployment experts have received attention, they appear to be doing various kinds of work. Gatta (2014, p. 71), for example, shows that case managers working with low-wage job seekers provide services ranging from résumé editing to confidence-boosting pep talks. For the most part, however, they are considered passive agents, mere conduits for discourses that they have no agency in creating.
In contrast, this article begins with the assumption that these experts are not passive carriers of discourse; they are themselves creators and shapers of discourse. Often while grappling with their own career struggles, they are claiming expertise about the causes of and solutions to unemployment. Through their creative reinvention, they position themselves as important actors governing the job search. In the following section, I discuss the data and methods used to study these experts.
Studying Unemployment Experts
My primary sites for studying unemployment experts are three job clubs in a large metropolitan city in the south. Job clubs are organizations that host regular meetings to support unemployed workers as they look for a new job, providing various kinds of job search support and career advice services. They are generally free of charge, open to the public, and run by non-profits, churches, or state unemployment offices (Trutko et al., 2014). Job clubs have become an important part of unemployment services for a wide range of workers in the United States. These clubs have expanded during economic downturns as federal workforce development funding has receded (Wandner, 2015, p. 147) and the Department of Labor estimated in 2011 that there were more than 3,000 such clubs across the country (Trutko et al., 2014). In the Covid-19 era, clubs continue to operate on digital meeting platforms.
I chose to study job clubs serving professional workers because professional work has long been considered an ideal form of employment. Although such stable, high-wage jobs constitute a fraction of overall employment, these jobs have an outsized cultural influence as a hegemonic, “standard” form of employment (Kalleberg, 2011). The ways that professional workers respond to work transformations such as heightened insecurity is especially important because their perspectives are core to legitimating employment regimes more generally. In the conclusion, I consider how this paper’s findings can inform research on different kinds of work and workers.
I studied three job clubs – Jump Start, Hired You, and Career Search Network – in order to capture possible variations in the kinds of experts and expert advice on offer. The most noticeable variation among the clubs is the degree to which they are faith-based. Jump Start job club ran a completely secular program, Hired You cultivated some Christian undertones, and Career Search Network operated out of an evangelical church and had an explicitly Christian basis. Meetings at all three clubs had between 20 and 80 attendees, the majority of whom are unemployed white professionals, fifty-years-old or older. Although I also sought out demographic diversity, I was not able to find significant variation in the race and gender of job club attendees or experts. Meetings also have similar agendas. After general announcements, they revolve around forty-five-minute presentations from guest speakers who offer expert knowledge on some topic relevant to the job search. Many of the guest speakers give their presentations in the hope of picking up paying clients for their own private expert services.
The following analysis is based on ten months of participant observation in these job clubs and twenty-one in-depth interviews conducted primarily in 2018. In all three clubs, I introduced myself and my research project to club leaders on my first day of attendance and was warmly welcomed. At two clubs, where it is a ritual for first-time attendees to introduce themselves, I also introduced my research project from the front of the room. I found that club leaders, attendees, and guest speakers were happy to talk to me and often expressed enthusiasm that their job-hunting experiences were getting scholarly attention.
My interest in the experts was piqued early in my fieldwork by a puzzling pattern: when giving speeches and recruiting clients, many experts would share that they themselves had experienced job dislocation and unemployment. I began interviewing these experts and probing their career histories. My sample included former adjunct professors, human resource professionals, corporate executives, sales directors, project managers, recruiters, and software engineers. They began their entrepreneurial careers after experiencing disruptions to their professional employment, losing jobs to layoffs, outsourcing and subcontracting, corporate reorganizations, and a range of more subtle “pushes.” They turned to job-search expertise in an attempt to build a new professional career out of the rubble of the old. I stopped conducting interviews with experts when I reached a point of “saturation” (Small, 2009) in which I was no longer identifying new patterns.
I also took extensive fieldnotes on their presentations to determine what kind of advice these experts were offering to job seekers. Many club attendees take notes during meetings, so my sometimes frantic scribbling rarely felt out of place. The presentations were of particular interest insofar as they offered the clearest articulations of each expert’s interpretation of labor market struggles. In my notes, I captured the key concepts, metaphors, stories, and prescriptions that different experts offered to job seekers. My fieldnotes on these presentations make up the bulk of data presented in this paper.
After transcribing interviews and collating field notes, I used “grounded theory” (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) to analyze the data, paying special attention to presenting experts and the diagnoses they offered workers. This involved multiple rounds of inductive coding and the writing of thematic memos. Distinct types of experts emerged early in my analysis of the data. Over time I combined my codes from what started as highly specific expert types (e.g. LinkedIn experts, Networking experts, Passion Experts) into more inclusive categories that reflected the core similarities and differences in how they interpreted unemployment. In the following section, I present my findings on these unemployment experts.
Findings
I organize unemployment experts into three ideal types, distinguished according to the alternative diagnoses and solutions for unemployment that they offer. First,
Job Coaches
Job Coaches diagnose unemployment as a technical problem stemming from the worker’s inability to navigate the modern job search process. Finding a job today, Job Coaches posit, is a matter of mastering several techniques: one must learn the rules of computerized résumé-readers, manage recruiter relationships, use LinkedIn, and be sure to network strategically. Their presentations at job clubs, which focus on explaining best practices in the job search system, have titles such as “Optimize your LinkedIn,” and “What Recruiters Look for.” In short, Job Coaches tell the unemployed that they simply need to learn to work the system.
A key part of this diagnosis is, first, establishing the premise that finding a job today is unlike finding a job in the past. Jake, a sixty-year old former software sales manager with a gray goatee, made this point visually at the beginning of his talk at Hired You job club. The first slide of his PowerPoint presentation was a timeline denoting different “eras” of job searching over the last half-century. The 1950s-to-1980s section was illustrated with pictures of a phonebook and a Rolodex. Jake began here and told stories of how he got his first few jobs in restaurants by looking up the phone number and calling to ask if they had any positions, or by just showing up in person. Pointing to the Rolodex image, he asked the audience, “Who remembers these?” – to which the audience laughed. “I was around in the day job searching was a yellow legal pad, pencil, and a phone,” Jake said in response to the laughter. “Young people haven’t even seen a phone book!”
Jake moved on to what he called the “email-era” of job searching – from the 1990s to the early 2000s – in which employers would post to job boards, and job seekers would email in applications. He told us this model is dead and gone, and then described the contemporary era, from 2005 to today, in which job searching depends on networking and social media-based tools like LinkedIn. “The game has changed,” Jake said before launching into a series of best practices for approaching employers through LinkedIn and Twitter.
The story of job search change is a common starting point for the Job Coach’s pitch. It asserts that job seekers have a dated understanding of how the job market works, resulting in a misguided and ineffective job search. The system itself has been updated, the story goes, and job seekers must also update their tools. Although this framing is particularly easy to establish with the older demographics that populate the job clubs I studied, it is ultimately an “evergreen” story: constant technological change means that the unemployed can always be accused of being behind the times.
Having framed the job searching process as a constantly updating operating system, Job Coaches then zoom in on its component parts to offer “reeducation” on how job seekers ought to navigate everything from conversations with recruiters to LinkedIn.
Jennifer, a middle-aged Job Coach in a checkered blazer and red scarf, focused on teaching the unemployed at Jump Start job club how to navigate the different kinds of recruiters they may encounter while looking for work. Jennifer herself turned to coaching after she had been laid off seven times from various positions in recruiting and HR. Her PowerPoint presentation began with a map of recruitment relationships, animated with clipart images of businesspeople. The job seeker sat at the center of the diagram, surrounded by several different kinds of recruiters from “Headhunters” to “Internal Recruiters” to “Staffing Agencies.” Jennifer spent much of her presentation deep in the bowels of this system, explaining each type of recruiters’ compensation scheme and relationship to the hiring firm. Some are paid by the number of eligible applicants they present to the hiring manager, she explained, while others are paid a percentage of a hired worker’s starting salary. As she did so, she sought to disabuse attendees of a central misconception by repeating several times: “recruiters do not work for you.”
Jennifer then offered expert advice on how to navigate these recruitment pathways. She presented attendees with a list of questions they could ask a recruiter to determine where exactly the recruiter fit on the map such as, “Are you working through a Vender Management System?,” “Are you working directly with the hiring manager?,” and “How many candidates have you placed with this firm?” Understanding whom you are working with is crucial, she said, so that you know your chances.
Jennifer’s detailed breakdown of recruitment systems suggests that extended unemployment is a problem of the job seeker’s misunderstanding of the system. The unemployed need only become proficient technicians of the system – studying the map of recruiters and consulting their prepared questions – to find their way into work. “Once you know the game,” Jennifer said by way of conclusion, “you can be powerful in the job search.”
LinkedIn is another part of the system that Job Coaches will teach job seekers to optimize. In his presentation at Hired You, a tall, slender coach named Michael first assured the audience that the job search is just a process, a system like any other. He told the audience that his presentation would “back-end” LinkedIn (a software engineering term) in order to show us how it works and how we can improve our profiles to find a job. He joked that as a “recovering engineer” (he worked for IBM for twenty years before being pushed out in his fifties), he is well prepared to explain and help manage this system.
Michael identified several common mistakes made when using LinkedIn. First, job seekers are presenting themselves too narrowly by offering only one job title on their page. He advised the two dozen attendees to add multiple job titles to demonstrate their multiple skills. To do so, one needs to use a vertical bar, he said, (e.g., “Product Manager | Project Manager”) and he explained where to find this bar on the keyboard. Michael also told the assembled unemployed that one’s LinkedIn profile should never suggest unemployment. He advised everyone to purchase their own Limited Liability Corporation or “Doing Business As” title, even if one is not starting one’s own business. That way job seekers can present their current position as CEO and Founder of their own company.
Finally, Michael emphasized the importance of one’s profile picture and header image. He shared his own photo, arms crossed in front of a colorful wall of graffiti, which he says makes him look “approachable.” Although this tip also reflects a need to build “chemistry” with potential employers (Sharone, 2014), Michael made it clear that this is not just about feelings. He has “A/B tested” his profile picture – experimenting with multiple different photos and measuring traffic to his page to determine his most productive self-presentation.
Throughout his talk, Michael implied that simple mistakes on LinkedIn hold job seekers back from finding new positions. He emphasized the technical nature of LinkedIn strategy by deploying engineering language and a “process” framework. Optimizing one’s profile, Job Coaches assure, is an important step in pulling oneself out of unemployment.
Another component of the modern job market that job seekers are told they misunderstand is the importance of networking. Job Coaches argue the unemployed are spending far too much time applying for jobs online (probably still caught in the 1990s era of job searching) when they should be building networks and mining those networks for job leads. In this vein, the clubs often host expert presentations with titles such as “Say Good-bye to Amateur Networking. Connect Like a Pro!” and “Networking with a Purpose.” The idea is that networking is a key strategy for navigating the new job search system. Like managing recruiters and LinkedIn, one can master this area by learning best practices.
Job Coaches try to deconstruct and rationalize networking interactions as much as possible. All job seekers can be effective networkers, they say, if they follow certain rules of engagement, regardless of whether they are “introverts” or “extroverts.”
Karen, a middle-aged former adjunct professor who now works as an “Executive Employment Coach,” taught job seekers specific techniques meant to simplify and ensure success in networking. “You wouldn’t go into an interview without a plan,” she said as she walked the audience aisles, handing each attendee a bright pink, yellow, and blue index card, “so you shouldn’t start networking without a plan either.”
On the blue card, we were instructed to write down our goals for the upcoming networking session (maybe: “Meet someone who can connect me to an IT hiring manager”). On the pink, we jotted conversation starters (start with light current events, she suggested, before probing industry knowledge). On the yellow, we were to write a catchy and concise “personal brand” to spring on our interlocutor when the moment is right.
With index cards clutched in hand like a bouquet, Karen told us to form groups of three and to put our networking strategies into action. The thirty-odd jobless professionals shuffled awkwardly into triads and began the handshakes and opening questions they had planned. Over ten minutes, each attendee tried out these new networking techniques with a combination of enthusiasm and resentment – some diving aggressively into interrogations of others’ connections, others rolling their eyes through halfhearted personal brands.
As we networked, Karen coached with all the enthusiasm of a first-year teacher, jumping into different groups to offer conversational pivot points. She emphasized three “rules of the game:” (1) be a connector, (2) find something in common with everyone you speak with, and (3) get contact information. When she pulled one networker out of my group, she coached him to immediately jot down notes on each person he had met. These notes would be important for the strategic follow-ups that she recommended conducting within three days.
Karen’s presentation zeroed in on networking as the key to overcoming unemployment. She presented this technique not as something dependent on one’s character or comfort with strangers, but as a skill that can be rationally refined and mastered.
Job Coaches are unified in their interpretation of labor market problems as technical problems. They tell precarious workers that their struggles are rooted in their inability to navigate the job search system. To overcome job market failure, they need to learn how the system has changed so that they can reverse-engineer its component parts and optimize for success. Whether focused on recruitment pathways, LinkedIn profiles, or networking strategies, Job Coaches position themselves as experts in these “best practices.”
Self-Help Gurus
Job Coaches’ technical diagnosis is just one of the expert discourses offered to job seeking professionals. Self-help Gurus diagnose unemployment as a moral failing of the job seeker. Rather than the problem being about learning and mastering an external system for finding a job, Self-help Gurus locate the problem in the soul of the worker, arguing that his or her bad attitudes and misguided orientations towards labor are the main barriers to be overcome.
The job seeker can be morally flawed in two related ways, which I here designate as sub-diagnoses. The first problem is that job seekers have the wrong mindset and that negative attitudes and “limiting beliefs” are to blame for their inability to find work. I call this the “Mindset Diagnosis.” The second is that the job seeker is not pursuing work that aligns with his or her “passion” or “calling.” I label this the “Calling Diagnosis.” Self-help Gurus’ discourse is often signaled by the titles of their presentations which focus on self-work, such as “Success Happens from the Inside Out” or “Find your Where and Why.”
The Mindset Diagnosis is, at heart, a phenomenological proposal. As presenters often say, “you create your own reality.” By cultivating and carrying negative attitudes and “limiting beliefs,” unemployed people are creating for themselves a reality that virtually guarantees they will never be successful in the job market.
Frank, a bald and bespectacled presenter at Jump Start, explained this idea using a metaphor of cameras and projectors. Most people, he told the assembled unemployed, think that things happen out in the world and that the mind takes objective snapshots of those happenings. They think that the mind works like a camera – what he called an “outside-in” understanding of human perception. Frank then explained that the opposite is true; that our minds – our attitudes, mindsets, and beliefs – project themselves onto the world as we have experiences. Our experiences are determined less by what happens out in the world, and more by our internal thoughts. This “inside-out” understanding sees the mind not as camera, but as projector. “We do not experience the world as it is,” he said. “We experience it as we are.”
The inability to realize one’s own agency, Frank said, leads to “blaming and complaining” that can tank one’s job search. The problem in unemployment is not out there but inside us. Then, to underline this message, he projected a quote from the self-help superstar Tony Robbins: “The defining factor in life is never resources,” it read, “but resourcefulness.”
To remedy a counter-productive “outside-in” attitude, Self-help Gurus teach the unemployed to re-train their language to highlight their ultimate autonomy and control. Dressed in a sleek business casual, Jeff gave job club attendees a polished presentation titled “Mindsets for Success.” A former adjunct professor at a Christian college, Jeff evangelized with a well-honed energy: “The only thing standing between you and wild, radical success, is you!” The first step towards that success, he said, is to take the words “I can’t afford that” out of your vocabulary and to replace them with, “I do not choose to purchase it.” Indeed, Jeff recommended that job seekers always use “I choose” and “I do not choose,” as sentence starters to describe their situations.
In addition to reasserting individual autonomy through language control, Self-help Gurus lead job seekers through exercises intended to cultivate more positive thinking. In a presentation at Hired You job club titled “Cleaning Out Your Mental Closet,” Jane, a self-styled “Passion Coach” and former charter school teacher, led attendees through a series of activities intended to help identify, visualize, and destroy “limiting beliefs.” Jane walked down the audience aisles and handed each of the thirty-odd attendees a sandwich bag stuffed with shredded newspaper, a few strips of yellow and red paper, and some small Lego blocks. The bag represents our mind, she explained. The shredded newspaper is “gray matter,” the red strips are our limiting beliefs, the yellow strips are our positive beliefs, and the Lego blocks are our “gifts, skills, and talents.” Attendees brainstormed about their limiting beliefs on a separate worksheet she provided that included prompts for various areas in which we might be holding ourselves back (e.g., in work/employment, in relationships, in romance). We were then instructed to write one limiting belief on each of our red strips before ripping them to shreds.
After we had symbolically destroyed these beliefs, Jane gave us time to put together our Lego blocks – our gifts, skills, and talents – in a creative way that represents us. Ari, a soft-spoken software engineer seated next to me, smiled boyishly as he arranged his blocks into what he told me was a spaceship. Jane then handed out markers and craft supplies with which we wrote out new, positive beliefs on elementary school guided-writing strips. The woman across the aisle from me wrote “I will find a great job!” on her strip. Finally, we were instructed to free-draw using our craft supplies. Anything we like, Jane said, because creative activities relieve stress, “increase brain plasticity,” and “build new dendrites.”
Self-help Gurus draw on a wide range of pseudoscientific pop psychology when treating the Mindset Diagnosis. In a presentation at Jump Start, a former HR director named Allison walked job seekers through a series of visualization exercises for overcoming negative filters and imputing positive thinking. Dressed in a power suit, Allison instructed the group of about fifty job seekers to rise from our chairs and strike a “power pose,” a physical posture that is supposed to make one feel powerful, such as having your hands above your head and feet spread in a victory stance. Once we assumed our positions, we closed our eyes as Allison led the group through a meditation and visualization practice during which we pictured a scene in which we are successful (maybe, she suggested, the moment we got a job offer) and then imagined that scene playing out as a movie in a frame in front of us. We were then instructed to reach out and grab that imaginary frame, hold it above our heads, and plunge our bodies through it so that we feel all of the positivity from that scene of success. We then took the frame and scrunched it down into an imaginary ring that we placed on our fingers to protect us anytime we were feeling negative. After a short debrief reiterating the power of positive thinking, Allison sent us off with a broad and generous smile, saying “I know you are going to get the most amazing job ever.”
In these examples, Self-help Gurus offer several therapeutic treatments for the Mindset Diagnosis. They say that job market failure is rooted in attitudinal failure; negative thinking and limiting beliefs are the primary obstacles a job seeker needs to overcome. They explain their diagnosis with imaginative metaphors and offer a range of treatments meant to exorcise bad attitudes and reassert the individual’s ultimate autonomy and control over his or her employment.
Self-help Gurus also offer a diagnosis of moral failing tied to one’s “calling.” In this story, the job seeker cannot find a job because she does not know where she “belongs” in the labor market, a concept that is mobilized with varying degrees of religiosity and spirituality. Once one figures out where she “fits,” securing employment is supposedly easy.
In its secular articulation, the Calling Discourse talks about finding one’s true “passion.” Addison, a self-described “career management expert” who spoke to Hired You, explained this concept in secular terms. “There is a motor inside everyone,” she said. “We call it your mission, your drive. If you can figure out what that is and message it, it all falls into place.” Ultimately, finding a job is about identifying the thing that, “makes you glow, makes you light up … At the end of the day it’s what you want to do … Us career folks call it passion.”
Greg, who founded the Christian-oriented Career Search Network after being laid off from Dell, provided his attendees a religious version: We distinguish between a job and a career and a calling…A calling is a career that’s in alignment with your God-given purpose and passion and personality and wiring, right? God’s wired us all. He’s given each one of us a unique passion and purpose and experience … [Getting a job] is just finding that fit and recognizing who you are.
Techniques for self-discovery are not limited to personality tests. Self-help Gurus offer a myriad of strategies for discovering one’s authentic self and matching that to an occupation. I have observed these experts suggest that job seekers create and analyze “vision boards;” build “life maps” that catalogue past experiences; use graphic organizers to visualize the intersection of interests and talents; and perform “360 reviews” of one’s self, modeled after corporate evaluation systems, in which the job seeker asks people from different areas of their life to describe their strengths and weaknesses.
The stated purpose of all of these techniques and devices is to resolve the central tenet of the Calling Discourse: that job seekers do not truly know themselves. Like the focus on mindset, this interpretation locates the problem of unemployment directly in the soul of the job seeker. The solutions Self-help Gurus offer for finding work focus on identifying and manipulating the job seeker’s character. As such, Self-help Gurus help produce what McGee (2005) calls the “belabored self,” a modern subject in constant, anxious search of itself.
Skill-Certifiers
In contrast to Job Coaches and Self-help Gurus, Skill-certifiers diagnose unemployment as a human capital problem. The reason professionals cannot find good jobs, they suggest, is that these people lack the requisite skills demanded by employers in the new economy. Before giving examples of this diagnosis, I first describe these experts’ structural position in the job clubs, since it differs in important ways from Job Coaches and Self-help Gurus.
Skills-certifiers work out of schools that have been approved by the state’s local workforce development office to provide skills-training to the unemployed. These schools, which are funded by grants from the Department of Labor, receive about $7,000 for each unemployed student they enroll who is eligible for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and up to $17,000 for students who are eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) grants.
Two local certification schools for professional workers, Career Solutions and Achievement Inc., have relationships with local job clubs in which they provide financial assistance to the club in exchange for being given time at the beginning of each meeting to advertise their services to first-time members. In two of the three clubs I studied, these schools maintain regular informational tables that provide pamphlets for the various courses they teach. These include classes on basic Excel, certification programs on new project management paradigms, and computer programming bootcamps. This is the primary way in which they recruit eligible students to their schools and secure the money that follows those students. Skill-certifiers representing these schools get less airtime in club meetings than do other experts, but their consistent presence ensures the stability of their message.
Mason, a former IBM manager and the president of Career Solutions, begins his presentation to Jump Start attendees by announcing that that there is a “hiring spree” happening locally, but that job seekers need to “be up to speed, be updated” to take advantage of it. He cites a low regional unemployment rate to describe the local economy as strong and growing, but as lacking qualified workers to fill many of its new positions. Occasionally, Mason brings to these presentations job listings from local employers and reads them off – Project Manager, Data Analyst, Software Engineer – before describing the courses his organization offers that teach their requisite skills. Even if one already has the skills, he tells us, one can still benefit from completing a formal course because local employers are, in Mason’s terms, “certification happy.”
Skill-certifiers encourage workers to make constant, future-facing investments in their productive capacities. Harry, the director of Achievement Inc. and also a former corporate manager who was laid off several years ago, regularly tells club attendees that they are not fulfilling this new requirement. “You should know tomorrow,” he said, pacing in front of the group in a dark blue suit. “You should study tomorrow. Your knowledge should be tomorrow, even though you’re working in today.”
In his presentations, Harry regularly questions the value that job seekers can offer to potential employers and he emphasizes one’s current and future productivity as the determining factor in career success. Harry cites a “successful business friend” of his, an employer himself, to make this point: “‘Attends work regularly’ is not a skill,” he said, quoting the friend. Showing up at work is an admirable quality, “but if you’re not creating value, who the hell cares if you show up or not?” By highlighting the human capital dimension of employment relationships, Harry disciplines seemingly antiquated dimensions of that relationship, such as loyalty between employers and workers (Wartzman, 2017).
In summary, Skill-certifiers suggest that the unemployed are unable to find work because they are lacking in productive skills. If job seekers could gain those skills (or the certifications signaling them), they would overcome their job market troubles. This interpretation is distinct from that offered by Job Coaches and Self-help Gurus, who highlight job-search techniques and personal character, respectively, as the target of intervention.
The position of Skill-certifiers’ in the job search arena also differs from other experts and offers additional insights. Since Skill-certifiers are tied directly to state programs and policies, their diagnosis aligns most closely with that of the official institutional experts in unemployment, namely economists. Economics has long focused on individual skills and marginal productivity as the central mechanism moving employment (Becker, 1964) and the idea of a “skills gap” needing remedy is the most recent, popularized version of this discourse. In their positions at state-certified training programs they operate as the low-level administrators of policies (like re-training grants) that are designed by and built around the economists’ particular interpretations of the labor market. As such, Skill-certifiers resemble “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 2010), translating an institutional policy into practical application with workers.
Discussion
This paper has analyzed the experts who provide guidance to unemployed professionals as they look for work. It finds that many unemployment experts themselves emerge from the ranks of the precariously employed and work to help others navigate their own precarity. The paper builds a three-fold typology of unemployment experts based on the alternative diagnoses and treatments that they offer the unemployed for their labor market struggles.
First,
Typology of Unemployment Experts.
These findings make two contributions to our understanding of how power is exercised in the labor market. First, it specifies how a proliferation of expert discourses can actually work to secure consent to precarious labor markets. As Smith (2001) has noted, unemployment in the new economy is experienced as a moment of great uncertainty, risk, and opportunity. Unemployment experts intervene in this confusing and vulnerable moment to offer workers roadmaps for how best to move forward. At first blush, the availability of multiple experts would seem to be an unalloyed good for job seekers; it gives the unemployed a sense of choice in self-diagnosis. With these three discourses ready at hand, the job seeker is free to determine whether her problem is about her skills, attitude, or job search technique and to pursue the appropriate treatment.
However, the sense of choice and empowerment is largely illusory. All three experts ultimately diagnose unemployment as rooted in an individual deficiency. None of these experts offer a structural or relational interpretation of unemployment; they do not name many of the well-documented causes of employment precarity like the decline of organized labor, financialization, and the normalization of layoffs, outsourcing, and subcontracting. The proliferation of expert discourses opens up room for attention to be directed at a range of personal shortcomings, not political problems.
This emergent technique of power – in which control is exercised through the apparent production of freedom and choice – aligns with theoretical formulations in both the “work-games” literature (Burawoy, 1982; Sallaz, 2009; Sharone, 2014) and the Foucauldian tradition (Foucault, 1978; Rose & Miller, 2008). Rather than disciplining the unemployed into a single explanation for their struggles, these experts seemingly multiply the choices available to job seekers while simultaneously foreclosing on opportunities to critique structural transformations to work.
Second, this paper draws experts to the foreground as important actors exercising power in the job search. Prior research has focused on the organizations and the ideological configurations that shape employment relationships, while treating the experts behind them primarily as passive agents, mere conduits of official knowledge. I find that the experts are themselves creative actors who are parlaying their own downward mobility into new professional opportunities by homing in on discourses that they can sell to the unemployed as explanations for their job market failure. Having themselves faced job loss, they are well positioned to finely tune those explanations to resonate with job seekers. They know the nerves of networking, the pull of finding one’s “calling,” and the anxieties of feeling your skills are out of date – and they channel their knowledge and experience as they craft expert discourses.
Unemployment experts occupy a unique and largely unrecognized position in the new economy. By reinventing themselves and developing these different expert discourses – themselves simply trying to make their own way forward in the new world of work – unemployment experts inadvertently take up positions in a system of discursive power that works to undermine and inhibit forms of collective resistance to precarious employment regimes. It is not quite accurate to call these experts “powerful” in their own right; they are, after all, fairly constrained by their own circumstances. However, their agency – their creative efforts at reinvention – gets channeled towards the exercise of power. As they pursue their own interests, they serve the interests of capital.
Conclusion
This paper has examined the emergence of experts in unemployment in the new economy. It finds that many of these experts are drawn from the ranks of the precariously employed, and it develops a three-fold typology that distinguishes experts according to the explanations they provide job seekers for their job market struggles. The findings are limited by the sample of experts studied (those available to a particular group of older, white, professionals) and by the choice to focus on expert discourses rather than job seekers’ reception of those discourses. These limitations invite further study of unemployment experts and the ways in which workers engage with such experts.
First, future research could examine the origins of these experts’ knowledge and the ways in which they build professional authority. Job Coaches draw on knowledge in the sphere of Human Resources; Self-help Gurus invoke positive psychology and other pop-science; and Skill-certifiers translate and apply the discourses of economists and policy makers. More empirical work could trace these discourses back to their sources and explain how they have been brought to bear specifically on the current plight of the unemployed. The table presented above could be extended to consider the genealogy of these different stories.
Research could also examine the professional trajectory of these experts. Most of the unemployment experts observed in this study are “minor” (Rose & Miller, 2008) in the sense that they do not hold the kind of jurisdictional power of traditional professions such as doctors and lawyers. How are unemployment experts able to build their authority as experts? What does “professionalization” look like for them? In some areas, specifically among Self-help Gurus, there appears to be levels of such expertise, with some superstar career-advice authors sitting on top and many gurus recycling and reselling their ideas to the unemployed through coaching. What is the structure of these spheres of expertise and how can we expect them to develop?
Further studies should also consider how the unemployed engage with such experts. First, what kinds of workers have access to what kinds of experts? While this paper focuses on professionals, further research could examine what kinds of experts emerge out of the ranks of manufacturing and low-wage service workers. Similarly, scholars could examine how these expert discourses are gendered and racialized. Which groups are drawn to these different stories? Second, although this paper does not directly scrutinize job seekers, I speculate that the variety of diagnoses that experts offer helps to secure consent among job seekers. Researchers could follow the example of Vallas and Christin (2018) and measure workers’ internalization of these expert discourses. What kinds of workers gravitate towards the explanations of Self-help Gurus as opposed to Skill-certifiers? If, as Lopez and Phillips (2019) find, the “chemistry game” may be losing its grip, will such workers move to another individual explanation for their struggles? Under what circumstances do workers turn to other kinds of experts – such as political organizers – for radically different explanations for their troubles?
This paper has analyzed unemployment experts as important new actors shaping the job market. As both products and producers of precarious employment regimes, they are strategic sites for examining transformations to work. Sustained attention to unemployment experts and their interaction with job seekers will continue to expand and specify how workplace inequality is produced today.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Christine Williams, Daniel Fridman, Ken-Hou Lin, Javier Auyero, Eldad Levy, Erika Slaymaker, and Elizabeth Nimmons for conversations and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to the Fem(me) Sem working group and the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and to the anonymous reviewers at Work & Occupations.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
