Avowing Unemployment: Confessional Jobseeker Interviews and Professional CVs

Authors

  • Tom Boland University College Cork

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6256

Keywords:

Avowal, Confession, CV, Jobseekers, Welfare

Abstract

While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault’s work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in ‘economic theology’. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as ‘pastor’ but with the market as the ultimate ‘test’ of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through ‘telling the truth’ about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised.

Author Biography

Tom Boland, University College Cork

Tom Boland is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork. His interests span sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy and literary criticism, and he has published journal articles across these disciplines. His main empirical areas of research are the sociology of culture and critique, and the governmentality of welfare and unemployment. His recent monograph, The Spectacle of Critique, was published by Routledge in 2019. This article builds on the analysis of jobseeking and CVs begun in The Reformation of Welfare: The New Faith of the Labour Market co-authored with Ray Griffin, published by Policy Press in 2021.

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Published

2021-06-14

How to Cite

Boland, T. (2021). Avowing Unemployment: Confessional Jobseeker Interviews and Professional CVs. Foucault Studies, (30), 29–53. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6256

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