Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today

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University of Chicago Press, Apr 12, 2017 - Business & Economics - 289 pages

Finding a job used to be simple. You’d show up at an office and ask for an application. A friend would mention a job in their department. Or you’d see an ad in a newspaper and send in your cover letter. Maybe you’d call the company a week later to check in, but the basic approach was easy. And once you got a job, you would stay—often for decades.

Now . . . well, it’s complicated. If you want to have a shot at a good job, you need to have a robust profile on LinkdIn. And an enticing personal brand. Or something like that—contemporary how-to books tend to offer contradictory advice. But they agree on one thing: in today’s economy, you can’t just be an employee looking to get hired—you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals.

That’s a radical transformation in how we think about work and employment, says Ilana Gershon. And with Down and Out in the New Economy, she digs deep into that change and what it means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. In telling her story, Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; talks with managers at companies around the United States to suss out regional differences—like how Silicon Valley firms look askance at the lengthier employment tenures of applicants from the Midwest. And she finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know.

Throughout, Gershon keeps her eye on bigger questions, interested not in what lessons job-seekers can take—though there are plenty of those here—but on what it means to consider yourself a business. What does that blurring of personal and vocational lives do to our sense of our selves, the economy, our communities? Though it’s often dressed up in the language of liberation, is this approach actually disempowering workers at the expense of corporations?

Rich in the voices of people deeply involved with all parts of the employment process, Down and Out in the New Economy offers a snapshot of the quest for work today—and a pointed analysis of its larger meaning.

 

Contents

A Book about Advice Not an Advice Book
The Company You Keep
Selling Your Self through Personal Branding
2 Being Genericand Notin the Right Way
3 Getting off the Screen and into Networks
4 Didnt We Meet on LinkedIn?
5 Changing the Technological Infrastructure of Hiring
What It Means to Be a Hiring Manager Recruiter or HR Person
7 When Moving On Is the New Normal
We Wanted a Labor Force but Human Beings Came Instead
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright

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About the author (2017)

Ilana Gershon is associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She is the author of several books, including Down and Out in the New Economy and The Pandemic Workplace, also published by the University of Chicago Press.