Volume 14 , Issue 3 , 2016

List of articles

Resume as Narrative: A Linguist reflects on the process of professional storybuilding

AuthorsAnna Marie Trester

2016

( 3 )

Abstract

While professional identities (like all identities) are largely discursively accomplished, the specific contextualized components which constitute “sounding professional” are often poorly understood, or indeed recognized more often in their absence. This presents an interesting challenge to those tasked with learning these ways of talking in securing a job, for example graduate students in a professionally-oriented MA program in sociolinguistics. This paper considers the linguistic process of presenting a professional identity, with particular focus on the resume as a very carefully constructed storyworld in which every linguistic choice (i.e. referring expression) contributes to positionings that construct and convey identity. Just as with any story, through the choices that we make in highlighting one aspect of a job over another “our identities as social beings emerge as we construct our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations” (Schiffrin 1996).

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Emotions and the market: How are emotions made economically effective?

AuthorsAgata Dembek

2016

( 3 )

Abstract

The paper provides an analysis of mechanisms leading to the commodification of emotions. Describing key cultural processes, characteristic of the culture of late capitalism -- psychologization of an individual subject and economization of social spheres of life -- I identify the relation between emotions and the market in each of those processes. I argue that in order to intentionally engage emotions into work and market-oriented activity, they need to be rendered objects of a “specific kind of expert knowledge, characteristic of new “specialists of emotions.” Construction of the knowledge on emotions requires their detachment from an individual subject, their ontologization and commensuration. However, operationalized and designed emotions need to be authentically felt and experienced by an individual, since the affective engagement is expected to generate, directly and indirectly, an economic outcome. Therefore, the detachment of emotions requires complementation with its mirror mechanism - reattachment of emotions into a subject. In this review paper, I depict both mechanisms, using examples from the fields of HR management, marketing and market research.

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Dirty work as seriality

AuthorsTommy Jensen; Johan Sandström

2016

( 3 )

Abstract

The literature on dirty work has traditionally zoomed in on workplace studies of occupational groups The liturature stigmatized by some parts of society. In this paper the bias is challenged and extended with the aid of Iris Marion Young’s appropriation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of seriality and an empirical study of workers with non-stigmatized occupations in stigmatized work contexts (arms and pornography). The study shows that the workers have to be constantly ready to deal with work-related dirt in their identity work and to do this without any means of support, development of a language or resistance to the transfer of dirt.

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Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry

Volume 14 , Issue 3 , 2016

List of articles