Abstract
Are there limits on what we can reasonably be asked to become? The concept of employability teaches the construction of new models of working identity – ones that emphasise personal traits and passions. It motivates recipients to become employable by ‘working’ on the self – such that a person’s identity becomes saleable on the job market. This article examines employability through its impact on those specifically asked to become employable – members of work clubs for the unemployed. Stemming from a 12-month, primarily ethnographic, study of unemployed experience, the article describes the nature of employability in practice and specifically the tensions experienced by long-term unemployed people who are repeatedly asked to manufacture a more employable version of themselves. Employability is assessed as a form of identity regulation which prompts individuals to construct themselves as continuously employable over time. The struggles surrounding this endeavour – as experienced by the unemployed research participants – point to the parameters and limits of identities specified within relations of power and the social consequences for those unable or unwilling to become what they are expected to be.
Keywords
Introduction
Identity regulation has been established as a key means by which management attempts to control employees within organisations (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Bardon et al., 2017; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2016). Efforts to craft an ideal or designer model of selfhood at work (Casey, 1995; Kunda, 1992) have been shown to be a common strategy of managerial authority (Rose, 1990). Whereas prior studies have identified the importance of revealing identity control as a management technique (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Kunda, 1992), critical scholars of identity have been quick to recognise that such efforts are never totalising (Bardon et al., 2017; Boussebaa and Brown, 2017). Rather than simply revealing the ideal forms of identity specified by management, critical studies of identity construction within power relations (Foucault, 1979) tend to focus on the ways in which workers respond to and resist discourses (Foucault, 1972) of identity imposed on them in organisations (Collinson, 1992; Costas and Fleming, 2009).
In the knowledge that identities are actively and reflexively worked upon by individuals (Brown, 2022), studies of responses to identity regulation often adopt an identity work perspective (Brown, 2015; Watson, 2008). Identity work is done as individuals reflect on themselves and their circumstances with the aim of producing relatively coherent narratives of ‘self-identity’ (Giddens, 1991). To achieve this persons draw upon a diverse range of existing identity resources – which can be social (Tajfel et al., 1979; Turner, 1985), dramaturgical (Schwalbe and Shay, 2014), discursive (Foucault, 1972; Ybema et al., 2009) or performative (Goffman, 1959) but are generally considered to be constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) through a process of active reflection.
Of course, identity work in response to identity regulation is never an entirely autonomous process but one in which individuals relate to the identity demands placed upon them within particular organisational circumstances (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Post-structuralist approaches suggest that identity work is conducted within power relations that influence identity or subjectivity in specific ways (Foucault, 1979). The notion of identity regulation implies that some identities are likely to bring success or recognition from peers whereas others are generally seen as undesirable (Goffman, 1963; Holmqvist et al., 2012). Studies of this interplay between a self-constructed sense of ‘who I am’ and identities preferred by various authorities have corroborated the idea that identities are crafted (Kondo, 1990) through personal reflection – not only on outer circumstance but also within discursively formed (Foucault, 1972) conceptions of the desirability of particular models of selfhood.
A growing body of literature emphasises the ways in which subjects subvert power-laden identity narratives through a creative re-appropriation of their terms in a manner functional to them (Bardon et al., 2017; Boussebaa and Brown, 2017), often for the sake of sustaining a career (Grey, 1994; Zanoni et al., 2017). Subjects of identity regulation in organisations have been shown to partially adopt and play with managerial discourses of self while conducting their own identity work, creating hybrid or ‘agile’ identities (Coupland and Spedale, 2020) – which often behove them socially, or perform some other psychological function (Costas and Fleming, 2009). Living up to external identity demands can, however, cause anxiety (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2016; Gill, 2015) as employees struggle with the expectations associated with the various forms of identity imposed upon them. This, in turn, can cause identity struggles (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003), which have been shown to prompt further bouts of identity work as individuals wrestle with what they are expected to be (Chen and Reay, 2020; Fernando et al., 2020).
The focus on identity work (Brown, 2022) as a response to identity regulation is valuable in that it confirms that identity is never solely determined by power and that individuals play a conscious role in their own self-construction (O’Doherty, 2005). Less attention, however, has been given to other kinds of potential reactions of those asked to form themselves within relations of power (Chen and Reay, 2020). Recent scholarship on identity construction in and around organisations has begun to question the parameters of identity regulation and its ability to prompt identity work among individuals (Alvesson et al., 2024), showing that workers are not always pre-occupied with questions of identity. Sveningsson et al. (2021) suggest that engagement in identity work often hinges upon a series of situational contingencies that make it more or less relevant to individuals working within particular industries. There may also be occasions where new identities are rejected as being unsuitable within certain organisational circumstances (Chen and Reay, 2020). Such studies begin to suggest that there are limits to identity work as a response to identity regulation; times when it is triggered among individuals in and around organisations and times when other responses take precedence.
Given that identity work cannot be presumed to be ubiquitous and continuous over time, but is nevertheless an inescapable aspect of identity regulation, there is scope for scholarship which probes the limits of the approach as a means of analysing responses to attempts to control identity. This article aims to provide such a study by providing a case in which individuals subject to identity regulation fail to conduct identity work in the manner specified. It examines personal and environmental limitations upon identity work done under duress as well as drawing out potential social ramifications of a failure to adopt an identity which is deemed as desirable. As such, the research is directed at answering the first research question:
The article aims, therefore, to contribute to an emergent scholarship on the parameters of identity regulation through a discussion of reactions to identity regulation at the margins of employment. It draws primarily on ethnographic research into the experience of unemployed people in work clubs – individuals who are asked to construct and perform employable identities in the name of finding work. Work clubs are small, often community-based organisations whose aim is to provide access to resources such as IT and training for unemployed people on the margins of the job market. Whereas in work clubs, many tasks take place with the aim of helping people to find work or apply for benefits, the paper focuses particularly on employability training, which represented a key feature of the employment support provided in most clubs that participated in the research.
Unemployment, employability and identity regulation
The meanings attached to the concept of employability fluctuate over time, but some notion of it has been central to UK labour market policy since the early 2000s (Department for Work and Pensions [DWP], 2008; HM Government, 2011; McQuaid and Lindsay, 2005). Employability training tends to focus on the development of individual traits that re-orient a person towards fruitful engagement with the job market. Fugate et al. (2004) understand the concept as a ‘psycho-social construct’ through which individuals are encouraged to internalise employable traits such as a concern with personal career identity, personal adaptability and social capital. Whereas they concede that boosting one’s employability does not necessarily result in employment (Fugate et al., 2004) engagement in its precepts, employability training is thought to assist unemployed people with the mental and emotional difficulties surrounding ‘worklessness’ (McArdle et al., 2007). Losing work often prompts doubts surrounding self and identity, as older working identifications are lost (Amundson, 1994; Borgen and Amundsen, 1984; Howe, 1990). The focus on personal employability is thought to function as a coping mechanism for the potentially disenfranchised unemployed person – who is encouraged to renegotiate their sense of identity and work orientation (Amundson, 1994) and who is considered capable of boosting their employability whether or not they are in work (McArdle et al., 2007). It is thought that the unemployed individual can learn to navigate a changing and unpredictable job market through a re-imagining of personal working selfhood (Amundson, 1994). Employability training can be understood as a form of identity work involving a re-orientation of one’s sense of self in relation to the job market (Amundson, 1994).
Though its theorists are clear that boosting one’s employability does not guarantee access to paid labour (Fugate et al., 2004), the concept has continued to play a central role in UK labour market policy not only as a means of coping with unemployment but as a remedy to it (DWP, 2008; HM Government, 2011). Here, unemployment is framed as an individual condition to be addressed through training, again boosting the employability of the person or group in question (Rogers, 2004). The assumption is that this training will not only help a person develop the skills and traits necessary to navigate unemployment or episodes of it but also find work itself.
The notion that unemployment can be read as a question of employability has been criticised as too narrow and individualistic (Crisp and Powell, 2017) in that it runs the risk of personalising what could equally be seen as a systematic issue (Cole, 2008). The approach has been said to over-emphasise individual responsibility for the condition (Dwyer, 2004) while obscuring important structural factors such as the job market. Of course, unemployment could just as easily be understood as a social outcome of a lack of suitable work. Recent UK labour market statistics (Office for National Statistics [ONS], 2025) reveal a steady decrease in job vacancies since 2022, alongside an increase in the number of unemployed people per vacancy, suggesting there are now 2.4 unemployed people for every job. This deepening scarcity of employment opportunities brings further into question the capacity of employability training to help unemployed people into work in general.
Moreover, it has been argued that employability’s individualising tendency has the potential to stigmatise (Goffman, 1963) the condition of worklessness (Evans, 2012), thereby legitimising punitive regimes of welfare (Crisp and Powell, 2017; Peck, 2001). Because employability frames unemployment as a question of individual responsibility, engagement in employability can take on a punitive quality – as unemployed people are compelled to re-habituate themselves in the ways of work, forging employable identities in the process, through the coercive dynamics of the welfare state in its current form (Dwyer, 2018).
Employability training may well function as a psychological basis for coping with unemployment (Fugate et al., 2004). When viewed within its role in UK labour-market policy though – as a means both of activating the non-working population and of resolving unemployment – employability takes on an altogether different set of meanings. Employability practice can rightfully be understood as a form of identity work in which a self is actively worked upon (Brown, 2015, 2022) at a time of personal crisis in which the individual renegotiates a sense of self (Daskalaki and Simosi, 2018) in relation to shifting external circumstances (Ybema et al., 2009). Within the experience of the long-term unemployed benefit claimant, however, employability should also be examined as a form of identity practice carried out within relations of power (Brown, 2022; Foucault, 1979). In particular, it should be appreciated as a project of identity regulation that delineates discursively (Foucault, 1972) constructed models of worthy and unworthy selfhood. These tendencies reflect general social pressures on individuals to continuously construct themselves as employable persons (Coupland and Spedale, 2020), albeit under the weight of a punitive benefit system within which deservingness of support is continuously cast into doubt (Scholz and Ingold, 2021).
There is a subtle assumption in employability training for the unemployed that access to work is an outcome of successful identification or re-identification with work as well as potential penalties for those who fail to do this. Can employment really be reduced to a question of identity however, and how far does the production of new working identities take those at the margins of employment? Alongside its exploration of the limits of identity regulation, this article interrogates this view presented by employability logic by asking a second research question:
Research setting
The article stems from a 12-month mainly ethnographic study in work clubs for unemployed people in Manchester. As a city largely built around industrial production, Manchester was affected over a lengthy period by processes of de-industrialisation and associated changes in work (see Peck and Ward, 2002). Due to the centrality of industry – notably manufacturing – and its loss to the economic fabric of the city (see Blakeley and Evans, 2015), Manchester was considered an appropriate place for in-depth, longitudinal research into unemployed experience. This paper evolved as a product of an ethnographic study of work clubs in Manchester, with the researcher volunteering as a work club assistant in several work clubs in central, north and east Manchester – a situation which facilitated an intimate investigation into the experiences of unemployed people looking for work and claiming benefits.
A key aspect of contemporary unemployed life, as revealed by the study, is benefit conditionality (Dwyer, 2004, 2008); a process by which an unemployed person’s benefits are made conditional upon the completion of a series of work-related tasks as specified by a person’s Work Coach at the Job Centre. Some have argued that the receipt of benefits now hinges on the unemployed person demonstrating the qualities of a ‘good jobseeker’ (Scholz and Ingold, 2021) through an active search for work, which is then monitored and checked by the Work Coach. Participant observation with unemployed people in work clubs revealed that an engagement with employability courses was one of the means by which an unemployed person could prove they were ‘actively seeking work’; it was highlighted, therefore, as a key aspect of the current unemployed experience.
Though research participants, particularly those classified as long-term unemployed, had often attended several employability courses at the behest of their Work Coach, they often complained that the courses were ineffective in helping them find work. Because their benefit was in part contingent upon attendance on such courses, however, research participants felt unable to refuse to participate for fear they would be ‘sanctioned’ (Dwyer, 2018) or, in other words, have their benefits stopped. What often resulted was a continuous, alienated and superficial engagement with the ‘job search’ (Foster, 2017) – not in the hope of finding work, but to demonstrate a simulation of work-related activity (Roberman, 2014) so as to prevent sanction. For long-term unemployed people, the engagement in employability courses was an inescapable fact of life, whether or not the training helped them find work.
As the research revealed, because employability featured so heavily in the lives of participants in work clubs – yet could also seem so unhelpful – it became necessary to analyse the construct in terms of its role in the lives of unemployed benefit claimants. This also threw up the question of whether or not employability courses genuinely assisted ‘jobseekers’ (Rogers, 2004) re-enter paid labour, what employability training meant in real time and what happened to those who failed to re-train correctly.
Data collection
The researcher volunteered as a work club assistant and conducted participant observation with work club members who used the work club to apply for jobs and claim benefits. Research participants were asked to comment on their experience of the job search, their work history and more generally their experience of being unemployed, while for example re-writing their CVs and applying for jobs in the work club. Initial interactions were logged through fieldnotes and provided, among other things, the basis for understanding first-order themes (Van Maanen, 1979) in the lives of participants. Initial interactions in the work club highlighted employability discourse and practice as a key element in the lives or participants. Subsequently, conversations and interactions with employability tutors teaching at the club, visiting the establishment, or during employability events were logged, again through fieldnotes. Having established key themes among research participants, the researcher then expanded the research twofold: first, by volunteering at or visiting a total of nine work clubs within Manchester and, second, by conducting a series of 15 interviews with key informants. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on a person’s work history, their experience with unemployment and their understanding of employability. Interview participants included a mix of unemployed people and employability tutors. The interview stage allowed the researcher a more nuanced understanding of first-order themes identified during the participant observation while capturing more detailed reactions to employability training among participants. As part of work club volunteer training, the researcher also attended two public employability events to collect more data on employability-in-action, as it manifested through practice.
Data analysis
Throughout the study, first- and second-order codes were established through a process of ‘open coding’ (Coffey and Atkinson, 1996), which involves the in-depth examination and interpretation of fieldnotes (see also: Alcadipani et al., 2018). As stated, initial themes of employability presented themselves during the early stages of the research. However, interpretation of data from fieldnotes taken throughout the study revealed several associated themes concerning employability as it manifested in and around the work clubs. The first of these was that work club attendees most often did not feel helped by such training and second, that employability training could be understood as a form of identity regulation (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002) which could prompt further bouts of identity-based tensions (Lam, 2019) for informants. After having identified these primary codes – and given the centrality of interest in the parameters and social consequences of identity regulation (Alvesson et al., 2024) – the data were then further examined to understand why certain people fail to adopt an employable identity or find work. This process of secondary coding required further analysis of interviews with key informants to show who failed to become employable and why.
To answer this question, the study began to analyse the background and experience of research participants. Though work club attendees came from a range of backgrounds, white working-class men (and to a lesser extent, women) stood out as a key demographic for the study, simply because this group was more populus in the everyday affairs of the clubs. As the interpretation process developed, data patterns emerged through the narrated experience of research participants in terms of their reactions to employability training – a process which highlighted ‘age’ and the specificities of ‘work history’ as explanatory factors in the over-representation of this group in work clubs. These codes were then woven into a final-stage interpretation, which allowed the research to provide insights on the limits and parameters of identity regulation (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Alvesson et al., 2024), highlight social ramifications of the issue and uncover some pitfalls of employability as it is currently thought of and practised.
It should be stated that, though this setting was new to the researcher, personal experience of extended periods of unemployment and claiming benefit undoubtedly assisted in the development of research relationships with unemployed people, while forming a reflective element in this analysis. Indeed, as is the case with ethnography in general, much understanding stemmed from the ethnographer’s immersion in the field or ‘being there’ (Bornema and Hammoudi, 2009), intimacy with the dynamics of the field, and thus personal awareness of the situation at hand. Such an approach is clearly fallible and open to reinterpretation, yet what is desired within ethnographic and other quantitative methods is not objectivity but plausibility (see Mees-Buss et al., 2022). That is, in attempting to capture relational intimacy with participants and the setting in general, the researcher’s role is to work with first-order concepts and to postulate workable second-order theories based on the analysis of the researcher following immersion in the field (Van Maanen, 1979). Much of the analysis below, then, stems from the author’s interpretation of data collected through ethnographic research, which aims at plausibility, not infallibility.
In the practice of ethnographic fieldwork, the professional integrity of the ethnographer is of course central. Productive research relationships are built on trust between ethnographer and informant who is being asked to reveal intimate and potentially delicate features of lived experience (Dingwall, 1980). Therefore, the data here, presented through a mix of ethnographic writing based on fieldnotes and vignettes from interviews, are represented faithfully and in accordance with the views expressed by research participants. Informed consent was attained from all involved, and the anonymity of all informants has been protected.
Constructing the employable self
This section sketches out the tenets of employability training as taught by professionals and volunteers in the work clubs. Much of the research was centred around an organisation in central Manchester that I will call the Central Work Club. The Central Work Club ran a 10-week employability course that was aimed at boosting a person’s employability or ‘work readiness’. The course used a mix of volunteering, employability training including presentation and job search skills, and a drop-in centre where participants received help with job applications and CV writing. The researcher volunteered as a work club assistant, helping programme participants write CVs and apply for jobs. Much of the detail in this section comes from interactions both with employability tutors and recipients as well as engagement in training courses for employability tutors, allowing a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of employability as identity regulation (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002) as it was taught in work clubs.
As stated, the Central Work Club’s employability programme aimed to produce a state of ‘work-readiness’ in those who came through its doors. Most often, participants had been asked to attend the course as a mandatory condition of their benefit claim. Work club members were commonly classified as ‘long-term unemployed’ by the DWP, meaning that they had been out-of-work for a year or more and had likely been instructed to attend the Central Work Club by their work coach.
A long-term unemployed person was seen by employability tutors as likely to carry with them a distain for employability and potentially for the business of finding work itself. Many had been sent on several employability courses before they arrived at the Central Work Club and had often developed a resentful attitude towards authorities they associated with the Jobcentre, including tutors at the Central Work Club. It was possible that work club participants would enter the course already in a dejected state, having tried to find work over a lengthy period and been unable to. Thus, an attitude of disillusionment with work and employability was commonly found in work clubs. After lengthy job searches or attending employability courses without finding work, long-term unemployed people often became alienated with the process, thereby developing a clearly negative attitude towards work and its acquisition.
This negative attitude towards work, however, would be immediately challenged by employability tutors when working with jobseekers. In fact, negativity of any sort was seen to be bad both for one’s employment prospects and for the atmosphere of the work club. The leader of the Central Work Club thus spoke about ‘combatting negativity’ in the group: If we sense negativity in the group we won’t let the people sit next to each other.
The negative attitudes that could build up towards work and employability had to be challenged not only for the sake of group cohesion but because they were seen as antithetical to the attitudes required to make a person employable. Preventing people sitting next to each other during sessions was one means of stopping negativity from spreading. Discussions of the difficulties that long-term unemployed people faced were seen as negative, which in turn was anti-thetical to the course’s goals of creating ‘work-ready’ people. Thus, the maintenance of a ‘positive attitude’ was key.
This focus on mindset was reflective of a more general preoccupation among employability tutors with the subjective qualities of unemployed people. As suggested earlier, as a supply-side antidote to unemployment, the logic of employability is founded on the assumption that there is no shortage of work and, therefore, that unemployment is a subjective problem. This assumption is reflected in the words of a work coach who told the author: There are opportunities out there if you look.
The assumption that there are sufficient jobs engenders a focus on the mindset of the unemployed person, their personal barriers to employment and finding ways to resolve them. The task of getting people into work, then, revolved less around re-skilling – as one might assume – as the creation of an employable mindset, which meant the adoption of a series of personal traits and attributes. The required mentality was outlined on a poster which hung on the wall of the Central Work Club:
Do you show these key personal attributes?
Motivated
Optimistic
Responsive
Empathetic
Flexible
Resilient
Aspirational
Proactive
Confident
The poster served as a reminder of personal traits that were seen as generally attractive to current employers and that the jobseeker should display in a job application.
A key method of prompting new ‘employable’ attitudes among the programme’s participants was the co-construction of a CV. Often a participant would enter the work club with generic or predictable information on their vitae, perhaps a simple description of qualifications and the declaration that the author of the document was punctual or hardworking. Such a CV would immediately be identified by employability tutors and rewritten on the grounds that it did not involve the attributes currently seen as employable. The model used to rewrite the document was also revealing. The Central Work Club emphasised the ‘personal profile’ (the introductory section at the beginning of the CV) and gave the following advice in one of their pamphlets: Writing a personal profile is the hardest bit of doing a CV, but this is your chance to shine and make yourself stand out from everyone else who is sending in CVs. Don’t be shy, you are a unique person with unique skills, abilities and achievements and you can make this stand out in your personal profile. Avoid using words like hardworking, reliable, punctual . . . everyone says this. Instead give them concrete details about you and what you bring to an employer and you’ll have a much better chance of getting through to that interview.
Again, to be seen as employable, a person was asked to go beyond the presentation of generic information and to involve more of their personality. As noted, terms such as ‘hardworking’ or ‘punctual’ were seen as being too generic and would fail to stand out in an employer’s eyes. The co-construction of the CV involved an almost confessional process (Metcalfe, 1992) through which the employability tutor encouraged the jobseeker to look ‘within’, to engage with personal experiences and traits which would demonstrate their uniqueness to employers. The distinctiveness of the applicant had to be identified through discussions between themselves and their employability coach and then displayed on the CV’s personal statement. As a work club volunteer, the researcher learned that the process of co-constructing a CV often involved intimate conversations surrounding a person’s work history, passions, family situation and their past, all of which would be woven into the document as unique personal ‘selling points’. These experiences and capacities could then be reformulated in language that would be attractive to employers. A person’s attributes, seen to be unique, were often tailored to the demands of specific employers. Thus, many tutors advocated rewriting the CV by rehashing the person’s attributes and experiences in response to the demands of a specific employer. Again, the subjective traits of the applicant, and their expression in line with the perceived wants of employers, were emphasised.
The construction of CVs was important in more than just appearing attractive to employers; it was often used as a device to achieve the subjective reorientations needed for ‘work-readiness’. During an employability training day attended by the author, a self-styled ‘CV guru’ described the vitae as a ‘marketing device’ but one in which a person’s personality, desires and aspirations were the central features to be ‘sold’. According to the guru, to create an effective CV a person had to engage in an act of self-reflection, plumbing their own working desires to then display them on the document. The expression of personal desire for the job at hand was vital: Why are you here? Ask yourself the question; what do you want to do? Because if you don’t know what you want to do then you have no chance. Just sending out the same old CV and hoping that someone will employ you will not work!
Another employability coach echoed this focus on self-reflection when describing his approach to working with unemployed youth: It’s about them [unemployed people] taking responsibility for where they are and what they are . . . and then questioning themselves . . . ‘well who am I and what am I?’
These quotes corroborate the idea that, for many in the employability sector, the business of becoming employable was a question of the reorientation of a person’s attitudes, traits and identity.
It is notable that few of these statements or artefacts mention skills or other practicalities one might associate with work. Instead, they indicate that boosting employability is a matter of developing a series of abstract subjective orientations that make a person employable. One of these, as reflected in the process of developing the CV, is an attitude of introspective self-exploration with the aim of developing a more authentic career identity, focally by thinking about ‘what you really want to do’. Though it was never expressed explicitly, the assumption inherent in statements of the CV guru and other employability professionals was that once a person has identified with ‘what they really want to do’ and learned to express this in a way unique to them through the CV, they will duly find work. Those who fail to do this, continuing to look for jobs they do not genuinely desire, are less likely to do so. The logic of personal introspection to develop career identity is evident in the following statement made by an employability professional: What do you want to do? What if money were no object? If you find the right job for you then you’ll never work another day in your life!
Again, the assumption is that finding work is a question of being in touch with desires emanating from the self and that once these are located, navigating the job market becomes straightforward.
Employability, then, becomes a matter of mining the self to find desires and qualities lurking ‘within’ which are attractive to employers. A person must discover these qualities and learn to express them alongside the other employable traits mentioned above, thus developing career identity and learning to communicate it in an employable way. Upon finding these personal ‘USPs’, the desire for work in a certain area must then be expressed in line with the requirements of whichever employer one applies to. Employability becomes a guided ‘project of self’ (Grey, 1994) wherein the individual is asked to augment their personality and experience, emphasising uniqueness and a passion for work. Employment too, understood through the lens of employability, comes to hinge on the subjective orientation of the person who is prompted to learn to be more ‘authentically’ themselves to become saleable on the job market; being more of ‘yourself’ to sell yourself.
On not becoming the employable self
Recognised as a particularly effective employability course, that of the Central Work Club boasted a 60% success rate, a number that suggests its approach was positive in assisting participants to find work. It became clear over months of participant observation, however, that many of the ‘success stories’ of the course had found work directly through personal contacts of the work club leader. Others claimed as success stories of the scheme found temporary work, which some subsequently lost, only to end up back at the work club. Though many were certainly helped by the club’s approach to employability, many participants felt that the course had not helped them find stable employment. Some began to question the claim that 60% of participants found work, and subsequently, the efficacy of the entire programme was brought into question. Even if the proclaimed success rate was accurate, the other 40% who failed to find work threw into doubt the optimistic claims of employability coaches. The following section challenges employability’s assumption that unemployment can be remedied solely through a person’s re-identification with work through a discussion of the experience unemployed work club members struggling to do just that.
Despite the upbeat proclamations of their coaches, work club members faced a series of barriers that limited them in achieving the re-identification with work and employment that was sought. The first and most obvious of these was their experience of the job market itself. Work club members complained that, despite following the advice given by their coaches, they struggled to find work, often applying for hundreds of jobs without receiving a single interview. One out-of-work electrician, Bill, said he applied for: . . . 200 jobs a month [. . .] and nothing, nothing at all was coming through. I was probably getting letters saying, ‘if you haven’t heard from us in such a time then your application has been turned down’ and that was the nearest I got.
Statements such as this were common among work club attendees who complained that their job search yielded nothing, even if they followed the guidance of their tutors. They experienced the job market as unreliable and impenetrable. Another participant, Simon, described his difficulty finding work as follows: Getting a job is like a lottery . . . you’ve got to be lucky.
In this tempestuous environment, many work club attendees began to question the wisdom of employability training. For some, work could not seemingly be found, whatever they did. Another work club member, Karen, expressed her irritation at the situation: I’ve tried it for a year [employability training and looking for work], but I can’t get anywhere, unless I volunteer, and do I get a job at the end of it? No. I mean I’ve another 15 years yet before I can retire, I’ve got to do something . . . I didn’t know it was so bloody hard [laughing] to get a job!
The experience of an endless, fruitless job search (Foster, 2017) framed many work club attendee’s reactions to their employability coaches and the models of identity required of them. Without the prospect of paid labour, constructing an employable identity felt pointless. Many members had been through numerous employability course before they arrived at the Central Work Club and were already questioning the utility of employability training. Work club members often asked, rhetorically: How many employability courses can they put you on?
Within the context of a job market akin to a ‘lottery’, work club attendees began to react to exhortations to reconstruct themselves as employable with resentment. Many complained that they felt patronised by the training. After having been asked to prepare and deliver a presentation to build up his communication skills, a course member asked me privately: What do I want to do all that for? What’s the point in that? I’ve done it all before, it’s just going round in circles.
Another, in a similar position described employability training as: Teaching grandma to suck eggs.
While yet another suggested she found engagement with course humiliating, describing it as ‘debasing yourself’ for the prospect of work.
Feeling patronised was directly linked to the perceived inapplicability of employability training for finding work. A positive attitude and a sense of working identity seemed to yield little positive outcome for such participants, and in these cases, unemployed people would rotate through different employability courses seemingly without the prospect of finding work. Another work club member, Pam, expressed her irritation at the situation thus: They have made me do irrelevant courses [. . .] and I truly believe having a job would be a lot more relaxing, instead of racing round to job centres, work programmes, open days, courses. I was told volunteering will go in your favour, so I did that and did the business and admin course – it made no difference whatsoever. I feel like what I’m doing has made no difference so far but you never know, it might make an impression on one employer, so I just keep trying and doing new things.
Again, without being able to find work the injunction to adopt positive new working identifications was often seen as irrelevant and patronising. Another member suggested that, when looking for work: I do all the stuff they tell me, and then I get on with actually looking for a job [. . .] but I’m under no illusions.
Several members complained that they felt, as one person described it, ‘talked down to’. Others complained that their CV had been ‘tweaked to death’, drawing attention to the fact that every employability course offered CV alterations, none having helped them access work.
This sense of being asked to engage in seemingly fruitless activity at times manifested in conflict between work club member and tutors as it did during one incident at the Central Work Club. Tensions had been building as a new group of long-term unemployed people had entered the club and begun the employability course offered. A couple of weeks into the course however a serious conflict between a female employability tutor and the group had occurred in which the police were eventually called. During an employability session members of the group complained to the tutor that ‘you’re treating us like kids!’ She had responded by saying ‘if you’re going to act like children then I’ll speak to you like children’, which incurred the anger of the group. Eventually, the conflict escalated to a point where the tutor left the building after being threatened by a member of the group, and the session was cancelled.
Other work club tutors blamed the incident on the patronising tone of a single employability tutor. The conflict, however, stemmed not only from the actions of one tutor, but a general sense among work club members that they were being mistreated and demeaned. While employability tutors continued to promote ‘new working identities’ as described above, their long-term unemployed interlocutors felt increasingly patronised and resentful. After the incident, one participant expressed his feelings on the matter thus: They seem to think we like being on the dole [claiming unemployed benefits], that it’s easier for us . . . it’s hell, it’s absolute hell!
The roots of feeling degraded by employability teaching also went deeper than perceptions of its inherent dysfunctionality. Grace, a former community carer and now in her 50s, described her experience of both unemployment and employability as follows.
I can’t get a job (laughs). I’ve got no idea. I mean it’s like when I told you about that cinema job I went for, a couple of weeks ago [. . .] ‘no experience, other people have got more experience than you’ [quoting the employer]. Of what love? Of giving out tickets, of taking money off people? I’ve got a lifetime of experience of dealing with people! It’s my age, it’s got to be down to how old I am. Cos the young’ns. . . I’ve been in the cinemas over there.
Many older participants felt similarly that their age prevented them from becoming employable. One participant, who formerly worked in marketing, had struggled to re-enter her field following a hiatus. She felt that, as an older person she lacked the ‘aggression’ needed to compete with younger candidates in her field. Another member, Tony, also in his 50s, was experienced and qualified in his field of property management but ‘struggled with interviews’, feeling that his younger interviewers were focusing more on his personality than his qualifications.
They ask you stupid questions like ‘if your colleagues are away from work do you miss them?’
What did you say?
No.
[Laughs]
You’re supposed to say yes.
Older work club members would often attempt to find work in a field they had experience in but were being recurrently rejected by employers. Tony, due to his qualifications, had been offered many interviews but failed them all. His employability tutors attributed this to his ‘directness’ in communication. Tony seemed not to understand the performative element of the interview, which made him undesirable in an employer’s eyes. Though he was highly qualified, he could not construct or perform an identity deemed to be employable and, therefore, remained unemployed.
It was also notable that – in work clubs that participated in the research – white working-class men were over-represented. Even in areas of Manchester that were racially diverse, work club tutors felt that this was the case, some highlighting that ‘older, white, low-skill, men’ as a group that struggled uniquely to navigate employability and the job market, thus ending up in work clubs. Former factory workers who were made unemployed through the erosion of the city’s industrial base (Peck and Ward, 2002) often struggled exponentially to adapt to the changes required by contemporary employment and employability. Sarah, a coach at the Central Work Club, commented: Those are the guys I struggle with the most, because the jobs are just not there. And they’re the jobs [. . .] which have the lowest turnover of staff. Pot washers in kitchen, people who work in environmental teams, you’ve literally got to wait for someone to retire to get a job because people don’t leave. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed but so many of the guys that come on this, they are isolated.
Findings suggest that the over-representation of this group could also be attributed to age, work history and the way these factors interacted with emergent requirements of work and employability for certain groups. Older working-class participants tended to have developed some sense of working identity, which informed their responses to the identity shifts asked of them. A white, male manual worker, Stephen, in his late 40s explained the working environment that he grew up in: When I left school you could start a job on Monday and if you didn’t like it you could quit on Friday and have another by Monday.
Many older working-class attendees struggled to identify with the ‘new’ culture of employability, because they still identified with previous working experiences and norms, which were often held to be more meaningful and evocative. Though men were highly prevalent in this grouping, the pattern of longing for older forms of work and struggling to adapt to current standards of employability extended to others who had experienced work they felt to be more meaningful.
Again, Grace described her emotions when she lost her job as community carer and explained her disgust at what had happened to the sector since: I loved it [her old job]. . .I broke my heart when I had to finish. I loved it, because you were on different shifts different rotas, and you never knew what was going to happen when you walked through that door, or what you were going to come into. And we were trained to sort it out, and we did. . . we got a wage, we got a weekly wage! I could take all the time I wanted to. And if I needed help I had a mobile phone and I could ring them up and say ‘look, can you just go to Mr. Jones and start on him’, ‘no problem’, because that’s what we were like, we worked with each other. Social services are supposed to be there for you. And there isn’t, it’s all gone. There isn’t no home support workers working for social services, it’s all private.
When reflecting on her search for work, Grace suggested succinctly, ‘Oh it’s terrible’. She explained her experience of meaningful work – now lost – in criticism of her current experience of work and employability. She missed the camaraderie, skills, as well as the regular remuneration, associated with her old position – suggesting her struggle with employability lay not in her inability to form a work-ready identity, or in her work ethic, but more that her original working identity that had already been constructed within what she saw as more meaningful constellations of employment. Not only Grace’s age, but her pre-existing sense of working identity prevented her from reformulating herself according to the dictates of employability training and the current job market. The same could be said for Tony, whose ‘directness’ and ‘practical’ attitude towards his work was again forged within a model of work that had been lost – one standing in contrast to the emotive overtones of current employability discourse. Though he was highly qualified, Tony’s application history speaks to his inability to perform the model of self currently seen as employable. Grace and Tony fail to become employable not because they lack productive working identifications, ethos or skill, but because the features of their habitual working identities do not match the tenets of the new employable self. Not only age but also wonted working identities, served as barriers to performing employable ‘identity work’. Again, in the work clubs, these seemed particularly prevalent among white working-class men but had the potential to affect other demographic groups who shared similar experiences.
Discussion
The research findings speak to the limits of the concept of employability both as a mechanism for coping with unemployment and as policy response to it (see Crisp and Powell, 2017). Whereas engagement in employability training has been suggested to help the unemployed cope with the condition of unemployment through a focus on career identity and personal work goals, the research findings suggest that this may not be the case when the training is enforced through the dynamics of ‘benefit conditionality’ (Dwyer, 2004, 2008). In the case described here, employability training forms part of a more general institutional structure that is punitive and threatening in nature. Thus, engagement in employability becomes mandatory and, over time, repetitive and alienating (Foster, 2017). For unemployed people, failure to find work meant the enforced engagement in more employability courses, which led to resentment and anger among unemployed participants. The notion of employability as a ‘psycho-social construct’ (Fugate et al., 2004; McArdle et al., 2007) that alleviates the potentially unwanted psychological conditions associated with unemployment (Borgen and Amundsen, 1984) is therefore drawn into question. Mandatory but meaningless engagement in employability often represented a challenge to the well-being of work club members who participated in this study.
Employability as described above involves the construction of positive working identifications (Amundson, 1994). However, developing new identities often had limited use, notably for older work club members, and could in fact contribute to their sense of resentment and confusion vis-à-vis their situation, as they were compelled to do so whether or not they felt it useful or relevant. Many unemployed people described feeling patronised by their employability tutors, who continued to enforce the necessity of ‘new’ employable identifications whether or not they were felt to be useful. What resulted were often identity struggles (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) in which work club members wrestled with what they were being asked to become.
The limits of employability training are obvious when considered as a method of finding work. Tutors emphasised the importance of ‘mindset’ and ‘work identity’ holding fast to the assumption that opportunities were available and, therefore, that the responsibility for unemployment lay with the unemployed person themselves. This focus on mindset however sat uncomfortably with many participants who actively expressed a desire to work and often had relevant experience but remained unemployed, nonetheless. Again, the root of their worklessness lay also in a job market that they found to be hostile and unpredictable (‘like a lottery’) where there were no guarantees of a positive outcome. The mindset, identity and attitude promoted by tutors would only go so far in navigating that chaos and, after lengthy periods of engaging with tutors’ prompts to make personal changes to become employable, were engaged in cynically. In the cases mentioned here, the identity-based directives of employability coaches sometimes morphed into tick-box exercises and eventually came to represent a distraction from the practicalities of finding work.
The contradictions experienced by participants on the ground are linked to problems with current conceptualisations of employability and their use in labour–market policy (McQuaid and Lindsay, 2005). As a supply-side measure (Crisp and Powell, 2017), employability problematises only the person who is unemployed, while tacitly assuming a conducive job market for those who are able and willing to become employable. Within the confines of this study, however, the unemployed experience of looking for work highlights the error of such assumptions. As an individualising approach to unemployment (Crisp and Powell, 2017) – one that responsibilise unemployed people for their own fate regardless of circumstance – employability discourse has no pragmatic answer to chronic worklessness (Evans, 2012) other than more employability training in the belief that work will eventually be found. The fact that there are now 2.4 unemployed people per vacancy in the UK (ONS, 2025) demonstrates that the root causes of unemployment are just as much structural as they are personal however, a fact borne out in the experience of many of the unemployed participants of this study. A failure to recognise these structural elements of unemployment can result in a chronic cycle of unemployment and employability training for many, the experience of which has been explored here. Analyses of employability as a construct then needs to be placed within a broader context to become meaningful, and this study suggests that the utility of employability training as a policy response to unemployment is necessarily limited by the specificities of the job market and institutional framework in which it is deployed.
The research findings also have important ramifications for our understandings of identity regulation and its parameters (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Alvesson et al., 2024). Not all identities are fit-for-purpose it seems, and the study suggests that there are situational limits on what human beings can reasonably be asked to become. Employable identities promoted by the employability tutors mentioned above were often a poor fit for the realities of seeking work and navigating unemployed life generally. Whereas tutors promoted ‘positive’ and ‘energetic’ new working identities, beleaguered unemployed people attempted to navigate a chaotic and unpredictable job market while often mourning the loss of other more meaningful working experiences. In the context of the ‘lottery’ -esque job market, engaging in new forms of identity work (Brown, 2015, 2022) to develop, for example, better career identity, had at best limited utility. The study reveals a case where the parameters of a discourse (Foucault, 1972), which stipulates a socially preferable model of identity stand in contradiction to the lived experience of those subjected to it, with some of these experiential realities representing barriers to the adoption of the identity in question (Chen and Reay, 2020).
Whereas many recent studies on identity within power relations have focused on identity work as a response to officially sanctioned identities (Bardon et al., 2017; Boussebaa and Brown, 2017; Fernando et al., 2020; Zanoni et al., 2017), other lines of response were highlighted as more prevalent among participants of this research. It is important to note here that many foregoing studies of identity within relations of power take place within work organisations or contexts where there are obvious incentives or outcomes attached to the adoption of managerially imposed identities (see Bardon et al., 2017). It makes sense for workers already in paid positions, or between episodes of high-paying labour (Gotsi et al., 2010) to at least partially adopt the tenets of managerially preferred identities. For the chronically unemployed person there is no such incentive to craft a new employable identity. Instead, their immediate response to identity regulation was often not to narrativise a counter-identity (Costas and Fleming, 2009) or to partially adopt official discourse in the service of a future career (Zanoni et al., 2017), but the rejection of the identity entirely, because it was felt to be both patronising and unhelpful.
The adoption of new identities can also be hampered by previously constructed senses of self that are regarded as more meaningful than those currently on offer. Whereas employability tutors continued to encourage unemployed work club members to adopt new working identities, many participants already felt themselves to be ‘work-ready’, having developed work-based identities through experience and self-reflection – ones they had performed during previous spells of work. The study offered highlights the importance of personal barriers to identity adoption that are likely to be found in foregoing experiences ones often mediated by social categories of race, age, class and gender. Here, an over-representation of white working-class men in the work clubs can be attributed to their historic experience of manual work, its loss and the sense of working self that these experiences facilitated (see Lamont, 2000). Gender, race or even class did not limit these barriers, as many who had formed working identities through historic working experiences felt them to be more meaningful, and reported similar reactions to pressures to adopt an employable identity.
The study reveals, then, the importance of the institutional and personal context in which identity work, and indeed prompts to carry it out, is done. Being asked to adopt specific identity traits within relations of power (Foucault, 1979) engenders responses that may go beyond further preoccupations with self-identity (Giddens, 1991), particularly in cases where the potential rewards of adopting or performing (Goffman, 1959) such identities are not forthcoming. Whereas Sveningsson et al. (2021) remind us that identity work is not ubiquitous and can represent a distraction from the job at hand, we might add that prompts to align with identities whose tenets stand in direct contradiction with lived experience may result in a rejection of identity work in favour of more practical concerns or indeed a largely perfunctory engagement with the identity imposed. Either way, lacking the infrastructure for their realisation (see Yoon et al., 2019), officially preferred identities and even identity work itself may be rejected as unhelpful. While employment is more than simply a question of the identification of the applicant, the scope of identity regulation can be said to be limited by the institutional structures which encase it.
Particularly worrying in the case of the unemployed person required to self-constitute as employable is the potential for social stigmatisation (Goffman, 1963) that a failure to become what is expected can bring. In the case described, not becoming ‘employable’ seemed to carry with it an assumption of personal failure on the part of the unemployed person, which could further legitimise and perpetuate their poor treatment by employability coaches. Seeing unemployment not only as a personal choice but as a failure to create a positive working identity framed the employability tutors’ assumptions that anyone who had not found work had simply not carried out the requisite levels of identity work. This, again, could lead to identity-based tensions between groups (Lok and Willmott, 2014) as tutors looked to reframe the experience of long-term unemployed people in a manner which contradicted their own, more situated understanding. Employability discourse in practice holds the potential of conceptually reducing work access to a game of personal identity while legitimising the immiseration of those who fail to understand its rules.
Whereas more research is needed to fully substantiate this point, the research suggests that a failure to conduct identity work in a manner which is deemed socially desirable carries with it the risk of stigmatisation (Goffman, 1963) which, in turn, can limit access to resources such as paid labour for the stigmatised party and legitimise pre-existing patterns of marginalisation. If this were found to be true more generally it would have important ramifications for the social outcomes of identity regulation (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002; Alvesson et al., 2024) as forms of social stratification are excused through recourse to perceived identity deficiencies of the marginalised party. Again, these dynamics are likely to be experienced differently across racial, gendered, generational and class contours, which themselves would provide fruitful lines of scholarly enquiry.
To avoid legitimising such processes, it is vital that scholarship on identity regulation and identity work continues to highlight that pre-existing structural contributors to selfhood, both internal and external to the individual, often act as limitations upon what human beings can reasonably be expected to become.
Conclusion
This paper has offered an interrogation of both employability as a construct and the parameters of identity regulation. In terms of employability as labour–market policy, it has argued that the concept is necessarily limited by the labour market itself. Because unemployed participants experienced it as turbulent and chaotic – whether or not they adopted the tenets of employability – they tended to engage in employability training with ever-increasing levels of cynicism and resentment. While employability as a construct has no other recourse in such circumstances other than to intensify its focus on the individual who is unemployed, the research carried out here should serve as a reminder that the question of responsibility for employment concerns more than just the individual dispositions of the jobseeker. The types and quantity and quality of jobs available to the individual in question should also be seen as key factors in questions of employment. Frustrations experienced by unemployed seekers of work stem not only from themselves but also from the limitations of employability training to help them navigate their circumstances given the opportunities available to them.
In terms of identity, the paper has analysed employability as a form of enforced extra-organisational identity work or identity regulation (Alvesson and Wilmott, 2002). Though responses to identity-based management have often been measured in terms of the construction of ‘agile’ selves – which partially adopt official identity narratives or discourses (Coupland and Spedale, 2020: Foucault, 1972) – the cases discussed here build upon insights from Sveningsson et al. (2021) by pointing to the non-ubiquitous and contingent nature of identity work and, therefore, its limitations as a theoretical basis for understanding responses to identity regulation. The ethnographic approach of the paper, while limited in its scope for broader generalisation, allowed the author to go beyond a solely narrative analysis thus locating the construction or non-constructions of identity within situated experience. This permitted insights into situations in which identity work might be rejected, or for other reasons not adopted in the manner specified within relations of power. While arguing that institutional and personal context is vital in the success of identity-based management schemes, the case also shows the potential for stigmatisation – which can be experienced as dis-embedded identity discourses are imposed upon people to whom they may not be relevant and therefore struggle to live up to. The employable self may indeed be wholly or partially internalised for the sake of gaining or coping with a career. In a situation where there are no such obvious benefits, or where strong and more meaningful working identifications exist, the notion of self as a ‘work-oriented-project’ (Grey, 1994) may be rejected entirely.
Finally, for ‘critical’ scholars of identity work more generally (see Villesèche et al., 2018), it becomes important to recognise that there are limits to the adoption of identities deamed socially preferable, and that these limitations may imply social sanctions for those who experience them. These barriers emanate from the various personal and institutional contexts upon which they are imposed. Just as individuals are less likely to continuously self-constitute as employable in situations where finding work itself is deemed to be impossible, or where other forms of identification are felt to be more meaningful, some socially preferred identities are simply too incongruous to be worthy of even partial adoption.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge Damian O’Doherty, John Hassard and Karen Sykes for their input in the development of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through a 1+3 studentship.
AI usage declaration
The authors acknowledge that they have followed Human Relations’ AI policy. No AI was used for preparing the manuscript.
