Legitimizing Beauty in Hiring: An Analysis of Cultural Repertoires in Defense of Appearances as Selection Criteria

Abstract

This article builds upon the body of literature confirming that aesthetics matter for finding work by investigating how gatekeepers reflect on the relevance of appearances in their evaluations of job candidates. Starting from the notion that in hiring the relevance of appearance conflicts with ideals of meritocracy and fairness, we seek to understand how gatekeepers solve this dispute and how they morally legitimize the importance of aesthetics. The analyses are based on in-depth interviews with 40 employee gatekeepers from the cultural (n = 17) and corporate (n = 23) sector, and show that although the gatekeepers problematize the importance of beauty, they do acknowledge that it plays a role in their evaluations. Three cultural repertoires for solving this contradiction and for legitimizing appearances as a hiring criterion are discerned from the data: (1) beauty as a business case; (2) appearances express personality; (3) looking right is a matter of effort. What the gatekeepers try to do is to come to a hiring decision using evaluation criteria that can be considered contextually legitimate. Yet, this can lead to applying evaluation criteria and, more structurally, labor market outcomes that they find morally problematic. This study highlights the relevance of cultural repertoires in processes of legitimation for understanding reproductions of inequalities related to appearances.