Making the neoliberal precariat: Two faces of job searching in Minneapolis

Abstract

This comparative ethnographic study charts the similarities and differences in crafting the job search enterprise following the Great Recession at two nonprofit programs in Minneapolis: Career Net, a support group for middle-class job seekers, and Good Deeds, a welfare-to-work service. Both programs attempted to create flexible, productive, and disciplined job seekers, but this unique comparison reveals how these organizations differently reproduced neoliberal subjectivities: Career Net helped participants actively re-craft their personal and professional selves through personal branding and social networking, training participants to become self-entrepreneurs. Good Deeds, on the other hand, took a more top-down approach to controlling client behavior, relying on program requirements and sanctions to keep clients in line and shuffle them into low-wage work. Cohering along lines of race and class, Career Net and Good Deeds underscored the demands of employability and further tipped the power scales in the interest of capital.

Keywords

Great Recession job searching neoliberalism unemployment welfare

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