Suchergebnisse

The tragedy of critique -- The sound and the fury : the insights and limits of the critique of critique -- The experience of critique : inside permanent liminality -- Critique is history? : understanding a tradition of tradition-breaking -- Unthinking critical thinking : the reduction of philosophy to negative logic -- The cacophony of critique : populist radicals and hegemonic dissent -- Asocial media : an auto-ethnography of on-line critiques -- Towards acritical theory -- Bibliography -- Index

Talk : nothing to be done / Tom Boland -- Dialogue : focus groups with young and mature unemployed / Jennifer Yeager and Jonathan Culleton -- City : redundant workers, forgotten citizens? The case of Waterford Crystal / Josh Lalor -- Place : graceful living : the experience of unemployment and the built environment / John O'Brien -- Rural : beyond deprivation theory : examining rural experience / Gordon B. Cooke ... [et al.] -- Forms : up one : observations on decoding a form of unemployment / Ray Griffin -- Space : autoethnographies of Irish social welfare offices / Tom Boland and Ray Griffin -- Job-seeking : making a self for the labour market / Tom Boland -- Activisation : experiencing activisation : Ireland's new pathway? / Tom Boland -- Media : nothing to be said : the underlying structure of 'news' about unemployment / Tom Boland, Rose Shearer and Aisling Tuite -- Statistics : on the statistical composition of unemployment / John O'Brien and Ray Griffin -- Afterword : unemployment : a problem of government / Tom Boland and Ray Griffin

Career Guidance shapes the labour market by providing advice to school leavers, jobseekers and career changers. While there are a vast variety of approaches within Career Guidance, arguably there are central ideas within the discourse about the labour market reflecting cultural understandings of transition and transformation. To illustrate how Career Guidance understands the labour market, this article traces a genealogy from 19th century cultural ideas about careers from Smiles and Parsons to psychologised accounts from Maslow and Rogers. These imagine career transitions as personal transformations and recommend intensive interviewing to overcome internal barriers and unleash potential. Drawing from 15 interviews with Guidance Counsellors, the contemporary presence of this understanding of the labour market is traced. This emphasis on transformation variously reflects neo-liberal enterprise culture, religious ideas of vocation and modern experiments of the self, all of which emphasise internal potential over structural forces.

Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on 'dystopian games', particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the 'scene of a trial' in Boltanski's phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault's work on 'truth-telling' and 'transformations', what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.

While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault's work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in 'economic theology'. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as 'pastor' but with the market as the ultimate 'test' of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through 'telling the truth' about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised.

Recent decades have seen the category of unemployment transformed into job-seeking. Attention has generally focused on the disciplining effects of interventions, procedures and techniques within social welfare offices, or on scrutinizing policy documents as political expressions of neo-liberalism. This article examines advice for unemployed people who are 'seeking a role', from the official leaflets of social welfare offices or Jobcentres, and state sponsored and associated careers websites and advice books. Such documents constitute an extension of the disciplinary apparatuses of government and particularly inculcate 'self-discipline' for actors in the labour market. Strikingly, these documents not only involve disciplining jobseekers to seek work, but to present themselves as an ideal candidate for any job, to become a protean thespian who can act convincingly. Jobseekers are required to manage, conceal and overcome the unpleasant economic and social consequences of unemployment and turn these negatives into a positive performance within a theatricalized labour market.

Rather than the preserve of the theorist, critique is a pervasive modern phenomenon requiring interpretation and analysis. In particular, this article pursues the relationship between liminal transitions and critical discourse, arguing that the former provokes the latter, and that critique makes transition almost interminable. Following Keohane and Kuhling (2004, 2007), the Celtic Tiger is thematised as 'liminality', a suspension of order, which incites and diffuses critical reflection on the 'taken for granted'. This wider social process is tracked by an analysis of a corpus of media texts published between 1997 and 2007, from widely divergent social and political positions. 'Critical discourse' then emerges as a series of interrelated tropes; disfigurement, cynicism, influence and unmasking.