What does it mean to market yourself as a business in today's job search world?Finding a job used to be simple. Now . . . well, it’s complicated. In today’s economy, you can’t just be an employee looking to get hired—you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals. That’s a radical transformation in how we think about work and employment, says Ilana Gershon. And with Down and Out in the New Economy, she digs deep into that change and what it means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. In telling this story, Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; talks with managers at companies around the United States to suss out regional differences—like how Silicon Valley firms look askance at the lengthier employment tenures of applicants from the Midwest. And she finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know. Rich in the voices of people deeply involved with all parts of the employment process, Down and Out in the New Economy offers a snapshot of the quest for work today—and a pointed analysis of its larger meaning.
Ilana Gershon is associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University. She is the author of several books, including Down and Out in the New Economy and The Pandemic Workplace, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Preface: A Book about Advice, Not an Advice BookIntroduction: The Company You Keep1 You Are Just like Coca-Cola: Selling Your Self through Personal Branding2 Being Generic—and Not—in the Right Way3 Getting Off the Screen and Into Networks4 Didn’t We Meet on LinkedIn?5 Changing the Technological Infrastructure of Hiring6 The Decision Makers: What It Means to Be a Hiring Manager, Recruiter, or HR Person7 When Moving On Is the New NormalConclusion: We Wanted a Labor Force but Human Beings Came InsteadAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
“Sympathetic and wide-ranging. . . . The world she finds is terrifying and topsy-turvy. . . . When an old boys’ network becomes a young boys’ network, as Gershon so nicely puts it, there will be new kinds of exclusion at work.”
