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- Title
Selling Your Self in the United States.
- Authors
Gershon, Ilana
- Abstract
In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person encounters adopting a form of corporate personhood? How does one foster relationships or networks that will lead to a job, not just a circulation of one's brand identity? Based on research in Indiana and northern California, this article explores the conundrums of marketing oneself as a desirable employee on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and so on. I address the reasons why the increased use of social media contributes to popularizing a notion of self-branding. I also discuss the quandaries people face when using social media to create this self-brand. In sum, this article investigates the obstacles people face when they try to embody a form of corporate personhood across media, a form of self putatively based on the individual, but one that has been transformed into a corporate form that people can not easily inhabit.
- Subjects
WORK environment; CORPORATE personhood; ETHNOGRAPHIC analysis; ETHNOLOGY; AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
- Publication
PoLAR: Political & Legal Anthropology Review, 2014, Vol 37, Issue 2, p281
- ISSN
1081-6976
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/plar.12075