Governing through career coaching: negotiations of self-marketing

Abstract

Career coaching for job seekers has become increasingly prevalent when guiding the management of the self in practices such as writing Curriculum Vitae (CV). This article explores career coaching by a Swedish white-collar union targeted at students. Through a framework of ‘governmentality in action’ (Brownlie, 2004), the article focuses on the interaction between career coaches and students and how this discursive practice is negotiated in talk. The concept of discursive positioning is used to analyse talk in interaction and the way people are positioned in discourse by their own and others’ utterances (Davies and Harré, 1990). The findings point to obstacles and ambiguities in the construction of a ‘sellable’ self. They also show that subjects actively participate in their own self-construction. Further, the category of a marketing self indicates obstacles emanating from gender and national identity in this context.