Marketing the Self vs. Preserving the Self: Resisting Downward Mobility in the New Economy

How do dislocated workers try to avoid downward mobility as they navigate insecure, nonstandard, and precarious work in the contemporary American economy? Should they embrace flexibility, or follow their passions? Drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews with 56 displaced job seekers, we extend the job searching literature to distinguish two kinds of job searching: self-marketing and self-preservation. Self-marketers are willing to reinvent themselves to pursue opportunities wherever they perceive the best payoffs. By contrast, self-preservers, drawing on affective commitments to particular kinds of work, limit their searches to their current occupation. In this paper, we show how the neoliberal economy buffets and preys on both types of job seekers and how bounded rationality and asymmetric information problems leave self-marketers vulnerable to downward mobility via cons, scams, and predatory business models. But self-preservation searches contain their own pathways to downward mobility: descents into low-wage work that begin as temporary measures often become permanent. Thus, even though self-marketers and self-preservers embrace very different job search strategies, neither flexibility nor passion offers protection against downward mobility in the post-Great Recession economy. We conclude with some reflections on how these two job search orientations may help us better understand current labor market upheavals.