PROMISES OF POTENTIALITY, PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFECTABILITY MADE IN THE SPHERE OF EMPLOYABILITY BY BOTH PARTIES (EMPLOYING ORGANISATIONS AND CANDIDATES)

1. Introduction We live in a world where people spend an important amount of their time at work. But before getting a job everyone plays the role of the candidate for a certain position. One important source of recruitment that employers have, is the graduate market. Over 400,000 students now graduate from universities in the United Kingdom each year, of whom nearly 300,000 are being awarded their first degree (Taylor, 2008, p.244). The principal methods used by employers are advertising the company around universities, attending career fairs, developing graduate programs, organising events on campus and keeping a strong connection with universities by offering to their students internships and placements. According to RI5, well over 1 billion is now spent each year on recruitment advertising in the United Kingdom, including 215million on online ads. (Taylor, op. cit., p.220). This advertisements demand interpretation because they send a hidden message. All these job advertisements that people encounter daily combine three elements: endless potentiality, search of selfperfection and presentation of work as performance. The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers portrays perfectly how advertisements become a management tool in the 21st century, used by companies to send a message to individuals described by Thrift (2000) as fast subjects. This writing will present three described and analysed illustrations chose from the top published by The Times. The examples represent the promises of potentiality, performativity and perfectibility made in the area of employability by both employers and candidates. 2. Example 1: Accenture One of the companies present in the top employers is Accenture. The main text, in their advertisement, written with big capital letters is BE > YOU IMAGINED (The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, p. 59). The sign greater than has a powerful meaning because it represents the idea of endless potential each person has. According to Thrift (op. cit.) modern capitalist system puts a great pressure on managers to work hard, to be innovative, agile and to keep up with fast business development. Therefore is implies the idea that they have great potential and are capable to meet all those characteristics and even more. This type of individual is called fast managerial subjects and is capable to take the strain of permanent high performance (p.674). Everyone imagines himself or herself as becoming an important person someday but Accenture pushes their candidates and the boundaries of their imagination further, making them aspire to a greater self. If the candidate already imagines his future self better, Accenture implies the idea that the way it is imagining himself it is not enough because it can achieve even more, it can become even greater than better. It makes the fast subject aim for perfection. The text in the left corner of the page represents an invitation to join the organisation that offers greater opportunity, greater challenge and grater satisfaction. The work place is not just a place where employers perform duties and gain money to make a living. It is a place of endless possibilities and a way of individual development, fulfilment and creation of the self (Grey, 1994). The image used also appeals to the fast subject. The advertisement present a person with the back turned to the viewers, having in front of her eyes a modern city.

Firstly not giving an identity to the person from the image gives the individuals the possibility to identify itself with the picture and to imagine itself in that place. Not only the city represents modernity by picturing skyscrapers but also represent the idea of continuously movement. The fast subject is in continuous movement, always looking for ways to develop itself and to become better and better. The fast subject lives in a city that can be compared in this case with big ones like New York known as the city that never sleeps. So the world in witch the fast subject lives is characterised by modernity, performance, movement and as a consequence it is pushing individuals to be energetic, to adapt to situations, to create themselves daily becoming faster and better. The space where the fast subject lives and works is important because it produces identity effects and it is an element of governmentality (Thrift, op.cit., p. 677). That means the space affects the way the individual acts and pushes him to perform in a certain manner. 3. Example 2: Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce graduate job advertisement (The Times Top Graduate Employers, p. 207) presents a young man drawing. In the centre of his drawing there is a cloud and inside it the text 2017 Where I could be . From this central text there are a few arrows pointing to words like expert, leader, pioneer and overseas working. This entire image contains powerwords that represent the skills someone can achieve after becoming their employee. The company sends the message that everyone has potential and different skills. Being part of their organisation can help the individual to create itself, to bring out the potential it has within and to grow. This way the principle of potentiality is presented. The idea that work is more than an action to fulfil certain responsibilities is suggested in this case as well. Work becomes a personal matter and the worker is represented as an individual in search of meaning in work, and wanting to achieve fulfilment through work (du Gay, 1996, p. 60). Therefore the idea of work as performance is highlighted too. Using the word I in the main text instead of where could you be puts emphasis on the individual, on the opportunity that he has and makes the message subjective. The moment when someone reads the text is the instant when that person could immediately start thinking of ways to become their employee and turn into a leader or an expert, someday, thanks to the circumstances created within the organisation. The use of year 2017 makes the fast subject think long term and not only at the present moment because development is a continuous process that never ends because the fast subject is always searching ways to become greater than it is. Analysing further the image in the right corner there is another cloud drawn with a text saying we like the way you think. The company suggests that they are looking for people with innovative ideas and every suggestion will be taken into account because they like individuals that are open minded. Thrift (op.cit.) makes suggestions about the creativity of fast subjects and how using their ima gination and ingenuity in their actions, can create successful organisations. Moreover he implies that individuals are innovative when they are prepared for surprise, both in their openness and adaptability to unexpected events and in their ability to see productive anomalies (p. 681). The last detail of the image is in the top, left corner. It presents one of the employees, Adam Newman, that states: I was given real responsibility. I wasnt making the tea I was making a genuine contribution from the word go. This statement sends the message that every individual within that organisation is making an impact and has responsibilities that lead to the development of the organisation.

The company gives the employee a sense of belonging, of importance and no matter its role within the company their contribution is vital, not only for the success of the company for witch they work, but also to the enterprise of their own life (du Gay, op.cit, p. 60). In the text underneath the image Rolls-Royce makes an important affirmation: So if you have big ideas of your own, this could be the prefect place to turn them into reality, with our first-class training and mentoring. Again the idea of individuals expressing their own ideas and being innovative is presented but this time along with the idea of training. Training is a mean used by companies to develop the skills of their individuals and to keep them up-to-date with the latest technology and other changes that take place in the business environment. Also training can be seen as a process of learning and of unlocking the potential of management body, and most particularly, the potential to innovate. (Thrift, op.cit., p. 680). 4. Example 4 Goldman Sachs The last example is based on Goldman Sachs advertisement (The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, p. 137). Four business people walking in a modern building represents the image used in the advertisement. The main text asks the question How will you make an impact?. The image is perfect represent ation of fast subjects. It is not a static image because the people are walking therefore it focuses on the idea that the fast subject is always moving and advancing. The question makes the individual think about ways it could make a difference and also see work as a method to put in practice those actions and to express itself. Using you here means that this text intends to function as a mirror for the reader and make the ethical responsibility internal to the self. (Costea et al., 2012, p. 30). The text underneath the image says: Contribute, collaborate and succeed with a career at Goldman Sachs. The three verbs present in the sentence are powerwords that express the idea of being a part of an organisation where the individual would be able to cooperate with others and through its work it would create a successful self and organisation, at the same time. Work is presented again as a way of self-realisation, therefore the principle of performativity is underlined. The word succeed is meant to target individuals desire to be successful in all areas of its life. Goldman Sachs has the recipe for success. Through working in their company an individual can build up not only a successful career and organization but also an outstanding self. In the text written with smaller letters the company makes an important statement as well. Through it the company is presenting itself in a positive light, therefore it is creating a positive organizational identity (Rafaeli, 2000). The text is meant to make the readers create a positive attitude towards the company and to choose it to be the company they want to fit in. This positive attitude is created through presenting what the company has to offer to their new employees (meaningful opportunities, best-in-class training and a wide variety of career paths) and also by describing companys success (access to important clients meaning that the company is working with influential names in the business word; chance to make an impact with global significance it is a company that works at international level, very developed). The sentence We believe that good ideas and innovation can come from anyone, at any level represents the idea of endless potentiality that everyone has no matter the persons background or degree.

5. Negative aspects of potentiality Exploiting the most out of an individual and pushing his boundaries sounds like an excellent way to develop him and transform him in a successful person but it also has negative aspects. The danger present in the potentiality principle is the fact that it expresses a sense of moral urgency to be heeded by individuals without allowing the limits of this exhortation to appear (Costea et al., p.32). This means that the self has two dimension: what it is and what it aims to become, but even after becoming the best it is not enough and it always needs to look for more. This insufficiency is a paradox and might make the individual question if he actually has that much potential or even worse, it might make him feel like it is loosing the sense of who he really is, loosing its identity. This process of developing continuous the self has no ending and that is why it can become and exhausting process where the individual is loosing him or her self on the way (Costea et al., op. cit.). 6. Conclusion Nowadays management change a lot since Henrys Ford time. Fordism was based on the division of work, control and specialised machines for different tasks. Today management moved from that form of authoritarian and controlled discipline to a more flexible type of management that creates successful organizations through training workers, making them work in teams, assigning projects and providing them technology. Managers are not the ones the control the workers anymore but they are more like mentors. Because work changed the circumstances of employment changed as well. Companies use today different means to attract candidates and media is one of them. This writing presented how the advertisements used by employers target the fast subjects and how they are a perfect representation of potentiality, performativity and perfectability. Companies choose very carefully the images and the word in their advertisements because they are meant to send a hidden message that individuals must elucidate. The work place is not only a way to gain money but became the way individual can express themselves and can fulfil their need of self-achievement and self-actualisation. The fast subjects must always look for ways to become better. This insufficiency is dangerous because fast subjects may well turn out to be fragile subjects, held together only at a cost (Thrift, op.cit., p. 675). This danger refers to the fact that the individual might not be sure about its endless potential anymore or about who he really is.

REFERENCE LIST

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