Selling the self: career portfolios and the new common-sense of immaterial capitalism

Abstract

This article presents a discourse analysis of a popular guide to composing career portfolios. Comprised of documents from work, school, and personal life, career portfolios chart workers’ personal trajectories from past to present to future. Job applicants use these texts to sell themselves to potential employers. In explaining how to compose portfolios, it is argued, the guide examined in this article (re)produces and circulates common-sense ideas about work in our current era. Central to these common-sense notions are: personal investment in work; deterritorialization of socio-cultural resources (e.g. ways of thinking, speaking, and interacting developed in non-work domains); and reterritorialization of these same resources in the domain of work. To explore these common-sense ideas, I engage Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's arguments about immaterial capitalism and the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of labor.