Scripts for the stage of job interviews

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore the institutionalization of work in the twenty-first century and its impacts on the object of Organizational Psychology analyzing the content of Brazilian publications on the Internet that purport to give advice to those who will undergo a job interview. It was established four separate categories of advices, according to the expressed content: affective, emotional, aesthetic and ethical. It was identified three affections as the most widely cited: the loyalty, the interest and the respect. With regard to emotions, the advice is that negative emotions should be hidden (insecurity and anger) and positive emotions expressed (mainly the enthusiasm). The aesthetic scripts deal with the dressing, speech and body stigmas. They are elitist and postulate, reifying, workers as commodities contained in packages. Ethical scripts, in turn, are confusing and prescribe the ethics of rational cynicism. In general, the analysis of the scripts for job interviews shows that the kind of relationship prescribed for workers on the job market is adaptive to the affects, emotions, aesthetics and ethics demanded: naive pressures from the ideology of adaptation are the material they are made from, attempts to pre-form non-reflective subjectivity, power exercised by the instituted society.