Making markets material: enactments, resistances, and erasures of materiality in the graduate labour market

Olga Loza*, Philip J. Roscoe

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Scholarship on the graduate labour market, preoccupied by structure, agency, and power, has largely focused on the market’s discursive composition. It has not yet paid significant attention to the concrete, material apparatus of the market and how this shapes market outcomes. In contrast, we approach the construction of the graduate labour market from a new materialist perspective and with reference to the growing literature of ‘market studies’. We consider the empirical case of a graduate recruitment hackathon to show how the hackathon’s material features were implicated in enacting a specific occurrence of the graduate labour market. The agendas of the hackathon’s designers and their visions of the graduate labour market were enacted in the hackathon’s material arrangements, but this enactment was not always reliable: in some instances materiality resisted and erased corporate agendas. Our article contributes to the sociology of work by highlighting the dynamic relationship between materiality and power (re)production in the graduate labour market.
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages21
    JournalWork, Employment and Society
    VolumeOnline First
    Early online date7 Mar 2023
    DOIs
    Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 7 Mar 2023

    Keywords

    • Graduate labour market
    • Hackathon
    • New materialism
    • Recruitment
    • Market studies

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