Hegemonic struggles or transfer of knowledge?
East and West Germans in job interviews
Job interviews are an important means for the selection of employees in Western industrialised countries. Thus, they may be decisive with regard to the future of the person seeking work, making the difference between successful social participation or marginalisation. After the German reunification, East Germans had to prove themselves in a communicative genre marked by West German standards hitherto unknown to them.The article analyses verbal sequences taken from job interviews between West German interviewers and East German job applicants in which genre specific knowledge is negotiated. It is shown that East German concepts of this genre are treated as knowledge deficits by the West German interviewers.There is a positive outcome in this, since this allows for a transfer of socially relevant knowledge. And from an analytical point of view, these sequences provide us with data showing how institutional agents pass procedural knowledge on to their clients. Nevertheless, these sequences often take an asymmetrical course which is linked with a high risk for the individual’s positive self presentation in the job interview. The fact that West German agents set their genre knowledge as being universally valid is based on their hegemonic claim.
Keywords: East/West German, job interviews, knowledge, hegemony
Published online: 24 August 2004
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.3.2.08bir
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.3.2.08bir
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Hudson, Nancie
2016. Communication and power in the job interview: Using a ventriloqual approach to analyze moral accounts.
Text & Talk 36:3 
Kuśmierczyk, Ewa
2014.
In Trust and Discourse [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 56],
► pp. 11 ff.
König, Katharina & Qiang Zhu
2017. Communicative constructions of space in epistemic asymmetry: The case of German-Chinese university placement interviews.
Intercultural Pragmatics 14:2
Manroop, Laxmikant, Janet A. Boekhorst & Jennifer A. Harrison
2013. The influence of cross-cultural differences on job interview selection decisions.
The International Journal of Human Resource Management 24:18 ► pp. 3512 ff.
Sanderson, Jimmy
2008. The Blog is Serving Its Purpose: Self-Presentation Strategies on 38pitches.com..
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13:4 ► pp. 912 ff.
Weston, Daniel
2021. Gatekeeping and linguistic capital: A case study of the Cambridge university undergraduate admissions interview.
Journal of Pragmatics 176 ► pp. 137 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
References
References
Adelswärd, Viveka
1988 Styles of Success. On Impression Management as Collaborative Action in Job Interviews. Linköping Studies in Arts and Science, Linköping University. Schweden: VTT-Grafiska Vimmerby.
Auer, Peter
1995 Hegemonialer Geltungsanspruch und konversationelle Realität: Anmerkungen zu einer vernachlässigten Perspektive auf die Ost/West-Daten der Forschungsgruppe “Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder”. In: Marek Czyzewski et al.. (eds). Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder im Gespräch, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 379–383.
1998 Learning How to Play the Game: An Investigation of Role-Played Interviews in East Germany. Text 18, 1, 7–38.
2000 Changing communicative practices among East Germans. In: J. Theobald and Patrick Stevenson (eds). Relocating Germanness. Discursive Disunity in Unified Germany. London: Macmillan, 167–188.
Auer, Peter and Kern, Friederike
2001 Three ways of analysing communication between East and West Germans as intercultural communication. In: Aldo Luziodi, Susanne Günthner and Franca Orletti (eds). Culture in Communication. Analyses of Intercultural Situations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Bergmann, Jörg and Luckmann, Thomas
1995 Reconstructive genres of everyday Communication. In: Uta Quasthoff (ed.). Aspects of Oral Communication. De Gruyter: Berlin/New York, 289–304.
Birkner, Karin
1998 “Normalerweise sagt man da…” Gattungsnormen im Bewerbungsgespräch. In: Birgit Apfelbaum and Hermann Müller (eds). Fremde im Gespräch. Frankfurt a.M.: IKO, 241–262.
2001 Ost- und Westdeutsche im Bewerbungsgespräch. Eine kommunikative Gattung im Zeiten gesellschaftlichen Wandels. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
2002 Ost- und Westdeutsche im Bewerbungsgespräch: Ein Fall von Interkultureller Kommunikation?. In: Helga Kotthoff (ed.). Kultur(en) im Gespräch. Tübingen: Narr, 301–331.
Birkner, Karin and Kern, Friederike
2000 Impression management in East and West German job interviews. In: Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed.). Culturally Speaking: Managing Relations in Talk across Cultures. London: Cassell Academic, 255–271.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel
1991 Ordnung des Diskurses, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.
Gramsci, Antonio
1991 Gefängnishefte. (Hrsg.vom Deutschen Gramsci-Projekt unter der wissenschaftlichen Leitung von Klaus Bochmann). Hamburg: Argument.
Günthner, Susanne and Knoblauch, Hubert
1994 Culturally patterned speaking practices — The analysis of communicative genres. Pragmatics 5(1), 1–32.
Kern, Friederike
2000 Kulturen der Selbstdarstellung. Ost- und Westdeutsche in Bewerbungsgesprächen. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag.
Komter, Martha
1991 Conflict and Cooperation in the Job Interview. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Kurtz, Donald V.
1996 Hegemony and anthropology. Gramsci, exegeses, reinterpretations. Critique of Anthropology 16(2), 103–135.
Luckmann, Thomas
1988 Kommunikative Gattungen im kommunikativen Haushalt einer Gesellschaft. In: Gisela Smolka-Koerdt¸ Peter Spangenberg
and Dagmar Tillmann-Batylla (eds). Der Ursprung der Literatur. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 279–288.
1995 Der kommunikative Aufbau der sozialen Welt und die Sozialwissenschaften. Annali di Sociologia 11 (I–II), 45–71.
Roberts, Celia
1985 The Interview Game and How it’s Played. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.