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.
1988Styles 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
1995Hegemonialer Geltungsanspruch und konversationelle Realität: Anmerkungen zu einer vernachlässigten Perspektive auf die Ost/West-Daten der Forschungsgruppe “Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder”. In: Marek Czyzewskiet al.. (eds). Nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder im Gespräch, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 379–383.
Auer, Peter
1998Learning How to Play the Game: An Investigation of Role-Played Interviews in East Germany. Text 18, 1, 7–38.
Auer, Peter
2000Changing communicative practices among East Germans. In: J. Theobald and Patrick Stevenson (eds). Relocating Germanness. Discursive Disunity in Unified Germany. London: Macmillan, 167–188.
1995Reconstructive 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.
Birkner, Karin
2001Ost- und Westdeutsche im Bewerbungsgespräch. Eine kommunikative Gattung im Zeiten gesellschaftlichen Wandels. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Birkner, Karin
2002Ost- 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
2000Impression 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
1992Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel
1991Ordnung des Diskurses, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.
Gramsci, Antonio
1991Gefängnishefte. (Hrsg.vom Deutschen Gramsci-Projekt unter der wissenschaftlichen Leitung von Klaus Bochmann). Hamburg: Argument.
1996Hegemony and anthropology. Gramsci, exegeses, reinterpretations. Critique of Anthropology 16(2), 103–135.
Luckmann, Thomas
1988Kommunikative 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.
Luckmann, Thomas
1995Der kommunikative Aufbau der sozialen Welt und die Sozialwissenschaften. Annali di Sociologia 11 (I–II), 45–71.
Roberts, Celia
1985The Interview Game and How it’s Played. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Eid, Gamal & Cornelius J. König
2023. Wie gehen Recruiter_innen mit der Herausforderung kulturübergreifender Bewerber_innenpools um?. Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie A&O 67:3 ► pp. 121 ff.
Hudson, Nancie
2016. Communication and power in the job interview: Using a ventriloqual approach to analyze moral accounts. Text & Talk 36:3
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 28 november 2023. 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.