This article addresses various ways that cybervetting recruiters (re)construct boundaries around the public–private division. Based on interviews with 37 recruiters in Sweden, we show how the practice of cybervetting is legitimised by the recruiters’ descriptions and accounts in relation to various notions of privacy and norms of information flow. We present this as a boundary work aided by especially two ways of framing information: the repertoire about accessible information and the repertoire of relevant information. These repertoires help define what information can be conceived of as public or private, and as legitimate versus unethical to search for and to use. Privacy is framed by employers as a responsibility, rather than a right, for social network site users. The findings also underline similarities and differences in jobseekers’ and employers’ norms of information flow, not least considering the right to online privacy.
The narrative about the squandering lottery winner ending up alone and in debt has been shown to affect other lottery winners’ thinking about how to manage their money. Based on a narrative analysis of interviews with 14 Swedish lottery winners, this article considers the ways in which lottery winners present themselves and their post-winning life in counter-position to this story about the squandering winner. By spending their prize money responsibly in order to project moderate, non-luxury consumption, the winners are ‘rewarded’ by feelings of fortune, security, and happiness. Finally, the article discusses how this narrative about ‘the prospering winner’ might be understood in relation to norms about consumption and identity.
The practice of cybervetting-i.e., online background checks of a jobseeker's 'data double'-is considered to be a valuable tool in the recruitment process by an increasing amount of employers. As a consequence, jobseekers lose some control over what aspects of their past, personal interests or private life they will share with the employer. Moreover, jobseekers are expected to confess, explain and contextualize unfavorable information about them if they want to be perceived as employable. This study aims to show how cybervetting recruiters encourage and anticipate such confessions, and use the outcomes to evaluate jobseekers' honesty and capacity for self-reflection. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 36 Swedish human resource professionals, hiring managers and employers, and guided by Foucault's theoretical work on self-examinations, along with the confessional culture and its related concepts. We argue that confessions about information found on the internet are an important factor of what we label 'online employability': jobseekers' capability to sanitize, keep track of and explain their data doubles. Hence, as the recruiter can examine a jobseeker's private spheres, cybervetting is a surveillance practice with direct consequences on recruitment as well as clear effects on jobseekers' self-examinations and interactions with human resources personnel.
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