Making Markets Material: Enactments, Resistances, and Erasures of Materiality in the Graduate Labour Market

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.