What can social constructionism contribute to our understanding of interviews
To complete this essay you will need to be able to explain briefly what social constructionism is. You then need to use the material on the guided reading to provide an analysis of how social constructionist ideas might be used to challenge what organizations currently do in terms of interviews. You should also provide a brief explanation of how we might rethink interviews on the basis of your analysis.
Some basic pointers:
2. You need to be able to use the literature to develop your analysis. You will need, for instance, to look at what the mainstream literature has to say about recruitment and then use social constructionist ideas to challenge and question this mainstream view, using relevant literature to support and illustrate your arguments.
3. It is probably a good idea to start your essay by briefly explaining the rationale behind recruitment that is, what do organizations hope to achieve by, say, conducting interviews. If you start the essay like this, it will help you identify some of the assumptions that underpin these goals and to think about how to use social conctructionism to challenge them. What, for instance, do job interviews assume about jobs and people (person job-fit discourse)?
Basically I will have to mention the two types of interviews (structured, unstructured) and some of their characteristics and say why they have poor predictive validity which is due to impression management (interviewee), bias (interviewer), more importantly homophily and range restriction, inaccuracies in how competencies are identified and measured (this is the mainstream literature viewpoint)
inaccuracies in how competencies are identified and measured and that work performance is context dependent and context specific (social constructionist viewpoint. So I have to make critical arguments from the mainstream literature and then give a different perspective through social constructionist on why interviews do not actually work which says that behaviours like impression management or homophily are a natural part of being human and that for example job roles are socially constructed (men, women), or our expectations of work are socially influenced and more examples. In the end I have to give a recommendation on how we could make them work by taking into consideration the role that context plays in interviews since it is a topic highly connected to social constructionism. Concepts like power relations which give rise to discourses are both very important in this essay because the discourses affect how we view jobs.
I have included the pdf files of the lectures so that would be helpful to look at as well as the marking grid, the details are helpful.
And I have included some literature and my own writing but I am expecting for added literature that I have not included to be incorporated.
