6.4. Constructing the Client that Can Create Himself: Technologies of Agency and the Production of a Will

This intermediation work is thus very ambivalent: on the one side, frontline agents surely “back” the young persons, promote them and highlight their qualities, qualities of the young person that might not have been seen by the employer if that person was brought to him through the classical market-based recruitment channels. Frontline agents can activate alternative orders of worth (Dahmen 2019) and make them count in the recruitment decisions of employers. Young persons that do not have the best school degrees and such would never have passed the “gates” of the apprenticeship-market might have alternative qualities that an employer might find attractive. In the words of the economy of conventions, frontline agents both create and modify frames of valuation – the young person might not have a good school degree, but he is “stable”, “motivated” a “team player” and “physically resilient” as his year-long commitment of playing football in a mid-league football club testifies. On the other side, frontline agents’ contact with employers is an opportunity for gathering information on a young person that is potentially valuable for the people-changing activities in the Motivational Semester. As the evaluation documents are filed in the personal portfolio of every participant, every official in the Motivational Semester disposes of detailed knowledge of how the young person fared at a certain internship and has access to an in-depth assessment of how employers evaluated the internship candidate.Through this privileged access to information, frontline agents dispose of a panoptical view of the young person and a potentially totalizing control of their work-related behavior. As we will see in the next chapter, this knowledge is regularly put to work.