One of the aspects of hiring in the UK and Ireland that is quite different to the US is the way that all finalists are brought in at the same time – they may meet each other at shared information sessions, go to dinner with faculty together or run into each other at the hotel where they are all staying. For most American academics this scenario strikes us as discomfiting but it carries a huge benefit to the hiring committee for it concentrates its work and enables members to get an immediate comparative perspective on candidates.  It isn’t nearly as awkward as might be imagined and in fact as a candidate myself in the past I have enjoyed the process of meeting some of the other finalists, learning more about their work and having an opportunity to chat I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

This way of interviewing also standardizes the hiring process and it is important to know if you interview for a job in the UK or Irish system that the job description is operationalized into precise categories and both shortlisting and the ranking of finalists is carried out on a numerical basis.  (This is one reason to scrutinize a job description very closely and to be sure that the case you are making for yourself responds directly and clearly to it).  In principle, the selection of an appointee should be a straightforward matter of finding the person with the highest score, though of course a lot of discussion accompanies this process.

The interviewing process in the UK and Ireland will strike many American applicants as highly codified and streamlined.  Less documentation is required in general; letters of reference may be slightly less important to the process than would be the case in the US and they are normally only taken up for finalists. Shortlisting is usually done quickly and arrangements for interview carried out with dispatch. Finalists’ obligations may seem minimal in comparison to the US as you will be expected to give a short research talk (for senior posts this often entails sketching your “vision” for the department) and then to appear for a formal interview.  It is possible that you will spend less than two hours in total with the members of the search committee.  One “plus” of this way of working is that you don’t start to sound like a broken record to yourself, avoiding the situation of meeting individually with faculty over a few days and explaining over and over what you do and how you go about it.

There may be a surprisingly high level of involvement in the search by faculty members who have little to no connection with media studies.  In my own institution we are obligated to give a slot on the search committee from someone outside of our college. At my previous institution the chair of the search committee was a senior faculty member from some other part of the university who I never met again although I was offered the post, accepted it and went on to work there for six years. It is not uncommon to ask colleagues from other institutions to serve on the panel; in Ireland full professorial appointments regularly entail one or more members of the hiring committee being brought in from other countries.

Institutional hospitality is generally greatly reduced in comparison to the US, with candidates often making their own travel and even accommodation arrangements and spending no “informal” time with those involved in the hiring process. About a decade ago I interviewed for a post at a well-known East Coast liberal arts college.  When I arrived in icy midwinter around eleven o’clock at night, the search committee chair collected me at the airport and although of course not openly stated, my interview really began in a dark car during an hour’s drive from the airport to campus.  By contrast, when I interviewed for my current post I had no contact of any kind with any members of the department – all of my communication went through HR. There was no meal for candidates and no “walk-through” of facilities; the five finalists for the job were simply given a campus map and told where and when to appear.

For all the differences in how hiring is carried out, it is unfortunately the case that the UK and Ireland share with the US many of the same intensifications of neoliberal institutional environments and attendant austerity regimes.  Interview slots are precious and monies to bring candidates to campus are growing scarcer. Relocation money (if any) is likely to reflect a set of negotiations between a department chair and a dean. Limited term posts are becoming the norm and so candidates face a tough set of choices when contemplating international relocation for a job that may last just a few years.  Traditional “perks” like start-up packages are almost unknown now.

That is not to say that there aren’t many rich rewards that come with working overseas nor is it to suggest that the ability to adjust to functioning in a very different system isn’t in many ways now a requirement for all kinds of successful twenty-first century workers.  My own career has certainly benefited from such experiences and adjustments. I think the media studies academy can only be enriched by a more internationalist mindset and way of working.

I haven’t mentioned yet how rapidly decisions are made in the UK and Ireland where customarily the search committee makes an offer by the end of the day and you can expect to be asked to supply a phone number at the end of the interview at which you can be immediately reached. Finally if you are offered the job you may be surprised at how quick an answer is expected of you. Arrangements are usually pinned down within days, a little longer at most.

I wish the very best of luck to all who are making applications.

In a cultural climate in which many now pick up a newspaper or turn on the nightly news with a strong sense of foreboding, a distinctive new ad has appeared in cinemas, run before every feature film I’ve gone to see in recent weeks.  Each time the ad runs, the audience distinctly quiets and there is an almost audible sense of pleasure in the theatre.  With a population of two and a half million, Dublin is still a small enough media market that its urban population is comparatively unused to seeing itself on screen and is certainly not in the habit of seeing its local geography so carefully and stylishly rendered.  In a September 29 comment accompanying the ad on YouTube, Xxandrew269 wrote that it “makes me proud to be Irish.”

There are, it seems to me, a number of elements working here to create an ad that is both wholly of its time and intensely ideologically manipulative.  Most obviously Elvis Presley’s “Pocketful of Rainbows” offers lyrical reassurance in tough times (“Mister Heartache/I’ve got a way to make him leave/Got a pocketful of rainbows/Got a star up my sleeve”).  Less apparent perhaps is the affective impact of Elvis’ creamy delivery in a national culture that has a warm, enduring relationship to Americana (and where hopes that Irish-American ties may buoy the nation in its current downtown are a stock element in media coverage of the sinking Irish economy). (In its oblique referencing to The Wizard of Oz the ad also speaks to the desire for an elsewhere, a desire that it seems many Irish people are acting on as emigration rates, particularly amongst the young, rise dramatically). Strikingly, the ad’s rainbow imagery draws from an image repertoire that has long been used to sentimentalize Irishness abroad and the fact that such images are now being deployed “at home” seems significant, particularly given the well-developed radar of most Irish people for saccharine images of twee Irishness.

A still from the "What Would You Do For a Few Million?" campaign

The Dublin represented by the ad is notable for two particular features – its heavy visual concentration on the corporate city centre (privileging locations like the newly-opened Convention Centre and the Samuel Beckett Bridge in particular and the International Financial Services Centre and Docklands districts in general) and its careful multiculturalism – two elements that were central to Ireland’s economic transformation and self imaging during the Celtic Tiger years.  Thus, the ad’s transfixing effect on audiences is rooted partly in its symbolic reinstatement of the social and economic conditions of the boom.  Tellingly, other current tv and radio ads for the National Lottery take a harsher tone, featuring a set of fictional testimonials about the lengths to which people would go in jeopardizing or embarrassing themselves to win millions of Euros.

Even more significant I think is the ad’s staging of a public warmly joining together to admire an artificially manufactured rainbow.  In this sense the ad betrays its investment in the idealization of a distractible, complacent public and becomes an unwitting commentary on a set of national cultural conditions that once fed an unsustainable boom and now operate to quell public protests against state-supported corporatism.  The first time one watches the ad, its visual, musical and civic pleasures are to my mind devastatingly unravelled with the closing appearance of the National Lottery logo and attendant invocation of the arbitrary financialism that currently prevails in Ireland.

This debate, shaped by the depressingly durable notion that a woman’s high-profile public success must inevitably be indicative of a disrupted work/life balance, has played out, I suggest, in a moment when many are inclined toward the view that the recession is taking a particular toll on male subjectivity. The notion of a “mancession” may or may not be economically plausible, yet it remains striking how few templates there are for visualizing/mourning female job loss and in more oblique ways the sense that the recession has disproportionately hurt men may have established considerable traction. In any case, diverse forms of popular culture seem preoccupied with the idea that men are losing ground that they should take back. Here I must confess that some of my thoughts in relation to this column were sparked on my flight from Los Angeles after SCMS, where my seatmate rapidly flipped the pages of Jon Krakauer’s bestseller When Men Win Glory (an account of the death of Pat Tillman) while an infant in the next row was outfitted in a tiny camouflage ensemble with “Boys Rule” scripted on the back. This admittedly highly impressionistic “evidence” is of course far from empirical but it feels germane to the conversation about the Oscar “curse” and the continual cultural impulse to mete out  “punishment” to high profile women.

For my part, I hope that celebration of Bigelow and Bullock’s wins isn’t overshadowed by speculation about the mindset of the former’s ex-husband James Cameron or press accounts that while the latter was filming her Oscar-winning role on one coast her husband was sleeping with a tattoo model on the other. Substantive discussion about the persistence of structural patriarchal features and their normalization in the mass media are occluded by the kind of coverage the People article represents. (Indeed the magazine’s attempts to mystify the very phenomenon it sought to pinpoint by designating it a “curse” is indicative of a postfeminist disengenousness and even bears faint traces of the supernaturalization of female experience that could be said to play out in a variety of current forms, notably the ubiquitous vampire romance). At a time when so many accolades are being directed toward women I hope we might soon see a diminishing of the kinds of female cautionary tales currently continuing to accumulate in postfeminist recessionary culture.

In celebrating this most perverse of television pairs, I want to argue first that it operates as a bracing “shadow couple” for the wholesome Jim and Pam and second that its meanings are deepened by the fact that Dwight and Angela represent versions of culturally normative modes of  masculinity and femininity pushed to pathological extremes. I shall refer to the couple henceforth using the moniker bestowed upon it by series fans – Dwangela.

I want to assert at the outset that The Office is a series whose well-wrought couple relationships have not been sufficiently analyzed.  The web of overt and covert desires that animates the series is complex and multi-dimensional as may be seen in the numerous suggestions of Michael’s fascination with Ryan and the often devastating relationship between Ryan and Kelly.  (When Ryan confesses dejectedly that “For whatever reason, I can’t do better than Kelly,” beside him Kelly beams in complete misunderstanding).  At the same time we would do well to note the series’ preference for couples which is indicated in part by its often shocking handling of single mother Meredith.

In this context, Dwangela emerges as a product of the impossible authoritarianism that characterizes the bizarre world of the contemporary corporate workplace.  Where Pam and Jim (a couple whose sweetness is wonderfully conveyed by the fused appellation “Jam”) are associated with mild and often toothless critiques of the corporate regime, pulling pranks and expressing symbolic (and frequently non-verbal) opposition to or incredulity about the absurdities of corporate life, Dwangela perform a more substantive critical function.

Dwight Schrute’s signature characteristic is a reverence for all forms of order and authority.  His conceptual templates for individual and institutional behavior are adopted from the brutalities of nature and the animal kingdom.  (He avoids smiling, we are told, because “showing one’s teeth is a submission signal in primates”).  Dwight’s understanding reflects a comically exaggerated form of the ubiquitous corporate parables that use animal metaphors to promulgate fantasies of self-empowerment in an era of consolidating corporate control.  Business mantras that exhort workers to “run with the wolves,” pursue re-located and deferred rewards conceptualized as the cheese for worker mice or typologize themselves and their co- workers as residents in an “organizational zoo” have proliferated in the neoliberal workplace.  Dwight is the company man turned inside out, his continually thwarted sense of grandiosity is matched by a sometimes touching credulousness (he believes in androids, bats that turn humans into vampires and the powers of Amazon women).

If Dwight is a distorted version of the aggressive and diligent capitalist male, Angela is a hyperbolic version of the “good girl,” seemingly adherent to old-fashioned behavioral norms and regularly seeking to act as a moral watchdog over her office colleagues.  Intensely attracted to power (as Dwight himself astutely observes) she, like Dwight, identifies intensely with animals and indeed she appears to  have more of an affinity with animals than with humans (the precipitating cause of the Dwangela breakup in Season Four is Dwight’s decision to euthanize Angela’s cat Sprinkles).  The extent of Angela’s identification with the feline is made clear when she describes a Halloween picture of herself in cat costume holding Sprinkles as “just a couple of kittens.”

Tall, deep-voiced and yet sartorially “off,” Dwight represents an idealized masculinity that isn’t quite right.  Similarly the diminutive and blonde Angela (so tiny she sometimes buys her clothing at the American Girl store) pushes idealized femininity to an uncomfortable extreme. Despite their shared affinity for order and control (each repeatedly praises the other to co-workers as “efficient”) Dwangela’s propensity for troubling the workplace keeps bursting forth partly in episodes of office sex, secret rendez-vous and (mostly) private modes of communication.  They actively personalize the workplace and appropriate it for their own interests.  Dwight secretly stocks an arsenal at Dunder Mifflin while Angela brings her cat to work where it sleeps in a file cabinet.  The resulting impression undercuts authority with anarchy, the human with the animal and the surface appearance of productivity and order with a complex libidinal economy.  I suggest that the Dwangela couple is fundamentally organized around an awareness that the kind of contemporary workplace it is so devoted to has lost its humanity.