Look at any job advert carefully enough and a pattern emerges. Alongside the technical requirements — the qualifications, the software, the sector knowledge — there is almost always a second list. Employers want communication, teamwork, leadership, resilience, initiative. Sometimes these feel like background noise. Increasingly, they do not. Increasingly, they are positioned as the thing that separates otherwise comparable candidates.
That creates a puzzle worth sitting with. Many applicants have done substantial things outside their studies. They have worked long hours in demanding roles, cared for family members, organised communities, captained teams, built projects with no institutional support. Yet they are often uncertain whether any of it “counts”. And they tend to notice — sometimes with a slow, uncomfortable clarity — that some achievements seem to carry far more weight than others, even when the underlying effort or complexity looks comparable.
This article argues that the recognition of soft skills is not neutral. It is socially patterned, culturally loaded, and — when examined carefully — reveals something important about how inequality is quietly reproduced in professional life.
The sociological question is not whether soft skills matter. They do. The question is why some people’s soft skills are visible, and others’ are not. And — more uncomfortably — why the people whose skills are invisible so often come to believe the problem is theirs.
Meet Jordan
Jordan is a second-year sociology student. She has spent the past two years working weekends in a care home while managing her studies. She has handled medical emergencies, mediated conflict between colleagues, supported residents through distress, and planned her own time under significant pressure. She has also, on three occasions, advocated for a resident whose needs were being overlooked by a system that moved too slowly.
Jordan applies for a graduate scheme. She is asked about leadership. She struggles to answer. The examples that feel truest to her — the conversations at 2am, the forms she filled in on someone else’s behalf, the decisions she made when no one more senior was available — don’t seem to fit the expected format. She is not sure they count as leadership. They were just things she did.
Meanwhile, another candidate describes leading a student society. He organised events, chaired meetings, and “managed a small budget.” His answer is fluent, structured, and lands well.
Jordan and her fellow candidate are not at opposite ends of a capability spectrum. They are at opposite ends of a recognition spectrum. This article is about why that gap exists — and why Jordan is likely to blame herself for it.
Soft Skills Are Not What They Appear to Be
The term “soft skills” does quiet ideological work simply by existing. By contrasting soft with hard or technical, it implies that interpersonal capacities are somehow secondary — things people either have or don’t, rather than things developed in specific social contexts under particular kinds of pressure. As Grugulis and Vincent (2009) argue, the classification of skills as soft obscures the conditions under which they are produced and the extent to which their recognition is shaped by the social position of those performing them.
This framing obscures two important facts.
First, soft skills are not soft in their consequences. They shape who gets hired, who gets trusted, who is promoted, and who gains access to the informal networks through which real opportunity flows. Research consistently shows that judgements about communication style, attitude, and “culture fit” are among the most significant points at which bias enters recruitment (Rivera, 2012). The softness is in the label, not the stakes.
Second, soft skills are not simply inside the individual. They are relational. Communication is not a fixed attribute carried from room to room; it is a capacity that is recognised — or not — depending on the audience, the setting, and the cultural norms that define what counts as credible. Bourdieu (1991) argued that language itself carries symbolic power: certain ways of speaking are treated as legitimate and authoritative, while others are marked as informal, inappropriate, or insufficiently professional — not because they are less precise or effective, but because they originate from the wrong social position. When someone is described as a “natural leader”, that description is doing something more than identifying a capacity. It is conferring social recognition — and that recognition depends on how the observer reads the person in front of them.
Key concept: Cultural capital
Pierre Bourdieu used this term to describe the dispositions, styles, and forms of knowledge that carry value in a given social context (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital is not equally distributed — it accumulates through upbringing, schooling, and exposure to institutions with their own codes of appropriate behaviour. Crucially, it tends to be misrecognised: treated as natural aptitude or personal polish rather than as the product of social advantage. In a hiring context, what looks like a candidate “interviewing really well” is very often cultural capital doing its work invisibly.
In practice, this means that when an employer says someone “came across as very professional”, they are often — without knowing it — recognising cultural capital. The candidate’s ease in the room, their vocabulary, their instinct for the right narrative register, their familiarity with what the interaction requires: all of these feel like personality. They are also class.
The Labour Market as a Field
To understand why soft skills work the way they do, it helps to think about hiring not simply as a process but as a field — in Bourdieu’s sense of the term.
For Bourdieu, a field is a structured social space with its own rules of evaluation, its own hierarchies of worth, and its own logic of what counts as valuable (Bourdieu, 1993). Fields are not neutral arenas. They are sites of competition in which those who already possess the right forms of capital are advantaged — not because the rules are overtly rigged, but because the rules were shaped by and for people like them.
The professional labour market operates as such a field. It has established conventions about what a credible candidate looks like, how they speak, what kinds of experience they foreground, and what narrative style they use to present themselves. These conventions are not derived from any objective assessment of capability. They are the accumulated cultural preferences of those who have historically controlled entry to professional life — and they are now so naturalised that they present themselves simply as “what professionalism looks like” (Ashley & Empson, 2013).
Key concept: Field
A field, in Bourdieu’s framework, is a structured social space with its own internal rules, hierarchies, and logic of value (Bourdieu, 1993). Crucially, those who already possess the forms of capital the field rewards are advantaged before competition begins. The professional labour market operates as a field: it has established conventions about what counts as a credible candidate, how experience should be narrated, and what a “good interview” looks like — conventions that appear neutral but are culturally specific and historically shaped.
This has a direct consequence for how soft skills are assessed. Within the field of professional recruitment, cultural capital — ease in institutional settings, familiarity with professional registers, the ability to narrate the self in outcome-focused terms — functions as a form of entry token. Possessing it feels, to selectors, like recognising a competent candidate. Not possessing it feels like something is missing. Neither impression is examined critically. Both are treated as common sense. Ashley and Empson (2013), in their study of elite professional service firms, describe this as the “posh but dim” problem in reverse: firms systematically excluded candidates from non-elite backgrounds not through formal discrimination but through informal cultural judgements that encoded class privilege as professional suitability.
The field also generates what Bourdieu calls the illusio — the shared, often unspoken belief that the game is worth playing and that its stakes are real and legitimate (Bourdieu, 1993). In recruitment, the illusio is the widespread assumption that the hiring process genuinely identifies the best candidates. Selectors believe it. Candidates believe it. Most careers guidance reinforces it. The belief is rarely interrogated — and it is precisely that non-interrogation that allows the field’s built-in inequalities to reproduce themselves, round after round, whilst appearing to be the natural outcome of fair competition.
Habitus: Why Jordan Doesn’t Recognise Herself
Here is the part of the story that is easy to miss — and that is, sociologically, the most important.
Jordan does not struggle to name her experiences as leadership only because the interviewer won’t recognise them. She struggles because she doesn’t recognise them. When she thinks about what she did in that care home, it doesn’t feel like leadership to her. It feels like work. Like obligation. Like what anyone would have done.
This is not a failure of confidence, though it might look like one. It is something more structural: it is the effect of habitus.
Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s central concepts, and one of his most powerful (Bourdieu, 1990). It refers to the durable dispositions — ways of seeing, thinking, and acting — that individuals develop through their social history. Habitus is not personality. It is the embodied residue of class position: the accumulated effects of the social world a person has moved through, laid down as instinct, taste, and sense of what is possible. As Reay (2004, p. 434) puts it, habitus is “a complex mix of the tangible and the intangible, of the material and the representational” — it is not simply what people think, but what they feel they are entitled to think about themselves.
Crucially, habitus shapes not only what people do but what they think they are entitled to claim. Someone whose habitus has been formed through working-class experience — in which getting on with things without complaint is valued, in which self-promotion feels uncomfortable or dishonest, in which certain institutions and opportunities feel like they belong to someone else — will approach a job interview differently from someone whose habitus has been shaped by middle-class professional life. Ingram (2018) describes this as the mismatch between a working-class habitus and the middle-class field of aspiration: not a deficit of ambition, but a deep-seated sense that certain social spaces are not for you.
Jordan’s discomfort is not irrational. It is the expression of a habitus that has not been calibrated to the field of professional recruitment. She has not grown up seeing people like her perform leadership in institutional settings. She has not been surrounded by the narrative language of competency frameworks. The care home felt like the right place for her skills. The interview room does not feel like a place where those skills belong.
Key concept: Habitus
Habitus is the set of durable dispositions — ways of seeing, thinking, and acting — that individuals develop through their social history (Bourdieu, 1990). It is embodied class: the accumulated effect of the social world a person has moved through, expressed as instinct, taste, and sense of what is possible for someone like them. In recruitment, habitus shapes not only how candidates present themselves but what they believe they have the right to claim. Working-class habitus, formed outside professional culture, can produce a genuine inability to recognise one’s own experience as leadership — not because the experience is lacking, but because the category has never felt like one that applies.
This matters because it exposes the cruelty at the heart of employability discourse. The system does not only fail to recognise Jordan’s skills. It produces in Jordan the sense that her skills are not quite real — that she is, in some way that she cannot fully name, not quite the right kind of person. That feeling is not a personal inadequacy. It is a structural effect. Reay (2005) describes how working-class students and candidates frequently internalise a “psychic landscape” of self-doubt that is not the product of individual psychology but of a social structure that has consistently told them, in a hundred small ways, that aspiration has a class ceiling.
The Translation Problem
Most people reading this will have had experiences that developed real capacities — patience, emotional regulation, problem-solving, the ability to hold competing demands under pressure. The difficulty is rarely that these capacities are absent. The difficulty is making them legible within the formats that hiring processes provide.
This is the translation problem. Recruitment is built around particular narrative conventions. Candidates are expected to present experience in structured, outcome-focused terms. The STAR framework — situation, task, action, result — is a common example. Nothing about that framework is neutral. It is a cultural technology that rewards those who have already learned to narrate themselves in a professional register. Goffman (1959) was among the first to analyse how social encounters involve the managed presentation of self: recruitment is a particularly high-stakes instance of this, in which the performance of competence must conform to conventions that are themselves socially produced.
Learning to narrate yourself this way is itself a form of cultural capital. Some people encounter it early — through family networks, through schools with strong professional links, through internships in environments where this self-presentation is modelled and practised. Others encounter it late, partially, or not at all. Brown et al. (2003), in their analysis of the global competition for graduate employment, describe this as the rise of “soft skill signalling” — a regime in which the capacity to perform employability is as consequential as employability itself, and in which that performance is unevenly distributed along existing lines of class, race, and gender.
The consequence is not that people without this exposure are less capable. The consequence is that they face an additional burden: translating experience into a format that was never designed with their lives in mind. This is an invisible tax, falling most heavily on candidates from working-class backgrounds, non-traditional educational routes, and communities with weaker connections to professional labour markets (Reay, 2017).
Key theme: The translation problem
Having the skills is not enough. Hiring processes require candidates to present experience in a specific narrative format — structured, outcome-focused, professionally fluent. This format is not neutral. It is a cultural convention, and learning it requires prior exposure to professional environments. Those who arrive without that exposure face a double burden: demonstrating capability and translating it into a language that was not built for their experience.
Think about Jordan again. The capacity she demonstrated in that care home — managing distress, advocating for a vulnerable person, making decisions without oversight — is real. But the interview format asks her to package it as a story of leadership, with a clear situation, a defined action, and a measurable result. The work she did doesn’t map neatly onto that structure. It was ongoing, relational, and often invisible. Telling it well requires knowing how to tell it — and that knowledge is distributed unequally.
Not All Experiences Are Created Equal
Even with perfect narrative technique, not all experiences carry the same weight. This is where the translation problem deepens: it is not only about format. It is also about symbolic status.
Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital refers to prestige — the authority that comes from being recognised as legitimate by those with the power to confer legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1986). In hiring, some experiences arrive pre-loaded with symbolic capital. Others do not — regardless of what they actually require. Grugulis and Vincent (2009) demonstrate this in their analysis of retail and care work: both sectors demand complex interpersonal skill under pressure, yet neither is routinely recognised as a site of professional development, precisely because their workforce is predominantly female, working class, and racialised.
An international volunteering placement, a competitive internship at a well-known firm, a student society presidency: these signal not only capability but familiarity with a world of aspiration, mobility, and institutional prestige. Care work, retail, domestic labour, and community-based activity often carry no equivalent status — even when the underlying demands are comparable or greater.
The table below illustrates the gap between what an experience can genuinely demonstrate and how it tends to be received:
| Experience | What it can demonstrate | Why it is often misrecognised |
|---|---|---|
| Paid care work | Responsibility, emotional labour, conflict management, planning under pressure | Low symbolic status; treated as ordinary work rather than complex labour |
| Customer service / retail | Communication, de-escalation, multitasking, resilience | Stereotyped as low-skill; rarely framed as professional development |
| Informal caring (family) | Coordination, advocacy, endurance, problem-solving | Treated as private life rather than structured responsibility |
| Community organising | Leadership, mobilisation, negotiation, stakeholder management | Political associations may be read as risk rather than asset |
| Sport / team captaincy | Teamwork, discipline, leadership, mentoring | Recognition varies significantly by sport and social coding |
| Self-directed creative projects | Initiative, persistence, self-management, delivery | Often dismissed as hobby without professional framing |
This is not a guide to writing a CV. It is a sociological map of how the same activity gets read differently depending on its position in a hierarchy of symbolic worth — a hierarchy that was not designed to be fair, and is not.
Key theme: The hierarchy of experiences
Not all experiences are treated as equally credible evidence of skill, even when the underlying demands are comparable. Some carry symbolic capital — prestige that makes them immediately legible as leadership or initiative. Others are coded as background, ordinary life, or low-status labour. This hierarchy reflects which activities have been granted social recognition, and by whom — not what those activities actually require of the people doing them.
Rivera’s research on elite professional firms makes this concrete (Rivera, 2012; Rivera, 2015). She found that recruiters consistently responded more positively to candidates whose out-of-class activities overlapped with their own social worlds — not because of explicit prejudice, but because of the comfort of cultural familiarity. Candidates from working-class backgrounds, with equally substantial achievements drawn from different social contexts, had to work harder for recognition. Sometimes they did not achieve it at all.
Bodies Out of Place: Race, Gender, and the Limits of the Argument So Far
There is a risk in framing the recognition problem primarily through class. Class matters — it is central to this argument — but it does not exhaust it. Some candidates face a recognition problem that operates at a more fundamental level: not the misreading of their experience, but the misreading of their body.
Nirmal Puwar’s concept of the space invader is instructive here (Puwar, 2004). Puwar argues that certain spaces — professional institutions, elite organisations, positions of authority — have been built around a particular somatic norm: the body of the white, able-bodied man. When people whose bodies do not match this norm enter these spaces, they are not simply encountered as candidates with unfamiliar backgrounds. They are encountered as bodies that do not quite belong — as presences that require explanation, that must work harder to appear natural, that are read against an implicit standard they did not set and cannot meet simply by narrating themselves differently.
This has direct consequences for how soft skills are assessed. Leadership, as we have seen, is not a behaviour that speaks for itself — it is an interpretation. And interpretations are shaped by deeply embedded assumptions about who a leader looks like. Wingfield (2010) shows how Black professional workers are routinely required to manage their emotional presentation with a precision not demanded of their white colleagues — suppressing anger, moderating assertiveness, performing calm — simply to avoid triggering racialised readings of their conduct. The labour this requires is invisible to those who do not perform it, and it is never factored into assessments of “cultural fit.” A Black woman who speaks with authority may be read not as confident but as aggressive; an Asian man who is measured may be read not as thoughtful but as passive; a disabled candidate who navigates the interaction differently may be read not as adaptable but as impaired. These readings are not the product of individual malice. They are the product of a field whose somatic norms have been formed over generations, and which recruits to reproduce itself (Puwar, 2004).
Key theme: The somatic norm and who belongs
Professional institutions are built around an implicit standard of who naturally occupies positions of authority — a standard shaped by race, gender, and ability (Puwar, 2004). Candidates whose bodies do not match this norm face a recognition problem that cannot be resolved by better narrative technique. They are read, before they speak, through a lens that renders them as not-quite-right. This is not a problem of individual prejudice. It is a structural feature of fields that were built to reproduce particular kinds of people.
What this means is that the translation problem — the challenge of making experience legible within professional formats — is not the same for everyone. For some candidates, narrative technique and cultural capital can close the gap. For others, the gap has a different character entirely. No amount of STAR-framework fluency fully addresses the experience of being read as a body that doesn’t belong. Career services teach candidates to reframe their experience. They do not teach institutions to examine their somatic norms — because that would require the institution to examine itself.
Resilience, Leadership, and the Politics of Who Gets Believed
It is worth pausing on two specific soft skills — resilience and leadership — because each reveals something about how recognition is politically structured.
Resilience has become one of the most prominent terms in contemporary employability discourse. On the face of it, this seems inclusive: hardship builds resilience, and many people have faced hardship. But look more closely at how resilience is typically assessed, and a different picture emerges. What most employers want is not evidence of having faced difficulty — it is evidence of having faced it in a particular way: calmly, constructively, with a clear lesson extracted and a positive outcome demonstrated. Gill and Orgad (2018) describe this as the “confidence cult” of contemporary workplace culture — a regime in which inner strength is both demanded and performed, and in which the demand falls most heavily on those already managing the most precarious conditions.
This is a performance of resilience, and it is a learned performance. Hochschild (1983) described the commercialisation of feeling as emotional labour — the managed, often invisible work of producing the right emotional presentation for an audience. Resilience, in the hiring context, is emotional labour: the production of a particular affective performance for selectors who are assessing not only what you have done, but how you feel about it.
Someone who has managed severe anxiety, navigated poverty, or lived with chronic instability may have extraordinary reserves of resilience. They may also have very good reasons for not narrating those circumstances in an interview room. The candidate who has “overcome a setback” in a safe, tellable form — a sports injury, a failed exam, a difficult group project — can perform resilience fluently. The candidate whose resilience was built in circumstances that feel too personal, too risky, or too stigmatised to disclose is put in an impossible position. The criterion presents itself as universal. The access to it is not.
Key theme: Performing resilience
In hiring, resilience is not simply having endured difficulty — it is the ability to present difficulty in an acceptable narrative form: calm, resolved, instructive. That is a learned performance — a form of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) — and not everyone can perform it safely. Candidates whose hardship is too personal, too ongoing, or too stigmatised to narrate in an interview are structurally disadvantaged by a criterion that presents itself as inclusive.
Leadership raises related issues, but with the added dimension Puwar’s analysis illuminates. Leadership is not only something people do. It is a recognition that others confer — or withhold — and that conferral is shaped by who the observer expects to be in charge. Research on gender, race, and disability consistently shows that the same behaviour is interpreted differently depending on who performs it (Puwar, 2004; Wingfield, 2010). The same assertiveness reads as decisiveness in one body and aggression in another. The same measured approach reads as thoughtfulness in one body and passivity in another. These differential readings are not random. They are patterned — by gender, by race, by disability, by class — and they compound one another in ways that make the recognition problem substantially harder for some candidates than for others.
Key theme: Leadership and the politics of recognition
Leadership is not a behaviour that speaks for itself. It is an interpretation — shaped by longstanding assumptions about who naturally holds authority, and by somatic norms about whose body looks the part (Puwar, 2004). Gender, race, disability, and class all shape how the same conduct is read. This is not only a matter of individual bias in selectors. It is a structural feature of fields built around particular images of authority — images that hiring processes reproduce without examining, and that diversity training rarely fundamentally disturbs.
When employers assess leadership, they are not observing it in any simple sense. They are interpreting behaviour through cultural templates shaped by decades of who has actually held leadership positions. Diverse hiring initiatives can introduce different bodies into a field — but they cannot, by themselves, change the somatic norms against which those bodies are read (Puwar, 2004). That requires something more uncomfortable: the examination of the field itself.
Employability as Ideology
There is a larger argument running underneath all of this, and it is worth making it explicit.
The discourse of employability does not merely describe the labour market. It functions ideologically — it produces a story about how the labour market works that is partial, that serves particular interests, and that shapes how people understand their own position within it (Brown et al., 2003). Tomlinson (2017) argues that employability has become a dominant logic in higher education, restructuring how students understand themselves, their degrees, and their futures — in ways that systematically advantage those who already possess relevant forms of capital while presenting that advantage as the natural outcome of individual effort.
The central claim of that story is that the labour market is a broadly fair sorting device. Develop the right skills, build the right profile, communicate your value effectively, and you will be recognised. Those who are not recognised have, implicitly, failed to develop or communicate adequately. The burden of adjustment falls on the individual.
Sociologists recognise this as responsibilisation (Gillies, 2011). Structural conditions — unequal access to networks, uneven distribution of cultural capital, discrimination, wage stagnation, precarious employment — are translated into individual deficits. You did not get the job because you need to work on your confidence. Your personal brand needs development. You should practise your interview technique. The language is almost always therapeutic and self-developmental. It is rarely political.
Key concept: Responsibilisation
Responsibilisation is the process by which structural problems are reframed as individual failings. In employability discourse, inequality in hiring outcomes is consistently explained in terms of what candidates need to work on — their confidence, their skills, their self-presentation. This framing is not innocent. It shifts attention away from structural conditions and places the burden of adjustment on those already disadvantaged by them.
Bourdieu and Passeron’s concept of symbolic violence ties this together (1977). Symbolic violence operates when the dominated come to accept the criteria by which they are dominated as legitimate — when the standards of the powerful are internalised as simply the standards, by everyone, including those they disadvantage. The particular cruelty of symbolic violence is that it does not feel like violence. It feels like feedback. It feels like self-knowledge. It feels like realising you have more work to do on yourself.
Jordan, in other words, will almost certainly leave that interview believing she needs to get better at talking about herself. She will not leave it thinking the interview format was culturally loaded, that the hierarchy of symbolic capital had worked against her before she opened her mouth, or that her habitus — formed in a social world the field was not designed to include — had shaped her inability to recognise her own experience as leadership. She will think: I should have prepared more. The system will have done its work perfectly, and left no fingerprints.
Key concept: Symbolic violence
Symbolic violence is domination that operates not through force but through consent — through the internalisation of hierarchies as natural and fair (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). In employability, it is at work when people come to understand their structural disadvantage as personal inadequacy. The standards of the dominant group are naturalised as the standards of professionalism. Those who meet them appear to have earned recognition. Those who do not appear to have fallen short. Nobody needed to deceive anyone. The field simply reproduced itself.
Career guidance, interview coaching, and skills development are not worthless. Within the existing system, they can make a real difference to individual outcomes. But presenting them as the solution to structural inequality is itself an act of responsibilisation — one that Tomlinson (2017) argues has been enthusiastically adopted by universities, which increasingly frame employability support as a form of social justice intervention while leaving the structural conditions of the labour market untouched. The problem is not that some candidates have not yet learned to perform the employable self. The problem is that the employable self is a culturally specific construction that encodes existing hierarchies of worth, and then misrecognises them as universal standards. Coaching helps people perform within those standards. It does not challenge them.
What Would It Mean to Take This Seriously?
Let us be direct about what this analysis implies — because the usual conclusion to articles like this one is more comfortable than the argument warrants.
The standard move is to say: for students, learn the grammar of the system; for employers, broaden your criteria; for sociologists, name the process. That is not wrong. But it stops well short of what the analysis actually demands.
If the labour market operates as a field structured by cultural capital, if habitus shapes not only how candidates present themselves but what they believe they deserve, if somatic norms render certain bodies as perpetual space invaders regardless of their qualifications (Puwar, 2004), and if symbolic violence ensures that those most disadvantaged are the least likely to name their own disadvantage (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) — then the problem is not a matter of technique. It is a matter of power.
Broadening criteria and training interviewers are worthwhile interventions. But they operate within a field whose fundamental logic remains intact. They ask the field to be more generous. They do not ask whether the field itself — its rules, its hierarchies, its consecrated forms of capital — is the problem. Ashley and Empson (2013) found that even firms with explicit diversity commitments continued to reproduce class-based selection through informal cultural judgements, precisely because those judgements were never identified as such.
That question is more difficult, and it has less comfortable answers. It would require asking not only which experiences are excluded but why certain experiences have been granted symbolic capital in the first place — and whose interests are served by that distribution. It would require organisations to examine not just their processes but their cultures, their somatic norms, and the ways in which “professionalism” functions as a classed, racialised, and gendered category (Kelan, 2008). It would require acknowledging that merit is not a thing that exists independently of the field that defines it.
For students and early-career candidates navigating this now: understanding the system does not make it fair, but it makes it legible. Recognising that your discomfort in an interview room may be habitus rather than inadequacy — that the format was not built for you, not that you are not built for the format — is not a small thing (Reay, 2005). It will not fix the field. But it might stop you from internalising its verdict as your own.
And for those of us who study and teach sociology: the most critical contribution is not analytical neutrality. It is the refusal to mistake description for explanation, or explanation for critique. The field reproduces itself because it is rarely examined from the inside. Examination is where something different becomes possible.
Jordan deserved to get the job. The question the field never asked is why she didn’t believe she did.
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