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Abstract
In this article I will describe how personality was mobilized during a Dutch language course that prepared job seekers for the care sector. I show how more than language competences, what was valued was who someone was as a person. While the emphasis on job seekers' personality in the context of a language course that prepared for an education and subsequent job in the care sector, is, on the one hand, in line with the general attention for the worker as a person and more specifically for what is generally referred to as soft skills, I show that the understanding of personality in the course also differs from how soft skills is generally understood: personality was seen as a stable essence, where potential for improvement was deemed to be limited. This view on personality can be associated with the history of care work and the morality attached to it, for which selection of workers is deemed necessary. Moreover, as I have shown, while personality is thought of as an abstract term that can be applied to categorize individuals separately from the specific context or from cultural or political influences, the type of personality that was required for a care worker was coded as feminine and associated with certain types of people along racialized lines. As such, there is an unequal distribution among which people are deemed suitable for care work. By demonstrating the effects of this specific understanding of personality, I also argue that it is important for language scholars to pay attention to such notions themselves, rather than to focus merely on their communication.

AbstractThis contribution investigates the rationale and implementation of an employment policy that envisions the quick insertion of migrants in the labour market through short and intensive language learning. We present an ethnographic analysis of a short and intensive course of Dutch for migrant job seekers developed in the context of Flemish employment policy. Our data show that the policy is framed in a discourse of empowerment and efficiency, but in its implementation focuses strongly on surveillance, the punitive consequences of which are tacitly attenuated by the practitioners implementing it. The drive towards quick and efficient language learning could be seen to conflict with the unpredictable nature of language learning. A focus on short-term language learning and quick professionalisation trajectories moreover seems to push migrants into low-skilled, precarious employment and to have stratificational outcomes along gendered lines. While arguing for the need to raise awareness of the way gender intersects with issues of language learning and professional integration, this contribution also reflects on the limitations of language learning as a strategy for migrants' empowerment and contends that an exclusive focus on language as the key to integration erases the structural factors that produce inequality on the labour market.