patron-client loopholes
I was just talking to someone who moved to the Taipei city government a couple of weeks ago. She moved here because she passed the gaokao, the higher-level national civil service examination, which allows her to take up a full-time, formal position in a government office. Before this, she worked in a couple of other government offices in other counties—what's called jianren, not necessarily part-time in terms of hours, but with no official title and no employment guarantees. (Surely we have a name for this in English?) She told me about how she got her first job, after she finished her MA.
Her professor was about to retire and kept intimating that she should take on the responsibility of organizing all his research files and publications and so on for posterity. But he never straight out told her to do it, so she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing exactly. With graduation coming up, she asked him if he could "introduce her" to some job, that is, use his connections. He just kept joking that she treated him so badly, wasn't organizing his files, and so on. She finally went on the web to look for a job herself, and found that a nearby county government was advertising a job that had to do with her training. She figured the hell with it, and applied.
She was the eighth of eight applicants interviewed, and the first question the interviewer asked her was: "Who do you know?" Every other applicant had some high-up connection in the government, a city councilmember, a legislator, an important professor, who knows what. So the interviewer was kind of in a fix: no matter whom he hired, he would end up offending the patrons of the other applicants. He had to figure out how to minimize the appearance that he was favoring one patron over another. This girl, bizarrely, knew nobody. She had been too scared to tell her professor that she was applying for the job, so she hadn't even managed to get him to mobilize his government contacts. The interviewer was delighted. If he hired her, he explained, at least nobody could say that he was favoring one patron over another. So she got the job.
Her professor was about to retire and kept intimating that she should take on the responsibility of organizing all his research files and publications and so on for posterity. But he never straight out told her to do it, so she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing exactly. With graduation coming up, she asked him if he could "introduce her" to some job, that is, use his connections. He just kept joking that she treated him so badly, wasn't organizing his files, and so on. She finally went on the web to look for a job herself, and found that a nearby county government was advertising a job that had to do with her training. She figured the hell with it, and applied.
She was the eighth of eight applicants interviewed, and the first question the interviewer asked her was: "Who do you know?" Every other applicant had some high-up connection in the government, a city councilmember, a legislator, an important professor, who knows what. So the interviewer was kind of in a fix: no matter whom he hired, he would end up offending the patrons of the other applicants. He had to figure out how to minimize the appearance that he was favoring one patron over another. This girl, bizarrely, knew nobody. She had been too scared to tell her professor that she was applying for the job, so she hadn't even managed to get him to mobilize his government contacts. The interviewer was delighted. If he hired her, he explained, at least nobody could say that he was favoring one patron over another. So she got the job.
posted by blahgstein at 2:03 AM
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