Between career development and modern slavery : A netnographic exploration of how LinkedIn users conceptualise and experience the unpaid internship

Sammanfattning: Societal demand to enhance individual employability in an increasingly congested postgraduate labour market has led to a boom in unpaid internships in the 21st century. This has produced a continuum of attitudes, from perceiving the unpaid internship as an important career opportunity to perceiving it as exploitative slavery. The present study is a netnography that draws on empirical data from debates taking place on LinkedIn, aiming to explore and understand former and potential interns’ conceptualisations of the unpaid internship phenomenon. It translates Olofsson’s (2013) concept of the ‘educational contract' (an implicit social contract with certain expectations attached) to the phenomenon of the unpaid internship. The findings show that the unpaid internship may be conceptualised as a successful or broken contract, based on both the lived experience, and whether the expected labour market outcomes were delivered. A third theme that emerged was the unsigned contract, whereby individuals who were unable to partake in unpaid internships based on life circumstances and socioeconomic factors perceived the phenomenon ambivalently - as both as a career enhancer and an exploitative practice that reproduces class inequality.