Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The MBA admissions interview is a gatekeeping encounter in which prospective applicants are evaluated on their skills and competencies for entry to a postgraduate program designed to foster entrepreneurial success. While there is little scholarship on this event, most studies take place in Anglophone countries and use survey-based methods to determine what criteria, if any, are used by evaluators to select applicants. The present paper breaks new ground by examining the unfolding interaction in MBA admissions interviews in mainland China, where socialist and nationalist discourses coexist, often uneasily, with those of neoliberal capitalism. Using the tools of interactional sociolinguistics, particularly Robert’s (2021) notion of discourse modes, and drawing on data from 68 simulated admissions interviews, this paper shows how success for individual candidates depends on their ability to seamlessly blend the display of professional competence, institutional objectivity and personal ambition with the pre-eminent discourse of China’s rise and the demands of the country’s socialist-governed market economy. In so doing, the study depicts a dynamic hierarchy of priorities, albeit one with the state in an invariably pre-eminent position. The analysis of data extracts will into these hybrid social and cultural norms, (re)produced by the interview’s participants, and so shed light on Chinese business-management and gatekeeping practices.