This article uses ethnographic data to explore the relationship between a job club facilitator and a job seeker with an intellectual disability, to illuminate the gulf between employment activation and the multifaceted everyday reality experienced through employment preparation activities, at a job club established for people with intellectual disabilities who are in receipt of social care. The focus of this article is the micro-interactions apparent within the job club that aligns with Goffman’s ‘cooling the mark’ framework, which is unpacked and extended. The strategies at play here refute the broader, individualised ‘welfare-to-work’ neoliberal rhetoric of employment being available to anyone who works hard enough to attain it. Instead, job seekers are reoriented to accept volunteering roles or dubious unpaid work which are presented as employment-like alternatives. Yet, Goffman’s concept is not static as he envisaged: it fluctuates. For, within this reorientation process, strategies are deployed onto individuals to ensure they are kept interested enough to both accept a lowered employment status, while simultaneously still encouraged to strive for paid work one day. As such, this article teases out the tension and paradox between the clusters of promises attached to work as ‘the good life’ together with everyday disabling experiences of cruel optimism by encouraging job seekers to accept non-normative forms of employment.

本文使用人种学数据探索就业俱乐部促进者和智障求职者之间的关系，阐明就业激活与通过就业准备活动体验的多方面日常现实之间的鸿沟，在一个为智障人士设立的就业俱乐部。正在接受社会关怀的残疾人。本文的重点是工作俱乐部中明显的微交互，它与 Goffman 的“冷却标记”框架保持一致，该框架已解压缩并扩展。这里起作用的策略驳斥了更广泛的、个性化的“从工作福利到工作”的新自由主义言论，只要努力工作就能获得就业机会。反而，求职者被重新定位以接受志愿角色或可疑的无偿工作，这些工作被视为类似于就业的替代品。然而，戈夫曼的概念并非如他所设想的那样一成不变：它是波动的。因为，在这个重新定位的过程中，策略被部署到个人身上，以确保他们保持足够的兴趣来接受降低的就业状况，同时仍然鼓励他们争取有偿工作一天。因此，本文通过鼓励求职者接受非规范的就业形式，梳理了与“美好生活”相关的工作承诺与残酷乐观的日常残疾体验之间的紧张和矛盾。