The ' employability' of graduates leaving Higher Education ( HE) is becoming a focus for the sector emphasizing 'high skilled' graduate destinations. 'Employability' has its roots within the career development literature which has a focus on individual agency as opposed to the social, economic, and political structures in which agency is immersed (Gee et al., 2022). This chapter provides a decolonial lens upon employability policy discourse to highlight how they are based upon a colonial logic of 'othering' and the myth of ' progress'. The chapter centres on the field of Health and Social Care in the UK to illustrate how such logic still permeates today, reproducing structural disadvantage for students from minoritized groups. It considers the pedagogical impact of such conceptions and how this produces and reinforces modalities of oppression found within the neoliberal-university. It discusses how research into decolonization produces a tension between reinforcing the mechanisms of the neoliberal university and subverting such practices. It concludes that HE promotes a smokescreen of meritocracy to students whilst maintaining the societal status quo via filtering processes that feed the precarious labour market. The authors argue that a decolonial approach provides resistance to such oppressive mechanisms, via undermining of colonial 'employability' narratives, providing material and collectivist components to think about alternative routes to anti-colonialism, subverting employability discourse, to question its emphasis on ' progress', its metrics and their formulations to challenge neoliberal logic. Such inquiry informs how policy, pedagogy, and research may benefit from taking a decolonial approach to employability (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Giroux, 2011, 2021).
Unpaid internships have become an omnipresent fixture in the global and Australian labour markets, particularly in the graduate labour market. Key drivers of this internship economy have included the growth of higher education and an increasing emphasis on graduates' job readiness. To meet the challenges of a crowded labour market and changing employer expectations, employability has become a key focus for higher education institutions, policymakers, and students and graduates themselves. Underpinning an increasing focus on employability are neoliberal policies and settings that have driven job seekers to 'assume the predominant burden of building their own employability' (Frenette, 2013, p. 358). While unpaid internships are purported to build employability, little is known about the lived experiences of interns as it relates to the notion of employability, including interns' perceptions of the labour market, employer expectations, and their experiences of Australia's higher education system. To better understand these lived experiences, 38 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with a diverse range of students and graduates in Australia who had undertaken unpaid internships. I find that structural and external influences and factors undoubtedly impact heavily on interns' experiences during their internships, and in their interactions with the labour market. This chapter focusses on four integral factors that impact the internship experience and colour interns' employability-building experiences: interns' perceptions of a competitive labour market, changing employer expectations, university structures and support, and lastly, a knowledge gap with regards to the regulatory environment, which ought to be further investigated.
This essay argues that efforts to improve the employability of jobless people should be understood as the recommodification of labour. For the sociology of work, this means understanding the political economy of pushing the jobless into the labour market as well as organization of the work to make this happen. Both of these involve disciplinary techniques biased against the working class, but neither necessarily performs well in terms of its intended effects. In this essay, the author sketches three different contradictions that undermine recommodification: austerity versus state capacity, top-down control over street-level bureaucrats versus on-the-ground capacity, and top-down control over claimants versus encouraging activity in the labour market.
Neo-Marxist analysis is undergoing something of a mini revival in the sociology of work and work organizations of late as researchers reach out to theoretical traditions which had previously seemed moribund and incapable of intellectually coping with the pace and complexity of change in early 21st century capitalism. Greer and Umney's book, Marketization, is one example of this mini revival. It needs to be evaluated in this wider contemporary context of capitalist transformation and work reorganization which has more than a hint of ' back to the future' about it in the recrudescence of structural changes usually associated with the early decades of the 19th century. Also, it raises fundamental questions about the role of the state in reshaping work organization as political and economic elites attempt to 'ride the tiger' of transformational change.
Relying on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data collected in Sao Paulo, this chapter examines the experiences and narratives of three young Brazilian workers navigating unemployment and platform labour. Findings reveal that low-income youth, confronted with numerous instances of employer harassment, poor working conditions, and exploitation, place their hopes in the gig economy as a means to escape traditional labour submission. However, due to various reasons and disillusionment with the idyllic narrative of autonomy promoted by platform companies, these workers increasingly consider entrepreneurship as an alternative to survive in Brazil's oversaturated market, which was historically characterized by informality and unemployment.
Seen from a critical theory perspective, 'employability' is an authoritative order for the adaptation of employees to capitalist requirements of extensive utilization. This is pinpointed again in the debates around the digital transformation, driving and facilitating certain changes in employment conditions and their educational foundation. Digitalized subject areas and changing teaching/learning methods also affect vocational education, which is considered a prerequisite for employability in Germany. Although both, education and the digital transformation, are usually associated with progress, their relationship is not without antinomies: In the debate around reforming vocational education in responding to the alleged demands of a 'digital transformation', the relevance of education in the development of society as a whole is ignored. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a general critique of employability in relation to this shortcoming. Building on two classical texts by Adorno and Horkheimer, this chapter aims to develop a critical reading of the relationship between current conceptions of employability and vocational education in times of unfolding digital transformation. By using Adorno's notion of half-education digitally oriented employability in vocational education is situated as a hyper-adaptation. With an instrumentally driven adaptation towards productivity, efficiency and utilization, vocational education becomes transformed into the mere acquisition of workable skills - with detrimental consequences for the subject and society. In practice, instrumentality, i.e. the reduction of vocational education to an instrument for achieving narrow purposes of contributing to capitalist profitability, undermines vocational education usefulness for the given purposes of employability.
This chapter considers whether social value evaluation might be a useful tool for third sector organizations (TSOs) to understand the impact of employability interventions. While employability as a concept has been adopted within strategies to support the unemployed into work, there are long-held criticisms of the concept and how it has been operationalized, as well as of the content, delivery and measurement of employability interventions funded by Governments. A key criticism has been around the measurement of success and whether a focus on job outcomes limits policy makers' ability to capture progress towards work. Set against a backdrop of the devolution of additional welfare powers to the Scottish Parliament, and a keenness of both the UK and Scottish Governments to apply social value in evaluating policy interventions, this chapter considers the potential role of social value in helping policy makers and practitioners understand the impact of employability interventions and provide a strong evidence base for improving upon client experience and outcomes.
In this introduction to the volume, we explore the topic of employability, arguing that it has an enigmatic character that renders it in dire need of sustained, critical analysis. We provide a framework for thinking about the enigma of employability - as ideology, policy, and practice. We then introduce the chapters that make up this volume, guiding readers through the differing theoretical perspectives and empirical settings and highlighting what we see as its central contributions.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a stark, sudden and novel 'career shock', potentially harming individual and social wellbeing in the short and long run (Akkermans et al., 2020). Disruption to labour markets and lives represented a sharp 'contextual discontinuity' (Archer, 2012), with graduate recruitment particularly severely affected in the UK (Hooley & Binnie, 2020). To understand how tertiary education graduates responded to this disruptive shock, we use Archer's (2007, 2012) theory of reflexivity. Located at the nexus of structure and agency, reflexivity explains how individuals reflect upon their (changing) contexts and (attempt to) exert agency. Using mixed-methods data from 399 UK graduates, and multivariate analysis, the authors focus on how reflexivity influences career agency, proxied through graduates' perceived employability and early career outcomes. Our use of qualitative survey data to code reflexivity is, itself, a novel contribution that overcomes weaknesses in extant quantitative scales. We find graduates adopted Archer's modes of potentially agency-enabling reflexivity (autonomous (most commonly), meta and communicative) to different degrees. One in nine graduates, however, evidenced fractured reflexivity. As in Archer's conceptualization, these graduates were paralyzed by their contexts, had significantly lower levels of career agency, and experienced traumatic feelings such as despair and failure. Importantly, we contribute a novel fifth mode, confounded reflexivity, which was negatively associated with early employment outcomes. Here graduates' pursuit of their chosen careers was halted, but without the trauma of fractured reflexivity. Our contribution has far-reaching implications for sociological theory; employability and careers research/practice; and post-Covid society.
This chapter explores the impact of digital technologies on employability and the future of work. It addresses three areas of contention within the literature. First, it examines whether new technologies are causing significant technological unemployment. Second, it discusses the idea of the 'hollowing out' of middle-level jobs due to technological change. Third, it evaluates the conventional 'labour scarcity' view, which assumes that technological change will lead to a growing demand for university-educated workers. Based on occupational trend data, it challenges the 'labour scarcity' view of employability and advocates a job scarcity approach, emphasizing a structural mismatch between available jobs and workforce skills. The chapter urges policymakers to focus more on job quality rather than continuing the search for 'supply side' solutions. Generative AI and related technologies are not skills-biased as previously assumed, as there is little evidence of an accelerated demand for 'knowledge' workers, and much will depend on how firms balance efficiency with human-centric employment practices.
Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.
Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers - wound clinicians and care workers - the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors' assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in 'doing' dirty work and in the 'purpose' of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.
This chapter presents a study of 'floral ethics', defined as a set of standardized practices for handling flowers shared among members of the florist occupation. Drawing on 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork in flower shops in Switzerland and Chicago, it contributes to the sociology of work and professions by providing a nuanced understanding of the tensions that can arise between the professional expertise of florists and the aesthetic preferences of customers. The findings on the micro-level reveal that adherence to floral ethics serves as a strategy for protecting and maintaining occupational legitimacy. By uncovering divergent conceptions of what constitutes 'work well done' among florists, this chapter offers a broader argument on the power asymmetry inherent in service relationships.
This comparative book review is concerned with two recent studies of essential workers in Germany: Jana Costas' Dramas of Dignity and Peter Birke's Grenzen aus Glas [literally 'borders made from glass']. While Costas is interested in studying how individual cleaners preserve their sense of dignity despite their widely believed stigmatizing work roles, Birke is interested in the power resources migrant workers can potentially mobilize for improving their working conditions despite the multi-dimensional (inter-sectional) precarity they confront in their life situation. In the context of German industrial and organizational sociology, both studies represent comparatively rare exemplars of detailed qualitative and ethnographic work that illuminate the labour process from taking a workers' perspective. Using different approaches to fieldwork, both studies reveal the precarious nature of being an essential worker in areas such as meat packing, warehouse work, and cleaning. This general observation gives rise to some concluding speculations about the emancipatory potential of ethnographic research, in labour studies and beyond.
This study applies Garfinkel's (1967) concept of 'breaching experiment' to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the 'emotion management' practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents' health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.
This study examines the construction of essential labour during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Research questions include: (1) How have government policies shaped designations of essential versus non-essential labour? (2) What are the consequences of these designations for essential workers? To address these questions, the author employs a case study of custodial services employees at Prairie University, a large public university in a major Texas city (Prairietown). The author begins with an examination of federal, state, and municipal guidelines about COVID-19 safety and critical infrastructure in order to understand the policy landscape within which custodial employees at Prairie University were formally deemed essential. Drawing on theories of non-nurturant care work, the author shows how government guidelines for essential work released during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic discursively invisibilized cleaning labourers. The author then demonstrates how this invisibilization contributed to Prairie University custodial services staff members' exposure to COVID-19. The author concludes by considering the implications of the findings for future research on care work and the construction of essential labour.
This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society's 'dirty work'. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.
It has been 50 years since the publication of Studs Terkel's groundbreaking book, Working, which consists of a compilation of interviews carried out with over 130 workers in the United States. In this chapter, the author revisits this masterpiece, which offers a penetrating analysis of the dehumanization and degradation of work. The author argues that Working is an ode to, and guide for, ethnographic scholarship on work and that it remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was originally published a half of a century ago.
In this chapter, we introduce the topic of essentiality of work, exploring its implications for workers, labour markets, and public policy. The essentiality of work often corresponds in a dialectical way with the precarity of work, raising pressing questions about how societies value and, more pertinently, devalue various types of labour, thereby influencing life chances and societal integration. What we see in the contributions to this volume and the wider evidence is that essential work is typically performed by workers who are treated as expendable, or inessential. We proceed to outline the various contributions from the studies compiled in this volume. These present diverse perspectives on 'essentiality' and the experiences of essential workers. Offering a range of new empirical insights, the volume underlines the vitality and lasting relevance of essentiality - both as a concept and in the experience of workers - beyond the pandemic.
This personal reflection piece relates my experience of vulnerability as a researcher when doing ethnographic fieldwork with journalists. Drawing on my empirical and emotional experience, I show the way the encounters in the field made me feel vulnerable and challenged my identity as a researcher. The chapter also introduces the way my self-disclosure in various ways as a fellow imperfect human being – a.o. regarding motherhood – was an important way to build relationships with the research participants and gain their trust. By doing so, this reflective commentary seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the articulation between researcher identity, fieldwork, and vulnerability.
