Anticipatory Socialization and the Construction of the Employable Graduate: A Critical Analysis of Employers’ Graduate Careers Websites

an article by Karen Handley (Oxford Brookes University, UK) published in Work, Employment and Society Volume 32 Issue 2 (April 2018)

Abstract

A discourse of employability saturates the higher education sector in the UK. Government and employers call on universities to produce employable graduates who are attractive to the labour market and can sustain their future marketability by taking responsibility for protean self-development.

While the neoliberal assumptions behind this call have attracted robust critique, the extent to which employers shape graduating students’ subjectivities and sense of worth as (potentially employable) workers has escaped scrutiny. Inspired by Foucauldian analyses of human resource management (HRM) practices, this article examines employers’ graduate careers websites and explores the discursive construction of the ‘employable graduate’.

The article contends that these websites function as a mechanism of anticipatory socialization through which HRM practices extend managerial control into the transitional space of pre-recruitment, with the aim of engaging students’ consent to particular norms of employability.

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Constituting neoliberal subjects? ‘Aspiration’ as technology of government in UK policy discourse

an article by Konstanze Spohrer (Liverpool Hope University, UK), Garth Stahl (University of South Australia, Adelaide) and Tamsin Bowers-Brown (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) published in Journal of Education Policy Volume 33 Issue 3 (2018)

Abstract

Since the 2000s, successive governments in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have embraced the idea of ‘raising aspiration’ among young people as a solution to persisting educational and socio-economic inequalities.

Previous analyses have argued that these policies tend to individualise structural disadvantage and promote a ‘deficit’ view of working-class youth.

This paper adopts a novel approach to analysing aspiration discourses combining Michel Foucault’s four dimensions of ‘ethics’ and Mitchell Dean’s notion of ‘formation of identities’. Applying Foucault’s and Dean’s work in this way provides a new lens that enables an examination of how policy encourages particular forms of subjectivation, and, therefore, seeks to govern individuals.

The findings presented in the paper complicate previous research by showing that raising aspiration strategies portray disadvantaged youth both in terms of ‘deficit’ and ‘potential’, resulting in a requirement for inner transformation and mobility through attitudinal change.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the identity formation of young people and for conceptualising contemporary forms of governmentality.

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Between a rock and a hard place: women and computer technology

an article by Yannis Pechtelidis, Yvonne Kosma and Anna Chronaki (University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece) published in Gender and Education Volume 27 Issue 2 (2015)

Abstract

This paper explores certain possible reasons behind the uneasy relationship between women and technology. The cultural identification of technology with masculinity has been well documented through previous research. However, we feel it is useful to revisit this complex relationship through the scope of a more subtle distinction between ‘users’ and ‘connoisseurs’, and the struggle over power, which revolves around a specific form of hegemonic masculinity.

We draw on interviews that examine students’ experiences, emotions, and statements about gender, technology, mathematics, and education, and we try to offer an understanding of the ways women negotiate their position within the dominant discourse about computing and mathematics. Our analysis employs post-structuralist discourse theory.

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When Information Conveys Meaning

an article by Anthony Reading (Tampa, USA) published in Information Volume 3 Issue 4 (2012)

Abstract

While some information is clearly meaningful and some clearly is not, no one has been able to identify exactly what the difference is.

The major obstacle has been the way information and meaning are conceptualised: the one in the physical realm of tangible, objective entities and the other in the mental world of intangible, subjective ones.

This paper introduces an approach that incorporates both of them within a unified framework by defining them in terms of what they do, rather than what they are. Meaningful information is thus conceptualised here as patterns of matter and energy that have a tangible effect on the entities that detect them, either by changing their function, structure or behaviour, while patterns of matter and energy that have no such effects are considered meaningless.

The way that meaningful information can act as a causal agent in bio-behavioural systems enables us to move beyond dualistic concepts of ourselves as comprised of a material body that obeys the laws of physics and a non-material essence that is too elusive to study [1].

Full text (PDF 9pp)

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