Description
Book SynopsisThis open access book offers critical, multidisciplinary analyses on graduate employability. The book examines employability at the macro, meso and micro levels: higher education policy, the labour market, higher education institutions, organisations, individuals and social groups, in European, North American and Australian contexts. The contributors provide social and contextual analysis of graduate employability as a theoretical concept, a discourse and policy imperative and a social and discursive practice. The volume also introduces novel methodological perspectives to study the process of graduate employability. There is an urgent need for comprehensive and unified critical perspectives on graduate employability, as such analyses have so far been scarce and often isolated. Besides filling this gap in the literature, the book will also serve as essential reading on courses that focus on graduate careers and employability as well as higher education policy and practice.
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Rethinking graduate employability in context, Päivi Siivonen, Ulpukka Isopahkala-Bouret, Michael Tomlinson, Maija Korhonen and Nina Haltia
PART 1 Critical perspectives on the theory of employability
2. Graduate employability and its basis in possessive individualism, Leonard Holmes
3. Relative employability: Applying the insights of positional competition and conflict theories within the current higher education landscape, Ulpukka Isopahkala-Bouret and Gerbrand Tholen
4. Boosting employability through fostering an entrepreneurial mindset: Critical analysis of employability and entrepreneurship in EU policy documents, Hanna Laalo , Heikki Kinnari, Heikki Silvennoinen and Nina Haltia
5. The affective life of neoliberal employability discourse, Karen Handley and Jill Millar
6. Grounding employability in both agency and collective identity: an emancipatory agenda for higher education, Peter Kahn and Mariangela Lundgren-Resenterra
PART 2 Employability and inequalities in graduate labour markets
7. Are graduates working in graduate occupations? Insights from the Portuguese labour market, Fátima Suleman, Maria da Conceição Figueiredo and Rita Henriques Guimarães
8. Institutionalisation of employability capitals in employment markets, Yuzhuo Cai
9. The vocational drift of French higher education and the employability of graduates, Claire Bonnard
10. Re-framing employability as a problem of perceived opportunities: The case of internships in a U.S. college using the Student Perceptions of Employment Opportunities (SPEO) framework, Matthew T. Hora
11. Working-Class Adult Students: Negotiating Inequalities in the Graduate Labour Market, Barbara Merrill & Scott Revers
PART 3 Graduate employability as a career and identity process
12. Health as employability potential in business graduates' career imagination, Katri Komulainen and Maija Korhonen
13. Finnish university students constructing their ideal employable identities – a case study of Top Performing Experts, Inka Hirvonen, Päivi Siivonen and Katri Komulainen
14. Strategies undertaken by international graduates to negotiate employability, Thanh Pham
15. Employability as self-branding in job search games: A case of Finnish business graduates, Heli Mutanen, Maija Korhonen and Päivi Siivonen
16. Negotiating (employable) graduate identity – Small story approach in qualitative follow-up research, Päivi Siivonen, Maija Korhonen, Katri Komulainen, Heli Mutanen and Nina Haltia
17. Epilogue, Michael Tomlinson
