Full Description
This 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.
Contents
1. Introduction: Rethinking graduate employability in context.- PART 1.- 2.Graduate employability and its basis in possessive individualism.- 3. Relative employability: Applying the insights of positional competition and conflict theories within the current higher education landscape.- 4. Boosting employability through fostering an entrepreneurial mindset: Critical analysis of employability and entrepreneurship in EU policy documents.- 5. The affective life of neoliberal employability discourse.- 6. Grounding employability in both agency and collective identity: an emancipatory agenda for higher education.- PART 2 - 7.Are graduates working in graduate occupations? Insights from the Portuguese labour market.- 8. Institutionalisation of employability capitals in employment markets.- 9. The vocational drift of French higher education and the employability of graduates.- 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.- 11. Working-Class Adult Students: Negotiating Inequalities in the Graduate Labour Market.- PART 3 - 12. Health as employability potential in business graduates' career imagination.- 13. Finnish university students constructing their ideal employable identities - a case study of Top Performing Experts.- 14. Strategies undertaken by international graduates to negotiate employability.- 15. Employability as self-branding in job search games: A case of Finnish business graduates.- 16. Negotiating (employable) graduate identity - Small story approach in qualitative follow-up research.- 17. Epilogue.
