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.
This is an open access book.
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.
Päivi Siivonen is Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland.
Ulpukka Isopahkala-Bouret is Professor in the Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland.
Michael Tomlinson is Professor in the Southampton Education School, University of Southampton, UK.
Maija Korhonen is University Lecturer at the Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland.
Nina Haltia is Senior Researcher in the Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland.
