Career Guidance for Emancipation

Reclaiming Justice for the Multitude

Tristram Hooley, Ronald Sultana, Rie Thomsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351616195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This edited collection explores ways in which social justice can be integrated into career guidance practice. Chapter authors propose models and practices which can contribute to struggles for social justice and consider how career guidance can play a role in these struggles. They explore policy and practice in the light of critical social theory both critiquing career guidance and opening up new possibilities for the field. The volume moves the discipline away from its overwhelming reliance on psychology in favor of theoretically pluralistic approaches informed by critical thinking in a range of disciplines. It seeks to expand the possibilities that are available to career guidance practitioners and researchers to support the growth of human flourishing and solidarity.

1
Representing Problems, Imagining Solutions

Emancipatory Career Guidance for the Multitude

Tristram Hooley, Ronald G. Sultana and Rie Thomsen

We the people—won’t wait for justice, freedom, equity, acceptance, respect. (From a placard held up by a protestor in Sydney, Australia.)

(Helmore, 2017)

Our last book (Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen, 2018) began with a quote from Donald Trump, where he argued that the people of the USA could not be expected to shoulder the blame for the fact that their careers had not turned out in the way that they had hoped. Prolonged recession and the capture of the good life by the elites should be seen as a systemic failure and a failure by the political class, he argued, rather than a failure of individuals. We used this quote to illustrate some of the crises that neoliberalism is experiencing and how they impact on the careers of individuals. We also used it as a warning that you cannot believe all that you are told and that what looks like social justice may turn out to be just the opposite. In this book we start in a different place—we start in the multitude and in the resistance.

The placard held up by the protestor in Sydney features the image of Munira Ahmed, a Bangladeshi American, photographed by Ridwan Adhami at the New York Stock Exchange and incorporated in a design by the artist Shepard Fairey as part of a project called ‘We are the people’ (Helmore, 2017). The project seeks to ‘ignite a dialogue about American identity’ and create ‘new symbols of hope to combat the rising power of nationalism, bigotry, and intolerance’ (Amplifier, 2017). Its appearance at a protest on the other side of the Pacific, repurposed for a different demonstration and re-inscribed with a new slogan by a nameless protestor who is unlikely to have ever met Ahmed, Adhami and Fairey but has nonetheless found some common ground with them, is inspiring and instructive about new modes of political expression and organisation.

We have often criticised academic discourses on ‘career’ and the practices of career guidance for being overly individualised and ignoring the context and constraints within which individuals build their lives and careers (Thomsen, 2012; Hooley, 2015; Hooley & Sultana, 2016; Hooley et al., 2018). Such literature typically focuses on concepts like self-efficacy, agency and aspirations whilst often ignoring the way in which opportunity is structured by class, power and other forms of inequality. Roberts (2009) argues that career routes are created by inter-relationships between family origins, education, labour market processes, employers’ recruitment practices, places, gender, ethnicity and other factors to create opportunity structures which ‘govern’ our lives and within which the role of individual choice making is limited. We recognise these limits to individual agency but believe that the idea of offering people more agency in their lives, which is central to the ideology of career guidance, remains an emancipatory idea. While an excessive focus on individual agency runs the risk of responsibilising individuals and blaming them for structural failings, structuralist perspectives can create a sense of powerlessness and fatalism.

In response to this dilemma we have tried to bring into view forms of political and collective agency that can be closely related to career guidance practices and in turn influence the ways in which people’s careers unfold. In a world characterised by neoliberal strategies of oppression, it may be a valuable additional strategy to support your career development by marching, organising and crafting critical slogans as our placard holder has done. Such strategies are not an alternative to polishing your CV and honing your career management skills but rather a complementary set of activities that open up the possibility that the opportunity structure can be nudged, stretched and transformed as well as navigated. We are not alone in this endeavour to refocus the field as the publication of the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance’s (IAEVG) (2013) communiqué on social justice shows.

In our last book we sought to link career guidance with such collective forms of agency by arguing that career guidance should be defined as support for ‘individuals and groups to consider and reconsider work, leisure and learning in the light of new information and experiences and to take both individual and collective action as a result of this’ (Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen, p. 20). In this volume we seek to deepen our understanding of what this means and to move beyond vision towards new and more critical forms of practice.

If Career Guidance Is the Solution—What Is the Problem?

In Career Guidance for Social Justice we explored the intersection between career guidance, neoliberal forces and social justice. Within the volume authors raised questions about how far career guidance could support social justice and how far it was complicit with those seeking to advance neoliberal policies and ideologies. We took a counter-hegemonic stance, seeking to problematise the way career guidance is conceived in ‘liquid modernity’, carefully decoding the way in which terms such as ‘resilience’, ‘employability’, ‘protean’ and ‘boundaryless’ careers, ‘life design’ and ‘entrepreneurial selves’ have acquired an innocent and ‘common sense’ aura and exploring how they serve to surreptitiously define ‘the problem’ in particular ways and responsibilise individuals for structure-induced crises and narrow the available courses of action available to people.

The analyses provided in the first volume, mobilising as they do an array of theoretical lenses from critical social theory and critical psychology, challenge the reader to consider whether the ‘problem’ that is being presented is in fact the ‘problem’ that needs to be addressed, whether we are in fact being distracted by a focus on the symptoms rather than on the cause and whether, as a result, what we do as career practitioners ultimately ends up working against the interests of those who, with the best intentions in the world, we set out to help.

In this volume we build on the arguments that we and our colleagues made in Career Guidance for Social Justice. We have invited more authors to explore and discuss ways in which career guidance can be part of the struggle for emancipation and for social justice. We hope to further inspire practitioners, researchers and policymakers in and around the field of career guidance to mount a challenge against neoliberal ways of framing career guidance. Here we shall briefly rehearse the arguments about why it is important to critically and constantly explore and develop our thinking about career guidance and the way that it is practiced in response to the ideal of social justice and informed by a critique of neoliberal governing practices. Central to this is a recognition of the existence of neoliberal governing, but also of its political nature, because once neoliberalism is understood to be a political proposition, project or strategy it becomes contestable and the possibility of challenging and changing such practices opens.

If we are presented with a problem it is critical to understand what strategies, styles, mechanisms, tools and practices might offer solutions to it. However, the nature of both the problem and the solution are complex and contestable and require further critical investigation. Bacchi’s (2009) five-step ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ approach (WPR approach) provides the insight that problems do not merely exist; rather descriptions and perceptions of problems are constructed. ‘Once we stop thinking about categories, concepts, theories and “problems” as fixed and determined, it becomes ever more useful to analyse critically the forms of problematisation upon [which] they rely’ (Bacchi, 2010, p. 7). This critical examination helps us to see how problems are framed, in whose interest and to what end and this in turn leads us on to the creative proposal of solutions. This line of thought leads us to ask, if career guidance is proposed to contribute to the solution, what was then the problem?

We are used to thinking of policy documents as objects of discourse analysis and less used to conceptualising research and scholarly articles as also (re)presenting problems. Skovhus and Thomsen (2017) argue that Bacchi’s WPR approach can be used in this way to illuminate the disciplinary assumptions that underpin research and thinking about career guidance. It is beyond the scope of this introductory chapter to perform a full WPR analysis; instead we will reflect on how both the problem and the solution are represented in current discussions about career guidance.

If the problem is represented to be that we live in the ‘competition state’ in which policy is no longer concerned with employment for its citizens but rather to support the constant development of the human resources and competences needed for companies to remain internationally competitive (Cerny, 2010), then the part that career guidance is invited to play in the solution is to support people in maximising their potential and develop flexibility in the face of the demands of the labour market. If the problem is represented to be the globalisation of trade then the role of career guidance is to foster and support mobility of labour (Van Esbroeck, 2008). If the problem is that the current state of welfare is unsustainable (Harvey, 2005), requiring the ‘rolling back’ of state institutions and practices (Epstein, 2006) and cuts to resourcing in education, then career guidance is expected to increase individual responsibility to compensate for the withdrawal of direction from the state and guide the individual to make wise investments in the development of their individual human capital. However, this representation of the problem also has implications for career guidance itself as it can be seen as yet another drain on the beleaguered public purse. This ultimately limits the capability of career guidance to serve as part of the solution and typically results in cuts to career guidance services (a new problem) to which the solution then becomes the provision of highly targeted services aimed at those who are ‘most in need’ (Watts, 2001). And as a final example, if the changing nature of work and the shift to the ‘boundaryless’ career (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) is represented as the problem, then career guidance offers the solution of career adaptability and active career management, which we would see as ultimately responsibilising the individual further.

The way that the problem is represented frequently shapes the nature of career guidance and frames it in ways that individualise rather than emancipate. In the previous volume (Career Guidance for Social Justice) and in the present volume we and our colleagues seek to reframe the way in which the problem was represented and move from problems to problematisation. In that volume and in this one we are seeking to deconstruct the representation of the problems in order to create spaces for new types of solutions to emerge from career guidance. Our hope is that by changing the representation of the problem and refocusing it on the structures that sustain neoliberalism, we will allow for career guidance to be constructed in very different ways, including in ways that are antithetical to neoliberal policy aims.

Authors in Career Guidance for Social Justice identify a problem representation in terms of the individualisation and responsibilisation of careers (Irving, Sultana, Rice, Olle and Bilon, Bergmo-Prvulovic, Viera et al.). They argue that a succession of policies and practices have placed undeserved blame at the feet of the individual for the failure of the economic system. Such a construction of the problem places career guidance in a complex position, as it is often seen as being a key technology through which responsibilisation takes place. Irving (2018, p. 57) argues that career/education, among many things, is expected to ‘produce citizens who, as active learner-workers, have acquired the “right” competencies, developed a competitive outlook on life, are able to demonstrate their (economic) value, embraced particular forms of lifelong learning, and learned to “play the game” effectively, in order to transcend any “personal failings”’ (ibid.). The alternative, according to Irving, is to practice career/education as a critical social practice with the aim of enhancing awareness and understanding of the diverse ways in which life-careers might be meaningfully constructed and enacted.

Another problem that is brought forward is that of self-commodification through and in relation to technology (Hooley and Buchanan), highlighting that career guidance has to address technological changes which shape the operation of power in new ways that are often difficult to see. This problem representation allocates career guidance with the role of conscientisation and helping individuals to explore the inter-relationship between their career development, technological change and political transformation.

In other chapters the problem is represented as one of geographical inequality and the marginalisation of those outside of the core centres of neoliberal power (Alexander, Ribeiro and Fonçatti). The authors argue that career guidance contributes to this marginalisation when it uncritically imports theories, models and notions of career across borders. Ribeiro and Fonçatti (2018) describe this process as globalised localism whereby first-world perspectives are imposed in a way that is disparate with the reality as experienced by people living there and which, often unconsciously, introduces ideas and beliefs that are helpful to the expansion of neoliberal strategies. An alternative to this is to resituate career guidance as a practice that does not, per se, promote geographic mobility (of theories, models and labour) but instead invites both practitioners and people to include a socio-spatial perspective to the notion of career and to think critically from both a local and a global perspective.

Continuing with a focus on theoretical and political fragmentation and insufficiency in relation to social justice and career guidance Rice, Olle, Ribeiro et al., Reid and West demonstrate the need for recognition, articulation and discussion of the diversity of ways to live and work. Some authors in the first volume, such as Pouyaud and Guichard, Rice, Sultana and Vieira et al., point to a problem representation as being precarity and the lack of decent work. They discuss how shifts in the political economy have resulted in individuals living precarious lives and seek to position career guidance as a way to reassert the rights of individuals to have some control over their lives and access to the good life. Pouyaud and Guichard use the concept of ‘decent work’ to explore and deconstruct the ‘nature’ of work within neoliberalism as they re-invoke Homo Faber in Arendt’s (1958) thinking of the active life—working—as a fundamental anthropological characteristic that needs to be rediscovered in response to the way that neoliberal policies have alienated human beings from their labour.

Sultana (2018) examines how austerity has increased precarity and argues that this requires a new emancipatory approach from career guidance. Even though it seems insurmountable for individuals scholars, practitioners and policymakers to address individually what seems to be ‘overarching systemic problems that require political and economical resolve and action at macro levels, both national and supranational’, he nevertheless reminds us of the everyday collective struggles that can be battled through choice of approach and of stance as a profession.

Finally, authors across the two volumes consider the need for new practices in research and point to the challenge of dominating current research strategies in the field doing research on people rather than actually involving career practitioners and citizens and doing research with people and through close collaboration contributing to the development of a strong profession (Poulsen et al., Bengtsson, Reid and West).

This second volume is divided into two parts which examine the problem representations in two different ways. In the first part the problem representations are examined through the diverse experiences of some different groups in society. Neoliberal policies impact on different groups in different ways, often dividing people from one another, fragmenting what Hardt and Negri call the multitude along the lines of a variety of aspects of identity and demography. Our coverage of these diverse experiences of neoliberalism is not comprehensive, but we were kee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Representing Problems, Imagining Solutions: Emancipatory Career Guidance for the Multitude
• PART I Addressing Diverse Experiences of Neoliberalism
• PART II New Practices, New Possibilities
• PART III Conclusions and Next Steps
• Biographies
• Index