Career Guidance for Social Justice

Contesting Neoliberalism

Tristram Hooley, Ronald Sultana, Rie Thomsen, Tristram Hooley, Ronald Sultana, Rie Thomsen

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351616287
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

This edited collection examines the intersections between career guidance, social justice and neo-liberalism. Contributors offer an original and global discussion of the role of career guidance in the struggle for social justice and evaluate the field from a diverse range of theoretical positions. Through a series of chapters that positions career guidance within a neoliberal context and presents theories to inform an emancipatory direction for the field, this book raises questions, offers resources and provides some glimpses of an alternative future for work. Drawing on education, sociology, and political science, this book addresses the theoretical basis of career guidance's involvement in social justice as well as the methodological consequences in relation to career guidance research.

1 The Neoliberal Challenge to Career Guidance

Mobilising Research, Policy and Practice Around Social Justice

Tristram Hooley, Ronald G. Sultana and Rie Thomsen

Introduction

Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

From Donald Trump’s inaugural address, January 2017

This book is the first of two volumes which address how career guidance can become part of the struggle for social justice. It is also about neoliberalism and how this frames struggles for social justice and the field of career guidance. The volumes examine career guidance practice, policy, theory and research and explores ideas, stances and values as well as strategies and actions that can move the field forwards. In this first volume, we look at the contexts that neoliberalism offers for career guidance, continue the process of developing theories to support career guidance to engage positively with social justice, and explore how research can inform the development of practice and how practitioners can be involved in research processes. In the second volume, we will go on to examine the diverse ways that different communities, groups and individuals experience neoliberalism and explore the range of possibilities for career guidance to be practiced differently. Our hope is that these volumes will help to reorient the field of career guidance for the challenging times in which we live.

Like most academic projects, Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neoliberalism has been written over a couple of years. While we have been writing, history has been unfolding in ways that have been both surprising and disconcerting. Two books about career guidance offer a small contribution to a world in which Donald Trump is co-opting the language of radicalism to dismantle the institutions of American democracy, in which the future of Europe, endangered by Brexit, revolves on successive elections where the populist right challenge for power and in which there are famines across East Africa, war in Syria, homophobic purges in Chechnya and precarity everywhere. But, as the quote above from Donald Trump’s inauguration demonstrates, concerns about career and livelihood remain at the heart of a myriad of personal and political struggles and their relationship to social justice cannot be assumed. Consequently, we hope that these books can contribute to our understanding of the shifts that are happening in our world and what they mean for our field and, most importantly, that the books can help those involved in the field of career guidance to think about responses that are possible and useful.

These two volumes of readings build on previous efforts by others in the field, and have drawn together insights from a range of disciplines and theoretical orientations—including critical psychology, social psychology, political economy, critical theory, sociology, feminism, queer theory, post-colonial studies, critical race theory, cultural studies and liberation philosophy. We hope to show the extent to which neoliberalism ‘sets the political and economic agenda, limits the possible outcomes, biases expectations, and imposes urgent tasks on those challenging its assumptions, methods and consequences’ ’ (Saad-Filho & Johnson, 2005, p. 4). It is by becoming more critically aware of the contexts in which we work, and how these contexts shape not only what we do, but also what we aspire to achieve and what we value, that career guidance can claim to wear the social justice mantle.

In the two volumes we address three main concepts (1) social justice, (2) neoliberalism, and (3) career guidance. Our hope is that the books can investigate the interactions between these concepts from a range of different perspectives. The primary purpose of this introduction is therefore to define these three concepts and to situate the books historically, politically and epistemologically.

Situating the Volumes

All three editors have been writing about career guidance and its relationship with social justice, inequality, community and neoliberalism for several years. As we wrote, we realised that we were not alone and we identified each other and many other people who were asking similar questions. We found a concern with social justice articulated across a range of countries and drawing on a range of different theoretical and political traditions. These two volumes were proposed as a way to draw this diverse movement together and to intervene into the theoretical debates that exist around career guidance and contribute to its development. We hope that it will help to shape the future direction of the field and identify an agenda for future research.

This tradition of sociopolitical writing about career guidance goes back, as Zytowski (2001) has argued, to the origins of the field. We can also find it represented in the work of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling (NICEC) in the UK, in Scandinavian research informed by critical psychology (Thomsen, 2014) and by sociology (Buland & Mathiesen, 2014; Lundahl & Olofsson, 2014) particularly between the late 1970s and 1990s, in the work of David Blustein and his colleagues in the USA (2006), and, increasingly, in voices coming from the global south (e.g. Ratnam, 2011; Da Silva, Paiva, & Ribeiro, 2016; Sultana, 2017a). Perhaps most visibly we saw the standard being raised in Irving and Malik’s (2004) Critical Reflections on Career Education and Guidance: Promoting Social Justice within a Global Economy. Career guidance, they argued, sits in a complex relationship with neoliberalism, at times enculturating people into a neoliberal sensibility and at others offering a space for critical engagement with power. It is this difficult balancing act that this volume hopes to continue to debate.

Over a decade after Irving and Malik’s book, two of the editors edited a special issue of the NICEC journal (Hooley & Sultana, 2016), which focused on the issue of social justice and career guidance. It became clear that there was much still to say about these issues and a wide range of authors keen to contribute. This provided the genesis of this project and encouraged us to think carefully about what had changed since Irving and Malik had written about “the triumphalist cry of capitalism” (p. 1) where “the neoliberal economic rationality overshadows any discussion of the collective good” (p. 3). By the early 2000s it was not just the politicians of the Right that were declaring that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. The politics of the Left was now dominated by the “third way”, which moved towards the centre and largely adopted the political and economic positions of the right (Romano, 2006). A year after Irving and Malik’s book, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair described the kind of individual who could succeed within this neoliberal world and identified the kind of career management skills that they would need to do so.

The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.

(Tony Blair quoted by Harris, 2016)

Such words echo much of the rhetoric of career theory with its talk of “boundaryless” (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) and “protean” careers (Hall, 1996) and of the need for individuals’ to build “career adaptability” (Savickas, 2013) in the face of “this changing world”. As John Harris noted on hearing Blair speak, “most people aren’t like that.” But these kinds of concerns, like those raised by Irving and Malik and many others about inequality, precarity and social exclusion, were easy to ignore for the political class.

Subsequent events have proved that the “third way” did not represent any kind of final settlement for capitalism. The financial crisis of 2008 has resulted in an intense period of political and economic debate and reconfiguration. The election of Donald Trump can be attributed to it, but so can the unexpected celebrity of Thomas Piketty, whose neo-Marxist Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014, became an unlikely, but welcome, best seller. We continue to live in a neoliberal world, but there are alternatives on offer. It is tempting to celebrate the emergence of Bernie Sanders in the USA, the left turn of the British Labour Party and Podemos in Spain. But, the alternative to neoliberalism is being most visibly articulated by the populist right variously represented by Le Pen, Wilders, Erdogan and others. The opening up of alternatives of both the left and right raises questions about whether neoliberalism is enduring or being replaced by something new (and potentially much worse). We will move on to address this later in the chapter, but first we should clarify what we mean by social justice.

What Is Social Justice?

Very few people would be happy to think of themselves as unjust or seek to bring about a society which results in injustice. Certainly, careers workers typically seek to locate themselves and their work as being able to contribute to social justice (Arthur, Collins, McMahon, & Marshall, 2009). However, such beliefs in “justice” and “social justice” require further scrutiny and definition. Social justice is an articulation of what individuals, groups and societies believe is morally and politically right. Inevitably, this means that our ideas about what constitutes social justice differ and we need to be very careful not to use social justice as a way of imposing ideology onto others without debate.

Political ideas should not be transmuted into moral absolutes. We want to open up debate and to celebrate pluralism rather than to impose orthodoxies. One of our concerns with the politics of neoliberalism is the way in which the political positions espoused by the ruling orthodoxy are frequently described as incontestable and understood in moral rather than political terms. Harvey (2005, p. 3) argues that the politics of neoliberalism has “become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world.” Our adoption of the terminology of social justice needs to be alert to its imprecision and to remain aware that what is social justice to us might be injustice to others.

The appeal of the terminology of ‘social justice’ therefore lies partially in its contestability. Other terms like socialist, liberal, anarchist, radical, feminist, critical race theorist, critical psychologist and so on would locate this project in a tighter political tradition. However, we are seeking a pluralist engagement with career guidance which recognises diverse experiences, backgrounds, theories and politics. We believe that such pluralism is a strength, and we have asked all contributors to think about what ‘social justice’ means from their perspective and to be explicit about it.

This is not to say that ‘anything goes’, nor to say that different conceptions of social justice are incontestable. As Sultana (2014a) has noted there are a range of different traditions of justice which are informed by different philosophical positions. How we relate to ideas about social justice is ontological, bound up with our fundamental beliefs about the world. Given this, talking about social justice should not be advanced to gloss over these differences, but rather should be a way of creating a space within which these differences can be debated. Such debates need to recognise that the problem of social injustice might be understood in a wide range of different ways and to recognise that we can have similar analyses about the problem (for example, recognising inequalities of wealth, power and voice), whilst advancing radically different ideas about what can and should be done about this and what the role of career guidance can be.

Each chapter in this book provides an answer to the question ‘What is social justice?’ Authors write for social harmony, for equity, for equality, for difference and diversity, but all with an awareness of a dystopian other. Within these volumes there are disagreements about what social justice is, but all of the contributors are sure that we have not got enough of it. The articles address a need for a change and argue that there are a range of roles that the activities of career guidance can play in this activities. However, before we discuss the multiple roles of career guidance in relation to social justice it is important to clarify our understanding of the world in which we are finding an absence of social justice.

What Is Neoliberalism?

The general contours of what constitutes ‘neoliberalism’ have been rehearsed in literature across a vast array of disciplines and sub-disciplines: Dunn (2016) claims that well over 400,000 academic publications have used the term. What we provide here is therefore only a cursory sketch, highlighting definitions and debates that are especially relevant and which justify its use as a framing narrative for this volume. As several authors in this collection of articles also note, neoliberalism—described by some as a fundamentalist doctrine that normalises its own tenets by propounding the view that ‘there is no alternative’—is a set of beliefs about how wealth should be produced and distributed: it thus has a major impact on the world of work, and consequently, on the way career guidance is conceived and practiced.

Some have argued that the term ‘neoliberal’ has been overused, and that its ‘conceptual sprawl’ (Dunn, 2016, p. 17) refers to such a wide array of social practices that it does not have an essential core meaning (Venugopal, 2015; Flew, 2014). We are alert to such critiques, and recognise the fact that neoliberalism is somewhat amorphous and even internally inconsistent, wearing different masks as it morphs in response to context (Gamble, 2001; Saad-Filho & Johnson, 2005). We are also sensitive to the call to use the term as an adjective and an adverb rather more than as a noun, thus short-circuiting the dangers associated with reifying ‘it’ in ways that suggest it is ‘an accomplished object’ rather than ‘a tendency, a more or less realized, more or less articulated, unevenly distributed ensemble of attributes discernible in the world’ (Comaroff, 2011, p. 141). Nevertheless, we consider that the term still has value for us given our purposes for these volumes. Chief among these is the attempt to challenge the career guidance field out of its enduring over-reliance on individualistic psychological methods in both practice and research, which, while useful in helping us understand some of the dynamics involved in the interplay between self and society, fails to acknowledge, let alone throw light on the systemic, social and political nature of the unequal power relations involved. A critical consideration of neoliberalism opens up a set of crucial conversations that, in our view, career guidance practitioners and researchers need to engage in if the field is to reject co-optation by, and subordination to, the instrumentalist rationality of the market and the ‘competition state’ (Cerny, 2010), and if it is truly to be a force for social justice.

Distinct political traditions of right and left exist which have been most iconically represented by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In this cleavage of political economy, neoliberalism can be seen as the recent articulation of the former’s reasoned and normatively driven insights about the economic nature of humanity, what impels it forward, and the kinds of environments that could lead to overcoming poverty. While Smith became convinced that the notorious ‘invisible hand of the market’ could conjure up this happy state of affairs, Marx—and those who drew on his analysis—argued that human dignity and wellbeing could not be abandoned to the whims of a Darwinian market that is thoroughly saturated in unequal power relations, and which could thus never deliver on social justice in terms of redistribution of wealth. Nevertheless, the 1980s saw the triumph of Smith’s doctrine, as reformulated by such economists as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and the defeat of both the Soviet bloc, which claimed to be Marxist, and Western social democracy, which was inspired by the ideas of another economist of note, John Maynard Keynes.

The new articulation of liberalism was supported by influential conservative think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It was aggressively propelled onto the international stage by larger-than-life conservative populist politicians such as Margaret That...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 The Neoliberal Challenge to Career Guidance: Mobilising Research, Policy and Practice Around Social Justice
• Part I Understanding the Neoliberal Context
• Part II Building Theories for Change
• Part III Research for Practice
• Contributors
• Index