Tristram Hooley discusses his contribution to a critical employability event held at Oxford Brookes University.

A few weeks ago I was invited to present to undergraduates as part of Oxford Brookes University’s Key Tips for Surviving Work event. The event was organised by Ma​ïa Pal who is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations, but who has been becoming increasingly interested in critical takes on the employability agenda within UK higher education. She is one of the authors of the new literature review on employability published by Advance HE.

The event brought me together with Christine Lewis, a trade unionist and researcher, Humza Naeem, a recent graduate who talked about his experience of racism and management bullying in the workplace, and Neal Harris who is a lecture in sociology and talked about how a Marxist analysis of the nature of work and alienation could inform students’ thinking about their career. In other words this was not your typical employability event. Rather it represented a serious attempt to engage undergraduate students in thinking about the nature, challenges and politics of work and career. It would have been nice to have been able to spend more time talking to the students about what they made of all of this, but this was just the first of a series of sessions on critical employability and so undoubtedly students will return to these themes again in subsequent sessions.

In my contribution I tried to reframe the concept of career as a democratic and participatory one which is about how we interact with society and its institutions. I then went on to adapt the five signposts for a socially just career guidance (which I’ve previously discussed in various places on this site e.g. here) into a framework for individuals’ to take action. My slides are available if you want to see what I did.

In his presentation, Neal Harris made an important critique of what I had said that I’ve been reflecting on subsequently. In the presentation I make the point that work is a challenging and alienating experience. In many cases it is where people experience most oppression. I then go on to argue that we can’t escape it and that there isn’t a space that exists outside of capitalism where we can go as an alternative. In making this point I was trying to take on the assumptions that some students and careers professionals have that through career decision making we can avoid full participation in the capitalist system. For example making a choice to work in an NGO rather than an arms company is an ethical and socially justice choice. While I don’t disagree with the idea that people can make better or worse career choices for themselves and for the planet, I am keen to avoid a narrative where the social justice movement in career guidance is seen as being about steering people into public sector or NGO type jobs. These kinds of individual career decisions might be a good idea for the individuals involved, but they won’t lead to system or structural change. The public sector is not an alternative to capitalism, but part of the capitalist system. This is what I was trying to say when I was arguing that there is no space outside.

Neal’s point was that the way that I presented it was disempowering, viewing capitalism as an iron cage from which there was no escape. While this wasn’t my intention I can see the point that he was making. By arguing that there is no space outside of capitalism we run the risk of communicating to people that there can never be such a space. In this vision, the purpose of career and employability learning becomes to use critical theory to increase people’s resilience to oppression. In future presentations I’m keen to stress more strongly the fact that there are visions and possibilities for ways that we can move past capitalism. There are even the kinds of examples of post(non)-capitalist social and economic organisation that are described by Erik Olin Wright in his book Envisioning Real Utopias which provide some inspirational insights into what could be and indeed of what is actually possible within current constraints. Again I think that we need to be careful about arguing that social justice in career is primarily about working for a co-op or some other kind of democratic organisation, but it does at least show the possibility of being something other than a wage slave.

Perhaps even more importantly, I think that I should try and draw out some of the ways in which industrial, political and community struggles can offer people ways to challenge the iron cage that they find themselves in. I try and do this through using the five signposts framework, but in the description of the reality that students experience, I think that it is important to increase the emphasis on its contingency and the way in which struggles for justice are always tugging at the contradictions within capitalism, even if so far they have failed to pull them apart altogether.

All in all, Ma​ïa Pal’s work at Oxford Brookes offers an exciting example of new and critical ways to organise employability provision. I hope the students enjoyed participating, and learnt as much as I did!