In this post Ricky Gee of Nottingham Trent University explores how technological change might impact on career guidance and examines how we might build a more critical response to notions of ‘career’ and ‘progress.
One of the major tasks of the sub discipline of the ‘sociology of work’ is to chart how technological developments influence the world of work. For example, Edgell highlights how technology shapes the organisation and management of work and in-turn the creation of social divisions.
Such schemas present how the development of the hoe through to the smart phone provide important markers tracing the boundaries between societal epochs, such as hunter gather, agrarian, industrial and post-industrial capitalist epochs. Such accounts provide a linear schema of human progress suggesting that the more complex and intricate the technology the more rational and civilised the epoch becomes. Though missing from such schema is the advent of the gun and the use of its inheritors to oppress particular people, justified by forms of scientific racism, for particular territories and resources. The inclusion of such negative aspects of technological ‘advancement’ or what Virilio describes as derailment can become a means of reconfiguring our understanding of the formation of modernity and the current context that influences action.
Technology and career education and guidance
Within a post-industrial milieu, shaped by what is often described as the digital information age, including continual automation, it is no coincidence that career education and guidance (CEG) becomes required to ask questions of technology. Consideration is likely to include the use of technology within work, how this may transform work, how it may be used for modes of resistance as well as accessing and interpretating a vast array of information to aid career management.
As Hooley points out in the Career guidance for social justice edited collection ‘it is surprising that automation, artificial intelligence and robotics have been given scant attention in the recent career guidance literature. If robots can transform the nature and extent of human work, career guidance needs to attend to this transformation carefully’ (pp. 94).
This is an assertion I would like to address, not only in this brief web article but more extensively in a recent article published in the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. To attend to these transformations of society I wish to bring into question our notions of ‘career’ and one of its central tenets, from the birth of the modern age, ‘progress’. I utilise the work of Virilio who argues that progress within our current context is synonymous to speed of production and consumption, where progress is to be viewed as a propaganda and a cult of speed.
What is career and does it need to progress?
This is a question that I have been writing about, influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology since 2016, and one which I am aware is becoming increasingly placed under scrutiny in the literature.
It is evident that the common use and everyday discourse of career adhere to notions of paid work with a linear progression through a hierarchical ladder. The Chicago School advocated for career to involve a person’s subjective understanding of their place in society, to include multiple strands such as work, housing, health etc… Doing so moves career beyond the vista of paid work, an activity that is more than likely to serve the capitalist class, especially when advocating a progression up an organisation’s hierarchical structure. As Gellner points out, such a discourse is in line with a middle-class life mirroring the logic of modernity which experiences the decline of religion and spiritual notions of heaven leaving a void left for progress to fill.
Progress thus becomes for the modern human a ‘secularised salvation’ a schema that not only mirrors a middle-class life but also western history of collectives – a movement from clans to tribes to metropolises – shaped by the supposed project of enlightenment. As Andrews asserts the enlightenment was essential in providing the intellectual basis for Western imperialism and provided justification for genocide, slavery and colonialism that are ‘utterly indispensable to Western progress’ (pp. 2). With the project of modernity hinging upon industrial capitalism and its serving colonial logic, speed of production becomes paramount, where time = money and speed = power. It is here that the work of Virilio becomes useful, where Virilio asserts that the propaganda of progress becomes an ideology that supresses other ways of seeing and being.
Given such insights I am advocating for a deconstruction of career, to consider the vested interests that shape its framing, a framing that invariably hinges upon the concepts of paid work and progress. As I have highlighted here paid work is likely to serve capital in a neo-colonial world that is still shaped by a logic of white supremacy, entwined with notions of technological progress, a propaganda and cult of speed.
Put simply, we are coerced to consider how the new smart phone or virtual reality kit provides a better existence without considering who mines for the minerals used to construct the product, who is positioned to work in a sweatshop to make such technology and who gets to consume it. I would also argue that those that consume such products are placed within a continually augmented and fast paced reality which challenges our cognitive abilities to keep up.
What is one to do?
What becomes apparent is that the position of CEG within this unfair global context is likely to influence its action. So, if the guidance practitioner is to consider social justice, a justice that is likely to be out of reach, a justice that is always to come, they need to become acutely aware of the parameters of their context and the social mechanisms that shape action, knowledge and distribution of resources.
My argument in the BJGC paper, please do read for a more detailed analysis, is that within the post-industrial milieu, those further from the mode of production are in a more precarious position than those at the core, as they are required to adapt at a greater speed, where speed of change influences precarity.
The question becomes how could career studies and practice respond to such dynamics? Especially given its recent social justice turn, where career guidance is asserted to be an agent for emancipation via adaptive career guidance, or where guidance can take note of Young’s faces of oppression to inform its interactions. Therefore, how might a critical analysis of career, to include a critique of progress, its imperial as well as propagandist forms, inform such practice?
My hope is that this argument opens up a needed discussion within the guidance community to contribute to the already initiated social justice turn.
Critical Perspectives on Career and Career Guidance (COCAG) 
Reblogged this on mylifework.
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