In this article Ronald Sultana summarises his recent article from the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance journal entitled Four ‘dirty words’ in career guidance: from common sense to good sense.

In my paper I discuss the relationship between language, thought, and action, and reflect on how language can shape consciousness, values, sentiments, and behaviour. I focus on four words – “resilience,” “activation,” “vulnerability,” and “employability” – that are commonly used in discussions about career guidance, showing how they shape the way we think about and approach careers work.

The key argument is that these words – among many others in circulation – are part of a neoliberal narrative that encourages individuals to view problems as personal rather than as system-induced shortcomings. By buying into this discourse, career workers, with the best intentions in the world, end up developing tools to address these problems, inadvertently responsibilising and contributing to the oppression of individuals and groups. The very vocabulary used serves to entrap practitioners in a “field of force” where specific meanings are produced and exchanged, serving the interests of those in power.

Take the term ’vulnerability’, for instance, which shapes our understanding of and approach to individuals and groups considered “at risk.” The word in the dominant narrative is used to conjure images of personal weakness and an inherent deficit in certain individuals and groups, and is associated with a sense of inevitability and naturalness. Consider what happens when we transform the adjective into a verb, “vulnerabilisation”. This helps shift the focus from the individual to the environment and draws attention to the active process of causing vulnerability. One is vulnerabilised by economic and social systems that value profits over human rights and dignity, lead to unfair compensation and lack of respect.

A similar insidious process of victim-blaming can be observed at work when we use the term ‘resilience’, a word that is increasingly present in political and popular discourse. In my paper I briefly trace the origins and genealogy of the term and how it has been used across different fields, including the helping professions. In the dominant discourse, resilience is associated with individual heroic forbearance and courage, where one’s personal strength signals the ability to withstand external shock and to return to the previous state of affairs without requiring radical change. The neoliberal framing of resilience as a personal trait that can be developed through self-improvement and self-responsibility ultimately embraces conservation of the status quo, with nefarious consequences on individuals and communities.

‘Employability’ is yet another of the often-used terms in career guidance – a multifaceted concept that refers to the personal and vocationally-relevant qualities that increase the chances of becoming employed. It is often used to describe programmes that aim to increase one’s employability by teaching both technical skills and generic soft skills, such as self-awareness and emotional intelligence. It is also connected to having the right qualifications, work experience, and proven competence, as well as being willing to learn and adapt. In the context of neoliberalism, employability becomes a personal responsibility and individuals are encouraged to view themselves as entrepreneurs of the self. In the neoliberal narrative, unemployment is the result of personal deficit, thereby conveniently forgetting that everybody suddenly becomes ‘employable’ when the demand for labour outstrips supply. Rather than ‘employability’, I argue, one should focus on ‘employer-ability’, where the deficiency is rather more with a system whose very existence depends on maintaining a reserve army of workers at its beck and call. Full employment has never been a goal of a free market economy.

Finally, I discuss the term ‘activation’, a word that conjures up images of young people and adults who would rather passively lounge about scrounging benefits rather than work… and who therefore need to be ‘activated’. Guidance, as part of so-called Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), is called upon to ‘balance’ the rights and duties of the unemployed by providing support while also making demands. These measures often include employment counselling, job search assistance, personal action planning, and vocational training and work experience. Activation is often punitive and requires beneficiaries to demonstrate responsibility by participating in government-sponsored programmes, updating their resumes, improving their behaviour… and accepting practically any job that they are offered. Those who do not show willingness to be ‘activated’ face sanctions, including the withholding of benefits. Such a framing of the problem conceals the fact that activation is driven by state commitment to a neoliberal economic doctrine, one that aims to reduce welfare spending by pushing down wage demands, increasing labour market flexibility, and lowering the cost of labour.

I conclude my paper by inviting career workers to continue engaging in contrapuntal readings of terms that circulate unproblematically around us, shaping our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions in ways that support neoliberalism. As career workers, it is important to be aware of how language can influence understanding and to resist the colonization of language by values that are alien to us. Changing language will not transform society overnight, but critical awareness of the powerful hold that words have on us helps contribute to the process of resisting dominant ideologies and creating alternative ways of understanding and approaching guidance work.

View the original paper in the IAEVG Journal.