Thank you to Ayşe Yavuz who is a communications volunteer for work group 3. She has written a reflective post which explores the work of Bourdieu, and its relevance to career guidance and recent activities in the work group. Dr. Ayşe Yavuz is an independent researcher holding a PhD in Educational Sciences from Aydın Adnan Menderes University, Türkiye, with a background in Psychological Counseling and Guidance.

“Every power… which manages to impose meanings as legitimate… adds its own symbolic force.”

— Bourdieu & Passeron

Career guidance is often framed as helping individuals make informed choices, encouraging them to explore interests, strengths, and possible futures. The language is familiar: choice, potential, self-discovery.

But how free are these choices in practice?

To explore this question, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, as developed in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), offers a useful starting point. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) demonstrate how education systems can reproduce social inequalities while appearing neutral and meritocratic. In this sense, power does not primarily operate through force, but through the ability to define what is seen as legitimate, appropriate, and achievable. Importantly, this form of domination is rarely visible. Instead, it operates through what is taken for granted, shaping everyday assumptions about what is considered realistic, what is seen as “not for people like me,” and what simply feels out of reach.

Bourdieu (1977), in Outline of a Theory of Practice, develops this perspective further through the concepts of habitus and misrecognition, showing how social structures become internalized as dispositions that shape perception. Opportunities are therefore not neutral options but socially interpreted possibilities, making some futures imaginable and others unthinkable. In this sense, psychological resources such as hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy can be understood not simply as individual traits, but as socially and structurally mediated resources, shaped by access to different forms of capital (Yavuz & Çengel Schoville, 2026). From this perspective, career decisions do not emerge from equal possibilities but from a socially structured horizon of what appears attainable.

Building on this, the theory of careership (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997) further explains how career decisions are shaped within a horizon for action, where choices are pragmatic and situated rather than fully rational, and closely linked to individuals’ experiences and positions.

Extending this perspective, recent discussions within Working Group 3 draw attention to the spatial dimensions of career development. In her webinar on Career Guidance for Social Justice in Rural Contexts, Dr. Rosie Alexander highlights how career aspirations are often oriented toward mobility, while the conditions that make mobility possible remain unequally distributed, and cautions against approaches that risk responsibilising individuals for navigating structurally shaped constraints. This introduces an important tension: what may be presented as beneficial for individuals, such as leaving rural areas for education or employment, does not necessarily contribute to the sustainability of local communities. At the same time, rural contexts should not be understood merely as spaces of lack, but as places with their own forms of value, belonging, and opportunity, raising questions about how far career guidance practices may encourage particular futures without fully engaging with the conditions that shape them.

These ideas are further developed in Alexander’s (2023) spatio-relational model of career development, which frames careers as socially and spatially structured processes of belonging and becoming. From this perspective, individuals do not simply navigate abstract opportunities; rather, careers unfold through relationships, locations, and access to resources over time, extending the notion of horizon for action to include spatial contexts within which individuals live, move, and imagine their futures.

Within Working Group 3, other activities also engage with these questions in different ways. The webinar The Four C’s of Career Learning! (Dr. Petra Røise) introduces a reflective framework that encourages critical questioning, collaboration, and attention to the social contexts of career learning. The workshop Enhancing Career Counseling Practices with Generative AI (Dr. Nurten Karacan Özdemir) explores AI integration while emphasising the importance of critical evaluation and human-centred approaches. Similarly, Earning While Learning (Dr. Kim Allen and Dr. Kirsty Finn) draws on empirical research to examine how students navigate the intersection of work and study, highlighting the inequalities shaping these experiences.

Taken together, these discussions point to a shared line of inquiry within Working Group 3, exploring how career development is shaped not only by individual choices but by the social, spatial, and structural conditions that make those choices meaningful.

Returning to this broader perspective, Burawoy (2019) highlights how symbolic violence operates most effectively when it remains unrecognized, embedded in everyday perceptions and practices. This insight is particularly relevant for career guidance, where processes often appear neutral while simultaneously shaping unequal outcomes.

Recognizing these dynamics does not mean denying individual agency. Rather, it allows for a more nuanced understanding of how agency operates within the social and spatial contexts that shape both opportunities and perceptions of those opportunities.

Perhaps, then, career guidance is not only about supporting decisions but also about examining how options come to appear possible, desirable, or out of reach. It is not only about expanding horizons, but about understanding how they are formed.

This invites reflection on what is encouraged through guidance practices, and how it is experienced, especially when what appears as choice may already be shaped by underlying structures. It also raises questions about whose interests are served, and whether what benefits individuals aligns with the communities in which decisions are lived. Have you come across these dynamics in your own context or practice? If so, how have you experienced or made sense of them?

References

Alexander, R. (2023). Spatialising careership: Towards a spatio-relational model of career development. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 44(2), 291–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2153647

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812507

Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (R. Nice, Trans.). Sage.

Burawoy, M. (2019). Symbolic violence: Conversations with Bourdieu. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478007173

Hodkinson, P., & Sparkes, A. C. (1997). Careership: A sociological theory of career decision making. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18(1), 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569970180102

Yavuz, A., & Çengel Schoville, M. (2026). Rethinking psychological capital: A Bourdieusian critique of neoliberal subjectivity. Human Arenas. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-026-00557-7