Journal Article


Anticipatory socialisation and the construction of the employable graduate: A critical analysis of employers' graduate careers websites

Abstract

A discourse of employability saturates the Higher Education sector in the UK. Government and employers call on universities to produce employable graduates who are attractive to the labour market and can sustain their future marketability by taking responsibility for protean self-development. While the neoliberal assumptions behind this call have attracted robust critique, the extent to which employers shape graduating students’ subjectivities and sense of worth as (potentially employable) workers has escaped scrutiny. Inspired by Foucauldian analyses of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices, this article examines employers’ graduate careers websites and explores the discursive construction of the ‘employable graduate’. The article contends that these websites function as a mechanism of anticipatory socialisation through which HRM practices extend managerial control into the transitional space of pre-recruitment, with the aim of engaging students’ consent to particular norms of employability.

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Authors

Handley, K

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Business\Department of Business and Management

Dates

Year of publication: 2017
Date of RADAR deposit: 2017-03-21


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


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