consensus theory of employability

consensus theory of employability

30.12.2020, , 0

Overall, consensus theory is a useful perspective for understanding the role of crime in society and the ways in which it serves as a means of defining and enforcing social norms and values. 'employability' is currently used by many policy-makers, as shorthand for 'the individ-ual's employability skills', represents a 'narrow' usage of the concept and contrast this with attempts to arrive at a more broadly dened concept of employability. Present study overcomes this issue by introducing a framework that clearly In effect, individuals can no longer rely on their existing educational and labour market profiles for shaping their longer-term career progression. Purpose. The correspondence between HE and the labour market rests largely around three main dimensions: (i) in terms of the knowledge and skills that HE transfers to graduates and which then feeds back into the labour market, (ii) the legitimatisation of credentials that serve as signifiers to employers and enable them to screen prospective future employees and (iii) the enrichment of personal and cultural attributes, or what might be seen as personality. While mass HE potentially opens up opportunities for non-traditional graduates, new forms of cultural reproduction and social closure continue to empower some graduates more readily than others (Scott, 2005). Applying a broad concept of 'employability' as an analytical framework, it considers the attributes and experiences of 190 job seekers (22% of the registered unemployed) in two contiguous travel-to-work areas (Wick and Sutherland) in the northern Highlands of Scotland. The neo-Weberian theorising of Collins (2000) has been influential here, particularly in examining the ways in which dominant social groups attempt to monopolise access to desired economic goods, including the best jobs. (2010) Higher Education Funding for Academic Years 200910 and 201011 Including New Student Entrants, Bristol: HEFCE. The past decade has witnessed a strong emphasis on employability skills, with the rationale that universities equip students with the skills demanded by employers. Expands the latter into positional conflict theory, which explains how the market for credentials is rigged and how individuals are ranked in it. On the other hand, less optimistic perspectives tend to portray contemporary employment as being both more intensive and precarious (Sennett, 2006). Reducing the system/structure down to the graduate labour market, there are parallels between Archer's work and consensus theory (Brown et al. While investment in HE may result in favourable outcomes for some graduates, this is clearly not the case across the board. Report to HEFCE by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information. What has perhaps been characteristic of more recent policy discourses has been the strong emphasis on harnessing HE's activities to meet changing economic demands. Teichler, U. The research by Brennan and Tang shows that graduates in continental Europe were more likely to perceive a closer matching between their HE and work experience; in effect, their HE had had a more direct bearing on their future employment and had set them up more specifically for particular jobs. Longitudinal research on graduates transitions to the labour market (Holden and Hamblett, 2007; Nabi et al., 2010) also illustrates that graduates initial experiences of the labour market can confirm or disrupt emerging work-related identities. Mason, G. (2002) High skills utilisation under mass higher education: Graduate employment in the service industries in Britain, Journal of Education and Work 14 (4): 427456. Rather than being insulated from these new challenges, highly educated graduates are likely to be at the sharp end of the increasing intensification of work, and its associated pressures around continual career management. Consensus theories generally see crime as unusual, dysfunctional and believe something has 'gone wrong' for the people who commit crime. The purpose of this study is to explain the growth and popularity of consensus theory in present day sociology. Employability skills are sometimes called foundational skills or job-readiness skills. For some graduates, HE continues to be a clear route towards traditional middle-class employment and lifestyle; yet for others it may amount to little more than an opportunity cost. This will help further elucidate the ways in which graduates employability is played out within the specific context of their working lives, including the various modes of professional development and work-related learning that they are engaged in and the formation of their career profiles. This has some significant implications for the ways in which they understand their employability and the types of credentials and forms of capital around which this is built. Ainley, P. (1994) Degrees of Difference, London: Lawrence Washart. This may be largely due to the fact that employers have been reasonably responsive to generic academic profiles, providing that graduates fulfil various other technical and job-specific demands. A consensus theory approach sees sport as a source of collective harmony, a way of binding people together in a shared experience. Smart, S., Hutchings, M., Maylor, U., Mendick, H. and Menter, I. A consensus theory is one which believes that the institutions of society are working together to maintain social cohesion and stability. Chapter 1 1. Mass HE may therefore be perpetuating the types of structural inequalities it was intended to alleviate. (2011) The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green, F. and Zhu, Y. Employability depends on your knowledge, skills and attitudes, how you use those assets, and how you present them to employers. (2003) and Reay et al. The new UK coalition government, working within a framework of budgetary constraints, have been less committed to expansion and have begun capping student numbers (HEFCE, 2010). Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, Not logged in Little, B. These negotiations continue well into graduates working lives, as they continue to strive towards establishing credible work identities. Structural Functionalism/ Consensus Theory. The label consensus theory of truth is currently attached to a number of otherwise very diverse philosophical perspectives. Most significantly, they may be better able to demonstrate the appropriate personality package increasingly valued in the more elite organisations (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown and Lauder, 2009). Perhaps more positively, there is evidence that employers place value on a wider range of softer skills, including graduates values, social awareness and generic intellectuality dispositions that can be nurtured within HE and further developed in the workplace (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011). Various analysis of graduate returns (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Green and Zhu, 2010) have highlighted the significant disparities that exist among graduates; in particular, some marked differences between the highest graduate earners and the rest. Wolf, A. Power and Whitty's research shows that graduates who experienced more elite earlier forms of education, and then attendance at prestigious universities, tend to occupy high-earning and high-reward occupations. (2008) Graduate development in European employment: Issues and contradictions, Education and Training 50 (5): 379390. Eurostat. His theory is thus known as demand-oriented approach. Research on the more subjective, identity-based aspects of graduate employability also shows that graduates dispositions tend to derive from wider aspects of their educational and cultural biographies, and that these exercise some substantial influence on their propensities towards future employment. Brown, P. and Hesketh, A.J. This paper aims to place the issue of graduate employability in the context of the shifting inter-relationship between HE and the labour market, and the changing regulation of graduate employment. Consensus Theory: the Basics According to consensus theories, for the most part society works because most people are successfully socialised into shared values through the family Smetherham, C. (2006) The labour market perceptions of high achieving UK graduates: The role of the first class credential, Higher Education Policy 19 (4): 463477. It draws upon various studies to highlight the different labour market perceptions, experiences and outcomes of graduates in the United Kingdom and other national contexts. Moreau, M.P. The perspective gained much currency in the mid 20th century in the works of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, for whom . Non-traditional graduates or new recruits to the middle classes may be less skilled at reading the changing demands of employers (Savage, 2003; Reay et al., 2006). The traditional human and cultural capital that employers have always demanded now constitutes only part of graduates employability narratives. This tends to manifest itself in the form of positional conflict and competition between different groups of graduates competing for highly sought-after forms of employment (Brown and Hesketh, 2004). Employability is a product consisting of a specific set of skills, such as soft, hard, technical, and transferable. The concerns that have been well documented within the non-graduate youth labour market (Roberts, 2009) are also clearly resonating with the highly qualified. Research in the field also points to increasing awareness among graduates around the challenges of future employability. There has been perhaps an increasing government realisation that future job growth is likely to be halted for the immediate future, no longer warranting the programme of expansion intended by the previous government. A further policy response towards graduate employability has been around the enhancement of graduates skills, following the influential Dearing Report (1997). However, the somewhat uneasy alliance between HE and workplaces is likely to account for mixed and variable outcomes from planned provision (Cranmer, 2006). The paper then explores research on graduates labour market returns and outcomes, and the way they are positioned in the labour market, again highlighting the national variability to graduates labour market outcomes. Hesketh, A.J. Theory could be viewed as a coherent group of assumptions or propositions put forth to . Slider with three articles shown per slide. For Beck and Beck-Germsheim (2002), processes of institutionalised individualisation mean that the labour market effectively becomes a motor for individualisation, in that responsibility for economic outcomes is transferred away from work organisations and onto individuals. Wilton, N. (2008) Business graduates and management jobs: An employability match made in heaven? Journal of Education and Work 21 (2): 143158. As Little and Archer (2010) argue, the relative looseness in the relationship between HE and the labour market has traditionally not presented problems for either graduates or employers, particularly in more flexible economies such as the United Kingdom. Hassard, J., McCann, L. and Morris, J.L. (2006) The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining the physical and psychological mobility, Journal of Vocational Behavior 69 (1): 1929. (2009) Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1): 3553. VuE*ce!\S&|3>}x`nbC_Y*o0HIS?vV7?& wociJZWM_ dBu\;QoU{=A*U[1?!q+ 5I3O)j`u_S ^bA0({{9O?-#$ 3? This tends to be reflected in the perception among graduates that, while graduating from HE facilitates access to desired employment, it also increasingly has a limited role (Tomlinson, 2007; Brooks and Everett, 2009; Little and Archer, 2010). research investigating employability from the employers' perspective has been qualitative in nature. This has been driven mainly by a number of key structural changes both to higher education institutions (HEIs) and in the nature of the economy. editors. The functionalism perspective is a paradigm influenced by American sociology from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, although its origins lay in the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing at the end of the 19th century. However despite there being different concepts to analyse the make up of "employability", the consensus of these is that there are three key qualities when assessing the employability of graduates: These . Perhaps increasingly central to the changing dynamic between HE and the labour market has been the issue of graduate employability. In countries where training routes are less demarcated (for instance those with mass HE systems), these differences are less pronounced. Wider critiques of skills policy (Wolf, 2007) have tended to challenge naive conceptualisations of skills, bringing into question both their actual relationship to employee practices and the extent to which they are likely to be genuinely demand-led. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). (2007) The transition from higher education into work: Tales of cohesion and fragmentation, Education + Training 49 (7): 516585. A Social Cognitive Theory. Dearing, R. (1997) The Dearing Report: Report for the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education: Higher Education in the Learning Society, London: HMSO. Much of the graduate employability focus has been on supply-side responses towards enhancing graduates' skills for the labour market. Tomlinson, M. (2008) The degree is not enough: Students perceptions of the role of higher education credentials for graduate work and employability, British Journal of Sociology of Education 29 (1): 4961. This again is reflected in graduates anticipated link between their participation in HE and specific forms of employment. If individuals are able to capitalise upon their education and training, and adopt relatively flexible and proactive approaches to their working lives, then they will experience favourable labour market returns and conditions. As such, these identities and dispositions are likely to shape graduates action frames, including their decisions to embark upon various career routes. 229240. Furthermore, this relationship was marked by a relatively stable flow of highly qualified young people into well-paid and rewarding employment. The problem of managing one's future employability is therefore seen largely as being up to the individual graduate. Smart et al. This is further raising concerns around the distribution and equity of graduates economic opportunities, as well as the traditional role of HE credentials in facilitating access to desired forms of employment (Scott, 2005). Employability. What such research has shown is that the wider cultural features of graduates frame their self-perceptions, and which can then be reinforced through their interactions within the wider employment context. The Varieties of Capitalism approach developed by Hall and Soskice (2001) may be useful here in explaining the different ways in which different national economies coordinate the relationship between their education systems and human resource strategies. Employment relations is the study of the regulation of the employment relationship between employer and employee, both collectively and individually, and the determination . (2009) reported significant awareness among graduates of class inequalities for accessing specific jobs, along with expectations of potential disadvantages through employers biases around issues such as appearance, accent and cultural code. It first relates the theme of graduate employability to the changing dynamic in the relationship between HE and the labour market, and the changing role of HE in regulating graduate-level work. The strengths of consensus theory are that it is a more objective approach and that it is easier to achieve agreement. Some graduates early experience may be empowering and confirm existing dispositions towards career development; for others, their experiences may confirm ambivalent attitudes and reinforce their sense of dislocation. For such students, future careers were potentially a significant source of personal meaning, providing a platform from which they could find fulfilment, self-expression and a credible adult identity. There are many different lists of cardinal accomplishments . This may have a strong bearing upon how both graduates and employers socially construct the problem of graduate employability. It also introduces 'positional conflict theory' as a way of Taylor, J. and Pick, D. (2008) The work orientations of Australian university students, Journal of Education and Work 21 (5): 405421. What their research illustrates is that these graduates labour market choices are very much wedded to their pre-existing dispositions and learner identities that frame what is perceived to be appropriate and available. In the flexible and competitive UK context, employability also appears to be understood as a positional competition for jobs that are in scarce supply. 2.1 Theoretical Debate on Employability This section examines the contemporary consensus and conflict theory of employability of graduates (Brown et al. Thetable below has been compiled by a range of UK-based companies (see company details at the end of this guide), and it lists the Top 10 Employability Skills which they look for in potential employees - that means you! Such changes have coincided with what has typically been seen as a shift towards a more flexible, post-industrialised knowledge-driven economy that places increasing demands on the workforce and necessitates new forms of work-related skills (Hassard et al., 2008). The end of work and its commentators, The Sociological Review 55 (1): 81103. Thus, HE has been traditionally viewed as providing a positive platform from which graduates could integrate successfully into economic life, as well as servicing the economy effectively. Moreover, in the context of flexible and competitive globalisation, the highly educated may find themselves forming part of an increasingly disenfranchised new middle class, continually at the mercy of agile, cost-driven flows in skilled labour, and in competition with contemporaries from newly emerging economies. Graduates in different occupations were shown to be drawing upon particular graduate skill-sets, be that occupation-specific expertise, managerial decision-making skills, and interactive, communication-based competences. Less positively, their research exposed gender disparities gap in both pay and the types of occupations graduates work within. Harvey, L. (2000) New realities: The relationship between higher education and employment, Tertiary Education and Management 6 (1): 317. Yet research has raised questions over employers overall effectiveness in marshalling graduates skills in the labour market (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Morley and Aynsley, 2007). In the context of a knowledge economy, consensus theory advocates that knowledge, skills and innovation are the driving factors of our society. The challenge for graduate employees is to develop strategies that militate against such likelihoods. X@vFuyfDdf(^vIm%h>IX, OIDq8 - This is perhaps further reflected in the degree of qualification-based and skills mismatches, often referred to as vertical mismatches. This has coincided with the movement towards more flexible labour markets, the overall contraction of management forms of employment, an increasing intensification in global competition for skilled labour and increased state-driven attempts to maximise the outputs of the university system (Harvey, 2000; Brown and Lauder, 2009). 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