Consuming work and managing employability: students' work orientations and the process of contemporary job search

Unemployment and precarity have become key features of 21st century work. Employability is presented as a solution to these issues. Individuals are exhorted to manage their employability, in order to be able to exercise choice in the labour market. While employability is individualsʼ responsibility, governments, employers and educational bodies simply provide opportunities for its development. Higher education is a key site for this process, as employability rhetoric increasingly informs policy and practice. It is founded on rhetoric that emphasises flexibility, skills and marketability, shaping students in certain ways with the risk of being deemed unemployable as the consequence of disengagement. At the same time, there has been a rise in employer presence on university campuses. Recruitment is no longer its key feature. Traditional ʻmilkroundʼ recruitment has been replaced by year round marketing campaigns. As a result, students are continually exposed to a selection of employers promoting a specific image of work and work orientations. The theoretical framework of this study is informed by works of Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin. Gramsciʼs notion of ʻcommon senseʼ is central to analysing the rhetoric on work and employability present on campus. I also give voice to students by recounting how they as ʻdialogical selvesʼ engage with such ʻcommon senseʼ. These issues are explored through an analysis of data gathered during seventeen months of fieldwork. This includes longitudinal interviews with students, participant observation, documents, interviews with careers advisors and non-participant observation of career consultations. From this, I argue that there was a strongly normative image of work constructed around an orientation I term ʻconsumption of workʼ. This image was closely associated with consumption opportunities, marketed to students through corporate presence on campus. ʻConsumption of workʼ was central to shaping studentsʼ work orientations and only few of them resisted the ʻcommon senseʼ. Those who made ʻalternativeʼ choices articulated doubt about these, with the challenge to employability as a key reason for it. Employability was presented to students as a lifelong project of the self, where constant acquisition, development and selling of skills were necessary to maintain a position in the labour market. Many students embraced the rhetoric of skill ʻpossessionʼ, but were ʻplaying the gameʼ when ʻdemonstratingʼ skills. Conforming to what the employers were willing them to ʻdemonstrateʼ and understanding how to do this became the primary condition for achieving employability

The consumption of work: Representations and interpretations of the meaning of work at a UK university

This paper focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work towards what we term ‘consumption of work’. Second, we argue that this new social construction is made up of three dimensions: consumption of an idealised image of work, consumption through specific work processes and consumption of self-development opportunities at work. We conclude by suggesting ways in which this argument could be researched further

The consumption of work: representations and interpretations of the meaning of work at a UK university

This paper focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work towards what we term ‘consumption of work’. Second, we argue that this new social construction is made up of three dimensions: consumption of an idealised image of work, consumption through specific work processes and consumption of self-development opportunities at work. We conclude by suggesting ways in which this argument could be researched further

Employability: Is it time we get critical?

This article encourages the media, and ultimately the public, to look more critically at the neoliberal notion of employability, which is discussed from a variety of angles, but is put under little critical scrutiny today

Introduction to the translation of 'Farmers and a degrowth economy in Russia': On surprises and doubts

This is an introduction to a translation (from Russian into English) of the interview with Teodor Shanin

Ten questions to open access editors

Open access editors replying questions about being part of open access journals and its challenges. This was part of the issue titled 'OPEN' of the Journal of Peer Production (issue 13

Consumption of work and the work of consumption

Today, work and consumption are notably blurred. Consumption matters are found to make inroads into the realm of work, while consumption gains traction in the domain of production. This special issue of ephemera gets to the heart of this phenomenon. Covering a range of themes – genetic testing, self-quantification, migration, popular media and modern workplaces – the contributions to this issue call attention to the ethico-politics of productive and consumptive aspects of contemporary life. Specifically, the contributions address practices that, under capitalism, fall prey to self-perpetuating accumulation, as well as reproduction and sedimentation of social divisions, which shape who we are, what we do and how we relate