Why social science matters issue 2 (free download)

Why Social Science Matters Issue 2 Employer Engagement and Employability after the Crash: Opportunities and Challenges for Learning, Teaching and Employment Edited by Àngels Trias i Valls

Published September 2009 by C‐SAP: Higher Education Academy Subject Network for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics ISBN 1 902191404 www.c‐sap.bham.ac.uk

Preface Why Social Science Matters is a new series of essays published by the Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, which is part of the Higher Education Academy. These papers aim to provide a space to explore a range of ideas, through the lenses of the social sciences, around learning and teaching. We will publish WSSM to accompany sessions and conferences at existing C‐SAP events, or to reflect on contemporary events and happenings in learning and teaching in Higher Education. WSSM serve as an introduction to a debate and for reflection afterwards, and take a variety of forms, from short provocative essays, to head‐to‐head conversations and debates, to longer think‐pieces and interviews with leaders in specific fields. Contributors write in an informed but informal style, making the work accessible to a wider academic and non academic audience. If you have ideas for an edition of Why Social Science Matters, then please feel free to discuss these with the series editors.

Malcolm Todd: m.j.todd@shu.ac.uk Darren Marsh: darren.marsh@c‐sap.bham.ac.uk

Contents

Leading Article 1. Fick Higher Education, Employability after the Credit Crunch Patrick Ainley p.5 Responses and Comments 2. Three Cheers for Socially Valuable Skills John Craig p.9 3. Examining Employability: modes of explaining ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in the transition from university to work Annika Coughlin p.12 4. Higher Education funding and the current crisis through the lens of long economic cycles Vincent Carpentier p.15 5. How to earn a living without selling your soul Max Farrar p.18 6. Employability of International Students : The role of Pedagogy Yiu Tung Suen p.23 7. Sociology and the Public(s): Using Public Sociology to Rework Student Engagement beyond University Matt Badcock p.25 8. Last in line: when employability skill are not enough Àngels Trias i Valls p.28

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1. Fick Higher Education, Employability After the Credit Crunch Patrick Ainley, Professor of Training and Education at the University of Greenwich School of Education and Training ‘there has never been such gross over‐simplification as in modern Britain.

Since the country is dedicated to the one over‐riding purpose of economic expansion, people are judged according to the single test of how much they increase production, or the knowledge that will, directly or indirectly, lead to that consummation… The ability to raise production, directly or indirectly, is known as “intelligence”: this iron measure is the judgement of society upon its members.’ Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy pp.134‐5 and note 2, p.160.

Introduction Many students currently seem in denial about their employment prospects on graduation. They are, as The Guardian headlined (10/1/09) ‘Generation Crunch’ who feel ‘like someone who is suddenly smacked in the face by a friend’, having ‘dutifully studied for decent degrees, prettified their CVs with useful internships and bounced out of university last summer. The world was their oyster. And then: thud.’

Some seem depressed, a few are angry but can see no collective way to express their feelings, resolving only to be better prepared than the next person to fight their corner. Many take refuge in the illusion of a speedy return to ‘business as usual’, ignoring the effect this would have on gathering climate catastrophe. Most pathetic are assertions that ‘a degree from new University X is worth as much as a degree from any other university’ when the hierarchy of employment preferences is now closing on ‘the Magic Five’ or – in the banking sector – ‘the Big Three’ (FT 05/01/09).

‘Other graduates’, who until very recently were relatively recession proof, even if excluded from elite recruitment, face the prospect of ‘internships’ – working for nothing in temporary positions, while the predictable graduatisation of another band of jobs puts more pressure on non‐graduates. What is the way through this impasse in which education as a whole but higher education in particular faces its own credit crunch as unemployment rises? This affects not only students who have mortgaged their futures for fees and universities speculating in sub‐prime student markets but the whole educational bubble of recent years.

A crisis of legitimacy The crisis of legitimacy for education is aggravated by the obsessive vocational focus inflicted by successive governments upon schools, colleges and universities since Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976 (Ainley 2007). The result is that, even where formal study allows genuine intellectual development, students’ educational participation is largely instrumental to gain labour market credentials.

Now the rug has been pulled from this narrowing of meaning, there is little other justification for their efforts. ‘Overschooling’ is recognised as school, college and 5 | P a g e

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university graduates fail to find employment comparable to the level of qualification they have acquired. Their inability to capitalise on their investment in time and money leads to the conclusion that Education make you fick. This is a feeling students may come to share with their parents, among whom New Labour’s policy of widening participation – which has popularly presented itself as professionalizing the proletariat while arguably disguising a proletarianisation of the professions – has commanded widespread support with parents often financially and in other ways supporting their children’s efforts. First generation undergraduates often confirm the influence of parents who wanted them to benefit from opportunities they themselves did not have. ‘But my mum and dad don’t know what it’s like!’ they often add (Ainley 2008, 2).

While it is unpredictable whether the bursting of the education bubble will see a fall in applications to higher education – so far this year, they are up – other reactions are possible. The cost of education – especially for those entering HE and its persisting debt culture for the first time must be the major factor in current government deliberation over whether to raise fees as planned in 2010 differentiated by subject as well as by institution. Part‐time fees currently remain the same pro rata but afford a means of spreading the load and, despite a recent 3% fall, currently stand at 38% of all enrolments. Similarly, combined degrees allow students to ‘hedge their bets’ for ‘flexibility’. Living at home whilst studying also reduces the intensity of traditionally compressed 3‐year subject degree courses.

Alongside ‘standards‐based’ vocational courses (like teacher training) on which skill is reduced to competence and knowledge to information, this all makes large parts of HE more like FE. But the crisis in graduate employment threatens young people as a whole, especially those with ‘intermediate’ or few/no qualifications, as graduates lower their sights intensifying job replacement. The current recession will also increase the significance if not the number of ‘Mcjobs’ as many young people become resigned to them as a permanent source of employment. McDonalds themselves have promised to provide 10,000 ‘apprenticeships’ by 2010 for counter staff, after previously introducing the ‘Burgerlaureatte’ for supervisors and managers (Allen 2008).

‘Internships’ (a form of graduate work experience) and a promise to create 35,000 more ‘apprenticeships’ at a cost of £140,000 million – are – like the YTS schemes 30 years ago – at best temporary solutions. As BBC News (27/2/09) quoted the Association of Graduate Recruiters’ estimate that 300,000 graduates are chasing 30,000 ‘graduate jobs’, a return to national service is proposed by the latest issue of the worthy Prospect magazine!

But what is ‘a graduate job’?

The nature of ‘graduateness’ has been debated since the Dearing Review. More recently, Elias and Purcell (2004) divided ‘graduate jobs’ into five types ranging from the ‘traditional’ to ‘niche market 1 ’. ‘Graduatisation’ may add another layer to

1 Traditional graduate jobs eg. medicine, higher education, science, 12% Modern graduate jobs eg management, IT, 13% New graduate jobs eg marketing, sales, 16%

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this list, perhaps by including many more retail jobs. These are the jobs many students occupy part‐time (or often full‐time) during their years at school, college and on into university. For many students, working whilst studying traps them in a vicious circle in which it is established that – over a critical limit – term‐time employment reduces degree classification (Callender 2008).

Even Stevens (!) from the fastness of Oxford’s city wall, recognises that ‘The idea that one might be training an educated elite who would provide leadership in different areas of life has become… unsustainable’ (2004, 107). And yet it is perhaps in the traditional notion of The Idea of a University that a genuine justification might be found for an assertion of HE’s claim to ‘higherness’. In particular, the class‐based distinction between further and higher education lies in the division of labour and knowledge between managers and managed. So that, if the logic of trade training in FE is to proceed horizontally as far as required by management to acquire craft competences, the logic of professional education in HE is to gain a managerial overview of what Cardinal Newman in his classic formulation of The Idea of a University called ‘knowledge of the relative disposition of things’. This generalised knowledge is currently only available through the constricted form of mutually isolated academic disciplines to which it is supposedly common. It is traditionally tested in written examinations that are often little more than estimations of acquired cultural capital and hence indications of social status through demonstration of literary manipulation.

Yet, there is no necessary barrier to broadening further at the same time as rising higher. Indeed, university graduates are perpetually castigated by employers for the lack of such lower level competences. Their acquisition would combine ‘higher’ with ‘further’ education with training and ‘deep’ with ‘surface’ learning, theory with practice. Indeed, this was Marx’s prescription for what became ‘polytechnic education’, originally polytechnic training (Small 2005, 107). Such application in ‘thick HE’ would be combined with non‐academic but nevertheless generalised knowledge to avoid restriction of learning to the acquisition of disconnected competences and isolated bits of information to which so much skilled craft and now knowledgeable professional labour has been and is being reduced.

Conclusion This is the way to think about ‘employability’, instead of blaming the unemployed for not having made themselves ‘employable’ enough by going into more debt to undertake another course or training scheme when everybody knows you can make yourself as ‘employable’ as you like but this does not guarantee employment.

Students outwith the charmed circle of the Big Three or Magic Five, have to convince remaining employers that, while their abstract ‘book knowledge’ may not be expressed with the literary elegance of the accepted ‘Cambridge model essay’ (Mann 2003), their practical experience has given them the ‘nouse’ to put that theory into practice. In the long term however, the current crisis of legitimacy for the entire education system calls into question the continuing separation of the academic from Niche graduate jobs eg. leisure and sports management, 21% Non‐graduate jobs, 38%

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the vocational (as in the latest Diploma qualifications, for instance) and demands the integration of generalised knowledge with skill and competence.

References Ainley, P. ed., (2008) ‘Twenty years of schooling…’ Student reflections on their educational journeys’, London: Society for Research into Higher Education.

Ainley, P., (2007) ‘Across the Great Divide – from a welfare to a new market‐state, the case of VET’ in special issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training on Perspectives on vocational education and training in post‐war England ed. W. Richardson, 59:3, 369‐384.

Ainley, P. & Allen, M., (2007) Education make you fick, innit ? What has gone wrong in England’s schools, colleges and universities and how to start putting it right, London: Tufnell.

Allen, M., (2008) ‘Here comes the Burgerlaureatte!’ Campaign Teacher, Spring 2008.

Callender, C., (2008) ‘The impact of part‐time employment on higher education students’ academic attainment and achievement’, Journal of Education Policy 23:4, 359‐377.

Elias, P. & Purcell, K., (2004) Seven Years On; Graduate Careers in a Changing Labour Market, London: The Higher Education Careers Services Unit.

Mann, C., (2003) Summary Report of Findings of the Project on Indicators of Academic Performance’ in Cambridge University Reporter, 12/2.

Newman, J., (1907) The Idea of a University, London: Longmans.

Small, R., (2005) Marx and Education, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Stevens, R., (2004) University to Uni, The politics of higher education in England since 1944, London: Politicos, 2004.

Young, M., (1958) The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870 – 2033, An Essay on Education and Equality, London: Thames and Hudson

Responses and Comments

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2. Three Cheers for Socially Valuable Skills Dr John Craig, Fellow in Learning and Teaching, Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Huddersfield The Leitch Report (2006) recommended that Higher Education Providers (HEPs) should engage with employers to develop the economically valuable skills of the UK workforce. These ideas have been taken up by Government and are currently pursued through a range of initiatives known as the Higher Skills Agenda. In this paper, I will identify how this differs from the employability agenda and then consider three possible responses to it.

The recommendations of the Leitch Report go considerably beyond existing conceptualisations of 'employability' that have been current in higher education since the publication of the Dearing Report (1997). The employability agenda focused on how students (implicitly assumed to be full‐time and progressing from school) could develop a range of key skills (such as numeracy and use of information technology) which their future employers might require. This approach has proved problematic for a number of reasons. It has produced a dualism between subject knowledge and generic skills. This has resulted in cycles of curriculum planning which veer between attempts to embed skills within subject based teaching, and the development of generic skills modules often delivered outside of subject teaching teams. There are also difficulties in defining the extent to which generic skills such as problem solving can be truly transferable. As Keep and Payne (2004: 58) point out, problem solving in one context may not equip us to deal with "a broken down car, invasive heart surgery or an overheating nuclear reactor!"

The Higher Skills Agenda aims to move beyond this by developing more direct links between employers and HEPs. It is exemplified in the Foundation Degree model, in which employers are encouraged to contribute to the processes of course design, teaching and assessment. In many of cases, the students on such course will already be employed in the sector and the learning will relate directly to their work role. As such it moves beyond the previous employability agenda and brings employers into the heart of higher education.

So, how have and how might social scientists respond?

(1) Defence of Academic Tradition. From this position, the emphasis on economic skills would appear as a negation of the purpose of the University.

Instead the pursuit of knowledge and learning should simply be seen as a valuable end in itself (Maskell and Robinson 2002). It can be subdivided into conservative strands, which tend to favour higher education as an elite pursuit, and more progressive and socially critical strands. However, common to both is a hostility to the pursuit of economic value or engagement with employers.

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of existing provision which combines academic content with some generic skills development. It argues, for example, that many employers value students who have undertaken a general liberal education. Employer engagement may be undertaken, but this will often be at arms length from particular programmes of study and focus on the views of large corporate employers.

There are, I would argue, distinct problems in pursuing such an approach. Firstly, it replicates the dualism between subject content and generic skills that was a feature of the earlier employability agenda. Secondly, social sciences appear to be on somewhat shaky ground in asserting the high economic value of what they are currently providing. Widely quoted research on graduate earnings suggests that subjects such as sociology and politics are low down the league table (Prospect Net 2008). While caution should always be exercised in drawing too far‐reaching conclusions from such data, it is important that we are aware that such information may become more publicly visible within the context of rising University fees.

(3) Engagement for Socially Valuable Skills. The third option involves an active but critical engagement by social scientists with the Higher Skills Agenda and employer engagement activity. It builds on the many projects and initiatives that have been undertaken across the social sciences to develop links beyond the academy through approaches such as placement and service learning, as well as the experience of Foundation Degrees developed within the social sciences. Work that I undertook for a recent C‐SAP funded project 'Politics After Leitch' identified a number of Foundation Degrees with politics content that engaged with employers such as local authorities, third sector providers and police authorities (Craig 2009b).

In such organisations, a public service ethos and commitment to social value remains central and increased commercial awareness has not yet given way to commercialism. Engagement with such employers provides an opportunity for higher education providers to reach out to wider society and together develop an alternative vision ‐ the pursuit of socially valuable skills.

This will not be without its own challenges. Academics may need to compromise on their traditional autonomy and negotiate curricula that reflect the needs and values of their partners. Some employers may also need convincing of the value of what higher education has to offer and we will need to be confident in making the case.

However, as I have argued elsewhere, such engagements can provide new scope for creating publicness in higher education (Craig 2009a) and may provide the basis for constructing an alternative vision of socially valuable higher education which can benefit academics, students and employers. Three cheers for socially valuable skills.

References Craig, J., (2009a) 'New Ways of being public: the experience of foundation degrees' Journal of Further and Higher Education 33: 1, pp.23‐31 Craig, J., (2009b) 'Politics After Leitch: Final Project Report'. This and other project resources can be accessed through http://socscihi.blogspot.com/ Dearing Report., (1997) Education in Learning Society: Summary Report, 10 | P a g e

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London:HMSO Keep, E., & Payne, J., (2004) "'I can't believe it's not a skill': the changing meaning of skill in the UK context and some implications' in Hayward,G. and S. James (ed) Balancing the Skills Equation : Key issues and challenges for policy and practice Bristol: Policy Press Leitch Report., (2006) Prosperity for All in the Global Economy: World Class Skills, Letich Review of Skills, Final Report, London:HMSO Maskell. D., & Robinson, I., (2002) The New Idea of a University, Thorverton: Imprint Academic Prospect Net., (2008) 'The Value of a Degree' http://www.prospectsnet.com/cms/ShowPage/Home_page/Main_Menu___News_and_i nformation/Graduate_Market_Trends_2008/The_value_of_a_degree__Spring_08_/p!eac Leee#Article

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3. Examining Employability: Modes of Explaining ‘Success’ or ‘Failure’ in the Transition from University to Work Annika Coughlin, Action Research Assistant and ELLI project coordinator at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, University of Bedfordshire A year ago I was commissioned to undertake a small six month research project about graduates’ employability and their transitions from university to work. The first thing I did, being a robust sociologist, was to define the term employability. This turned out to be an impossible task as there were numerous definitions, some which wouldn’t be very easy for me to measure. I had been asked to look at the students who were unemployed six months after graduation; to contact them about their experiences and ask if they needed help. I could therefore only assume that the term employability in this context meant rather simplistically, ‘gaining employment’.

For many institutions, employability and student success are much broader concepts than just gaining employment. These concepts are difficult to measure statistically (and in many cases, measurement in this way is undesirable). The marketisation of higher education however means that great importance is given to an institution’s position in a league table and crude statistics are what counts.

William Locke gave a paper at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference in December 2008 on the league table culture of universities. He argued that league tables are poor proxies for the qualities identified and that there is insufficient transparency about the way league tables are complied. He also argued that staff morale is affected by them.

I agree with Locke and would go further to say that many graduates’ morale is also affected by league tables. Students and graduates can develop a distorted view of the realities of finding graduate employment and may get the impression that you are a success if you get a graduate job six months after graduating and a failure if you don’t. Students who are particularly vulnerable are those who align themselves with the human capital discourse of employability.

In the context of higher education, human capital theory looks somewhat like this: · · · · ·

Personal improvement is through education.

Education equates with economic gain Improve your skills and you will get a job It is up to the individual to make the effort Unemployment is an individual problem that can be avoided by gaining skills.

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success is down to the individual having possession of the skills needed in order to gain employment. Government is encouraging people to go on to Higher Education under the premise that they will get better returns in the labour market and help to improve the economy.

Whilst at university, students are advised to take on periods of work experience, voluntary roles and so on in order to boost their CV’s and gain advantage in the graduate labour market. There is resistance amongst some students to taking part in extra activities as they feel it could have a negative affect on their grades. A participant in my small research project told me that a staff member advised them that their best option was to get work experience, rather than focus fully on their academic studies, as a first class degree wasn’t going to secure them a job. Although this advice was based on fact and good intentions – there is no doubt employers tend to be looking for ‘oven‐ready’ graduates – it was sad to hear the student’s ambition for academic excellence marginalised in support of the dominant discourse of education linked to economic gain.

On the other hand students who have done all that has been suggested and plugged the gaps on their CV but still ‘fail’ in the graduate labour market may be confused and disheartened. Without a broader sociological imagination – that is the process of linking individual experience with social institutions and one’s place in history ‐ highly qualified graduates run the risk of blaming themselves for difficulties they may experience in the graduate labour market.

For example, many graduates may be unaware that their position in society affects their chances of securing a graduate job. Class, ethnicity, gender, age, disability and so on all affect employment outcomes, even if they as individuals possess all the skills needed to do a job. An Equal Opportunities Commission’s report (2007), highlighted some of the stereotypical assumptions that employers make of Asian women. For example some employers believe that Asian women: ‘don’t speak English; are not well qualified; will get married off and have children or; are not allowed to work for cultural reasons.’ The EOC was able to provide evidence to counteract all of these assumptions.

Brown and Hesketh (2004) studied a group of white middle class graduates who all had a high academic standard and were applying for a fast track scheme. Their study exposed the subjectivity of the interviewers involved in the selection process. One interesting example from their observations of a selection discussion by an interview panel showed how a decision to allow a candidate through was based on his preference for Star Trek rather than Star Wars.

What many graduates also may not realise is that employment success is a learnt process. This is something careers advisors know all to well as they attempt to train graduates in the art of interview techniques to improve their employment chances.

The interview is a performance where the candidate tries to convince an employer of their capabilities. It is a learnt skill which takes time and practice to master. You have to learn how to play the game.

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in the transition from university to work? I agree with Moreau and Leathwood who suggest it is of key importance to ‘provide students and graduates with a critical framework within which to interpret concepts of employability and their experience in entering the graduate labour market – both to mitigate against them interpreting a lack of success as a personal failure and to make collectivist interpretations and challenges seem possible.’ (2006:320) In this paper I have briefly discussed a critical framework I call the ‘3P’s’ which offers different modes of explaining success or failure in the graduate labour market: 1. Employment success is about the individual Possession of skills.

2. Employment success is dependent on your Position in society.

3. Employment success is a learnt Process.

A follow on may be to allow students and graduates to interpret their own experience with reference to the ‘3P’s’ framework. This would be a useful exercise particularly in a recession where arguably graduates may be more aware of labour market factors beyond their control, but also of value during periods of economic growth.

References Brown, P. & Hesketh, A., (2004) The Mismanagement of Talent. Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy Oxford University Press Coughlin, A., (2008) What can the University of Bedfordshire do to improve the employability of its graduates? An internal evaluation report, University of Bedfordshire.

Botcherby, S., (2006) “Moving on up? Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean women and employment survey: aspirations, experiences and choices”, Equal Opportunities Commission, www.eoc.org.uk, Arndale House: Manchester Locke, W., (2008) A ‘league table culture’? The policy and governance implications of university rankings in a hierarchical higher education system. Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, Open University. Paper given at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference, Liverpool, 9‐11th December 2008.

Moreau, M. & Leathwood, C., (2006) Graduates’ employment and the discourse of employability: a critical analysis. Journal of Education and Work Vol. 19, No. 4, pp.

305‐324

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4. Higher Education funding and the current crisis through the lens of long economic cycles.

Vincent Carpentier, Senior Lecturer in History of Education, Institute of Education, University of London There is a shared consensus on the need to reform higher education (HE) but different views are expressed about how to address key issues (the relative contributions of private and public finance; the possible effects in terms of access and equity; the benefits for individuals, the economy and society). Undoubtedly, the current downturn is a pertinent time to revisit the political economy of HE. The changing landscape of the political economy of HE Historically, the changes in the articulation between funding and access policies have been strongly influenced by economic transformations and social change.

Until the 1960s, HE consisted of an elite system relatively well funded by the University Grants Committee since 1919. The 1963 Robbins Report captured the mood of the 1960s and its emphasis on socio‐economic investment in HE led to a substantial increase of enrolments supported by a well funded grant system. At the time, the political agenda prioritised the expansion of HE to sustain the post war economy without too much concern for funding issues. This focus was to change in the aftermath of the mid 1970s economic crisis when cuts in funding started clashing with the expansionist agenda. These tensions between tighter public resources (provoked by neoliberal policies) and an increasing demand for HE (associated to the knowledge economy) kept rising all along the 1980s and 1990s.

That is in this context that the 1997 Dearing Commission recommended that students should contribute to the cost of their studies (through tuition fees and means tested grants) on the ground that graduates benefit from better employment and higher income. The 1998 HE Act followed the recommendation with the introduction of £1000 upfront fees but controversially replaced grants by loans.

Students’ contribution increased further under the 2004 HE Act and the introduction of variable fees of up to £3000 in England. Concerns were expressed about the potential impact on access and it was decided that fees should be deferred and paid once the graduate earns more than £15000. Moreover, a grant of up to £2700 was reintroduced for households earning up to £20000. Financial barriers were further recognised by the Brown government which recently decided to increase the threshold for a full grant to £25000 and to up to £60 000 for a partial grant. As a result, a third of students are eligible for a full grant (£2 825) and another third is eligible for a partial grant.

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the political economy of HE. Kondratiev cycles and the public­private substitution A closer look at the evolution of the main indicators of funding and participation in HE since 1945 may offer some insights into the current situation. The major historical pattern is the contrast between the continuous growth of enrolment and the substantial fluctuations of resources available to institutions. This can be explained by two major trends. Firstly, the growth of public funding in HE corresponded to long economic cycles (or Kondratiev cycles) and accelerated during the period of post‐war prosperity, only to go into relative decline following the economic crisis of 1973. 2 Secondly, the growth of private resources has, since the 1980s, acted as a substitute for public spending rather than an additional income (Carpentier, 2006).

This mechanism of public‐private substitution of resources explains the persistent underfunding problem and raises questions about the financial prospect of the sector. It also suggests that further increase of fees without adequate public financial support to student may have implications for access. These questions are even more acute in the context of the current downturn and the crisis of private debt. It is true that fees are deferred but some studies have shown that students from poorer background are more debt averse (Callender and Jackson, 2005). Moreover, it is not clear whether the higher unemployment prospects and its potential impact on less attractive salaries will dissuade people to invest in HE or will convince them to enrol in order to increase their employability. Other private resources like donations or endowments may be hit by the crisis and lead to shortage of resources for HE institutions which have increasingly depended on them since the 1980s.

This leaves us with the question of public resources. Will the bank bailout lead to more or less public spending? Some people argue that too much taxpayer’s money has been spent and that public spending should be cut until growth returns. The framework of Kondratiev cycles and a closer look at previous downturns may be useful here.

Previous economic downturns Looking further back than 1945 offers a different perspective on the relationship between funding in education and economic downturns. Trends in public expenditure on education were countercyclical before 1945 but not after. This suggests a reversal of the historical relationship between Kondratiev cycles and public expenditure on education (Carpentier, 2003; Fontvieille and Michel, 2002).

Before 1945, increased levels of public investment in education took place during economic downturns (1830s‐1850s/1870‐1890, and 1920s‐1940s) and indeed offered an escape route out of socio‐economic crisis. Such public investments in

2

Four cycles of approximately 50 years have been identified, each of them showing expansion and depression phases: (1790– 1820/1820–1848); (1848–1870/1870–1897); (1897–1913/1913–1945); (1945–1973/1973–?) see Loucã and Reijnders, 1999.

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education contributed to appease social tensions but also to revive productivity levels and overcome a situation when capital was abundant but not invested efficiently.

The solutions to previous crises greatly contrast with the austerity policies adopted in the mid 1970s. Since then, private debt rather than public spending have been the driving force of the economy and have masked inequalities. Ultimately, the current combined financial and economic crises suggest that such model based on the contraction of the social infrastructure of development has not managed to offer a sustainable economic growth (despite an attempt during the last decade to reverse the trends of slower social expenditures). What the world economy is experiencing may not be the beginning of a new downturn but the culmination of a depressive phase of the Kondratiev cycle which started in the mid 1970s. In that case, the current crisis could represent a key moment where structural transformations towards an inclusive and sustainable growth are about to take place as they did during the previous downturns in the 1830s, 1870s and 1930s.

This crisis may test the public‐private substitution to the limit (if both public and private resources decline) and reveals the tensions between the agenda of the knowledge economy and the agenda of low taxation. This could be the return of the old elitist system. However, the crisis also offers the opportunity to develop new mechanisms which could guarantee a progression of public funding (independent from additional private funding) to ensure sufficient resources are provided to develop a strong and inclusive HE system contributing to social cohesion and the economy.

References Callender, C. & Jackson, J., (2005) ‘Does the Fear of Debt Deter Students from Higher Education?’, Journal of Social Policy, 34(4), 509–40.

Carpentier, V., (2003) Public Expenditure on Education and Economic Growth in the UK, 1833‐2000. History of Education 32, no.1: 1‐15.

Carpentier, V., (2006) Funding in Higher Education and Economic Growth in France and the United Kingdom, 1921‐2003. Higher Education Management and Policy 18, no.3: 1‐26.

Fontvieille, L. & Michel, S., (2002) Analysis of the Transition between Two Successive Social Orders: Application to the relation between education and growth.

Review, A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 25, no.1: 23‐46.

Loucã, F. & Reijnders, J. eds., (1999) The Foundations of Long Wave Theory.

Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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5. How to Earn a Living Without Selling Your Soul Max Farrar, sociologist at Leeds Metropolitan University and Manager Community Partnerships and Volunteering, Leslie Silver International Faculty My aims in this short article are: 1. To put ‘souls’ and ‘job‐hunting’ into a context of radical sociology, utilising some of the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Michael Burawoy.

2. To think through some (radical?) career options (including some tips on how academics can support those who want to find work).

On souls and radical social science It is often argued that sociology is, in its basic assumptions, a secular and scientific discipline. I can’t think of a founding father (and we are forced to recall the gendered assumptions built into the start of our discipline) who was avowedly religious. In fact, Marx argued that materialist philosophy starts with the critique of religion. Durkheim’s insight was that religious practice was, properly (i.e. sociologically) understood, a means of affirming the social. Marx’s most often quoted ‘opium of the people’ epithet puts a political spin on Durkheim’s analysis.

But Marx’s less quoted phrase, from the same passage, is that religion is also ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soul‐less conditions’. And Weber – perhaps the major early sociologist of religion – saw religious practice as an antidote to the routinised, rationalised, ‘iron cage’ of modern society. I subscribe to all these positions, and I recognise that to use a concept like ‘the soul’ is to teleport into 21st Century social science a pre‐modern conceptualisation of a person’s subjective, ‘inner’ life, normally used to coerce people into a moral code dictated by the church.

Significantly, however, modern sociology’s efforts to secularise and rationalise such a notion, with its introduction of a concept of ‘the self’ – particularly in its theorisation of the utterly social self, constructed in negotiation with the other – leaves an unknowable space where the soul was assumed to reside. Late modern, or postmodern sociology exacerbates this, moving from ‘self’ to ‘identity’ and postulating a never‐ending flux, as identities shift their shape, hybridising, re‐ forming and moving ever onwards, but rarely upwards. Interlaced with Lacan’s reading of Freud, postmodernists face the gloomy prospect of there being a completely empty space from which the soul has been banished by the recognition that the ‘real’ self is a modernist illusion.

I want to briefly reconcile my acceptance of the (postmodern) argument of that the self is inherently fractured and identities are mobile with my effort to reinstate a notion akin to the soul. My initial, polemical, point is this: without a concept rather like the soul, the social sciences are pointless. Just as social scientists have to 18 | P a g e

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reinvent agency in a structured world, we have to strive for progressive values in a neo‐liberal world. Those values, as Bauman has argued, cannot be assembled by scientific endeavour; there are no unassailable foundations for values. Bauman utilises Levinas’ argument that a sense of responsibility for the Other is summonsed as we encounter the Other’s face as a means of asserting a basic human ethic of care.

But we all know that the care‐less human who rejects the Other is as common as the self‐less altruist. Social thinkers (Les Philosophes) in the early modern period, Bauman argues, were ‘legislators’. Cllaiming a hot‐line to reason and science, they aligned themselves with power (the emerging State). In late, or post‐modernity grand‐narratives no longer command much respect and, anyway, social scientists (apart from Lord Giddens) have been assigned in perpetuity by the State to the naughty step. According to Bauman, sociologists in liquid modernity can only be ‘interpreters’, divorced from power. The role of the intellectual‐as‐interpreter: consists of translating statements, made within one communally based tradition, so that they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on another tradition . . . [the interpreter aims at] facilitating communication between autonomous (sovereign) participants . . . preventing the distortion of meaning’ (Bauman 1987 p. 5) This notion of the social scientist’s role can be usefully linked to Michael Burawoy’s effort to create a ‘public sociology’. (I suggest that we can substitute ‘social science’ for sociology.) Burawoy’s ‘public sociology’ is, above all, a sociology which creates dialogue in society. But, unlike Bauman’s 1987 book, Burawoy is quite explicit about the political stance entailed by this type of sociology. Public sociology is: · A ‘type of reflexive knowledge which aims to engage with public debates’. · Aligned with critical sociology’s questioning of society’s fundamental assumptions (‘critical sociology’ is another type of sociology). · In dialogue with ‘professional’ and ‘policy’ sociology (two other types of sociology). · ‘Taking knowledge back to those from whom it came [the public], making public issues out of private troubles’. · ‘Dialogic’. · Engaged with ‘multiple publics in multiple ways’. · Provides ‘a defence of the social . . . [and] defends the interests of humanity’ and · It has a ‘particular investment in the defence of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of [neoliberal] markets and [authoritarian] states’.

(Burawoy 2005) Bauman has also made his politics quite explicit in recent years: “Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something” (Bunting 2005). Both Bauman and Burawoy have their personal and intellectual roots in Marxism. Bauman remains a socialist (as, I think does Burawoy) and maintains that “never has the world needed socialism more than now” (Bunting 2005). Bauman is 19 | P a g e

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explicitly anti‐foundationalist in his theory and so am I: there is no proof for truth (just as there is no cure for life). But, like Bauman and Burawoy, I have no difficulty in taking a political stance in public (and in my teaching). I do so on the basis that all I can offer is interpretations of current and historical events, which can never be proved to be ‘correct’. But they can be shown to be logically connected to a specific set of values. If there are no ‘scientifically provable’ foundations for these values, I think we have to pillage the rhetoric of religion to justify the values we adopt. If God is the dyslexic’s Good, and the Soul is the repository of the Good, radical, interpretive, public social scientists simply have to mirror the Monotheist’s ‘act of faith’ and assert that our values of altruism, responsibility, respect, equality, democracy and justice are simply what we believe in; we then demonstrate that their implementation is in the best interests of humanity and nature. If we do not believe in the soul, we probably believe that these values are somehow embodied, that they are ‘close to our hearts’. If we love soul music, then we might say these values reside in our souls. And to say, colloquially, that these values are good for the soul, and for the world, is just to remind us how indebted we are to the religious utopians.

So if this is our value position, how do we earn a living?

Students (and staff) probably end up in the social sciences because they have developed these kinds of values through their everyday experience (often, but by no means always, filtered through their early home‐based learning). Whether we adopt the view that the social sciences are real sciences, that can actually prove these values to be true, or whether we take the anti‐foundational position, these values feel real to us. We’ve withstood the gibes about our hair‐styles and our hair shirts and we want to study, teach and/or research in the social sciences.

But many of us also want to work beyond the ivory tower, in the ‘real world’. (And some of us want to spend money on hair‐cuts and designer clothes, which, contrary to received wisdom on the left, does not necessarily make you a conservative.) The ‘real world’ includes business. One of the paradoxes of the neo‐liberal economy in the UK is that, just as it has become increasingly assertive about the iron law of the market, and its irrefutable faith in the value of selfish competition has grown, so has the movement in business circles towards what is called corporate social responsibility (CSR). The advocacy of CSR started in the early 1980s, long before the current faltering of faith in unregulated capitalism as the only route to happiness.

About ten years ago I asked a young woman in one of my sociology classes what she wanted to do when she graduated. “I just want to work anywhere I can wear heels and pretty clothes,” she said. She is just the kind of student who needs to know that you can now work for Shell Oil or Barclays Bank in their CSR department. (As it turned out, she got a job in my university’s student support services, and still dressed fashionably.) And there are other of other parts of the private sector where social science graduates will find a comfortable job which won’t undermine their progressive values, such as radical publishers (e.g. Serpent’s Tail, Zed, Verso, Academic publishers), the eco‐tourism sector, parts of the sport and leisure industry and so on. One step away from business are the social enterprises and co‐ops (check the Edinburgh Bicycle Co‐op for an outstanding example of the latter). While they sometimes have to struggle to maintain their public service values, those who work 20 | P a g e

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for the Civil Service and local authorities often align themselves with progressive values and earn a living wage. Nor should we do anything more to undermine the value of our own profession as teachers (since others do that job well enough already). Working in education, particularly if we can contribute to the formation of critical citizens while adhering to our stance as ‘interpreters’ – still seems to me to be a worthwhile calling. Allied to public education are the many and various progressive Think Tanks (e.g. Young Foundation, Demos, Institute of Public Policy Research, Runnymede Trust) all of whom provide jobs for some of our brightest graduates. Similarly there are good jobs to be found in Trade Unions, political parties and, dare I say it, Parliament.

The so‐called Third Sector provides another huge number of jobs for people who want to contribute to radical social change. I’ve divided these into categories just to illustrate the range: · Supporting: E.g. CABs, Law Centres, Women’s Centres, Healthy Living Centres, Animal Aid and such like. · Believing: E.g. Islamic Relief, Christian Aid, Sikh Gudwaras, CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) etc. · Campaigning & supporting: E.g. Oxfam, Barnardos, Amnesty, Refugee Council, Help the Aged, Stop Hate Crime UK etc. · Pressuring (Social Movements): Social Forum, Operation Black Vote, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Indian Workers’ Associations etc.

Recently I asked a young woman who was staffing one of the Islamic Awareness Week stalls in the university concourse what she was studying. “Accountancy,” she said, “but I don’t really want to be an accountant, I want to do something useful.” I asked her if she had considered working as an accountant for one of the big charities. “No,” she said, “no‐one in the Business School has ever mentioned that.

I’m gong to check it out straight away.”

Finally, it needs stressing over and over again that volunteering is not simply a government plot to undermine paid jobs in the welfare sector. Those of us who are politically active are volunteers. Volunteers (especially women) have been the back‐ bone of every community organisation I’ve worked with over the past 35 years. For young people, volunteering is an indispensable way of developing and testing their values and getting some flavour of the world of work. Perhaps some do it simply to enhance their CV but in my experience students who volunteer are already altruistic, compassionate and public spirited; many of them will go on to work in the types of organisation listed above. And here are just a few of the web‐sites which help people plug into the world of volunteering · Find an organisation near you which needs volunteers: Do­It · http://www.do­it.org.uk/ · Change your neighbourhood, town, city http://www.vinspired.com/vreg · BASSAC · NCVO ­ British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres 21 | P a g e

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(bassac) · Voluntary Action hubs E.g. Voluntary Action­Leeds · Change the world with VSO Volunteer jobs ­ Volunteering – VSO To conclude, I’ve argued here that social scientists should take a position within their disciplines which affirms, as an act of faith (metaphorically speaking), progressive social values and they should engage in an ‘interpretive public social science’. In so doing, we open to our students the wide range of occupations that are available to them which are commensurate with their progressive values. This does not mean that we present ourselves as holier than thou, condemning those who want to earn higher salaries than are offered to most of us in the public sector. We should note and affirm those aspects of the private sector which are developing both socially and ecologically responsible programmes. Just as the seriously religious admit that there are no easy routes to salvation, those us who are seriously secular should admit that there are no easy jobs to be had, ethically or physically. Bearing in mind the words Zygmunt Bauman quotes from Immanuel Levinas – “Don’t ever console yourself that you have done everything that you could, because it is not true” (Bunting 2005) – our students should be encouraged to work, or volunteer, in any of the occupations listed above. When redundancy strikes we should do the same.

References Bauman, Z., (1987) Legislators and Interpreters, Cambridge: Polity.

Burawoy, M., (2005) ‘For Public Sociology’ American Sociological Review, 2005, vol.

70 (February: 4–28).

Bunting, M., (2003) ‘Zygmunt Bauman – Passion and Pessimism’ Guardian 5th April 2003.

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6. Employability of International Students: The Role of Pedagogy Yiu Tung Suen, PRS Sociology, University of Oxford

UK Council for International Students Affairs (UKCISA) and several careers services of universities have noted the importance of enhancing international students’ employability and attempted to establish programmes and provide information to international students about work during and after their study in the UK. However, the approach used mostly focused on practical information about job search, visa application and CV polishing. While it is undeniable that these applied skills are useful, it is important to understand that such is not enough.

The diverse expectations of international students after their study in the UK should be noted. Some students prefer to stay after studying overseas, while some would rather choose to go back to their home countries. There can be many reasons behind the decision, and can be grouped into ‘professional, societal and personal’ considerations (Alberts & Hazen, 2005).

The role of the university in equipping both students who want to leave and stay in the UK with employability after their study needs to move beyond the focus on practical skills of job search, and consider the whole structure of courses provided. It is essential for both universities and students to recognize cultural capital formation in the syllabus used (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). An important question is: what should be the content of the courses provided? Or, more broadly, is there a pedagogy of teaching international students that can enhance their employability?

Syllabus has impact on the employability international students and merits more attention. How ‘global’ and how ‘local’ (UK) should the course content be? If the course discusses mainly global content, some students may feel that they know too little about local (UK) culture and systems to compete, especially with UK candidates in the labour market. On the other hand, if the content focuses on local (UK) issues, students may feel irrelevant or even disinterested: ‘why do I care about local systems which may not be of use in the future?’ In the latter case, studying overseas may in fact decrease the employability of students as through the years of study, they become detached from their own countries of origin and also have fewer chances of building up personal networks.

Hence, universities need to expand their consideration of international students’ employability beyond services provided by careers services, but to mainstream employability and its relevance in their consideration of pedagogy for international students. It is clear that it is neither possible nor desirable to have a syllabus that is either completely ‘local’ or entirely ‘global’, and there is a need to strike a delicate balance between the two. At the same time, it is important for course providers to understand that local and global are not two opposites and can not engage in communication, rather they can be different sides of the same coin. Local (UK) cases 23 | P a g e

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can help international students to re‐consider examples of their countries of origin, and their own experiences can also help them to understand local (UK) systems better through comparison. The pedagogy here is to honour and bring to the forefront the similarities and differences among cases, rather than muting them.

‘Compare and contrast’ are the keywords, as they help both international students who want to stay and leave the UK after their study.

Of course, responsibilities lie on both sides, university and students. While university and teaching staff should consider the above issues in pedagogy, international students do also need to actively engage in discussion and flagging up questions that they do not understand rather than keeping silent or taking things for granted.

It is not the intention of this commentary to give an impression that employability is the most important consideration for teaching international students, but to point out some considerations for universities if they are interested to promote their international students’ employability. The pedagogy suggested, in fact, is not only helpful and contributes to employability, but also personal growth and cultural awareness of international students as well. There are going to be many practical difficulties of putting the pedagogy into practice, and more research into them is urgently needed.

References Alberts, H. C. & Hazen, H. D., (2005) "There are always two voices": International Students' Intentions to Stay in the United States or Return to their Home Countries.

International Migration, 43(3), 131‐154.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. C., (1990) Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

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7. Sociology and the Public(s): Using Public Sociology to Rework Student Engagement University Matt Badcock, Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University Rethinking Employability after the ‘Crash’ In recent years those of us who teach in the higher education sector have been challenged to develop the employability of our students by focusing on the development of what have been termed ‘soft’ (or interpersonal) skills that are so desired by employers. This is, of course, part of a broader government agenda in which education and the economic development of the country are inextricably linked, but at ground level this demand can sometimes be perceived as being at odds with the subject‐specific hard skills which have always been at the core of degree courses. But the present condition of the global economy demands a rethink of exactly what employability is and the contribution it makes to social, cultural and economic development. Would we be in the state we are in if we had been more aware of what was happening, if we had been more critical citizens, able to question the sustainability of the course we were on? Perhaps now is the time for us to re‐ work the link between the employability agenda and social, cultural and economic development.

One way to do this is by developing a more activist or interventionist approach to placement learning. Public Sociology offers is the ideal medium through which this can be accomplished. We might begin to encourage students to use their disciplinary knowledge to explore and make public – and even help to develop solutions to – the everyday impacts of the ‘crash’. This could be a process that would allow them to continue to develop their ‘soft’ skills while also promoting a more critical engagement with the social world around them. Reorientating placement learning in this way also provides an prime opportunity to reassert the relevance of social science knowledge, something vitally important in the context of recent government HE funding allocations (Attwood, Newman, Corbyn, Gill 2007) A Process of Mutual Education?

So what is Public Sociology? Although the term was not new – it emerges, for example, out of C. Wright Mill’s Sociological Imagination (1959) – it was coined by Michael Burawoy to describe the agenda of his presidency of the American Sociological Association in 2004 (Burawoy 2004) This sought to encourage the discipline to engage in explicitly public and political ways with issues stimulated by debates over public policy and political activism. He argued that the discipline of Sociology has two main sub‐forms – ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’. Traditional sociology involves the production of books by sociologists that are read by those ‘beyond the academy’, newspaper articles and column writing, where sociologists comment on matters of ‘public importance’, and using journalists as a conduit to shift academic 25 | P a g e

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research into the public realm. In all these traditional forms the public sociologist gets things started, acts as a catalyst, but does not necessarily get involved.

Contrastingly, organic – or public – sociology involves work that is undertaken ‘in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local and often counter‐public’, engaging in ‘dialogue’, through ‘a process of mutual education’. Burawoy went on to argue that much organic public sociology remains hidden from view, the consequence, he argues, of days being filled with the undertaking of such activities, leaving little time to actually document them. In sum, Burawoy notes that a key task of any public sociology, then, is to ‘make visible the invisible, to make the private public, [and] to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life…’ because such organic work is often treated as ‘private’, ‘invisible’ and/or separate from ‘our professional lives’.

In recent years a number of social science subjects have begun to explore this approach to Sociology further within their own disciplinary contexts. This has particularly been the case in Human Geography (rebranded as ‘public geography’ – see for example the work of the late Duncan Fuller) as well as in other subjects like History, Archaeology and Anthropology plus the sciences more generally (Atwood 2007); indeed, Sociology arguably now lags behind other disciplines in its engagement with the debate over the ‘public turn’. In the past year an official stamp of approval has been conferred on the notion of public social science and all it involves by the ESRC through its funding of the Engaging Geography (Cook 2008) and Activism, Volunteering and Citizenship (ESRC 2009) seminar series.

Creating Public Sociology Placements How might public sociology ‘placements’ differ from conventional placements?

Rather than spending a block of time with one particular agency or employer they could be problem‐focused, action research‐based and interventionist in nature. In fact they could be structured like a web, an approach expounded by Jeff Jarvis in his section on hacking education in his book What Would Google Do? (2009) (Jarvis 2009) He argues that in the future responsible teaching (and here, by extension, placements) must become cross‐disciplinary and would be far more effective if people from a variety of perspectives came together to engage in the comparative analysis of common problems. This approach would allow students to connect and engage with a variety of publics whilst exploring one particular issue in depth.

Consider, for example, a ‘placement’ project that was focused on the impact of unemployment on local communities, an issue which has significant social, economic and political connotations. Students could work to bring together insights from community members, local businesses and charities and local government among others with their own disciplinary knowledge of relevant topics. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and different approaches, new insights could develop and practical solutions emerge.

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placements the ‘soft’ skills desired by employers will still be developed but there is much more emphasis on the role of critical engagement and dialogue, the discovery of mutual knowledge and dissemination of knowledge. Whichever direction they choose to go in, they will be encouraged to engage with a wide variety of individual, institutions and organisations to build up an understanding of a variety of different viewpoints but with one aim in mind: to connect, engage and intervene in the social world outside of the university.

Public Sociology, then, offers an alternative means of engaging with the world at this critical juncture. It offers a new way of writing and engaging intellectually with the world outside of the academy, one that is more interventionist in its approach and which aims to create mutually beneficial links with different ‘publics’. It is through these interactions that employability ‘skills’ could be developed, but alongside the development of a more participatory, critical view of social issues.

References Attwood, R. & Newman, M. & Corbyn, Z. & Gill, M., (2007) “Funding fallout creates wide smiles and gnashing of teeth”. 12 March 2009 The Times Higher Education.

Available at: http://bit.ly/R3Slo. Atwood, R., (2007) “Academics told to push intellectual credential” 13 April 2007 The Times Higher Education. Available at: http://bit.ly/Pu652 Burawoy, M., (2004) “For Public Sociology”. American Sociological Review, University of California‐Berkeley pages 1 to 28. Available at: http://bit.ly/RQYSW. Cook, I. et al., (2008) “Engaging geography” Available at: http://engaginggeography.wordpress.com/ ESRC., (2009) “ESRC Seminar Series: Activism, Volunteering and Citizenship” Available at: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/res_con/cpp_main/cppevents/esrc semseries

Jarvis, J., (2009) “Hacking Education: Google U”. Available at: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/03/06/hacking­education­google­u/

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8. Last in Line: When Employability Skills are not Enough Àngels Trias i Valls, Social Anthropologist, Senior Research Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary European Studies, Regent’s College Did you know? Shift Happens The famous YouTube clip Shift Happens (2006), also known as Did You Know? started its life as an educational power‐point presentation in a faculty meeting in Colorado. It aimed at making educators aware of shifts in education in a globalised, fast changing world; and how to prepare educators and children for ‘their future’ (and future employment). The aim of the video was about ‘making children successful’, about preparing them for a world where all parameters of knowledge and skills are shifting very fast. ‘Shift happens’, with more than 5 million online viewers, has become a good example of narratives of educational ‘shifts’ and employability. They argue: ‘We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet’ The clip continues with an invocation to a higher voice, that of Einstein telling us that: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’ It concludes with its repeated tag line, using oratory style: ‘Did you know?

Shift Happens.’

And so it goes, one of the most important mythological tales on ‘educational success’ of our times.

Shi(f)t happens: Economic Crises, Education and Employer Engagement I take here the video’s predicament that ‘we can’t solve a problem (like employment) using the same kind of thinking that created them (formal economic thinking)’. We can, however, as anthropologists argue, look for ways of solving problems with other types of thinking; here is the not so obvious solution: we can use social solutions rather than economic ones to deal with employer engagement. The point is then, how do we use social solutions when dealing with employment and Higher Education after the Crash?

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Current policy narratives of how to empower students to improve their chances of employment are often trapped, like those of the famous clip above, in their own mythological narratives of what ‘higher’ [what the educational ‘shift’] means. A beautiful example of this is described by Ainley in this volume where he considers how narratives of diversification and compartmentalization, the separation of ‘the academic from the vocational, skills and competence’ define the way in which current policies reproduce narratives of ‘shift’. My addition to the discussions on this volume is to argue that in our analysis of employer engagement we often take for granted one specific narrative, that of ‘formal economic thinking’ as the ‘given’ way of addressing the ‘employability crash’.

I contend that at the core of new policies on employability after the crash lie a relentless refusal to understanding debt in other than economic terms. Hind (2009) argues, in its critique to the financial crisis, that it is our inability to understand debt ‐and certain specific bankers playing on this weakness to fuel debt‐acquisition to their advantage‐ that underpinned the onset of the crisis. In other words, if one were to find ‘a shift’ in thinking that has lead to the crash, both educational and financial, this has to be gradual erosion in our thinking when dealing with monetary and social debt.

Whilst I agree with Hind to an extent, I disagree with explaining the economy, and the crash, from a purely ‘economic’ or what in anthropology we call ‘formalist’ (neo‐ classic economics) point of view. Economic anthropologists have for several decades argued about the importance of understanding ‘economy’ from a non‐formalist economic point of view; of understanding, for example ‘debt’, from a perspective of social contracts; and how ‘debt’ is not always resolved through ‘economic principles’ (See Hart & Ortiz 2009 for a recent contextualisation). Debt in non‐formalist way of thinking is about resolving social contracts between people, it is about the negotiation of specific kinds of relatedness between people that makes possible for people to ‘call back on’ other people’s help or support in time of need and to constitute people as ‘someone’, ‘oneself’ in relations with others. Debt (and any other ‘economic’ principle), seen from a non formalist perspective allow us to have a better understanding on what makes people able to learn certain skills and apply these to a job, a voluntary or paid job, and to be successful at it.

Unfortunately, our students are usually provided with formalist understandings of debt, which are the ones that precisely, will get them into more debt. What goes against employability agendas, with all their efforts to anticipate what is perceived as a ‘shift’ is that their emphasis on skills (in further education) and graduate options (in higher education) is anchored in formalist understandings of things like spending, earning and debt. Instead, I argue, the value of aiming ‘higher’ should provide students with skills that make social contracts resonate, by this I mean, speak to, relate to other groups with their own sets of networks and relationships where social debt, reciprocity and other values may be negotiated socially, first. This may go some way to enable some of the prepositions of other authors in this volume, Ainley’s preposition of providing students with an ‘acquisition of connected competences’, and that of Badcock and Farrar’s engaged public social science, in Farrar’s words ‘encouraged to work, to volunteer’, as a much needed stimulus to make people think in Craig’s words about ‘doing things in socially valuable ways’.

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Disposable Skills Latest figures indicate that summer 2009 will see 300,000 graduates and 400,000 school leavers enter the laboral market in a period of high uncertainty, high competitivity, and employer ‘cheery picking’ of employees (Curtis and Lipsett 2009).

New Labour’s provision of ‘graduateness’ to borrow Ainley’s term, has legitimated the new narratives, or so called ‘culture of blame’ on the students in making themselves employable, and on the teachers failing to give students the skills to make them employable. The economic crash had as an immediate effect, a multiple creation of mythological narratives on how the crisis happened and who is to blame that will fuel our uncertainties about how best to prepare students for the future.

‘Graduateness’, with its contingent provision for learning skills for the employability agenda, aims at producing a kind of ‘further post‐higher education’ strategy that rather than resolving the division between ‘further’ and ‘higher’ it mutates the meaning of skills (and knowledge) into (priced) ‘commodity possessions’.

This division, often presented under the guise of transferable versus academic skills, hides the fact that our new priced skills/degrees are dependant on employment fashions that make these ‘commodity possessions’ also highly disposable. The paradox we face here is that within the employability agenda our students have degrees and skills that are easily disposable possessions, a short‐lived dream of ‘having’ something to offer to employers but something that can be easily discarded by market forces.

If we are to succeed in a period of financial crisis, employability agendas and educational policies must address two things: one, the future of what I term ‘disposable commodity possession’ skills/knowledge; and two, the current failure to legitimate non degree based skills, and degrees alike as, in Craig argument being ‘socially valuable’ at all levels, further, higher and learning during employment.

A good skill to develop could be that of gaining resilience [critical, political, emotional, social resilience] against the pervasive nature of formalist economic narratives, with their emphasis on ‘becoming successful’, ‘becoming employable – either through skills or a degree’ which reduce the newly acquired skills to fast‐ disposable ones.

Conclusion: Nurturing relatedness It is doubtful that currently defined ‘Employability’ and ‘employability skills’ in the political agenda is what will prepare us for future shifts. Skills are abilities that get tested. To measure skills against economic efficiency and to succeed requires more than employability skills: it needs a society that values social relations, a society that values the kind of disciplines that teaches these: ‐anthropology, sociology, politics, educational studies‐; and one that values the non‐academic places in society that deal with the concerns addressed by these disciplines.

There is much despair in knowing that a trained student, with good skills, full of knowledge, critical, a student born of the shift, prepared for it, will be seriously unemployable and very easy to fire and be blamed for it (Barkham & Curtis 2009).

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[Last in line: when employability skills are not enough]

potential, will be last in line and blamed for it too. To nurture skills we must to see them as ‘valuable social relations’. A genuine shift, not a speculative one: social valuable skills that will benefit all.

A skill/knowledge is for students to know where to turn when the unemployment shift happens: what kind of social contracts [relations] are going to be necessary for students to tap into in order to become ‘someone’ and feel ‘oneself’ if employer engagement fails?

Do we prepare our students to understand, deal and have skills [and critical power] in Relatedness? Guts? Improvisation? Empathy? Resilience? The 21st employability society hasn’t shifted regarding the need to be able to respond to one of our major crisis of vision: formalist economic thinking as a dominant thinking paradigm.

How we relate to employment and how employers relate to others through employer engagement, in ‘socially valuable ways’, matters most. In concluding, I echo John Craig’s three cheers, for socially valuable [skills] ways of knowing about relatedness and relations.

References Barkham, P. & Curtis, P., (2009) The Crunch generation. The Guardian, Saturday 10 January. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/10/graduate‐careers‐crisis‐ unemployment‐recession Curtis, P. & Lipsett, A., (2009) Class of 2009: up to 40,000 graduates will join jobless roll, The Guardian, Wednesday 10 June. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/10/students‐higher‐education Fisch, K. & McLeod, S., (2007) Did you Know? Shift Happens. http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ Video Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U Hind, D., (2009) Jump! You Fuckers! Verso Books. Available at: http://www.versobooks.com/FTP/Jump%20You%20Fuckers%202%203.pdf.

Hart, K. & Ortiz, H., (2009) Anthropology in the financial crisis. Anthropology Today, Vol.24, No. 6., pp. 1‐3.

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WSSM Issue 2

About C‐SAP

C‐SAP is the subject network for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. We are one of 24 subject networks which were part of the Learning and Teaching Support Network, funded by the UK Funding Councils for Higher Education, and now part of the Higher Education Academy (http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/).

Based at the University of Birmingham, we aim to promote a scholarly and disciplinary‐specific approach to the innovation and reform of learning and teaching in the social sciences.

C‐SAP provides a unique opportunity to draw on the different strengths of the three disciplines to analyse and shape current practices and debates in higher education. We engage with staff, departments and students through a wide range of activities including our publications, annual project funding, events and workshops, special interest groups, C‐SAP Associates, as well as our annual conferences.

For more information about our work, or to find out how to get involved, please see our website or contact our enquiries line: http://www.c‐sap.bham.ac.uk Tel: 0121 4147919

email: enquiries@c‐sap.bham.ac.uk

ELiSS – Enhancing Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences ELiSS is C‐SAP’s online journal, and will produce a series of regular and thematic issues. However, its main focus is on articles/digital records and commentary submitted by all who work in higher education with an interest in the social sciences. The journal uses Web 2.0 technologies and particularly encourages contributors to use such opportunities. The editorial board encourage a wide range of submissions and seek to attract the following: · · · · ·

a critical analysis of teaching and learning which takes account of national and international developments; reflections on practice which can inform and support others; exemplars of innovations which are theorised and supported through scholarship; engagement with theoretical debates within the social sciences which inform learning and teaching; exploration of the dynamic and changing processes in teaching and learning.

More information on how to submit papers, and to read the current and past issues, please visit the website: http://www.eliss.org.uk