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iger Education & Corporate Realities
A new approach to the analysis of cultural reproduction focusing on the impact of economic change. The book demonstrates the reinforcement of cultural stereotypes in recruitment caused by interaction between corporate restructuring and the education system.; This book is intended for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates in sociology with an interest in the sociology of work and the sociology of education as well as researchers and students within human resource management and cultural studies.
208 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1994
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December 29, 2017
There are people in the world who have what generally gets called a vocation – they know they want to be a doctor or a lawyer and they make their way through school and become one or the other. This is a very handy thing, there is a clear link between the education they pursue and the profession they end up in. But for the rest of us who go to university the connection between the course we take and the job we end up doing isn’t really all that clear cut. One of the things that I’m endlessly fascinated by is just how people end up deciding what job they will do once they graduate or what degree course they will undertake to lead to a job. I say this because I did a kind of general Arts degree – philosophy and professional writing and editing – and have never really worked in either of those fields. You know, the job market for the holders of an undergraduate degree in philosophy isn’t all it is cracked up to be. But, of course, a job as a philosopher (whatever that might be) isn’t the point of studying philosophy at university – the point is to learn how to engage with texts that are hard to engage with and to, hopefully, then get something out of them. Deep, close reading and thinking might not make you a Donald Trump, but then, that sounds like as good a reason to give it a try as anything else I can think of.
Many people try to plot their university degrees on the basis of the jobs they might end up with afterwards. This often means studying something like an MBA or accountancy. There are also moves towards increasing the number of people studying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). I know people from my children’s generation that have engineering degrees and that have never worked as engineers. There now appears to be an oversupply of people with STEM degrees, soon there will be far too many accountants, there were always too many MBAs.
That is where this book – although a bit old now – is so interesting. The basic idea is that the authors had witnessed the changes in the labour market over a number of years. Those changes included the fact that employers had basically given up on the social contract where they buy employee loyalty (including management employees) in exchange for life-long employment. Instead, the economy has shifted such that everyone’s employment (basically no matter where you are in the hierarchy) is, at best, ‘until further notice’.
However, one of the things that hasn’t changed is that most universities spit out graduates who have ‘skills’ – you know, they have a named profession, they are an engineer or a chemist or an accountant. Or rather they are a sub-group of one of those, a chemical engineer, say, or a commercial lawyer. The point being that rapid technological change might well mean that whatever ‘skills’ you acquired during your long and expensive education may well no longer be needed in the ‘new economy’ when you finally graduate (newly minted and burdened with debt). Even if those skills are still needed, you are likely to need to hone those skills in ‘the real world’ and the company that employs you might not want to spend too much money helping you to do that honing, particularly since they don’t expect you to be around for all that long – not only due to the problem mentioned above about the crisis of a lack of loyalty, but also because companies aren’t particularly great at forward planning. There’s a bit in this where a company complains that they sent off some of their bright young things to do an MBA and as soon as they got their degree they left the company – so, the lack of loyalty thing seems to cut both ways, who would have thought?
The problem is that it cuts the employees much more deeply than it does the employers. Even getting into the job market is difficult for graduates, but getting a degree costs more than just money, it costs years of your life. So, given the lack of loyalty, the lack of certainty that you will be employed doing whatever it was you trained to do, and also how easy it is to be pigeonholed as whatever it is you studied and therefore be effectively barred from jobs because, well, ‘aren’t you an engineer???’ This book asks what have these changes in the economy more generally done to make how students go about choosing their university degree courses and also what have recruitment people in businesses done in changing how they go about looking for graduates they are seeking to employ.
The news isn’t good. A large part of the point of this book is to say that universities have, for most of the 20th century, sought to spit out people who will be ‘managers’. Up until fairly recently very few people went to university and those that did were ‘of the right class’ and they would, in fact, end up being managers virtually just by having studied at university. And this was true whether or not their degree was directly related to ‘managing’ per se. And this is still ‘sort of’ true, as at one point here one of the recruitment people says that it doesn’t really matter what degree you get or what mark you get in that degree – neither really tells them very much about who they should employ (he even quotes Macbeth (although, it’s really Banquo) about looking into the seeds of time and saying which grain will grow and which will not, a degree on its own doesn’t help you see who is management material. The point is that in the olden days you did a degree to become a manager and that fit nicely into the social structure of the economy where a certain number of managers were needed and those managers were needed within a highly bureaucratic organisation. So, you were being spat out of the university machine in a one-size-fits-all standardised form. You were expected to ‘fit in’ and part of the fitting in was to meet the specifications of the template of a manager. The whole of the structure – from education through to company office – was designed to make sure the people being employed would operate according to specification and that meant ‘not be too creative’ since creativity is disruptive – almost by definition – and the old bureaucratic structures didn’t do disruption.
But in the ‘new economy’ the expectation is for you to be entrepreneurial (whatever that actually means) and therefore not just fit the template, but also be able to think outside the square (and a whole range of other clichés too, if you can possibly manage it).
The authors therefore expected that they would find that young people would be keen to acquire these shiny new entrepreneurial skills – to learn how to be charismatic, for instance, for if there is anything the new economy can’t get enough of it is charismatic entrepreneurs. However, this is not really what they found – well, no, they did find this, but mainly only among the children of the already wealthy upper classes.
They interview students at various universities in England – across the social class divides that universities cater to (and they refer to these universities as Oxbridge, Home Counties and so on). Anyway, what is really interesting here – and I would love to see if this is still the case about 20 years later (because I suspect it would be) – is that many people still hope that they will get a job in a good company and that they will move incrementally up the ladder. And they hope this will be the case despite all evidence to the contrary following decades of downsizing, restructuring, outsourcing and other nice ways to say ‘sacking people’.
The most interesting part of this was where the recruiters are talking about the qualities they look for in new employees – and a degree itself is no longer enough. Now you have to be able to show a number of things that will ensure you fit. One of those things is that you have been to one of the more elite universities – Oxbridge, preferably – as this means you have already been selected and have what it takes. As something I read in the Guardian a while ago said, at least you know that someone who has gone to a good school knows how to wear a suit… But as I said before, a university degree and good marks are no longer seen as being enough – and neither is being able to wear a suit. What you now also need to be able to show your prospective employer is that you have get-up and go – and you show this by your extra-curricular interests. So, you need to be able to point to the time you rowed backwards up the Amazon (a quote from the book, although, hyperbole, obviously) and then they can say, ‘this guy is a go-getter’. But, you could just as easily do this by employing people by postcode – as such ‘entrepreneurial’ skills are very much based on the availability of money your family had to lavish on you, and not only on your education, but also on your recreation too.
It was also interesting to see how those who had been relegated to the ‘second rank’ responded to the meritocracy. You might think they would be a bit annoyed that they had been sold a pup – you know, gotten themselves into mountains of debt and basically achieved a second-rate degree that would, almost by definition, deny them access to what those born into a ‘better’ family would have direct access to – even with worse ‘marks’. But the myth of merit runs deep in our society, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I really enjoyed this book – I could read this stuff all day. I know this one is getting a bit old, but I think much of what it has to say is probably still the case.
Many people try to plot their university degrees on the basis of the jobs they might end up with afterwards. This often means studying something like an MBA or accountancy. There are also moves towards increasing the number of people studying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). I know people from my children’s generation that have engineering degrees and that have never worked as engineers. There now appears to be an oversupply of people with STEM degrees, soon there will be far too many accountants, there were always too many MBAs.
That is where this book – although a bit old now – is so interesting. The basic idea is that the authors had witnessed the changes in the labour market over a number of years. Those changes included the fact that employers had basically given up on the social contract where they buy employee loyalty (including management employees) in exchange for life-long employment. Instead, the economy has shifted such that everyone’s employment (basically no matter where you are in the hierarchy) is, at best, ‘until further notice’.
However, one of the things that hasn’t changed is that most universities spit out graduates who have ‘skills’ – you know, they have a named profession, they are an engineer or a chemist or an accountant. Or rather they are a sub-group of one of those, a chemical engineer, say, or a commercial lawyer. The point being that rapid technological change might well mean that whatever ‘skills’ you acquired during your long and expensive education may well no longer be needed in the ‘new economy’ when you finally graduate (newly minted and burdened with debt). Even if those skills are still needed, you are likely to need to hone those skills in ‘the real world’ and the company that employs you might not want to spend too much money helping you to do that honing, particularly since they don’t expect you to be around for all that long – not only due to the problem mentioned above about the crisis of a lack of loyalty, but also because companies aren’t particularly great at forward planning. There’s a bit in this where a company complains that they sent off some of their bright young things to do an MBA and as soon as they got their degree they left the company – so, the lack of loyalty thing seems to cut both ways, who would have thought?
The problem is that it cuts the employees much more deeply than it does the employers. Even getting into the job market is difficult for graduates, but getting a degree costs more than just money, it costs years of your life. So, given the lack of loyalty, the lack of certainty that you will be employed doing whatever it was you trained to do, and also how easy it is to be pigeonholed as whatever it is you studied and therefore be effectively barred from jobs because, well, ‘aren’t you an engineer???’ This book asks what have these changes in the economy more generally done to make how students go about choosing their university degree courses and also what have recruitment people in businesses done in changing how they go about looking for graduates they are seeking to employ.
The news isn’t good. A large part of the point of this book is to say that universities have, for most of the 20th century, sought to spit out people who will be ‘managers’. Up until fairly recently very few people went to university and those that did were ‘of the right class’ and they would, in fact, end up being managers virtually just by having studied at university. And this was true whether or not their degree was directly related to ‘managing’ per se. And this is still ‘sort of’ true, as at one point here one of the recruitment people says that it doesn’t really matter what degree you get or what mark you get in that degree – neither really tells them very much about who they should employ (he even quotes Macbeth (although, it’s really Banquo) about looking into the seeds of time and saying which grain will grow and which will not, a degree on its own doesn’t help you see who is management material. The point is that in the olden days you did a degree to become a manager and that fit nicely into the social structure of the economy where a certain number of managers were needed and those managers were needed within a highly bureaucratic organisation. So, you were being spat out of the university machine in a one-size-fits-all standardised form. You were expected to ‘fit in’ and part of the fitting in was to meet the specifications of the template of a manager. The whole of the structure – from education through to company office – was designed to make sure the people being employed would operate according to specification and that meant ‘not be too creative’ since creativity is disruptive – almost by definition – and the old bureaucratic structures didn’t do disruption.
But in the ‘new economy’ the expectation is for you to be entrepreneurial (whatever that actually means) and therefore not just fit the template, but also be able to think outside the square (and a whole range of other clichés too, if you can possibly manage it).
The authors therefore expected that they would find that young people would be keen to acquire these shiny new entrepreneurial skills – to learn how to be charismatic, for instance, for if there is anything the new economy can’t get enough of it is charismatic entrepreneurs. However, this is not really what they found – well, no, they did find this, but mainly only among the children of the already wealthy upper classes.
They interview students at various universities in England – across the social class divides that universities cater to (and they refer to these universities as Oxbridge, Home Counties and so on). Anyway, what is really interesting here – and I would love to see if this is still the case about 20 years later (because I suspect it would be) – is that many people still hope that they will get a job in a good company and that they will move incrementally up the ladder. And they hope this will be the case despite all evidence to the contrary following decades of downsizing, restructuring, outsourcing and other nice ways to say ‘sacking people’.
The most interesting part of this was where the recruiters are talking about the qualities they look for in new employees – and a degree itself is no longer enough. Now you have to be able to show a number of things that will ensure you fit. One of those things is that you have been to one of the more elite universities – Oxbridge, preferably – as this means you have already been selected and have what it takes. As something I read in the Guardian a while ago said, at least you know that someone who has gone to a good school knows how to wear a suit… But as I said before, a university degree and good marks are no longer seen as being enough – and neither is being able to wear a suit. What you now also need to be able to show your prospective employer is that you have get-up and go – and you show this by your extra-curricular interests. So, you need to be able to point to the time you rowed backwards up the Amazon (a quote from the book, although, hyperbole, obviously) and then they can say, ‘this guy is a go-getter’. But, you could just as easily do this by employing people by postcode – as such ‘entrepreneurial’ skills are very much based on the availability of money your family had to lavish on you, and not only on your education, but also on your recreation too.
It was also interesting to see how those who had been relegated to the ‘second rank’ responded to the meritocracy. You might think they would be a bit annoyed that they had been sold a pup – you know, gotten themselves into mountains of debt and basically achieved a second-rate degree that would, almost by definition, deny them access to what those born into a ‘better’ family would have direct access to – even with worse ‘marks’. But the myth of merit runs deep in our society, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I really enjoyed this book – I could read this stuff all day. I know this one is getting a bit old, but I think much of what it has to say is probably still the case.
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