https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5951-5189
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ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on how universities are increasingly made responsible for the employment of their students . Drawing on Governmentality Studies, we suggest framing this pressure as an employability dispositif. We join critical studies which link the employability imperative to a neo-liberal transformation of the higher education landscape. However, we criticise them for not paying enough attention to how the dispositif is put into practice by different universities and countries. As a consequence, they overlook important differences in terms of its institutionalisation. This contribution presents an overview of the dispositif's variegation, based on the findings of a survey with responses from 84 European universities in 26 European countries, which makes our study the most comprehensive in the field to date. Using an abductive approach, we aim, in addtion, to find explanations for the variegation. We show that a high youth unemployment rate has little explanatory power for the strength of the employability dispostif, in contrast to tuition fees and the country typology that we use and further develop. The dispositif is most advanced in Liberal Market Economies, indicating that universities in these countries seem to be on the way to becoming labour market institutions in their own right.
Acknowledgement
We would like to show our gratitude to the European University Association (EUA) and European Association of Institutions in Higher Education (EURASHE) who helped us to disseminate our questionnaire. We thank Susan Robertson and Adrian Mackenzie for sharing their insights, ideas and expertise in digital methods with us that greatly improved the research design. A special thank also goes to the three anonymous reviewers for their very useful and constructive comments on an earlier draft.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. For an interesting controversy about the differences between discourse analysis and institutional theory as well as the possibility of integrating them, see Lok and Willmott (Citation2006); for a good introduction to New Materialism, see Coole and Frost (Citation2010).
2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/employability. This definition was echoed in the UK by New Labour under Gordon Brown, who defined employability as ‘development of skills and adaptable workforces in which all those capable of work are encouraged to develop the skills, knowledge, technology and adaptability to enable them to enter and remain in employment throughout their working lives.’ HM TREASURY (1997) Treasury Press Release 122/97, 13th October: Gordon Brown unveils UK Employment Action Plan. London: HM Treasury, p. 1.
3. An inquiry in the database Web of Science shows a steady increase of publications on employability and higher education since 2001, with a sharp rise since 2008. 2017 alone saw 1123 new publications on the topic.
4. For an interesting analysis of cross-border student mobility programmes as part of the neoliberal reform see Courtois (Citation2018).
5. The situation in the UK looks different since British universities had traditionally such autonomy. However, the former polytechnics gained such autonomy when turned into universities in 1992.
7. We will use the term dispositif here, even though many English translations prefer ‘apparatus’. We share Jeffrey Bussolini’s view that these translations fail to account for the important theoretical differences between dispositif and apparatus (Bussolini Citation2010). The notion of apparatus is heavily informed by Louis Althusser’s theory of state apparatuses. Dispositif, in contrast, puts more emphasis on the dynamic nature of social ordering.
8. We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for reminding us of this important argument made by Foucault in his lectures on the birth of biopolitics.
9. A recent survey of the Swiss labour market conducted by Credit Suisse indicates that small and middle size enterprises conduct much less of their recruitment through job portals than do large companies, particularly in the high-tech sector (Suisse Citation2017: 18).
10. EUA represents more than 800 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 48 European countries. Being a recognised representative body, we took it as a proxy for established universities in Europe. This left a considerable number of higher education institutions out of our research, who are not EUA members. We thank the EUA for distributing the questionnaire.
13. 7-point Likert scale, where 7 means full responsibility and 1 no responsibility at all.
14. 7-point Likert scale, where 7 means great importance and 1 little importance in comparison to other strategic orientations.
15. On a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 means they do not agree at all and 7 means they fully agree.
16. On a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 means no use at all and 7 means extensive use.
17. All on a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 means no use at all and 7 means extensive use.
18. This may change in the future in this rapidly changing environment, and with Facebook launching its own job search feature in 2017 (see Abed Citation2018). LinkedIn is also changing its features in time (cancelling some and introducing others), but stays strategically focused on higher education.
19. A further 12% did not know whether their institution does so. The number that motivates students may therefore be even higher than 68%.
20. A further 13% did not know, so the number might be higher in reality.
21. A further 19% did not know, so the number might be higher in reality.
22. A further 20% did not know, so the number might be higher in reality.
23. On a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 means they do not agree at all and 7 means they fully agree.
24. For an interesting anaylsis that considers the new technologies as part of an neoliberal ideology see Jandrić and Hayes (Citation2019).
25. Based on our respondents, the more a university considers employability as its responsibility, the more staff it employs (for yes to mentioned employability, M=1.46; for no, M=0.62). This result is supported by the Spearman correlation indicating a significant positive association between the share of staff dedicated to employability out of all administrative staff and the importance of employability in relation to other strategic orientations of respondent universities (rs=.31, p<.005).
26. Youth unemployment refers to young people (aged 15 to 24) who are neither in employment nor in education and training (NEET): Eurostat, Youth unemployment figures, 2007-2017 (une_rt_q) and (lfsi_act_a). https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tipslm80.
27. We took employment rates based on ISCED levels 3 to 8, and for ISCED levels 5 to 8, for the reference year 2017. ISCED refers to the International Standard Classification of Education with eight levels. See more here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/International_Standard_Classification_of_Education_(ISCED)#Implementation_of_ISCED_2011_.28levels_of_education.29 [last accessed 1 October 2019].
28. We also tested the other way around, and found a negative association between the employment rate at ISCED 3-8 and (i) the general use of Facebook (r=−.27, p<0.016) and Twitter (r=−.28, p<0.013) and (ii) the importance of having a LinkedIn profile to finding a job (r =−.34, p<.002). Similarly, there s also a negative association between the employment rate at ISCED 5-8 and (i) the general use of Facebook (r=−.30, p<0.007) and Twitter (r=−.26, p<0.018) and (ii) the importance of having a LinkedIn profile to finding a job (r =−.31, p<.005).
29. Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) is a term used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the group of countries comprising Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, and the three Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Witt et al. also use the category Advanced Emerging Economies (AEE), which we did not include since our sample for this category was too small.
30. We use the relative wealth measurement of the EU, i.e. General Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) expressed in relation to the European Union (EU28) average set to equal 100 (tec00114). For further information see http s://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tec00114 [last accessed 1 January 2020].
31. From LMEs, 9 said yes, 5 said no and 4 did not know. From SECs, 23 said yes, 3 said no, and 3 did not know.
32. For LMEs, all reported providing this, with 13 saying they do this regularly and 1 occasionally; for SECs, 3 reported they do not do it, 11 said they do it regularly, and 15 said they do it occasionally.
33. For CMEs, 5 said they do it regularly, 4 do it occasionally, and 9 do not do it. For CEEC-Bs, 0 said regularly, 1 said occasionally, and 4 said they do not do it.
35. The situation in the UK looks different since British universities had traditionally such autonomy. However, the former polytechnics gained such autonomy when turned into post-1992 universities.
The situation in the UK looks different since British universities had traditionally such autonomy. However, the former polytechnics gained such autonomy when turned into post-1992 universities.
36. The British employers stand in particular out with their unwillingness to provide and fund the specialist education and training they need also in the context of further education. A recent survey of the thinktank Learning and Work Institute identifies a drop of 10 percentage in the number of adults taking part in training since 2010, which is equivalent to 3.8 million fewer adults (Smith, Egglestone, and Aldridge (Citation2019)).
37. For further information on PPS see http s://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-datasets/-/tec00114.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eva Hartmann
Dr Eva Hartmann is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on cross-border recognition of higher education qualifications in the context of an emerging European and international labour market, on cross-border quality assurance, and on the internationalisation of further and corporate education. Her current research project focuses on the rise of transnational private authority in the sphere of education, digitalisation and educational diplomacy after BREXIT.
Janja Komljenovic
Dr Janja Komljenovic is a lecturer in Higher Education at Lancaster University. She is interested in the diversity and complexity of markets in and around universities, including the variety of actors that have entered the sector, their strategies and ways of working, and the consequences for higher education and societies at large. Most recently, she has been studying the relation between the digital economy and higher education and how they might affect each other. She has published internationally on higher education policy, governance, and markets.