Becoming a professional: the warranting of emergent identity

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Becoming a professional the warranting of
emergent identity

• Leonard Holmes
• The Business School, University of Bedfordshire
• len.holmes_at_beds.ac.uk
• www.re-skill.org.uk

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Higher education and ...

• knowledge society/ economy
• professionalisation
• symbolic analysts
• knowledge workers
• professional-managerial workers

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Research into graduate employment employability

• quantitative-descriptive
• possessive
• positioning
• processual

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Employment vs employability

• not the same
• relationship?
• how research?
• description
• analysis/ explanation
• what to do?
• prescription

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Employment vs employability

• explanation of patterns of employment outcomes
• in terms of actionable policies and practices
• at macro, meso and micro levels

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Employment research

• PEP (1956) Graduate Employment
• Kelsall et al. (1970) Six Years After
• Roizen Jepson(1985) Degrees for Jobs
  Employers expectation of higher education
• IES Annual surveys
• IER (Warwick)/ AGCAS/ CSU longitudinal study
  (1996 onwards)
• CHERI CIHE projects
• HESA longitudinal study

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Employability

• dominant perspective/ approach
• graduate skills and attributes
• Skills ATTributes SKATTY
• concepts of skills and attributes not questioned

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ESECT definition

• a set of achievements - skills, understandings
  and personal attributes - that make graduates
  more likely to gain employment and be successful
  in their chosen occupations.
• (Knight and Yorke, 2003)

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Key contributors ...

• Enterprise in Higher Education
• Higher Education for Capability
• NCVQ - core skills
• Various projects lists
• Smith et al. (1989) - 20 transferable employment
  skills,
• Allen (1993) - model of 108 skills, 8
  categories, 4 zones
• Harvey et al. (1992) Someone who can make an
  impression
• AGR (1995) Skills for graduates in the 21st
  Century
• Lee Harvey et al. (1997) - Graduates' Work
  Organisational change and students' attributes
• ESECT (2002-2005)
• Student employability profiles (2006)

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example lists ...

• QHE project (UCE) - set of generic or core
  skills which employers and academics agreed
  should be demonstrated by graduates, including
• "willingness to learn, team work, problem solving
  and a range of personal attributes including
  commitment, energy, self-motivation,
  self-management, reliability, co-operation,
  flexibility and adaptability, analytic ability,
  logical argument and ability to summarise key
  issues."

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AGR - Self-reliance skills

• self-awareness
• self-promotion
• exploring and creating opportunities
• action planning
• networking
• matching and decision making
• negotiation
• political awareness
• coping with uncertainty
• development focus
• transfer skills
• self-confidence

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Dearing Report (1997)

• we believe that four skills are key to the
  future success of graduates whatever they intend
  to do in later life. These four are
• communication skills
• numeracy
• the use of information technology
• learning how to learn.
• ( para 9.17)

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Student employability profiles

• A graduate with an Honours Bachelor's degree in
  Law will have the ability to
• demonstrate an understanding of the principal
  features of the legal system(s) studied
• apply knowledge to a situation of limited
  complexity so as to provide arguable
• conclusions for concrete actual or hypothetical
  problems
• identify accurately issues that require
  researching
• identify and retrieve up-to-date legal
  information, using paper and electronic sources
• use relevant primary and secondary legal sources
• recognise and rank items and issues in terms of
  relevance and importance
• bring together information and materials from a
  variety of different sources
• synthesise doctrinal and policy issues in
  relation to a topic
• judge critically the merits of particular
  arguments
• plus 9 others

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lists, lists, lists

• Which list?
• How do we relate to each other?
• Proliferation of lists - unuseable information
• not based on any sound empirical research -
  mainly semantic elaboration, borrowing etc

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SKATTy research

• assumption of stable, unequivocal meaning of
  terms
• mainly opinion research
• nominal ordinal data transformed into ratio
  data
• over-interpretation of qualitative data
• originates in HE, not employment?

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poor explanation of employment outcomes

• differences in employment outcomes, in terms of
• ethnicity
• gender
• socio-economic class
• institution attended
• occupation entered
• what about un-/ under-employed graduates?
• variations in employment trajectories

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Societal embeddedness

• macro and micro
• system and process
• structure and action
• social and personal
• time perspective synchronic and diachronic

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Foundations for processual perspective

• Interactionism (eg Cooley, Mead, Blumer)
• Interpretativism (eg Schutz, Luckmann)
• Negotiated order (eg Strauss)
• Dialogical approach (eg Bakhtin)
• Relational constructionism (eg Hosking, Gergen)

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Phenomenological reduction

• Cannot observe skills, attributes, competencies,
  etc
• Need to focus on significant (meaningful)
  behaviour/ conduct by real persons
• BUT ...
• Significant behaviour is a situated construal as
  behaviour-of-a-type
• by a kind-of-person
• ie instantiation of a certain practice (from a
  set of salient practices) by someone identified
  as a certain kind of person (from a set of
  possible salient identifications)
  (practices-identity model of construal of
  behaviour)

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Practice-Identity model of performance
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Importance of identity

• Goffman moral careers(Goffman)
• identity projects (Harré)
• situated, multiple
• processual identifying/ identification vs
  entitative view of identity
• negotiated claim and ascription
• emergent identity

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Trajectories of emergent identity
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Modalities of emergent identity

• Trajectories through zones or modalities
• Warranting of claims and affirmation/
  disaffirmation
• Becoming (1) successful trajectory
• Becoming (2) engagement in practices appropriate
  (prescribed and preferred-permitted) to identity
  claim affirmation

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Graduate Identity approach

• focus on biographies, career trajectories
• narrative, biographical research
• analytical and interpretative frame
• particular focus on tensions between different
  situated identities
• particular focus on conflictual and disruptive
  situations

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Graduate Identity approach

• dynamic career trajectories, and chance events
• better explanation of employment outcomes
• oriented to post-graduation lives, not merely
  employment
• relevant after graduation, not just at graduation