Lecture content or analytical view? Perceptions of disciplinary knowledge and its use at work

Graduates’ disciplinary knowledge has been critiqued as being too narrow for the knowledge economy and is largely absent from graduate employability debates. These debates tend to reproduce what this paper terms ‘the employability status quo’ by emphasising generic employability skills valued by the labour market and treating disciplinary knowledge similarly instrumentally. This gives only a partial account of and obscures the transformational potential of disciplinary knowledge. This paper addresses this omission by exploring how graduates perceive and use disciplinary knowledge at work, using interview data from twenty graduates working in newer areas of graduate employment in the associate professions in the UK. Drawing on concepts of powerful knowledge, the pedagogic device, and students’ and graduates’ relationships to disciplinary knowledges, this paper argues that higher education can still provide access to transformational knowledge that reshapes graduates’ relationships to employment, although this access may not be equally distributed. This argument leads to two contributions challenging the employability status quo. First, that graduates transformed by higher education hold wider conceptualisations of disciplinary knowledge and can better articulate how they use it at work than graduates holding narrower conceptualisations, even when working in discipline-unrelated fields. Second, that powerful knowledge can deepen graduates’ understanding of using research skills, developed in a disciplinary context and integral to knowledge-based jobs, helping graduates approach their work in imaginative and critical ways. This paper therefore brings disciplinary knowledge firmly back into graduate employability debates and emphasises its wider relevance to the knowledge economy.