'The best laid plans’: reflexivity, employability and early employment outcomes when graduating in a pandemic

Scott Hurrell*, Pauline Anderson, Daria Luchinskaya, Dora Scholarios, Belgin Okay-Somerville

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic was a stark, sudden and novel ‘career shock’, potentially harming individual and social wellbeing in the short and long run (Akkermans et al., 2020). Disruption to labour markets and lives represented a sharp ‘contextual discontinuity’ (Archer, 2012), with graduate recruitment particularly severely affected in the UK (Hooley and Binnie, 2020). To understand how tertiary education graduates responded to this disruptive shock, we use Archer’s (2007, 2012) theory of reflexivity. Located at the nexus of structure and agency, reflexivity explains how individuals reflect upon their (changing) contexts and (attempt to) exert agency. Using mixed-methods data from 399 UK graduates, and multivariate analysis, we focus on how reflexivity influences career agency, proxied through graduates’ perceived employability and early career outcomes. Our use of qualitative survey data to code reflexivity is, itself, a novel contribution that overcomes weaknesses in extant quantitative scales. We find graduates adopted Archer’s modes of potentially agency enabling reflexivity (autonomous (most commonly), meta and communicative) to different degrees. One in nine graduates, however, evidenced fractured reflexivity. As in Archer’s conceptualisation, these graduates were paralysed by their contexts, had significantly lower levels of career agency, and experienced traumatic feelings such as despair and failure. Importantly, we contribute a novel fifth mode, confounded reflexivity, which was negatively associated with early employment outcomes. Here graduates’ pursuit of their chosen careers was halted, but without the trauma of fractured reflexivity. Our contribution extends Archer’s typology with wide-ranging implications for sociological theory, employability and careers, post-Covid society and future research.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationResearch in the Sociology of Work
Subtitle of host publicationEmployability
Place of PublicationLeeds
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 6 Jan 2024

Publication series

NameResearch in the Sociology of Work
PublisherEmerald Publishing Limited
ISSN (Print)0277-2833

Keywords

  • reflexivity
  • employability
  • graduate outcomes
  • graduate employment
  • COVID-19
  • pandemic effects

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  • Graduating in a Pandemic

    Luchinskaya, D. (Co-investigator), Scholarios, D. (Co-investigator), Anderson, P. (Co-investigator), Okay-Somerville, B. (Co-investigator) & Hurrell, S. (Principal Investigator)

    1/04/20 → …

    Project: Non-funded project

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