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

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.