Dr Karen Handley

Graduate employment programmes offer university students the prospect of a reasonable salary and development opportunities. For employers, such programmes offer a talent pipeline and a means to identify future leaders. The psychological contract which develops during recruitment processes creates high expectations on both sides of the employment bargain. A corollary is that graduate programmes usually entail highly competitive, multi-stage selection processes, in which applicants must repeatedly demonstrate their employability in online psychometric tests and computerised activities before progressing to the final selection stage. Drawing on Foucauldian theories of governmentality, this study uses interviews (n = 17) and focus groups (n = 2) to explore how final-year students at a post-1992 English university navigate graduate recruitment processes, and learn to signal what they believe is employability. The article shows how students’ understanding of employability is formed not only through traditional channels such as university careers services or employer communications, but increasingly through third-party (and often commercial) ‘helper’ apps offering online test-practice sessions, templated careers advice, and other methods for gaming the recruitment process. These helper apps can have distorting effects, producing graduates focused on the performance rather than the substance of employability.

This article examines the troubling of gender norms that unfolded on the social networking site, Mumsnet, at the beginning of the UK's first lockdown response to the COVID pandemic. Using an analysis of 7144 contributions which included the acronym 'WFH' (=working from home), posted from 1/3/2020 to 5/4/2020, the article examines how Mumsnet members talked about WFH whilst caring for toddlers and home-schooled children.

Mumsnet discussions about everyday moral dilemmas create a discursive space for examining the situated rationalities and normative judgements which shape expectations of how to behave as a working parent. Drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory, the article shows how Mumsnet contributors generated alternative sub-categorisations of ‘good mums’, and destabilised discourse assumptions of intensive motherhood such as always ‘being there’ for their children, thereby ‘working the weakness in the norms’ (Butler, 1993) and creating potential for change.

This article examines the narratives of 24 knowledge workers aged 48-58 as they anticipate their future employment and employability. The term knowledge worker is used to indicate occupational roles such as software engineer, academic, architect, manager and lawyer, where work involves non-routine problem-solving using 'intellectual assets'. Four narrative patterns about future employment are presented - winding down; reorienting 'self' away from work; seeking progression; renewal. These patterns reveal contrasting self-evaluations of employability and potential.

We argue that employability is not a straightforward function of human capital, which usually refers to experience, knowledge and qualifications. We show through our data how judgements about a person’s employability – both self-evaluations as well as evaluations by others - are complicated by social norms and cultural understandings of 'potential'. Strategies to signal one's potential become more complex and sometimes less effective for older knowledge workers. We contend that a person's age influences others' evaluations of their employment potential, such that the relationship between attributed merit (based largely on past experience) and attributed potential (based on assumptions about a person's future) is inverted as workers become older.

The findings have implications for public policies such as Extending Working Lives. Policies that remove legal and institutional barriers to extended working lives may be only partially successful without changes to cultural attitudes about older workers' employment potential.

Enterprise education has been identified as suffering from fluctuating policy, inconsistent funding and faddish practice, thereby limiting the development of a sustainable community of scholar-practitioners. In view of these constraints, this article considers the position of the often-isolated enterprise educators, and focuses on the role networks play in supporting their sustainable professional development and hence the domain itself. A case–based analysis draws on social-constructivist concepts of networks and communities of practice to analyse a UK-based network, Enterprise Educators UK (‘EEUK’). It is argued that the member-driven nature of EEUK is unique and important for providing a sustainable forum through which enterprise educators can engage, share practice, find identity, develop ownership of and deliver sustained innovation in enterprise education. Generating a rich picture of the enterprise educator’s ecosystem, the article makes a methodological contribution to network research by undertaking a longitudinal analysis of a decade of ‘Best Practice’ events. It extends Community of Practice theory of peripheral participation and identity in professional associations, and derives practical implications for enterprise educator networks. Recommendations are made for future research and dissemination of enterprise educator practice at, between, and beyond events, to further the development of the international enterprise education domain.

A discourse of employability saturates the Higher Education sector in the UK. Government and employers call on universities to produce employable graduates who are attractive to the labour market and can sustain their future marketability by taking responsibility for protean self-development. While the neoliberal assumptions behind this call have attracted robust critique, the extent to which employers shape graduating students’ subjectivities and sense of worth as (potentially employable) workers has escaped scrutiny. Inspired by Foucauldian analyses of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices, this article examines employers’ graduate careers websites and explores the discursive construction of the ‘employable graduate’. The article contends that these websites function as a mechanism of anticipatory socialisation through which HRM practices extend managerial control into the transitional space of pre-recruitment, with the aim of engaging students’ consent to particular norms of employability.

Within many higher education systems there is a search for means to increase levels of student satisfaction with assessment feedback. This article suggests that the search is under way in the wrong place by concentrating on feedback as a product rather than looking more widely to feedback as a long-term dialogic process in which all parties are engaged. A three-year study, focusing on engaging students with assessment feedback, is presented and analysed using an analytical model of stages of engagement. The analysis suggests that a more holistic, socially-embedded conceptualisation of feedback and engagement is needed. This conceptualisation is likely to encourage tutors to support students in more productive ways, which enable students to use feedback to develop their learning, rather than respond mechanistically to the tutors' ‘instruction'.

Feedback is central to pedagogic theory, and if feedback is to be effective, students need to engage with it and apply it at some point in the future. However, student dissatisfaction with feedback – as evidenced in the National Student Survey – suggests that there are problems which limit student engagement with feedback, such as their perception that much of their feedback is irrelevant to future assignments. This article reports on a study which sought to enhance engagement by giving students exemplar assignments annotated with feedback before submission of their final assignments. This was done by providing an online facility where students could view exemplars and post comments or questions to tutors and peers on a discussion board. The exemplar facility was highly valued by students, although there were no quantitative effects such as an increase in students’ assignment marks when compared with the previous cohort. The article reflects on possible reasons for this result and discusses ways to improve the exemplar facility, for example by facilitating dialogue between tutors and students. The article concludes with lessons learned about how to construct exemplars, and considers how exemplars might also be used within marking teams to improve consistency of marking.

Feedback on students’ assignments may be comprehensive and well-constructed as a result of careful thought from tutors trying to identify and address students’ needs. However, feedback’s utility ultimately depends on the way students engage with it. ‘Doing time’ by complying with a norm of collecting, but then only skim-reading, feedback is a long way from the ‘mindful’ engagement associated with reflection, interpretation, deepening understanding and changes in later behaviour.

This article argues that the literature’s traditional focus on experimental studies of feedback attributes (whilst ignoring students’ engagement) is misplaced, particularly given the methodological problems and inconsistent findings associated with these studies. These limitations suggest the need for an alternative line of enquiry.

In this article, we develop a conceptual framework intended to illuminate the process of student engagement with feedback. We further propose a research agenda which can convey the variety of student experiences and generate analytic insights about students’ evolving engagement as a result of multiple feedback encounters in an educational setting. We suggest that this research agenda can lead to policies and practices to enhance student engagement with feedback, which may build students’ sense of responsibility and ownership for their learning.

Constraints in resourcing and student dissatisfaction with assessment feedback mean that the effectiveness of our feedback practices has never been so important. Drawing on findings from a three-year study focused on student engagement with feedback, this paper reveals the limited extent to which effectiveness can be accurately measured and challenges many of the assumptions and beliefs about effectiveness of feedback practices. Difficulties relating to multiple purposes of feedback, its temporal nature and the capabilities of evaluators reveal that measuring effectiveness is fraught with difficulty. The paper argues that the learner is in the best position to judge the effectiveness of feedback, but may not always recognise the benefits it provides. Therefore, the pedagogic literacy of students is key to evaluation of feedback and feedback processes.

Management consultancy is seen by many as a key agent in the adoption of new management ideas and practices in organizations. Two contrasting views are dominant-”consultants as innovators, bringing new knowledge to their clients or as legitimating client knowledge. Those few studies which examine directly the flow of knowledge through consultancy in projects with clients favour the innovator view and highlight the important analytical and practical value of boundaries-” consultants as both knowledge and organizational outsiders. Likewise, in the legitimator view, the consultants" role is seen in terms of the primacy of the organizational boundary. By drawing on a wider social science literature on boundaries and studies of inter-organizational knowledge flow and management consultancy more generally, this polarity is seen as problematic, especially at the level of the consulting project. An alternative framework of boundary relations is developed and presented which incorporates their multiplicity, dynamism and situational specificity. This points to a greater complexity and variability in knowledge flow and its potential than is currently recognized. This is significant not only in terms of our understanding of management consultancy and inter-organizational knowledge dynamics and boundaries, but of a critical understanding of the role of management consultancy more generally.