Rethinking Careers Education and Guidance

Theory, Policy and Practice

Ruth Hawthorn, Jennifer M. Kidd, John Killeen, Bill Law, A. G. Watts, Ruth Hawthorn, Jennifer M. Kidd, John Killeen, Bill Law, A. G. Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134770526
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Re-thinking Careers Education and Guidance is the first book published in the United Kingdom to cover theory, policy and practice in all sectors of careers education and guidance provision. The book features:
* an authoritative review of career theories, together with a new career learning theory
* an analysis of the development of careers provision in schools; colleges; higher education; work organisations; the Careers Service, and in other agencies
* an examination of the main aspects of practice
* an exploration of ways of supporting development and evaluation
* an analysis of the role of public policy, and the development of guidance systems in other parts of the world.
Re-thinking Careers Education and Guidance is an essential text for students in initial training, those engaged in in-service and higher degree work, and reflective guidance practitioners.

Part I
Theory and context

All careers education and guidance policy and practice is based on theory: on some model of the reality with which it is dealing. The task of formal theory is to offer policy-makers and practitioners a variety of such models, fleshed out and supported by evidence, against which their own model can be explicated and tested.

Chapter 1 examines the changing social context in which careers education and guidance has to operate. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the concept of ‘career’ is changing, including the increasing emphasis on functional flexibility and non-standard work patterns. Arguably, these changes greatly strengthen the case for lifelong access to careers education and guidance.

Chapter 2 reviews a wide range of career theories, disentangling some of the key elements that distinguish them. It pays particular attention to recent theoretical work, which has placed more emphasis than hitherto on economic factors. Indeed, as a crude generalisation, it could be argued that whereas in the 1940s and 1950s the careers field was dominated by psychology, in the 1960s and 1970s this dominance was challenged in the UK by sociology, and in the 1980s and 1990s by economics. Career theories need to be distinguished from guidance theories: career theories are concerned with describing, explaining and predicting what happens; guidance theories with providing a basis for action. Nonetheless, since effective interventions have to based on an understanding of the processes in which they are intervening, guidance theories are necessarily based on career theories.

Chapter 3 presents a new career theory, focusing on career learning. It contends that career development proceeds through four ‘capacities’: sensing, sifting, focusing and understanding. Each of these stages is divided into two sub-stages. It is suggested that such a framework may be particularly valuable in designing progressive careers education programmes.

Chapter 4 looks at the outcomes of guidance. It distinguishes learning and economic outcomes, and examines the existing evidence on the extent of such outcomes. It also explores the relationship between the two forms of outcome, arguing that if such a relationship could be definitively demonstrated, learning outcomes could be used as proxies for economic outcomes. This would have the additional merit that learning outcomes are considered by many practitioners to be the most appropriate outcome measure in terms of professional practice.

Chapter 1
The social context of guidance
John Killeen

1.1
INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to think of an element of the social context which does not have implications for, or is unconnected from, working life and careers. This context is a changing one, and the rapidity of change is becoming central to our thinking about the role of guidance. The writing about careers, and hence guidance, is increasingly dominated by images of disorder and unpredictability, as if the direction and speed of history have become overwhelming in their consequences for individuals and their families. We shall first consider some of the sources of change in the organisation of work and the character of labour markets. We shall then look at some of the main implications for organisations and careers, and conclude by examining their implications for guidance.

1.2
SOURCES OF CHANGE

Technological change

Technological change is deeply embedded in the restructuring of developed economies. The most recent wave of technological transformation is the micro-electronic and information technology revolution, which is powerfully shaping the world of work. Most obviously, it is making process technologies practicable in an ever-increasing range of industries. The general outlines of this particular application of information technology were the first to be recognised, leading some commentators to treat industries such as petro-chemicals as the model for the future. Machine-paced, de-skilled, minutely sub-divided assembly-line work would give way to process-control work, and the trend in worker alienation would be reversed (Blauner, 1964). More recently, attention has shifted to the new forms of capital-intensive ‘flexible specialisation’, or batch production, which rapidly re-programmable technologies permit (Piore and Sabel, 1984). A more general conception of ‘post-Fordist’ production has emerged which (prematurely) announces the death of repetitive assembly-line work.

But of course, information technology is deeply implicated in many other changes in the character of work organisation. For example, it is changing most forms of work which involve the manipulation of symbols and images. The most routine forms of manipulation, once performed by an army of clerks, are being reduced to data input. Change extends to expert intellectual and artistic work, creating a new stratum of expert system-users. It also challenges the spatial concentration of work organisations. At one pole, this is represented by ‘home-working’; at the other, by the emergence of new forms of industrial organisation which depend upon real-time knowledge of internal operations, irrespective of geographical location.

Globalisation and regional free trade

Globalisation is the term used to describe the way in which national economies are increasingly becoming local ones, so that in order to understand what happens in them, we must attend to the whole of which they are parts. Most obviously, globalisation implies a reduction in national barriers to trade (for example, through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), so that an increasing proportion of firms compete on world markets. But regional alliances such as the European Union have also arisen within which barriers to trade are even more sharply reduced (Robson, 1993). These developments can be viewed as intensified competition. Under very intensely competitive conditions, the way firms operate and the kinds of careers they can offer are constrained in ways we shall consider in detail later.

But globalisation means much more than the internationalisation of product markets. Capital markets, too, are increasingly international. Capital may move on open markets, and the ownership of firms may consequently become internationalised. Capital also, however, flows across national boundaries within multinational companies: these acquire or create subsidiaries in each regional market, often dispersing both production and research-and-development activities; in addition, they move production around the globe with increasing ease, pitting plants against one another in an internal product market. Parallel to this, alliances are forged between companies across regional markets in order to share research-and-development costs and marketing facilities. This can lead to merger and the creation of new multinationals (Adams, 1993).

Britain’s ability to attract inward investment is sometimes considered in isolation from its ability to export capital. Historically, it has been a net exporter of capital; even in the 1980s, the influx of US, continental and far-eastern companies into the UK, and the jobs they created, did not match the outflow of capital from UK firms (CBI, 1991). A study of 25 large UK companies in this period (Williams et al., 1989) showed the rate of growth in the number of their foreign employees (28 per cent) to be almost exactly matched by the rate of reduction in their UK employees (29 per cent). Britain can with some justice claim to be one of the most globalised of developed economies: 80 per cent of its overseas trade in manufactured goods is conducted by multinationals, and 40 per cent of the employees of UK-based multinationals are overseas; in addition, an increasing proportion of UK jobs are in foreign-owned companies (United Nations, 1988).

An obvious possible consequence is the internationalisation of careers, both by conventional labour mobility and, for the upper echelons, by mobility inside international organisations. Thus the European dimension of guidance, in particular, has become increasingly prominent (Watts et al., 1994). But undoubtedly the most discussed potential consequence is the domestic impact of non-UK corporate cultures on working life.

Unfortunately, there is a wide measure of disagreement about what those cultures are and the degree to which they have permeated Britain. A general view which covers US companies such as IBM and Japanese ones such as Nissan includes high rates of pay and job security, the exclusion of trade unions or conclusion of single-union deals, highly evolved human-resource-development and training strategies, a superficial form of egalitarianism which is reflected in little movement between the main employment strata, close and individualised performance monitoring and appraisal, and, in the Japanese case, sweatshop work intensities, all resulting in high productivity. In order to compete, it is assumed that British firms must either emulate this strategy, or retreat into low-skill, low-wage sectors. Ashton et al. (1989) pointed to the absence of plans for training in up to 70 per cent of UK firms as evidence of the latter, but most firms are small-to-medium enterprises, not involved in direct competition with either foreign or British-owned multinationals.

Turning to ‘Japanisation’, this is often taken also to include Toyotaism’ (lean’ and ‘just-in-time’ production), which involves the minimisation of buffer stocks and the elimination of all obstacles to the continuity of production (Womack et al., 1990). This, in turn, is associated with features such as team-based, shop-floor problem-solving of production-engineering problems, and the embedding of responsibility for quality in all production tasks and teams. A second feature commonly noted is the creation of intimate, long-lasting relationships with suppliers, based upon the assumption that they will continually strive to surpass contractual obligations (for a review, see Wood, 1991). The implications for careers within the hierarchy of corporations and favoured suppliers is one of organisational employment stability, in return for extremes of commitment, effort, obedience and flexibility. But Japanese ‘transplants’ have gone to exceptional lengths to select young, fit, and psychologically-adapted workforces (Berggren, 1993). It remains to be seen if, like football players, their playing days are numbered.

Industrial restructuring and the rise of the service sector

Viewed in terms of employment share, and even in terms of the absolute numbers of people employed, primary industries, such as agriculture, mining, energy and water supply, have been in long decline. But until recently, falling employment in failing manufacturing sectors, or sectors shedding labour due to productivity gains, was more than offset by new employment in emergent ones. The 1960s were the high-water mark of manufacturing employment, and since then there has been an absolute decline. In 1971, 6.8 million people were employed in (non-primary) manufacture, comprising approximately 30 per cent of the labour-force. By 1986, these figures had declined to 4.5 million and 21 per cent respectively (CSO, 1990), prompting fears that Britain was de-industrialising. Since that time, decline has been much slower, but is projected to continue.

On definitions which focus upon financial services and the knowledge professions, the trend towards service employment has been observable since the mid-nineteenth century, in the sense that its growth rates exceeded those of other sectors (Bell, 1974). On the broadest conventional definitions, the sector is very heterogeneous, including activities as diverse as tourism, the arts (the economic importance of which is consistently underestimated in the popular imagination), transportation, catering, repair, banking and medicine. But even taking the broadest definition, the service sector is dramatically expanding. It accounted for half of all jobs in 1971, but two-thirds by the early 1990s (Employment Gazette, various issues). All developed countries are treading a similar path and, as part of this process, all are losing manufacturing jobs to developing ones, such as those of the Pacific Rim. Unlike countries such as Germany, however, Britain is particularly dependent on the export of ‘invisibles’ (services) to replace the manufacturing capacity it has lost. The optimistic view of industrial transformation is sometimes expressed in the proposition that Britain is becoming a ‘post-industrial society’, characterised for 1970s commentators by the dominance of knowledge-based professions (Bell, 1974), or in its more up-to-date formulation by the dominance of information and knowledge-based private-sector industries dependent upon advanced information technologies, coupled with a large arts, leisure and tourism sector.

Unemployment

The price of technological change, globalisation and restructuring has been unemployment. During the post-war boom years, unemployment was mainly ‘frictional’—a short-term consequence of movement between jobs, rather than a long-term consequence of the inability to find work. It was assumed that frictional unemployment of about 0.5 million people was consistent with ‘full employment’. But in the later 1970s there were more than a million unemployed, rising to more than 3 million in 1982. Fast growth in the late 1980s reduced this figure by about a half, but by 1993 the figure of 3 million was again exceeded, declining slowly thereafter (Employment Gazette, various issues). Unemployment is notoriously difficult to measure. The ‘claimant count’ upon which the foregoing figures are based is a by-product of a changing benefits system and therefore lacks a stable definition. The tendency of changing definitions is to minimise the number of unemployed. The Labour Force Survey estimate does not take benefit entitlement into account, treating someone who is not working but is actively seeking work as unemployed. Used in conjunction, the methods can be used to produce a higher estimate than either one taken alone, as the people they count as unemployed do not fully coincide. But whatever the true rate, mass unemployment, on a scale similar to the period 1921–39, has become a normal condition.

The par...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• PART I: THEORY AND CONTEXT
• PART II: PROVISION
• PART III: PRACTICE
• PART IV: DEVELOPMENT
• PART V: POLICY