The neoliberal challenge to career guidance — mobilising research, policy and practice around social justice

Abstract

This book is the fi rst of two volumes which address how career guidance can become part of the struggle for social justice. It is also about neoliberalism and how this frames struggles for social justice and the fi eld of career guidance. The volumes examine career guidance practice, policy, theory and research and explores ideas, stances and values as well as strategies and actions that can move the fi eld forwards. In this fi rst volume, we look at the contexts that neoliberalism offers for career guidance, continue the process of developing theories to support career guidance to engage positively with social justice, and explore how research can inform the development of practice and how practitioners can be involved in research processes. In the second volume, we will go on, in the volume to be released next year, to examine the diverse ways that different communities, groups and individuals experience neoliberalism and explore the range of possibilities for career guidance to be practiced differently. Our hope is that these volumes will help to reorient the fi eld of career guidance for the challenging times in which we live. Like most academic projects, Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neoliberalism has been written over a couple of years. While we have been writing, history has been unfolding in ways that have been both surprising and disconcerting. Two books about career guidance offer a small contribution to a world in which Donald Trump is co-opting the language of radicalism to dismantle the institutions of American democracy, in which the future of Europe, endangered by Brexit, revolves on successive elections where the populist right challenge for power and in which there are famines across East Africa, war in Syria, homophobic purges in Chechnya and precarity everywhere. But, as the quote above from Donald Trump’s inauguration demonstrates, concerns about career and livelihood remain at the heart of a myriad of personal and political struggles and their relationship to social justice cannot be assumed. Consequently, we hope that these books can contribute to our understanding of the shifts that are happening in our world and what they mean for our fi eld and, most importantly, that the books can help those involved in the fi eld of career guidance to think about responses that are possible and useful. These two volumes of readings build on previous efforts by others in the fi eld, and have drawn together insights from a range of disciplines and theoretical orientations—including critical psychology, social psychology, political economy, critical theory, sociology, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, cultural studies and liberation philosophy. We hope to show the extent to which neoliberalism ‘sets the political and economic agenda, limits the possible outcomes, biases expectations, and imposes urgent tasks on those challenging its assumptions, methods and consequences’ ’ ( Saad-Filho & Johnson, 2005 , p. 4). It is by becoming more critically aware of the contexts in which we work, and how these contexts shape not only what we do, but also what we aspire to achieve and what we value, that career guidance can claim to wear the social justice mantle. In the two volumes we address three main concepts (1) social justice, (2) neoliberalism, and (3) career guidance. Our hope is that the books can investigate the interactions between these concepts from a range of different perspectives. The primary purpose of this introduction is therefore to defi ne these three concepts and to situate the books historically, politically and epistemologically.