Anticipatory Socialization and the Construction of the Employable Graduate: A Critical Analysis of Employers’ Graduate Careers Websites
本文分析英国雇主毕业生职业网站如何通过预期社会化机制，在招聘前阶段塑造学生对“可就业毕业生”的认知，并使其接受特定的就业能力规范。
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 socialization 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.