Precarity, austerity and the social contract in a liquid world : career guidance mediating the citizen and the state

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, career guidance has featured highly on the policy horizons of several countries across the world. Stimulated in part by a severe economic downturn, and, in response to that, by policy steers from such supranational and transnational entities such as the OECD, the World Bank and the European Union (Watts & Sultana, 2004 ; Watts, 2014). Career guidance is back in fashion—at least as a policy topic. This chapter sets out to unpack the discourses that have developed around the fi eld of career guidance, drawing on a three-fold typology proposed by Habermas (1971), and pointing out the implications that each discourse has for career guidance policy, practice and research. This chapter furthermore explores the three discourses—technocratic, humanistic, and emancipatory—in relation to the current historical conjuncture marked by austerity measures and the rise of the precariat (Standing, 2011). In doing so, the chapter draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’ in order to make a case for what I refer to here as ‘emancipatory career guidance’. The latter involves taking a normative stand that is critical of the neoliberal regimes that have thoroughly colonised our lifeworld, and adopting instead a social justice agenda. Such a stance, it is argued, carries repercussions for the way we ‘imagine’ career guidance, and for the way we practice it.