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This chapter examines the relationship between entrepreneurship and a particular kind of education process termed credentialism. An entrepreneurial spirit is essential to the dynamism of a commercial society like Hong Kong. It has facilitated the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and is a quality most Hong Kongers have taken pride in. However, this force seems to have declined since the 1980s. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) reports that the territory's total entrepreneurial activity index scores low. In light of new opportunities on the mainland, one has to ask if this generation of Hong Kongers has been prepared well enough to explore them. Professionals in the creative industries have crossed the border to seek strategic alliances with mainland counterparts.

This chapter analyzes the impact of globalization on higher education. Higher education has not been immune to the impact of economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of channeling some of the most dynamic, and therefore destabilizing, tendencies of neoliberal marketization. The rise of modern institutions for training professional elites, and, in particular, the growth of research universities with close ties to industry and government agencies, have transformed higher education into national systems of heavily subsidized services and inputs, each with fiercely protected patterns of funding, credentialism, and employment cultures. Yet in recent years, as universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, their institutional life have been driven more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and fixed, professional expectations.

This chapter assesses another new kind of policing and security agent — public corporate security personnel — with attention to the frontiers of security knowledge and credentialism. It considers the establishment of corporate security units in municipal and federal levels of government in Canada. Corporate security, operating in the private sphere, is now entering new and unexpected frontiers to become elements of policing and security networks. The chapter then focuses on how knowledge and technology from the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS International) is transferred into Canadian levels of government and their newer corporate security units and operations as well as into the UK and Australia through some of its 240 chapters worldwide.

The cultural changes since his day, by which Defoe would be astonished, include mass literacy, the decline of Christian belief, the relaxation of sexual mores, and perhaps most of all the undermining of self-confirming stereotypes about the characters and capacities of women. But distinctive status groups linked largely but not exclusively to occupational roles were reproduced in a similar hierarchy of prestige, educational reform did not bring about ‘parity of esteem’ between educational institutions, and professionalization (and therewith ‘credentialism’) accentuated rather than moderated the differences between working-class ‘jobs’ and middle-class ‘careers’. The enfranchisement of women did not lead to the formation of a women’s party as such and their entry into the labour market paralleled their social standing. The narrowing of social distance on which commentators remarked did not subvert the established order of social prestige but took place within it.

This chapter discusses Jane Bolin's career in the legal profession and the lived experiences that produced her as the nation's first African American woman judge. A member of a small unit of black women lawyers, Bolin's early practice mirrored that of other black women lawyers who gained entrance, but not full integration, into the legal profession. Jane's strides in the legal profession from 1931 to 1939 were made relatively quickly, suggesting a tale of easy access and an unobstructed path. However, an examination of her professional life beyond the pioneering peaks reveals the pervasive discrimination that Bolin overcame, and unravels the threads of gender, class, race, credentialism, and politics that colored the fabric of her professional life.

This chapter assesses whether higher education within the four occupations performs as assumed according to the dominant discourse on graduate labour. The chapter aims to elucidate what the meaning and value of graduate education and university qualifications are within the four graduate occupations under investigation. The chapter examines how we can describe the meaning that higher education has within these occupations, whether the university degree functions as a credential, and to what extent higher education drives career progression. It shows that the significance of higher education differs between the occupations and tends to be overstated. Within a mass system of higher education, university credentials lose much of their value to employers and employees alike, certainly several years after graduation.

China and Japan share some historical affinities, and they faced similar challenges of foreign threats and unequal treaties in the nineteenth century. Their subsequent paths were very different, however. As a late developer, Japan experienced industrialization in two movements, the more recent being the postwar period under the strong influence of the United States and its New Deal institutions. After its 1949 revolution, China also underwent late-developer industrialization, but under the initial influence of the Soviet model. China’s rapprochement with the United States and subsequent opening led to massive institutional change and rapid growth as a compressed developer, with significant foreign direct investment and global-value-chain engagement. A comparison of education and skill development highlights just how different these paths were.

This chapter proposes an analysis of the social space inhabited by the CEOs and chairpersons of the top 100 Indian companies in 2012, using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The analysis aims to understand the internal divisions to be found in the field of economic power, by looking at the divisions along the lines of educational capital, inherited capital (family capital), caste and social capital (drawing on a network analysis of interlocking directorates). Our results point to a very peculiar structuration of the economic field: we find that credentialism has a very weak influence; there is a clear and massive cleavage between owners and managers of capital; social capital carries decisive weight; and the actors closest to the State apparatus occupy a marginal role. We argue that it is possible to identify three poles among business leaders: the multipositional family-business owners, the unipositional family-business owners, and the managerial galaxy.

The worst labor-market fears about innovative dynamism are either unjustified or can be allayed by better policies. Except during the depths of recessions, more jobs are created than destroyed. Job loss is usually gradually and often can be foreseen. The pains of labor can be reduced through policies that avoid repeating the Great Depression or the Crisis of 2008. The pains can be further reduced by fostering more robustly redundant job markets, such as in Silicon Valley, where most workers can quickly and easily find new jobs. Some innovative entrepreneurs succeed at turning their startups into the fast-growing gazelles that create most of the new jobs in the economy. Redundant job markets can be fostered by minimizing regulations on the gazelles, and by reducing the credentialism exemplified by occupational licensing. Robots and artificial intelligence are not to be feared because they are more complements than substitute for human labor.