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The full model that informs the research explores the potential impact on well‐being of a range of potential factors including forms of organizational support, employability, features of the role and employment of choice as well as the psychological contract. This chapter draws together the data to provide a test of this full model. It shows that all these factors are significantly associated with outcomes such as well‐being, commitment and work‐related behaviour. However, when we explore their role as mediators between type of employment contract and outcomes, the results show that employment contracts often retain a significant association with well‐being and that temporary workers report more positive outcomes than permanent workers. This is contrary to our initial expectations but is a robust finding that remains after quite rigorous analysis.

In the last decades, rights to social assistance benefits have become more conditional. Governments in Europe, as in other welfare states, have sought to ‘activate’ their unemployed citizens by requiring them to participate in mandatory work programmes. This chapter examines how liberal and communitarian thinkers have justified or rejected welfare-to-work (WTW) policies within social assistance systems and how these policies have been legitimised by key notions of inclusion, responsibilisation, employability and empowerment, which correspond with liberal and communitarian justifications of WTW. Drawing on critical socio-legal literature, the authors question these justifications and clarify their decision to explore WTW from a threefold normative perspective that takes into account: 1) power relations and human social rights (the legal perspective); 2) lived experiences within WTW relationships, including endemic power asymmetries and perceptions of justice (the sociological perspective); and 3) the republican theory of non-domination (the philosophical perspective). The last part of this chapter introduces the chapters of this book.

The shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based economy gives rise to the value of intelligence and talent as employers focus on diversifying their talent pools. Governments around the world find ways to enhance the employability of their workforces by expanding access to higher education, disregarding social barriers, utilizing human creativity and enterprise, and other such measures. The challenge is not the limited supply of managerial and professional jobs, but the assurance that the workforce has access to high-waged jobs that require high skills. The socially disadvantaged are now preparing for opportunities for high skilled employment, but without a guarantee. In analysing this ‘promise’, the study makes use of interviews with six organizations from both the public and private sectors to obtain information regarding their competitive strategies, human resources, and recruitment processes. Also, sixty graduates are interviewed and their recruitment into these organizations is observed.

Because the stakes in managerial labour markets in the new knowledge-based economy (KBE) are high, there seems to be a shift from looking at the hard currencies of employability like certificates, awards, and the like, to analysing the soft currencies like the skills, capabilities, and performance of individuals. Potential employees have to be more than smart and well-qualified but they also have to be innovative, creative, and critical problem-solvers. Employability now has become stylized and becomes open to a certain level of subjectivity. This chapter looks into the science of gut feeling as a method of recruitment by examining how employers' justify their hiring decisions.

People invest in university education in the hope that, once they graduate, they will be able to find high-paying managerial and professional jobs. Also, these graduates have to view their careers as a portfolio of jobs rather than having a permanent job. This chapter concentrates first on the expectations of graduates and their perspectives on the job market and identifies the factors, such as higher education, race, and ethnicity, which could possibly contribute to success in work. Secondly, the chapter explores the employability strategies that university graduates use to land jobs by conducting interviews with a sample set of graduates. The study distinguishes and compares the approaches of the two ‘ideal types’ — the ‘Players’ and the ‘Purists’ — and shows how the latter approaches the labour market aggressively while the latter uses a more conservative approach.

Despite the efforts of individuals to attain higher education and the increasing demand for knowledge workers in the new economy, there are not enough high skilled and high wage jobs to accommodate those who are qualified for such positions. Because of changing market conditions, there is no guarantee that all highly qualified graduates will be able to land a regular job that will best suit their abilities. In such cases, and with the advent of globalisation and migration, mass higher education will only contribute to costs and industrial competitiveness rather than becoming part of the solution to a much broader problem. Success in the job market is thus based not only on one's hard and soft currencies but also on the employability of others.

This chapter argues that the State is no longer seen as a provider of employment, but rather as a provider of ‘employability’ directly focusing on the unemployed (rather than on the labour market or the economy). One can observe a series of emerging trends in the delivery of ‘employability’ measures, and in particular the growing individualization, personalization, and contractualization of these employability ‘services’. These trends raise a number of problematic points (Are these real contracts? Are they illiberal contracts or unequal contracts? What should be the limits to administrative discretion in this sensitive area? What is the nature of the multilateral contracts including private contractors?), which are addressed in separate points.

This chapter critically evaluates the balance between compulsion and choice in contemporary narratives around the University, as scripted by policy documents and critiqued in the literature. Specifically, it analyses the cultural script of the ‘student- as- consumer’, and its impact on the academic– student relationship. For young people making the decision about whether to go to University, where to go, and what to study, the process is replete with choices – reflecting the landscape laid out in the 2010 Browne Report, which presented the increase in tuition fees as enabling students to benefit from an enhanced range of choices offered by a competitive marketplace. Yet, the study reveals that this choice is limited to decisions about where to go to university rather than deeper considerations about whether to proceed to Higher Education. This reflects tensions within the logics of massification, marketisation and politicisation. The analysis reveals an iterative reconfiguration of the purpose of Higher Education, through the augmentation of the ‘student- as- consumer’ and the gradual disappearance of the academic as central to the work of the University. As such, the chapter argues that deprofessionalisation and waning autonomy are not unintended consequences of policy developments, but critical prerequisites for the situation of Higher Education as the expected next step for increasing proportions of school leavers.

This chapter draws on qualitative data from the Mass Observation Study and interviews with students to explore how members of the general public, and prospective and current students, frame the meaning of Higher Education, both in policy terms and according to their own experience. This analysis highlights a central contradiction within the position held by the 21st century University in the public imagination. On one hand, expansion is regarded as a progressive development, and there is a striking generosity and optimism in the ways that the provision of this experience for more young people is discussed. On the other, there are widespread concerns about the motivations and effects of massification, including the normalisation of student debt, the diminishing value of degrees, and the quality of education provided.

This chapter maps a framework for understanding the rise of mental health disorders in the undergraduate population, drawing a connection between broader social, cultural and educational change, and individual psychological malaise. The structural inconsistencies wrought by high expectations, contrasted with actual opportunities and experience, provide the basis for an insecure and individualised approach to Higher Education. Students experiencing high levels of anxiety are encouraged, both by the pressure to succeed and the procedures now in place within Universities to manage high levels of mental illness, to conceive of and present their distress in medicalised terms. The chapter explores the implications for the academic– student relationship, both in terms of the growing expectation on academics to act in loco parentis, and the extent to which the practice of study and the pursuit of knowledge itself comes to be considered potentially damaging to students’ mental health and emotional wellbeing.

This chapter shows that, in the Dutch case, protection of a new social risk – insufficient employability – is possible even without the creation of collective welfare-state protection, namely through collective bargaining. It describes four major developments in employability policy in the Netherlands. Each of these developments is looked at in turn, considering what theoretical questions are raised by these developments and how they can be explained. The concluding section relates these developments to the previous cases of disability and childcare protection.

Occupational health and safety is seen in many ways: an investment, protection for workers and their families, a cost to the employer, an ethical responsibility, a public health measure, a human right and a social good, and a necessity of “corporate responsibility”. Occupational health services are best viewed as an investment in the foundation of society, not as a benefit to workers or a luxury. Preventing disability due to occupational disorders removes a major cause of suffering, economic insecurity and lost economic productivity. Occupational health faces many challenges in coming years to provide services for everyone in an economic system, including mobile workers, workers in fragmented workplaces, in small- and medium-sized enterprises, and in the informal sectors and workers who are self-employed and other underserved groups. Occupational health must work to expand the content of services to cover psychological and psychosocial aspects of work and to develop the connection between occupational health and work ability in order to achieve better employability and expanded opportunity. Occupational health should be a basic right of working citizens, as recognized by international organizations and the constitutions of most democratic states.

This chapter explores the rise of the concept of employability and how it has influenced policy and practical interventions to address unemployment. It explores how the concept has been understood as a threshold for labour market readiness or as a process of continual skills development necessary in a flexible labour market. It argues that employability is frequently utilised in neoliberalising forms of governmentality, shifting responsibility of gaining work onto the individual, rather than considering the various external and structural factors that affect employment prospects. A case study of an employability programme in the North East explores the practices through which the discourse of employability acts upon individuals.

This chapter investigates volunteering, much vaunted in recent policy as a valuable means by which young people may gain valuable experience for work and careers. The chapter argues however that policies to encourage more youth volunteering are based on a conundrum: the fact that there is no robust evidence to support the view that volunteering is a beneficial means by which to access paid employment. Case study research of a volunteering organisation in Scotland, which delivers bespoke employability training to young people which includes daily spells of volunteering in a range of voluntary sector workplaces, provides some insight into why this might be the case. Work experience placements can consist of young people ‘time-filling’ with meaningless, poor-quality work and lack of engagement by employers makes it difficult for young people to gain experience in organisations offering paid employment opportunities. However, the chapter underscores the significant contribution of trainers to other beneficial outcomes of volunteering programmes, such as the confidence and wellbeing of young trainees.