I think the point of it all — what we are doing and other people are elsewhere — is trying, possibly futilely, to help students who would probably not have been at university ten, twenty, thirty years ago to *act* in graduate-like ways. ‘Graduate’ jobs require a lot of narrative and reflection on the part of the applicant, particularly if they are milkrounding it. If this is beyond the experiences of your family and friends, how do you learn to do this, if it’s what you want? Who can mentor you? How do you get beyond or change the ways in which so many of the professions have typically recruited ‘new’ members through an exclusive use of social and cultural capital… families of doctors… the public school and Oxbridge ‘old boy’ network… ‘recognised’ routes such as studying x at y Oxbridge college if you want to do z, that don’t always make it into the careers advice guides… If we think it is important that the composition of our professions reflect our society, then this is a major issue. Equally, with the newer ‘brain’ or creative industries, the routes in may be more fluid but class still has an impact, through knowing who you know, being able to take internships or crapply-paid jobs, being able to raise capital for a start-up… in many ways it seems as though education since the 1960s has moved far more towards a notion of meritocracy than the working world has, wants or needs (or knows it wants or needs). Thus our students/graduates need to be able to talk two ‘languages’ and to be able to build up their social capital.…

Ben, you’re asking me to engineer the souls of my students; seriously, i’m not (we’re not) that powerful. There’s no recognition of structure in what you say.
As for not being convinced that there’s much to be said for teaching them about the sociology of work, I’m stunned: spending all this time making sense of why work is organised how it is, but then not telling the students about that, right at the time when many of them are thinking about moving full time into the workforce, doesn’t make sense to me.

Randy, welcome!

I’m not convinced that teaching them about the ‘sociology of work’ will help (much). But teaching them about the ‘work’ of sociology might…

And so we need to start thinking about the nature of a ‘sociology industry’: what kinds of skills does it require, what kind of sophistications and orientations? What is a ‘practical sociology’? And how does it relate to ‘open’ sociology?

Savage & Burrows have some thoughts which I’ve sort of developed