“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.

“dunno sir”

Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.

“Accountant?”

“ Yeah, that’ll do.”

Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)

Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.

In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.

Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:

1. the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
2. that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).

But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.

And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.