All Outputs (12)

Knowing or not knowing the rules of the game: Exploring the role of institutional habitus in shaping individual expectations and experience on talent management programmes (2025)
Journal Article

This paper applies the concept of institutional habitus to analyse the accounts of participants on a talent management (TM) programme that is underpinned by an Exclusive/Developed talent philosophy. In doing so we reveal the structural presence of th... Read More about Knowing or not knowing the rules of the game: Exploring the role of institutional habitus in shaping individual expectations and experience on talent management programmes.

Reconceptualising graduate resilience – an integrated multi-level framework for future research (2024)
Journal Article

This paper draws on Bourdieusian social theory to reconceptualise graduate resilience in post-industrial societies to provide a fresh perspective on a concept that has gained increasing prominence in recent years. Through a review of sociological cri... Read More about Reconceptualising graduate resilience – an integrated multi-level framework for future research.

An exploration of the impact of different peer learning activities utilised to develop student employability (2024)
Journal Article

Assumptions about fostering human capital for national competitiveness underpin higher education policy drivers regarding employability. Departing from this focus on human capital development, research has highlighted the importance of relationality... Read More about An exploration of the impact of different peer learning activities utilised to develop student employability.

Stories of family in working‐class graduates’ early careers (2020)
Journal Article

How do young graduates view the role of immediate families in influencing/supporting them as they start their working lives and how do those reflections affect how they think of themselves as graduates? Social, political and economic changes have led... Read More about Stories of family in working‐class graduates’ early careers.

Addressing unrealistic optimism with counterfactual reasoning in an employability module in higher education (2020)
Journal Article

Purpose: The study aimed to explore the effect of second year business students engaging in counterfactual reasoning on their unrealistic optimism regarding attainment on an employability module. Design/methodology/approach: Using an experimental des... Read More about Addressing unrealistic optimism with counterfactual reasoning in an employability module in higher education.

Maintaining the promise without killing the dream: Developing resilience for future 'graduate' careers (2020)
Journal Article

Significant numbers of recent graduates continue to enter non-graduate roles. Against this backdrop, there is a need to consider how students and graduates can be prepared for the graduate labour market. Resilience is represented as a key attribute f... Read More about Maintaining the promise without killing the dream: Developing resilience for future 'graduate' careers.

Navigating the graduate labour market: the impact of social class on student understandings of graduate careers and the graduate labour market (2019)
Journal Article

Significant expansions in higher education over the last few decades have raised concerns about an over-supply of graduates in the labour market, such that a degree no longer seamlessly translates into a graduate career or occupation, with the increa... Read More about Navigating the graduate labour market: the impact of social class on student understandings of graduate careers and the graduate labour market.

Decent work in the UK: Context, conceptualization, and assessment (2019)
Journal Article

Access to decent work is an important goal for policymakers and for individuals navigating their working lives. Decent work is a career goal for individuals and a priority for many employers and policy makers seeking to promote social justice. Decent... Read More about Decent work in the UK: Context, conceptualization, and assessment.

Capturing habitus: Theory, method and reflexivity (2018)
Journal Article

Bourdieu’s career long endeavour was to devise both theoretical and methodological tools that could apprehend and explain the social world and its mechanisms of cultural (re)production and related forms of domination. Amongst the several key concepts... Read More about Capturing habitus: Theory, method and reflexivity.

‘Graduate Blues’: Considering the Effects of Inverted Symbolic Violence on Underemployed Middle Class Graduates (2015)
Journal Article

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. The understanding of social reproduction, from a Bourdieusian perspective, is that the dominant typically reproduce their position in social space through various apparatus, such as the education system, to the detriment... Read More about ‘Graduate Blues’: Considering the Effects of Inverted Symbolic Violence on Underemployed Middle Class Graduates.

Well-founded social fictions: A defence of the concepts of institutional and familial habitus (2012)
Journal Article

This article engages with Atkinson’s recent criticisms of concepts of collective habitus, such as ‘institutional’ and ‘familial’ habitus, in order to defend their conceptual utility and theoretical coherence. In so doing we promote a flexible underst... Read More about Well-founded social fictions: A defence of the concepts of institutional and familial habitus.

The biographical illumination: A bourdieusian analysis of the role of theory in educational research (2011)
Journal Article

The intention of this paper is to serve as a reflexive comment as to my ongoing empirical processes and epistemological position concerning research on university graduates' aspirations and expectations of graduate employment. This paper will illustr... Read More about The biographical illumination: A bourdieusian analysis of the role of theory in educational research.