The Articulation of Learning in the Knowledge Economy: Recontextualization in Transitions

In a knowledge economy, work entails utilising symbolic resources and intellectual capabilities, and evidence of what workers can produce is more immaterial (Guile and Wilde 2018). Graduates need to be able to articulate the work they can do, and the knowledges that they can contribute and build upon. Higher education institutions have developed strategies to support students to develop their ‘employability’. However, this agenda replicates key elements of neoliberal ideology that seeks to place responsibility for gaining work on the individual, and requires graduates to learn how to ‘sell themselves’ (Gershon 2024; Leonard and Wilde 2019; Urciuoli 2008, 2009). The employability agenda also reproduces a misconception of the relationship between the knowledge learnt in HE and the knowledge and immaterial knowledge practices required in workplaces, mistakenly assuming that knowledge is directly transferable. This is rarely the case, the experience of HE has not necessarily prepared graduates for contemporary forms of work that require situated judgement and immaterial expertise (Wilde and Guile 2021; Guile and Wilde 2018). By shifting the focus to the immaterial activity graduates engage in to secure employment by recontexualising their knowledge, we have been able to reveal that graduates learn in a variety of ways post-university how to articulate their skill, knowledge and their self-identity to themselves before they can recontextualise them to employers in relation to specific job requirements. Our articulation-recontextualisation process is not a justification for a continuation of neoliberal employability policies but, instead, a radical challenge for future policy and research agendas to see transitions as developmental, rather than rite of passage, processes.