Realist and relational perspectives on graduate identity and employability: a response to Hinchliffe and Jolly

This article responds to that by Hinchliffe and Jolly, published in an earlier issue of this journal, exploring graduate identity and employability. Their article espousedly draws upon the conceptualisation of graduate identity, as formulated by this present author. This article argues that Hinchliffe and Jolly have given insufficient attention to different modes of conceptualisation, the realist and the relational, that are key to differentiating the original use of the term ‘graduate identity’ from uses where that term is conflated with ‘graduateness’. After exploring realist and relational perspectives, the article considers possible reformulation of the study by Hinchliffe and Jolly, to enhance its contribution to research from a relational perspective.