Introduction to the special issue: positionality and social inequality in graduate careers

This Special Issue entitled Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers concerns the changing status of Higher Education (HE) graduates as privileged occupants of highly desirable jobs. As a result of the global expansion of higher education, there is now a large and diversified body of graduates in a crowded graduate labour market and, given the less dramatic expansion of high-skilled well-paid jobs, only a fraction of them will attain the leading positions and the ranks of top earners (e.g. Figueiredo et al. Citation2017; Tholen Citation2017; Brown, Lauder, and Ashton Citation2011). The recent labour market shocks have made graduates’ labour market entry and career trajectories even more complex. Within the last two decades, we have seen the global economic crisis in 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022, and, more recently, the influence of geopolitical armed conflict hurting (sections of the) graduate labour markets. The distribution of graduates’ labour market opportunities and the traditional role of credentials in facilitating access to desired forms of employment is in flux (e.g. Brown and Souto-Otero Citation2020; Tholen Citation2020; Tomlinson Citation2017; Isopahkala-Bouret and Ojala Citation2022).Within changing and uncertain labour market conditions, it is timely to ask how graduate careers actually develop. Furthermore, social inequality within the graduate labour market is among the most pressing issues to investigate in a critical and comprehensive manner. In labour markets where the supply outstrips the demand, positional competition is thought to be heightened (Brown, Hesketh, and Williams Citation2004) meaning that labour market opportunities increasingly will depend on how well graduates can signal their worth relative to other graduate competitors. Yet too often the positional competition for graduate jobs has become rather a mechanical queuing process through which supply and demand of educational credentials are coordinated. We need to have a more sophisticated understanding about the social, cultural, and educational conditions through which the positional competition becomes meaningful to both employers and graduates.In this special issue, our purpose is to provide new insights into graduate careers by examining the institutional and social conditions under which the positional competition takes place and, in particular, examining how graduates with various backgrounds manage their labour market trajectories in different countries. We aim to advance the state of the art of scholarship by examine the mediating role of HE systems, policies and practices in access to different job positions and labour market inequalities. The main questions that we explore are:How educational credentials are used and interpreted by employers and graduates in an era in which the value of educational credentials is often found to be in decline?How are advantages based on social origin intensified or reduced in and through HE?What is the role of HE systems and institutions in mediating positional competition and the impact of graduates’ social origins in the labour market?By way of introducing this special issue, we present below the dominant theoretical conceptualisations of the relationship between credentials and positional competition and show the growing scholarly interest in social inequalities in entry to graduate labour.