EL PRINCIPIO DE LEGALIDAD PRESUPUESTAL

In this chapter so far, the different voices that exist in discourses about employability and careers have been distilled. Arguably, each of the voices described stems from answering dialogically an authoritative individualistic employability discourse. Ibrahim has been traced as an example of “multi-voicedness”, however, the other examples above also show how individuals even as they illustrate one particular voice, may well say things that conflict with this voice especially in relation to the powerful influence of family and community, which act to qualify any espousal of free-floating individualism. It is in this territory, where individuals demonstrate contradictions, in what can be considered a self-contest of ideas at times, that analysis can reveal the complexity of the meaning-making that individuals engage in and how agency may occur as they move between different voices. Such a consideration of self-contest leads onto consideration of how the orchestration of multiple voices can allow for the tracing of the evolution of an “internally persuasive discourse”, in which individuals are testing out and arguing against prevailing discourses.

Anna, Matthew and Isabelle are used here as examples to illustrate some of the cognitive struggle that is implied to be necessary to develop agency in Holland et al.’s theory, and is associated with an “internally persuasive discourse” which involves testing voices, not just authoring or appropriating them. This can be triggered in response to “ruptures” in taken for granted assumptions about how a career may play out, and can be more likely to occur when individuals have a clearer view of their own “positionality”.

Anna, who is a working-class, Black Caribbean, Fashion graduate, with a family lineage which includes a number of “seamstresses”, shows considerable awareness of her own “positionality”, i.e., her gender, ethnicity, Christian faith, and occupational heritage. This explicit acknowledgement is evident in her being pulled from a purist/responsible agent who believes “you can do anything as long as you put your mind to it” to a player/responsible agent voice with a strong awareness of challenges to be overcome for young Black women like her face in the fashion business. She also shifts to a player/victim voice, when stating how much she hates the fashion business which she describes as “toxic, nepotistic and exploitative”. However, in her plans to set up her own lifestyle fashion website which can draw upon a “community of positive people” who share her ideas and in which she can build upon her own heritage (e.g., she is naming her website after her grandmothers) and support available through her background, it is possible to observe her testing established individualistic voices about what it takes to make it in the fashion business. In so doing, Anna shows traces of growing her own

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“internally persuasive discourse”, which has been triggered by how tough she has found her early experiences in the job market.

Isabelle, a Graphic Design graduate, also evidences the cognitive struggle of “internally persuasive discourse”, and acknowledgement of her own “positionality” helps her in doing so; her late diagnosis of dyslexia, her exploitation as an unpaid intern as well as her failed study of architecture as well as her parents’ late occupational mobility all feature for her. Over the course of the research project she moves between a purist/victim voice in which she berates her own indecision and disappointing career situation to arguing against dominant ideas about what graduates should be doing as she chooses to work and travel. Later, she adopts what is a more purist/responsible agent voice, partially qualified by the realism of the player. Nine months after her research interview, she contacts me to say she is returning to the UK, having travelled and worked in a tax advice job in New Zealand. In dialogically answering the world (including me) she defends her ongoing rejection of dominant ideas about settling into a career and voices her own “internally persuasive discourse”.

I don’t have any plans past Christmas as I am not really a person who plans things, and I am quite excited to go back to the UK not knowing what I will end up doing… it is a possibility that when I go back to the UK I will just get a job to save more money to go travelling again…, but as I previously stated I have zero plans; just a head full of ideas of what I could do. I feel like this would’ve previously scared me but now it makes me happy not knowing what is around the corner.

Although Matthew’s voice is predominantly a purist/responsible agent one, he does seek to argue against what he sees as dominant discourses. His unconventional final year at university during which he had started a successful music promotion business, led him to question what he calls the “paradigm of the Business school” as he figures himself as a rebellious entrepreneur. In his survey response he is critical of employability discourses which focus on how graduates can be moulded to be employable for employers:

We are taught very effectively what companies are looking for in graduates and the new workforce. However, I feel we should be taught more about how we as skilled individuals should identify the work best suited to ourselves.

In so doing, he is arguably testing out established player discourses in employability, which risk a focus on becoming employable in an impersonalised way. Such testing on his part can be associated with the concept of “internally persuasive discourse”.

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