The employability agenda within HE is as prominent as ever, describing the potential for: on the one hand, employment outcomes, and on the other, an incentive for HEIs to subsist. I’m interested in the origins of agenda, stakeholder expectation, the way decisions are extracted from data and evolve, and how (if at all) it impacts on human agency.
Terminology of the metric lineage and policy evolution of employability include indicators, measures, targets and now benchmarks (words I will use interchangeably to mean ‘performance measured and targets’). From the perspective of careers & employability provision the benchmarks are engineered to exclusively focus on employment outcomes of graduates and the much coveted SOC 3.
The measures in question are agile, evolvable and discernible. They strive for growth and prominence, even in the face of dynamic and volatile environments. Because of this, can we consider them as agents of change in their own right?
Instrumental agency
Instrumental agency is a term I have devised to reflect the expectations derived from measures, in this case for HEIs and careers & employability service efficacy.
Such metrics are externally and internally imposed. Contemporary external examples include Graduate Outcomes and Office for Students benchmarks. Internal examples can mimic externals (often do) and also include localised KPIs such as service offerings, campaigns, events, internships, inter alia.
Essentially, instrumental agency is a non-human entity that uses agency in a similar way to an individual – but artificially. It has capability for change, has a mandate and the source of its functions (usually) derive from a corporate legal entity. Importantly, instrumental agency operates within confines of structure similarly to human agency.
Can a non-human entity have agency?
Can we draw analogy to personify a measure as having human-like qualities? To attempt to answer this I’m drawing past experiences and interactions with:
(1) the notion of impartiality in careers practice;
(2) my previous life as a Law Graduate; and,
(3) the impact to individuals and their own agency potential.
1) Employment is the primary instrumental agent for careers services in HE. Employment is also one of a small number of measures for HEIs and students, and reports on performance are published annually.
GO and its forerunner, DLHE, have presided over the exponential growth in the employability agenda over the last ten years, with provisions focusing on techniques to secure jobs and recruitment models of practice. The most recent iteration is skills, focusing on a ratchet approach to employment.
As a careers practitioner, I view employability (and to a greater extent employment) as a narrow way of determining the careers practitioner’s efficacy, identity, values and career-management facilitation as well as the perceived success of graduates . The effects determine the content of provision at every level and effectively call into question how impartial a service or practitioner can truly be. Career in its broadest sense is a culmination of a person’s being with employment being a single strand (Employment<Employability<Career!)
2) Back to my former life as a Law Graduate. It is interesting to know, legally, who is responsible when a business breaks the law. Usually, it’s the organisation per se because a business is regarded its own legal entity. There are exceptions, but as a rule of thumb the business is culpable rather than individual members. Because of this a business can be more selective about its morals, values and overall goals than most people themselves are comfortable with. My contention is that the instruments, by extension of the organisation, are arguably the agent because of their legal status.
3) If you do accept the concept of instrumental agency how do you think it effects the agency of individuals? My interest as a careers practitioner is in people, i.e. students and colleagues. Having an instrument that provides clear goals has advantages in terms of the clarity of what one should be doing (or able to) at a particular time. Contrastingly, it can also limit options available and the potential for self-actualisation.
Let’s start by considering the external instrumental agency of employment. In many HEIs employability is a compulsory element (and credit-bearing) of a degree with the effect of being part of an exclusive list of priorities that shape the agenda, content and expectations of students and staff whether they agree to it or not.
Causes for effect
The consequences are telling. The employability(ment) models disengage students in large numbers and raise issues about baked-in inequality. This is difficult to understand when data points to an overwhelming majority of entrants coming to university for employment purposes and social mobility.
It is difficult to pinpoint one specific reason for disengagement but I would suspect that human agency has broader aspirations and a greater desire for autonomy than agenda confines.
Closing thoughts…
Convinced on instrumental agency? Is it just structure? Is instrumental agency merely a by-product of individual or collective human agency earlier in the process? Whether you are convinced or not, the expectations around metrics (i.e. to meet or surpass them) and their impact are very real. They are a mechanism for (or of) structure that has some human-like qualities, such as adaption and aspiration for change that can have a complementary or detrimental impact on our own agency.
The validity of a measure (or instrument) is exactly that, a measure!
A measure for employment outcomes is no different than taking a temperature or measuring height. It’s only when conditions are attached to the measure that effects take place (or agency), in which case, whose effect or agency matters more: mine or the measure?
Emerson said that when an argument is made into a tangible thing that others can see and handle, the cause is half won! My point is that there should always be possibility for consultation (and ideally, consent) on the measure and the meanings attached to it; otherwise who are the OfS benchmarks and GO outcomes methodology actually for? Going back to my temperature check analogy, my doctor doesn’t ask me to jump in an ice bath to meet their metrics…perhaps if I stay in it too long I’ll be too cold to meet the metrics or worse, have hypothermia!
Instrumental Agency 1.0: Artificial Intelligence (Synthetic Agency)
Instrumental agency is an idea, an analogy based on the premise that metrics can take on enough human characteristics to be comparable to human agency. Although I can envisage instrumental agency as a real thing, I’m not blinkered enough to see it as a complete concept, so let’s call instrumental agency 0.5.
However, the growth of AI gives me cause to believe that a more complete version isn’t too far away. Evidence exists of AI in current recruitment practices, particularly affluent companies and graduate recruitment. The current skills agenda is also giving rise for AI to be developed in prescriptive methodologies such as trait and factor – LinkedIn job matching capabilities are a prime example. Consequently, the more autonomous the system the more of an instrumental agent it becomes.
Picking pebbles on the beach...explorations in career practice! 