‘Got a degree…all of a sudden I'm in a Jobcentre’: The role of ‘stigma’ in ‘precarious’ graduate transitions

Abstract

There is widespread evidence that those claiming out-of-work benefits experience different types of ‘benefit stigma’ in the UK, with the focus largely falling on conventionally disadvantaged welfare users. In contrast, graduates’ experiences of ‘benefits stigma’ go unnoticed because of their relative advantage within the labour market. Yet, an increase in precarity across the labour market has unsettled graduate transitions and is re-shaping their relationships with out-of-work benefits. Against this backdrop, this article explores how graduates respond to different aspects of ‘benefit stigma’. It posits that challenging stigmatising narratives associated with out-of-benefits – is integral to support graduates furthest away from knowledge-based economy jobs.

Employability for UK University Students and Graduates on the Autism Spectrum: Mobilities and Materialities

“…Employment for modern university graduates increasingly involves intricate patterns of physical and virtual movement based on complex spatio-temporal arrangements (Dorow, Roseman & Cresswell 2016). More and more it demands non-standard, precarious working arrangements (Formby 2017) grounded in the micro-geographies of household dynamics, the daily commute, and the power-geometries of class, race, gender, dis/ability, and age (Massey 2012). Whilst employment mobilities certainly involve the capacity to secure better work prospects appropriate to levels of skill and qualification, they also go beyond this in constituting a new space of identification and belonging (Robertson et al 2018).…”

Inequality Restructured: A Regional Comparison of the Occupational Position of Young People Before and After the Great Recession of 2008

“…By 2011, over one million young people were unemployed (ONS, 2011: 10) -21.7 per cent of all young people. This impacted all groups -even those not usually associated with labour market insecurity -as one in five graduates also became unemployed (Office for National Statistics, 2011;MacDonald, 2011;Formby, 2014;Formby, 2017). In the ten years since the Great Recession, young people have continued to experience substantial difficulties in the labour market.…”

Using a situated knowledge lens to reveal knowledge gains for community partners engaged with a university – community partnership

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In recent years, the association between youth and precarity has become increasingly strengthened. Most commonly, youth precarity has been linked to the labour market (Shildrick et al, 2010;Crisp and Powell, 2017;Formby, 2017) and the housing market (McKee et al, 2020) although other social strata such as precarity of place (Banki, 2013) and precarious leisure (Batchelor et al, 2020) have also received attention. Deindustrialisation, forceful neoliberal politics, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008, austerity measures and, most likely now, the social and economic costs of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated academic attention on young people with concern over how they are faring amid a complex web of unpredictable and insecure social structures and what consequences these will have for their futures.

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