Harriet Bradley

• University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

The final chapter of the book draws together the overall contribution of the research in a discussion focused on rethinking constructions of graduate success. In particular, the chapter draws out the significance of the material and the symbolic in graduate employment, and highlights the importance to graduates in our study of not only making a liv...

What are the challenges for the current generation of graduate millennials? The role of universities and the changing nature of the graduate labour market are constantly in the news, but less is known about the experiences of those going through it. This new book traces the transition to the graduate labour market of a cohort of middle-class and wo...

This chapter explores the significance of ‘home’ for graduate mobility. It considers the ways in which home contributes to capacities to navigate graduate futures and explores the legitimation of certain forms of geographical navigation over others. For young people who participate in higher education in England, the dominant narrative is one of le...

This chapter provides an overview of the project design and an explanation of the methods that were employed. It provides demographic details about the participants, including social class, university attended and gender. The chapter discusses measures of social class, the limitations of definitions of gender and the operationalization of the conce...

This chapter considers the working of gender in male-dominated fields and the ways in which this plays out for men and women on the graduate labour market, focusing on the field of engineering. The chapter draws on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence to expose embodied gendered experiences of the workplace that delegitimize women’s position and...

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It considers dominant framings of graduate ‘success’, how this is viewed and measured by multiple higher education actors, and what is missing from broader conceptualizations and measurements of graduate progression. We lay out the context within which young people progressed from university to gra...

This chapter uses the lens of ‘luck’ to consider how young adults in our study understand their opportunities, obstacles, successes and failures. We analyse perceptions of luck and bad luck as explanations for apparent non-decision making or lack of strategic planning. Each of the graduates discussed in this chapter left university without a plan f...

This chapter takes as its focus London and its role in the reproduction of inequality through the perpetuation of discourses that problematically conflate social and geographical mobility. While London is widely recognized as a hub for elite graduate recruiters, particularly in respect to jobs in finance, law and information technology, and a place...

This chapter focuses on ‘following dreams’ and considers success in the graduate labour market from graduates’ perspectives of meaningful work. It does this through the lens of aspirations for jobs that are deemed to have a social worth and traces the classed and gendered experiences of two graduates. The chapter engages with Berlant’s notion of ‘c...

This chapter considers the intersection of class and gender in the making of ‘top boys’, focusing on the finance sector. The chapter highlights key class-based differences in the way in which aspirations for success play out, based on the narratives of three young men from different social class locations. Comparing these narratives highlights the...

Learn more about The Degree Generation via the podcast, just released at this link. https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2023/12/06/podcast-has-the-university-experience-failed-millennials/

Drawing on Huw Beynon’s paper in HSIR 40 (2019), this article surveys the position of women in the UK labour market over the last fifty years. It suggests that many of the developments Beynon describes are relevant to women’s employment, but with the added twist that women’s position in the labour market and society is structured by their responsib...

David Peetz and Georgina Murray (eds.) (2017) Women, Labour Segmentation and Regulation: Varieties of Gender Gaps, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, £69.99, pp. 271, hbk. - Volume 48 Issue 2 - HARRIET BRADLEY

There is increasing concern about high rates of dropout from universities, especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In the UK this is related to recent changes in higher education policy, especially the imposition of a higher fees regime and the uncapping of student numbers. While recent research has explored the demography of stud...

This chapter focuses on how students make their way through HE. We focus in particular on how students come to an understanding of their social-class positioning in relation to other students they encounter at university. We discuss processes of ‘fitting in’, in social and academic contexts. We focus on narratives of students who have a sense of be...

The concept of social class and the categorization of individuals by social class is the subject of intense debate at the present time. Changing economic and labour market conditions, along with wider social changes, mean that social class is more contested and complex than ever before. This chapter addresses how we operationalized the concept of s...

This chapter considers students’ routes into university. It discusses students’ hopes and expectations, which indicate how HE is seen as an important opportunity in relation to social mobility, social class maintenance and positioning. We highlight the role of families and schools/colleges in students’ decision-making, and consider how class contin...

This book explores higher education, social class and social mobility from the point of view of those most intimately involved: the undergraduate students. It is based on a project which followed a cohort of young undergraduate students at Bristol's two universities in the UK through from their first year of study for the following three years, whe...

This chapter explores intersections of class and ‘race’ in the context of HE. The chapter considers the largely unspoken whiteness of the HE environment in England, and then examines what ‘getting in, getting on, and getting out’ mean for students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. We focus on a number of individual student narrativ...

This chapter focuses on students’ preparation to move on. We discuss students’ desires and ambitions, how they have sought to use work experience, placements and internships to prepare them for their next step, and develop the notion of positional capital—capitals for careers: What do students make of what they’ve got; do they ‘know’ how best to ut...

The two universities in Bristol typify many of the widely recognized differences in the UK between those founded before and after 1992. The University of Bristol is an elite research-intensive university, while UWE Bristol is a modern university, a former polytechnic, with a focus on teaching as well as research, with a much larger undergraduate po...

This chapter introduces the project, with details of its aims and methods. It locates the project in the wider policy context and in the relevant research and policy-based literature.

‘Education, education, education’. The Blairite slogan appears on the face of it uncontroversial and designed to attract universal electoral support. We all ‘know’ that education is important as a means to success in a meritocratic society, that qualifications are increasingly crucial for accessing a good career and that university education contin...

In the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in 2007 stands one of Louise Bourgeois’ cell installations. Wooden panels enclose a bedroom scene. A blood-red mattress lies on a wire bed-frame. A square red pillow (for the man?) sits next to a small white pillow with the words ‘je t’aime’ embroidered on it in the same scarlet red. Bu...

THE STUDY OF GENDER AND INEQUALITYVOICING WOMEN: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ON GENDERSTUDYING GENDER INEQUALITY AND SEGREGATION OF WORKCONCLUSION: FUTURE ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF GENDERED INEQUALITIES

This chapter discusses some general issues from the findings presented in this book. It upholds that global economic change has caused the fracturing of youth transitions that have become lengthened and precarious. Young people across Europe are vulnerable to unemployment, insecure employment, and low wages. The chapter notes that the characteristi...

This chapter explores the notion of winners and losers in relation to the changing labour-market situation of young people. It details the impact of labour market changes on various groups of young people though an in-depth study of the youth labour market in a service-based, ‘post-industrial’ city in the south west of England. Research confirms th...

Introduction There has evolved in Europe a popular rhetoric of winners and losers linked to the changing labour markets of the ‘new economy’ of Europe and the advanced capitalist economies. This chapter picks up this idea, already explored by Plug and du Bois-Reymond in Chapter Three. While it is commonly stated that major social and economic chang...

In the past three decades a remarkable shift has occurred, even an inversion, within the sociological agenda. In the 1970s no self-respecting British sociologist could ignore the concept of class: class analysis was a major concern, if not the key concern of British empirical sociology. At this time the sociology of ‘race relations’, as it was char...

One of the most notable recent developments in sociology has been the increased attention to ethnicity and gender as key aspects of social relations. The study of these two dimensions has developed separately, as two distinct sub-disciplines; but in the past ten years there has been an emerging awareness that in concrete social contexts ethnicity a...