Career guidance policies : global dynamics, local resonances

Abstract

This paper considers the spate of reviews of career guidance that have taken place since the year 2000, and which were commissioned by such supranational entities as the OECD and various agencies and directorates of the European Commission. The paper argues that this series of overlapping comparative studies – involving 55 countries in all – constitutes a powerful discursive field which has helped to frame career guidance in particular ways, and that it has led to opportunities for policy lending and policy borrowing on an unprecedented scale. The paper examines the dynamics of such policy learning, identifying some of its potential motives as well as key mechanisms by which transfers take place through ‘push’ and ‘pull’ forces. It then goes on to raise a series of questions regarding the viability of deterritorialized policy exchange, noting that social practices such as career guidance are inscribed in a particular complex of values, meanings, and significations that are tightly coupled to the ecological climate in which they thrive. Two case studies – one focusing on career guidance in small states, the other on career guidance in Arab countries – are presented in order to illustrate the way trans-national, globalised agendas are reconfigured and reinterpreted at the local level. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ethical and epistemological responsibilities that need to be confronted by ‘boundary persons’ who mediate between the global and the local.