Introduction to the special issue: positionality and social inequality in graduate careers

This Special Issue entitled Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers concerns the changing status of Higher Education (HE) graduates as privileged occupants of highly desirable jobs. As a result of the global expansion of higher education, there is now a large and diversified body of graduates in a crowded graduate labour market and, given the less dramatic expansion of high-skilled well-paid jobs, only a fraction of them will attain the leading positions and the ranks of top earners (e.g. Figueiredo et al. 2017; Tholen 2017; Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2011). The recent labour market shocks have made graduates’ labour market entry and career trajectories even more complex. Within the last two decades, we have seen the global economic crisis in 2008, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022, and, more recently, the influence of geopolitical armed conflict hurting (sections of the) graduate labour markets. The distribution of graduates’ labour market opportunities and the traditional role of credentials in facilitating access to desired forms of employment is in flux (e.g. Brown and Souto-Otero 2020; Tholen 2020; Tomlinson 2017; Isopahkala-Bouret and Ojala 2022). Within changing and uncertain labour market conditions, it is timely to ask how graduate careers actually develop. Furthermore, social inequality within the graduate labour market is among the most pressing issues to investigate in a critical and comprehensive manner. In labour markets where the supply outstrips the demand, positional competition is thought to be heightened (Brown, Hesketh, and Williams 2004) meaning that labour market opportunities increasingly will depend on how well graduates can signal their worth relative to other graduate competitors. Yet too often the positional competition for graduate jobs has become rather a mechanical queuing process through which supply and demand of educational credentials are coordinated. We need to have a more sophisticated understanding about the social, cultural