Building a radical career imaginary: using Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri to reflexively re-read Ali and Graham’s counselling approach to career guidance

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I have just published a new article with the snappy title Building a radical career imaginary: using Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri to reflexively re-read Ali and Graham’s counselling approach to career guidance in the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. It is open access so if you are interested you can get it for free.

In the article I explore the work of the two pairs of political theorists Laclau & Mouffe and Hardt & Negri. I’ve been interested in these theorists for a long while as they seem to get pretty close to articulating what I believe about politics and political change. So, I decided to try and think through what they have to offer to career theory and the practice of career guidance.

I argue that these theorists offer us a number of really interesting concepts which help us to understand ourselves and the relationship between the individual and society. By engaging with they key concepts we can inform and expand career guidance’s capability to support social justice. The following table summarises these key concepts.

I then use these concepts to undertake a reflexive re-reading of Ali & Graham’s counselling approach to career guidance. I did this because I think that Ali & Graham’s model is well used and provides practitioners with a very practical approach to giving career guidance. By re-reading using these new concepts I hope to preserve the practical and easily applied nature of their guidance model, but to repopulate it with concepts that can support social justice.

The following figure summarises the way I put the model together with the new concepts.

I hope that you find this interesting. It was certainly interesting and challenging to write.

To read the full article just go to Building a radical career imaginary: using Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri to reflexively re-read Ali and Graham’s counselling approach to career guidance.