Institutionalisation of Employability Capital in Employment Markets

Cai and Tomlinson’s (A renewed analytical framework for understanding employers’ perceptions of graduate employability: Integration of capital and institutionalist perspectives. In T. Broadley, Y. Cai, M. Firth, E. Hunt, & J. Neugebauer (Eds.), SAGE Handbook of Graduate Employability (pp. 479–495). Sage, 2023) renewed analytical framework for understanding employers’ beliefs about graduate employability integrates Tomlinson’s (Forms of graduate capital and their relationship to graduate employability. Education + Training, 59(4), 338–352. https://doi.org/10.1108/et-05-2016-0090, 2017) concept of employability capital and Cai’s (Graduate employability: a conceptual framework for understanding employers’ perceptions. Higher Education, 65(4), 457–469. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9556-x, 2013) conceptualisation of the institutionalisation of employers’ perceptions of graduate employability. This paper uses it to reinterpret an empirical investigation of China-based Finnish employers’ perceptions of Finnish-educated Chinese graduates (Cai, Understanding employers’ perceptions of international graduates: An investigation of the employment prospects of Finnish-educated Chinese graduates in Finnish companies operating in China. Tampere University Press, 2012) to test and enhance the framework. The re-analysis of old findings with the new framework focuses on two questions: What is the explanatory power of Cai and Tomlinson’s (A renewed analytical framework for understanding employers’ perceptions of graduate employability: Integration of capital and institutionalist perspectives. In T. Broadley, Y. Cai, M. Firth, E. Hunt, & J. Neugebauer (Eds.), SAGE Handbook of Graduate Employability (pp. 479–495). Sage, 2023) framework, and how can it be demonstrated? How can the framework be further enhanced? By answering these questions, the paper also contributes to resolving some long-standing debates in the graduate employability literature, such as whether an international education improves employability.