In this post Dr Tania Lyden (Assistant Professor and Course Director (CEIGHE), University of Warwick) discusses her research about career mentoring and social mobility (Lyden, 2021). She reflects on her experience of presenting her findings to mentoring scheme managers at the 2023 AGCAS conference. She unpacks taken-for-granted assumptions about career mentoring as a ‘universal good’ and asks important questions about the ethics of mentoring that seeks to enhance social mobility.
Ethical practice and career mentoring
In June, the AGCAS annual conference explored “Employability, Ethics and Evolution.” It proved a valuable opportunity to share my research findings and recommendations on career mentoring and social diversity.
Mentoring for social justice?
The conversation in careers has turned towards how practitioners can play their part in the delivery of social justice in our society. Higher education institutions encourage staff to be active bystanders by challenging the social injustices they see. However, as we all know, when we consider ethical dilemmas, they are dilemmas for good reason and that is often because ethical codes can compete and force us to make tough decisions about priorities.
So, what could the ethical problem be when we consider offering career mentoring to students with career aspirations above and beyond those typical of their socio-economic background? Surely this is an unambiguously excellent service for a career and employability team to offer.
Research into career mentoring in HE; using the theories of Bourdieu and Bandura
Over ten years ago, I began to research career mentoring outcomes in higher education and on witnessing its benefits I developed a university-wide scheme with over 600 mentee/mentor pairs. I designed the scheme with social justice in mind using Access Participation Plan funding. As my research became more formalised, I developed two key research questions: How far do the short-term perceived outcomes of career mentoring vary by social background? What facilitates or inhibits the perceived success of career mentoring?
The research I undertook rested on two concepts: ‘habitus’1 (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) and ‘self-efficacy’2 (Bandura, 1977). My research showed that career mentoring seemed to enable mentees, through using mentors as role/sector exemplars, to examine their own career identities relative to that of their mentor. Partial identification seemed to result in close examination of mentor/mentee differences leading to unease if significant and to the moderation of career aspirations. This process seemed to evidence the loose, constraining nature of ‘habitus’. Conversely, mentoring seemed to also proffer ‘performance mastery’ interventions such as work experience, in-depth work project discussions, training to be successful at applications, interviews, communication and networking and reassurance (Bandura, 1977). This meant that lower socio-economic status mentees could gain in ‘self-efficacy’ and challenge the constraining effects of their ‘habitus’.
Bourdieu argued that habitus was a loose framework for the worldly practices of individuals, but that modern day multiple exposures to contexts, or ‘fields’, that our habitus are not suited to would lead to ‘hysteresis’ where we were less able to ‘play the game’ and would feel uneasy. He also argued that the consequence for the individual, when enduring significant social mobility, was a habitus clivé where someone’s sense of belonging in their old familiar contexts would break down and those in the new context might never form, leaving the person without a sense of belonging. Many would argue against Bourdieu’s problematic depiction of changing ‘habitus’ for social mobility. For example, Goldthorpe’s (1974) research into groups of socially mobile people illustrated that original habitus could comfortably be preserved through the mutual support of likeminded individuals.
Back at the conference.
I wanted to share my research findings and recommendations to begin a conversation about ethics and career mentoring. I asked scheme managers if they felt a part of the structural forces that surround a student and whether they felt accountable for the effects of their schemes. More specifically, I wanted them to consider whether, or how far, they should encourage social mobility and risk student ‘hysteresis’ or even ‘habitus clivé’? I wanted to know if they actively trained mentors to develop mentee ‘self-efficacy’ to sustain their career aspirations, what duty of care looked like to them and if they considered the long-term outcomes for mentees?
We began by broadly exploring the ethical challenges scheme organisers face. Concerns were shared about how well schemes know their mentors. Just because someone is successful at their job does it make them a good mentor? Are career mentoring schemes perpetuating nepotism or simply enabling students to build social capital where needed? Should schemes have mentors from organisations which our institutions have business relationships with? Who should get a mentor? Which one? How far are matching decisions based on sound research? These are just some dilemmas faced by scheme organisers who can lack information and operate in organisations with conflicting managerial and professional demands.
We then explored the core ethical issue I identified which was that schemes were providing situations where mentee aspirations, were being constrained by their habitus through partial identification, but that skilled mentors, especially if partnered with reflexive and resilient mentees, seemed able to stretch this habitus and mentee self-belief in their ability to secure aspirational roles. My concern was at what cost to the mentee.
Let the mentee decide – “they can always go back”.
The first audience response focused on agency – let the individual decide “They can always go back”. Taken at face value, this seemed a valid point, but I felt minded to reflect on how most experiences that change us, and stimulate an emotional response, do not seem to work this way. It is often after long periods of stress or low mood that people tend to notice how they had been feeling and behaving, they do not always notice in the moment. How many of us went off to University and came back feeling somewhat detached from our hometowns and lacking a sense of belonging there? Were we aware of that happening at the time? Were we able to ‘go back’ or were we permanently changed by the experience? Can our mentees decide to go back if the experience has changed them?
My recommendations, amongst other things, suggested a much greater role for scheme transparency, dyad and individual mentee/mentor reflexivity, further discussion about similarity and difference between mentor and mentee and between the mentee and their aspired to role and how this makes the mentee feel. Only by being open that mentees are embarking on a set of performance mastery tasks through mentoring that may change them and how they feel about their origins can a mentee be informed. We need to help them recognise that social mobility has gains but it may also have costs.
I argue that scheme managers must explore their schemes through many lenses – societal, institutional, interpersonal and individual to truly understand them. They should also extend evaluation practices to include a longer term look at whether their schemes do in fact promote social mobility. They also should accept a duty of care to socially mobile students, perhaps by facilitating mentee peer support groups to enable students to be mobile but to retain a sense of belonging to their home environments. This may also create virtuous circles, with mentees returning as mentors over time. These suggestions may not fully resolve all of the ethical issue, but are important steps in the right direction.
Career mentoring schemes must explore their full impact and recognise the ethical challenges this creates. Schemes managers need adequate time and skill to do these issues justice. Whether this is possible in the current financial predicament in higher education, is a debate for another day.
Notes:
1 Habitus is a “system of durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 72)
2 Self-efficacy theory proposes that how far someone believes they can successfully execute a course of action in a future situation, influences whether they decide to take that course of action or not. (Bandura, 1977).
References:
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage
Goldthorpe, J. H. (1974). An Introduction to Sociology. London: Cambridge University Press
Career guidance for social justice 