EXTENDED SUMMARY

Introduction

Flexibility defines as production actors adjust their capacities according as changing circumstance. The concept usually is perceived loaded with positive value. Flexibility, however, can consist of different meanings for employees and employer or cover different advantages and disadvantages for both. While employers decrease the production costs, and increase their advantages thanks to flexible working regime, employees bounce from place to place in insecure working circumstance. Flexibility, thus, is not non-idelogical phenomenon, and mostly causes applications served capitalists’ interest.

Career managment politics also have been affected by neoliberal economy. While career management applications was interested in unemployment, migration, education, poverty, inequality, working class, and disadvantaged groups in the 80s’, the subjects have slided to topics like self-improvement, communication abilities, career choices for last four decades. In order to construct the neoliberal individualism and flexibility as dominant discourse have been used much mechanism. The most important one is, of course, education institutions.

This article aims to show how the neoliberal flexibility discourse is reproduced and glorified by the Career Planning Course. The Career Planning Course is taught to serve information regarding how they will plan and form their career to undergraduates in Grade one, as compulsory sessions. We claim that these courses don’t just reveal the ways of career planning, but also serve to collect the undergraduates around the neoliberal flexibility discourse and impose the neoliberal values on them. In this sense, the Courses work as the ideological apparatus served to justify the flexibility discourse.

In this research, in which the critical discourse analysis technique was used, the content analysis of the Courses spreaded 14 weeks was made and the indicators of flexibility in the texts were investigated. The flexibility was investigated in the codes that are the adaptation to the changing circumstance, the freedom of choice, making individuals responsible, underestimating the working ethics, and belonging.

Flexibility, Potentials and Actual Facts

When flexibility was discussed in the early days, Liberals defended it because it increased employees’ power and responsibilities. According to them, flexibility ensures job rotation and obtaining new skills, boosts skills of problem-solving, makes employees more active, offers employees to adjust working hours whatever they want, provides opportunities to them in terms of work-life balance, and promises more income for all workers. It, however, has disappointed all aspects. Moreover, it has left most employees defenseless and insecure with the effect of developments such as contraction, shrinkage, and crisis. Under these conditions, flexibility has brought about more working workload, work and income insecurity, and dispossession and precarization. The difference between promises and offers that are served by flexibility, determines the doze of critics against it. Thus, there is a big difference between potential flexibility and actual flexibility.

Neoliberalism and Career Planning Approach after the 2000s’ in Turkey

Neoliberalism has transformed emancipatory career planning thinking into individualized career management. Career guidance worked for poverty, unemployment, refugees, social inclusion, and disadvantaged groups until the 90s’. However, later, it has adopted new values such as entrepreneurship, flexibility, individualism, human capital, employability, and self-development. Economic and social disadvantages have not been taken into account. These have been accepted as things that will correct themselves in the course of the operation of the market.

Neoliberal economic policies have affected employment processes and career approaches in Turkey last four decades. The flexible labor regime has got to individualism, entrepreneurship, self-development, and human capital coming into prominence. Career Planning Courses by universities and Turkish Labor Institutions inform undergraduates and people about careers. Who organize the Courses claim they want to help undergraduates and people with career choices. According to us, the Courses also benefit to spread the neoliberal labor values mentioned above. For this purpose, we did a critical discourse analysis of the Career Planning Course that was studied at universities as a compulsory session in Turkey. The Career Planning Course prepared by Presidential Human Resources Office consists of sessions of 14 weeks. The Courses have stable contents and aim to direct lecturer. As such, the Courses reflect the legal ideas of the State regarding both career approaches and the employment regime.

Findings and Conclusion

As a result of the analysis, we saw that flexibility, changing jobs frequently, and being open to new experiences were emphasized in the Career Planning Courses. Moreover, the cause of the flexibility was shown globally competition, technological development, and employees’ expectations. This causation spreads the idea that flexible working is employees’ demand. Courses underestimate solid working regime due to hindering upward mobility and claim that flexible working gives chance to employees to climb up. Risks, insecurity, unemployment, precarization, however, are never mentioned in the Courses. Working and career are a journey. According to this, employees choose where they work, how much to work, and their pay. Flexibility is an abundance of options.

It has no land for belonging and loyalty in the new working world. Flexible capitalism consists of freedom, autonomy, boundless, individualism, competition, and chasing opportunities. While institutional loyalty was an important value once upon a time, corporations have discovered the importance of job loyalty. New technologies and management models demand anymore self-renewing employees. We found a lot of such expressions in the Course contents.

Additionally, the Courses presume that career planning turns into an individual’s responsibility together with flexibility obligation. The new approach demands from individuals to make career plans by themselves. For this, individuals have to keep themselves updated and should adopt life-long learning. Moreover, the achievement is no longer evaluated by salary and promotion but career success is about personal perception. In short, it is important that a person saw self to what extent success.

As conclude, it was seen that the flexibility discourse was intensely represented, reproduced, and glorified along the Courses. However, it was seen that, it was not mentioned to precarization, unemployment, insecure and low-paid working conditions.

That undergraduates construct their own subjectivation experience by being exposed to neoliberal flexibility discourse will lead to blaming themselves and being supposed to an insecure working regime. Today, being unemployed, getting fired, being exposed to long working hours, not achieving work-life balance, precarization, working for low wages, or doing the job unhappily are associated with not being flexible enough, not following the developments, not adopting the changing conditions, not keeping pace with the liquid working market, and not accepting the changes. What needs to be done, however, is to build a working regime that both secures the employees and creates flexible working conditions. The way to do this is to regulate the distribution relations.