Against idle complicity: Challenging the employability agenda in teaching and daily academic life

This chapter highlights the centrality of employability in UK universities and traces how this has come to be the case by looking at the discourse of higher education policies. It contains two vignettes that come from UK and Sweden, which draws upon to cement the analysis as part of a global phenomenon. The chapter provides a historical overview of how employability became central to universities, referring to the example of the UK. It also considers business and management schools as a special case, which provides an opportunity for a special form of engagement and potential platform to challenge the pervasiveness of this discourse. The chapter also highlights academics' idle complicity in furthering the employability agenda by failing to engage critically and imaginatively with this neo-liberal requirement. The Robbins Report identified four key objectives of higher education, one of which was connecting education with the world of work through the development of 'key skills' that students would need in labour market.