Gerbrand Tholen
Biographic Data
| ID | 265142 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gerbrand Tholen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gerbrand |
| FAMILY NAME | Tholen |
| SIGNATURE | THOLEN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | City, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6439-5046 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 131 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
From human capital to asset ownership: AI as rentier asset
Scholars remain divided on AI’s implications for the future of work, with debate centred on what AI can do to jobs rather than on the economic regime shaping how it is deployed and who appropriates its returns. This article argues that AI’s impact on university-educated labour cannot be understood through technological capability alone, but requires analysing the rentier dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy and sociol…
Matching Candidates to Culture: How Assessments of Organisational Fit Shape the Hiring Process
Organisational fit represents a crucial criterion in the hiring process. This article aims to understand how employers and external recruitment consultants define and apply organisational fit in professional labour markets, such as engineering, marketing and finance. It also investigates how the use of organisational fit in hiring can lead to social bias within these labour markets. It relies on semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruit…
The meaning of higher education credentials in graduate occupations: The view of recruitment consultants
Three influential theories are used to understand why employers value and seek out educational credentials in hiring. Qualifications can function as proof of productive skills (Human Capital Theory), as a signal of desirable characteristics (Signalling and Screening theories) or as a means for social closure (Closure Theory). Although these explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they tend to be presented as alternatives in the liter…
Introduction to the special issue: Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers
This Special Issue entitled Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers concerns the changing status of Higher Education (HE) graduates as privileged occupants of highly desirable jobs. As a result of the global expansion of higher education, there is now a large and diversified body of graduates in a crowded graduate labour market and, given the less dramatic expansion of high-skilled well-paid jobs, only a fraction of them will atta…
Within-Occupation Forms of Positional Labour Market Advantage in Three Skilled Occupations
In recent decades, many scholars have accentuated the role of occupations in social stratification and class analysis. Within occupations, workers compete to improve their labour positioning over time and in the process, create unequal outcomes. Advancement to better positions or improved wages can be dependent on many individual factors such as tenure, skills, experience, and effort. Yet, occupations also allow workers to create relative advanta…
Degree power: Educational credentialism within three skilled occupations
An ongoing debate is centred around the question of how we can understand the value of university credentials in accessing jobs. We know that occupations are strong determinants of which skills, knowledge and abilities are utilised in work but we do not know enough of how occupational contexts shape what university degrees represent to employers and labour market entrants. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article compares and contr…
The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour
This chapter assesses the dominant understanding of what graduate labour is. This continues to influence how we currently understand the work that graduates perform, their status, and the role of higher education in the economy. The chapter outlines the discourse on modern capitalism and in particular the knowledge economy and explains how it changed our vision of the graduate labour market. Contemporary society is portrayed as ever more complex,…
Graduates’ Careers
This chapter examines the notion of graduate careers. By examining the career of graduate workers in the four occupations, it argues that university education does not tend to be the direct driving force within the careers of graduates. There is nothing intrinsic about the graduate labour force that warrants set career paths. Characterizations such as the ‘boundaryless career’ can be associated with some graduate workers but it would be hard to a…
Graduate Work: Skills, Credentials, Careers, and Labour Markets
The expansion of higher education (HE) has been one of the most important changes to affect Western labour markets. More than a third of all British workers are now degree holders. The graduate labour market is often understood as that part of the labour market characterized by high skills and high knowledge intensity and required in an increasingly complex economy. HE is presumed to be the developer of these advanced skills. Yet with the graduat…
Symbolic Closure: Towards a Renewed Sociological Perspective on the Relationship between Higher Education, Credentials and the Graduate Labour Market
This article explores how our understanding of the graduate labour market can be improved by re-assessing some of the insights of the conflictual tradition within sociology. In particular, its theorising of 'social closure' and the use of educational credentials within the labour market remain highly relevant. Yet these ideas need to be modified to better deal with the current social, economic and educational contexts. This article extends the so…
The Changing Opportunities of Professionalization for Graduate Occupations
In recent times, rapidly changing occupational contexts have altered professional trajectories. While sociologists have emphasized that abstract knowledge acquired in higher education is an important characteristic of professionalism, it is not clear whether the expansion of higher education has affected the possibility of individuals and groups to monopolize their university credentials. In this article the author argues that the emergence of ne…
Credentials, talent and cultural capital: A comparative study of educational elites in England and France
This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu's account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately account for comparative differences in the social structure of competition and ideological shifts in class…
Higher education, graduate skills and the skills of graduates: The case of graduates as residential sales estate agents
The UK labour market is subject to significant graduatisation. Yet in the context of an over‐supply of graduates, little is known about the demand for and deployment of graduate skills in previously non‐graduate jobs. Moreover, there is little examination of where these skills are developed , save an assumption in higher education. Using interviews and questionnaire data from a study of British residential sales estate agents, this article explor…
L'éthique des élites scolaires. Du mérite à la responsabilité chez les étudiants de Sciences Po Paris et de l'Université d'Oxford
Être étudiant dans une filière d'élite implique-t-il de développer un rapport éthique au monde social ? À partir d'une enquête comparée sur les représentations du monde social chez les étudiants de Sciences Po Paris et de l'Université d'Oxford, le présent article vise à éclairer les systèmes de justification mis en œuvre par les étudiants scolarisés dans ces établissements. L'analyse met au jour l'émergence d'un principe de légitimation des inéga…
Giving something back? Sentiments of privilege and social responsibility among elite graduates from Britain and France
This article explores the complex relationship between transnational elites and civil society through examining the contrasting orientations of two cohorts of 'elite graduates' from Paris and Oxford. Both cohorts believe their privileged status has been earned through hard work and ability. But they are also aware that they have benefited from advantages not available to all. Perhaps because of this, they express the need to 'give something back'…
What can research into graduate employability tell us about agency and structure
Traditionally theorists who have written about agency and structure have eschewed empirical research. This article uses the findings of an empirical study into graduate employability to inform the sociological debate on how they relate to each other. The study examined how Dutch and British final-year students approach the labour market right before they graduate. The study revealed that the labour market and education structures are mirrored in …
Graduate employability and educational context: A comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
Within policy circles, graduate employability remains a problem. It is often understood as an individual phenomenon, overlooking the influence of the organisation of higher education on the competition for graduate jobs. This article explores and compares how graduate employability is socially constructed within Great Britain and the Netherlands. It provides an analysis of both Dutch and British systems of higher education and explains how they s…
The role of networks and connections in educational elites’ labour market entrance
Self, Career and Nationhood: The contrasting aspirations of British and French elite graduates
There is increasing interest in the emergence of a 'global middle class' in which high achieving young graduates increasingly look to develop careers that transcend national boundaries. This paper explores this issue through comparing and contrasting the aspirations and orientations of two 'elite' cohorts of graduates. Interviews with students at the University of Oxford, England, and Sciences-Po, France, reveal very different ambitions and alleg…
What we know and what we need to know about graduate skills
The expansion of higher education has led to more graduates in the UK labour market. Despite government expectations, this expansion has not boosted national economic competitiveness. This article argues that current understanding of the impact of graduates' skills is limited by methodological and conceptual narrowness in current research and that a broader research agenda is required. This agenda needs to cover not just the supply but also the d…
The Social Construction of Competition for Graduate Jobs: A Comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
This article examines how Dutch and British students socially construct the positional competition for jobs within their educational and labour market contexts. The findings illustrate two contrasting approaches to employability. The competition for jobs as understood by the Dutch students is based on absolute performance, an unclear relationship between skills and the labour market, and the development of human capital in areas of experiences, s…
Credentials, talent and cultural capital: A comparative study of educational elites in England and France
This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu's account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately account for comparative differences in the social structure of competition and ideological shifts in class…
The role of networks and connections in educational elites’ labour market entrance
Self, Career and Nationhood: The contrasting aspirations of British and French elite graduates
There is increasing interest in the emergence of a 'global middle class' in which high achieving young graduates increasingly look to develop careers that transcend national boundaries. This paper explores this issue through comparing and contrasting the aspirations and orientations of two 'elite' cohorts of graduates. Interviews with students at the University of Oxford, England, and Sciences-Po, France, reveal very different ambitions and alleg…
What we know and what we need to know about graduate skills
The expansion of higher education has led to more graduates in the UK labour market. Despite government expectations, this expansion has not boosted national economic competitiveness. This article argues that current understanding of the impact of graduates' skills is limited by methodological and conceptual narrowness in current research and that a broader research agenda is required. This agenda needs to cover not just the supply but also the d…
Giving something back? Sentiments of privilege and social responsibility among elite graduates from Britain and France
This article explores the complex relationship between transnational elites and civil society through examining the contrasting orientations of two cohorts of 'elite graduates' from Paris and Oxford. Both cohorts believe their privileged status has been earned through hard work and ability. But they are also aware that they have benefited from advantages not available to all. Perhaps because of this, they express the need to 'give something back'…
What can research into graduate employability tell us about agency and structure
Traditionally theorists who have written about agency and structure have eschewed empirical research. This article uses the findings of an empirical study into graduate employability to inform the sociological debate on how they relate to each other. The study examined how Dutch and British final-year students approach the labour market right before they graduate. The study revealed that the labour market and education structures are mirrored in …
Symbolic Closure: Towards a Renewed Sociological Perspective on the Relationship between Higher Education, Credentials and the Graduate Labour Market
This article explores how our understanding of the graduate labour market can be improved by re-assessing some of the insights of the conflictual tradition within sociology. In particular, its theorising of 'social closure' and the use of educational credentials within the labour market remain highly relevant. Yet these ideas need to be modified to better deal with the current social, economic and educational contexts. This article extends the so…
Graduate employability and educational context: A comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
Within policy circles, graduate employability remains a problem. It is often understood as an individual phenomenon, overlooking the influence of the organisation of higher education on the competition for graduate jobs. This article explores and compares how graduate employability is socially constructed within Great Britain and the Netherlands. It provides an analysis of both Dutch and British systems of higher education and explains how they s…
Matching Candidates to Culture: How Assessments of Organisational Fit Shape the Hiring Process
Organisational fit represents a crucial criterion in the hiring process. This article aims to understand how employers and external recruitment consultants define and apply organisational fit in professional labour markets, such as engineering, marketing and finance. It also investigates how the use of organisational fit in hiring can lead to social bias within these labour markets. It relies on semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruit…
Higher education, graduate skills and the skills of graduates: The case of graduates as residential sales estate agents
The UK labour market is subject to significant graduatisation. Yet in the context of an over‐supply of graduates, little is known about the demand for and deployment of graduate skills in previously non‐graduate jobs. Moreover, there is little examination of where these skills are developed , save an assumption in higher education. Using interviews and questionnaire data from a study of British residential sales estate agents, this article explor…
The Social Construction of Competition for Graduate Jobs: A Comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
This article examines how Dutch and British students socially construct the positional competition for jobs within their educational and labour market contexts. The findings illustrate two contrasting approaches to employability. The competition for jobs as understood by the Dutch students is based on absolute performance, an unclear relationship between skills and the labour market, and the development of human capital in areas of experiences, s…
Degree power: Educational credentialism within three skilled occupations
An ongoing debate is centred around the question of how we can understand the value of university credentials in accessing jobs. We know that occupations are strong determinants of which skills, knowledge and abilities are utilised in work but we do not know enough of how occupational contexts shape what university degrees represent to employers and labour market entrants. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article compares and contr…
The Changing Opportunities of Professionalization for Graduate Occupations
In recent times, rapidly changing occupational contexts have altered professional trajectories. While sociologists have emphasized that abstract knowledge acquired in higher education is an important characteristic of professionalism, it is not clear whether the expansion of higher education has affected the possibility of individuals and groups to monopolize their university credentials. In this article the author argues that the emergence of ne…
The role of networks and connections in educational elites’ labour market entrance
Self, Career and Nationhood: The contrasting aspirations of British and French elite graduates
There is increasing interest in the emergence of a 'global middle class' in which high achieving young graduates increasingly look to develop careers that transcend national boundaries. This paper explores this issue through comparing and contrasting the aspirations and orientations of two 'elite' cohorts of graduates. Interviews with students at the University of Oxford, England, and Sciences-Po, France, reveal very different ambitions and alleg…
What we know and what we need to know about graduate skills
The expansion of higher education has led to more graduates in the UK labour market. Despite government expectations, this expansion has not boosted national economic competitiveness. This article argues that current understanding of the impact of graduates' skills is limited by methodological and conceptual narrowness in current research and that a broader research agenda is required. This agenda needs to cover not just the supply but also the d…
The Social Construction of Competition for Graduate Jobs: A Comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
This article examines how Dutch and British students socially construct the positional competition for jobs within their educational and labour market contexts. The findings illustrate two contrasting approaches to employability. The competition for jobs as understood by the Dutch students is based on absolute performance, an unclear relationship between skills and the labour market, and the development of human capital in areas of experiences, s…
Graduate employability and educational context: A comparison between Great Britain and the Netherlands
Within policy circles, graduate employability remains a problem. It is often understood as an individual phenomenon, overlooking the influence of the organisation of higher education on the competition for graduate jobs. This article explores and compares how graduate employability is socially constructed within Great Britain and the Netherlands. It provides an analysis of both Dutch and British systems of higher education and explains how they s…
What can research into graduate employability tell us about agency and structure
Traditionally theorists who have written about agency and structure have eschewed empirical research. This article uses the findings of an empirical study into graduate employability to inform the sociological debate on how they relate to each other. The study examined how Dutch and British final-year students approach the labour market right before they graduate. The study revealed that the labour market and education structures are mirrored in …
Credentials, talent and cultural capital: A comparative study of educational elites in England and France
This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu's account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately account for comparative differences in the social structure of competition and ideological shifts in class…
Higher education, graduate skills and the skills of graduates: The case of graduates as residential sales estate agents
The UK labour market is subject to significant graduatisation. Yet in the context of an over‐supply of graduates, little is known about the demand for and deployment of graduate skills in previously non‐graduate jobs. Moreover, there is little examination of where these skills are developed , save an assumption in higher education. Using interviews and questionnaire data from a study of British residential sales estate agents, this article explor…
L'éthique des élites scolaires. Du mérite à la responsabilité chez les étudiants de Sciences Po Paris et de l'Université d'Oxford
Être étudiant dans une filière d'élite implique-t-il de développer un rapport éthique au monde social ? À partir d'une enquête comparée sur les représentations du monde social chez les étudiants de Sciences Po Paris et de l'Université d'Oxford, le présent article vise à éclairer les systèmes de justification mis en œuvre par les étudiants scolarisés dans ces établissements. L'analyse met au jour l'émergence d'un principe de légitimation des inéga…
Giving something back? Sentiments of privilege and social responsibility among elite graduates from Britain and France
This article explores the complex relationship between transnational elites and civil society through examining the contrasting orientations of two cohorts of 'elite graduates' from Paris and Oxford. Both cohorts believe their privileged status has been earned through hard work and ability. But they are also aware that they have benefited from advantages not available to all. Perhaps because of this, they express the need to 'give something back'…
The Contested Nature of Graduate Labour
This chapter assesses the dominant understanding of what graduate labour is. This continues to influence how we currently understand the work that graduates perform, their status, and the role of higher education in the economy. The chapter outlines the discourse on modern capitalism and in particular the knowledge economy and explains how it changed our vision of the graduate labour market. Contemporary society is portrayed as ever more complex,…
Graduates’ Careers
This chapter examines the notion of graduate careers. By examining the career of graduate workers in the four occupations, it argues that university education does not tend to be the direct driving force within the careers of graduates. There is nothing intrinsic about the graduate labour force that warrants set career paths. Characterizations such as the ‘boundaryless career’ can be associated with some graduate workers but it would be hard to a…
Graduate Work: Skills, Credentials, Careers, and Labour Markets
The expansion of higher education (HE) has been one of the most important changes to affect Western labour markets. More than a third of all British workers are now degree holders. The graduate labour market is often understood as that part of the labour market characterized by high skills and high knowledge intensity and required in an increasingly complex economy. HE is presumed to be the developer of these advanced skills. Yet with the graduat…
Symbolic Closure: Towards a Renewed Sociological Perspective on the Relationship between Higher Education, Credentials and the Graduate Labour Market
This article explores how our understanding of the graduate labour market can be improved by re-assessing some of the insights of the conflictual tradition within sociology. In particular, its theorising of 'social closure' and the use of educational credentials within the labour market remain highly relevant. Yet these ideas need to be modified to better deal with the current social, economic and educational contexts. This article extends the so…
The Changing Opportunities of Professionalization for Graduate Occupations
In recent times, rapidly changing occupational contexts have altered professional trajectories. While sociologists have emphasized that abstract knowledge acquired in higher education is an important characteristic of professionalism, it is not clear whether the expansion of higher education has affected the possibility of individuals and groups to monopolize their university credentials. In this article the author argues that the emergence of ne…
Degree power: Educational credentialism within three skilled occupations
An ongoing debate is centred around the question of how we can understand the value of university credentials in accessing jobs. We know that occupations are strong determinants of which skills, knowledge and abilities are utilised in work but we do not know enough of how occupational contexts shape what university degrees represent to employers and labour market entrants. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, this article compares and contr…
Within-Occupation Forms of Positional Labour Market Advantage in Three Skilled Occupations
In recent decades, many scholars have accentuated the role of occupations in social stratification and class analysis. Within occupations, workers compete to improve their labour positioning over time and in the process, create unequal outcomes. Advancement to better positions or improved wages can be dependent on many individual factors such as tenure, skills, experience, and effort. Yet, occupations also allow workers to create relative advanta…
The meaning of higher education credentials in graduate occupations: The view of recruitment consultants
Three influential theories are used to understand why employers value and seek out educational credentials in hiring. Qualifications can function as proof of productive skills (Human Capital Theory), as a signal of desirable characteristics (Signalling and Screening theories) or as a means for social closure (Closure Theory). Although these explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they tend to be presented as alternatives in the liter…
Introduction to the special issue: Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers
This Special Issue entitled Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers concerns the changing status of Higher Education (HE) graduates as privileged occupants of highly desirable jobs. As a result of the global expansion of higher education, there is now a large and diversified body of graduates in a crowded graduate labour market and, given the less dramatic expansion of high-skilled well-paid jobs, only a fraction of them will atta…
Matching Candidates to Culture: How Assessments of Organisational Fit Shape the Hiring Process
Organisational fit represents a crucial criterion in the hiring process. This article aims to understand how employers and external recruitment consultants define and apply organisational fit in professional labour markets, such as engineering, marketing and finance. It also investigates how the use of organisational fit in hiring can lead to social bias within these labour markets. It relies on semi-structured interviews with 47 external recruit…
From human capital to asset ownership: AI as rentier asset
Scholars remain divided on AI’s implications for the future of work, with debate centred on what AI can do to jobs rather than on the economic regime shaping how it is deployed and who appropriates its returns. This article argues that AI’s impact on university-educated labour cannot be understood through technological capability alone, but requires analysing the rentier dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy and sociol…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Economics (14 works) · Law (10 works) · Pedagogy (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Higher Education and Employability (9 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Engineering (7 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (7 works)