The development and transformation of mainstream notions on ‘Career Guidance’. A discourse analysis on EU policy papers on (un)employment

Abstract

Assisting to successfully manage transitions to work has become an important field for social workers. For this reason, it seems important to us to acquire in the discipline and profession of social work a critical attitude to forms of counselling, especially with regard to career guidance. The paper analyzes the policy discourse on "Career Guidance Services" (CGS) through policy documents from the EU and other European institutions from 1980 to the present. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct how the predominant discursive pattern of CGS has evolved within the EU discourse and thus to reveal the inherent power mechanism. For this purpose, we will rely on a critical analyses of discursive practices from a Foucauldian perspective, especially from the perspective of governmentality studies.