Introduction

In contemporary working life, graduates’ personal virtues and qualities of the self are understood as crucial for their employability, labour market attractiveness and success in work organisations. Employability has become a particular skill in its own right, a way of displaying and presenting oneself in a positive way to demonstrate ‘potential’ (Moore, 2010, p. 39; see Handley, 2018). The call for potentiality as a key criterion of employability produces the idealisation of employees trapped by demands to be continuously productive yet also forever transforming themselves (Handley, 2018).

In this chapter, we argue that health has become new areas of life—and new social practices—through which graduates display their potentiality in terms of employability, represent themselves in a positive way in workplace contexts and aim to enhance their value as workers. Drawing on the thematic analysis of interviews with 26 business graduates, we investigate how graduates construct health as employability potential when they envisage and evaluate working life through ‘career imagination’.

According to Cohen and Duberley (2021), the career imagination concerns how individuals view the possibilities and constraints of their working life, and chart and evaluate their route in the labour market. We suggest that prior employability studies tend to create a rather abstract and generalised picture of working life, simultaneously detaching the employable graduate from their career imagination. Following Holmes (2015), we argue that prior employability research hasn’t taken account enough the longer timescales of individuals’ lives, including their employment careers. From an individual point of view, however, working life becomes relevant and gets its meaning through career.

Career imagination concerns social time which refers to “the systems of trajectories and rhythms that human create as they engage in interaction within social institutions” (Snyder, 2016, p. 11). Social time is made up of timescapes and time maps. Timescapes, according to Snyder (2016, p. 13), are the configurations of rhythms which actors create within a space of interaction. Work timescapes involve, for example, schedules, deadlines and sequences of tasks. Each work timescape features the braiding of multiple rhythms of mental and physical energy expenditure, giving the individual employee a different experience of pace, sequence and articulation (ibid., p. 14). Timescapes are themselves embedded in larger temporal structures—time maps—that make out the general shape of the remembered pasts and expected future (Snyder, 2019). Careers are such organisational time maps within institutions which structure people’s lives into certain kinds of trajectories (Snyder, 2019; Cohen & Duberley, 2021). Thus, work timescapes and time maps contribute to employee’s experience of both the texture and direction of social time. They are the resources that people use to locate themselves in time and space in their career imagination.

Previously, career has connoted predictability, order and steady progress along an organisationally prescribed timeline (Cohen & Duberley, 2021). We refer to such a career imagination with the concept of ‘bounded career’ (Snyder, 2019). As an organisational time map, it invites employees to expect—or at least wish for—security and a pathway to seniority from the future work trajectory. It has been argued, however, that contemporary capitalism has created new time maps for career imagination (Snyder, 2019; Cohen & Duberley, 2021). Contemporary careers have been characterised by increased mobility, uncertainty and greater individual agency as opposed to the bounded career models of full-time employment in mostly single organisations (LaPointe, 2013). We use the concept of ‘flexible career’ to refer to current schemas for movement in institutions that structure people’s lives into particular trajectories. As an organisational time map, a flexible career encourages employees to relate to themselves as if they were entrepreneurs—to be constantly active, compete with oneself and others, realise their full potential and embrace risks (Scharff, 2016).

Based on their citation analysis of journal articles, Healy et al. (2022) show that graduate employability and career development research are relatively separate research fields, and a substantive exchange between these research areas has remained surprisingly limited. Moreover, although health has become a key marker of employability in contemporary labour markets, there is very little research with the explicit purpose of investigating how employability is associated with health and well-being (Berntson & Marklund, 2007). Therefore, it is important to investigate how graduates perceive themselves as healthy employable subjects in their career imagination. By tackling this topic, this chapter aims to contribute to critical employability research and illustrate the new forms and practices of employability and labour management in graduates’ career imagination.

Health as a Social Practice in the Neoliberal Governance of Workers

Career imagination is influenced by the multi-layered structural and cultural context withinwhich an individual is situated (Cohen & Duberley, 2021). In this study, we approach such a context from the governmentality research (Foucault 1980, 1982; Rose and Miller, 1992; Rose, 1999) and critical health research (Brown & Baker, 2012) point of view. Governmentality studies have focused not only on how the state manages its population, but also on how it shapes the self-knowledge and self-conduct of the individuals (Rose, 1999). Whereas governmental self-formation refers to ways in which authorities seek to shape the conduct of aspirations, needs and capabilities of specified categories of individuals, the ethical self-formation concerns “practices, techniques, and discourses of the government of the self by the self by means of which individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves” (Dean, 1994, p. 156). We suggest that neoliberalism constitutes a form of governmentality that modifies ethical self-formation and such a career imagination within which a specific type of individual is idealised—an enterprising self who regards themself as autonomous and manages to put their whole self to productive work (Maravelias, 2018). Enterprising individuals are not only capable of carrying out specific labour as employees, but they act entrepreneurially in all spheres of life and aim to continually invest in themselves as ‘human capital’ and nurture, manage and develop their professional as well as private selves (Maravelias, 2015).

In contemporary labour markets, health and well-being have become important dimensions of private self, through which individuals are supposed to invest in their human capital and cultivate themselves as enterprising workers (Maravelias, 2015; Bardon et al., 2021). Neoliberal governance of healthy workers embodies the wider characteristics of capitalist production and immaterial labour, in which workers are required to mobilise new and intimate dimensions of their subjectivities to display their engagement with work (Farrugia, 2019) and to contribute to the competitiveness of the organisation (Maravelias, 2018).

From the perspective of critical health studies, the requirement to cultivate oneself as a healthy worker is a manifestation of the embodied neoliberal governance (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Lupton, 1999) and illustrates the more general views of health in modern societies. In these views, health is individualised as a moral duty and personal responsibility for health, and good health represents markers of autonomy, rational agency, good citizenship and good life (Crawford, 1980, 2006). Accordingly, individuals must seek out, assess and act upon an endless stream of knowledge on health threats. This fosters anxieties about perceived health risks. From a governmentality perspective, risk-avoidance can be understood as a ‘technology of the self’ (Foucault, 1982), wherein personal responsibility for health promotion “becomes viewed as a moral enterprise relating to issues of self-control, self-knowledge, and self-improvement” (Lupton 1999, p. 91).

In this chapter, we approach health as a social and normative practice (Crawford, 2006; Clark, 2018) that provides dominant discourses through which graduates demonstrate their employability potential in the labour market. Thus, for us, health is not a biomedical concept, but refers to multidimensional aspects of wellness. Such a holistic understanding of health encourages individuals to recognise the whole person (physical, mental, emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual), and expands the quest for health far beyond medical priorities towards mind-over-matter conceptions, such as positiveness, happiness, self-confidence, ability to function and productivity (Crawford, 2006). The holistic approach sees health as constructed in relation to social structures and experience and systematically articulated with other meanings and practices, such as practices of working life.

Thematic Analysis of Business Graduates’ Interviews

This study is part of a larger research project on graduate employability and social positioning in the labour market (HighEmploy, 2018–2022). In the project’s qualitative sub-study, altogether 76 higher education graduates with degrees in business and administration were interviewed in 2019 for the first time and 44 of them in 2020 for the second time.Footnote 1 The participants had been studying in three different Finnish universities and two Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS).

The interviews covered themes such as the participants’ educational and working-life routes, experiences related to university studies, employment and working life, current life and work situation, and future perceptions and goals. The interviews ranged from 1.5 to 3 hours and were conducted face-to-face, on the phone or via video conference call. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the data was pseudonymised.

For the purposes of this chapter, we selected the first interviews with university graduates from one university. Our data set consists of 26 interviews (13 women and 13 men), aged between 24 and 45 (the mean age 32.92 and median 31 years). At the time of the first interviews, 19 of them had already graduated with a master’s degree in business and administration, and seven were about to graduate in the near future. The interviewees worked in business organisations with titles such as accountant, application consultant, back-office executive, business consultant, chief financial officer (CFO), credit manager, controller, human resource and marketing coordinator, investment manager, marketing manager, procurement specialist, product director or sales coordinator. In addition, one of them worked as managing director and as shareholder in his company. Two of them worked in public sector.

In our analysis, we first focused on those parts of the interviews (435 pages of the total 1261 pages of transcribed interview data), in which the interviewees constructed career imaginations. Second, we further identified all instances from the data where the topic of health (in a holistic meaning) was explicitly or implicitly referred to. Health was originally neither in the interest of the research project nor explicitly asked about or discussed in the interviews; thus, it was indeed a marginal topic in the data corpus. Most of the interviewees considered health mainly as the absence of illness: “Of course [it is important in the future] that you stay healthy, that you can work (Tom)”. Moreover, in our data, health represented a valued human capital and a competitive advantage in the job search. Although job search was one context of career imagination, we excluded this topic from this study, as it is discussed elsewhere in this book (see Mutanen, Korhonen & Siivonen).

Our method of analysis was based on the thematic analysis conducted within a social constructionist framework. Thus, our aim was not to analyse personal experiences or the reality of the participants, or to focus merely on the semantic content of the data. Instead, we identified and explored the underlying ideas, assumptions and conceptualisations that shaped or informed the semantic content of the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). In other words, the themes that we identified from the data were considered as socially produced and effected by a range of discourses operating within society, although no specific discourse analysis was carried out.

The focus of our analysis was on health discourses through which graduates sought to know and act on themselves as employable subjects in their career imagination. The analysis was performed jointly by the authors and proceeded with the following steps. We coded the data for specific research questions in our minds. We started our analysis by identifying the ways by which graduates constructed higher education, private and working life, careers and work life, and organisations in their talk, and understood themselves as healthy subjects in these fields. We recognised that intensive working life and bounded and flexible careers (Snyder, 2019) were the major frameworks through which graduates understood and constructed themselves as employees, as well as persons in private lives. Next, we analysed the sub-themes of these frameworks and the categories and qualities (of an employee and a healthy person) that the interviewees used in these frameworks to form knowledge of themselves as certain kinds of labouring subjects. We explored how the categories were used to create distinctions between success and failure, valuable and unvaluable, healthy and unhealthy behaviours (such as being active—being overactive, agile—flexible), bodies (persistent—weak), minds (risk-aware—unaware) and emotions (balanced—unbalanced) of a labouring subject (Korhonen et al., 2023). Finally, we analysed how these distinctions formed the criteria for a healthy employee and how the interviewees evaluated themselves and their responsibility and success in meeting these criteria.

Health in Terms of Timescapes of Working Life: Normalising Intensive and Stressful Working Life

As stated above, our analysis aimed to trace the kinds of timescapes and time maps that shaped business graduates’ knowledge of themselves as employees and thus their career imagination. We discovered that when business graduates demonstrated their employability potential, they, on the one hand, described their daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms of work tasks in their organisations and reflected on how well or badly they performed in these day-to-day duties. Thus, they formed knowledge of themselves as employees within certain kind of work timescape. On the other hand, graduates formed knowledge of themselves within larger temporal frames, that is, organisational time maps within which they described their success or lack of success in their careers. Although timescapes and time maps intertwine in career imagination in a reciprocal way such that each reflects and constitutes the other, we present our results by opening up, firstly, how graduates’ knowledge of themselves was structured by a particular timescape. Then we show how careers as organisational time maps shaped graduates’ construction of health as employability potential.

It turned out that an intensive and stressful working life provided a timescape and a technology of the self through which graduates displayed their (un)successfulness and (un)potentiality in their career imagination. The timescape of intensive working life, which emphasised a constant pressure on the one hand and the individual’s own responsibility for handling this pressure on the other, has historically been produced for example in Finnish public discussion. Especially from the 1990s onwards, this discussion has painted a grim picture of the negative effects of a competitive economy, such as constant time pressure, uncertainty, rapid changes, as well as stress and burnout (Varje & Väänänen, 2016), and emphasised the employees’ own responsibility over their mental well-being and highlighted individual stress management abilities to regulate one’s workload (Kuokkanen et al., 2020).

Business graduates imagined their career through such a timescape and presented themselves as physically and mentally strong subjects who could be in coordination with the intensive rhythms of the organisation by withstanding the pressures of working life. Tuure’s quotation illustrates how graduates’ notions of themselves as good and healthy employees were built through this specific organisational timescape:

Tuure::

In my opinion, some stress is part of work […] At least I need stress myself because work is not worth doing and life not worth living if there isn’t enough some kind of pressure. So perhaps it’s a kind of more popular concept of entropy, that there must be pressure because otherwise you cannot keep yourself together as a person […] A being needs to have a certain surface tension to keep it together. If you don’t have a goal or a purpose, why should you exist at all?

In his quotation, Tuure normalises the stressful working life by comparing it to the natural phenomena (entropy), and by seeing a sufficient amount of stress and pressure as an inevitable condition of existence which gives meaning and purpose to life itself. The idea that “life [is] not worth living if there isn’t enough some kind of pressure”, places ‘activity’ as a generic measure of virtuous behaviour; activity is good in and of itself (Till, 2018).

Health as a Driving Force and Enabler of Vitality

The promotion of activity is the primary organising principle of the timescape of intensive working life, and the ‘cult of busyness’ (Till, 2018) demands vital, full-blooded and thus productive employees. In their interviews, business graduates emphasised their past and/or current ability to work endlessly in hectic work circumstances. Toughness and durability for work performance, as well as the ability to maintain vitality and deal with stress, were personal qualities through which graduates performed their success in intensive working life:

Benjamin::

With regard to progressing in my career, probably working hard and, just, doing that work and that I have managed to do it [has helped]. At some point, someone always notices that this person works […] you mustn’t try too much and also not too little, but work in a kind of unselfish manner […] I have worked long days, been busy and so on in all of them [workplaces], so […] I’m not afraid of the busyness and I can […] handle pressure. Perhaps it has led me in a certain direction in working life, too.

An inexhaustible energy and vitality for work performances was seen to originate from the young, inherently enthusiastic and resilient individual, and it was realised in the value of their labour and in the success of their careers (see also Farrugia, 2019; Korhonen et al., 2023). Like Benjamin said: “with regard to progressing in my career, probably working hard and, just, doing that work [has helped]”. Thus, graduates cultivated themselves as active and energetic employees. For them, having the energy to deal with day-to-day duties and having the ability to optimise one’s performance in stressful working life represented a central marker of employability potential.

Health as Risk Awareness and Skilful Risk Management

For business graduates, the intensive working life was also a danger and potential risk for well-being. Like Crawford (2006) states, health-consciousness is also danger-consciousness—an awareness of and sensitivity to increasingly ambient and omnipresent potential harms. Thus, “the ‘imperative of health’ is a mandate to identify dangers in order to control them” (Crawford, 2006, p. 403).

According to graduates’ views, a good and healthy employee works in line with schedules, timetables and deadlines, that is, the ways by which organisations structure timescapes (Snyder, 2019). However, under neoliberal governance, it is the individuals’ responsibility to be in coordination with the rhythms of the organisation. This coordination requires not only self-control of time but also control over one’s health. For graduates, managing their well-being was thus a skill among other employability-related skills (Maravelias, 2012), such as time management, as Sofia’s quotation illustrates:

Interviewer::

What do you think, what kind of competence, abilities and skills are required from you in working life now and perhaps from now on?

Sofia::

Self-governance, or self-management, is required today. It doesn’t matter what the position is, it is a key skill that many people do not master, however. I mean, how you inspire and motivate yourself to do things that may not be so interesting, or how you manage your use of time, or your recovery or the work-life balance. I find it an essential part of modern working life as work is so flexible […]. It is seldom location-specific. And especially in specialist tasks, work takes over your life if you don’t have the means to interrupt it.

First, in such a timescape, self-management of health includes the ability to acknowledge risks. Like Sofia says: “how you manage your recovery […] it an essential part of modern working life”. Second, self-management of one’s optimal performance in intensive working life involves controlling emotions. According to Till (2018), affective force is essential for the maximisation of productivity in contemporary capitalism. Therefore, the important task for the individual is to reconfigure the self in such a way that emotions, which might disrupt productivity (e.g., too little or too much enthusiasm), are self-managed and constrained (Brown & Baker, 2012, p. 17; see also Gill & Orgad, 2018). Like Sofia reflects: “how you inspire and motivate yourself to do things that may not be so interesting”.

Third, self-management for guaranteeing ones’ productivity and efficiency in intensive working life needs the ability to maintain equilibrium between ‘dangerous identities’ (Till, 2018)—of being too disengaged (lacking activity) or being overactive (being burnout). In avoiding dangerous identities, the healthy employee needs to be capable of distinguishing and interpreting the bodily signs of stress and exhaustion:

Tuure::

If business is war, like someone claimed in the 80s, I have experienced that war and survived it. After that, nothing has really affected me very much any more. Of course, there is sometimes more stress. My heart rate during rest can sometimes be pretty high when I measure it. I sometimes cannot sleep for a long time and sometimes sleep five hours a night for weeks and so on. But you learn to cope with it all. And there’s the personal tolerance and an understanding of what the minimum and maximum limits of your tolerance are. So when you determine what they are and notice that you coped with it, next time the challenge will not feel so strange any more.

Business graduates’ bodies were their disciplinarians; their bodies schooled them into practices of self-knowledge and self-governance (see also Björklund, 2008). Like Tuure explains: “when I measure it […] you learn what the minimum and maximum limits of your tolerance are”. The lessons learnt from the body turn attention away from any social and institutional factors, instead placing emphasis on the individual’s ability to manage their health. In addition, individual health management was seen as a business value: business graduates argued that health management and the related risk-avoidance as a “working life skill” is above all in the interest of the company and the customer:

Tea::

So, I have had to learn working life skills […] The content of the work is not difficult, but the working life skills are […] If you always strive for the best possible result, you will definitely be exhausted and have a burnout. Companies are quite strict about how money is used and what people are employed for. So, usually the person has a bit more work than they have time to do during the working hours […] Myself, I’m a person who keeps seeing things that need doing and would also like do them well enough. So remembering to keep an eye on your own coping and that you do not work too hard, either. That’s what I’ve had to learn. You have to learn to say no and to delegate things. So that kind of skills. I haven’t learnt them in business studies and they would be really important.

Interviewer::

How have you yourself […] learnt these working life skills that you just talked about?

Tea::

In the hard way a little bit, too. You have to talk about things, if you feel that you can’t cope on your own, if you see some risks. I brought it up when I felt that there was a risk […] I was a consultant at the time […] that the success of that client or the success of the company with that client was at risk if I didn’t say anything [about the risk of burnout]. And it made it easier. So then I found more energy myself to work a bit harder.

Thus, for business graduates, the ability to recognise health risks, to communicate the recognised risks in organisation, as well as the ability to balance and to be tough under pressure were essential criteria for a healthy employee. Health thereby was a question of choice and responsibility. Business graduates’ interpretations show how, under neoliberal governance, workers are to become resilient subjects who work on the self to monitor and manage their vulnerabilities related to well-being (Gill & Orgad, 2018).

Health in Terms of Time Maps: Constructing Employability Potential in Career

Careers provide time maps of ‘projectivity’—the future-oriented aspects of meaning-making and action, such as expectations, predictions or plans (Snyder, 2019). We discovered that both bounded and flexible careers as kinds of organisational time maps shaped graduates’ self-knowledge, thus reflecting the fact that the expectations for career security and progress have not disappeared (see also LaPointe, 2013).

However, as the career imagination is as constraining as it is enabling (Cohen & Duberley, 2021), business graduates constructed not only ideals but also dangers of bounded and flexible careers. Whereas the dangers in bounded career consisted of boredom or feelings of meaningless life, a risk of stress or even burnout was associated with the flexible career. Although graduates formed knowledge of themselves as labouring subjects who have a need and will to compete and realise their full potential, they were also critical towards the demands for constant availability, increased responsibilities, to subordinate personal life to the sphere of work and career, and desired clarity and stability in their careers (see also Loacker & Śliwa, 2018). However, in their career imagination, the contradictions between the ideals and dangers of bounded and flexible careers were conceived in different ways.

Work-Life Balance as Postponed to Future Career

We have illustrated above that business graduates approached their current view of themselves through the timescape of intensive working life. In addition, they expressed appreciation for entrepreneurial challenges of the flexible career and sought to ensure their future career success by “working hard” (Samuel), “expanding their competence” (Katarina) or “making efforts and striving forward” (Andrei). However, business graduates saw their current situation just as one stage on the way to a better future career, which was imagined through the time map of work-life balance.

In the following quotation, Katriina imagines a career in which she is constantly striving to do better and advances fast and hierarchically (i.e. bounded career), but also takes risks, is confident about her coping ability and orients herself to making the best use of her time (Scharff, 2016). As a result of constant activity there is also a feeling of a lack of time and actions related to health and well-being, such as resting and relaxing after hard work, are postponed to a later date:

Katriina::

It’s typical of our whole generation […] That we work hard, but we are also […] very demanding, like that we want things to happen now, we want to progress in our career fast and straight away, but […] we also work even a bit too hard. We have a terrible need to show that we know how to do these things, that we are the best people in our field […] I have a great need to expand my competence, be involved in so many things. In a way, that also backfires so that I work an awful lot […] Of course, I […] always think that, okay, if I do these now, in five years’ time I might… So, I’m perhaps not able to stop there yet and take a breath for a while, but always think about what this will look on my CV. It’s always there at the back of my mind. […] So there is a slight upward trend in my career and then I try to balance with the rest of my life. But I have been thinking about having a longer summer holiday this summer and really trying to relax a bit more then.

Katriina’s example reveals that although the graduates’ career imagination contained hopes and expectations for hierarchical career advancement, it did not specifically locate this advancement within an organisation. Thus, the career was not the responsibility of the organisation but of the entrepreneurial individual. Although Katriina does not have personal experience with work balance, she imagines it as part of her future career. A career as a balance between high-level performance at work and well-being was, thus, a cultural resource through which graduates located themselves in the future time and spaces in (working) life.

Health as Achieved Equilibrium

Whereas some business graduates postponed actions related to health and well-being to a later date (Katriina: “So, I’m perhaps not able to stop there yet and take a breath for a while”), others stressed that they have successfully managed to overcome the early career threshold and become hardened under the pressures of working life. They perceived themselves as more experienced actors in a career, who are no longer in the state of endless becoming but rather standing confidently on their own feet. They presented themselves as physically and mentally equipoised and energetic employees who are—precisely due to these qualities—both willing and capable of deploying all their strength to do the work. They imagined a more balanced and harmonious future career where they succeed in “staying healthy” according to the neoliberal ideal of self-responsible health and work management, as Samuel’s quotation reveals:

Samuel::

I think I have managed to get slightly beyond the entry level and have got my foot in the door. So now I will start to work on opening that door […] I’ll do my bit well and we’ll see where it takes me […] I must work hard for it and keep the other things in life in balance and stay healthy so that I will have the energy, the resources and the motivation to improve myself and go forward. So, it’s about balancing things. But most of all, it’s just about trying to keep yourself motivated and being prepared to do a lot, a lot of work for it.

In the following, Andrei says that he has changed from a young, hasty and restless worker to an experienced, patient and self-confident employee who does not strive to please everyone anymore and succeeds in maintaining a healthy level of intense activity in his work. His example illustrates that, above all, optimal equilibrium means a sort of relaxed attitude, embodied in calm and bold confidence in one’s own expertise and success in career:

Andrei::

Now that I’m 30, I have a found certain kind of motivation […] that I could still be really well physically, so I would want to invest in it more. This has been so hectic and mentally straining at times […] I am now finding some kind of slight internal peace where I no longer make such an effort and strive forward so much from the point of view of schools and career. […] For a long time, I was in a kind of crossfire where the clients bombarded me, the team members bombarded me and everyone expected something from me […] And all the time, I should have been able to communicate, be available to them, so […] For example, I have never had an out-of-office assistant in my email during holidays, ever. I don’t even know how to set it up. Perhaps that shows my service-minded attitude and mentality […] For example, I don’t dare to ignore the phone for more than three days, so it is sometimes a little bit too much for me. I am getting there gradually […], the patience and finding the courage and being prepared for things not always happening there and then, […] they develop and grow through experience, which I haven’t had yet because I’m a bit impatient as a person.

Andrei’s interpretation also reflects the discourse of agility which is firmly rooted in neoliberal ideology and is recognisable as a form of governance (Gillies, 2011). In this discourse, the agile worker, like the agile company, is one fitted to survive and thrive in the modern labour market. Compared to the traditional flexible worker, the agile worker is more agentic and proactive and less docile, has potential and capacity for quick and well-coordinated movement, can initiate and improvise, and cannot be manipulated by others. Whereas business graduates perceived their younger labouring selves as agile, they portrayed their more experienced selves as settled and calm—although still autonomous, energetic and dynamic.

According to Till (2018), the productive power, which capitalism must appropriate now, is not just physical capacities (energy) or the psyche (resilience) but affective lives of the worker. In such a culture, happiness is an effect and resource for success, occasioned by a career imagined as an endless array of emerging opportunities and resources, including one’s own emotional states (Binkley, 2013). Thus, happiness is a force which is outside of the capitalist enterprise but is valued when channelled in such a way as to increase productivity (Cederström & Grassman, 2010).

Samuel’s quotation illustrates how happiness-based technologies of the self are reshaping both the meaning and the logic of workers’ self-knowledge and behavioural patterns (Cabanas & Illouz, 2017). In his career imagination, Samuel does not only picture himself as a worker who proceeds in his career (in one organisation), but as a future entrepreneur and a leader who manages to make himself—and others—happy due to his individual actions and efforts forged by a sense of self-responsible freedom (Binkley, 2013):

Samuel::

I would like to have a company of my own as soon as possible. It’s […] one route to being able to do things that I care about and find important and good for me. It’s the best tool for doing that and I can also use it to provide happiness, success and pleasure to other people. Like, to my employees, clients and others. That would be the best thing that could happen. And it […] is like […] the ultimate goal [of the future career] […] where I feel that I can perhaps in some way fulfil myself or feel that this is important to me and that, as a whole, it has a positive influence on the people around me and others.

In Samuel’s view, being an entrepreneur and the ability to harness positive emotions for the use of the company create well-being and happiness for himself, his employees and his clients. Samuel’s example shows that happiness, as both a goal and means of work, is the property of an autonomous agent who regards the career not as defined by social norms and responsibilities to which one must adjust, but, rather, as a store of resources to be used in the service of self-optimisation (Binkley, 2013).

The Counter Stories of Intensive Working Life and Flexible Career—The Discourse of Balance

According to Lewis et al. (2007), work-life balance is a metaphor that, on the one side, stresses the need for personal control of time. Instead of emphasising the need for organisational change, it focuses on personal responsibility for getting the balance right, for example by prioritising different aspects of life. On the other side, the work-life balance metaphor emphasises the need for workplace flexibility, which focuses on the working arrangements in workplaces. Lewis et al. (2007) argue that both sides of the metaphor incorporate an individual choice dimension and obscure structural and relational constraints.

As stated above, some business graduates formed knowledge of themselves within a framework of a flexible career and imagined the work-life balance to be achieved in the future. For others, however, work-life balance was a resource through which they imagined their current career and located themselves in time and space of working life. Business graduates emphasised the need for personal control of time and constructed their health against the normative background of career advancement and the moral duty to demonstrate commitment to the organisation by working long hours. Like Emilia explains, she is ready to put aside career progress—at least temporarily—to have the possibility of being in her “comfort zone” and in “balance”, although she noticed that “it’s not good in the long term, of course, but it’s good at the moment”:

Emilia::

I don’t need changes workwise. It’s nice to be even in your comfort zone. It’s not good in the long term, of course, but it’s good at the moment because my private life is not necessarily so easy [talks about her child’s illness in the interview]. If I progressed in my career now and were promoted and given more responsibility, it might mean more travelling and longer days, so … I don’t want that [laughs briefly]. I find precisely that balance important, so that work doesn’t overtake everything else, so that all areas are in balance.

Interviewer::

Is there something you would like to change when you think about the coming year?

Emilia::

Well, you should always invest in your own well-being, make sure that you have a healthy lifestyle and have good hobbies and so on. But it’s part of that balance. And of course, I have to look after the children all the time.

Organisations hold specific time disciplines which regulate individuals and aim to conform them to the rhythms of a social group (Snyder, 2019). A rhythmically ideal worker has long been assumed to be one who can prioritise work above all other time-consuming activities (Lewis et al., 2007). Like Emilia, Alex also challenges such an image of an ideal worker and the demanding working hours and chooses to prioritise other aspects of life than work:

Alex::

Well, would like to keep my working hours between 8 am and 4 pm. I don’t work in the evenings, that time is for other things and I’m not prepared to compromise that. I will rather stay in my old job and keep these elements in balance than take on a top job. I know I would have to work about 50 hours per week and cut down other things, so I’m not prepared to do that.

Although Alex refuses to work long days and to strive for a top-job or career advancement, he does not seek security or a pathway to seniority, that is, bounced career, either. Rather, he imagines his career within the frameworks of balance and the ‘flextime’, stressing the ability to make choices to arrange core aspects of his (professional) life, particularly regarding where, when and for how long the work is performed (Snyder, 2019).

Discussion

Our empirical study set out to explore how business graduates construct health as employability potential and form knowledge of themselves labouring subjects when they envisage and evaluate working life through career imagination.

Our analysis showed firstly that, for business graduates, the intensive working life with the demands of constant physical and emotional energy was an organisational timescape through which they demonstrated their value and superiority as healthy employable employees and manifested their full potentials. Business graduates approached health as a constant—and challenging—task of maintaining equilibrium between well-being and high-level of performance at work, which includes the risk of overwork and exhaustion. An ideal healthy worker was aware of these risks and self-managed them skilfully, which implies practices of self-knowledge and self-control as parts of the formation of the labouring subject. Thus, health was their moral duty and personal responsibility at work.

Secondly, business graduates charted and evaluated their route in the labour market through the time map of flexible, entrepreneurial career. In such a career, health—associated with human capital such as energy, vitality and happiness—was a driving force that enabled graduates both to be in coordination with the hectic rhythms of working life and guaranteed their top career performance, and thus their employability. However, only the current performance at work was imagined through a time map of flexible career. A career as a working life balance was a cultural resource through which graduates located themselves in the future time and spaces in (working) life and imagined themselves as employable subjects. Thus, career imagination informs ideas about future possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Cohen & Duberley, 2021).

Some graduates, however, produced counter stories of intensive working life and flexible career by imagining their current career through a time map of a working life balance. They refused to take part in the rhythms and time disciplines of flexible career and intensive working life and, thus, performing their employability. They wanted more personal control over their career and the use and management of time in their lives, and health was identified as one of the important areas of present life to be prioritised. Thus, balance has a two mutually inclusive meanings, specifically depending on whether the graduates’ considered the relationship between health and excessive work load (equilibrium between high-level performance at work and health) or looked at the role of work in life as a whole (work-life balance and well-being).

In this chapter, we have criticised employability research for detaching graduates from their careers and explored employability through the concepts of governance, career imagination, time maps and timescapes in order to highlight the dynamic connection between the individuals and the social space and time. Our approach focuses on the ways by which individuals form knowledge of themselves as healthy employable subjects, while they participate in temporally structured social situations and coordinate (or dis-coordinate) their minds and bodies to these situations. We have shown that the ways by which graduates demonstrate their potentiality, and thus employability, are embedded in more profound but implicit processes of career imagination and certain kinds of time maps and timescapes reflecting embodied neoliberal governance. On the one hand, with the concept of career imagination, we have highlighted that a career is deeply entangled in the facets of one’s life, thus challenging the work and non-work (Cohen & Duberley, 2021) and mind and body boundaries. On the other hand, our empirical analysis reveals that a career is also imagined through timescapes, which structure the rhythm and flow of events in (organisational) life and shape the self-knowledge and self-conduct of bodily and affective labouring subjects.

In addition to its contributions, our study has some limitations. The business graduates interviewed in this study represent social backgrounds, education and work contexts that can be characterised as middle-class. The meanings they give to health may be typical of their social position, especially since among middle-class people, health is associated with positive meanings and morally valuable qualities, such as success in (work) life, responsibility and individual willpower (Maunu et al., 2016). Moreover, some of the business graduates viewed themselves as lacking qualities of a healthy employable subject and, thus, vulnerable in the face of the labour market demands. In future research, it is important to further investigate how health as an employability potential and the related vulnerabilities (related to ill-health, for example) provoked by the embodied neoliberal governance are intertwined with gender and class.

Moreover, participants of this study come from business schools and business organisations, where the ideal of the enterprising, employable self is built in and naturalised (McCabe, 2008; Fotaki & Prasad, 2015; see also Korhonen et al., 2023). Thus, further research is needed to explore how health as employability potential is perceived in different higher education, organisational and working life contexts, as well as from the point of views of age and employment situations. On the other hand, it would be interesting to explore whether the time maps and timescapes through which graduates approach their work and imagine their career would look similar if the attributes of employability other than health were examined.