As graduate labour market conditions have become increasingly challenging, higher education institutions have intensified their focus on ‘employability’ via strategies such as work placements. Focusing on work placements in the media and creative industries, this article identifies and analyses three key discourses that animate the pedagogical literature in these sectors: work placements as facilitating a ‘smooth transition’ to the labour market; work placements as a place in which inequalities in the labour market are (re)produced; and work placements as a space for fostering resilience and adaptation to labour market precarity. The article argues that critiques of inequalities based on race, class or gender are marked by a transformative impulse that is largely absent in critiques of those based on worker precarity. This highlights a need to adopt pedagogies that similarly unnaturalise the economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism to discursively (re)construct work in new, more socially just, ways.

随着毕业生劳动力市场条件变得越来越具有挑战性，高等教育机构通过工作实习等策略加强了对“就业能力”的关注。本文以媒体和创意产业的工作实习为重点，确定并分析了在这些领域为教学文献注入活力的三个关键话语：工作实习促进了向劳动力市场的“平稳过渡”；工作实习是（再）产生劳动力市场不平等的地方；工作实习作为培养弹性和适应劳动力市场不稳定的空间。文章认为，基于种族、阶级或性别的不平等批判具有变革性冲动的特点，而这种变革冲动在基于工人不稳定状况的批判中基本不存在。