Conference Agenda

The global expansion of higher education has facilitated a structural decoupling between academic credentials and labour market entry (Marginson, 2016). In this era of credential massification, recruitment is no longer a simple search for skills but a response to informational noise caused by the ubiquity of university degrees (Tomlinson, 2012). This phenomenon diminishes the traditional capacity of credentials to signal individual capability, leading to heightened evaluative uncertainty for recruiters. While existing literature often examines employability as an individual possession of attributes, this approach frequently overlooks the decisive role of organisational appraisal as the fundamental mechanism for allocating market opportunities (Rivera, 2012; Tholen, 2015). This research argues that employability is not an inherent quality owned by the individual but a situated relational construct awarded through organisational valuation. Adopting an employer perspective is an analytical imperative because recruiters act as the primary gatekeepers whose evaluative judgements determine the legitimacy of individual merit.

Previously, studies adopting an employer perspective have moved beyond human capital models to recognise credentials as screening devices for trainability and cultural alignment (Rivera, 2012). While these studies identified elite credentials as institutional proxies to manage applicant volume and candidate dispositions, they often focus on the static outcomes of these filters. This creates a critical research gap as existing literature fails to explain the dynamic and interpretive mechanisms through which employers navigate selection when primary signals lose their differentiating utility. This research investigates the active and interpretive processes of valuation through which organisations reconstruct employability as a negotiated construct. This offers insights into how organisational evaluative frameworks function as interpretive mechanisms that redefine the perceived value of higher education within the labour market (Brown, 2017).

The contemporary Chinese graduate labour market provides a critical empirical site for this investigation. China serves as a magnifying glass for systemic tensions arising from the erosion of traditional meritocratic benchmarks (Mok & Jiang, 2018). In this context, the abundance of elite degrees renders academic signals indistinguishable, forcing employers to navigate significant evaluative ambiguity. These conditions provide essential insights for European scholars observing similar credential saturation under the Bologna Process. By examining China as a precursory case of extreme market congestion, this study offers a comparative lens to understand how organisational recruitment logic evolves when educational hierarchies no longer guarantee informational clarity.

The research investigates three interrelated questions:

1. What types of supplementary signals do organisations rely upon to construct graduate employability once academic credentials reach a point of diminishing informational returns?

2. How are these signals interpreted and prioritised as evaluative indicators to differentiate candidates within highly homogeneous pools?

3. How do organisational contexts and evaluative frameworks shape and legitimise the employer’s construction of graduate employability as a situated relational construct?

This study seeks to extend classical signalling theory (Spence, 1973) to address its limitations in high-saturation markets. The original signalling theory assumes that signal costs effectively distinguish between different levels of ability. However, this mechanism of differentiation collapses under massification as informational clarity is compromised by the ubiquity of high-cost signals. Consequently, there is a theoretical need to explain how selection persists during informational attenuation. By integrating the culture of choice (Schwarz, 2018), the study conceptualises recruitment as a culturally mediated practice involving a layered repertoire of signals. Academic credentials function as primary risk-management filters. In response to credential homogeneity, recruiters utilise non-academic indicators to resolve evaluative ambiguity. From this perspective, signal weight emerges from an interpretive process that balances organisational priorities with shared cultural norms. This evaluative dynamic redefines employability as a contingent outcome of organisational valuation.

The quality assessment of doctoral degrees constitutes a vital research topic for evaluating doctoral students' innovative capabilities and the effectiveness of their training, holding critical significance for understanding the reproduction of disciplinary knowledge. Current academic discourse on dissertation quality predominantly adopts a functionalist orientation, lacking constructive research grounded in evaluators' perspectives. Since the emergence of the modern doctoral system in the early 19th century, dissertations have transcended their role as mere vessels for original knowledge, assuming multiple missions. Leveraging peer recognition, long-term investment orientation, and dissemination value, these dissertations are frequently employed to reflect upon or address various challenges and crises within doctoral education. Their purpose is to bridge or highlight gaps between doctoral research training, disciplinary specialization, and societal development. With the rise of New Public Management, “quality” has become a universal term for evaluating doctoral thesis value. Peer reviewers play a pivotal role in shaping quality standards and decision-making processes, yet few studies have illuminated the “black box” mechanisms of expert evaluation—particularly how experts identify research quality and the value orientations underpinning their decisions. This study underscores the necessity of understanding the unique context and challenges of evaluating humanities and social science dissertations: knowledge generation is context-dependent and subject to diverse interpretations, posing significant challenges to traditional peer review. Gaining insight into evaluation criteria and processes through peer review feedback is crucial for deepening theoretical understanding of quality assessment and enhancing doctoral education quality.

This study employs Michel Lamont's theories of evaluation and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of academic capital (Lamont, 2009; Bourdieu, 1975, 1984) to analyze the formation and variation of “academic quality” standards in doctoral dissertation peer review from social constructivist and structuralist perspectives. Lamont emphasizes that academic quality is not an inherent property of the research itself but emerges through reviewers' negotiations and interactions during the peer review process. She argues that academic evaluation is influenced not only by disciplinary norms but also constrained by power structures and informal rules within academic communities. This provides new perspectives for understanding and enhancing the quality of doctoral dissertation reviews.

University rankings are not merely “descriptive” tools; they also operate as devices that shape expectations, organizational priorities, and strategic decisions. In this sense, rankings help to produce the world they claim to measure. Higher education is therefore influenced by a metric logic that risks narrowing the meaning of educational quality, insofar as it tends to reward what is easily commensurable. As a result, crucial dimensions of university life—such as inclusion, accessibility, and justice, which are intrinsic to education—may become marginal because they are less “countable.”

Hazelkorn (2014) notes that rankings “have encouraged the prioritization of research over teaching, and graduate over undergraduate education, with multiple implications for students and the academic profession” (p. 21). This “hierarchy” creates a structural incentive: universities tend to reallocate resources and time toward what carries greater weight in comparative measures. In the field of educational research, I highlight two related risks. The first concerns the compression of research timeframes. Educational processes are complex phenomena and typically require multi-year work and interdisciplinary approaches. Within this context, the reputational pull of rankings may inhibit the depth of theoretical research in pedagogy precisely when greater critical capacity is needed. The second risk concerns those aspects of education that are inherently difficult to submit to measurement. A clear example is the marginal position that inclusion may occupy in rankings. In the most widely used global reputational benchmarks—such as the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE WUR) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)—inclusion does not appear to function as a central axis. More recent or multidimensional instruments (for instance, those connected to the SDGs or to European benchmarking initiatives) make inclusion more visible. However, problems of indicator quality and comparability remain. Moreover, even when inclusion becomes measurable, it can still appear as an “ornamental” element: present without transforming the criteria through which we define “quality” and “knowledge.”

Within this framework, I consider Undergraduate Research (UR) as an innovative practice for knowledge production, understood as the outcome of participatory, democratic, multi-level research—across genders and generations. Although the last two decades of scholarship document relevant benefits for students and faculty, UR can be implemented in universities as a pedagogical response:

• To the split between research and teaching, because it turns teaching into an inquiry-based practice and turns research into a formative experience;

• To counter and prevent “ornamental” inclusion, because it treats difference as a heuristic resource: more perspectives generate more questions, greater attention to the unthought, and stronger interpretive responsibility.

However, precisely because UR is often presented today as a “high-impact practice,” it must be recognized that it is not automatically inclusive. Therefore, “unequal participation remains a central issue.” In other words, if unequal access to UR is not analysed with clarity, it tends to become normalized and to remain invisible. For this reason, pedagogy has a specific task: to investigate how UR is implemented, which students gain access, and under what modalities, constraints, and outcomes.

The paper is guided by two questions:

1. How, and under what conditions, can UR respond to the reputational pressure of rankings and generate educational quality and public value that cannot be reduced to metrics alone?

2. Which elements of this response are transferable across European contexts with different evaluative cultures and governance arrangements?

It is also necessary to define and test pedagogically grounded indicators and tools—i.e., instruments that create transparency and accountability with respect to educational aims. These indicators should include, at minimum: (a) access and equity of participation; (b) quality of the experience (intensity, duration, mentoring, recognition); and (c) tangible and intangible outcomes (epistemic competencies, agency, sense of belonging, trajectories)

Abstract

1.1 Context and Research Question

This research conceptualizes the Chinese County High School (CHS) as a field defined by high-stakes testing (HST), where the pressure of the Gaokao “increases the competitive nature of the educational system” (Zwier et al., 2021). This field is seen as being governed by an “affective economy” (Ahmed, 2004), where students’ emotions such as anxiety, shame, and collective fervor are systematically produced and circulated to align their subjectivities with institutional goals.

Rural students who enter this field with competitive test scores often embody a primary habitus rooted in utilitarian pragmatism and a moralized belief in effort as a survival instinct. Nevertheless, the CHS’s affective economy intends to cultivate students to gain a secondary habitus—one that transforms their raw survival instincts into abstract, meritocratic feeling rules and an alienated obsession with social hierarchy.

To reconcile their primary habitus with the institutional logic, students learn to mobilize resources. This study focuses on how varying configurations of emotional capital and digital capital act as mediating tools in this struggle. We ask: How do rural students mobilize emotional and digital capitals to respond to the affective governance of the high-stakes testing field, and how does this process result in divergent forms of habitus clivé?

1.2 Theoretical Framework

This study employs Bourdieu’s (1984, 1990) triad of field, capital, and habitus to analyze how institutional structures reshape subjective dispositions. We focus on the tension between a student’s primary habitus—the embodied dispositions acquired from their rural upbringing—and the secondary habitus developed by the high-stakes testing field. When the school’s competitive logic contradicts the student’s original background, a habitus clivé (cleft habitus) or “ontological incoherence” (Bennett, 2007) emerges.

We redefine this testing field as an “affective economy” (Ahmed, 2004), where emotions like anxiety and shame are “produced, circulated and capitalized on” to ensure academic productivity (Zembylas, 2007, p.458). In this field, the school imposes strict “feeling rules” to govern student subjectivities. Consequently, rural students often engage in “chameleoning” (Keane, 2023)—a performative adaptation to reconcile the split between their past selves and institutional expectations.

To navigate this affective governance, students mobilize emotional and digital capitals. Drawing on Cottingham (2016), we argue that while primary emotional capital is tied to one’s background, secondary emotional capital can be actively acquired to foster “emotional reflexivity”—the ability to distance oneself from institutional pressure.

Crucially, digital capital (Verwiebe & Hagemann, 2024) affects the success of this reflexivity. Instead of a simple tool, digital capital acts as a gatekeeper to external resources: it either provides a “reflexive bridge” to alternative value systems that buffer school pressure (as seen in Student A), or it functions as an “echo chamber” that amplifies academic anxiety (as seen in Student B). Thus, the divergence in habitus clivé is produced by the different modes of mobilizing the two capitals.

1.3 Findings

The research identifies two distinct trajectories of secondary habitus formation and the resulting habitus clivé:

The Detached Stranger (Student A): By mobilizing digital capital to access alternative values, Student A accumulated secondary emotional capital. This fostered “emotional reflexivity” (Cottingham, 2016, p. 464), allowing her to treat the school’s logic as an external game. Her shift from alignment to resistance resulted in a calculated habitus clivé, where academic success is coupled with profound alienation and “chameleoning” (Keane, 2023).

The Compromised Stranger (Student B): Lacking digital resources to buffer institutional pressure, Student B internalized the school’s meritocratic hierarchy. His trajectory moved from initial resistance to total adherence. This led to a “paralyzed habitus clivé” and “emotional bankruptcy”: he devalued his rural origins but failed to achieve upward mobility, remaining trapped in a persistent sense of failure.