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Drawing on the concept of hypermobility, the paper examines a case of study-abroad mobility from a governmentality perspective. Based on a critical analysis of policy texts and interviews with Irish students who have taken part in the Erasmus exchange programme, it argues that under the conditions of neoliberal globalisation, the normalisation of study abroad aims to produce self-governing practices that align with dominant discourses promoting voluntarist attitudes to labour mobility. These dispositions, described as hypermobility, are an additional dimension of the flexible, entrepreneurial subject imagined in neoliberal societies. The paper examines the discourses and practices at state and institutional levels and how they circulate and impact on students' subjectivities -- analysing affective detachment from home and cosmopolitan sociability as self-disciplining practices that align with the production of neoliberal hypermobile subjectivities.

Many studies have espoused the pedagogical benefits of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) across multiple disciplines. With the increasing use of PBL within higher education there exists a need to consider its position not just as a pedagogical approach but as a functional instrument in the development and promotion of social capital and status. Drawing on social identity theory (SIT), this study explored Business Masters graduates' justification for undertaking a PBL-based programme. The findings suggest that students discursively elevated the status of the PBL programme they had completed over other alternatives, in an attempt to gain professional mobility. Two primary strategies of "individual mobility" and "social competition" were employed by participants to elevate their position. This paper concludes by problematising the utilisation of pedagogical approaches as a mechanism for differentiating programmes and graduates within an increasing competitive higher educational landscape.

This study examines the impact of managerialist policies on care relations in higher education. It is based on a study of 10 higher education institutions in Ireland. The paper shows that a care-free worker model is ingrained in systems of performance appraisal, especially for academics in universities, and increasingly in the Institutes of Technology, although it also impacts on support staff in other professions and occupations. It assumes a life of boundary-less working hours and unhindered mobility. The market-informed tools of performance appraisal, especially audits and metrics, cannot measure essential care work because care is a process and disposition, not a product. Because it is not countable caring becomes invisible as do the people who do it. The managerial ideology of 'work--life balance' merely operates as a mask that conceals how over-working is normalised. There is no legitimate language to name over-working for the structural problem that it is. When work organisations disregard care commitments outside of work, and even within it, these are then repackaged and fed back to women/carers as personal problems and failures. The idealised care-free worker model operates as a care ceiling over women particularly; it is taken as given, even natural.

Labour market dynamics are complex, limiting the capacity for consensus on a singular phenomenon to account for patterns. In this paper, we present a range of broader empirical trends from the Irish labour market that suggests the possible impact of neoliberal-type policies in the Irish market has been counterbalanced by strong human capital and skills development, growth in higher level occupations and employment protection. Though precarious work is a feature of parts of the labour market, the theoretical assumptions underpinning precarious work we argue should not be extrapolated to explain changes in job stability in the labour market at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on social mobility in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has confined itself exclusively to the linkages between male occupational origins and destinations. In this paper, three unique aspects of the Irish occupational mobility experience is investigated. First, the question of women's intergenerational occupational mobility is considered for the first time. Second, as in some recent North American research, traditional models of male intergenerational occupational mobility are modified to allow only the occupational achievement of mothers in the portrayal of a woman's occupational origins. Third, the occupational category of housewife is included as one possible occupational outcome for Irish women. The general conclusion of this paper is that not only does a mother's occupational attainments more realistically display the influence of occupational origins on women's subsequent occupational activities, but one vital component of this influence must be the occupational category of housewife. Only via the introduction of both these elements may the notably ascriptive nature of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in relation to female occupational mobility become understandable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the impact of MNC internationalization on the training and development of employees, drawing on the findings of a survey of training and work organization among high-tech MNCs operating in Ireland. The survey illustrates clearly that the internationalization of training and development spans a wide occupational spectrum and that it is not solely a feature of a distinct international management cadre. While the literature identifies international managers as the main groups benefiting from international training and development, the findings question the extent to which non-managerial labour can be viewed as primarily local and national in outlook and skill formation. Further, the level of both short-term and longer-term training mobility reflect a wider set of business attributes of multinationals in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a general model for occupational mobility, incorporating both age and occupational tenure, and representing unobserved as well as observed heterogeneity. It details the generalization of the Markov process. The reasons for doubting the universal applicability of cumulative inertia in the context of occupational mobility are given. The article highlights the estimates of the model using occupational histories from the 1973/74 Irish Mobility Study.

The article discusses the two multivariate Markov models on occupational mobility and the labor market structure in Ireland. It delineates the two Markov models' distinctive features and their attempt to elaborate earning differential within the frameworks of the human capital model as well as to delineate the way in which the distribution of the labor force changes overtime as a result of occupational mobility. It also presents Ireland's rates of occupational mobility while integrating the Markov process in probing the mobility dependence that correlates between human capital and income as well on the measures of occupational skill, life cycle position and duration of stay in the current occupation.