The Ethics of Employability: Accountability, Justice, and Responsibility in Racialised Graduate Labour Markets

Abstract Persistent racialised inequalities continue to shape graduate outcomes in the United Kingdom, despite decades of policy reform, institutional initiatives, and employability-focussed interventions. Racially minoritised graduates consistently experience ethnic penalties in hiring, earnings, and career progression, even when controlling for educational attainment and institutional prestige, with UK-born and international racially minoritised graduates facing structurally distinct but compounding forms of disadvantage. Yet, dominant employability frameworks have positioned employability as an individual responsibility, centred on skills, capitals, and adaptability, thereby obscuring the structural injustices embedded in higher education and labour markets. This paper reframes employability as an ethical domain of pressing importance for both higher education and business ethics. Drawing on an integrated theoretical architecture comprising normative foundations of justice (distributive, procedural, recognition, and epistemic), race-centred lenses (Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and Bourdieu’s theory of capitals), an accountability spine, and the capabilities approach, it develops the Ethical Employability Framework (race-centred), which redistributes responsibility across universities, employers, and the state within the UK. The framework exposes how employability discourses can function as a form of “misframing”, legitimising inequality by shifting responsibility onto graduates while neglecting systemic exclusion. The paper’s theoretical contributions are hierarchically organised: it reframes employability as an ethical construct; integrates race as a constitutive theoretical concern through a race-centred explanatory architecture; develops an accountability spine that operationalises shared institutional responsibility; adopts the capabilities approach as the evaluative standard for substantive flourishing; and maps these elements into a coherent multi-level framework connecting normative theory to institutional practice. In doing so, the paper advances a justice-oriented agenda for employability scholarship, policy, and practice that places racially minoritised graduates at its centre.