Overqualification as misrecognition

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the phenomenon of overqualification by confronting two distinct notions surrounding what constitutes a praiseworthy achievement. On the one hand, the model that operates de facto in the contemporary labor market understands the notion of achievement in instrumental, competitive and individual terms. On the other hand, another model, which lays the foundation for workers’ demands for recognition, is wider than the former one and considers workers’ qualifications as standalone achievements. In my view, the experience of overqualification as misrecognition is based on the huge and ever-increasing amount of effort and resources that individuals must invest into their education and training processes, as well as on the fact that social institutions publicly and explicitly regulate, encourage and promote these processes. I conclude with a brief analysis of the main structural cause of this mismatch between demanded and obtained recognition, namely, the system is unable to generate enough social esteem to proportionally recognize the capacities that the system itself pushes workers to develop.