Conference Program

Guidance systems across Europe address inequality through service access and information provision, assuming the main obstacle is informational. Both research and practice challenge this premise. Within the life design paradigm (Savickas et al., 2009; Savickas, 2019), career guidance supports people in constructing biographical narratives across transitions. Yet a critical question remains underexplored: what makes such construction possible, or impossible, for those whose resources have been eroded by structural disadvantage?

This contribution, grounded in systematic reflective practice (Schön, 1983) within ASNOR's national network across school, school-to-work transition, and employment services, identifies a form of inequality that existing frameworks do not name. Practitioners consistently observe a recurring pattern: people arrive at guidance encounters with adequate information but without conditions to integrate it biographically, disorientation rather than orientation. The adverse conditions are not informational but biographical: material deprivation, relational abandonment, social marginalisation, cultural isolation. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1986) analysis of how structural disadvantage becomes embodied in dispositions, and Floridi's (2014) account of how information saturation erodes the capacity for meaning, we propose semantic inequality: the unequal distribution of conditions under which people can access, process, and regenerate meaning at life transitions.

Within Nussbaum's (2011) capability framework, this constitutes a capability failure: the deprivation of conditions for practical reasoning and autonomous life planning. Sultana (2014) locates the problem in the rationalities determining who guidance systems serve. Semantic inequality makes this concrete: when guidance requires interpretive resources that people lack as a precondition, it reproduces the injustice it claims to address.

Neurocognitive evidence democratises this argument. Merleau-Ponty's (1945) phenomenology establishes that meaning arises through the lived body, not a disembodied mind. We draw a democratic claim: if meaning-making is bodily, its foundation is universally shared; what is unequally distributed are the conditions for its exercise. Panksepp and Biven's (2012) research on the SEEKING system shows that when conditions are adverse, people lose the motivational drive to engage with biographical possibilities. Memory reconsolidation research (Lane et al., 2015) shows that biographical narratives can be reorganised, but only under relational safety that environments must provide. These findings ground the policy argument: if meaning-making requires specific conditions, designing them is not an optional service but a structural obligation.

EU lifelong guidance guidelines (ELGPN, 2015) address service access, information quality, and institutional coordination. We propose a fourth level: the structural design of conditions under which universal meaning-making capacity is activated across the guidance system. This requires a prior act: policy must first recognise what erodes that capacity, poverty, isolation, absence of recognition, before designing conditions to restore it. This directly addresses the individual responsibility gap CEDEFOP (2025) identifies as unresolved. The framework generates four outcomes: a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) for research, a diagnostic question for every service node - do the conditions for meaning-making exist here? - reframing quality from information delivered to conditions created, a fourth policy level, and a systemic design principle. This paper advances the design of guidance systems where every person is seen before being served.