Employability and Industrial Mutations

Nevertheless, some lessons can be drawn from the research presented here. Sustainable employability, which enables individuals to lead their professional lives, for themselves and without suffering, is located at the meeting point between three dimensions. It requires the mobilization of individual or collective resources that allow for the development of skills, and also for taking risks. It also implies working to enhance the value of individuals, which sometimes leads to a reconsideration of the way in which professional abilities are viewed by others and by the individuals themselves. It is as much about self-confidence as it is about building confidence. Finally, it involves exploring a wider universe of possibilities in order to detect happy opportunities.

Introduction written by Florent NOËL.

From injunction to shared responsibility: the three analytical contributions that open this collection converge in denouncing one-sided or even truncated versions of employability, which shift the burden of adaptation to work or to the labor market onto the individual, and in identifying and promoting emancipatory versions that rebalance responsibilities between public policies, individuals and companies. They come from three different disciplines, economics, sociology and management, and as a result, they each highlight different dimensions and issues. Economics is concerned with the unemployed and public policy actions aimed at getting them back to work. Bernard Gazier’s contribution ( Chapter 1) shows that these policies have long been subject to the test of reality, and also to political pressure to “activate“ the unemployed. Through the identification of seven operational versions of employability, several of which have been abandoned or reformed, he highlights the necessarily interactive dimension of the concept. Sociology is interested in individuals and groups, and in the constraints that affect them as well as the room for maneuver that is open to them. Bénédicte Zimmermann’s contribution ( Chapter 3) focuses on employees in employment and shows that beyond the adaptation of skills, what is at stake is the freedom of individuals and their capacity to act. She adds the processual dimension to the interaction emancipatory employability, when practiced, is a co-construction that requires the sustainable opening of the company to the values of inclusion, learning, citizenship and social dialogue. Finally, human resources management is interested in the managerial strategies and devices that can operationalize the promotion of employees’ employability in a context where work and employment are rapidly changing both internally and externally. In turn, the contribution by Florent Noël and Géraldine Schmidt ( Chapter 2) distinguishes, from a managerial point of view, a series of focuses and versions of employability in order to show the topicality and even the urgency of the issue, before laying down the requirements for a coherent set of management tools ranging from measurement to levers and action favoring project initiatives.

This dialogue between three disciplines, between these three texts that respond to and complement each other, opens up a hitherto little explored or even unprecedented perspective, that of a general theory of employability. General firstly because the arrival in the foreground of the role of the company alongside and on a par with public and private employment policies (employment agencies, compensation for the unemployed, vocational training) enriches and rebalances the understanding of the interplay of actors too often reduced to consideration of the state of the labor market as a given to which one must submit. It is general because the spectrum that goes from the positive (describing and understanding what is) to the normative (describing and understanding what should be) is covered here in its entirety: from the actual practices observed over the last hundred years, to the management strategies with their displays and indicators, to the deepening of the requirements of the capacity to act and the search for a balanced distribution of responsibilities. Finally, it is general because the whole range of practices linked to employability is taken up here and understood less as a range of more or less ambitious options than as a combination in involution, as pillars in mutual support. The shift from the maintenance of skills to the promotion of the ability to act does not eliminate skills, it gives them a necessary but never sufficient place. Sticking to a truncated version leads to a risk of authoritarianism, as is the case with “activation“ and vocational training and guidance policies when they impose unwanted objectives and paths.

However, we are only at the beginning of the integration of the three economic, sociological and managerial perspectives. Among the essential dimensions that remain to be explored is the multi-status dimension, starting with the employability of the self-employed, which is often dependent on the networks that they must create and maintain. It is all the more important to understand and explain this as discontinuous or “oblique” careers, going, for example, from salaried employment to entrepreneurship via voluntary work experiences, and eventually returning to salaried employment, are becoming more frequent, whether it is a question of itineraries over time or of accumulation, as the same person may be salaried part-time and self-employed for the rest of his or her working time. The network can integrate as well as exclude, and the employability of platform workers is called into question every day by the evaluations of clients and the platform itself. The trans-status dimension then leads us to an employability “beyond wage employment”, to use Alain Supiot’s expression, where the capacity for initiative can meet success as well as self-exploitation.

Another dimension, barely sketched in the three contributions, is the set of exit-type behaviors in the face of voice-type practices. Economics is at the forefront here, since it is concerned with the unemployed and their capacity to negotiate on the labor market, which is often very weak in a context of massive unemployment. To make people accept wage cuts, the degradation of working conditions and the precariousness of employment without any prospect of recovery, is then an option that the public employment services risk practicing by default or by political choice. The debate here is complex, since many public policies, particularly in France, aim to compensate for the effects of a labor cost deemed excessive by some employers through employment subsidies. A distinction must be made here between, on the one hand, general policies to lower labor costs, which carry the risk of weakening the attractiveness of workers who would be better supported by vocational training policies, a pessimistic and ultimately stigmatizing signal, and, on the other hand, targeted and massive subsidies aimed at reintegrating a category of workers by putting them back into employment at a high price, a voluntarist signal.

But another type of exit behavior, on the contrary, shows a very good capacity for negotiation: emancipatory employability can be manifested by an individual’s ability to leave a company to develop in another. It would be wrong to oppose exit and voice here. It is qualified and self-sufficient workers with redeployable skills who have the best chance of making their point of view known in the event of restructuring. And the company that favors the transferability of qualifications can certainly lose workers whose employability it has developed, but it can also find others who are equivalent, if it operates in a territory or a sector that has developed such guaranteed mobility. The question then becomes one of the collective controls over the labor market as much as over companies.