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Introduction to Part 1

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.

Finally, the question of sorting and including people calls for much discussion. If employability based on capabilities is “inclusive” from the outset, taking into account the variety of aptitudes and projects, employability as a managerial imperative must avoid the trap of favoring the initiatives of the most dynamic to the detriment of the least favored. Moreover, employability as it is highlighted and practiced in the labor market brings to the forefront the sorting of people according to their distance from a return to employment. This sorting is then reversed in the case of public interventions: the aim is to provide more help to those who need it most. However, there is a borderline, which is not always clear-cut and which sometimes changes, between people who are not very employable and who will benefit from intensive efforts, and people who are deemed to be slightly less employable and who will be pushed out of normal employment, either into sheltered employment or into inactivity with the risk of relegation. A pathway can then be envisaged in the case of people who regain a foothold in protected activities, and gradually gain access to normal employment thanks to the accumulation of experience and the promotion of successive circuits. However, there is also a risk of practicing the tyranny of the project for people for whom this is neither the desire nor the horizon. This leads to the question of the variety of itineraries and also of enterprises, market, non-market, cooperatives and so on.

Taking into account experiences of entrepreneurial creation in addition to work as an employee, oblique itineraries, clarification of sorting and counter-sorting practices, validation, and also invalidation and rehabilitation both on the labor market and within companies: these less explored dimensions converge towards a demand for collective control of the labor market as well as of companies, aimed at countering excluding polarizations and guaranteeing sufficient opportunities for the future. We can then come full circle, by returning to our starting point, that of the unfair and inefficient transfer of the burden of adaptation onto individuals, characteristic of truncated versions of employability. Individual initiative and risk-taking, whether they set themselves market or non-market objectives, must be valued and equipped with a set of institutions and guarantees. In particular, pressure should be brought to bear on companies or organizations that do not play the game, and the complementarity between exit and voice, which is rarely given and most often has to be constructed, should be used to open up the space for individual choice.

Economics can be interested in the conditions under which companies practicing employability based on capacity can develop and their practices spread; just as it can seek out the conditions of organization of the labor market that allow companies and their employees to move towards protected mobility. Symmetrically, sociology – and psychology with it – can look more deeply into the individual and collective support points from which each person can benefit in order to negotiate with others and with him or herself at the bifurcation points of a personal and professional itinerary, whether in the company or in an employment agency. Management can work, among other things, on the meeting between the tools for identifying employability internally and those implemented by placement agencies and training organizations: skills directories, sectoral forecasts, bridges between branches or diplomas and so on.

The particular context of the publication of this book, with the challenges arising from the coronavirus health crisis, seems to relegate the concerns we have just reviewed to the background. This is not the case, and the numerous job losses and restructurings that are announced for the following years show, on the contrary, a challenge that is that of the collective construction not only of employment, but also of autonomous and emancipating employability understood simultaneously as a series of intertwined public practices and guarantees, a “total organizational fact” to be extended and reinforced, a “managerial imperative”, in short as a central political issue in our society.

Introduction written by Bernard GAZIER.