Employability and Industrial Mutations E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Industrial, economic and organizational mutations are creating a transformation in employment, skills and work. Developing the employability of the workforce is one response to these challenges. However, the link between mutations and employability is not obvious: it must be constructed and implemented in order to ensure that employees are able to reach satisfying professional situations. Employability and Industrial Mutations presents a definition of employability and the associated challenges for public authorities, organizations and employees: managing unemployment, successful change and employee empowerment. It then examines several worker profiles to better understand what "being employable" means. It goes on to analyze several examples of management systems for employability at different stages of an individual's career, and finally explores the issue of developing or maintaining employability in real-life situations and contexts. This book brings together researchers and practitioners from a range of different fields in order to shed light on the complex relationship between mutations and employability.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Patrick Gilbert
Foreword by IPSI
Introduction
PART 1: Towards a General Theory of Employability
Introduction to Part 1
1 Employability and Public Policy: A Century-long Learning Process and Unfinished Process
1.1. One hundred years of trial and error between the individual and the collective: seven operational definitions of employability
1.2. Current tensions and recompositions
1.3. Conclusion
1.4. References
2 Employability as a Managerial Imperative?
2.1. Employability and change: the migration of a concept
2.2. Employability management practices
2.3. Conclusion
2.4. References
3 Capability-based Employability: A Total Organizational Fact
3.1. Employability: being able and enabled to
3.2. Skill-based employability, capability-based employability
3.3. A total organizational fact
3.4. The five traits of the capability-enhancing organization
3.5. Conclusion
3.6. References
PART 2: Employability and Individual Trajectories
Introduction to Part 2
4 The “Unemployable”: Different Figures, Between Societal Construction and Unconscious Meanings
4.1. People who are not allowed to work
4.2. Discriminated audiences
4.3. Audiences for cognitive remediation
4.4. People who “suffer” in social work through their work
4.5. The generation of refusal
4.6. Conclusion – discussion
4.7. References
5 Staying in the Game: Employability and Mobile Careers in the IT Industry
5.1. Independence as the pinnacle of a boundaryless career orientation
5.2. Maintaining employability as a condition of independence
5.3. Boundaryless career success and employability
5.4. Conclusion
5.5. References
6 Employability in the Era of Digitization of Jobs
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Skills for the contemporary labor market
6.3. Research methods
6.4. Findings
6.5. Discussions and directions for future research
6.6. References
PART 3: Career Stages, HRM and Employability
Introduction to Part 3
7 The MRS, a Device in Favor of Employability and Social Performance
7.1. The MRS as a partnership practice
7.2. MRS and employability
7.3. Survey and main findings on MRS recruitment
7.4. Discussion and conclusion of the results
7.5. References
8 Recruiting in Innovative Activities: From the Impossible Search for a Match to the Construction of Employability
8.1. Recruiting for an innovative activity in a context of rapid growth in production
8.2. The effects and actual functioning of these devices
8.3. Lessons learned in terms of employability
8.4. Conclusion
8.5. References
9 Reclassification and Employability: A Reading in Terms of Boundary Objects
9.1. Social support for company liquidations: a collective actor for the employability of those made redundant
9.2. Studying the boundary objects of the reclassification of victims of collective dismissals
9.3. Study of an emblematic case, the reclassification cell of the Air Littoral liquidation PSE
9.4. The boundary objects of the reclassification of victims of the Air Littoral PSE
9.5. Discussion: the infrastructure of individual and collective employability in reclassification
9.6. Conclusion
9.7. References
10 Being Employable, a Matter of Context
10.1. Employability, an imperative between universalism and contingency
10.2. Results
10.3. Conclusion
10.4. References
PART 4: Employability and Work Situations
Introduction to Part 4
11 What are the Possible Futures in the Factories of the Future? The Case of Operators in an Aeronautics Company
11.1. Review of the literature
11.2. Methodology
11.3. Results
11.4. Conclusion
11.5. References
12 Digital Technologies as a Lever for Developing the Employability of Middle Managers
12.1. The employability of middle managers
12.2. Digital technology and employability of middle managers
12.3. Research context
12.4. Data collection and analysis
12.5. Main results
12.6. Discussion
12.7. Conclusion
12.8. References
13 Work as a Factor of Integration and Employability: The Case of Trisociété
13.1. From employability controversies to the study problem
13.2 Professional integration and production requirements: the case of Trisociété
13.3. Discussion: from employability to “employerability”
13.4. Conclusion
13.5. References
Conclusion
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1. Two generations of employability
Chapter 2
Table 2.1. Concepts of employability and management issues
Chapter 5
Table 5.1. Respondents
Chapter 6
Table 6.1. Characteristics of the sample
Table 6.2. T-test mean comparison
Table 6.3. ANOVA test
Chapter 7
Table 7.1. Number of applicants throughout the recruitment process by MRS
Table 7.2. Hierarchical regression analyses – testing the mediation hypotheses
Chapter 8
Table 8.1. Differences in tutors’ practices
Chapter 10
Table 10.1. Salais and Storper’s (1993) four worlds of production
Chapter 12
Table 12.1. Identification of digital tools
Table 12.2. Description of managers and their context
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. The three dimensions of employability, from De Grip et al. (2004)
Figure 2.2. The Van der Klink et al. model (2016)
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Capability: a multi-level co-production
Figure 3.2. Capability-based employability: a total organizational fact
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. Example of a “virtuous circle” career diagram
Figure 5.2. Example of a “dead end” career diagram
Figure 5.3. Circularity model
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1. The process of constructing the psychological contract according to ...
Figure 7.2. MRS quality of recruitment model
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. The formalized tutoring system
Figure 8.2. The employability process through an internal/external and training/...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1. Boundary objects around the Air Littoral reclassification cell
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1. Adapted capability model, from Van der Klink et al. (2016)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Patrick Gilbert
Foreword by IPSI
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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Technological Changes and Human Resources Set
coordinated by
Patrick Gilbert
Volume 4
Employability and Industrial Mutations
Between Individual Trajectories and Organizational Strategic Planning
Edited by
Florent Noël
Géraldine Schmidt
First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2022
The rights of Florent Noël and Géraldine Schmidt to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950756
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-743-9
Foreword by Patrick Gilbert
While technological change is, at least potentially, a source of progress, it also brings its share of uncertainties and fragilities. This is true of their effects on employment. Industrial change has always had consequences in this area. At the level of nations, organizations and individuals, the difficulty is always to assess the scope of these changes and to prepare for them.
Industrial revolutions have followed one another with well-known consequences on the content of work and the volume of jobs. Today, the “digital revolution”, while giving rise to the hope of new jobs, also poses certain threats with the rise of automation and the emergence of artificial intelligence. A recent OECD report (2019) on employment prospects estimates that, in the next 20 years, 16.4% of French jobs will be threatened and 32.8% will undergo a radical transformation.
In a period marked by these major transformations, companies are therefore led to reflect, very early on, on the actions to be taken on human resources. Hence, the notion of employability is becoming central and cannot simply be left to the initiative of each worker and the State. Beyond the institutional injunction to be responsible for one’s own destiny, what does this notion of employability cover? What is its history? What issues does it address? What are the respective roles of public policies, managerial practices and individual actions? What can be said (and done) about unemployability? How can we meet the challenge of the digitalization of jobs? What are the levers for building employability?
This book, which brings together researchers from different specialties around these issues, aims to shed light on the current changes in work by addressing the theme of employability in all its complexity. I am proud to welcome it to this series.
Patrick GILBERTProfessor at IAE Paris-SorbonneHead of the series“Technological Changes and Human Resources” November 2021
Foreword by IPSI
1980s… 1990s… At the trade union level, the word employability was not acceptable. It was seen as a tool for the exclusive use of employers to organize terminations and support outplacement.
Today, the ability to be employed has become one of the major challenges for companies, so that employees can adapt to the internal and external changes taking place. The exponential digitalization of all work relations is one of the concrete illustrations of these changes.
The ability of human beings to adapt to changes in their work is, more than ever, a key element in the success of these transformations. However, sociological constraints remain and the initial suspicion is sometimes still present. Although significant efforts have been made in training to “nurture” and develop skills, this is not enough.
The initial mistrust will only disappear completely if firms help to set up work organizations that promote and develop the ability to be employed. This requires employers accepting, internally, a different distribution of powers, in order to free the initiative and the responsibility of the employees.
It is at the price of this “revolution” that the ability to be employed will gain the support of all the actors in the company. If the work organization parameter becomes a central element of the management method, adaptation to change could be more natural, because it is permanent.
Today, it is not enough to have good ideas. They must be shared. The conditions for employability must therefore be worked out in concert with the employees themselves and their representatives, through a permanent, high-quality social dialogue, which requires a number of prerequisites (trust, carrying out a shared inventory before any negotiations, etc.).
This joint work on employability in periods of major change will make the adaptation actions of companies more legitimate and acceptable, including in the event of restructuring: “I will be more confident about my future if I know that I have the ability to adapt to a new job”.
Box 1.IPSI (Institution pour le progrès social dans l’industrie) in a nutshell
The Institution pour le progrès social dans l’industrie (IPSI) is a joint association whose founding members are the Groupement des entreprises sidérurgiques et métallurgiques (GESiM), on the one hand, and the trade unions CFTC, CFDT, CGT-FO and CFE-CGC, on the other hand.
The association’s main objectives are as follows:
– to contribute to the improvement of social, professional and strategic dialogues in companies;
– to promote a management by competencies, a management that is responsible, valorizing and a source of performance in the long-term;
– to contribute to all innovations and experiments in social matters;
– in a more global way, to take an interest in all subjects in the field of human resources (work organization, skills management, training, etc.).
Its operation is based on the exchange of experiences and joint sharing between HRDs, DAS and federal representatives of trade unions.
IPSI, in the wake of Think Tanks, also has a more operational vocation as a Do Tank: support, observation and capitalization of social experiments.
The company, as a cell of society, would thus have a better capacity to adapt to the evolution of its environment thanks to employees who, in the course of their duties, have permanently developed their own capacity to be employed in a context of constant change.
Xavier LE COQ President of IPSIPresident of the CFE-CGC Sidérurgie French National Iron and Steel UnionJacques LAUVERGNE Vice-President of IPSI, President of GESiM Emmanuelle CHAPELIER General Delegate of IPSI November 2021
Introduction
The Mutations – Anticipations – Innovations research chair at IAE Paris Sorbonne Business School has been structured for some 20 years in the form of a collective of researchers and economic actors (employers, trade unionists, consultants and experts) concerned with producing knowledge useful for action on the economic, technological, organizational and sociological changes that have an impact on employment and skills. Like this book, this network is open to a variety of disciplinary and institutional positions.
Since 2019, a partnership with the Institution paritaire pour le progrès social dans l’industrie (IPSI), a forum for dialogue and experimentation involving industrial employers and four representative trade unions (CFDT, CFE-CGC, CFTC and FO), has made it possible to extend the Chair’s discussions. It encourages the sharing of experiences and points of view, and the capitalization of knowledge necessary for collective learning within a joint observatory of industrial mutations. This book, the result of a research seminar organized in December 2019, is one of the milestones. Its ambition is to produce actionable knowledge by mobilizing research work firmly anchored in concrete situations to shed light on managerial decision-making on a practical issue: employability.
Choosing the theme of employability is far from trivial. As our partners suggest in the joint foreword they have written together, referring to employability in France is a political choice. When the word was dropped into the public debate in the mid-1990s by Jacques Barrot, then French Minister of Labor, it announced a change of perspective: the fight against the mass unemployment that was plaguing French society did not necessarily involve preventing redundancies, but could also involve better equipping workers for their professional transition. This is a paradigm shift for HRM thinking: adjusting employment is no longer a shameful decision as soon as employees find internal or external re-employment. Betting on employability means betting on movement and adaptability and giving up on stability and immobility; it means thinking of the “work factor” as a flow and no longer as a resource.
Since then, a succession of reforms has been introduced to support this project: greater flexibility in the terms and conditions for terminating employment contracts (with redundancy gradually giving way to contractual termination), the development of access to training independently of the employer, the portability of social rights, and the development of a rhetoric that makes individuals responsible for their own career paths. If yesterday’s “talent” made it possible to find a “good situation”, today’s “talent” consists of knowing how to be wary of putting down roots and moving from situation to situation by seizing opportunities.
This change of perspective is part of fundamental societal changes – the “liquid society”. It also reflects and makes possible a change in changes. These changes are probably more rapid, and quantitative and qualitative adjustments to the workforce can no longer be matched at the rate of generational renewal. The feeling has taken hold that there is an urgent need to adapt always and everywhere to new technologies, to intensifying competition, and to an environment that has become so turbulent that any effort at planning has become futile. Employability is seen as an imperative: an imperative for job seekers, obviously; an imperative for employees for whom being employable allows them to remain in employment despite the changes; an imperative for companies, which can see it as a way of succeeding in their transformations, all the more so because mobility is less costly for employees.
However, this rosy picture needs to be qualified. Although, at first glance, employability is defined as the ability to find a job or remain in a job, it is only a solution if workers have the concrete possibility of seizing quality opportunities and of not embarking on career paths marked by precariousness, downgrading and loss of income. However, the changes we are talking about here often have the effect of destroying the value of acquired skills and putting workers in competition with each other each time they appear on the internal or external labor markets. Flexibility without insecurity is the challenge.
This collective work returns to these questions. First, the concept of employability and its implications for public authorities, organizations and employees will be better defined (Part 1). It will then be possible to specify several figures of the employable or unemployable worker to better understand what being employable means (Part 2). Then, examples of management systems will be presented, all of which contribute to the development of employability at different stages of a career: recruitment, skills upgrading and reclassification (Part 3). Finally, the question of developing or maintaining employability will be examined as the result of the work situations and contexts in which workers evolve (Part 4).
The first part of this book aims to clarify the issues involved in thinking about employability by crossing disciplinary perspectives. In Chapter 1, Bernard Gazier first traces the history of the concept by adopting the point of view of the public authorities, for whom the challenge is to deal with the nagging issue of mass unemployment and to fight against the casualization and downgrading of workers. This leads him to look back at the various employment policies that have followed one another and that have become sedimented. Between measures to evict people from the labor market, the fight against discrimination, access to training and career guidance services, different conceptions of employability are emerging, ranging from the objectives of combating poverty to the “construction” of a worker responsible for his or her career and able to interact with the opportunities offered by the labor market and institutions. Géraldine Schmidt and Florent Noël (Chapter 2) approach the issue of employability from a business perspective: developing employability is one of the conditions for the success of the restructuring, mutations and transformations that companies must carry out to remain competitive. Making employees employable ultimately means facilitating professional transitions and making changes more easily acceptable. This means planning workforce movements and skills development efforts, and also empowering employees. It can also mean letting employees decide on the direction of their activity and thus build, in an emergent and bottom-up way, the organization and even the strategy of the company. This brings us to the emancipatory conception of employability put forward by Bénédicte Zimmermann in Chapter 3, who, on the basis of fieldwork, explores the conditions under which employability is confused with the ability of individuals to widen their field of possibilities to enable them to make professional choices of value to them, thus distancing themselves from the constraints of the labor market, on the one hand, and organizational rigidities, on the other hand. These three contributions set out the terms of the debate: the challenge of employability is not only to gain access to employment or to remain in employment, but also to aim for dignified living conditions and ultimately to aspire to freedom.
This broadening of perspectives allows us in the second part to draw a portrait of employable or, in a sense, unemployable workers. It is a question of discussing “what staying on the sidelines” or “being in the running” could be. To this end, Chapter 4, written by Raymonde Ferrandi on the basis of her experience as a psychologist working in social services to help with social and professional integration, draws up a series of portraits of people excluded from employment. These are people who are not allowed to work for administrative or medical reasons, or people who belong to discriminated groups. They are sometimes people who do not manage to master the social codes in force in the world of work or who, for various reasons, keep themselves away from work, which they see as an insurmountable situation. It is the weight of social representations of people or individual representations of work that is highlighted. In contrast to these problems of exclusion, Pauline de Becdelièvre, Cindy Felio and Jean-Yves Ottmann focus in Chapter 5 on qualified Information Technology workers who embark on the adventure of self-employment. The life stories they present are those of workers wishing to emancipate themselves from subordination – sometimes driven by a desire for independence, sometimes as a result of accidents along the way – who then have to work on themselves and for themselves to make themselves attractive. Constant monitoring of new technologies and professional practices, “self-marketing“ and the maintenance of networks become the conditions, not always met, for their professional development. Martina Gianecchini, Paolo Gubitta and Sara Dotto finally address the problem of employability for “stable” employees (Chapter 6). Their questionnaire survey of a large sample of Italian workers shows the importance of the ability to interact broadly with the various trades that make up a company. Particularly for jobs related to innovation or team management, mastering a particular expertise is not enough. The “digital revolution”, in particular, requires an interest in other specialties. This observation leads the authors to plead for the return of the “honest man of the Renaissance”, gifted with a broad and general understanding of problems and capable of imposing himself in project mode.
At the end of these first two parts, the reader will hopefully have a better understanding of what is meant by employability development. The third part describes concrete management systems set up by companies, sometimes in collaboration with labor market actors, to develop employability. These examples show that employability is not an attribute of individuals, but that it is the result of approaches to identifying and enhancing skills that explain the concrete dynamics of careers. Being employable is a question of collective judgment which requires coordination between the actors involved: individuals and employers at least. In Chapter 7, Anne-Laure Gatignon-Turnau and Séverine Ventolini discuss the simulation-based recruitment method developed by Pôle emploi, which makes it possible to dispense with the curriculum vitae that penalize the long-term unemployed and those who are furthest from employment. Putting workers in a situation makes it possible to validate the possession of skills despite the absence of validated training or validated experiences. It can be a way for companies to broaden their sourcing to compensate for possible labor shortages. This way of organizing the meeting of labor supply and demand ultimately makes it possible to establish a dialogue between employers and new employees and has the effect of strengthening commitment to work. Chapter 8 is in the same vein, but for different categories. Thierry Colin, Benoît Grasser and Fabien Meier present the skills enhancement approach developed in an aeronautics company to recruit for production positions with high requirements of reliability and quality. What’s more, these positions involve new products and technologies that do not yet exist. A fortiori, there is no ad hoc training leading to them. They clearly show that employability is co-constructed in the interaction between an individual and an organization through manpower pre-qualification mechanisms based on very general skills, followed by training and tutoring mechanisms. They also stress the fundamental role of work instructions and teaching tools that make learning, work, employment and thus employability possible. Employability is thus decided in the uncertainty during the recruitment process and then in the on-the-job training process. Risk and investment are at the heart of the approach. At the other end of the employee’s “life cycle” in the company, Ève Saint-Germes offers, in Chapter 9, a dive into a world that is too often overlooked: that of outplacement units. Here again, employability appears to be the result of coordination between actors with different constraints: individuals looking for work after being made redundant, the employer who makes them redundant, the redeployment unit, the joint committee monitoring the redundancy plan and so on. We find the idea that employability is equipped with tools and gives rise to intense negotiations on measurement systems, the categorization of individuals leading to orientation towards a particular support measure, budgets and so on. Employability is not given, it is socially constructed. Chapter 10 closes this section. Sara Dotto, Patrick Gilbert, Florent Noël and Nathalie Raulet-Croset attempt to identify typical configurations in which production requirements, ways of defining the qualities of work and management systems for assessing and developing employability, are brought into line. The figure of the multi-skilled, available and opportunistic worker is only one model among others, alongside the worker with certified skills modeled on the stable requirements of standardized production or the worker included in networks within which the shared culture and affinities necessary for collaborative work are developed.
The approaches presented in the third part are based on structured and deliberate management systems: building tests, organizing training, monitoring the development of skills and so on. But employability is also built in the work situation in interactions with management and peers, in the learning of professional gestures, behavioral codes and the discovery of desirable opportunities. It is the whole organization that must be empowering. The contributions in the last part of the book return to the ideas developed upstream by presenting examples of companies undergoing change and tension, in which the work situation has a positive or negative influence on the employees’ career path. The transformation of the SAE group’s factories towards a factory of the future model, presented by Emmanuelle Garbe and Jérémy Vignal in Chapter 11, raises interesting questions about the employability of operators in the current context of digital transformation. Technological changes have led to fears of a polarization of the workforce, with super-operators, on the one hand, who are called upon to increase their skills in order to carry out the tasks of controlling and managing installations, and less qualified operators on the other, who may fear that their work will be de-skilled with them becoming servants of the machine. No one has been able to make valuable predictions that would help to cope with uncertainty. Dealing with these transformations is a challenge that HR professional can hardly meet. But the other actors in play – workers and managers – can build their own solutions. Two illustrative cases are proposed in Chapters 12 and 13: the local managers of a large French group, followed like a shadow by Anne-Laure Delaunay, may also be concerned about the rapid technological changes they are experiencing. It is true that the proliferation of hardware tools (smartphones, tablets) and work applications may, at first glance, be perceived as a threat to jobs and skills. However, it generates opportunities for organizational tinkering, which are all the more fruitful as the tools are plastic and managers can appropriate them and define their use. In the end, the modernization of tools contributes to an increase in skills and the development of expertise that is particularly sought after internally and externally. The integration enterprise studied by Emmanuelle Begon and Michel Parlier is also constrained by production requirements. It is by exposing its employees to high-quality requirements, by involving them in participative and reflective management processes, and above all by not renouncing anything that an employer can and should expect from his employees that reinforces the feeling of efficiency in its fragile employees, develops their employability and remobilizes them towards sustainable employment. In this case, the very organization of work professionalizes the employee and enables him or her to “fully be a worker”.
We can see that talking about employability means thinking about cooperation between actors with different logics: public systems, HRM approaches, individual strategies and so on. All these actors have their role to play and their responsibilities to assume in solving fundamental problems: the fight against unemployment, labor shortages in “shortage” occupations, inclusion and emancipation of individuals, management of change, professional trajectories.
While these issues are at the forefront of the media and the daily life of organizations – redundancy plans, technical change, new forms of employment relationship – they have not yet found clear answers, either in research or in the practices that would form the basis of the professional activity of human resources managers or their union partners. Beyond the local experiments which this book has attempted to report on, no one really knows how to address these issues, negotiate employment and adjust skills. Each unique situation gives rise to its own unique management methods. The solutions found here and there are often presented as the result of encounters or opportunities that cannot be reproduced. These sensitive subjects are euphemistically described and it is often preferable to remain discreet about the solutions found, even when they are innovative, because discussing them would mean revisiting the often painful problems that gave rise to them or revealing certain aspects that could not be resolved in an honorable way. In short, learning remains rare, and the actors often “tinker” in the complexity of situations combining business strategies, economic constraints and human realities that are difficult to reconcile.
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.
PART 1Towards a General Theory of Employability
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.
1Employability and Public Policy: A Century-long Learning Process and Unfinished Process
Understood as the ability to obtain and keep a “normal” job, that is, one that is not protected, employability is a century-old term that is being used more and more widely. It finds a natural field of application in the context of job renewal: rather than protecting a worker in a job, it is advisable to develop his or her professional capacity to adapt to future jobs, his or her employability.
For a long time, it was a concept developed and used by social and health practitioners confronted with the differentiated care of the unemployed: social workers, placement office agents, administrative authorities, doctors, trainers and so on. Researchers or specialists in an academically recognized discipline such as economics, sociology, education sciences or human resources management, came to grips with it later, and extended it to all categories of active workers, whether in employment or not.
However, the term remains controversial. The public debate seems to oscillate between fuzzy acceptance and virulent rejection. In the field of public policy, the term employability is indeed fraught with concrete issues and also with collective potentially stigmatizing or reproachful, representations. Using it often means focusing attention on individual aptitudes and motivations, seeming to exonerate the other actors in the labor market, and in particular companies, from any responsibility for access to employment or job quality (Orianne and Conter 2007). Actors and institutions that use the notion of employability can also, and even more simply, be accused of endorsing a market representation of human capacities to the detriment of the integrity and autonomy of individuals.
But the context of the early 2020s, with the health crisis and its repercussions on the economy and employment, as well as the increasingly pressing challenges of the environment, provides renewed justification for using the term employability. Indeed, the necessary adaptation should take place with important changes in the nature and requirements of the available jobs, just think of the development of “green” jobs or the expected rise of the electric car. The challenges of massive reconversions are emerging, and the development of employability, which has been at the heart of projects and practices to secure professional careers for the past 20 years, is becoming a crucial imperative. But what kind of employability can and should we be talking about?
Based on a series of works carried out during the 1980s and 1990s (Gazier 1990; Gazier 1999) and extended more recently (Bruggeman et al. 2012; Gazier 2017), this contribution will proceed in two stages. First, it will focus on the major operational versions of employability that have been developed for more than a hundred years in the field of public policies dealing with unemployment in developed countries. Second, it will discuss the current meaning of employability, showing how, faced with the demands of operationality, a series of works and developments in practices are beginning to give it the meaning of a collective construction.
1.1. One hundred years of trial and error between the individual and the collective: seven operational definitions of employability
Faced with a vague concept, poorly defined or not defined at all, but clearly covered by various meanings such as employability, one possible strategy is to stick to operational versions, by which we mean the presence for each of them of three directly interrelated components: a definition, a statistical translation and consequences for economic and social policy. This leads us to identify at least seven distinct versions.
1.1.1. Seven versions in three waves during the 20th century
A systematic study presenting the details of the corresponding bibliographical references (Gazier 1999, pp. 62–67) and summarized in (Gazier 2017) has endeavored to distinguish these different versions, and to give them a name that makes it possible to differentiate them. The names chosen are thus intended to clarify this range and were not produced or used by the various people who developed and used this or that version, who mostly confined themselves to talking about “employability” without seeming to note that it was a specific version.
The first version (E1) dates back to the 1900s and persisted, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, until the early 1950s. It was a simple dichotomous perception of employability. A person was – or was not – employable, that is, able-bodied and immediately available for work. The statistical translation of this “dichotomous employability” gradually emerged around three criteria that became common in a number of studies conducted in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s: age criteria (being between 15 and 64 years old), the absence of physical or mental disability, and the absence of strong family constraints such as, for mothers, having young children to raise. People experiencing poverty can then be channeled differently: the “unemployable” could receive emergency social assistance, while the “employable” were first assigned to public works and then, when these had been interrupted, sent back to the labor market. This concept has been widely criticized, partly because it was formulated without reference to the labor market context and partly because it did not provide for any gradation between employability and unemployability.
Modern versions of the concept began in a second wave of usage and elaboration around the 1950s and 1960s, which immediately extended beyond the English-speaking world, and included contributions from many countries, notably France. Three very different types of employability were identified and used by social workers, employment policy makers, statisticians and physicians.
First, the second version, E2, which can be described as “medicosocial employability”. Mainly developed by doctors and rehabilitation practitioners, and aimed at the disabled, this version introduces a quantitative scale from the outset: one can be more or less employable, and this assessment forms the basis of the intervention which aims to improve employability. In concrete terms, it involves scores on a series of items constituting an individual employability test: the abilities of a more or less disabled person are scored in different areas (visual, auditory, cardiac, motor skills, etc.), and also abstraction skills, and the ability to read and write. This is an individual employability test: the abilities of a more or less disabled person are noted in various areas which cover physical as well as mental impairments. Depending on the deficiencies identified, those that can be treated or compensated for are selected and a program of action is drawn up.
This version was almost immediately doubled by a third, more general version, mainly aimed at unemployed people in difficulty. In fact, it is possible to introduce into the scale, with various weightings, items relating to handicaps that are no longer medical but social: we then move on to deficiencies in terms of qualifications, and also in terms of mobility, presentation and so on. For example, a person who does not have a driving license, or who has a criminal record or a history of drug use may be considered to have low employability. This E3 employability can be described as “labor policy employability”. It is intended to measure the distance between the characteristics of an individual and the imperatives of production and acceptability in the labor market. Here again, we can intervene by selecting the items on which action is possible (e.g. training programs or simply driving lessons, or even clothing advice).
