lead him/her to be integrated. He or she can then accept or contest this classification, and after discussion with the employment service agents, the classification can be confirmed or modified, for example by taking into account a personal project or a change of direction. In this case, there is a use of optional interaction, putting the person concerned back at the heart of the process for a time.
1.2.2. Employability between individual capacity and collective construction
Interactive employability is caught up in a bundle of processes, some of which are initiated by or depend on the reaction of individuals, and others which depend on collective interactions, whether they are linked to placement or training policies, or to company practices with their repercussions on the ability of workers to orient themselves and to act. Most of the contributions presented in our first part can therefore shed light on one or another facet of employability.
Two perspectives are currently being explored, which deepen the collective dimensions and could eventually lead to new operational definitions. They are characterized by the fact that they are based on other concepts from theories of action, such as “capacities”, empowerment or “functionalities”.
The first, explained by Dutch sociologists (Pruijt and Yerkes 2014), favors an approach based on empowerment, the ability to act autonomously. It focuses on strategic and negotiated interactions between groups of actors and proposes to define employability as “empowerment in the career field”. Such a definition is well adapted to current practices of career construction and securing professional paths, emphasizing the resources available to such and such groups as well as their perceptions. Based on a self-perceived employability scale adapted from Rothwell and Arnold (2007), the empirical study by Bourguignon et al. (2015) explores the links between this and the intensity of employees’ union involvement, showing that these links are ambivalent: the feeling of being highly employable can both encourage disengagement or strengthen collective action. This work then returns to the critical analysis of policies centered on individual employability, which combine in an unstable way domination and freedom, therapy, rhetoric and concrete actions, but by insisting on the margins of maneuver which the unemployed or employees can seize.
Another perspective seeks to capture a set of broader interactions including, most often in a given territory, processes of anticipation, creation or maintenance of activities at the same time as processes of acquisition, development or, on the contrary, atrophy of skills (Bruggeman et al. 2012). Employability can then be defined as “the ability of a group of skilled and redeployable workers to attract capital and activities to obtain quality jobs”. The aim is to identify virtuous or vicious circles associating networked skills and jobs. The result is a focus on processes of collective destruction/reconstruction of employability, such as can be observed during restructurings with cumulative losses of jobs, income, cognitive abilities and social networks.
In short, in the field of public policy, work is beginning to appear that gives substance to the idea of employability as a collective construct that may or may not open up spaces for individual initiative.
This shift to the collective must be supported by linking employability and work, and thus presupposes an opening up of the perspective restricted to public policies for placing the unemployed: by first explaining the contribution, or even the influence, of companies on the employability of their employees, whether it results from their actions or their inactions. This is how it is possible to identify very different capacities for professional transitions among employees, depending on the type of company to which they belong or have belonged (Korver and Schmidt 2012).
It is also necessary to mobilize an explicit theory of choice and empowerment. The sociology of capabilities (Zimmermann 2011) provides a particularly relevant one, showing how, in different contexts, with different resources and different abilities to use them, workers may or may not find room for maneuver and progress. Reference to Sen (Sen 2009) and his theory of capabilities
An illustration of what institutional collective capacities can be is given in the work of Bruggeman et al.
1.3. Conclusion
Employability as used in public employment policies has undergone a multifaceted and very slow learning process, still incomplete as we have just seen, with practitioners first exploring a dichotomous version and then unilateral versions, either individual or collective, before focusing on interactive processes. Even though employability actors have often focused on various categories of workers who are more or less far from employment, their use of the term has long been circumscribed to the issue of access to formal employment, taking company practices as data. The depth of the determinants and constraints, for example, rooted in previous work experiences has only been recognized since the 2000s.
The interactive capabilities discussed today integrate, with the consideration of personal and contextualized constraints and room for maneuver, the social anchoring of the first dichotomous definition which directly took into account family constraints as they were experienced at the time. Now understood as the interaction of individual and collective capacities, the idea of employability was not fully stabilized in the early 2020s. However, it opens the door to a way beyond: most of the versions currently being explored, far from falling back on a market order taken as given, are likely to nourish approaches to appropriation and emancipation. It would thus be a matter of “equipping the labor market to serve people” as much as, if not more than, “equipping people for the labor market”.
1.4. References
Bourguignon, R., Noël, F., Schmidt, G. (2015). Is employability detrimental to unions? An empirical assessment of the relation between self-perceived employability and voice behaviours. Revue de gestion des ressources humaines,
Bruggeman, F., Gazier, B., Paucard, D. (2012). Affronter les restructurations d’entreprise en Europe. Propositions pour une démarche unifiée. Revue de l’IRES,
Gazier, B. (1990). L’employabilité. Brève radiographie d’un concept en mutation. Sociologie du travail, 4, 575–584.
Gazier, B. (ed.) (1999). Employability. Concepts and Policies. Report 1998. Employment Observatory, RESEARCH Network. European Commission, Employment & Social Affairs. Institute for Applied Socio-Economics, Berlin.
Gazier, B. (2017). Les dynamiques des versions opérationnelles de l’employabilité,
