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.
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
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
