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Employability and Industrial Mutations


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is basically (excluding business creators) a binary distribution according to the probability of exhausting one’s compensation rights. Finally, others have integrated profiling into an approach that takes into account the unemployed person’s assessments and projects in an original way, as in the Netherlands (Georges 2007). The unemployed person is informed of the statistical and operational category into which the profiling calculations 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”.

      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).

      An illustration of what institutional collective capacities can be is given in the work of Bruggeman et al. (2012) on restructuring. It leads to the outline of three “functionalities” (defined as the availability of collective capacities for action) that should be put in place jointly to equip local labor markets and the productive and social fabrics on which they depend: involving the relevant actors in the management of productive change; developing employability; and steering the local job supply. Employability is one of the several functions, dependent on two others that give it meaning and support, and consists of developing the employability of workers in their jobs and organizing fair transitions for all in the event of restructuring. In France, the GPEC (Gestion prévisionnelle de l’emploi et des compétences, Forward Planning of Employment and Skills) agreements which explicitly include employability prefigure, in a partial manner and for the favored workers of large firms, the type of approach outlined here.

      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.

      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, 98(4), 3–17.

      Bruggeman, F., Gazier, B., Paucard, D. (2012). Affronter les restructurations d’entreprise en Europe. Propositions pour une démarche unifiée. Revue de l’IRES, 72, 29–64.

      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,