Employability and Industrial Mutations

10Being Employable, a Matter of Context

Employability has gradually replaced job protection in managerial concerns and public policies. In doing so, the idea has been established that individuals should be made responsible for their own career paths and should be allowed to develop the qualities necessary for their permanent mobility: skills, adaptability, know-how, etc. This conception of the employable worker goes hand in hand with the promotion of an individualizing model of human resource management, in the sense of Pichault and Nizet (2013), which conceives of the employment relationship as a permanent negotiation between the individual and the employer aimed at reconciling the needs of the company with individual aspirations.

But being employable is not only a question of aptitude or an individual attitude, and employability is also the subject of reflection and management regulations on a collective scale. Employability is in fact a cross-cutting issue in all human resource management: recruitment, work organization, evaluation, training and careers (Zimmermann 2005; Guilbert et al. 2016). Therefore, if HRM is contingent, so is the management of employability: it is part of management systems mobilizing numerous actors, discourses, and instruments that combine and complement each other in a more or less coherent way, but always in a specific context.

The ambition of this contribution is to reintroduce the diversity of contexts into the reflection on employability and ...