Employability and Industrial Mutations

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 ...