Employability: is it time we get critical?

Universities, government, media – we're all in thrall to the employability agenda, says Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, but do we need wider public debate about its origins and meaning?
Academic research, even the sort that looks at issues closest to 'real life', often remains distanced from public debate. Academic voices, in particular those stimulating critical reimagination, are hardly heard. But we need to encourage the media, and ultimately the public, to look more critically at employability – a theme that is discussed from a variety of angles, but is put under little critical scrutiny today.
The concept of employability – or at least the one most familiar to us – appeared in the 1980s. It was introduced by corporations, marketed as a response to the need to be flexible in the face of global competition, adapting to the unstable economic environment. Companies, it has been claimed, could no longer offer job security to employees and introduced 'employability' instead, as the new psychological contract. As such, it forms part of 'the new spirit of capitalism' (outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in 2005), substituting a lifelong career in one organisation by a career of numerous temporary projects which promise to make individuals employable to take up further short-term projects.
Employability was met with suspicion even within mainstream business schools, and was considered a concept that employees, even HR managers, would not buy into. Clearly it was not an equal substitute for job security. Yet, it gained the upper hand. Employability was taken up by governments who joined hands with the business world, and, not being able to influence labour demand, they built the whole government policy around labour supply – or employability. Read more...