Linköping University Post Print
Discourses on Employability: Constituting the
Responsible Citizen
Andreas Fejes
N.B.: When citing this work, cite the original article.
This is an electronic version of an article published in:
Andreas Fejes, Discourses on Employability: Constituting the Responsible Citizen, 2010,
Studies in Continuing Education, (32), 2, 89-102.
Studies in Continuing Education is available online at informaworld
TM
:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2010.488353
Copyright: Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.asp
Postprint available at: Linköping University Electronic Press
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-54880
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Discourses on employability:
constituting the responsible
citizen
Andreas Fejes
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Published in Studies in Continuing Education, 32(2), 89-102.
In the last couple of decades, there has been a shift from speaking about
employment to speaking about employability. The interest in this article is
directed at how discourses on employability are mobilized in the wider
discursive terrain of governance. How does governance operate, what
subject is produced and, more specifically, who is positioned as responsible
for the employability of the citizen through such discourses? These
questions are addressed by analysing three different kinds of texts:
transnational policy documents on lifelong learning and the labour market;
a Swedish policy text on in-service training in the health care sector;
interviews with employees at six nursing homes for elderly people. A
discourse analysis is performed inspired by the concepts of governmentality
and the enabling state. Although the analysis indicate that the individual is
constructed as responsible for her/his own employability, and the state and
the employer are construed as enablers. This is not clear-cut or
deterministic as different kinds of texts produce different kinds of
positioning. This kind of analysis might help open up a new space for
thought and action.
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Introduction
In recent decades, transnational and national policies on education have
focused increasingly on questions concerning lifelong learning, especially in
Europe (cf. EC 2001; Ministry of Education 1998). A shift has occurred
from speaking about education to speaking about learning. Learning is no
longer only connected to formal schooling. Instead, learning today is
connected to numerous practices such as everyday life, working life, etc.
This shift brings with it a focus not only on learning but also on the learner.
More than previously, educational policy positions the learner as
responsible for her/his own employment, rather than referring to wider
structures of inequality built into the labour market or the educational
system (cf. Edwards 2004). Thus, the emergence of lifelong learning
indicates a reconfiguration in the positioning of the citizen in terms of
governance (cf. Fejes & Nicoll 2008; Rose 1999).
Discourses on lifelong learning are connected to another discourse which
participates in the re-positioning of the citizen in terms of governance –
namely, employability. A couple of decades ago, employability emerged as
discourse, which replaced the previous way of describing the workforce (cf.
Clarke and Patrickson 2008; Kruss 2004; McQuaid and Lindsay 2005).
Instead of speaking about a shortage of employment and describing the
citizen as employed or unemployed, policy now spoke about a lack of
employability and the citizen came to be described as employable or not
employable (Garsten and Jacobsson 2004) or in need of employability skills
(cf. Williams 2005). Employability is currently used as an explanation, and
to some extent a legitimation, of unemployment (Stråth 2000). This kind of
discourse positions the citizen as responsible for her/his own employment,
and less emphasis is placed on structural inequalities and problems in the
labour market.
Thus, discourses on employability and lifelong learning seem to signify a
shift in terms of how government is conducted and how the citizen is
positioned as a subject of government. Questions of such reconfiguration
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concerning how to perceive government have been elaborated upon by
researchers who draw on Michel Foucault‟s (2007) concept of
governmentality (cf. Dean 1999; Fejes and Nicoll 2008; Rose 1999; Fejes
2008). From such a perspective, government becomes something more than
the government of the state. Here, government becomes an interconnection
of the government of the self, the government of others and the government
of the state, which Foucault (2007) termed the conduct of conduct. Such a
perspective makes it possible to acquire an understanding of how discourses
on employability position citizens as subjects, and how governing in a
broader sense operates in the present time. In this article, drawing on a
governmentality perspective, my interest is therefore directed towards how
discourses on employability are mobilized in the wider discursive terrain of
governance. How does governance operate, what subject is produced and,
more specifically, who is positioned as responsible for the employability of
the citizen through such discourses? By asking such questions, the ambition
is to denaturalise discourses on employability, and illustrate how there are
different ways to construe such discourses and thus different ways possible
to produce subjects (cf. Popkewitz 2008).
The analysis relates to a strand of critical policy analysis, where
employability can be seen as a planetspeak discourse (Nóvoa, 2002; Fejes
2006; Ball 2008); a way of reasoning that seems to have no structural roots,
no social locations and no origin. It is part of a “worldwide bible” that is in
every tongue and it seems to provide solutions to the problems faced. It
travels through the world and is inscribed in different countries and
practices where it takes different forms. This article therefore, as a way to
acquire a broader understanding of how governance operates, focuses on
how such discourse is translated in three different kinds of texts:
transnational policy texts, national policy texts and interviews with people
involved in an in-service training programme in the health care sector in
Sweden. From such perspective, these texts are not seen as hierarchical
where the focus is on tracing whether policies created in one practice are
“actually” implemented in the next. Rather, the focus is on how discourses
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are shaped in different practices by analysing different kinds of texts, how
subjects are positioned in terms of responsibility, and how entities such as
the state and employer are positioned in relation to such responsibilisation
(cf. Rose 1999). This makes it possible to cast such discourses in sharper
relief, to help denaturalise the present and thereby try to open up a new
space for thought and action (cf. Popkewiz & Brennan 1998; Fejes & Nicoll
Forthcoming; Simons et al, 2009). What is “critical” in this kind of analysis
is making things contestable, as Popkewitz (2008, p. XV) argues:
To make the naturalness of the present as strange and
contingent is a political strategy of change; to make visible the
internments and enclosures of the commonsense of schooling
is to make them contestable.
By analysing how discourses on employability operate and are translated in
different texts, it becomes possible to illustrate how, through the workings
of power, employability is construed as natural and as something desirable.
At the same time, it makes visible how these discourses are not totalising, or
coherent. With its focus on a transnational and national policy practice, and
local work practices, thus throwing the discourses on employability in
sharper relief, this article contributes to the ongoing discussion on
employability and its relation to how governance operates by providing an
empirical example of how discourses position subjects in different practices
(cf. Garsten & Jacobsson 2004; Williams 2005).
Empirical material and analytical perspective
The article is based on an analysis of an in-service training programme for
health care assistants (HCA) who wished to become licensed practical
nurses (LPN). The programme was part of a major state initiative, called
Step for Skills, focused on raising the skills and competencies of the
employees working in elderly care in Sweden, and to make the vocations in
health care more attractive. In this programme, HCAs who had worked
many years with elderly care were given the opportunity, during work
hours, to participate in a process of recognition of prior learning, teaching