Introduction

Since the early 1990s, the concept of ‘competences’ has experienced new developments within the world of labour. This has produced – in France particularly, but also in other European countries such as Germany – a set of new management practices, which are now the object of attempts to systematise them into a ‘competence-oriented logic’. The scope of these attempts is all the more important as the concept of competence often goes along with that of ‘employability’. In particular, the logics of evaluation and classification of persons which result from them are placed at the core of a ‘politics of employability’. The notion of employability has been promoted by European employment policy as one of the ‘four pillars’ for reforming the labour market (EC 2000c). It is therefore interesting to look into the modes of implementation of one of its possible practical expressions. One of the aims of this chapter is to explore the implications, but also the limits, of a politics of employability too exclusively centred on the logic of competence. Indeed, the concept of competence tends on the one hand to locate employability on the side of the individual – the individual is responsible for updating and developing her competences – and to construct employability primarily upon an internal competence market within the company on the other. A politics of employability developed thus is first oriented towards the needs of companies and only in second place towards the needs of employees as regards career development.