Vvaluing their “human capital”, their “soft skills” (general skills), their “savoir-être”, these are all pieces of advice given to students and employees to promote their employability. These concepts refer to the subjective behavioral and relational skills of individuals such as dynamism, creativity, entrepreneurship and any other personality trait that an individual may develop in his personal or professional life.
One of the challenges of developing these skills is to emphasize that employees, far from being simple “expenses” for companies (this is the status assigned to them by the accounting system), in fact constitute real capital. human just as decisive for their sustainability as the financial capital held by the shareholders.
However, despite potentially laudable initial intentions, this general tendency to highlight soft skills and human capital is not without risk. This is in any case the result of a study that we recently carried out and which ends up warning against the “dark side” of these concepts.
A new step in the quantification of the world
The introduction of the concepts of human capital and soft skills within companies and scientific studies, particularly in the accounting field, has led to an objectification of the subjective qualities of individuals reduced to indicators that can be compared with economic performance and corporate finance.
This logic, pushed to the extreme, leads to legitimizing a better valuation of a sympathetic, docile or enterprising employee, according to subjective criteria which raise questions. This is a new stage in the quantification of the world and in its commodification, since it is here the “personality” of individuals that becomes measurable and financially valuable.
It is precisely this phenomenon that is at play when the Carrefour group proposes to set up a new system called “blabla caisses”. Intended to recreate social ties, these checkouts make it possible for people who so wish to establish a time for discussion between the checkout host and his customer, by allowing them to take the time to discuss.
A logic of competition and permanent distinction
If this idea was welcomed with some success by the employees, who remain free to participate in it, it is a question of such actions bringing into the process of commodification an action, until now, normal (exchanging with the cashier or cashier), which the same companies helped to destroy by installing and encouraging automatic checkouts, and before that by maximizing the pace of checkouts.
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