Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame

ABSTRACT

Languages and language skills are commonly tagged as a marketable asset, or ‘human capital’. The article analyses the implications and social effects of Human Capital Theory. I show that the possession of language skills does not necessarily increase employment prospects, and certainly not in the way envisaged by neoliberal policy-makers in the European Union. Wider, systemic social inequalities come into play. Taking the Irish context as an example, and amid dwindling public funding for education, I argue that human capital theory functions ideologically as a strategy of displacement to shift responsibility for employment outcomes from the social to the individual.

Les langues et les compétences linguistiques sont communément étiquetées comme un actif commercialisable, ou ‘capital humain’. L'article analyse les implications et les effets sociaux de la théorie néolibérale du capital humain. Je montre que le la possession de compétences linguistiques n'augmente pas nécessairement les perspectives d'emploi, et certainement pas de la manière envisagée par les responsables politiques dans l'Union européenne. Des inégalités sociales plus larges et systémiques entrent en jeu. Prenant le contexte irlandais comme exemple, prenant en considération la diminution du financement public pour l'éducation, je soutiens que la théorie du capital humain fonctionne idéologiquement comme une stratégie de déplacement pour changer la responsabilité des résultats de l'emploi du social à l'individu.

KEYWORDS:

• Language skills
• human capital
• neoliberal education policy
• graduate employment
• social inequality
• ruling ideology

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewer who offered such detailed comments on the first draft. While our interpretations of human capital theory differed, I found the comments very useful as they provided a focus for me to rephrase things, I hope, with more clarity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Marnie Holborow Associate Faculty at Dublin City University, has written widely on politics and language. She has written on the politics of English, ideology and language, neoliberal keywords in the university, austerity in higher education in Ireland, and the legacy of Raymond Williams. She contributed the first entry for Neoliberalism in The Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics and she is the author of Language and Neoliberalism (Routledge 2015). She is currently writing on the commodification of language in work situations.

ORCID

Marnie Holborow http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8422-1545

Notes

1 It is interesting to note that in the 1980’s Gary Becker explained lower pay for married women in terms of the ‘intrinsic’ sexual division of labour. His claim was that the demands of child care and housework led married women to spend less effort in paid work than men. ‘Hence, married women have lower hourly earnings than married men with the same market human capital, and they economize on the effort expended on market work by seeking less demanding jobs’ (Becker 1985, p. 33). Such circular logic converts discrimination into an optimal approach that maximises efficiency – and the discrimination remains in place.

2 The ‘x’ is a way of representing males and females in this group.

3 For a comprehensive critique of the extensive use of capital and its ‘twixt Becker and Bourdieu’ ambiguity, see Fine (2002).