infonet-economy

In recent years it has become increasingly popular in the German speaking part of Europe to train individuals in so called 'social competences' or 'soft skills', thus presumably enabling both individuals and organizations to better relate with each other and thus 'function' more efficiently and effectively - at least this seems to be the inherent promise. Yet, within this fashion of 'training soft skills', most notably promoted by HRM, the individualistic agency isn't questioned. I will thus take issue with this omission through a discursive study of two Swiss organizations. Based on problem-centred interviews and group-discussions I have been asking people in these organizations to talk about their 'social life' i.e. how they relate with each other in the context of their professional life. First going about deconstructing the popular individualistic discourse, interpretive repertoires could even offer explanations how these 'soft skills' are rendered that important, that they seem to have become a prerequisite for employment (even schools and universities include soft-skills trainings in their curricula). I will thus reveal that the talk of soft skills, when constructed as 'finished' after leaving parents home, seems to reify the idea of stable personalities - thus rather discouraging than enabling the much-lauded flexibility of the workforce.
In an attempt to reflect individual utterances on the level of organizational metaphors, I used Morgan's scheme to inquire how the realities of 'the social' vary according to the organizational metaphor. Somewhat surprising however is that most accounts of the interviewees were construing organizations as machine - as a result of which 'the social' was placed either outside of the organization (and thus represented as disturbance) or inside the organization where it was conceived as a useful, instrumental element. On the face of it, the apparently 'hot fashion' of social skills could be reconnected to the rather 'old stories' of Taylorism and Human Relations.
In view of the aim of the study, i.e. to analyse the construction and sensemaking of 'the social' within organizations, the results show how the growing popularity of 'social skills' trainings, on the one hand neglect the level of co-construction of contexts and on the other hand obscure that the supposedly 'altruistic social' is subject to a perspective which strongly stresses the utility function of human labour and thus helps to envisage the individual as 'useful workforce' for and within the organization.