Chapter 5: Employability in Digital Times: How Instrumental Reason Contributes to the Conversion of Vocational Education

Seen from a critical theory perspective, ‘employability’ is an authoritative order for the adaptation of employees to capitalist requirements of extensive utilization. This is pinpointed again in the debates around the digital transformation, driving and facilitating certain changes in employment conditions and their educational foundation. Digitalized subject areas and changing teaching/learning methods also affect vocational education, which is considered a prerequisite for employability in Germany. Although both, education and the digital transformation, are usually associated with progress, their relationship is not without antinomies: In the debate around reforming vocational education in responding to the alleged demands of a ‘digital transformation’, the relevance of education in the development of society as a whole is ignored. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a general critique of employability in relation to this shortcoming. Building on two classical texts by Adorno and Horkheimer, this chapter aims to develop a critical reading of the relationship between current conceptions of employability and vocational education in times of unfolding digital transformation. By using Adorno’s notion of half-education digitally oriented employability in vocational education is situated as a hyper-adaptation. With an instrumentally driven adaptation towards productivity, efficiency and utilization, vocational education becomes transformed into the mere acquisition of workable skills – with detrimental consequences for the subject and society. In practice, instrumentality, i.e. the reduction of vocational education to an instrument for achieving narrow purposes of contributing to capitalist profitability, undermines vocational education usefulness for the given purposes of employability.