Abstract:

Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs hereafter) aim to improve the employability of people in situations of vulnerability or social exclusion. They intend to make employment accessible to people who have not had opportunities to participate in productive processes establishing links with ordinary labour markets and showing that employment may be inclusive.

A criticism of employment policies is that they have focused preferentially on improving individual and personal aspects of employability rather than on the contextual conditions that generate unemployment and exclusion. Therefore, it is necessary to recover a complex and multidimensional conception of employability in which personal and contextual dimensions interact. In this sense, in as much as processes of training and learning involve the internalisation of social processes in which people participate, it is necessary to guide our analysis towards the configuration of the social processes that occur in the WISEs.

The study we present here is based on a comprehensive model in which the intervention in WISEs is understood as learning trajectories, in which personal and contextual factors that interfere result in the improvement of employability. Thus, the characteristics of the WISE and of its jobs and their connection with the labour market; the organisation of productive and training processes; and the type of accompanying and support become key elements that interact with personal factors.

In this paper we analyse which of these contextual factors are more determinant to improving the employability of the insertion workers in the WISEs. We present an instrument, the “Questionnaire on external factors of employability” (CUFEE) that tries to measure the external factors that have an impact on the employability in WISEs considering the opinion of their workers. This instrument has a structure that is grouped into 4 dimensions with 12 categories and 70 items. 31 WISEs are involved in the process of validation of the instrument, with a total of 53 questionnaires completed by 47 professionals with several profiles (production, accompanying and management). The results are analysed using the statistical programme SPSS.

The results provide information about the dimensions that have a greater development in the WISEs –strengths– and also those that could be improved. Relations between results in different dimensions and variables of WISEs (such as their characteristics, their insertion rates, or professional sectors they are involved into) are established, too. These may help us both to better understand the productive and training processes in WISEs and to make proposals for improvement.

Keywords:

Employability, social inclusion, work integration social enterprise, evaluation.