Language skills as human capital? Challenging the neoliberal frame

Abstract

ABSTRACTLanguages 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.