Abstract
The rise of digital tools for recognizing soft skills highlights a tension in contemporary work and training dynamics. Based on a study of a digital program run by a French equal opportunities association, we analyze the social logics underlying the recognition of these “invisible” skills, which do not fit traditional certification standards. Our approach adopts a sociological perspective focused on legitimization: how have skills long marginalized in academic and professional discourse acquired the status of recognized, documented, and sometimes certified objects? Digital recognition involves power and legitimacy relationships between young people, educational institutions, companies, and mediating platforms. These digital programs produce a dual effect. They offer individuals a space for self-assessment and reflection, allowing them to identify and present relational, organizational, or communication skills. Simultaneously, they reveal social differences in empowering experiences and feelings of legitimacy, conveying implicit norms about what counts as a valuable skill and situating users within an institutional framework of recognition that is never neutral. By drawing on theories of recognition, competence, and the sociology of work, we examine how the digitization of soft skill valuation reconfigures boundaries between individual, collective, and institutional skills. This contribution sheds light on contemporary transformations in recognition at work and in activities newly valued in society, particularly volunteering, navigating the tension between the valorization of lived experience and normative framing by digital devices.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Considering Digital Pedagogies
KEYWORDS
Soft skills, Digital platform, Social inequalities, Recognition, Reflexivity
