Responding to the special issue call "Capital and Capability," this paper undertakes a critical policy analysis of a recently published Irish labour market activation strategy for people with disabilities through a discourse analytical framework. Drawing on a disability studies lens informed by Foucault's theory of discourse, the study…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity to examine the initial policies developed by Australian, Canadian, English, German, Greek and Irish governments to limit the spread of the virus. This has revealed governments' conceptualisation of the early childhood sector and its workforce. This paper argues that neoliberal ideology and…

Significant variations in educational attainment and labour market outcomes exist not only across OECD countries but also within them. Some regions concentrate the human capital of a country. In particular, many countries' capital regions stand out for their high share of tertiary-educated people. However, overall employment prospects are often…

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

The making of human capital is increasingly seen as a principal function of higher education. A keyword in neoliberal ideology, human capital represents a subtle masking of social conflict and expresses metaphorically the commodification of human abilities and an alienating notion of human potential, both of which sit ill with the goals of…