Sustainable employability (SE) – which can best be defined as the ability of workers to, throughout their working lives, keep participating in the labour market now and in the future in ways that safeguard their health and welfare (e.g., Hazelzet et al., 2019; van der Klink et al., 2016) – is an important European concern that defines the future of both the European labour market and European public health (de Rijk & Bültmann, 2025). Many people face increasing difficulties in engaging with the labour market in sustainable ways. This is due to an increasingly complex interplay of various societal, economic, and political developments taking place in Europe, such as demographic changes, welfare state austerity, the extension of the pension age, and changes in work methods (e.g., digitalization and robotization). These structural barriers make it difficult for large swaths of individuals, especially marginalised groups, to engage with work in sustainable ways (de Rijk & Bültmann, 2025; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025; Hazelzet et al., 2019).

Lifelong learning initiatives have been suggested to solve these problems (e.g., Quendler & Lamb, 2016). SE has therefore also become a concern for educational researchers (Álvarez-González et al., 2024; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025; Meerman et al., 2022), who explore how education might support individuals in positioning themselves in the labour market in good and healthy ways.

However, the relation between education and SE is complex and often fraught. Education is both assumed to play a significant role in enabling sustainable participation in the labour market (Álvarez-González et al., 2024; Grau-del-Valle et al., 2025) and understood as necessarily limited in its capacity to influence SE. What education can exactly contribute to SE, then, remains unclear in current discourse.

It is not our aim to simply critique this current state of SE research. Rather,  we work from the assumption that research on SE might obscure the communal educational processes of value-making and experience that are already taking place in workplaces throughout Europe, and through which people come to experience their work as valuable as part of a labour community. Here, educational refers to the ongoing processes through which people learn what matters in their work, how to hold on to it, and how to act together in ways that give their labour meaning.

In this paper, we focus on the concept of valuable work as part of SE and argue that an educational approach is able to acknowledge both individual lived experience and its communal context. To do so, we turn to the lens of “educational obstinacy” as a way of understanding and articulating how value is made and experienced in workplaces.

Obstinacy, as a philosophical concept, is part of a long research tradition but has gained recent attention in educational research (Biesta, 2016; Torenbosch, 2025). Although obstinacy, in a traditional sense, might mean “to foolishly resist” change, orders, or requests, in this research, “obstinacy” does not mean refusing to work with others or stubbornly resisting change. Rather, it is an affirmative act: an effort to hold on to what is important to the community of actors who work together to create specific labour practices and, in doing so, deal with the challenges they face while keeping hold of what they create as shared value in the work they do (Biesta, 2019; Torenbosch, 2025; Sandel, 2020).

Therefore, rather than placing value-making as either an individual disposition or as part of workplace interventions, obstinacy directs attention to the communal educational processes through which value is made in already existing everyday labour practices.

Valuable work is regularly approached in SE research through the capability approach as introduced by Amartya Sen (e.g., 1999; 2001) and translated to the area of work by other authors (e.g., van der Klink et al., 2016). These authors have found that experiencing one’s work as valuable is one of the most significant factors in SE. People are more likely to remain part of the labour market in healthy ways when their work is experienced as valuable to themselves and to the community they are part of, even when compared to factors such as financial rewards, work–life balance, or autonomy (e.g., Sandel, 2020; van der Klink, 2016; Torenbosch, 2025). Similar conclusions have been drawn in educational studies on the experienced attraction and value of work (e.g., Sandel, 2020; Torenbosch, 2025), which show that people are often drawn to, and sustainable engage with, labour practices because of the specific “sense of obstinacy” those practices impart. In this sense, obstinacy cannot be separated from the concrete ways it helps people navigate their work and their world (Torenbosch & Merckx, 2025). Obstinacy thus allows us to attend to the values that actors, both human and nonhuman, create together in workplaces. As noted earlier, these values already exist but are often underarticulated and underused in supporting SE in both research and policy. As such, we depart from a (scoping) literature search of empirical and theoretical papers on SE and offer an analysis of how obstinacy can supplement existing articulations of value in SE. We focus, as a case study, on how obstinacy can extend understandings of value within the capability approach by attending to how value is articulated and maintained in everyday labour practices. In doing so, we aim to make visible the communal and educational processes through which SE is supported in workplaces. Therefore, methodologically, this study proceeds as a theoretical and conceptual analysis, based on a close reading of existing conceptualisations of value in SE through the theoretical lens of obstinacy. By taking up obstinacy as an analytical lens, our aim is not to criticise existing and proven workplace interventions on value or the capability approach (e.g., Hazelzet, 2019), but to sharpen how value-making in SE is understood. Through conceptual analysis, we examine how people hold on to particular ways of doing work that matter to them and their communities.

Ultimately, this article contributes to understanding how obstinacy within labour communities supports SE as part of an educational, and therefore healthy and sustainable, way of living with labour, rather than as a direct educational intervention. This matters in a European context where interventions are constantly developed, while fostering what already exists and is of value to us and our labour right now remains underdeveloped and underarticulated. From this perspective, obstinacy and SE exist not simply for economic competitiveness, but especially for the health and wellbeing of European citizens who live a large part of their lives working together (de Rijk & Bültmann, 2025). Through obstinacy, researchers and practitioners can pay attention to how labour practices collectively maintain what is of value to them and how labour communities within those practices literally make sense of that value together. This paper has both practical and theoretical implications. Theoretically, we reframe the current focus in SE studies (i.e., how work can be regarded as more valuable in order to improve employees’ SE) towards understanding how SE is already being developed as part of everyday and obstinate educational processes that take place in European workplaces (SE as a part of valuable – and meaningful – work). Practically, this educationally rooted approach shifts attention from individual SE to the communal labour practices through which value is made visible, imparted, and sustained. This allows labour communities and researchers a lens to articulate meanings that go beyond individual opinion and instead reflect what is important to them as shared members of a community.

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