The New Work Order

James Gee, Glynda Hull, Colin Lankshear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975752
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This book presents a sociocultural approach to language, literacy, and learning that deals directly with the new work order and that integrates concern for schools with concern for workplaces. It helps readers to confront complex problems and to construct their own broader theories.

1 Sociocultural literacy, discourses, and the new work order

A sociocultural approach involves the view that language, literacy, and learning can only be understood when situated in their social and cultural settings. This book argues that we have to go a step further: they need to be situated, as well, in the context of society’s ‘work order’. This is particularly crucial as we enter into a new work order within a new capitalism. In this chapter we develop a sociocultural approach to language, literacy, and learning that deals directly with this new work order and that integrates concern for schools with concern for workplaces.

I A sociocultural approach

On the traditional view, literacy is seen as a largely psychological ability—something true about our heads. We, on the other hand, see literacy as a matter of social practices—something to do with social, institutional, and cultural relationships (e.g., Gee 1996; Heath 1983; Kress 1985; Lankshear with Lawler 1987; Scollon and Scollon 1981; Street 1984; for related work from the perspective of social cognition see Lave and Wenger 1991).

To show you how we arrive at this claim we need to run through a simple argument (Gee 1996). The argument is meant to show that social, institutional, and cultural relationships play a much more prominent role in literacy than one might have thought. We will sketch the argument in relation to reading. (There is an obvious analogue of the argument that concerns writing, rather than reading.)

The argument begins as follows: Whatever literacy is, it must have something to do with reading. And reading is always reading something. Furthermore, if one has not understood what one has read then one has not read it. So reading is always reading something with understanding. Now, this something that one reads with understanding is always a text of a certain type which is read in a certain way. The text might be a comic book, a novel, a poem, a legal brief, a technical manual, a textbook in physics, a newspaper article, an essay in the social sciences or philosophy, a ‘self-help’ book, a recipe, and so forth through many different types of text. Each of these different types of text requires somewhat different background knowledge and somewhat different skills.

In fact, all of us can read certain types of text and not others. If any highly educated people need convincing of this point, and assuming they have had no background in philosophy, they need only read a few pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. They will immediately become convinced that they cannot read Hegel in any useful sense of the word ‘read’.

Furthermore, any text can be read in different ways. Here we need an example. Consider the following sentences from a brief story in which a man named Gregory has wronged his former girlfriend Abigail: ‘Heartsick and dejected, Abigail turned to Slug with her tale of woe. Slug, feeling compassion for Abigail, sought out Gregory and beat him brutally’.

In one study (Gee 1989, 1996) some readers, who happened to be African-Americans, claimed that these sentences ‘say’ that Abigail told Slug to beat up Gregory. On the other hand, other readers, who happened not to be African-Americans, claimed that these sentences ‘say’ no such thing. These readers subseqently claimed, in fact, that the African-Americans had misread the sentences. The African-Americans responded: ‘If you turn to someone with a tale of woe and, in particular, someone named ‘Slug’, you are most certainly asking him to do something in the way of violence and you are most certainly responsible when he’s done it’.

The point is that these different people read the sentences in different ways and thought that others had read them in the ‘wrong’ ways. Even if we think that the African-Americans—or the others—have read the sentences incorrectly, the very act of claiming that their reading is incorrect admits that there is a way to read the sentences and that we can dispute how the sentences ought to be read (and we can ask who determines the ‘ought’ and why). If we say that the African-Americans have gone too far beyond the text—or the others not far enough—we are still conceding that there is an issue of ‘how far’ to go and what counts as a way (or the way) of reading a text.

Now we have made out the case that reading is understanding a particular type of text in a certain way. All of us can read certain texts in certain ways and not others. Reading is thus a plural notion: readings, rather than reading.

The next stage of the argument asks: How does one acquire the ability to read a certain type of text in a certain way? Here the sociocultural approach argues that the literature on the acquisition and development of literacy is clear: a way of reading a certain type of text is acquired only when it is acquired in a ‘fluent’ or ‘native-like’ way, by one’s being embedded in (apprenticed as a member of) a social practice wherein people not only read texts of this type in this way but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in certain ways (Garton & Pratt 1989; Heath 1983; John-Steiner, Panofsky & Smith 1994; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Lave & Wenger 1991).

Texts are parts of lived, talked, enacted, value-and-belief-laden practices carried out in specific places and at specific times. Think of legal texts, comic books, recipes, Dick-and-Jane readers, basal readers, graffiti, traffic tickets, lab notebooks, journal articles, notes to family members, manuals, and so forth. You feel your mind run through quite different practices, quite different configurations of people, actions, and settings, quite different ‘ways of being in the world’ at a time and place.

Now it turns out, to move to the next and last stage of our argument, that in these social practices we can never extract just the bits concerned with reading (or ‘literacy’ in any other sense) and ignore all the bits concerned with talk, action, interaction, attitudes, values, objects, tools, and spaces. All the bits—the print bits and the non-print bits—constitute an integral whole. Apart from the social practices in which they are acquired and in which they are always embedded, the ‘literacy bits’ do not exist, or at least they do not mean anything (in several senses of the word ‘mean’). Once extracted from the practices they are not the ‘same thing’ that existed in the living social practice.

That’s the end of the argument. We start from reading and arrive at social practices integrating talk, action, interaction, beliefs, and values. We arrive at specific and diverse ways of being in the world. Let us return to the sentences from the story about Gregory, Abigail, and Slug. The African-Americans read, on this occasion, out of a social practice that treats written texts as if they say things the way people do. In this sort of practice, written texts get their meanings in the way speakers do—by embedding their words within the contexts, conditions, and constraints of experiences one has had in the world. In this sort of practice you just don’t turn to a guy named ‘Slug’ with your problems and then claim you’re blameless when he beats someone up. You cannot evade responsibility by hiding behind the ‘literal meanings’ of words.

The others in Gee’s study read, on the same occasion, out of a social practice that treats texts as though they have ‘explicit’ and socially invariable meanings all by themselves, sitting there on the page, quite apart from experiences one has actually had. These meanings follow ‘logically’ from socially invariable and mentally stored reading skills. Here, too, this way of reading is deeply connected to specific ways of talking, acting, interacting, valuing, and being in the world; ways that are, in fact, quite pervasive in many school-based social practices.

On this occasion the others chose to read out of school-like social practices; on other occasions they might not have. So too the African-Americans could have, on a different occasion, read out of different social practices, connected to different social identities. What one cannot do is read out of no social practice. There are many ‘ways of being in the world’, connected to work, social groups, cultures, institutions, and communities with different interests and values. And, in the context of the new work order, many of these are rapidly changing.

Reading and writing always swim in a far richer sea than traditional approaches to literacy allow for. As things like telecommunications, computers, graphics, virtual reality, and cyberspace become progressively more central, our basic point doesn’t change. These too are elements in, bits and pieces of, social practices—not ‘stand alone’ realities.

When we take a sociocultural approach to literacy we exit the mind and ultimately the school, and enter the world, including the world of work. In a sociocultural approach, the focus of learning and education is not children, nor schools, but human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various social institutions. If learning is to be efficacious, then what a child or adult does now as a learner must be connected in meaningful and motivating ways with ‘mature’ (insider) versions of related social practices.

Educators have for too long given pride of place to children and schools, to the detriment of both. However, this conclusion does not emerge only from a sociocultural approach to language and literacy. It is a leitmotif of writing on the new work order in the new capitalism (which we discuss further in Section III below, and in detail in Chapter 2). The argument here is that the world has changed and the nature of learning and knowledge is changing along with it (Aronowitz & DiFazio 1994; Drucker 1993; Handy 1989; Kelly 1994; Kennedy 1993; Kotter 1995; Lash & Urry 1994; Reich 1992; Smith 1995).

Knowledge now goes out of date too fast to rely on what you have learned in school, including college. Furthermore, ‘academic’, ‘specialist’ knowledge—the sort that has traditionally been seen as the highest goal of good schooling, at least for those who are college or university bound—is deeply problematic amid the complex systems of our contemporary and fast-changing world. For example, listen to Peter Senge, who has championed learning organizations:

The ‘compartmentalization of knowledge’ creates a false sense of confidence. For example, the traditional disciplines that influence management—such disciplines as economics, accounting, marketing, and psychology—divide the world into neat subdivisions within which one can often say, ‘This is the problem and here is the solution’. But the boundaries that make the subdivisions are fundamentally arbitrary—as any manager finds out who attempts to treat an important problem as if it is purely ‘an economic problem’ or ‘an accounting problem’. Life comes to us whole. It is only the analytic lens we impose that makes it seem as if problems can be isolated and solved. When we forget that it is ‘only a lens,’ we lose the spirit of openness (Senge 1991: 283).

The business world, as part and parcel of massive global economic, technological, and social change, now sees knowledge as its primary ‘value’. Contemporary, globally competitive businesses don’t any longer really compete on the basis of their products or services per se. They compete, rather, on the basis of how much learning and knowledge they can use as leverage in order to expeditiously invent, produce, distribute and market their goods and services, as well as to innovatively vary and customize them. Such knowledge is made up of both highly technical components and components dealing with communication, motivation, and social interaction. Similar changes are affecting non-business institutions as well.

‘Knowledge’ used to be the purview of schools and universities, who had ‘rights’ over what counted as knowledge. Given the emphasis in the new business world on knowledge work and knowledge workers, the nature of schools and universities is implicated at the very heart of this world. The new work order puts a huge stress on the need for lifelong learning and the need continually to adapt, change, and learn new skills, very often on site while carrying out the job.

Schools and universities, especially as they are currently structured, no longer have a monopoly on learning, and indeed are not always well suited to the task:

‘In a knowledge age economy,’ Louis Perelman writes in School’s Out, ‘the learning enterprise is strategically crucial.’ ‘Far too crucial to leave to the schools’, he adds. Perelman … imagines all the world turned into a giant learning network … The guiding principle is personal learning ‘on demand’, ‘just in time’, ‘whenever and however the opportunity is wanted’ …

At one point, Perelman admiringly cites Harvard’s Professor Shoshana Zuboff, who reports working with a plant manager in an advanced manufacturing operation ‘who was toying with the idea of calling the plant a college [because] … work and learning [there] had become increasingly interconnected’ (Peters 1994: 183–184, 185; see also Perelman 1992).

The bottom line is this: the focus of education, we argue, should be on social practices and their connections across various social and cultural sites and institutions. Learners should be viewed as lifelong trajectories through these sites and institutions, as stories with multiple twists and turns. What we say about their beginnings should be shaped by what we intend to say about their middles and ends, and vice versa. As their stories are rapidly and radically changing, we need to change our stories about skills, learning, and knowledge. Our focus, as well, should be on multiple learning sites and their rich and complex interconnections. We will see below and in other chapters that this focus on social practices brings us squarely up against the growing concern in the new capitalism with sociotechnical practices—that is, with the design of technology and social relations within the workplace to facilitate productivity and commitment, sometimes in highly ‘indoctrinating’ ways.

In the end we need to see learning and knowledge as distributed across lifetimes, social practices, social groupings, and institutions. We can and should ask how much knowledge resides in a family, an organization, a social practice, a particular technology, a community, a culture, or a nation—not just in a person’s head. We can and should ask, also, how this knowledge is exploited for good or ill.

Knowledge, then, is like potential energy in physics, energy that can be released in various forms and for various purposes. Knowledge is energy that resides in individuals, groups, practices, technologies, communities, organizations, and nations. We can define knowledge, like physical energy, in terms of the amount of work that it can be used to produce. But we badly need to reconceptualize what work is or should be in our changing world. Schools and children are only one element in this much bigger picture.

Furthermore, the new business world is offering education new challenges. For example, as we discuss further below, many businesses, in the face of the new global hypercompetition of our science-and-technology-driven world, are seeking to break down the barriers between work, community, and private life. They seek and demand total commitment and full immersion in the goals, vision, and practices of the organization (Boyett & Conn 1992; Peters 1992; Smith 1995).

Work in the old capitalism was alienating. Workers were forced to sell their labor, but often with little mental, emotional, or social investment in the business. Today they are asked to invest their hearts, minds, and bodies fully in their work. They are asked to think and act critically, reflectively, and creatively. While this offers a less alienating view of work and labor, in practice it can also amount to a form of mind control and high-tech, but indirect coercion.

Such promises and such perils ought, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Sociocultural literacy, discourses, and the new work order
• 2 Fast capitalism: theory and practice
• 3 Alignments: education and the new capitalism
• 4 A tale of one factory: training for teams
• 5 A tale of one factory: teams at work
• 6 A tale of one village: global capitalism and Nicaragua
• 7 What is to be done?
• Bibliography
• Index