Learning and Work

An Exploration in Industrial Ethnography

Charles N. Darrah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136513923
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume examines how employees in two manufacturing concerns perceive and perform their jobs, and how the workplace influences employees thinking. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book describes and explores the experiences of daily work. Workers are observed as they interpret instructions, and deal with often contradictory expectations and ambiguous information. The study shows that this process is far more complex than the one portrayed in discussions of skill requirements by managers, expert analysts, and many educators. The book demonstrates that workplaces impart lessons that are at least as powerful as those conveyed in training programs and other official activities. It explores how people acquire an organizational world view that enables them to interpret the rules of the workplace and to perform appropriately. The book also examines how the new worker becomes part of a dynamic community of co-workers. Ethnographic descriptions document variations in the experiences of different workers and the strategies they adopt. The picture that emerges challenges widely held assumptions about the importance of skill requirements at work and the presumed inadequacy of ordinary people to work effectively. This book is especially timely as the nation seeks to reform education to better meet the demands of increased competition, and to address domestic concerns about preparing people for employment. A bibliography of references is included.

1 THE RHETORIC OF SKILL REQUIREMENTS

Edward, a supervisor at Kramden Computers Company,¹ reclined in his chair and assessed the impact of his firm’s newly instituted “team concept” on its production floor:

Right now we have one spokesperson who has to tape record the meetings and have her daughter translate them each night. That’s just insane. The team concept means that workers who just did what you tell them, the kind of worker you wanted, won’t be enough anymore. We’ll need people who can talk and cooperate on their team. And it’s too bad, because those other sort of workers built this company.

His words seem ordinary, even commonplace; after all, his lament about the gap between what work requires and what people bring to the workplace is widely echoed. Indeed, Edward’s struggling spokesperson provides a vivid, almost comical, case of the worker who lacks a required job skill. Similar tales are recounted by employers across the country as evidence of the obvious: Work is changing and all too many people are ill-prepared for the changes at hand.

Edward’s remarks are also unexceptional because they frame the problem in a way that is deeply rooted in the American formulation of common sense. Specifically, the team concept is presented as an inevitable, externally imposed feature of the organizational landscape, one to which workers must adapt by having the correct bundle of skills. Edward’s call for a different kind of worker—and the sudden abandonment of another kind who built the company—thus seems to be the logical and responsible managerial response.

Yet Edward’s comments leave unsaid much of importance, and their very familiarity reflects deep, tacit assumptions about the world of work and its proper description. Indeed, his remarks suggest a working world that is quite exotic. In this world, change comes from elsewhere and cannot be resisted. Workers are not active participants in the workplace but rather are acted upon by management and other experts. Questions about incentives—for example, to cooperate and talk—are absent, for supervisors are able to demand that workers act appropriately. Just what workers will cooperate and talk about is curiously unspecified.

Edward’s comments also reveal a privileged perspective on the workplace. He assumes that he sees what is really occurring on the production floor, and that he understands its implications for his job and those of his workers. The latter, he believes, are about to experience large changes at work, but the work of supervision will apparently continue as it is. His work will change only if he has to look hard for a different kind of worker.

To recapitulate briefly, Edward’s remarks might be ordinary, but they reveal important, unexamined assumptions about power, control, and human agency. They assume an omniscient view of the workplace in which changes in work are predictable and can be described through the neutral discourse of skills.

The purpose of this book is to challenge the view of work just described. I argue that the world of work is far more complex and unpredictable, and that workplaces and work practices are at least as important as skills. Most important, I suggest that the failure to understand this richer view of work distorts the role we give schools in preparing people for work.

We proceed by lingering for a while on Edward’s production floor, chatting with his workers, watching them make computers, and observing their engagement with the team concept and a series of ill-fated training classes. Then we pay an extended visit to another company, Calhoun Wire and Cable, in order to trace the outlines of an expanded view of work and workplace. The learning that we encounter there is far more complex, creative, and ambiguous than is typically portrayed in the dire accounts of poorly skilled workers that we routinely encounter.

CRISIS IN THE WORKPLACE

Concerns about education’s role in preparing people as workers are not new, but they reached a crescendo in the mid-1980s. Beginning with A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983), policy reports, scholarly tomes, and the popular press alike have proclaimed a national crisis in education, thereby fueling calls for reforms such as improved computer literacy, educational restructuring, and national testing.² These concerns continued into the 1990s, as evidenced by What Work Requires of Schools. the Department of Labor’s influential SCANS Report (1991), and the policy concerns of the Clinton administration. Indeed, a virtual cottage industry of future workplace skills reports has emerged.

Although the literature regarding future workplace skills is diverse, the reports collectively paint a picture of the skills required of American workers. Most postulate a set of academic skills, including reading, writing, and mathematics or numeracy, and a set of higher cognitive skills that build upon the first; for example, reasoning, creativity, and critical thinking. The need for workers to be flexible is reflected in the need for problem solving and the ability to “learn to learn.” Communication skills, including oral expression and listening, are widely cited, and they merge with and support a diverse set of social skills. Providing feedback, teamwork, and the ability to collaborate in heterogeneous groupings are widely cited. Interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, and negotiating skills are mentioned, as is understanding the operation of the workplace organization. Finally, a heterogeneous set of desirable work habits and attitudes is mentioned (e.g., self-direction, initiative, independence, pride, punctuality, and enthusiasm). Even a cursory review of these skills reveals ambiguities and inconsistencies, but most important for the present argument is that the reports consistently use the concept of skill requirements in order to describe work.

The stakes in the current policy debates are especially high since the spread of new technology and forms of work organization are apparently transforming job requirements. Thus, just when schools are accused of failing in their mission to educate, workplaces are demanding workers with more—and different—skills. Further heightening the sense of urgency are demographic shifts in which more new workers will be drawn from historically disadvantaged populations, and the challenges faced by American firms trying to compete in a global marketplace will increase.

This is exceedingly complex public theater, and the plot of the play being performed is convoluted at best. Especially striking is that despite bold claims and strident calls for action, little empirical evidence showing how people actually work makes its way on stage. Perhaps because of the sense of urgency, or because everyone is assumed to be an expert on the subject of work, debate about the “skills gap” has rapidly proceeded from alarms to solutions.

Descriptions of what people do at work would clarify the forgotten, “workplace side” of the skills gap, but instead we have witnessed a rhetoric of skill requirements in which sweeping generalizations are made with apparent certitude. By a “rhetoric of skill requirements” I mean any attempt to analyze work by decomposing jobs or people into constituent characteristics that are somehow necessary for the work to be performed. Precise terms vary, and include abilities, competencies, and capabilities.³ Although they may be defined somewhat differently, these terms reflect a common view in which jobs or people are decomposed into discrete components that are analyzed and then reassembled. And despite disagreements about the importance of specific skills, there is little question that this is the natural and obvious way to analyze jobs and workers. Despite disagreements about the importance of specific skills, or whether job skills are rising or falling, the concept of skill provides the lingua franca in which the debate is conducted, one that seems too obvious to question.

It is precisely the ease with which business and industry leaders, educators, policy makers, and ordinary citizens describe work in terms of skills that warrants attention. The concept of skill embodies a culturally specific way of looking at workplaces and workers, one consistent with broader features of American worldviews. It is precisely this consistency that makes the resulting accounts of work seem so ordinary, sensible, and realistic. In fact, such accounts are quite exotic, embodying as they do assumptions about how best to understand the world. Work and workplaces are represented as phenomena readily analyzed by outside experts and new workers alike. It follows that gaps in understanding what work requires are largely problems in measurement rather than in the basic conceptualization of work.

A goal of this book is to delineate how the concept of skill requirements molds our thinking about work, and to explore alternate ways of looking at workplaces, ones that may affect the definition of acceptable or reasonable educational responses. It proceeds by presenting extensive case study materials resulting from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in two manufacturing facilities. Considerable detail is included to illuminate the complexity of even routine, ordinary work in order to present these materials. The purpose of this exercise, however, is to explicate the complexity of understanding work and workplaces, and the implications for educators of settling for the “thin descriptions” (Geertz 1973) that result from analyzing work into bundles of required skills.

This book, then, is as much about the process of observing work as it is about the work itself, and it perhaps reflects my own fragmentary, incomplete, and flawed understanding of the workplaces where I spent many months. While I believe that my understanding has improved, it remains incomplete; what work in these places is “really” about was never revealed through fieldwork. In this sense, the book is intended to serve as a cautionary tale for those who make bold and sweeping generalizations about work based on scanty or nonexistent data.

APPROACHES TO SKILL REQUIREMENTS

Despite the certitude of the policy reports, trends in skill requirements are more ambiguous than presented. Although positions are complex, they reflect four arguments about trends in job skills: skill levels are increasing (“upskilling”), decreasing (“deskilling”), contingent on many variables, or being polarized into high and low skill jobs. Proponents of the upgrading thesis argue that aggregate job skills are rising due to the characteristics of new technology that automate routine work, allow workers to focus more on problem solving and improving the production process, and accordingly require that workers understand the larger production systems of which their jobs are only a part. The upskilling thesis is cogently articulated by Blauner (1964), and it emphasizes how technology drives skills upward (Adler 1986; Hirschhorn 1984).

Other theorists argue that skills are being downgraded as jobs are increasingly deskilled through the inexorable logic of capitalism, which seeks to routinize work in order to reduce the cost of labor while simultaneously increasing managerial control of potentially recalcitrant workers. This position is articulated in Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), which spawned an extensive debate concerning the labor process in Great Britain and the United States (Form 1987; Thompson 1983), and case studies of specific occupations or industries (Gartman 1986; Noble 1984; Zimbalist 1979). These theorists criticize the technological determinism associated with the upskilling thesis and generally argue that new technology reinforces labor’s subordination.

The upskilling and deskilling theses have been predominant, but other perspectives emerged as the flaws of each became apparent during the 1980s. Some theorists began to emphasize the contingent nature of skill requirements as work organization and new technology interact in unforeseen ways. Zuboff (1988), for example, argues that new technology potentially automates work, thereby decreasing job skills, but that it can also be used to free workers to improve the production process, thereby adding value to their work and resulting in higher-skilled, “informated” jobs. Goodman, Griffith, and Fenner (1990), too, argue that similar technologies can be configured in ways that have different impacts upon tasks, making it difficult to predict the skill requirements of individual jobs.

The contingency approach has led researchers to seek to identify the conditions that shape job design (Kelley 1990), such as shopfloor politics that characterize the firm (Wilkinson 1983) or the presence of labor unions (Cornfield 1987). It suggests that skill requirements may be neither simply rising or falling, but rather that the mixture of specific skills required for jobs may be changing. Spenner (1988) and Cyert and Mowery (1989) conclude that there is no compelling evidence for either the massive upgrading or downgrading of skill requirements. They argue that changes in work are best viewed as requiring a reskilling of the work force. A related interpretation is that skill requirements are polarizing, with some jobs being upskilled while others are routinized and deskilled.

These perspectives on skill requirements have implications for educators. The upskilling thesis implies that the demand for more able workers is increasing, and it has been used to rationalize widespread educational reforms leading to increased basic skills, familiarity with computers, and national educational standards. The deskilling thesis, of course, suggests quite the contrary. The implications of the emerging contingency perspective are predictably less clear, but in general support the importance of the basic skills that increase a worker’s capacity to understand and adapt to changing circumstances, as well as the social skills that allow new forms of work organization to function. The polarization perspective is perhaps most challenging, for it suggests that there is little justification for a national effort to upgrade skills, although it may be in the interest of any individual to do so.

Further discussion of the skilling debate is beyond the scope of this book, but it is significant for the present argument that its participants express changes in the nature of work in the idiom of skills and skill requirements. Thus, there appears to be a consensus among educational policy analysts, academic theorists, and political commentators regarding the usefulness of the concept of skill for expressing complex changes in the nature of work.

The skill concept may be ubiquitous in discussions of work, but its use is inconsistent and often ambiguous. Skill levels are sometimes inferred by reference to broad occupational groupings, or they may be indirectly measured by reference to wage rates or educational levels. Alternatively, skills may be directly measured by various survey, archival, or historical methods (Spenner 1990). Vallas (1990) identifies three categories of studies of skills. National aggregate studies, such as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles or “DOT” (U.S. Department of Labor 1977), utilize aggregate data in order to infer skill levels and their educational implications (Spenner 1979, 1983). Restricted quantitative studies follow a similar strategy in assessing skills but do so in specific industries or regions. Studies of the printing industry conducted by Wallace and Kalleberg (1982) and of clerical work by Vallas (1988) represent this approach. Finally, a variety of qualitative studies assess changes in skills within firms or occupations. For example, Noble (1984) traces the impacts of automatic machining tools on the skills of machinists, while Kraft describes the evolution of computer programming (1979). Both authors describe a process of deskilling, as jobs are simplified through a combination of changes in production technology and the organization of work. Hirschhorn (1984) and Zuboff (1988) describe the impact of information-based technologies on skills, and they generally emphasize their potential for creating “upskilled” jobs.

Collectively, these studies paint a broad picture of skills in the United States, although it is one open to conflicting interpretations. In general, the national aggregate studies support the upskilling view of work, although conclusions based on them must be approached with caution (Spenner 1990). The restricted quantitative and qualitative case studies are heterogeneous, and their results are more difficult to interpret. The labor process debate has produced case studies which (predictably) document the deskilling of jobs (Zimbalist 1979), although other studies have documented the limitations faced by management as it seeks to impose control in the workplace and to deskill jobs (Wilkinson 1983; Halle 1984). Other case studies have presented evidence of upskilling (Attewell 1987).

Despite a vast and heterogeneous literature, relatively few studies of sk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Rhetoric of Skill Requirements
• Chapter 2 The Poverty of Skills
• Chapter 3 Skills, Context, and Practice
• Chapter 4 Seeing Work, Working at Seeing
• Chapter 5 Nuts and Bolts
• Chapter 6 Competition, Paperwork, and Projects
• Chapter 7 Learning in Communities of Practice
• Chapter 8 Reproduction and Change
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index