People at Work

Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New Economy

Marjorie L. DeVault

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814720332
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

People at Work is noted sociologist Marjorie L. DeVault's groundbreaking collection of original essays on the complexities of the modern-day workplace. By focusing on the lived experiences of the worker, not as an automaton on an assembly line, but as an embodied human of flesh and bone, these essays offer important insight on the realities of the workplace, and their effects on life at home and in communities. With contributions from some of today’s top scholars, each essay is a detailed case study of a different aspect of the working world.

Compelling, lively, and sometimes chilling, the contributors address issues from disability rights to immigrant labor, welfare reforms to budget cuts, competition to personal motivations. Each one valuable on its own, the essays in People at Work combine to illuminate the hurdles that workers of all backgrounds struggle with and, more broadly, the impact of change on workers’ lives in the new, increasingly global, economy.

[ PART I ]

Ideologies of the Neoliberal Economy

This section introduces key ideological building blocks in a dominant view of economic change that circulates within and from sites of administration and management—the conceptual currencies of policymakers. Each chapter begins in a specific place—in a high-tech, “high-performance” Canadian workplace; at kitchen tables in Ontario and in California; among members of a community organization and its low-income clients in the southwestern United States; and in the lives of disabled youth in Iceland—with the activities of people at work in those places. Each analysis then traces out and explores threads of the ruling relations that have been crafted to align local activity with the (sometimes contradictory) institutional discourses emerging elsewhere; these include discourses of competitiveness; accountability and efficiency; and individual empowerment and inclusion achieved through participation in economic activity.

The conceptual currencies introduced in these analyses appear throughout the book, though in different forms that adapt them to particular institutional realms. They work, in part, through their double character (Rankin and Campbell 2006), which can recruit local actors to a reorganization of consciousness and thereby align their activity with ruling agendas. Empowerment through paid work, for example, may be understood in the context of an individual’s life as a route to economic security, pride in accomplishment, and recognition as a full member of society. Within the managerial logic of the new economy, however, the same concept can refer to a stark version of independence in which individuals increasingly shoulder all the responsibilities and risks of their own and others’ sustenance. Our analyses call attention to these conceptual currencies and examine, in some detail, how they aim at such alignments with managerial goals in particular cases and sites.

[ 1 ]

“Hell on My Face”

The Production of Workplace Il-literacy

NANCY JACKSON AND BONNIE SLADE

Editor’s Introduction

In this chapter, Nancy Jackson and Bonnie Slade examine the notion of workplace literacy, considering both policy and practice. Bonnie’s work as a team leader in a Canadian electronics plant grounds their analysis in the ways that permanent employees and skilled immigrant contract workers operate on a daily basis. Her on-the-ground frustrations provide the kind of puzzle that opens up an extended analysis in an institutional ethnography; in this case, that analysis links workers’ activities with the company’s flexible labor regime and the demands for elaborated textual forms of accountability arising outside the company. Quality is increasingly defined textually, producing an additional layer of work. And the production regime is racialized, since it is the primarily North American–born permanent workers who are positioned through the company’s managerial strategies to contribute textually to quality control. The analysis links the discussions of policymakers addressing an ostensible crisis of literacy and the ways that workers manage—and are managed by—these new demands for text-based accountability. The juxtaposition of the policy discourse with the view of texts-in-use on the shop floor suggests that supposed problems of literacy may often be not problems of individual skill so much as perverse effects of textually mediated production and a flexible labor regime.

* * *

The New Economy is bringing new stresses to working life. Many jobs are changing, and mostly not for the better; they are often part-time, more precarious, with lower wages and fewer benefits. At the same time, even such arguably bad jobs are said to involve higher skills and thus new requirements for employees. In this context, poor literacy skills are increasingly cited by employers and policymakers as a problem of crisis proportion, posing a threat to the global competitiveness and the prosperity of industrialized nations.

This chapter challenges the dominant discourse about a “literacy crisis” at work, with its emphasis on skill deficits of individuals. We argue that framing the issues this way conceals critical processes of organizational restructuring that are changing the nature and meaning of literacy at work. These changes focus on a growing labyrinth of workplace texts used to govern both work and workers, as part of documenting and standardizing work in the name of “quality” and productivity. The centrality of these texts to systems of work intensification and performance monitoring can foster fear, avoidance, or resistance among employees. Thus, paperwork is often a site of struggle; when it does not get done, complaints about literacy are usually not far behind.

But closer examination of these troubles shows that they are often not about the functional skill levels of individuals but rather about changes in the social relations of work. The concept of literacy has come to stand for this complex textual relation between the demands of powerful institutions and the lives of individuals. Here we will explore these dynamics in a manufacturing environment, but similar issues will be familiar to workers in service, health, retail, and many other workplaces in both the private and the public sectors.

This essay speaks in two voices, based on the experiences of the two authors. In the first half of the paper, Nancy draws on accounts of workplace change found in social studies of work, particularly analyses of lean production and quality assurance, to situate an understanding of workplace literacy within a broader picture of widespread changes in the organization of work. She argues that everyday demands of reading and writing are increasingly embedded in a web of textual relations that are complex and highly contested. While this way of framing the problem of “literacy” will be familiar to readers of other studies in the social organization of knowledge, it stands in some contrast to the dominant discourse around workplace literacy (see Belfiore et al. 2004).

The second part of the chapter is a first-person narrative account of Bonnie’s reflection on her experience as a team leader on a high-tech manufacturing line. She takes us onto the shop floor to examine the organization and implications of everyday literacy practices in this environment. She argues that “literacy” in this workplace was much less about individuals’ ability to read and write than about forms of textual communication, either paper or electronic, that subordinated front-line workers and excluded them from the exercise of power in their workplace.

Literacy: Discourse of Crisis, Danger, and Blame

A critical perspective on the meaning and uses of the concept of literacy is far from new in academic life. There is a long tradition of critical studies showing how the concept of literacy has been used in various ways across the centuries to manage populations for the benefit of powerful interests: the church of the Middle Ages, or the industrialists of the early twentieth century (Graff 1987; Hautecoeur 1997; Larson 2001). There is also a critical literature on the social construction of skill, written from feminist, labor, and other critical perspectives, that shows how skill labels have been used historically to organize categories of privilege and exclusion that reproduce hierarchies of gender, race, and other dimensions of difference (Cockburn 1983; Connell 1987; deWolff 2000; Galabuzi 2005; Green 2001; Jackson 1991; Slade and Mirchandani 2005). Curiously, these critical analyses of skill categories have rarely been connected to the notion of literacy.

Indeed, over the past decade or so, the principal analyses of adult literacy have come not from academics at all, or even from community advocates as in past, but rather from employer groups, business councils, and other labor-market and economic think tanks. Their interest in literacy is reflected in mainstream newspapers and magazines in North America, featuring articles with rhetorical headlines such as “Literacy Problems Cost U.S. Companies $60 Billion Annually in Lost Productivity . . . What’s Your Company Doing About It?” (Baynton 2001).

Under pressure from the business community, national governments of many political stripes have begun to pay more attention to literacy. Some, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, have moved to develop more comprehensive national policy frameworks (Jackson 2005b). Even more significant may be the actions of supranational policy bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and UNESCO, which have supported the Canadian government in developing the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the U.S. government in creating the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The objective of this survey process is to measure and profile literacy levels among the working-age population in more than thirty countries across the world. The first round of these surveys began in 1994, with the most recent version, called the Adult Life Skills Survey (ALSS), starting to report in 2003 with data from seven countries, including the United States and Canada (see National Center for Education Statistics 2003; Statistics Canada 2003; OECD and Statistics Canada 1997, 2000).

Results from these surveys have caught the attention of governments across the industrialized world, particularly the claim that large portions of the working-age populations do not have adequate literacy levels to support everyday life and work. Depending on the country and which iteration of the surveys is cited, between one-third and more than two-thirds of adult populations in countries surveyed¹ are said to lack the minimum skill level (Level 3) considered by experts to be suitable for coping with the increasing demands of the emerging knowledge society and the information economy (OECD and Statistics Canada 1995). American newspapers reported sensationally that “half of America’s adults are functionally illiterate!” (Sticht 2001a).

There have been many controversies among experts about the methodology, reliability, and meanings of the findings of these surveys (Sticht 2001a, 2001b). Perhaps the point that gained the most attention was the large disparity reported between measured performance on a set of task-based test items and the views about performance ability expressed in the self-assessment portion of the survey. Respondents were asked how well their reading, writing, and numeracy skills met the demands of their daily lives and work. Quite consistently, adults believed their own skills to be much higher than their measured performance. For example, in the United States, among adults rated by the first NALS test results as being in the bottom two categories (Levels 1 and 2) of literacy functioning, most reported that “they could read and write English ‘well’ or ‘very well’” (Sticht 2001a). Similarly, in Canada, among adults assessed as being at Level 1 on the task performance scale, almost half (48 percent) rated themselves as having “excellent” or “good” reading skills, and only 22 percent said their skills were “poor” (Sticht 2001b: 21). Other contrasting reports have long been reported elsewhere in the academic literature (Prinsloo and Breier 1996; Darville 1999) and are familiar to literacy practitioners. According to Darville (1999), “Whatever IALS measures, it is neither people’s general abilities to function, nor their abilities to use reading in situations where they have occasion to” (p. 281).

These anomalies in survey results have produced quite different reactions among some government officials. As one senior official in the Canadian government, speaking on a panel at a government sponsored conference on literacy in 2002, observed, “People are illiterate, and they don’t even know it! This is very dangerous!”² For this official, the problem is self-evident: the test scores are simply right, and individuals are simply wrong about their own abilities. But, for our purposes in this essay, this talk of danger and blame offers not an explanation but more puzzling data. What might be going on behind these heated controversies and official alarm about a “literacy crisis” in Canada and elsewhere?

In the following pages, we aim to shed light on this puzzle by looking first at what the literature can tell us about changing uses of text at work and then by exploring a concrete example of an electronics manufacturing workplace. In both parts, we will show how the concept of literacy can function as an ideological construct that obscures powerful interests at play in even routine job tasks of a “high-performance” workplace.

High-Performance Work

Volumes have been written in the past two decades about workplace restructuring, revealing a sea change in the philosophy of management for workplaces of all kinds, both private- and public-sector. The manufacturing sector has been central to these developments, with the decline of mass production and the emergence of new approaches to the theory and (sometimes) practice of manufacturing, known variously as post-Fordism, flexible or lean production, agile manufacturing, high performance, or just “the new workplace.” All of these terms refer in various ways to evolving approaches to increasing productivity through more intensive management of both material and human resources, largely influenced since the 1980s by the so-called Japanese manufacturing revolution.³

In this chapter we use the term “high performance” to refer broadly to this climate of pressure to do “more with less.” High-performance workplaces are said to operate in a highly competitive market by changing quickly in response to customer needs and by competing on the basis of quality assurance (QA) as well as cost (Womack et al. 1990). In this context, “quality” has a technical meaning defined by ISO certification (International Organization for Standards), operationalized as adherence to standard operating procedures (SOP), and demonstrated through systematic recording of production data on the shop floor. Achieving this standard depends heavily on prescribed use of text, either paper or electronic, by front-line workers. Maintaining ISO certification requires regular on-site audits to ensure conformity with ISO standards, and failure to pass an audit can mean a serious threat to staying in business.

A second and closely related aspect of high-performance production is continuous improvement (CI). Like quality assurance, CI is a highly technical practice involving the systematic use of an ongoing cycle of planning, executing, checking, and refining operations to improve efficiencies and to eliminate waste in all aspects of the production process. All this depends on intensive recordkeeping and is referred to in the Japanese management literature as “speaking with data” (Imai 1997: 197). Data come from many sources, including the most routine use of charts, checklists, and logbooks, sometimes computerized, as part of the daily work tasks of employees in all kinds of workplaces. Thus, whether by hand or by computer, “speaking with data” also depends centrally on literacy practices of front-line workers.

These connections among ISO, CI, and the use of text are at the center of the widespread concern about a “literacy crisis” at work (Belfiore et al. 2004; Jackson 2000/2001). Until the 1990s, production environments often involved very little paperwork. Production control was exercised through an oral culture of supervision. But today, all that has changed. Supervisors, team leaders, and even some middle managers in the high-performance workplace are caught between the competing demands of “getting the product out the door” and doing the paperwork. Shop-floor workers commonly see the paperwork as an add-on and a second priority, while for senior managers and quality assurance experts, the data— in the form of paper or electronic text—are increasingly the form of work that counts. The texts increasingly stand in for the product and mediate business relationships through real-time and just-in-time communications between suppliers and customers. Thus, the use of text, electronic or paper, in this setting is inseparable from the exercise of managerial power.

To show how all this works in real life, we turn to Bonnie’s experience in an electronics manufacturing firm. She shows us how the demands of reading and writing in this setting are embedded in a textual organization of work that is complex and highly contested. From this vantage point, we see that the charge of “literacy problems” arises less as a description of the actual education and performance abilities of individuals than as an ideological construct that blames certain workers for the tensions and competing interests in workplace life.

The “Hell on My Face”

When I was asked by Nancy and Tim⁴ if I had enjoyed my job as a team leader on an electronic manufacturing assembly line, I scowled and said, “Can’t you tell by the hell on my face?” Tim leaned forward in his chair and said, “Hmm, could you tell us about that?” As I described my former workplace and the frustrations I had experienced, Nancy and Tim asked me questions about how my workplace functioned. When they first asked me about the role of texts, I told them that there weren’t many texts; I remembered instructional manuals and logbooks, but they seemed relatively unimportant to me in terms of my daily activities and responsibilities. However, as we continued our dialogue about my work in the plant, we discovered that texts were profoundly important, both to understanding the nature of the work and to identifying my frustrations with my job. Here I will try to make those tensions visible.

For seven years, I worked in a large, global, ISO9001-registered electronics contract manufacturing company. I was one of approximately fifty surface mount technology (SMT) team leaders in the plant whose job was to lead a small team of workers through the first manufacturing step in the production of electronic circuit boards, such as memory cards and motherboards. The physical work of making circuit boards was relatively straightforward, since the processes for each machine and each product were documented in manufacturing instructions (MIs); although there were wide variations in the types of products that we built, the process itself was highly prescribed.

Adherence to standardized operating procedures (SOP) is a cornerstone of the ISO9001 approach. Texts, or, more specifically, “controlled documents,” were the vehicle for achieving standardization of work processes within one plant, as well as among geographically distant plants. All approved procedures for each stage of the production needed to be explicitly documented. The MIs, for example, contained product-specific process steps, including details on which parts should be on the board, how much solder paste should be applied, and how to handle the boards.

At the beginning of each shift, my first responsibility was to check the production board to find out which product we were building. My second task was to print all the relevant MIs to ensure that the team had the most current set of instructions. Not only did all processes have to be documented, but each document had an “owner” (rather than an author), a number, and a revision number. An owner of a document was the person, usually a process engineer, who was responsible for the correct maintenance of the document in compliance with ISO. As team leader, it was my responsibility to ensure that the team was using the correct revision number of the document; this requirement meant that most team leaders printed a new set of documents each shift just to be safe. In theory, we were allowed to do only what was detailed in the MI; in practice, there were often more effective ways to get the work done. Yet, if we were audited by a quality specialist or internal ISO auditor and asked why we were doing something in particular, we would need to be able to show the relevant section of the appropriate document to justify our actions. These documentary requirements were essential in order for the plant to maintain the ISO9001 certification. Thus, documents governed our work both by defining the acceptable range of our actions and by curbing our discretion.⁵

At the same time, workers were also active producers of texts in the workplace. The SMT line proce...