Although social scientists have long believed that mechanization degrades skills, they disagree on the meaning and measurement of skills. A dominant view stresses that capitalists simplify skills to increase efficiency and profits; another, that managers deskill jobs to increase control over workers and work organization. Although case studies document the disappearance of many crafts during the industrial transformation of Britain and the United States, they do not show that skills as a whole declined. Recent historical studies reveal that industrialization may have created as many new skills as it destroyed, that early manufacturing used many traditional skills, and that new industrial skills were genuine. They also show that scientific management deskilled workers slightly and that management successfully wrested control of work organization from the traditional crafts. Twentieth-century census data reveal little aggregate compositional change in the skill distribution of major occupations. Short-term ...

On the Degradation of Skills

This paper examines the relationship between work organization and stratification processes, specifically, the dimensions and determinants of workers' technical roles. Four dimensions of worker-technology relations emphasized in previous research are analyzed: skill and variety, diversity, technical interdependence, and control over work pacing. We find pervasive gender differences in the forces affecting worker-machine relations: ascriptive characteristics and schooling are more decisive for women; and, because there is a more rigid differentiation among women's technical roles, occupational and job characteristics exert a greater influence on relations to machines and technology than is the case for male workers. Results indicate that individual attributes minimally affect workers' positions within the technical division of labor;factors governing the organization of jobs and firms are more decisive. The implications of these results for theoretical debates and future research concerning work and inequality are discussed.

Workers and Machines: Dimensions and Determinants of Technical Relations in the Workplace

Worker involvement in implementing new technology

Postwar literature reveals that sociologists disagree on the composition of the working class and neglect to specify relationships among its manual, clerical, and service workers. Contrary to Marxi...

Sociological Research and the American Working Class

Research on the effects of technological change on work has generated a wide and confusing array of findings. A key problem to date has been the lack of large-scale studies of the relationship between mechanization and work characteristics. This study analyzes this relationship using data from the 1980 Census of Population. The results are mixed: work characteristics in more mechanized industries compared to less mechanized industries are higher in some dimensions and lower in others. A path model approach allows aggregation of these mixed results. Using wages as a yardstick, and controlling for other determinants of wages, we find that the work characteristics of more mechanized industries are upgraded in the aggregate, compared to those in less mechanized industries. @ 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Ben B. Seligman

Papers

Technological Advance in an Expanding Economy