Showing papers on "Deskilling published in 2007"

Agricultural Deskilling and the Spread of Genetically Modified Cotton in Warangal

Abstract: Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh, India, is a key cotton‐growing area in one of the most closely watched arenas of the global struggle over genetically modified crops. In 2005 farmers adopted India’s first genetically modified crop, Bt cotton, in numbers that resemble a fad. Various parties, including the biotechnology firm behind the new technology, interpret the spread as the result of farmer experimentation and management skill, alluding to orthodox innovation‐diffusion theory. However, a multiyear ethnography of Warangal cotton farmers shows a striking pattern of localized, ephemeral cotton seed fads preceding the spread of the genetically modified seeds. The Bt cotton fad is symptomatic of systematic disruption of the process of experimentation and development of management skill. In fact, Warangal cotton farming offers a case study in agricultural deskilling, a process that differs in fundamental ways from the better‐known process of industrial deskilling. In terms of cultural evolutionary theory, ...

‘Joining the BBC (British Bottom Cleaners)’: Zimbabwean Migrants and the UK Care Industry

Abstract: This article contributes to the literature on 'global care chains' by examining the narratives of Zimbabwean women and men working as carers in the UK. It investigates why social care has become an important focus of employment for Zimbabweans, and explores the means by which migrants of different legal status have negotiated work in a diverse sector. The article explores the experiences of a highly educated, middle-class migrant group, who left their country in the context of deepening economic and political crisis. Some Zimbabweans have been able to use transnational mobility and care work as a means of coping, finding opportunities to meet family obligations and personal ambitions, while entrepreneurs have found openings to set up in business as care agencies, providing work for their compatriots and others. Yet the article also emphasises the stress and deskilling most Zimbabwean care workers have experienced in trying to support themselves and dependents through excessive hours of low-status and often poorly paid work, the strain of working in strongly feminised and racialised workplaces, and the insecurities and abuse produced by informality, including 'tied' and other forms of labour exploitation. There is a need for greater attention to be paid to the dynamics of race and gender in social care workplaces, and to means of securing the rights of migrant careworkers, who are playing an increasingly important role in caring for some of the most vulnerable members of British society.

The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade

Abstract: Many people who look at art today decry it for the lack of craft skill in its production, whether it be painting, photography or sculpture. In "Intangibilities of Form", John Roberts sheds an entirely new light on this obsolescence of traditional craft skills in contemporary art, exploring the technological and social developments that gave rise to those postmodern theories that suggest that art may not require an author and certainly not one with any technical ability. Envisioning Marcel Duchamp as a theorist of artistic labour, Roberts describes how he opened up new circuits of authorship to the artist. He then looks at how these approaches proliferated in art after the 1960s and in the rise of Conceptual art. In explaining why the question of authorship has been so fundamental to avant-garde art and neo-avant-garde in the 20th century, "The Intangibilities of Form" is a formidable history of the hidden labours of the artwork.

Restructuring Teachers’ Work and Trade Union Responses in England: Bargaining for Change?

Abstract: A key feature of current school-sector reform in England is the restructuring of teachers’ work and the increased use of support staff to undertake a range of activities previously undertaken by teachers. Supporters speak of a new teacher professionalism focused on the “core task” of teaching. Critics fear deprofessionalization through a process of deskilling, work intensification, and labor substitution. This article uses labor process theory and empirical data to analyze recent developments in teachers’ work and links these to the different ways in which teacher trade unions have bargained over reform. The article argues that workforce reform cannot be analyzed separately from the trade union strategies that seek to influence policy and that the emergence of a type of “reform unionism” in England represents the integration of product and process in policy.

Overseas nurses in the National Health Service: a process of deskilling.

Abstract: Aims and objectives. This paper shows that overseas nurses (OSN) recruited to UK hospital trusts become deskilled in technical aspects of clinical practice. Background. Existing research reports that many newly recruited OSN are prevented from using technical skills acquired in training abroad, to the detriment of the National Health Service (NHS) and the concern of the nurses themselves. Design. The author conducted case study work in three NHS hospital trusts in the northwest of England. The findings reported are part of a wider investigation into the assimilation1 of OSN from the Philippines, India and Spain into NHS hospitals. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with members of four groups of actors: managers, OSN, home nurses (HN) and mentors, which were analysed thematically. Results. The research confirms the finding that many OSN are prevented from using technical skills in the UK, but also suggests reasons why this is so. The finding of deskilling emerged strongly in all three cases and is singled out for discussion in this paper. Conclusions. The experience of OSN highlights ambiguity surrounding the role of the nurse in British hospitals. This arises partly because OSN tend to be recruited to the bottom grades of nursing in the NHS, where their technical skills are underused. Relevance to clinical practice. Segmentation within the nursing hierarchy contributes to the conflicting messages and mismatch of expectations experienced by nurses at the ward level, regarding the role of the nurse.

Education make you fick, innit?: what's gone wrong in England's schools, colleges and universities and how to start putting it right

Abstract: This book connects teachers and students in schools, colleges and universities in England and Wales to ask what has happened to education in a mass system of lifelong learning from primary to postgraduate schooling. It explains how allegations of 'dumbing down' and deskilling contrast with claims of rising standards for a world class workforce, showing how education has become the main means of social control in an increasingly divided and self-destructive society. Rather than emancipating the minds of future generations, it forecloses their possibilities. In this sense, Education Make You Fick, Innit? Ainley and Allen argue that to understand how this occurred and what can be done about it the system has to be understood as a whole. What is happening in schools makes sense only in relation to similar systems of management and control in FE and HE where privatisation in particular is in many ways more advanced. They detail successive perversions of the comprehensive ideal for schools to the latest 'personalisation' agenda that stretches across the new raised leaving age of 18, showing how competition and control combine to set institutions and individuals against one another in a market for inflated qualifications. They reject the relentless testing and selection of students in prolonged training that still does not guarantee employment. From their experience of teaching and researching in schools, FE and HE, the authors call for democratic control to reverse privatisation and maintain free provision so as to remain true to the Enlightenment ideal of understanding society in order to change it.

White-Collar Proletariat? Braverman, the Deskilling/Upskilling of Social Work and the Paradoxical Life of the Agency Care Manager

Abstract: • Summary: This paper considers the experience of a small cohort of agency care managers 1 (N = 23) in the context of the ongoing debate about the deskilling of social work. Evidence is presented and discussed in relation to post-war studies of the labour process and asks whether Braverman's proposition that deskilling is an inevitable outcome of capitalism's labour process has any relevance in explaining whether agency social workers are `white-collar proletarians' or not.• Findings: The article identifies that there have been important changes to the social work labour process, including the regimes of care/case management and the subsequent intensification of employee workloads and deskilling (particularly for agency workers). However, for agency workers there are important processes that have stood to contain the full impact of proletarianization.• Applications : The evidence provided suggests that 1) social work is still experiencing significant forces of change which continue to extend the process o...

The Learning City in a "Planet of Slums".

Abstract: This paper considers the implications of current notions of the learning city. It argues that popular neoliberal ideologies create an environment in which lifelong learners strive for the learning city as an end product, both in production and for consumption, rather than embrace it as a living, social context. The rhetoric of the knowledge economy ideologues is very narrowly construed but at the same time politically powerful and, despite clearly documented effects of globalized capitalism such as massive deskilling, tremendous structural unemployment and vast (and rapidly growing) urban slums, the dominant economistic paradigms and power structures make critical reconsideration very difficult. Some adult educators, like those in Hume City, Australia, or of the Shikshantar Institute in Udaipur, India, who hold a wider, critical view of lifelong learning, are promoting the learning city not as an end but as a social process of participation and negotiation.

Marx, Machines and Skill

Abstract: of technology on skill requirements.' Marx's name figures prominently in this research as a theorist and prophet of the dehumanization and deskilling of work under capitalism. Indeed, it is now considered almost obvious that Marx, rightly or wrongly, saw capitalist development and use of machinery as tending to--and at least to some extent designed to--reduce skill requirements.2 This article argues that distinguishing more carefully between theory and polemic in Marx's writing and between short-term processes and long-term trends in Marx's theory reveals the possibility of a quite different reading. Apart from its exegetical merits, this new reading offers a theoretically provocative and surprisingly optimistic perspective on the longer-term trend in skill requirements under capitalist conditions.

Les Infirmières Exclusives and Migrant Quasi-Nurses in Greece

Abstract: The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the `nursing profession' in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways in which a rudimentary welfare state and a large informal economy have created the demand for les infirmieres exclusives and for `quasi-nurses'. The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate this informal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant women themselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their deskilling, exploitation, marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that these processes take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicity and class, as sexism intersects with different forms of `othering' and racialization processes in the destination country. The position of these women is also located in terms of ethnic and national boundaries.

Automation Skill and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: Braverman's landmark study, Labor and Monopoly CapitaL (1974) opened a fruitful arena for research with its argument that close study of the labor process could yield insight into the trajectory of the capitalist form of society. However, the empirical implausibility of his deskilling diagnosis has prompted later researchers to leave behind any effort to characterize long-run, aggregate tendencies and to focus instead on local studies and on the sources of cross-section variations in labor control systems. This article develops a new conceptual basis for better addressing the larger historical issues raised by Braverman. I argue that Braverman 's skill yardstick - the craftsman - is increasingly obsolete. I develop an alternative framework that comprises a quantitative dimension of skill - substantive complexity as measured by training-time requirements - and three qualitative dimensions - responsibility, abstractness and interdependence. The banking case and other case studies re-read in this light suggest that competitive pressures force managers to seek out more productive ways of implementing automation, and these ways typically (although not always) involve more training, higher levels of responsibility, more abstract tasks and goals, and greater functional interdependence. These trends in automation's impact on skill requirements undermine the effectiveness of traditional personnel management practices. In doing so, these trends simultaneously undermine the viability of the commodity form of labor-power and create the premise of alternative post-capitalist forms of organization.

The Turn to Public Sociology: The Case of U.S. Labor Studies

Abstract: THE TURN TO PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY: THE CASE OF U.S. LABOR STUDIES. 1 Michael Burawoy I N the US, 1974 marked the beginning of a great transformation. In labor studies it was the year of the publication of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, and the launching of a Marxist research program focused on the labor process. Braverman turned away from all subjectivist views of work to proclaim his famous deskilling hypothesis, namely the history of monopoly capitalism was the history of the degradation of work. True or false, it was a decisive break with narrowly conceived industrial sociology and timeless organization theory. 1974 also marked a major recession in the US economy and the onset of an economic and then a political assault on labor that would throw Braverman’s claims into relief. More broadly, this birth of neoliberalism, capitalism’s third wave of marketization, would deeply affect both the labor movement and the focus of academic research. It is the changing relationship among economic and political context, labor movement and labor studies that preoccupies this paper. The rupture with professional sociology marked by Labor and Monopoly Capital, and the research program it inaugurated, was followed by a transition, some 20 years later, from the study of the labor process to an engagement with the labor movement. This transition to public sociology has been one of the more exciting developments in an otherwise heavily professionalized discipline and a generally bleak labor scene. Yet the shift of focus from structure to agency, from process to movement, from a critical- professional sociology to a critical-public sociology of labor occurred in the very period of the labor movement’s greatest decline -- the percentage of the labor force unionized in the private sector fell precipitously from 23.6% in 1974 to 7.4% by 2006. 2 Why should sociologists devote themselves to a labor movement that was fast becoming extinct? Sociologists, after all, have always been interested in movements in ascendance not in decline! The paradox begins to unravel if one recognizes how the labor movement was itself responding to the challenge of third-wave marketization. The 1973-1974 recession spelled the demise of class compromise and hegemonic production politics that had arisen in the post-war period. Capital, aided and abetted by the state, was making an unrelenting assault on union organization through the 1980s. Confronting their own demise, labor leaders set about rethinking strategic options, with the result that a large fraction of the labor movement turned from business unionism to social movement unionism, from servicing existing members to organizing new members, from catering to Paper to be presented at the TASA/SAANZ Conference, Auckland, December 4-7, 2007. All unionization figures are taken from Hirsch (forthcoming) and the data appendix that accompanies that paper. See http://www.unionstats.com/

Beyond Agricultural Deskilling and the Spread of Genetically Modified Cotton in Warangal. Discussion and Author's reply

Abstract: Stone’s (CA 48:67–103) major claim is that the rapid spread of genetically modified cotton in Warangal hampered the individual and social learning important to the agricultural skilling process. Though his use of the concept of agricultural deskilling is fascinating, he does not provide adequate and appropriate empirical data to support his claims. Astonishingly, his ethnographic research does not consider any aspect of the existing agrarian structure, such as caste, class gender, political representation, age, and educational level. He treats farmers as a homogeneous category. In fact, he does not really offer us a sociology of which farmers have and have not adopted Bt cotton, their socioeconomic status, or even whose skills and what skills have been lost. Even if we ignore these structural and sociological questions, all three aspects of deskilling that Stone has proposed— inconsistency, unrecognizability, and rapid change of technology—are not peculiar to Bt cotton but equally relevant to all hybrid varieties. Stone does not explain how Bt cotton is different from non-Bt hybrid cotton varieties in terms of agricultural deskilling. Likewise, while deskilling can occur at each and every stage of a peasant’s agricultural operations, from preproduction and production to marketing of the final product, Stone focuses merely on the adoption of seeds. Finally, his modernist assertion (p. 97) that the “loss of an obsolete skill set does not constitute agricultural deskilling” raises the question who decides whose skills and what skills are productive or obsolete and how a productive skill becomes obsolete. From a neoliberal modernization point of view, any skill set of a farmer or a worker that hinders the expansion of the market is obsolete and must be destroyed, but this is assertion, not analysis. Stone argues that the farmers of Warangal do not make substantial experimental trials in their fields—the basis of environmental learning—to discover whether adopting Bt cotton is good, bad, or simply a fad. Here I find his method unsound. To determine whether farmers were conducting any experiments, I interviewed them and looked at their year-toyear farming profiles to see how many acres of land they

Changing Skill Intensity in Australian Industry

Abstract: This article examines the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the changing cognitive skill structure of industry in Australia for the period 1991 to 2001. Indices of cognitive skill for industry based on Census employment data are used. Changes in mean industry cognitive skill levels are analysed, as are the relative contributions of changes to the occupational structure within industry and changes to the industry structure of employment. Main findings indicate that the drivers of skill change differed substantially between the two Census periods and prior to 1996 the majority of the change was due to shifts towards industries with a more highly skilled workforce. After 1996 changes in the economy-wide skill level were dominated by within-industry changes in occupational composition. This coincided with a sharp pickup in the rate of capital expenditure on information and communication technologies. The increasing use of part-time employment overall had a deskilling effect.

'De-skilling' the 1891 Censuses in New South Wales and Tasmania

Abstract: The 1891 censuses taken in New South Wales and Tasmania abandoned the long-established practice of grouping working-class occupations into “skilled” and “unskilled” categories. Instead, they were grouped into “Industrial” categories that did not differentiate between grades or degrees of skill. In this paper the sudden disruption to the preceding practice is explained as an effect of the intersection of two histories: the changing meaning of skill, and the history of scientific method. The paper traces the transformations in meanings of skill from an “artisanal” to an “industrial” form and examines how the two central figures in the construction of the 1891 census — the statisticians T.A Coghlan and R.M Johnston — were enmeshed in that history. Coghlan is usually given the more prominent role in accounts of late nineteenth-century statistics, but in this case Johnston's expertise in using scientific method was instrumental in the “deskilling” of the census.

Are clerical workers proletarian? A case study of the Australian Public Service.

Abstract: This paper explores whether clerical workers have been proletarianized by using the Australian Public Service (APS) as a case study It shows that before the late 1980s the market, work and status situations of APS clerks were predominantly proletarian since they were typified by limited career prospects, low skill requirements, restricted autonomy; low organizational status and estrangement from senior management This proletarian class situation was reflected in an order taker's culture of informality, cynicism, hedonism and alienation Since the late 1980s however technological change and workplace restructuring have markedly reduced the number of unskilled and lower paid jobs in the APS, thereby belying widespread predictions of deskilling I conclude that proletarianization is more likely to have arisen from a decline in the status of clerical work during the course of the twentieth century rather than from a process of deskilling Notwithstanding the fact that their class situations were predominantly proletarian, most clerks have identified as middle class We can attribute this not only to the fact that their class situations differ from those of manual workers, as noted by Lockwood, but also to a widespread tendency to identify as middle class, the tendency of many female clerks to base their class identity on their husband's occupation and the fact that popular stereotypes tend to equate class with occupation It is difficult to decide if clerks are proletarian since 1 Their class situations display a mixture of proletarian and middle-class characteristics 2 They exhibit diverse class identities, social origins, marriage partners and cultural attributes and 3 They occupy different positions on different aspects of inequality We are therefore unable to allocate them en bloc to a single uniform class I conclude that while a minority of clerks are proletarian most are better described as middle class

Deskilling of junior doctors

Abstract: Self-harm assessment is an integral part of any psychiatric training. The traditional training model of junior doctors has mainly focused on independent assessments routinely carried out in A&E and acute psychiatric units. However, nowadays, most self-harm assessments are carried out by the crisis

From Gutenberg to Gates: a study of socio-technical change in the Edinburgh printing industry.

Abstract: Printing has a long and illustrious history as a craft industry. This study explores the effects of technological change on skilled workers in the Edinburgh general printing industry. Three, initially distinct, areas of sociological theory concerning technological change shaped the research questions. These were, firstly, to establish the nature of recent technological change, and what drives it; secondly, to explore managers’ decision-making in relation to such changes; and thirdly, to understand how workers’ experiences of work, and their relationships at work, have changed with these changes in technology. My findings are based on three waves of investigations carried out over fifteen years, using responses from both managerial and shop-floor staff in five selected companies. This was done initially through questionnaires and later through semi-structured interviews. At Wave One (1991-92), most companies had made initial changes towards sophisticated computerisation, which had become embedded by Wave Two (1996-97). By Wave Three (2005-06) there was an ongoing programme of continual updating of these established systems constrained by the need to maintain compatibility with the computer systems used by customers due to the global hegemony of computer manufacturers. However, the effects upon workers were unexpected. Computerised typesetting programs inevitably brought deskilling, but original skills, learnt and used by workers over many years of rapidly changing technology, did remain relevant, and the acquisition of new skills associated with computerisation was regarded favourably. The most significant change for workers was the increased pressure resulting from a close relationship with customers, with vastly reduced time allowed for each job, and some erosion of workers’ capacity (and managers’) to produce work which satisfied their own standards of quality. The three, originally separate, themes converged to show that the particular nature of computerised technology used in this sector of the printing industry has led to a change in the traditional capitalist production relationship. These workers were not alienated, their skills had not been entirely lost, as neo-Marxist labour process theory would suggest. Rather, relationships between managers and these skilled shop-floor workers were characterised by mutual respect and understanding of the need for collaboration, not conflict, in the face of external hostile pressures.