This commentary was originally posted on the “Work in Progress” blog of the
American Sociological Association’s Organizations, Occupations, and Work
Secretion. It’s a terrific blog, and I recommend it to anyone interested in
issues related to contemporary work.
***
If that venerable debunker of
inflated language, George Orwell, were alive today, he would gleefully be ripping
into the lingo of the “new economy,” particularly taking aim at the gaseous
hyperbole associated with digital technology.
To be sure, the last half-century has
been a time of significant changes in the organization and technologies of
work, and these changes have had huge consequences for workers. But the typical
depictions of those changes misrepresent the complex nature of work and the
workers who do it. The standard story line—found in political speech, opinion
pages, and countless popular books on the new economy—is familiar to the
readers of this blog.
The story begins with a historical divide
between the new economy we live in and the old economy of
heavy manufacturing and traditional services—the first of many simplified
binaries. The new economy gives rise to new kinds of work—knowledge work, symbolic
analysis—and a new kind of highly educated worker. Those workers in
front-line jobs also need to be smarter, possessing both hard skills (computer
literacy, problem solving ability, specialized knowledge) and soft
skills (flexibility, curiosity, ability to communicate). These
are 21st century skillsfor a 21st century
economy, neck up work versus the neck down labor
of an old economy built on brawn, repetition, and control. Consider this not
atypical summary from an award-winningmanagement book, “Whereas organizations operating in the
Industrial Age required a contribution of employees’ hands alone, in the Information
Age intellect and passion—mind and heart—are also essential.” Workers didn’t
think before 1980.
The dark revelation in this story is that
we lack sufficient workers for these new jobs; there is a skills
mismatch between the smart workers we need versus the old economy
workers we inherit or the undereducated young people coming out of school.
The smart corporation is structured (or
is restructuring itself) so that it maximizes the skills of these 21st century
workers, both at the high levels of product innovation and creativity and on
the front line of production, drawing on their skills to improve quality and
efficiency. The new corporation is flexible, nimble, and lean, its
leaders vigilant to cut costs through consolidation, sub-contracting, and
outsourcing – and to respond quickly to changes in market demand.
As with any grand narrative, there are
gaps and distortions in this one. It is unclear, for example, how many new
economy companies actually draw on a broad array of their workers’ skills, or,
for all the talk about the demand for 21st century workers,
the highest job growth has been in low-wage,
low-tech areas:
restaurant servers, nursing home aids, retail salespersons. There are also
a host of challengesto the skills mismatch theory: industries
have stripped away in-house training that once developed necessary skills; or
overstate the skills requirements for particular jobs; or, simply, won’t pay an
adequate wage for the skilled workers who are available.
What is telling is that in most
renderings of this narrative you won’t hear from workers themselves,
particularly the old economy folk. They are present only as an abstraction, and
certainly had no hand in crafting or amending the story. So questionable
features of the story—such as the characterization of old economy work as
mindless—go pretty much unchallenged in mainstream accounts of the new economy.
One of the things that most concerns me
about this story is that, as in a morality tale, there are the damned and
redeemed, the deficient and the virtuous. Old economy workers, unless they can
be retrained and up-skilled, are the problem, as are younger workers coming in
the door without the requisite hard and soft skills. These workers are not only
the losers in their own economic lives, they also collectively weaken our national
position in the monumental contest of the global economy.
Consider, in contrast, the portrayal of
those working in high-tech, not the factory workers—certainly not them—but the
small slice of engineers, designers, and programmers. They are teased for their
geekiness and occasionally chided for their insularity, but, by and large, are
depicted as exceedingly smart, hard-working, entrepreneurial (all true) and as
the youthful embodiment of an innovative and prosperous future, filled with
technological wonders. Here is where the language glides off the rails.
Consider this opening to a special report on tech startups in the January 18,
2014 Economist:
About 540 million years ago something
happened on planet earth: life forms began to multiply, leading to what is
known as the “Cambrian explosion.” Until then sponges and other simple
creatures had the planet largely to themselves, but within a few million years
the animal kingdom became much more varied.
This special report will argue that
something similar is now happening in the virtual realm: an entrepreneurial
explosion.
I
get it. The author is trying to convey the combinatorial power of the elements
in our tech ecosystem. But do we really have to look back 540 million years to
find a fitting analogue for a Stanford or MIT graduate using open source
devices and services to create another social networking app? Where is Orwell?
Fortunately, there is growing criticism of both the tech enterprise itself
and of the hype surrounding it—and the Economist feature, in the midst of its
celebration, acknowledges these liabilities: the 90% failure rate for startups,
the adolescent culture and gender imbalance, the questionable societal value of
many of high-tech’s products and services.
What I don’t hear much in the criticism
of high-tech—nor in the more careful treatments of the nature of the current
economy—is the issue I mentioned a moment ago: the way the average worker gets
represented in our society’s narratives about work in our time. I’ve been
writing a new preface for my study of the thinking involved in blue collar and
service occupations, The Mind at Work, and simultaneously I’ve been reading
story after story about our society’s best and brightest going into finance or
tech, about “entrepreneurship,” “innovation,” and “disruption,” about the smart
machine and the workerless workplace, and about the astounding amounts of money
that fuel these developments. What strikes me is the degree to which the average
worker—typically the “old economy” worker—comes across either directly or by
implication as not smart enough, not disciplined enough, not skilled enough,
not young enough, and, simply, not cool enough.
The way a society talks and writes about
work matters. The new economy discourse contains many truths about
transformations in the workplace, but its simplifications and excesses
contribute to the diminishment of entire categories of workers, providing a
rhetorical backdrop for flattened salaries and two-tier pay scales, for the
cutting of hours and benefits, for inequality. In mainstream tales of the new
economy, these workers do not represent promise, tomorrow’s cutting edge. The
are sub-par and need fixing–and are to blame for the bad deal they’re getting.
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