Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches

Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches

PAT ARMSTRONG

York University

Je m’appuie sur l’economie politique feministe pour argumenter qu’ilnous faut changer notre approche. Au lieu de nous concentrer sur lesstructures du travail axees sur la dequalification et le controle de lamaind’œuvre ou sur les individus et leur apprentissage formel, nousdevons nous interroger sur les conditions qui empechent les individusd’acquerir et d’utiliser les competences voulues et reflechir aux differentsmoyens de tenir compte du facteur temps dans la facon d’evaluer lescompetences. Notre article se veut d’abord une intervention theoriquedans le debat sur les competences, mais qui prend racine dans unepreoccupation tres concrete : les competences requises dans le domainedes soins de sante.

Using a feminist political economy lens, I argue that there is a need tochange how we approach skills in political economy. Instead of focusingsolely on labor processes that deskill and limit control (as much of therich political economy literature does, in this journal and elsewhere), oron individualized formal learning (as much of the management literaturedoes), we need to ask what prevents people from developing and usingthe skills they need for their work, and how time can be factored intoskill assessment. The argument is theoretical, but grows out of apractical concern with skills in health care.

AS PATRICIA MARCHAK (1985) explained to readers of the CanadianReview of Sociology and Anthropology (CRSA) nearly three decades ago,Canadian political economy “became the intellectual label under which asubstantial portion of feminist studies took place” (p. 674). A special issuein November 1975 was dedicated to women in the Canadian social struc-ture, and at least three of the articles were framed by what is now calledfeminist political economy (Armstrong and Armstrong 1975; Gaskell 1975;Smith 1975). From the 1970s on, work has been a central focus of Canadianfeminist political economy, including the “work of creating the concepts and

Pat Armstrong, Department of Sociology, 2118 Vari Hall, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto,ON, Canada M3J 1P3. E-mail: [email protected]

C© 2013 Canadian Sociological Association/ La Societe canadienne de sociologie

Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches 257

categories” (Smith 1975:353). In the pages of this journal, feminist polit-ical economists have explored occupational segregation (Armstrong andArmstrong 1975; Boyd 1982; Fox and Fox 1987), unions (Creese 1996;Marchak 1973), gender consciousness at work (Livingstone and Luxton1989; Northcott and Lowe 1987), domestic labor (Sinclair and Felt 1992),class (Carroll 1987; Li 1992), volunteers (Mellow 2007), flexibilization(Shalla 2004), income (Goyer 1981), and discourses related to workplaceideology (Gazso 2004) and education (Gaskell 1975) to name only some is-sues taken up from this perspective. In the process, they have contributedto and sparked international developments. However, as I reviewed all theCRSA issues since 1964 in search of political economy, it became clear thatvery few authors from any perspective in the journal have considered thequestion of skill. When they have, skill has been most often simply equatedwith level of formal education (Jones 1980). One exception is an article byJohn Myles (1988), which uses but does not challenge “self-reported skillrequirements from the Canadian Class Structure Survey” (p. 335).

Yet, skill is central to the analysis of work and has long been a puzzlefor policy makers, managers sociologists, and political economists, amongothers (Attewell 1990; Rinehart 1975; Thompson and van den Broek 2010).The theoretical debates are often quite abstract, but they are none-the-less critical because what is understood as skill has fundamental con-sequences not only for how work is organized and rewarded, but alsofor the quality of goods and services that result. These debates often re-flect as well as expose assumptions about gender, racialization, and dis-ability. Discussions of skill at all levels of abstraction are full of confu-sions and tensions, resulting in large measure from the complex natureof skill.

For this special issue, I decided to focus on skill both because it is socentral to feminist political economy issues and because there are so manyconceptual issues still to be resolved. The main tenets and contributionsof Canadian political economy in general and feminist political economyin particular have been effectively covered in multiple publications (see,e.g., Andrew et al. 2003; Clement 1997, 2001; Clement and Myles, 1994;Clement and Vosko 2002). I am more interested now in looking forwardthan looking back, but in ways that search through the past to draw outcritical themes and insights rather than trace some chronological develop-ment. This article is, thus, an attempt to analyze and organize the insightsfrom the past rather than an exhaustive survey of the literature. Since thefirst article we published in 1975 in CRSA (Armstrong and Armstrong,1975), I have been struggling to understand, reveal, and protect skills. Mythinking about skills is advanced by our research on care, so care is usedhere to illustrate many of the more general points that I seek to makeabout skill and our need to develop our thinking further in this field.

This article is intended primarily as a theoretical intervention in theskills debates, but one growing out of a very practical concern with the

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skills involved in health care. Using a feminist political economy frame-work, I seek to bring together a host of theory and research in order toclarify the debates and contribute to them. The section "Tensions in Ap-proaches to Skill" focuses on identifying what I see as central tensions ordichotomies in these debates, although they are seldom presented as ten-sions and are not set out together in ways that allow us to sort throughthe multiple aspects of skill. Yet, tackling these usually hidden tensions isa necessary first step in moving toward an understanding of skill. Settingthem out as specific dichotomies makes them more visible, even thoughI recognize that there is in most instances considerable overlap in ap-proaches.

Based on my exploration of these tensions, we argue that skills arenot individual, independent, objective capacities with an intrinsic worth.Although I recognize that there are measurable, observable componentsin what are defined as skills, skills are primarily socially constructed. Theargument that skills are socially constructed is not new. My contributionis identifying and assessing the array of tensions in approaches.

This leads me, in the section "Forces Shaping Skills," to consider eco-nomic, social, and structural forces that shape what is recognized, valued,and practiced as skill. These forces operate at multiple scales that mustbe taken into account in understanding the meaning and components ofskills. These forces play out in particular contexts in ways that profoundlyshape what is required, allowed, and recognized as skill. This explorationof dichotomies, forces, and the specificity of context lays the groundworkfor my argument that we need to change how we approach skills andthe questions we ask. Instead of focusing on labor processes that deskilland limit control (as much of the political economy literature does), or onindividuals and their formal learning (as much of the managerial litera-ture does), we need to ask new skill questions about the conditions thatprevent people from developing and using the skills they need to do thework. We also need to think about the various ways time can be factoredinto how we assess skills. My goal is to reinvigorate the debate that isso critical not just to workouts in the seminar room, but also to our dailyworking lives.

TENSIONS IN APPROACHES TO SKILL

There are multiple tensions and confusions in the ways skills are de-scribed, understood, and assessed. In what follows, I set out the varioustensions I have identified in my many years, struggling with the conceptof skills and the application to women’s work, especially in health care.It is not possible to acknowledge all the important Canadian contribu-tions on which this analysis is based. What is offered rather are someexamples.


The Individual versus the Job

First, we need to consider whether the focus is the skills of the persondoing the work or the skills required to do the job. This may seem like anobvious question and a clear dichotomy but the two are often collapsed orconfused. This has been the case in discussions about equal pay for work ofequal value, for example, Armstrong (2007) and Gaskell (1991). Althoughit is the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions required in thejob that are at issue in equal pay cases, the evidence used to justify theinequality is often about the skill of individual female workers. Humancapital theory, which focuses on an individual’s investment in their owneducation and on their labor market experience, has been employed toexplain the gap between male and female wages in their workplaces. Ithas also been used to explain gaps in earnings differentials between im-migrants and Canadian-born workers (Ferrer and Riddell 2008). Data onthese individual factors may be useful in comparing wages overall but forseveral reasons are problematic when it comes to the skills required forparticular jobs (Ferrer and Riddell 2002; Livingstone 1997).

Explanations that emphasize skills and experience attributed to theindividual usually assume a match between formal knowledge and jobdemands. They also often assume that every year of experience in a jobcontributes to the expansion of skills necessary for the work. At the sametime, women’s years out of the labor force, and thus their more limited ex-perience in paid work, are used to justify a wage gap while ignoring theiryears of work experience in the home. What is required by a specific job isoften not taken into account when skills are treated as primarily indepen-dent of the workplace and as belonging solely to the individual. Focusingon the individual also allows assumptions about race and disability to playa role. As Peter Li (2001:2) has shown, “immigrant credentials carry apenalty” and both gender and race play an integral role in the evaluationof foreign credentials.

Clearly, education and experience matter in doing a job and the recog-nition of skills that can be transferred is obviously important to an individ-ual. However, there is no automatic relationship between what a workerknows and what the job requires. Rather, it is this relationship that needsto be part of skill analysis. There may be a match between the job re-quirements and the person’s skills or there may be significant differencesbetween the two. Starting with individuals in particular workplaces canmean looking at the skills people have but do not use, with the individualsoften defined as overqualified or underemployed (Baumann et al. 2006;Rinehart 1975). At the same time, there are people who do not have theskills required for the job, who might be defined as unqualified or under-skilled for the work but who nevertheless hold the job. The Peter Principle(Peter and Hull 1969), for instance, was a theory about the process of pro-moting individuals beyond their skill levels. And there may also be people

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who have formally learned skills on the job—skills that have become inpractice required in the job—but these skills are not recognized as belong-ing either to the individual or to the job demands. Similarly, the notion thatplace in the hierarchy equates with skill is also a matter for investigation.Those nearer the top of the hierarchy are not necessarily more skilled. AsTania Das Gupta (2009) demonstrates in the case of nursing, for example,racism is too often a factor in keeping some nurses at the bottom of thehierarchy.

Equally clearly, jobs require skills. Recognizing what the job demandsis important to both employer and worker. But there is no automaticrelationship between the job description and the skills required. Heretoo, it is the relationship between the skills required and those definedas necessary by the employer that is the object for investigation in skillanalysis. On the one hand, there may be credential inflation. Employersmay inflate the formal learning or experience required to get into a job orto stay in a job. They may do so as a means of simplifying selection or ofeliminating workers, even if this education or experience is not requiredto do the job. On the other hand, the skills required for the job may notbe recognized by the employer as skills or even as required. Those withforeign nursing credentials, for example, may “be brought into this coun-try to work under the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) not as nurses, butas nannies and 24-hour home support workers, providing a marginalizedsource of cheap labor that furthers the movement toward private healthcare” (Rosen 2001). They do not forget their nurses’ education when theydo this care work and the application of this knowledge often becomes anessential part of the work. As feminist political economists have pointedout, employers and even women themselves often dismiss women’s workas unskilled because it is low paid and because so many women do suchwork, in spite of the learned capacities required to do the job (Armstrong2007). Indeed, the international trade in domestic workers is often basedon the assumption that this is unskilled work that can be done by anywoman (Bakan and Staiulis 1993).

Similarly, there is no necessary relationship between skills and pay.Low wages do not automatically indicate lack of skills required in the jobor that the work is performed by people with few, if any, skills. Indeed,low wages may primarily reflect precarious employment (Vosko 2006),immigration status (Li 1992), trade agreements (Higgins 2012), or defi-nitions of disability (Galarneau and Radulescu 2009). Nor does high paynecessarily mean multiple skills are required for the work. The segre-gation of the labor force based to some extent on gender and on racial-ization, with jobs dominated by women and by those from racializedgroups paid less than those dominated by white men, may primarily re-flect discrimination rather than any appropriate evaluation of skills (Li1992; Miller 2005). High wages may reflect power at least as much asskill.


In short, the kinds of formal education required as well as the contribu-tion of all forms of experience are matters for investigation in determiningthe skills necessary and used.

Learned versus Unlearned

This leads directly to a second set of dichotomies; namely that betweenlearned and unlearned capacities. Skill could be defined as the learnedcapacities required to get work done effectively and efficiently. But sucha definition begs a host of questions about the distinction that requireinvestigation. What capacities are innate compared to acquired has longbeen a debate in feminist political economy, particularly in relation to care(Benoit and Hallgrimsdottir 2011). Do women naturally know how to feeda child or get an older person to bed? Are people from particular racializedgroups particularly adept at doing such work? Does this then mean no skillis required?

This issue of learned versus innate is related in turn to the distinctionbetween personal characteristics and learned capacities. Is empathy—acharacteristic most frequently attributed to women—an acquired skill orsimply part of being a woman and thus not to be recognized as a skill?Similarly, racialized and/or immigrant groups may have characteristicsand capacities attributed to them that are assumed to be part of theirnational character or biology. Filipino women, for example, may be seenas naturally possessing capacities that make them particularly suited forchildcare work even when they have formal credentials in the field andwhat Sedef Arat-Koc (2006) calls transnational mothering implies thatwomen in general know how to raise children. Contesting the notion thatthese aspects of the job are just part of being a woman, feminist politicaleconomists have sought to make it clear that many of these skills take longyears to learn and many of them are required in the job (Hochschild 1983,2012; James 1989).

Where the learning happens is also at issue. The question of learningrequired for the job is different from learning on the job. That is, do wemean the capacities that the worker brings to the job or do we also meanwhat they learn on the job? Are these capacities only those which haveresulted in formal credentials or do they include experience? If so, is ex-perience simply about years on the job and does each year add skill? Forinstance, is each year working collecting garbage as significant for skilldevelopment as each year working as a nurse? And are there assumptionsmade about capacities of those with disabilities; assumptions that meanthe failure to recognize what has been learned?

Moreover, the learning on the job may be individual or collective,raising a question about whether the acquired skills are understood asthe capacity of the individual or of a larger group (Hampson and Junor2010). Collective learning on the job and learning to learn collectively

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is harder to document but may be critical, especially in health care.For example, nurses frequently teach each other how to fix equipmentor how to talk a particular resident into the bath. Workers togetheror individually may constantly or periodically reskill in ways not for-mally organized or recognized. These issues are related to the questionof skills that can be carried with a worker to a newer one and what isorganization specific, although both kinds of skills may be recognized asrequired.

In sum, as feminist economists have made clear, we cannot assumethat skills are the product of nature but instead need to investigate whatskills are required and how they are acquired.

Hard versus Soft Skills

These old questions about the distinction between learned and unlearnedare related to a third set of dichotomies, newer ones between what areoften called hard and soft skills. Hard skills are those that are more likelyto be easily measured and to result in a product, such as a chair, or obviousservice, such as surgery. Craft mastery, “the combination of knowledge ofmaterials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities requiredto carry on a specific branch of production” (Braverman 1974:443), is as-sociated with hard skills. However, there is an increasing emphasis onthe “soft skills,” such as leadership capacity, or “putting on a good face”(Sheane 2012) that have gained prominence with the massive shift of jobsfrom the manufacturing and resources sector to the services sector where“hard skills,” such as those required to drill a well or build a barn, wereassumed to be the norm.

Hochschild (1983, 2012) has drawn attention to the ways flight at-tendants are taught to, and required to provide managed friendliness andexpressions, all in the commercial interests of their employers. The in-creasing emphasis on the skills involved in what has come to be calledemotional labor is not without critics. As Grugulis, Warhurst, and Keep(2004) put it, there is “a growing tendency to label what in earlier timeswould have been seen by most as personal characteristics, attitudes, char-acter traits or predispositions as skills” (p. 6). Politeness and a positiveapproach to work are two examples of soft skills that may be called per-sonality traits, raising issues about whether these are capacities expectedof all workers and thus not particularly relevant to any specific job or evenuseful to identify as skills. Payne (2009), for example, argues that muchof what has been termed skilled emotional labor is simply what most of usdo every day and therefore not useful to define as a skill. What are knownas generic, key, or core skills—such as literacy—may also be expectedof everyone and therefore discounted as skills. And they may be asso-ciated with particular genders, classes, or racialized groups. Assuming


women are empathetic and immigrants hard working are just twoexamples.

In short, the distinction between hard and soft skills remains far fromclear-cut. Surgeons are expected to have a bedside manner, for example,and nurses to be empathetic while giving a needle. In their study of out-sourcing of public sector services in England, Grugulis and Vincent (2010)found that “while traditionally ‘feminine’ skills were more widely acknowl-edged this recognition failed to benefit the women who exercised themand, in some cases, was used as a justification to confine them to taskswell below their (technical) competence” (p. 598).

When skills are associated with and required from particular groups,flags should be raised. The extent to which such skills are required, ac-quired, recognized, and rewarded is a matter for investigation.

Manual versus Mental

Related to the distinction between hard and soft skills is a fourth di-chotomy; that between manual and mental skills. Those understood asprimarily working with their hands are often defined as less skilled thanthose defined as mainly working with their heads. This differential evalu-ation is evident in health care as nurses seek to shed the manual aspectsof their work in part to increase their recognized skill levels (Sandelowski1999). Yet, manual labor can be recognized as quite skilled. Surgery isone example. Increasingly, even managers must use their typing skillson the computer, even though their work may be defined as primarilymental.

Although the more highly valued mental work is assumed to be sep-arated from manual work, Daly and Willis (1989) argue that a skilledworker is one who combines manual and mental labor. But this assumesthat there are manual jobs that do not require mental capacities and men-tal ones that do not require manual capacities. Carrying the bricks to thebricklayer may require knowledge about what bricks to bring and how tocarry them without damaging yourself or the bricks. When I type this pa-per for myself, am I doing mental labor only? If I type a paper for someoneelse, is there mental labor involved? Does the mental work become morehighly skilled when it also involves manual work or is the reverse thecase?

Like other dichotomized notions of skills, the distinction betweenmanual and mental skills may be challenged. The extent to which theseskills are combined and required is a question for research. And as isthe case with other skills, the extent to which manual and mental la-bor is assumed to be the work of particular populations also needs to beinvestigated.

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Routine versus Complex

The distinction between manual and mental parallels the one betweenroutine and complex, and raises similar issues. There is a problem withequating routine with unskilled, or even with assuming that a job is rou-tine, as many feminist political economists have pointed out (Hampsonand Junor 2010). There are ongoing debates—particularly in relation tocall center work—about the hidden skills involved in jobs that appear rou-tine (Bolton and Houlihan 2007) and about the danger of assuming thatall work in a category, such as call centers can be defined as routine orlacking in mental effort (Glucksmann 2004).

There are also debates about whether we should understand the abil-ity to cope with such work as a skill in itself. Answering the same questiontime after time, day after day, in ways that are polite and interested mayrequire considerable self-control. Even speed is not necessarily an indi-cator of either routine or lack of skills. The capacity to work quickly andwithout conscious thought may appear routine and thus unskilled but maybe the product of considerable and difficult learning. As Attewell (1990) ex-plains, ethnomethodologists argue that long practice can make it appearthat jobs require little skill, with skill becoming “socially invisible to bothactors performing them and to observers familiar with them” (p. 430). Onthe other side of the debate, Lloyd and Payne (2009) argue that claimingso much work as skilled while overplaying the amount of control and dis-cretion workers have allowed a “convenient veil to be drawn over the dull,monotonous reality of much service sector work” (p. 631).

The extent to which mental and manual labor are combined as wellas the extent to which they require learned capacities is thus a matterfor investigation, as is the assumption that work is routine in ways thatindicate lack of skill.

Visible versus Invisible

This leads to a sixth distinction between visible and invisible skills. Whilesome skills may be obvious, easily measureable, and clearly learned—inserting a catheter, for example—others are more difficult to see or count,such as calming a patient during a bath or convincing them to leave theirroom. The discussion about the invisibility of skills overlaps considerablywith that related to hard and soft skills, with the latter being less visi-ble and hard to measure. Indeed, the discussions about emotional laborhave been largely about invisible skills and unrewarded job requirementsin areas, such as call centers, airplanes, and other service jobs, with theclaim often made that these skills have been appropriated by the em-ployer. Bolton (2004), for instance, argues that models of skill that focuson tasks and discretion do not value or even recognize emotion work, evenas “emotion works have never before required such a high level of skill”


(p. 25). Similarly, the argument that routine work often involves skills isalso an argument about invisibility. What cannot be seen cannot be mea-sured or counted as skills. And ideas about race, gender, class, disability,and physical location often render skills invisible.

Unrecognized skills do not have to be rewarded, which is obviously ofinterest to those who pay for skills, but invisible skills may also be difficultto use, which is of particular interest for workers. Not being allowed tochange a resident’s diapers when your experience tells you it should bedone is one example (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Messing 2009). Whatis not visible or formally required is unlikely to be valued, but visibilityalone does not determine value. What is defined as readily available andin plentiful supply is unlikely to be defined or rewarded as skilled, thatis, skill is socially constructed as a positional good. When a capacity isunderstood as something any woman can do, then supply includes half thepopulation (Palmer and Eveline 2012). Similarly, particular capacities aretoo frequently associated with racialized groups, assumed to be innate, andthus not worthy of either recognition or compensation. Supply is a factor ininvisibility as well in the case of how the skills of immigrants are defined,as is their lack of other options. Sexism, racism, and unequal power allplay a role.

The invisibility/visibility distinction has taken a particular form inrelation to women’s work. Making these skills visible and valued is centralto the work of pay equity, for example. Feminists have exposed the waysassumptions about gender permeate classification systems in a mannerthat not only segregates by gender, but also lowers the values of skills onthat basis (Armstrong and Armstrong 1991). The issue then is not onlyabout the nature of the work but also about the way work is organized tobuild the invisibility of skills into the structure while still counting on theskills, an issue I will return to later.

Control versus Lack of Control

A seventh and final dichotomy I have identified in the skills literatureis that between control and lack of control. Lack of control is frequentlyequated with lack of skill. While lack of control is associated with thoseat the bottom of the hierarchy, the reverse is also the case. Positions atthe top of the hierarchy are usually assumed to involve control defined asskill. In the service sector, autonomy has often been associated with skillsjustified largely in terms of formal credentials or place in the hierarchy. Inthe case of physicians, for example, autonomy and skills are equated.

For Braverman (1974) and others (Burawoy 1985; Edwards 1979),managerial control is often sought by reducing skill through the divisionof the work into simplified and timed tasks, each requiring little knowledgethat could be the basis of power. Control may be further exercised throughclose supervision, technology, or overall work organization, with little trust

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and much recording of tasks. Early explorations of control tended to focuson visible and formal aspects of the work relationship, especially in goodsproduction ostensibly (Thompson and van den Broek 2010).

More recently, research in goods production has expanded to look atother, less visible forms of control. Studies of the service sector have exam-ined not only the extension of technical and bureaucratic control developedin goods production (Thompson and Callaghan 2001), but also indirectmeans of control, such as using customers as “agents in the managementcircle” (Fuller and Smith 1991:11). Seeking to understand control in theservice sector, others have looked at teamwork, electronic surveillance,and reporting as well as at managerial strategies designed to encouragecommitment to and cultural identity within the workplace (Thompson andvan den Broek 2010). While ostensible about the redistribution of controlto workers, methods such as Total Quality Management and other strate-gies developed in the auto sector have been analyzed to reveal the waysworkers are controlled in the process (Armstrong et al. 1997). Organiza-tional strategies, such as casual employment and part-time work, have alsobeen examined as forms of managerial control (Shalla 2004; Vosko 2006).Similarly, new accountability strategies based on counting processes andoutcomes which are justified in the public sector in terms of responsibil-ity to the public have been examined as forms of electronic surveillance.Patient satisfaction surveys can fulfill this control function as well.

As critics of Braverman (1974) have pointed out however, control overthe labor process is contested, with skill, technology, and control centralto the contestation (Buroway 1985; Edwards 1979). Employers may adoptmultiple strategies and even reintegrate labor processes in ways that ex-pand cooperative skills in particular, as they may do in teamwork withinhealth services. Equally important, as feminist political economists amongothers have shown (Duffy 1986), workers do not simply accept employers’work reorganization and a subsequent deskilling of work. Formally andinformally they resist in a way that can retain or even expand skills.Moreover, workers themselves may struggle for changes that shed someaspects of their work, such as nurses promoting the transfer of bathing topersonal support workers (Armstrong and Armstrong 2009). Or they mayorganize to protect their skills and create monopolies, as physicians havedone for more than a century (Witz 1992). In other words, employers’ rolein the ways skills are defined, valued, and practiced reflects interests andpower in ways that need to be investigated rather than assumed.

Feminist political economists also criticized Braverman for failing totake gender into account (Rubery 1978; West 1990). The “hard skills”Braverman (1974) focused on are associated primarily with men and theseskills are easier to control and divide up into tasks than is the case withthe “soft skills” more often associated with women. Feminists drew at-tention to the parallels between domestic and wage labor, arguing thatwomen acquired skills in the home that were then used in the labor force.


However, because so many women do the work and because they arelearned at home, the skills are often invisible to both the women and theemployers who hire them but in any case are undervalued. James (1989)argued that emotional labor was one such example, with women learningto manage emotions within the household and applying these skills withlittle recognition in the labor force.

Control may in itself require skill. However, an emphasis on con-trol, as is the case with Braverman (1974), often assumes that workerslose their skills because they no longer have control over the labor pro-cess. In addition to ignoring the ways workers struggle to resist deskillingand to the ways they work to develop new skills or use their old ones,the equation of skills with control fails to consider the skills that are re-quired and practiced in spite of little individual control over the laborprocess. The assumption that lack of control means lack of skill requiresinvestigation.

In sum, these confusions and tensions emphasize the contingent na-ture of skills, challenging the notion that skills are easily measurable,objective individually acquired capacities with intrinsic worth. I have setthem out here as dichotomous in order to analyze a broad, disparate lit-erature in an integrated fashion and in order to clarify assumptions. Asfeminist political economists have been maintaining for decades, skill is so-cially constructed and defined, relational, and a contested terrain, even asmany would agree that there are measureable and objective components.“This social construction occurs within and outside the workplace and mayadvantage members of particular groups” (Grugulis et al. 2004:5), mostobviously in relation to gender and racialization. Such an approach bringsthe location of the job, as well as unpaid work, into the concept. Makingthese tensions explicit, bringing them together in order to assess them isa necessary first step in defining skills and in identifying the conditionsthat allow those skills to develop and flourish.

FORCES SHAPING SKILLS

The preceding discussion of the tensions about the definition of skills doeslead to one conclusion, namely that skills are not individual, independent,objective, individually acquired capacities with an intrinsic worth. Rather,they are the results of an array of forces that shape what is recognized,valued, and practiced as skill. The confusions reflect these multiple forces.This is not to deny that there are measurable, observable components inwhat are defined as skills. Nor is it to deny that individuals have skillsthat they acquire on their own. Rather it is to argue that in understandingskills as primarily socially constructed, we also need to understand theforces that shape how they are defined, employed, and valued. While thereare many such forces, the following section considers only the most power-ful, namely those seeking profit, states, workers organizations, ideas, and

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technology. Once again, the purpose is to identify, integrate, and clarifycentral issues from a broad literature.

The Search for Profit

At the global level, there is a neoliberal faith in and promotion of mar-kets with the belief in an invisible hand governing the market hiding thegrubbier ones directing it (Martin 1993). At the international and nationallevel, employers and their search for profit are critical to how skills aredefined and valued. So, is the transfer of labor to low income countries andthe importation of temporary workers to Canada. When skill is defined aslearned capacities required to do the job efficiently and effectively, it begsthe question of what is understood as efficient and effective. An employermay define speed as efficiency and measured or high output as effective.Who defines what is required and how efficiency and effectiveness are un-derstood take us to that old political economy question of whose interestsare served by this definition, who has the power to define, whose decisionsprevail? Undoubtedly employers have more power to define. What appearas objective assessments of job skills and requirements are profoundlyshaped by these power relationships.

Braverman (1974) explored how employers sought to reduce whatworkers needed to know in order to get the job. He exposed how theydeveloped means of increasing control over the labor process and, not in-cidentally, of reducing costs and increasing profits. Jobs were fragmented.Conception was separated from execution, mental from manual work. Of-ten called deskilling, the process involves simplifying the job so that itcan be learned and done quickly with little formal training. Measurementis an important aspect of the skill question here, especially as employersseek control through measured performance or tasks and with the stresson accountability as counting. As a host of literature indicates, there havebeen many moves to break down jobs into simple, repetitive tasks that canbe quickly learned.

Strategies with similar purpose involve skill denigration and down-ward substitution (Trivedi 1992). Someone with less formal training takesover tasks previously done by those with more formal training, on thegrounds that the substitute workers are doing the more routine and easilylearned part of the job. The process is evident when nurses start doingwhat was once exclusive to doctors and when personal support works takeup what was defined as nursing work (Armstrong and Armstrong 2009).

In sum, employers commonly work both to reduce the skill involvedand to define work as unskilled in order to reduce costs while increasingcontrol and profits. There may well be employers, such as those at Google,who seek to enhance and support skill development along with workercontrol over the labor process. Commitment and pride in the applicationof skills to both innovation and a job well done could be the basis for profit


in some organizations. But claims that control necessarily means highskill, such as those which claim lack of control means low skills, requireinvestigation, as do claims for control itself. Sorting out the extent to whichskill has been primarily reduced rather than mainly redefined needs to bepart of the analysis.

States

States are also a factor in how skills are defined, valued, and practiced.In the years following Second World War and during the development ofthe welfare state, the public sector not only expanded, but also operatedlargely on the basis of a logic different from the for-profit sector. Profitwas not a driving force and public servants were understood to be com-mitted to service, with financial compensation to some extent traded forjob security and the intrinsic rewards resulting from the nature of thework. These servants were assumed to be selected on the basis of theirskills, reflected in their formal credentials and a written exam. Unionsand professional organizations were able both to protect some skills and toincrease compensation in the public sector, in part through retaining theidea of service as a critical component. With neoliberalism, however, thenotion of different logics was attacked and there was a paradigm shift toNew Public Management. For-profit managerial techniques were adoptedand new accountability structures emerged with their emphasis on mea-surement rather than on notions of service, shifting how skills in the pub-lic sector are perceived and assessed (Andrews and Waerness 2011). At-tacks on public spending have also played a role, with those employed inthe public sector portrayed as fat cats rather than as dedicated, skilledservants.

But it is not only through approaches to their own employees andservices that states play a role. States also influence skills through im-migration policies, often defining what skills are required and thus whatis valued as skill. Skills are frequently defined as a basis for selection orrejection of an immigrant. Some skills are downgraded in the process, asis the case with domestic workers (Stasiulis and Bakan 2005).

States also influence skills through support for various kinds of tech-nologies that can replace or control workers, as well as through the regula-tion or nonregulation of professional practices. Equally important, statesshape skills through the construction of education programs and policies.In Ontario, for example, the colleges were initially intended to provideterminal programs that would prepare individuals for specially definedjobs, granting them a certificate or diploma in a narrowly defined fieldand preventing them from moving up various levels through the systemor to university. Universities, in contrast, granted degrees, allowed peopleto move through various levels and were intended to prepare people for a

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variety of employment. Indeed, level and kind of formal education is oftenused as the main indicator of skill.

Unions and Professions

Professional organizations are, to a large extent, organized and de-signed to protect skills. Supported by the state, some of them con-trol what skills are required, how they are obtained and certified, whogets to practice those skills under what conditions. Indeed, the auton-omy and power of some professions is frequently both justified and ex-plained in terms of their skills and need for autonomy to practice them(Witz 1992). Those established first also have an important influenceover how other, related occupations define and use their skills. Physi-cians and surgeons in Canada provide a classic example of organizingto use their class, gender, and race to ensure control, as does theirrelationship to nurses and technical occupations in health care (Arm-strong and Armstrong 1989; Naylor 1986). Not incidentally, these pro-fessional organizations also negotiated how these skills will be valued andrewarded.

However, not all those with the professional credentials have beenequally protected. Traditional lay midwives, for example, lacked controlover many areas of their work (Benoit 1989; Bourgeault and Khokher2006). As Muzzin, Brown, and Hornosty (1995) have shown in their studyof pharmacy, women’s credentials get them into jobs but do not help themmove up the hierarchy. Racialized groups have a similar experience, sug-gesting that clearly defined, objectively measured skills are not the onlyfactors at play. Research on university professors show much the samepattern, with wage inequalities for women in spite of their credentials(Davies, Mosher, and O’Grady 1996). Moreover, the power of professionalorganizations has come under increasing assault from governments, em-ployers, and other professions. In health care, for example, the oversightbodies for physicians and surgeons have been forced to add nondoctorsto their ranks. Employers have pushed to break down doctors’ monopolyon certain defined skills as a means of substituting the cheaper labor ofnurses, often supported in these efforts by both the state and by nurses(Armstrong and Armstrong 2009).

Unlike the craft guilds that did much the same thing as professions,unions have focused more on protecting employment, wages, and benefits.Nevertheless, some craft-based unions still do make claims around skillsalthough they seldom control training and accreditation. The right to se-niority does provide workers with a measure of recognition for experienceand a degree of autonomy through promotions.

In short, while employers have more power in shaping and recogniz-ing skills, those who do the work are not powerless. Moreover, individualworkers including those without protection from unions or professional


organizations may influence how work gets done and the skills defined asnecessary in the work.

Ideas and Structural Supports

Assumptions, ideas, and attitudes all play a role in how skills are definedand practiced. As Phillips and Taylor put it (1980), “skill definitions aresaturated with sexual bias” (p. 79). They are also infected by ideas aboutclass, race, and disabilities. Drawing on Marx and Engels’ approach toideology, Smith (1975) emphasized the way ideas are produced for others:“They are located in and originate from positions of dominance in society”(p. 355). In The Double Ghetto (Armstrong and Armstrong 1978), we ex-plored the additional, and complementary, approach of Marx and Engelswhich understands ideology as produced in and through work and othersocial relations. Ideas, power, and structural supports are linked becauseideas are not independent of the structures and power relations that reflectand reinforce them.

The tendency to see skill in dichotomous terms reflects and reinforcesvalues not only about both gender and race, but also about a host ofother aspects of work and relations. While “mental production” is largelyin the hands of owners, managers, administrators, and states (Smith1975:355), we all participate to some extent in the creation and perpet-uation of ideas as we go about our daily lives. As a result, analysis ofskills must take not only the ruling ideas into account, but also “the sub-jective dimensions that affect assumptions” about skills that workers hold(Esposto 2008).

Technology

Technology, too, is a powerful force in the way skills are defined, valued,and practiced. The computer age, for example, was thought to herald aknowledge economy. As Walby (2007) explains, “it is argued that the de-velopment of a knowledge-based economy provides higher skilled, moreautonomous, more flexible, better quality jobs, coordinated through flatterhierarchies and networks” (p. 9). Yet, there is growing skepticism aboutthe extent to which skills have expanded in the wake of new technolo-gies, and especially the extent to which they have increased autonomy andimproved job quality (Green 2006).

Technology may complicate the work with, for example, the develop-ment of transplant techniques, or simplify it, as do digital thermometers.And it may do both at the same time. Computers, for example, makeit easier to do many tasks, but also require new skills. Technology canalso increase the demand for some skills, while reducing the demand forothers. The technology may replace workers, as it does when new dialy-sis machines are intended to be used by the patient at home or it may

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increase demand for workers, as happens with the expansion of magneticresonance imaging machines. Technologies can also relocate work fromhigh income to low income countries, in the process redefining the skillsand rewards required. They can, in addition, make it possible for peoplewith disabilities to do tasks they have never been able to do before, al-though the value of the labor may be redefined in the process. Some ofthose employed in companies developing new technologies or applicationsof technologies may be given more autonomy, although other means suchas time deadlines for products and the work that must be taken home maylimit control (Ladner 2008).

Information technology has become particularly important in shapingskills and control. It makes it easier to measure resources. It can produceand make useable data on how work should be done. Information tech-nology can measure tasks and produce data used to determine how manyemployees work for how long, at what speeds, and with whom (Armstronget al. 2009:273). These technologies have also blurred the line betweenproduction and consumption in ways that can serve to denigrate skills inthe paid workforce. Checking yourself out in grocery stores, filling yourown gas, and using a bank machine not only shift the labor to unpaid con-sumers, but also imply that the work does not involve a great deal of skillsince it is assumed anyone can do the job (Armstrong 1984; Ritzer 2011).

All of these forms of information technology have a profound im-pact on skills and control, although it is important to recognize that thetechnologies are not simply value-free inventions designed with the greatergood in mind. It is often used by both governments and employers as ameans of altering the definition of the skills required.

In sum, skills are shaped by multiple, interacting factors. Owners,states, unions and professions, ideas, and technologies are among themost powerful influences on how skills are defined and practiced. Allmust be taken into account in assessing what skills need to be devel-oped and used. While all five forces shape what is understood, allowed,and rewarded as skill, their relative strength varies. For example, as aresult of both the Second World War and prewar experiences, powerfullabor organizations combined with ideas about state support for somecontrol over capital led to a growth in the public sector based on a no-tion of measureable skills that deserved rewards. Increasingly, however,public sector workers are under attack as overpaid workers, with theirskills becoming less visible and less valued as their unions become lesspowerful and corporate strength grows. These varying strengths meanskills change with time and place. Placing skills in context thus requiresthat the global, national, regional, and local must be taken into account,recognizing how skills are constructed by such interacting forces in dif-ferent ways in different times and places. Although the overall pres-sures may be similar, they play out differently within various sectors andworkplaces.


THE CONTEXT FOR SKILLS

The context for skill development and practice involves multiple scales. Itis classed, raced, and gendered, albeit in different ways depending on thelocation of the particular workplace. The specific context matters in thesocial construction of skills in at least four significant ways.

First, examining the context allows us to understand the interestsinvolved, their relative power, and how they play out in particular timesand places. It encompasses the overlapping worlds of paid and unpaid la-bor as well as of public and private. The public and private distinctionis further complicated by the differences among for-profit, not-for-profit,and state enterprises within the formal economy and by households com-pared to sectors outside them (Armstrong and Armstrong 2005, 2010).In the case of Canadian long-term residential care, for example, theseinterests include governments at multiple levels, national and interna-tional level for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, professions, unions,and organized as well as unorganized workers, residents, families, andvolunteers, community organizations, and other groups representing var-ious publics. All have a vested interest in the skills that are learned andcan be exercised, although they have quite unequal influence over theirconstruction.

Second, taking context into account allows us to think through theconsequences of historical factors and specific values as well as the rela-tionship to other institutions and their impact on skills. Ideas about genderand racialized groups are critical but they are not the only values at play.To use residential care again as an example, how older people are valuedand understood are central factors in what skills are seen as necessary andin how skills are both defined and employed. Current policies that promoteand impose responsibilization also play a role.

Third, examining the context allows us to understand the specificnature of the work, what is required to learn and have learned and theconsequences of failing to do so. Tasks, and the capacities required to carrythem out, do not have the same meaning in health care as they have forinstance in call centers. Relational work has quite different boundariesand demands than factory work, although both may require a range ofskills.

Fourth, the location of the work and of the learning has an impact inhow skills are understood and valued. Skills employed in the home tend tobe less visible both as they are learned and as they are practiced. Visibleproducts may also contribute to skill definition and value. It is easier tosee, measure, and value the skill involved in making a cake in a bakerythan in comforting a child at home.

In sum, while we need to theorize skills on multiple levels of abstrac-tion, we need to understand them by thinking them through and examiningthem in terms of particular workplaces.

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TIME FOR SKILLS

Political economists from Marx on have been concerned with issues oftime and labor. Barbara Adam (2004) has clearly demonstrated that time,timing, and tempo are all factors to be considered in examining the issue ofcontrol over work. Canadian feminists were among the first to successfullydemand that unpaid work time be counted while Marilyn Waring (2003)argued that time use surveys should be the basis of accounting. Time is alsoinvolved in the ways skills are defined, assessed, and practiced. It is centralto our understanding of skill, although skill is not often discussed in theseterms. Most obvious is the time taken to get the credentials required to getthe job in the first place. Apprenticeships, high school diplomas, universitydegrees, and professional licensing all have fixed time attached to themand the time required to acquire these capacities is taken as a measureof the skill involved. There are debates about whether such programs arenecessary, whether they teach what is required for the job and whetherthey exclude some while favoring others but the time is relatively easy tomeasure.

Time also factors into discussion around how long it takes to learnhow to do specific tasks. This is related to the extent to which jobs aredivided into tasks and measured in terms of time. Taylorized jobs arethose timed and divided in time, with each task taking little time to learn.Time becomes a means of control of both knowledge about the process andof the process itself.

More flexible, and often less formally recognized as well as more con-tentious, is the time it takes to learn how to do the job well. Benner (1984)makes the case in relation to nursing, describing the movement from noviceto expert as an essential development in becoming an effective nurse. Butthe expert stage may itself require continual learning, making it more dif-ficult to measure in any noncontentious way. The debates around the skillrequired in call centers are to some extent about the time it takes to learnthe job and whether the learning is finite or not (Bolton 2004; Grugulisand Vincent 2010; Hampson and Junor 2010).

Part of the issue around the time to learn is related to what is nec-essary to learn, returning us to the questions around what is requiredand what is efficient and effective. What needs to be considered includesnot only specific tasks and responsibilities but also the extent to whichworkers need to know about their employing organization as a whole, itsrelationship to other organizations, policies, and consumers, and about thework of others within their workplace as well as about coordination withthem.

But time enters in another manner that is seldom discussed in theliterature on skill and is perhaps easiest to see in relation to the discussionof emotional labor. This time is about the interaction with clients whichhas been the focus of these debates. The interaction with clients may be


brief as it is on an air plane, but repeated over a period of time as it may bewith certain service calls (Lloyd and Payne 2009). It may be singular, butlengthy as it may be with sales over the phone or continuous over a longperiod of time, as it may be with some service calls. It may involve workingwith the same team for years or frequently with different teams, implyingdifferent skills. And it may involve people with disabilities who take moretime in ways that are necessarily variable. In long-term care for example,the emotional labor required and the knowledge acquired as care providersinteract with residents and their families for a considerable time each dayand over years results not only in specific kinds of capacities, but alsodemands specific kinds of skills. Indeed, residents highly value personnelwho stay over the long term (Kruzich, Clinton, and Kelber 1992). Theskills required are quite different from those required of flight attendantsor sales clerks.

Equally important, as Glucksmann (2000) makes clear in Cottons andCasuals, different actors in the process may have very different perceptionsof time. Relatives, workers, and employers may all have conflicting ideasabout and the perception of time needed and devoted to get the work donewell (Luxton 1983).

Finally, time of day may also be a factor. While certainly the literaturetalks about the demands associated with working shifts, for example, thisis not often discussed in terms of skill. Yet, we are told by nurses that thelater it gets, the smarter they get. They are expected to do a wider rangeof clinical and social intervention when others are absent at night.

The nature of the interaction, the consequences of the interaction, andthe timing of the interaction are all critical factors in health care, shapingwhat skills are required and used.

WHERE DOES THIS TAKE US?

In the 1970s, Braverman’s work provoked a host of theory and researchon skill, as well as considerable critique from feminist political economistsin particular about the failure to take gender and resistance into account(Phillips and Taylor 1980). Shortly after, efforts to achieve pay equity drewa wide range of scholars into explorations of the gendered nature of skillsand the invisibility of those expected of women. Here, too, feminist politicaleconomists played a role in ways that emphasized the social constructionof skills and the forces that shape them (Armstrong 2003; Fudge and Mc-Dermott 1991). A decade later, skill debates centered around emotionallabor, with Hochschild’s (1983, 2012) work especially prompting a widerrange of research intended to expose a highly gendered and hidden as-pect of work. Most recently, critiques of emotional labor have emerged inways that revive issues that have permeated theory and research sinceBraverman (Bolton 2004).

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This article is intended to contribute to these debates by integrat-ing and analyzing theory and research on skill, and by extending thesedebates through a different perspective on time. To argue that skills aresocially constructed, gendered, and raced, that they are shaped by unequalpower relations on multiple scales, and in particular contexts is not new.However, the various dichotomies and forces in operation have neitherbeen brought together in this fashion, nor has time been considered in thismanner. I have done so to set the stage for a new challenge, one growingout of our ongoing research in long-term residential care.

Our surveys and interviews with those employed in long-term carefacilities (Armstrong et al. 2009) have prompted us to ask different skillquestions. For example, workers reported that their knowledge about par-ticular patients’ bodies and needs, as well as long experience in the work,meant they knew when a resident should have their diaper changed. How-ever, employers told workers they could not change the diapers until thethin blue line on them indicating saturation was reached. They were alsotold that the number of diapers was limited and counted. In response,workers hid diapers in ceilings and carts in order to have a supply to usewhen their skill told them it was time for a change. Workers also told usthey knew how to calm and support residents and even had the formalcontrol to respond, but were prevented from doing so by the lack of staffand time. They go home feeling inadequate because lack of time and staffmeant they could not provide the care they know, through training andexperience, residents need and want. Certainly there were issues withthe recognition and valuing of the skills in this traditional women’s work,especially in areas most closely associated with the home. And equallycertainly, these workers lacked control over many areas of their work. Butthe primary problem was not lack of knowledge, training, and experience(Campbell 1998; Sims-Gould and Martin-Mathews 2010). Nor was it lackof control in the way the term is usually used or even work organizationas often defined. Rather, the main problem was the conditions of work.

This is not to argue that workers reported having acquired all theskills they required. Indeed, many talked about changing resident needs.In the past, their population mainly consisted of frail elderly women whorequired support with daily living and with their emotional needs. Today’spopulation has complex mental and physical needs, is more culturally andracially mixed, and includes more men as well as more younger people.Workers recognized that they need more knowledge to respond to thesechanges. However, they reported that they are often prevented from de-veloping the skills they require in order to respond to the new residents orfrom using ones they possess and know are required.

Diapers with a thin blue line to determine when they should bechanged are an example of technology at work in ways that limit skills.The strategies for control reflect both the infiltration of the for-profit sectorinto health services and the adoption of for-profit strategies by the public


sector. While professional organizations have been able to protect somenursing skills, the unions representing the personal support workers whomake up the bulk of this labor force have been less successful in defendingand expanding the acquisition and recognition of skills. This failure has inpart been shaped by ideas about women’s work, especially as it relates tothe daily care of the elderly. In sum, ideas, technologies, states, the searchfor profit, and collective resistance are all at play.

Addressing these skill problems means shifting the focus from theways the labor process deskill workers to ask instead what conditions,including the organization of work, prevent care providers from developingand/or using the skills they require to make good care and good care workpossible. Or conversely, what conditions would allow them to develop anduse the skills they need. Included in these conditions are issues related toprecarious employment (Vosko 2006), to international trade (Wells 2001),and to international exchange of labor (Valiani 2012).

Answering this new question is far from simple. It requires a deter-mination of what skills are required, a complicated question when skillsare understood as socially constructed and relational, as reflecting un-equal power relations, as shaped by assumptions—especially those aboutgender and racialized groups—as well as by conditions outside the paidworkplace. It means the answer to the question of what skills are re-quired is always contingent and results from negotiations as well as fromresearch.

Nevertheless, such negotiations must draw some boundaries aroundskill. Otherwise all capacities become skills and the concept then has nomeaning and cannot be the basis of negotiations, let alone policies andpractices that provide appropriate conditions. But in drawing those bound-aries, it is necessary to avoid assumptions that have prevented appropriateskills from being acquired and employed. The theory and research suggestthat the determination of skills begins with an investigation of particularworkplaces, respecting what workers do and say they do, as well as withthe way work is organized, controlled, and measured by managers. Suchan investigation recognizes that skills are not exclusively about readilyobservable capacities to complete specified tasks or simply about formalcredentials. It also recognizes that skills are often invisible to those whodo the work. It interrogates simple dichotomies, such as skilled/unskilled,routine complex, mental/manual, hard/soft. It questions assumptions notonly about gender, race, and hierarchy, but also about control. It also askshow time influences the skills required. Moving toward a more complexand sensitive approach to comprehending the skills required means miti-gating the influence of those forces which serve to render skills invisible,unusable, or undervalued.

Establishing what skills are required and what conditions allow themto be used thus requires a reflexive, historical political inquiry into howthese forces have shaped the organization and its exigencies, to be what it

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is. It is a question that is far from simple, but one that theory and researchcan help us answer. For me, feminist political economy offers not only ameans for understanding the world, but also for changing it in ways thatpromote a more just and equitable society. On this anniversary of our firstCanadian sociology journal, I am arguing that continuing the challenge ofunderstanding and changing how we assess and value skill is critical forour discipline.

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Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches

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