Work: Skills and Deskilling

Sociology

Skills and Deskilling

The idea of scientific management in the business world is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises (Braverman, 2005, p. 59). According to Grint (1998, p. 176), the notion of mixing human labor with raw materials is a concern that Marx had about the labor process itself being an adaptation in relation to the needs of capital. Two theorists that have contributed greatly to this field are Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harry Braverman.

Braverman believed that the dynamic and immanent process of deskilling and degradation underlay the progression towards monopoly capitalism (Grint, 1998, p. 177).

Changes in the demand for skills are the consequence of changes either in the necessities associated with individual jobs or in the division of employment across jobs that have dissimilar skill requirements (Cappelli, 1993, p. 515). From the earliest of times skilled trade has been the fundamental unit of the labor process, where the worker was recognized to be the master of a body of knowledge that included the methods and procedures that were needed to accomplish a job (Braverman, 2005, p. 75).

Over time though, Braverman says that science and technology has played a major role as a servant to capital because it has replaced some human labor and deskilled the rest (Grint, 1998, p. 179). Taylor, on the other hand, believed that the issue was in the chain of development of management methods and the organization of labor, and not in the development of technology, which he felt only played a minor role (Braverman, 2005, p. 59).

Taylor's structure can be summed up in three principles. The first principle is known as the dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers (Braverman, 2005, p. 78). The second principle is the separation of conception from execution (Braverman, 2005, p. 79).

The third principle is the use of the monopoly over knowledge to control every step of the labor process and the way it is executed (Braverman, 2005, p. 82).

According to Braverman (1998, p. 83), modern management has developed on the basis of these three principles, which supports the idea that capitalism has taken away the craftsmanship in the work place. Braverman felt that his work was an expansion of Marxist theory in that he "wanted to bring the focus closer to the shop floor to what he considered as the structurally determined imperatives of managerial control, its effects upon the workers themselves, and the dynamic and immanent process of deskilling capitalism" (Grint, 1998, p. 176).

The disjointed and delegated tasks that deskilling brings about, in the end results in a decrease in worker control and lower compensation (Braverman, 1998, p. 78). It has also been criticized for diminishing quality, debasing labor by rendering work mechanical, rather than considerate and making workers machines rather than artisans, and deflating the community (Lerner, 1994, p. 186).