Evaluate Sociological Analyses Of Deskilling Essay, Research Paper

Deskilling, put simply, is the replacement of skilled workers with machines. There are many consequences of deskilling, some being alienation, autonomy and control. Harry Bravermann argues that there has been a tendency towards deskilling as today most of the workforce is entirely deskilled. Yet some say that the workforce is becoming more diverse with a growth of whitecollar, managerial and professional occupations. Bravermann believes that in the 20th century there has been a progressive degradation of deskilling of work. He claims that the principles of scientific management have been used by employers and management to take control of the labour process and to remove skills from workers. Scientific management is an idea developed by American management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor and the turn of the last century. Taylor suggested that managers should remove all decision making from workers and that jobs should be designed so that the workers only had to carry out a series of simple tasks coordinated by managers. Henry Ford, the American car manufacturer who pioneered mass production was strongly influenced by Taylorism. Under Fordism workers perform repetitive assembly tasks which require little or no training at all. Labour costs are held down because there is little need to employ skilled labour. Robert Blauner claims that 34% of manual workers in that industry find their jobs dull and monotonous but this figure rises to 61% for those working directly on the assembly line. From Bravermanns point of view such production methods, when combined with scientific management, do indeed deskill work and facilitate management control over the labour process. However his views can be brought into question as some believe that Fordism is now being outdated and replaced. Bravermann argues that the ideas of Taylor and Ford led to more and more jobs being deskilled. The planning and thought required from workers is increasingly taken over by managers or programmed into machines. Skilled workers can often threaten the ability of management to control the labour process theory since their skills are often required to organise their work making it difficult for managers to supervise or regulate them. Deskilling, therefore, becomes a strategy for managers who wish to take control of the labour process. The management studies the skills required and uses this knowledge to redesign the jobs. The management takes responsibility for conception leaving the workers nothing but the exceution, therefore extending managerial control over workers. As the workers jobs are broken up into small simple tasks this reduces their baragaining power as unskilled workers are easier to replace. Similar to Marx, Bravermann believes that work within a capitalist society is alienating. He doesnt however believe that work has been equally degraded during all periods of capitalism but that the 20th century has seen a particularly rapid degradation of work. He discusses automation and class but does not see changes in the labour process as being a direct consequence of automation; instead he sees automation as a consequence of attempts to change the labour process. Bravermann believes that the level of skil required in work has been progressively reduced under capitalism mainly because employers, as aforementioned, have used deskilling as a method of controlling the workforce. His argument is based on that usually under capitalism, what the worker sells, and what the capitalist buys, is not an agreed amount of labour, but the power to labour over an agreed amount of time. Deskilling, in turn, leads to alienation which Marx believes is the main evil of capitalism. Marx claims that as long as the primary object of work is to generate profit, as long as work is organised and controlled by the capitalist class, as long as that class owns the products of the work, then workers will remain alienated wage slaves. They will be cut off from the work, from their fellow workers and from the products of their labour. He also claims that even if the workers believe that their work is interesting and fulfilling and are satisfied then they are still objectively alienated. For Marx alienation was not a subjective state experienced by the worker but an objective situation created by the relationship of the worker to the means of production. Anna Pollert, a feminist sociologist, claims that women are often forgotten when it comes to studies of workers’ orientations. She suggests that working class boys are more ready to embrace manual employment than girls and according to her study of women in a tobacco factory, the women were ‘immediately painfully aware of the futility, dehumanisation, the mind-destroying emptiness of their jobs’. Pollert’s study, Wives, Factory Lives stated that although they finished ‘work’ at 4.30pm it all started again with household chores and their roles as wife and mother. However, Bravermann’s view is questioned as many researchers claims that reality is far more complex than his theory suggests. He seems to imply that there was a golden age in the 19th century when most workers were highly skilled whilst today most workers are almost entirely deskilled. His critics claim that only a tiny minority of workers in the 19th century were skilled artisans, while most were semi-skilled or unskilled. Firthermore, while some new jobs have been deskilled by technology, new skilled jobs have been created such as computer programmers and some existing jobs have been reskilled for example typists moving to word processors. Critics have argued that Bravermann places too much emphasis on the ability of employers to assert control through deskilling, and too little on the ability of workers to resist this process. Andy Friedman shows how car workers in Coverntry were able to exercise considerable control over the labour process through trade union negotiations in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Such control was strengthened by the rise of the shop stewards movement whereby ordinary workers negotiated payrates and conditions with management on behalf of their colleagues within each department of a firm. Another view is that Bravermann sees Taylorism as the only method used by management to control workers. As Stephen Wood puts it, ‘he takes the logic of Taylorism to be the logic of capitalism’. He claims that there are other ways to control the workforce such as ‘technical control’ , ‘responsible autonomy’ and ‘bureaucratic control’. Bravermann’s theory of deskilling is beneficial to sociologists; he claims that there has been an incremental degradation of work so that the capitalist class can control and regulate their workforces and the labour process. There was not, however, a golden age where everyone was skilled, so examining the decline of skills in the 20th century is almost impossible.