International Political Economy of Employability

Book: Phoebe Moore:IPE of Employability, Skills Revolutions, East and West (Palgrave 2009 forthcoming)

links employability to peer production and open source types of working

Excerpt

Phoebe Moore from the final chapter:

"So far, I have focussed on government policy toward the production of a particular subject who is seen to have a set of competencies to survive the contemporary world of neoliberal capitalism: individualism, entrepreneurialism, flexibility, and ongoing willingness to reskill to match any foreseen market demands (with a contradictory call for teamworking and networking skills). Capitalists have realised that to capture surplus value from workers they must recognise that workplace specific activity is not enough: that training for specific jobs and provision of a range of training for work will not necessarily be profitable for the capitalists but can result in detrimental results such as what is usually considered in Marxist literature to be ‘subjectivity’ which means class consciousness, solidarity, and the resulting possibilities for uprisings and resistance.

The chapters have looked at the labour process literature for an insight into how studies on management control have emerged with the use of empirical analyses and Marxist attitudes toward possibilities in the light of restructuring and ongoing economic change. Braverman has been accused of overlooking the possibilities for resistance of management control through a reclaiming of the subjective in his seminal work on deskilling and Taylorist scientific management and the ‘degradation of work’. in fact, Braverman shows that capitalists consciously divorce the subjective factors of the labour process from the physical act of production ‘not only is capital the property of the capitalist, but labour itself has become part of capital. Braverman refers to that Taylor’s claim that ‘not only do the workers lose control over their instruments of production, but they must now lose control over their own labour and the manner or its performance’ (116). While Burawoy is congratulated for updating these ideas through extensive anthropological work in factories, he is also critiqued for his neglect to take into the account external factors that affect work and the workplace (1970, pp. 140 – 57).

Labour process theory overall indeed focuses on the workplace itself, rather than looking at the social forces of capital which generate many of the antagonisms in these settings, which is a valid criticism of this literature. However, Wardell writes that one cannot separate society from the workplace, one cannot see work outside of the wider context of capitalism, unless a new model for production is envisioned and practiced, thus creating a model for coherent and sustainable value systems that challenge the exchange value of capital within the now-hegemonic capitalist model.

So far, I have looked at increased investigation and control of subjectivities of workers through the emerging relationships between the public and private sectors through industry involvement in education under the rubric of neoliberal capitalism. After a detailed look at how the subjective elements of employability are portrayed in the relevant skills revolutions across the world, in the final section of the book I analyse what has become a very interesting resistance movement that has emerged from the creative industries and the ‘creatives’: the peer to peer (p2p) movement, which is one that transcends geographical boundaries and promises to challenge the core activities and premises of competitive capitalism. This alternative economic model originally emerged from those working in the software industry alongside the innovations of Richard Stallman et al, but it has become a model that is applied through immaterial labour as well as the production of hardware and relevant infrastructures.

Traditionally, studies on workers’ uprisings and struggle have relied on the ‘control/resistance’ capitalist model, one that is reliant on the Marxist treatise of humans losing their control of production in the sense of craft work. This model relies on particular aspects of capitalism to exist, including capital’s control over workers, and workers’ resistance. Workers have no control over the means of production and their skills are very particular to certain tasks, and management’s use of technologies to separate head-from-hand work. In the typical Marxist resistance formula, the ‘ability to resist stems from the structural relations of capitalism, as workers act out a role in an evolving historical script written into the logic of capitalist development’ (Wardell labour process theory book p. 160).

But I argue here that the new technologies for management control, in the form of dominant discourses of employability and lifelong learning, are less powerful than the technologies manipulated in both the physical and the cognitive sense, in peer to peer production environments. Producers of software in the open source communities operate to some extent on a similar ethos than is seen in the rhetoric of the skills revolutions: while they are a form of entrepreneurs and are some of the most precariat workers in the contemporary world of work, but interestingly, they are also some of the most revolutionary in their ideas for knowledge production as well what we are seeing within eminent hardware production projects. Rather than focusing on the worker revolutions in South Korea, simmering unrest in the United Kingdom, or the nascent signs of resistance in Singapore, to battle an idea of subjectivity of the proposed subordinate learner worker, I now investigate actual producers’ involvement in what is often unpaid production in the arena of open source models of production, in what appears to be a voluntary and a very much enjoyed arena of resistance to dominant models of capitalism.

In the critical IPE literature, we are too reliant on traditional perceptions of time and space. We need to start thinking about new sites for revolution, emerging from the shared wisdom Marx referred to in his depiction of the ‘general intellect’. The final sections of this book explore what it can mean to be a ‘lifelong learner’ outside of the skills revolutions rhetoric chapters 3 and 4 discuss. Rather than becoming individuals who are subordinate to flexible work situations and changing labour markets, could workers become learners who become empowered in a way that eliminates even the need for the concept ‘employability’, as workers become more powerful according to their shared alternative value systems? Is the future of work really based in the subjectivity proselytised by the skills revolutions depicted in my ‘east’ and ‘west’ distinctions? Or is this recent challenge one that will in fact instigate a revolution of people who will find power to dictate their own destiny through the formation of work communities not reliant on a wage, such as those producers in open source communities? Could a new ‘ethical economy’ (Arvidsson 2008),[i] or an economy of reciprocity (Orsi),[ii] arise from these communities?

The key to the argument is that the production of knowledge occurs within a rapidly changing arena and holds the potential to become a site for contestation, or for a reconsideration of how intersubjectivities are formed. Because the value of labour is increasingly difficult to measure quantitatively with the developments of technology and with the transformation from the reliance on full time employment to a flexibilised notion of employability, workers are thrown into a completely new playing field. Demands on labour and conditions of production have a tendency to change rapidly and unpredictably and thus, often remain uncontested. This volume has looked at how the idea of employability has been consistently used in way that exploits the subjective nature of people’s skills through universalisation of certain ideas, in particular through education and training policy reform, and therefore through perpetual reform of the discourse that informs concrete policy initiatives. I demonstrate empirically grounded case studies of skills revolutions in the form of employability campaigns in both hemispheres. But to resist geographical parameters, I look at a resistance movement that is based on Marx’s concept of the General Intellect which may, I argue, overcome class struggle and empower people in ways that labour struggle previously has not been able to do."