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The Deskilling Controversy
Abstract
The thesis that capitalism continues to degrade and deskill work in the twentieth century, creating an ever more unskilled proletariat, has been forcefully argued by Harry Braverman and his colleagues. In this article I present a series of theoretical, empirical, and methodological criticisms of the deskilling position, drawing upon a diverse literature, and upon original research. Particular attention is given to the application of the deskilling thesis to contemporary trends in the computerization of clerical work, as a way of highlighting methodological weaknesses in the deskilling approach.
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Citations
Cited by
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Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (2013) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.1120.0806 · Cited by 1,364
Practices of Distributed Intelligence and Designs for Education
(1993) · HAL · Cited by 1,046
When combinations of humans and AI are useful: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Vaccaro, M., Almaatouq, A., & Malone, T. (2024) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-024-02024-1 · Cited by 570
ATTEWELL, P. (1990) · Work and Occupations · doi:10.1177/0730888490017004003 · Cited by 317
Self-citationWhat is Social Informatics and Why Does it Matter?
Kling, R. (1999) · D-Lib Magazine · doi:10.1045/january99-kling · Cited by 290
Metadata
- Authors
- ATTEWELL, P.
- Venue
- Work and Occupations
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1987-08
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 323-346
- ISSN
- 0093-9285 (ISSN-L)
- 0730-8884
- 1552-8464
- OpenAlex
- W2155966959
- Cited by
- 199
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 40.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- ATTEWELL, P. (1987). The Deskilling Controversy. Work and Occupations. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888487014003001
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
