Duncan Gallie

Patterns of Skill Change: Upskilling, Deskilling or the Polarization of Skills?

The debate about the long-term direction of skill trends has occupied a central place in economic sociology, but there has been a virtual absence of relevant representative data. This paper draws on a major new source of survey data to assess three perspectives on skill change. Using a number of different indicators of skill, it examines whether changes in the occupational structure do reflect an expansion of higher skilled jobs. It then considers the extent to which people have experienced upskilling or deskilling within occupational classes. Finally, it looks at the implications of the growth of the service sector, of technological change and of gender for the distribution of skills and for the experience of skill change. It concludes that, while there is little evidence of extensive deskilling, there has been a marked tendency towards the polarization of skills in the 1980s.

Changing patterns of task discretion in Britain

Task discretion has held a central place in theories of work organization and the employment relationship. However, there have been sharply differing views about both the factors that determine it and the principal trends over time. Using evidence from three national surveys, this article shows that there has been a decline in task discretion since the early 1990s. This contrasts with an increase in other forms of employee involvement such as direct participation and consultative involvement. Many of the arguments in the literature about the factors that favour higher task discretion are supported by our evidence - in particular those emphasizing the importance of skill levels and the broader organizational ethos with respect to employee involvement. However, such factors do not account for the decline in task discretion, implying that existing theories fail to address some of the crucial determinants. It is tentatively suggested that it may be necessary also to take account of macro factors such as competitive pressure, public sector reform programmes and the growth of accountability structures.

Employer policies and organizational commitment in Britain 1992-97

An important current of thinking in the last decade has emphasized the need for a shift from control to commitment as the central objective of management employment policies. This paper is concerned to assess whether there was a significant increase in British employees’ commitment to their organizations in the 1990s, using comparative data from two large-scale and nationally representative surveys carried out in 1992 and 1997. It finds that there was no evidence of an increase in commitment over the period. As in the early part of the decade, employees had only a weak level of attachment to their organizations. The analysis examines a number of factors that have been seen as important determinants of such commitment: changes in the level of skill, task discretion, controls over work performance, and forms of employee involvement. While there were changes in some of these factors that encouraged higher commitment, these were largely cancelled out by a notable decline in the discretion that employees were allowed to exercise over their work.

FOR BETTER OR WORSE? NON-STANDARD JOBS AND HIGH INVOLVEMENT WORK SYSTEMS

Over the last couple of decades, core-periphery models of employment have dominated the debate on organizational responsiveness to change. More recently, however, researchers have also turned their attention to organizational reforms that seek to involve, engage and empower workers in their jobs. This paper addresses two related questions that emerge from these debates: are non-standard jobs lowly skilled and insecure and, if so, do high involvement work systems make things better or worse? By drawing on the 2001 Skills Survey the paper presents evidence on the most comprehensive and up-to-date information currently available in Britain. The paper finds that, while in most respects part-time workers and those on temporary contracts (especially those with contracts of uncertain duration) are in more lowly skilled jobs, only those on temporary contacts suffer from relatively high levels of insecurity. Despite this, non-standard employees appear to gain more than full-time permanent employees from being part of a high involvement work system - part-timers, in particular, benefit most from the increased level of skills these workplaces demand, and some types of temporary employees take additional benefit from the enhanced employment security with which these workplaces are associated.

Employee involvement, the quality of training and the learning environment: an individual level analysis

Theories such as human capital theory, the metaphors of learning and the high involvement work paradigm all suggest that the quality of training and learning varies along a number of axes. This article shows how these theoretical insights have been translated into questions used in a UK survey of 6829 employees carried out in 2006. We find that the qualities of both the training experience and on-the-job learning are strongly associated with the extent and nature of employee involvement. This suggests that employee involvement is likely to play an important role in the process of upskilling the workforce, which has been accorded a central role in the economic strategies of many nation states as well as supra-national organizations such as the European Union.

Teamwork, Skill Development and Employee Welfare

There has been a sharp divergence in the literature about the benefits of teamwork. Some have claimed that it is solely in the interests of management, others that it is beneficial for employees and yet others that it makes little difference to either productivity or well-being. This article draws upon the British Skills Survey Series. It shows that while teamwork did expand between the early 1990s and 2006, this was due primarily to the growth of the type of teamwork that allowed employees little in the way of decision-making power. Indeed, there was a decrease in the prevalence of self-directive teamwork. At the same time, our evidence shows that the benefits of teamwork, in terms of both enhancing work motivation and employee welfare, are confined to self-directive teams, while non-self-directive teams suppress the use of personal initiative and discretion at work.

Unemployment and life satisfaction : A cross-cultural comparison

The paper addresses the issue of the nature and determinants of variations between countries in the severity of the implications of unemployment for psychological well-being. It focuses on ten countries in the European Union over the period 1983 to 1994. It establishes that there are consistent differences between countries over time. It then examines a number of potential explanations, in particular relating to the level of unemployment, the social composition of unemployment, the strength of the work ethic in the society and the characteristics of welfare institutions. It concludes that such differences cannot be accounted for in terms of the level of unemployment or its composition in terms of age and sex. They are also unrelated to measures of employment commitment. Rather the severity of the impact of unemployment has to be understood in terms of the interaction between the characteristics of the welfare regime and the composition of the unemployed with respect to household position.

Direct participation and the quality of work

The article compares the importance for the quality of work of three forms of direct participation – individual task discretion, semi-autonomous teamwork and consultative participation – drawing on a representative national survey of British employees. It assesses their implications for employee welfare, specifically their subjective importance, their implications for learning new skills and their effects on psychological well-being. It finds that individual task discretion is the most effective form of direct participation, followed by consultative participation. Although there are also positive effects of semi-autonomous teamwork, these are weaker and less consistently significant. The article finds that the strength of the implications of direct participation vary between employees, particularly by occupational class and the importance employees attach to the use of initiative at work. However, with the exception of those with weak initiative orientation, its effects are generally positive across different categories of employee.

Computers and the changing skill-intensity of jobs

This paper investigates the impact of computer usage at work and other job features on the changing skills required of workers. It compare skills utilization in Britain at three data points: 1986, 1992 and 1997, using proxies for the level of skills actually used in jobs. This study questions the validity of investigating the facts about, and the sources of, rising skills by using just educational attainment or occupational grouping data. This paper finds that: • Job skills have increased, more quickly for women than for men; these increases are more extensive than those captured by changes in the occupational class structure. • The spread of computer usage is very strongly associated with the process of upskilling, and accounts in part for narrowing of the gender skills gap; expanded use of quality circles is also linked to upskilling. • Evidence for any direct role of trade in inducing skills increases is weak. • Using the qualification held or occupation as a skills measure can lead to erroneous conclusions as to the origin of skills changes.

Unemployment and social exclusion in the European Union

AbstractThis paper examines the argument that unemployment leads to higher levels of social isolation, which in turn reinforces long-term marginalization from the labour market by reducing financial resources and increasing psychological distress. It examines social isolation both in terms of people’s position in the household and the nature and quality of their social networks. It considers whether the link between unemployment and social isolation is of a general type or is mediated by societal variations in patterns of household structure and sociability. It argues that while the evidence is consistent with the view that social isolation among unemployed people does reinforce other types of disadvantage, vulnerability to social isolation varies in important ways between societies. The paper draws upon data from a major EU survey carried out in 1996, which provides comparative evidence for all member states.