Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital

By Evan Watkins

In recent years, a number of books in the field of literacy research have addressed the experiences of literacy users or the multiple processes of learning literacy skills in a rapidly changing technological environment. In contrast to these studies, this book addresses the subjects of literacy. In other words, it is about how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself.

As Evan Watkins shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed in relation to not only technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced considerable debate over basic definitions as well as the complexities of gain and loss. At the same time, the visibility of these debates between advocates of old versus new literacies has obscured the development of more fundamental changes. Most significantly, Watkins argues, it is no longer possible to represent human capital solely as the kind of long-term resource that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have defined. Like corporate inventory and business management practices, human capital—labor—now also appears in a “just-in-time” form, as if a power of action on the occasion rather than a capital asset in reserve.

Just-in-time human capital valorizes the expansion of choice, but it depends absolutely on the invisible literacy work consigned to the peripheries of concentrated human capital. In an economy wherein peoples’ attention begins to eclipse information as a primary commodity, a small number of choices appear with an immensely magnified intensity while most others disappear entirely. As Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital deftly illustrates, the concentration of human labor in the digital age reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside of technological innovation and losers everywhere else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823264247

Book preview

Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital

Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital

Over the past decade the growing use of unpaid interns has drawn legal as well as political attention. Lengthy analyses have appeared in Atlantic and the New York Times, among other publications, and a quick Web search can turn up a number of sites that offer help with lawsuits for those who feel victimized. The concern, of course, is that employers are simply taking advantage of the soft job market to extort free labor from applicants desperate for positions. The 29 January 2010 Department of Labor guidance letter for training and employment identifies education as the primary purpose of unpaid internships, and the six criteria for unpaid trainees that it spells out are strict. The first of the six is that the training offered should be similar to what might be given by an institution for vocational or academic education. The second is that the training must be for the benefit of the trainees. Neither criterion precludes the individual from performing typical operations required at the workplace. The fourth criterion, however, forcefully states that the employer cannot gain immediate advantage from trainee activity and adds that from time to time employer operations may well be impeded by the presence of the trainee. Media accounts critical of the proliferation of unpaid positions question the extent to which either the first or the fourth criterion is widely observed. Yet even critical accounts sometimes concede that the trainee may receive intangible benefits from an internship, which might include gaining a behind-the-scenes understanding of how the business or profession actually works; a pipeline awareness of key players and how they might influence job possibilities; and simply the fact of being on the spot and (the trainee can hope) demonstrating his or her abilities. The fifth Department of Labor criterion makes explicit that trainees are not entitled to a job at the end of the training period, but the intangibles can seem sufficient to give the trainee a vital edge over others who apply for openings.

The position of an unpaid intern may appear to have very little in common with a wide range of ordinary activities in which a great many of us engage. The federal criteria for unpaid positions, however, help reveal some surprising connections as well as obvious differences. Even a simple ATM transaction, for example, requires at least some degree of customer knowledge, but it offers nothing by way of education, the key stipulation throughout the Department of Labor guidance letter. Yet according to the letter’s first criterion, what actually goes on in the brief period we spend at the ATM sounds very similar to what might happen at any given moment during a temporary unpaid intern position. Like a bank teller, an ATM customer taps codes into a machine (owned or leased by the financial institution or the network to which the institution belongs) that dispenses cash. That is, the ATM customer is in the position of a trainee engaged, in the words of the first criterion, in the actual operation of the facilities of the employer. Our moment at the ATM is like a preview pane for some more extended process of unpaid intern work.

The Department of Labor criteria for traineeships also help pinpoint the problem with a frequent and convenient misrepresentation of the larger context for what is going on with ATMs. It is not really the case that an automated teller machine has replaced a human bank teller. In the recent past, new bank branches meant more teller hires, but the Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that branch growth has now slowed. Additionally, the Handbook continues, online and mobile banking allows customers to handle many of the same transactions as tellers do. While there are still numbers of jobs available for bank tellers, it is because many workers leave this occupation. In short, what has happened is not that the machine has replaced the teller. Work practices by customers at multiple locations have replaced typical work practices by tellers—paid employees working in the bank. Like an unpaid intern using actual employer facilities, the customer now does the primary work of the transaction, quite often in circumstances in which that customer also pays a fee. Such a transaction is obviously at odds with the intent of the Labor Department’s criterion 3 for traineeships, which states that rather than displacing regular employees, trainees must work under their supervision. Further, in violation of what criterion 4 stipulates—and without even factoring in ATM fees—the financial institution, which in this comparison occupies the position of an employer, can benefit a great deal from these and similar kinds of transactions such as online banking, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters.

At the same time, it would hardly be accurate to say that customers receive no benefits from ATM transactions. Education may not be included, but convenience is advertised as a major plus, and the convenience depends on an expanded range of choice. Many different ATMs in many different locations, open twenty-four hours a day, mean that to a much greater extent than in the past, customers can obtain cash as they choose rather than in conformity with bank hours and locations and via waiting in lines at teller windows. Mobile banking—such as from one’s computer or mobile device—is becoming more and more popular, but when cash is necessary, the benefits of ATM use would seem to outweigh the relatively minor annoyance of performing the transaction oneself and paying a fee. According to a recent widely reported study entitled The Cost of Cash in the United States by Bhaskar Chakravorti and Benjamin Mazzotta of the Institute for Business in a Global Context at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, however, there are large social costs associated with cash use. The most insidious is how it exacerbates the inequality that currently seems to be on everyone’s mind. The study concludes that the poor and the unbanked are the biggest users of cash in relation to other payment methods, and they pay the highest fees to obtain cash when they can. Rather than the combination of convenience and choice usually touted as an advantage to ATM users, the Institute’s research data suggest that in these circumstances, having no choice might well be a much better descriptor for some ATM users, as well as for those who are not in a position to use ATMs at all.

As made familiar and elaborated by Gary Becker in Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (first published in 1964) and in his subsequent work, human capital can be defined as a resource that is embodied in the person of its possessor. Hence in corporate terms, the education, skills, intelligence, and even character of employees can appear as capital assets, every bit as much as a stock portfolio or a new CNC router to be used in production. As the current marketing cliché has it, people are our most important asset. The logic of Becker’s concept leads to the conclusion that potential employees who can represent themselves as rich in human capital should have a far better chance of being hired into good positions by employers eager to maximize those resources and prevent competitors from controlling them. Becker has claimed for some time that his research demonstrates the full extent of how wage and income differentials reflect the distribution of human capital resources. The contrasting directional movements of human capital in my examples above, however, point to a more complicated situation.

When structured appropriately through federal criteria, the unpaid intern scenario might lend itself easily enough to a human capital–based interpretation. Becker understood from the beginning that human capital could not be treated as a commodity in the way that neoclassical economics typically understands labor and the labor market. Nor is it a natural resource. It must be produced in some systematic way, and for Becker, education is the primary producer and educational attainment the most significant measure of human capital resources. Ideally, an unpaid position extends the education of the trainee from the school to an actual workplace. While as yet unpaid in the salary terms of labor market exchange, the trainee is nevertheless in the process of building human capital resources. The range of intangible benefits the individual may stand to gain contributes at least indirectly to the process. Formal education is the primary factor for Becker, but he acknowledges that the official markers of educational success, such as degrees and certificates, typically come with surrounding layers of less easily quantifiable benefits.

With respect to educational enhancement, even the lack of an immediate job guarantee as specified in the Labor Department’s fifth criterion might be construed as a potential advantage rather than a liability. Becker’s account maintains that the acquisition of general human capital as a flexible reserve of skills and resources is almost always a better investment than the limited increase in human capital that can be gained from intensive training in a very location-specific set of skills. Hence the lack of a job guarantee from the particular employer offering unpaid training might be viewed as helping to fill in the educational promise of the internship, particularly if the training is structured to extend a wide-ranging academic preparation. The bottom line is that when the internship has been completed, the unpaid intern should embody more human capital than before taking the position, and at least by legal standard the employer should not have received any immediate advantage from the presence of the trainee and whatever human capital resources she or he already possessed. Human capital benefits must move in the direction of the unpaid trainee.

Although it is a knowledge easily taken for granted, how to use an ATM after all must be learned, and for some people relearned—as part of rehabilitation programs, for example. That is, an ATM transaction also presupposes that the customer already possesses some human capital resources. In sharp contrast to an unpaid intern, however, the customer can have no expectation of adding to his or her human capital. Customers may feel they benefit from the transaction. Nevertheless, the benefits of their human capital resources brought to the transaction flow entirely toward the financial institution rather than toward the customer who does the work, and, unlike the trainee, that customer likely learns nothing at all from the process. The skills involved may seem minimal, but this is partly because they have become so familiar, so everyday, and so widespread. Huge numbers of people in the United States know how to use an ATM.

Relatively minimal skills and a large labor force employed on a temporary basis are not exactly unheard of in U.S. labor history. The recent furor over unpaid interns might suggest otherwise, but unpaid labor is hardly new either. Several decades of feminist scholarship have documented, for example, the extent and economic value of women at home doing household work and child rearing. Yet unpaid labor such as housework or child rearing requires considerable skills and an often overwhelming commitment of labor-intensive time—every day, all the time. The obvious contrasts between this work and an ATM transaction involve not only the very brief time period and limited skills necessary for the latter, but also the existence of an available range of choice and convenience, at least for the upper levels of users.

The benefits that go in the direction of financial institutions for the unpaid customer labor of ATM use depend on the sheer volume of transactions possible from a large population of consumers. No single consumer transaction contributes much, and it requires so little time and attention from the individual that it hardly appears as work at all. In the background of this individual experience, however, there can be any number of consumers at any given moment in twenty-four hours of every day engaging in ATM transactions. Even further in the background, the flow of benefits to institutions also depends on the elaborate production process necessary to develop the human capital resources in a consumer population large enough that their transactions can yield tangible results from processes of such short duration for any given individual at any moment. The support structure for such a process requires a lot of other people doing a lot of work. Human capital resources may be defined as embodied in individuals, but they are never solely the result of individual effort, nor can they be initiated solely by individual choice—not even at a base level of such everyday transactions as ATM use.

ATMs are hardly cutting-edge technology (most are still running Windows XP) compared with mobile banking, and the limited skills necessary for ATM use constitute only an extremely small part of what is now often identified under such umbrella terms as digital literacy or computer literacy. ATM use might also be folded into one tiny corner of still another familiar umbrella term such as financial literacy. As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, the use of the term literacy in all these different conditions involving a considerable range of new and still newer technologies is for many critics questionable. Whether viewed positively or negatively, however, new literacies can involve remarkable complexity, well beyond anything required by ATMs, and, most important, the numbers and range of users across the entire field can be staggering.

Despite the critical accounts directed at the terminology, literacy studies research no less than media representations have spotlighted some striking individual success stories, built on observing sophisticated uses of multiple new literacies. Meanwhile, however, educational reform advocates are frustrated by how lack of funding and a divisive political situation prevent a more full-scale incorporation of new technologies into school curricula generally where they might benefit more people on a larger scale. In The Race between Education and Technology, economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s historical account shows how educational attainment rose as literacy and other human-capital valued skills became more widespread through most of the twentieth century. At the same time, income inequality narrowed from the immense gap that had existed earlier in the century. The alarming trend that has emerged over the last three decades reverses this pattern. By early into the twenty-first century, income inequality had once again reached nearly the same extent as at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just at this point when human capital is becoming more important than ever economically, education in the United States is failing to supply adequate numbers of human capital–rich individuals who might contribute most to economic productivity and simultaneously be in a position to realize the benefits of economic growth.

Becker’s concept of human capital is not exclusively keyed to the workplace, but he assumes that human capital can pay off for the individual investor in terms of better pay and working conditions. While new literacies can have significant workplace value, their economic importance extends into many other sectors as well. Conceptions of human capital more recent and expansive than Becker’s make it easier to include not only workplaces, but also such everyday practices as ATM use—practices that are unlikely to appear within wage/labor exchanges in any direct way. Further, according to recent surveys, more and more population groups would seem to be actively involved in everyday practices requiring the technologies linked with new literacies. While the so-called digital divide has hardly disappeared by any means, recent widely publicized studies by the Kaiser Foundation in 2010 and by Nielsen in 2011 and 2012 show much greater use of digital technology than previously by youth in low income and minority groups. The Nielsen study reveals that in fact Hispanic and African American youth in the United States are more likely than whites to use smartphones. It can be exciting for researchers to document the ways in which sophisticated multimodal users deploy emergent literacies, and more expansive concepts of human capital help substantiate a claim that these uses can have high economic value. In light of the directional movement of even low-range human capital benefits in ATM transactions, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the benefits available from a range of new literacy skills naturally remain in the hands of the users who do the literacy work involving new technologies. Nor should it be assumed that educational reform directed at producing more human capital–rich individuals would immediately translate into reducing income inequalities.

Like human capital as Becker understands it, the newer, more expansive forms of human capital also depend on and simultaneously disguise the labor appropriated in the process of their acquisition. While

Reviews for Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital by Evan Watkins is a discussion centered largely around the ideas of various literacies, their relation to attention and attention flow, and how these combine in today's "just-in-time" form of human capital.Watkins addresses foundational literature in the area of literacy studies as well as current arguments and debates, walking a fine line between academic and popular writing style. For the most part he succeeds in making these ideas accessible to a lay reader, such as myself. That said, it still requires both an attention to detail and perhaps a second reading to get the most out of the book. I will readily admit I missed some key points my first time through and am looking forward to a better understanding the next time through. I present the last comment as a positive, a book outside my normal scope that can motivate a second reading has managed to be interesting and well-written at the same time.This is a valuable work for those in both education (educators in general as well as those in cultural or literacy studies) and business. The better we understand what we are really doing and how we have tried doing it, the better we can consciously and systematically teach or utilize those resources.Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.