De-Skilling, Re-Skilling, and Up-Skilling

Skill is a property, the capability to accomplish something, which requires practical knowledge and ability and is acquired with practice. De-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling are each processes through which the skill demanded of practitioners by specific activities, tasks, or situations is changed or redistributed. A process of de-skilling involves something demanding less skill of the people accomplishing it. For example, the replacement of handlooms with mechanized looms in the early nineteenth-century British textile industry demanded less-skilled human labor to accomplish the production of woven cloths. Re-skilling generally refers to processes through which someone develops new skills. Its dominant use has been to describe processes through which workers made redundant from one skilled trade, such as in manufacturing, are re-skilled to be competent practitioners of a new trade, such as working in a service sector occupation. Up-skilling is the equipping of someone with the capability to take on something that can be seen as more demanding than what he or she currently accomplishes. It has most visibly been applied to grand plans for up-skilling a workforce, or a nations' youth, or a class of workers to face the challenges and opportunities of a new technological age or of a dawning knowledge-based economy, and so on.

It is immediately clear from these examples of dominant usage and meaning that ideas of de-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling have been forged and applied in relation to production and labor processes. However, with recognition over recent decades that skill resides in the activities, tasks, and situations of consumption as well as those of production, these terms take on analytical relevance to directly understanding the dynamics of consumption. In what follows, this entry first considers the roots of these terms in debates over labor, capital, and technology, which stretch back to the nineteenth century, before finally turning to applications of the terms to understanding processes of contemporary consumer culture.

While the processes described by the three different terms of the title can be retrospectively identified over centuries, of the three terms, de-skilling has the longest history of use and meaning. In academic debate, its origins are particularly identified with Harry Braverman's de-skilling thesis. Braverman contested accounts of labor process theory that saw twentieth-century processes of deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy as a process of the elevation of work away from routinized manual labor toward white-collar occupations. Drawing on Karl Marx's understandings of the appropriation of surplus labor and the alienation that ensues under capitalism, Braverman argued that the twentieth century saw the continued degradation of both manual and white-collar work. By reducing the need for skilled craftspeople, reducing individual responsibility and scope for action within labor processes, twentieth-century capitalism functioned to extend into new realms of economic activity the processes of proletarianization identified by Marx in the nineteenth century.

Threads of Braverman's arguments continue into contemporary debates over the managerial imperative of both capital and state. For example, George Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis contends that the rational management control, standardization, and efficiency characteristic of the archetypal fast-food outlet was increasingly characteristic of a broadening range of social phenomena. The effects of contemporary “audit culture” in both private and public work situations can similarly be criticized as deprofessionalizing and de-skilling occupations like teaching or social work, as knowledge, skills, judgment, and creativity are separated from practitioners into generic codes of practice in ways which facilitate managerial monitoring and control in the interests of maintaining particular models of quality or value. Through such processes, de-skilling can be argued to be part of the continued degradation of work into the twenty-first century.

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