Skilled Work

Classifying Work as Skilled

One general approach regarding how to classify a particular form of work as skilled versus unskilled originates from psychologists Robert W. Proctor and Addie Dutta, and it has become influential also within other fields of research. They define skills as “goal-directed, well-organized behavior that is acquired through practice and performed with economy of effort” and subsequently distinguish between four types of skills: Motor skills refer to speed and accuracy of physical movements or dexterity and are thus the manual aspects of performance; perceptual skills concern the ability to make distinctions and judgments; response skills concern how to select the appropriate course of action and can, to a certain extent, be developed with practice; and problem-solving skills can be acquired and developed through practice while being at the same time dependent upon intellect and mental models. When translating this perspective to the sociological work-focused perspective, skilled work then becomes work that generates demands regarding speed, accuracy, and quality in a physical, perceptual, responsive, and/or problem-solving sense.

Others have questioned whether the concept of skilled work should be reserved for formally classified work types and instead look for the types of knowledge actually required in order to perform the work tasks. Thus, Kenneth C. Kusterer found, when he studied allegedly unskilled workers, that their work required substantial amounts of [Page 780]“working knowledge.” Similarly, Tony Manwaring and Stephen Wood highlighted the existence of “tacit skills” required for certain kinds of work that were in a formal sense classified as unskilled.

There has, in addition to these analytically based approaches to the issue of whether work should be classified as skilled or not, in recent years been a surge of interest focusing on the political aspects of skill. The notion of skilled work, according to this perspective, may be viewed as an outcome of socially constructed processes, and evidence of such processes can be seen back to premodern times. For example, the medieval crafts in Europe were legitimized by guilds exercising power regarding entrance into their specific knowledge domain, and the work they subsequently controlled was defined as skilled based on the power they held rather than on an objective assessment of whether the work carried out required skills or not. This kind of mechanism continued with the emergence and institutionalization of professions, which in a similar (albeit more subtle) way can work toward the monopolization of how to define particular types of work as skilled. One relatively recent strand of research argued that the entire discourse on skills is socially constructed, in the sense that it has a strong gender bias. Simply put, there may have been strong mechanisms throughout history influencing the way certain kinds of work have been classified as skilled versus unskilled, biased by the domination of male values and preconceptions.

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