Unskilled Work

Social Sciences Research

Two broad trends can be said to characterize research in unskilled work. One trend aims more at the macro level as economists, sociologists, and others studying labor markets have a longstanding interest in the level of skill existing at any point in society. A second broad trend, led by sociologists of work and cultural anthropologists, involves understanding how individuals and groups make meaning from unskilled work. This section discusses findings from these two research traditions.

Questions from the macrolevel stream are concerned with how political, economic, and social processes create unskilled jobs. Mechanisms that might affect these processes have important implications for research within inequality, labor markets, technology, immigration, health and well-being, and other broad topics. Within the macro level, there are two distinct traditions. One is a status attainment literature, dating back to 1950s functionalist research, such as that of Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, that views unskilled, low-paying jobs as necessary for society. More recently, this research is framed in terms of human capital theory, wherein the education and skills of the individual are said to predict the level of prestige and income that individual will attain. A more structuralist tradition borrows from theories such as labor market segmentation, which argues that unskilled people are not “naturally” matched to unskilled jobs. Rather, social structures tend to produce different kinds of jobs and then unequally track particular social groups into good jobs and bad jobs. Queuing theory, most famously associated with Barbara Reskin, is an example of this research.

More generally, the theoretical effort to understand these broader social processes can be traced back to the “upgrading” versus “deskilling” debate, which preoccupied researchers in the 1970s and 1980s. Harry Braverman's deskilling thesis argued that, embedded within the logic of capitalism, organizations will necessarily seek to dominate their labor force in order to compete and therefore make their survival more likely. By taking skilled jobs and making them unskilled—through technology and the organization of production—firms can gain control over the terms of work. As capitalism develops, more and more jobs should become unskilled.

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