WHOSE SKILL IS IT ANYWAY ? 'SOFT' SKILLS AND POLARISATION Irena Grugulis and Steven ...

31 Pages·2011·0.1 MB·English

WHOSE SKILL IS IT ANYWAY ? ‘SOFT’ SKILLS AND POLARISATION
Irena Grugulis and Steven Vincent

Whose skill is it anyway? Soft skills and polarisation (Irena Grugulis and Steve Vincent)
Work, Employment and Society 23 (4) pp 597 – 615 December 2009
Address for correspondence: Durham Business School, Mill Hill Lane, Durham DH1
3LB E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

The skills that employers require are changing, with soft skills replacing technical
ones. This article draws on two detailed case studies of outsourced public sector
work, where these changes were particularly marked. Here, the new skills polarised
the workforces. Highly skilled IT professionals were advantaged as soft skills gave
them an additional dimension to their work while benefit caseworkers with
intermediate skills were disadvantaged since soft skills were presented as an
alternative to technical competences. Women caseworkers suffered a double penalty,
not only were their technical skills devalued but many were confined to traditionally
‘feminine’ and unskilled work at the reception desk. Soft skills certainly aided the
acknowledgement of women’s skills, but they did nothing to increase their value.

Key words
skill, soft skills, public sector, outsourcing, management skills, customer service,
gender

Introduction

In recent years there has been a dramatic shift in the skills employers (claim to)
require, marginalising technical skills and privileging soft skills (Hillage et al., 2002);
a shift that has had a mixed response from academic researchers. While some have
welcomed this extension to the vocabulary of skill, claiming (among other
advantages) that the attributes of many women workers would now be acknowledged
(Hampson and Junor, 2009), others have greeted the development with concern (see,
for example Payne, 1999; Grugulis, 2007) with Keep (2001) arguing that the new
lexicon served only to create a skills escalator: the number of skills that an individual
could lay claim to was rising, but those on the bottom step were still on the bottom
step.

The public sector is one of the areas where this shift has been most dramatic. Indeed,
changing the way employees work is one of the principal justifications for
marketisation (Katz, 1997). This article follows the outsourcing of public sector work
in two case studies: housing benefit caseworkers with intermediate skills and IT
professionals with high skills, exploring the differences between the cases by
reviewing the new skills required and assessing their impact and efficacy. In these
studies, the way workers experienced both outsourcing and soft skills varied, with the
highly skilled IT workers gaining, while the housing benefit caseworkers, and
particularly the women caseworkers, were disadvantaged. Here, while traditionally
‘feminine’ skills were more widely acknowledged this recognition failed to benefit
the women who exercised them and, in some cases, was used as a justification to
confine them to tasks well below their (technical) competence. Overall, the switch to
soft skills was used to undermine the expertise of housing benefit caseworkers since
soft skills were seen as an alternative to technical ones. By contrast, the IT
professionals’ technical skills remained highly valued and soft skills were used to
improve work attitudes and flexibility for their new, American, employer. So while
the housing benefit caseworkers’ bargaining position deteriorated dramatically, that of
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the IT professionals remained high. It was here that workers were able to use soft
skills to their own benefit as graduate recruits hired for their entrepreneurship sought
out the most advantageous projects to be on then took their newly acquired skills
elsewhere. This article shows the way that employers placed very different values on
soft skills, depending on the workers who exercised them. A bias which further
advantaged people who were already highly skilled and penalised those who were not.

The changing nature of skill

Skill has always been an elusive concept. The increasing prominence of ‘soft skills’
has added to this complexity. Accounts of skill now include communication, problem
solving, team working, an ability to improve personal learning and performance,
motivation, judgement, leadership and initiative (DfEE, 2000:24). The shift, as Payne
(2000; 1999) notes, is from technical skill to personal attributes and it is these soft
skills that are now, at least rhetorically, most in demand by employers (DfEE, 2000;
Hillage et al., 2002).

In some respects, little of this is novel. Employers have always been interested in the
type of person they employ (Beynon, 1975). Those interviewed by Oliver and
Turnton (1982:199) lamented the shortage of ‘stable’, ‘reliable’ and ‘responsible’
workers and Steiger’s (1993) account of work on a building site reveals the
importance of getting on with colleagues. There is continuity, then, in the demand for
soft skills, but there are also new developments in the workplace that shape both the
qualities demanded and the significance they assume. These include: the growth of
the service sector, when the process of being served is as much a part of the sale as
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any physical products (Noon and Blyton, 2007); the introduction of lean
manufacturing, with its emphasis on teamwork and problem solving (Thompson et al,
1995; Shibata, 2001); and, of particularly relevance to this article, the marketisation,
privatisation and use of new management techniques in the public sector (Katz, 1997;
Martinez Lucio and MacKenzie, 1999).

Problems with soft skills

There are problems with this increasing emphasis on soft skills. Firstly it may support
and legitimise discrimination. Personal attributes, attitudes to work and individual
qualities are extremely difficult to evaluate and, in practice, proxies are used. Again,
much of this is familiar. The jobs that people do and the way they are required to do
them are stereotyped (Kanter, 1977; Skuratowicz and Hunter, 2004; Hebson and
Grugulis, 2005). So male (but not female) lawyers are encouraged to be aggressive,
while female (but not male) paralegals are expected to nurture (Pierce, 1995); women
call centre representatives must be empathetic, men need only reach sales targets
(Taylor and Tyler, 2000); and black men are rated as less loyal and ambitious than
their white colleagues (Maume, 1999). Gender may be taken as a “proxy for
productivity” (Reskin and McBrier, 2000:210) and competence rated highly when
employees are the ‘right’ gender for the job (Erikson et al., 2000; Fischer et al.,
1997). The tendency to recruit based on stereotypical assumptions (Collinson et al.,
1990; Braddock and McPortland, 1987) may be exaggerated in the service sector
where customers and clients also gauge competence through stereotypes (Reskin,
1993; Erikson et al., 2000) and behaviours and qualities which run counter to
expectations are condemned, even when these are appropriate for the occupation
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(Collinson et al., 1990; Pierce, 1995). Re-defining personal attributes and behaviours
as skills puts individuals in a double bind: legitimising gendered and racialised
assumptions while ignoring the structural aspects of work that create and reinforce
such assumptions. When it is an individual’s character that is being judged,
evaluations based on gender and race are far more likely.

General definitions of valued attributes also serve to convey the impression that the
qualities described are generic: that communicating the location of baked beans in a
supermarket is the same as communicating the rules of cricket or abstract theories in
mathematics (for criticisms of this see, for example, Peters, 1972; Keep, 2001). Yet
effective and sensible communication on any or all of these topics may also involve
subject knowledge, an awareness of local processes and personal judgement, factors
discounted in generic lists. Conflating personal attributes and skills also
individualises responsibility for them and neglects their reciprocal and relational
elements. Moss and Tilly (1996) conducted research in two warehouses in the same
district of Los Angeles, both of which employed present and past gang members.
While managers in one complained of high turnover, laziness and dishonesty, in the
second, which paid several dollars per hour more, managers had few complaints and
turnover was a modest two per cent. As Lafer (2004:117 - 118) argues:

traits such as discipline, loyalty and punctuality are not “skills” that one either
possesses or lacks; they are measures of commitment that one chooses to give or
withhold based on the conditions of work offered.

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More worryingly, the relationship between soft skills and technical skills is not
always complementary. All work involves a (fluid) mixture of expertise and social
skills. As Thompson et al. (1995) and Shibata (2001) have shown, technical
knowledge and expertise coupled with softer team working and problem solving skills
can can impact positively on productivity. Yet soft skills are often referred to as
alternatives to technical knowledge and expertise (Payne, 1999, 2000) and in Canada
and the USA low level training courses, designed to get the unemployed back to
work, now focus entirely on soft skills, effectively depriving workers of one of their
few opportunities to learn technical skills and trapping them in poorly paid jobs
(Cohen, 2003; Lafer, 2004). In some instances, it seems that skill development has
become a zero sum game.

The few empirical accounts that exist reinforce the notion that soft skills are
employer-defined, locally relevant and political rather than universal and generic.
Brown and Hesketh (2004) argue that it is not just the skills themselves but the way
they are enacted which are ‘authorised’ by employers, so ‘good’ employees display
the ‘right’ skills in acceptable and accepted ways. While Rees and Garnsey’s (2003)
study of a range of institutions demonstrates that the soft skills on which employers
choose to focus are not neutral demands derived from the nature of the task but
political statements about the direction the organisation ‘should’ progress in. To this
end their case studies emphasised soft skills which were variously aggressively
‘masculine’, empathetically ‘feminine’ and, in the case of two public sector
organisations (a hospital and a university) clearly prioritised managerial virtues over
professional ones. The reason for these local languages of skill are easy to see. After
all, organisations are political entities (Jackall 1988), not simply institutions for
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getting tasks done, so activities, priorities and (as here) desirable personal qualities are
likely to vary from firm to firm.

Soft skills in the public sector

These comments have particular resonance in the public sector and it is not just in
Rees and Garnsey’s (2003) study that soft skills were part of restructuring and
marketisation. Ferner et al. (1997:102) cite an internal, post-privatisation British
Telecom document which sought to train employees to “relate to customers in a
knowledgeable and caring way” (see also Keefe and Batt, 1997; Bamber et al., 1997).
Yet customer service, though central to much private sector work, is, in the public
sector, only one aspect of a complex and often politicised relationship. While contact
with the ‘consumer’, courtesy and efficient service are important, they form only part
of the ‘service’ process (Foster and Hoggett, 1999). The public sector, in structure,
values and objectives, is inherently political, and is responsible to a range of
stakeholders beyond its ‘customers’, including parliament (Martinez Lucio and
MacKenzie, 1999; Corby and White, 1999). Carlzon’s (1987) “moment of delight” at
the point of contact between ‘consumer’ and ‘service worker’, through which the
customer conflates the manner of service delivery with the product delivered
(Korczynski, 2002) is often only one aspect of an on-going relationship. Public sector
service may have objectives such as social justice, equity and democracy, that are not
readily achieved and for which the ‘customer’ cannot choose to go to another provider
if they are dissatisfied. Understandably, demand for such services tends to exceed
supply (Fountain, 2001) and, while excellent service in the private sector may
stimulate both demand and resources, in the public sector, good service may mean
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securing reasonable delivery when faced with declining or limited real resources
(Rainbird et al., 2004, Boyne, 2003).

The public sector environment adds an extra dimension to the shift to soft skills. In
this study we set out to explore locally constituted soft skills and (particularly)
investigate the impact that the shift in emphasis had on employees. Given the diverse
forms that these skills could take and our interest in the process of ‘being skilful’
detailed case studies were undertaken and the research techniques included
interviews, participant observation, repeat visits and analyses of internal and external
documents, since it was felt that this type of qualitative approach could best reveal
both the way that employers shaped skills (and how this resonated with the work
conducted and the organisation itself) and the way workers responded. The two case
studies described here, ‘TCS’ and ‘Futuretech’, were selected because both claimed to
prioritise soft skills as a way of improving productivity in marketised public sector
services. Both were private sector companies which had taken on large public sector
contracts and were operating with a workforce dominated by ex-public sector staff
who had been transferred over. They aimed, through a combination of new soft skills
and different ways of working, to change both the work undertaken and the way it
was done.

Introducing the case studies

Futuretech was a large multinational software company that had experienced rapid
growth in the USA and UK, largely through providing outsourced IT development
and support. The UK division of Futuretech had grown from just a few hundred
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employees at the start of the 1980s to more than 20,000 at the time this research was
conducted. Futuretech had a ten-year contract with Govco, a Government
department, to provide computer services. The department was large and bureaucratic,
employing 60,000 people in more than thirty divisions. Its employees used some
40,000 computer-terminals on a daily basis, which required both programming and
maintenance. Initially, more than 2,000 staff were transferred from Govco to
Futuretech with 200 opting for voluntary redundancy (800 applied). Over the life of
the contract the amount of work that Futuretech actually did for Govco doubled, and
large numbers of university graduates were hired, increasing staff numbers by
approximately 25 per cent.

Total Customer Services (TCS) specialised in business operations outsourcing. It had
a turnover of over £200 million per year and more than 3,000 employees. TCS took
over housing benefits claims processing from Council X, a London borough, as a
loss-leader in order to break into what was considered an expanding area of
outsourcing business. This housing benefits office had previously been under
performing and was identified as one of the worst boroughs in London.

Since the research was qualitative and aimed to understand organisational processes,
repeated visits were made to each site and a total of 81 formal interviews were
conducted. Forty-eight of these were in Futuretech/Govco: 35 with Futuretech
managers and supervisors, six with programmers and one with a full time trade union
official. Six additional interviews were conducted with senior managers in Govco
who monitored Futuretech’s work. Thirty three interviews were conducted in
TCS/Council X: 11 with TCS managers and directors, two with supervisors, five with
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case workers and three with agency case workers. Three managers and one case
worker working for Council X were interviewed and the research team also contacted
three trade union representatives, one policy officer with a local government body and
three managers from the government’s Improvement and Development Agency. In
both cases, while key management and union respondents were selected by the
research team other first line management and ‘shop floor’ interviewees were found
by a combination of ‘snowball’ contacts, managerial nominations and informal
approaches during participant observation. Interviews lasted an average of one and a
half hours (with some taking considerably longer) and all were taped and transcribed
in full. Access was also gained to some internal documents and (particularly for
Govco) extensive policy material.

The changing nature of work

Both TCS and Futuretech claimed to be bringing not only expertise but also new,
private sector attitudes to their tasks (even when the people employed had simply
been transferred over). They not only changed the way work was done, they also
changed the way it was supposed to be carried out (see fig. 1).

INSERT FIGURE ONE ABOUT HERE

In both case studies work was reorganised. In TCS claims processing was sub-
divided into its constituent parts. This meant that, rather than following a claim
through from start to finish and learning about the special requirements of each
claimant, caseworkers dealt with one aspect of the form then passed work on.
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