Security, deskilling and abstract systems

Abstract systems deskill -- not only in the workplace, but in all the sectors of social life that they touch. The deskilling of day-to-day life is an alienating and fragmenting phenomenon so far as the self is concerned. Alienating, because the intrusion of abstract systems, especially expert systems, into all aspects of day-to-day life undermines pre-existing forms of local control. In the much more strongly localised life of most pre-modern societies, all individuals developed many skills and types of `local knowledge',

-- 138 --

in Geertz's sense, relevant to their day-to-day lives. Everyday survival depended on integrating such skills into practical modes of organising activities within the contexts of the local community and the physical environment. With the expansion of abstract systems, however, the conditions of daily life become transformed and recombined across much larger time-space tracts; such disembedding processes are processes of loss. It would be wrong, however, to see such loss as power passing from some individuals or groups to others. Transfers of power do occur in such a way, but they are not exhaustive. For instance, the development of professional medicine has led to the `sieving off' of knowledge and curative skills once held by many laypeople. Doctors and many other types of professional expert derive power from the knowledge-claims which their codes of practice incorporate. Yet because the specialisation inherent in expertise means that all experts are themselves laypeople most of the time, the advent of abstract systems sets up modes of social influence which no one directly controls. It is just this phenomenon that underlies the emergence of high-consequence risks.

Braverman was mistaken to suppose that, in the sphere of work, a one-way process of deskilling occurs. In the workplace, new skills are continually created, and in some part developed by those whose activities are deskilled. Something similar is true in many other sectors of social activity where the influence of abstract systems has made itself felt. The reappropriation of knowledge and control on the part of lay actors is a basic aspect of what I have sometimes termed the `dialectic of control'. Whatever skills and forms of knowledge laypeople may lose, they remain skilful and knowledgeable in the contexts of action in which their activities take place and which, in some part, those activities continually reconstitute. Everyday skill and knowledgeability thus stands in dialectical connection to the expropriating effects of abstract systems, continually influencing and reshaping the very impact of such systems on day-to-day existence.

What is involved is not just reappropriation but, in some circumstances and contexts, empowerment. Coupled to disembedding, the expansion of abstract systems creates increasing quanta of power -- the power of human beings to alter the material world and transform the conditions of their own actions.

-- 139 --

The reappropriation of such power provides generic opportunities not available in prior historical eras. Such empowerment is both individual and collective, although the relations between these two levels is often tangled and difficult to unravel, both for the analyst and for the layperson on the level of everyday life.

The profusion of abstract systems is directly bound up with the panoramas of choice which confront the individual in day-to-day activity. On the one hand, there is often a selection to be made between local or lay ways of doing things and procedures on offer from the domain of abstract systems. This is not simply a confrontation of the `traditional' and the modern, although such a situation is common enough. As a result of processes of reappropriation, an indefinite number of spaces between lay belief and practice and the sphere of abstract systems are opened up. In any given situation, provided that the resources of time and other requisites are available, the individual has the possibility of a partial or more full-blown reskilling in respect of specific decisions or contemplated courses of action.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 692