Labour perspectives on the new politics of skill and competency formation: International reflections |
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| Authors: | Peter Sawchuk |
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| Institution: | (1) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada |
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| Abstract: | Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the
goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced
capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding issues of instrumentality and social
control, as well as the failure of skill/compentancy approaches to articulate a meaningful understanding of human learning
capacities. In this article, these critical perspectives are clarified further by a review of contributions to understanding
the skill/competence question emerging from sociology of work literature. Building from these critiques, this article outlines
recent experiences with and perspectives on skill/competency frameworks amongst different national labour movements. Included
in this outline is a more detailed, comparative analysis of Norway and Canada; here we see the lofty ‘new’, ‘knowledge economy’
rhetoric — in two countries where one might expect to see it blossom in application — brought down to earth by the realities
of industrial relations, employer intransigence and intra-labour movement differences. ‘Skill/competence’ proves to be a floating
signifier that, amongst both employers and labour, stands as a proxy for ‘power/control’ struggles. Degenerating in this way,
from a labour perspective, the new politics of skill/competency formation is seen to have spiraled toward irrelevance in Norway
and Canada; awaiting, in both countries, a re-invigoration through attention to changes in the participatory structure of
the labour process itself. |
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| Keywords: | work competency skills employability labour policy industrial relations Canada Norway |
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