Introduction: The SCELI Skill Findings

Abstract

Abstract The chapters of this book are based on the research carried out for the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. SCELI was launched in 1985, just over a decade after Braverman’s (1974) influential publication on the degradation of work. This book had led to a continuing and intense debate over the direction and nature of change in the skill level of jobs, and perhaps more fundamentally over the meaning or social significance of the terms ‘skill’ and ‘skilled work’. Developing alongside this debate over deskilling was a second, over flexibility in work tasks and pressures for new systems of work to meet changing competitive conditions and new (especially electronic) technologies. Intermingling with both these debates, but always retaining its own dynamic, was yet another, over gender and the relationships between social and gender divisions and the meaning and concept of skill.