Supposedly we Americans live in a “knowledge economy,” in which the source of wealth is neither financial capital, physical plants or natural resources, but the knowledge, expertise and intelligence of individual human beings. We have a whole industry called “information technology.”
But although employers require ever-higher levels of academic credentials, this is not reflected in the work itself. College graduates wind up doing work that high school graduates once did, and high school graduates do work that school dropouts once did.
In the early 20th century, businesses adopted a practice called Taylorism—resolving factory work into the simplest, most basic, mindless human motions. Now we have McDonaldization—resolving service work into the following of simple checklists.
Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer, in their 2016 book, THE STUPIDITY PARADOX: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work, attribute this to the tendency of organizations to suppress critical thinking because of their need for obedience to orders and smooth internal functioning.
What they write is true as far as it goes, but organizational stupidity is more than a simple mistake in setting priorities. Organizational stupidity is maintained by powerful vested interests.
Knowledge Is Power
Knowledge is power. If I am a supervisor and my subordinate is more knowledgeable and competent than I am, that diminishes my power. What college graduate, fresh out of business school, wants to be contradicted by some grouchy old skilled craftsman, who has less schooling but may know more than he does?
Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Power and David Noble, in America by Design and Forces of Production, described the de-skilling of the American work force and the development of technologies devoted to increasing command and control by management rather than increasing productivity as such.
The more knowledgeable and skilled a worker is, the more power the worker has in relation to the employer, both as an individual and as a member of a labor union. So knowledge and skills aren’t necessarily wanted except where they are indispensable.
A friend of mine who went back to school in mid-life to get an advanced degree in his specialty discovered that employers did not want his new skills. What they wanted, he said, was “a jack of all trades who would work cheap.” Employers see more benefit in having replaceable workers than in having productive workers.
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