Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital
Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital
EVAN WATKINS
Copyright Date: 2015
Published by: Fordham University Press
Pages: 176
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15m7nj6
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Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital
Book Description:

In recent years, a number of books in the field of literacy research have addressed the experiences of literacy users or the multiple processes of learning literacy skills in a rapidly changing technological environment. In contrast to these studies, this book addresses the subjects of literacy. In other words, it is about how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself. As Evan Watkins shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed in relation to not only technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced considerable debate over basic definitions as well as the complexities of gain and loss. At the same time, the visibility of these debates between advocates of old versus new literacies has obscured the development of more fundamental changes. Most significantly, Watkins argues, it is no longer possible to represent human capital solely as the kind of long-term resource that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have defined. Like corporate inventory and business management practices, human capital-labor-now also appears in a "just-in-time" form, as if a power of action on the occasion rather than a capital asset in reserve. Just-in-time human capital valorizes the expansion of choice, but it depends absolutely on the invisible literacy work consigned to the peripheries of concentrated human capital. In an economy wherein peoples' attention begins to eclipse information as a primary commodity, a small number of choices appear with an immensely magnified intensity while most others disappear entirely. As Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital deftly illustrates, the concentration of human labor in the digital age reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside of technological innovation and losers everywhere else.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-6426-1
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. ix-xii)
  4. Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital
    Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital (pp. 1-32)

    Over the past decade the growing use of unpaid interns has drawn legal as well as political attention. Lengthy analyses have appeared inAtlanticand theNew York Times, among other publications, and a quick Web search can turn up a number of sites that offer help with lawsuits for those who feel victimized. The concern, of course, is that employers are simply taking advantage of the soft job market to extort free labor from applicants desperate for positions. The 29 January 2010 Department of Labor guidance letter for training and employment identifies education as the primary purpose of unpaid...

  5. CHAPTER 1 Capitalizing on Autonomy
    CHAPTER 1 Capitalizing on Autonomy (pp. 33-58)

    Gary Becker had available a number of sources for the concept of human capital developed in his 1964 book of that title, but one particularly powerful originary formulation occurs in none other than Adam Smith. InThe Wealth of NationsSmith identifies, as one kind of fixed capital, “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society,” noting that “[t]he acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person” (358)....

  6. CHAPTER 2 Arrivals and Departures: Just in the Nick of Time
    CHAPTER 2 Arrivals and Departures: Just in the Nick of Time (pp. 59-92)

    Made famous as the Toyota Production System, just-in-time business models are promoted as a way to radically reduce the carrying costs of inventory while also speeding up production. With the corporate success and popularity of just-in-time through the 1990s and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, it has become ever clearer that the various versions of a just-in-time model are about managing people and people skills as much or more than about managing inventories or materials movement. Given the twin objectives of reducing waste and upping efficient productivity, potentially unnecessary workers pose a more significant problem...

  7. CHAPTER 3 Star Power
    CHAPTER 3 Star Power (pp. 93-123)

    At the beginning of the 1990s Google had not yet made a fortune in the attention market (and had not yet confounded common business sense) by giving away services for which other enterprises charged a considerable amount. The infamous attention-tracking ads of remarketing initiatives were still a ways into the future. Throughout the decade, however, there were abundant Internet examples that seemed to demonstrate the importance of attention as a primary and still underexploited resource available to those best able to track attention and measure its flows. Within this attention-centered business logic, the initial mistake made by theorists of an...

  8. CHAPTER 4 Capital Divisions and Literacy Work
    CHAPTER 4 Capital Divisions and Literacy Work (pp. 124-160)

    InThe Race between Technology and Education, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz document a relatively long period beginning early in the twentieth century during which income inequality in the United States gradually diminished. This did not always happen at the same rate, and certainly did not happen everywhere at the same time for everyone, but according to their account, the overall picture from after the Depression until around 1980 shows a continual reduction. Their claim is that in this century of human capital, the lessening of income inequality can be correlated generally with the gradual climb in educational attainment, if...

  9. Works Cited
    Works Cited (pp. 161-166)
  10. Index
    Index (pp. 167-170)
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