Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 First edition for Diane Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital Capitalizing on Autonomy Arrivals and Departures: Just in the Nick of Time Star Power Capital Divisions and Literacy Work Works Cited Index Acknowledgments I have mined David Ruccio’s expertise about all things economic that appear in this book, from Adam Smith and Marx to Oliver Williamson, and I have benefited over and over from his generous willingness to share that expertise I want to thank Ann Miller for a superb job of copy editing, making far more of the manuscript intelligible than I would have thought possible I am fortunate to write surrounded by family support I rely more than anything on my wife, Diane Logan Watkins, and my son and daughter-in-law, Christopher Watkins and Amy Marinelli Chris’s wide-ranging knowledge of digital literacies, literacy uses, and business practices that involve multiple literacies has been especially invaluable for this book And my wondrous and magical grandchild, Clara Bay, limns the literacies to come I was blessed to work with Helen Tartar for more than thirty-five years and now five books Everything seemed to belong within her vast orbit of passionate intelligence, and like everyone she knew, I’ll miss her so much Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital Over the past decade the growing use of unpaid interns has drawn legal as well as political attention Lengthy analyses have appeared in Atlantic and the New 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 internships, and the six criteria for unpaid trainees that it spells out are strict The first of the six is that the training offered should be similar to what might be given by an institution for vocational or academic education The second is that the training must be for the benefit of the trainees Neither criterion precludes the individual from performing typical operations required at the workplace The fourth criterion, however, forcefully states that the employer cannot gain immediate advantage from trainee activity and adds that from time to time employer operations may well be impeded by the presence of the trainee Media accounts critical of the proliferation of unpaid positions question the extent to which either the first or the fourth criterion is widely observed Yet even critical accounts sometimes concede that the trainee may receive intangible benefits from an internship, which might include gaining a behind-the-scenes understanding of how the business or profession actually works; a pipeline awareness of key players and how they might influence job possibilities; and simply the fact of being on the spot and (the trainee can hope) demonstrating his or her abilities The fifth Department of Labor criterion makes explicit that trainees are not entitled to a job at the end of the training period, but the intangibles can seem sufficient to give the trainee a vital edge over others who apply for openings The position of an unpaid intern may appear to have very little in common with a wide range of ordinary activities in which a great many of us engage The federal criteria for unpaid positions, however, help reveal some surprising connections as well as obvious differences Even a simple ATM transaction, for example, requires at least some degree of customer knowledge, but it offers nothing by way of education, the key stipulation throughout the Department of Labor guidance letter Yet according to the letter’s first criterion, what actually goes on in the brief period we spend at the ATM sounds very similar to what might happen at any given moment during a temporary unpaid intern position Like a bank teller, an ATM customer taps codes into a machine (owned or leased by the financial institution or the network to which the institution belongs) that dispenses cash That is, the ATM customer is in the position of a trainee engaged, in the words of the first criterion, in “the actual operation of the facilities of the employer.” Our moment at the ATM is like a preview pane for some more extended process of unpaid intern work The Department of Labor criteria for traineeships also help pinpoint the problem with a frequent and convenient misrepresentation of the larger context for what is going on with ATMs It is not really the case that an “automated teller machine” has replaced a human bank teller In the recent past, new bank branches meant more teller hires, but the Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that branch growth has now slowed “Additionally,” the Handbook continues, “online and mobile banking allows customers to handle many of the same transactions as tellers do.” While there are still numbers of jobs available for bank tellers, it is because “many workers leave this occupation.” In short, what has happened is not that the machine has replaced the teller Work practices by customers at multiple locations have replaced typical work practices by tellers—paid employees working in the bank Like an unpaid intern using actual employer facilities, the customer now does the primary work of the transaction, quite often in circumstances in which that customer also pays a fee Such a transaction is obviously at odds with the intent of the Labor Department’s criterion for traineeships, which states that rather than displacing regular employees, trainees must work under their supervision Further, in violation of what criterion stipulates—and without even factoring in ATM fees—the financial institution, which in this comparison occupies the position of an employer, can benefit a great deal from these and similar kinds of transactions such as online banking, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters At the same time, it would hardly be accurate to say that customers receive no benefits from ATM transactions Education may not be included, but convenience is advertised as a major plus, and the convenience depends on an expanded range of choice Many different ATMs in many different locations, open twenty-four hours a day, mean that to a much greater extent than in the past, customers can obtain cash as they choose rather than in conformity with bank hours and locations and via waiting in lines at teller windows Mobile banking—such as from one’s computer or mobile device —is becoming more and more popular, but when cash is necessary, the benefits of ATM use would seem to outweigh the relatively minor annoyance of performing the transaction oneself and paying a fee According to a recent widely reported study entitled “The Cost of Cash in the United States” by Bhaskar Chakravorti and Benjamin Mazzotta of the Institute for Business in a Global Context at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, however, there are large social costs associated with cash use The most insidious is how it exacerbates the inequality that currently seems to be on everyone’s mind The study concludes that the poor and the “unbanked” are the biggest users of cash in relation to other payment methods, and they pay the highest fees to obtain cash when they can Rather than the combination of convenience and choice usually touted as an advantage to ATM users, the Institute’s research data suggest that in these circumstances, having “no choice” might well be a much better descriptor for some ATM users, as well as for those who are not in a position to use ATMs at all As made familiar and elaborated by Gary Becker in Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (first published in 1964) and in his subsequent work, human capital can be defined as a resource that is embodied in the person of its possessor Hence in corporate terms, the education, skills, intelligence, and even character of employees can appear as capital assets, every bit as much as a stock portfolio or a new CNC router to be used in production As the current marketing cliché has it, people are our most important asset The logic of Becker’s concept leads to the conclusion that potential employees who can represent themselves as rich in human capital should have a far better chance of being hired into good positions by employers eager to maximize those resources and prevent competitors from controlling them Becker has claimed for some time that his research demonstrates the full extent of how wage and income differentials reflect the distribution of human capital resources The contrasting directional Writing together in the foreword to Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell’s Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies, a collection of essays intended to explore productive connections between New Literacy Studies (NLS) and multimodal communications research, Gunther Kress and Brian Street express considerable concern about the proliferation of literacy as a term of identification for a wider and wider range of skills: “For instance, in both approaches there is a worry about the stretching of the term literacy well beyond the NLS conception of social practices of representation to become a metaphor (and often much less than that) for any kind of skill or competence One needs to ask whose interests are advanced and in what ways by the use of labels such as ‘palpatory literacy’ (skills in body massage), ‘emotional literacy’ (skills in affective massage?), ‘cultural literacy’ (skills in social massage??), and so on” (Travel Notes foreword, vii; Kress and Street’s emphasis) After all, marketing a particular set of ideological values as if it were a “literacy” makes it much easier to criticize those with other interests as not yet educated enough to understand the real issues: “[W]here a ‘literacy’ is identified, those with an interest in finding the corresponding illiterates are never far behind with their remedies” (vii) The Council for Economic Education provides some strong justification for the fears Street and Kress express about ideological interests intent on providing remedies for the illiterates among us The Council proudly boasts on its website’s home page that it has been “leading the charge for economic education and advancing financial literacy for over 60 years,” particularly during April, which is “financial literacy month.” Among other resources available on its website(www.councilforeconed.org) is a series of carefully elaborated lesson plans designed for K12 students (complete with content standards for teachers) that teach them, in increments, the basics of neoclassical economics According to these plans, already by the fourth grade students should have grasped central concepts about scarcity and free markets In addition, by the fourth grade they must learn to practice new skills, thereby starting to build their human capital early It’s good for them, and good for the country Over the last few years the Council has developed more and more online resources, including Gen i Revolution, an online game for middle and high school students in which they are introduced to characters facing a specific financial crisis: “[T]he student learns about the crisis, strategically selects ‘Operatives,’ and then completes activities with the ultimate goal of solving the mission” (Gen i Revolution, “Overview”) You just have to learn to make the right choices Frequent surveys during the sixty years of the Council’s existence have attempted to document the persistence of financial illiteracy, which needless to say comes down to an inability to grasp fundamental neoclassical economic doctrines Despite the Council’s best efforts in the past, clearly more work is necessary Street and Kress are not the only ones to express criticism about increasingly widespread use of adjectival literacy terms When longtime literacy historian Harvey Graff turns to the present in Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons, he devotes much of a chapter to distinguishing between the idea of multiple literacies that he supports and the process whereby nearly every kind of adjective gets attached to literacy: “ ‘Many literacies’—a conception I have long supported—sits precariously between an essential, and a necessary recognition, and the dangers of trivialization and debasement of literacy Overuse of the word ‘literacy’ and the concept empties it of value and useful meanings” (22) Later, in a footnote, he is rather more emphatic: “I have a list of more than 500 ‘literacies’ that I’ve seen mentioned in print Although I support notions of ‘many literacies,’ I not endorse the ceaseless, confusing, critically uncontrolled, and potentially dangerous proliferation of ‘literacies’ ” (34, n 32) From a disciplinary angle different from Graff’s, Patrick Goggin in Professing Literacy in Composition Studies wastes no time in attacking how the term literacy has been trivialized by leaving definitions basically a matter of whatever anyone wants to make up on any occasion: “Another side of the ‘literacy is whatever anyone wants it to be’ perspective is that it represents the trivialization of literacy and the perpetuation of what Graff (2006) calls a ‘new’ literacy myth” (5) Powerful ideological interests certainly helped shape the older, exclusionary definitions of literacy that Street and other New Literacy Studies critics began to challenge several decades ago Specific interests are also at stake among the labels and categories Street and Kress instance in their foreword to Pahl and Rowsell’s Travel Notes, and quite likely with all five hundred adjectival literacies that Graff reports having seen in print Yet once one identifies the ideological claims in definitions of “financial literacy” or “cultural literacy,” to pick obvious examples, it does not follow that the same interests are shaping the definitions of “palpatory literacy” or “depression literacy.” Even within a single category such as “gun literacy,” where one might well expect a powerfully concentrated ideological focus, especially in light of recent events, there seem to be a range of interests at work, as evidenced by various websites devoted to the subject, and often a single link on a site may lead to multiple and very different threads A number of sites devoted to “gun literacy” appear to be dedicated to little more than a kind of basic knowledge of the field, exchanging information about the terminology associated with various weapons and ammunition, such as caliber and cartridge size and so on Yet terminology is never really an ideology-free zone, and even under the guise of simple instruction in the fundamentals, issues of terminology can easily appear more fraught For example, on a page of the For Journalists website intended to educate journalists in the basic literacy about guns necessary for covering firearms-related stories, it would be difficult not to recognize a tone familiar from other uses of these terms in more directly obvious propaganda pieces The website instructions for journalists (which have since disappeared from the site as I had originally accessed it) came complete with insider warnings about how those in the know would “cringe at the Georgia newspaper’s story about 16mm mortar fins, or the Boston television station’s report on a guy being caught with a 50-caliber assault rifle, which actually turned out to be a 30-caliber belt-fed, tripodmounted machine gun—some 30 pounds of equipment that absolutely nobody is going to put on their shoulder in an ‘assault’ ” (Gun Guide: Basic Gun Literacy, at www.forjournalists.com) Whatever ideological work Street and Kress’s comments might accurately anticipate are at work within individual categories such as “financial literacy” or “gun literacy,” however, the same specific interests will hardly appear across the entire spectrum of adjectival literacies—hence the conclusion that Goggin draws, that literacy now appears as little more than an honorific attached to altogether separate activities In these recent circumstances, in which adjectival attachments to the term continue to proliferate, the identification of any given set of interests at work in assigning a particular label cannot really address the issue of what drives the process of proliferation in the first place The kind of ideological critique New Literacy Studies had directed at the exclusive, hierarchical control exercised by traditional definitions of literacy is unlikely to have the same force that it once did Specific critique directed at any one category remains basically nontransferable to the others, especially given that new categories continue to appear The immediate issue is less the efforts of the Council on Economic Education or anyone else to indoctrinate and drive home a single point of view —no surprise there—than why the term literacy might feature so prominently across so many different sites, with the numbers increasing all the time How is it that literacy seems an ideal cover for ideological or any other interests? Recent history offers some guidance “The Professional-Managerial Class” by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, which appeared as the lead article in the collection Between Labor and Capital (edited by Pat Walker,1979), helped generate a lot of interest among academic critics trying to define and understand what the rise of a professional class was all about As with the term literacy in current circumstances, academic critics often did not agree at all on basic definitions of professional Meanwhile, however, outside of academia the term seemed to have multiplied Professional was appearing everywhere, from glossily expensive ad campaigns to the Yellow Pages and the classifieds To critical eyes the result could easily be seen as a trivializing of the term almost to the point of meaninglessness, to little more than the empty honorific Goggin claims literacy has become in many situations today Like the loosening of the meaning of literacy later, the term professional appeared in relation to jobs and people that had little grounds to be recognized as professional, becoming no more than a metaphor “for any kind of skill or competence,” as Street and Kress remark about literacy In an age of human capital built on the credentialing of expertise, principles of merit, and the idea of personally embodied capital skills, the proliferation of the term professional signaled something like the emergence of a black market in facsimile goods People were marketing themselves and their job skills as if “the real thing,” with no credentialing, no guarantee at all of authenticity At the same time, charges hurled at others of being “unprofessional,” like charges of “illiteracy,” could mask a lot of different ideological interests Yet despite the similarities, Graff’s own example of “depression literacy,” as well as the websites I have instanced above, suggests a key difference Even in the Yellow Pages or in classified ads, the use of professional made a human capital claim, in effect, for the individual or the firm’s workers It implied a higher level of specially acquired skill and accreditation than that offered by competitors To some people these claims may have been suspect or empty or whatever, but they pointed first toward the speaker Graff’s example of depression literacy, in contrast, similar to financial literacy or gun literacy or the other uses mentioned above, does not seem to involve much emphasis on the speaker’s qualifications Graff reports that he discovered the term depression literacy in the Medical Journal of Australia Beyond Blue, in a statement of the organization’s objective on its website (beyondblue.org), emphasizes that depression literacy involves a struggle against public apathy and avoidance of the issues, that it is a means to help improve awareness and understanding of depression by educating a larger public That is, the statement takes for granted that those in the organization understand a lot about depression, as the Council for Economic Education assumes its members possess knowledge of economics, and so on Unlike the typical use of the term professional, uses of the term literacy such as this are not primarily part of an individual’s or a firm’s self-representation Literacy in these contexts is all about an audience and audience education Educational directives about literacy aimed at a particular potential audience are hardly new, but as Graff acknowledges, the market has changed when the many literacies around must “struggle to bloom and for recognition, often competing for attention and privilege in curricula, budgets, standards, tests, even law and policy—and for mention in print and other media” (Literacy Myths, 21) In an attention economy it is never enough to know about something—depression, or emotions, or body massaging, or whatever It is also necessary to develop a power of representation that can command attention elsewhere and educate others about how and why to pay attention The proliferation of adjectival literacies is also the proliferation of representational practices and educational imperatives It may occur very much at the periphery of educational institutions in their many different forms, but adjectival literacy is no less an educational project Some organizations, such as the Council for Economic Education, use their websites to extend their educational reach, as I mentioned above, by directly offering resources to the public schools for K-12 instruction Others, such as Beyond Blue, are more intent on educating the general public and acting as a clearinghouse for information For the maze of websites devoted to gun literacy, the audience seems composed of individuals and groups already interested in firearms, often already affiliated with some form of gun organization, and wary about outsiders who might have different values and interests altogether The specific educational practices can vary a great deal, but pedagogical processes remain central At the same time, the claims to attention represented by adjectival literacies typically encourage some sense that the potential audience should want to educate itself about the issues and knowledges involved From web pages devoted to newbie gun instruction to a relatively massive website such as that of the Council for Economic Education, the expectation is that audiences should buy in to the education on offer If use of the term professional seems a matter of selling the self or the firm as rich in human capital and thereby qualified to the job especially well, websites devoted to adjectival literacies, in contrast, are selling an audience on acquiring a form of socially or individually valuable knowledge Thus in some baseline sense, the pitch is little different from that of any postsecondary educational institution The idea is that you should spend time and expend effort here as a student in order to receive something important for your future As Graff acknowledges, the competition has come to be intense, as it often is among educational institutions in recruiting students What you get from this paying of attention and learning at the periphery, however, is not always clear, by any means This is not a matter of defining literacy carelessly or not at all, although cogent definitions may well be lacking To use Graff’s example of depression literacy again, it seems true enough that a better-educated general public might in the long run benefit medical research and those who suffer from depression But given that the education offered by the idea of depression literacy is one without degree, accreditation, or the promise of a job, the open question is what’s in it for those members of the general public who follow through Even relatively sophisticated sites like that of Beyond Blue, built around a generally recognized “good cause,” seem to imply that somehow what you will acquire through attending to its resources will be, just like a college degree, a kind of human capital good As I remarked above, acquiring human capital resources is usually represented as a process that broadens the individual, unlike the acquisition of material capital In addition to educational institutions and organizations operating at the periphery to offer adjectival literacy education, businesses often develop new literacies in house, as Lesley Farrell and other workplace researchers emphasize Rather than depend on schools to produce skilled, or “literate,” workers and to determine the norms of usage, businesses engage in their own development and education programs As Farrell argues in “Texting the Future: Work, Literacies, and Economies,” literacy researchers have been slow to catch on to what has been happening: “To date, most empirically based literacy studies have occurred in school and community settings This is understandable; schools are recognized as places where children and young people learn the valued literate practices of their societies and community settings are the well springs of local literacies Workplaces have only relatively recently been understood to be sites in which literacy is not only used but also learned and produced” (182) Although literacies developed in the workplace are hardly adjectival literacies in the same sense as those discussed above, the development of such literacies adds a whole other sector to the range of literacy education occurring beyond schools and local communities In comparison to the scale of the already existing network of charter schools, private schools and colleges, and for-profit universities, the pedagogies of adjectival literacy exist very much at the periphery of an increasingly privatized education in the United States The pedagogical efforts of even relatively large institutions with strong funding such as the Council for Economic Education and the Powell Institute are dwarfed by the size of the private educational sector that Donoghue and others have described At the same time, however, taken all together, adjectival literacies, along with the literacies developed internally by large corporations, can affect a remarkable number of people living in a wide range of circumstances An attention economy is also an education economy, and educational projects are spread throughout the periphery as well as located in highly visible educational systems As the mapping of attention flows involves more and more sophisticated processes and is targeted at continually larger and more diverse markets, human capital is more frequently represented as crucial In the marketplace terminology of business writers Davenport and Beck, both paying attention and getting paid by knowing who is paying attention seem dependent on instant recognition of the shifts in human capital direction and momentum As I argued in the previous chapter, the autonomy of choice identified with just-in-time human capital may well be the most dramatic representation, but more traditional forms of human capital resources remain significant, even if they are now accorded far less importance in terms of market value than they once were In short, human capital has become a fundamental value nexus in an attention economy The range and diversity of adjectival literacy education at the periphery is a demonstration of just how fundamental and pervasive that value nexus has become In the context of an attention economy it becomes easier to recognize the import of earlier concerns about the over-use of the term professional The proliferation of the term occurred at the same time that human capital assumed a heightened importance in economic analysis Once human capital began to be represented as a primary source of value in more and more sectors, an immediate danger appeared to be the potential for false representation, the promise of human capital that is not really there Similar to the indiscriminate use of the term professional, current uses of literacy can seem empty of content, merely metaphors or inventions of the moment, meaning pretty much whatever one wants The immediate difference from the case of the word professional is that in human capital resource terms , what adjectival literacies have to offer are indeed empty categories from the beginning Unlike unwarranted uses of professional, adjectival literacies not falsely represent their individual or organizational sources as possessing genuine human capital assets for hire Adjectival literacy is directed instead at the audience that is being recruited It is about future human capital The larger difference is that while adjectival literacies may promise to that audience a future full of human capital assets, in the moment what they offer is an invitation to some work That is, in contrast to professional, which identifies a supposedly human capital–rich individual who then may or may not be hired for a job or into a profession, adjectival literacies are through and through about doing literacy work Human capital remains in the distance Adjectival literacies are a form of conversion labor that streams attention flows as widely as possible by offering to capitalize anyone and everything in the intensely competitive peripheral zones outside the central concentrations of human capital They may be at the pedagogical periphery, but they supply a vital component of the immense educational machinery necessary to produce and support a central concentration of human capital They extend the range of human capital dominance and shape the largely unpaid labor that helps make human capital possible somewhere else Focusing on character as they do, Charles Murray and fellow conservative David Brooks are rather more direct than are Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in insisting that human capital is all about smart people, those with “high cognitive ability,” as Murray usually puts it The passive-voice assumption underlying Goldin and Katz’s argument (human capital is about lots of people learning more skills and acquiring more knowledges) becomes the active equation of human capital with intelligence Such a visible parading of individual intelligence as a natural paradigm, however, then invites an easy symmetry for explaining all those familiar Sarah Palinesque responses (“well I’m dumb as dirt and proud of it”) as if they expressed little more than resentment about smart people In much the same way as Twenge and Campbell see their students in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, in Murray’s vision it is assumed to be the case that lower-class people just not like anyone smarter than they are The various versions of this narrative link with the endless old-versus-new debates I discussed in chapter to obscure the radical school reforms that have been taking place Murray, in contrast, does recognize well enough how the college sorting machine in tandem with a residential sorting machine has concentrated human capital–rich individuals in isolated enclaves Following through on that recognition, he also understands that among other effects, this concentration of human capital has required significant changes in education The only explanation he can offer, however, is that these individuals with high cognitive ability naturally behave “like that,” in a way that political policy can never change And naturally enough, some business leaders have been smart enough to take advantage of the competitive edge that human capital supplies In previous chapters I have argued instead that human capital functions pretty much the same as any other form of capital, as a material economic asset Thus rather than attempt to explain Murray’s picture of class division by pointing to qualities of individual character and intelligence, as he does, I think it worthwhile instead to explore Marx’s analysis of capital centralization and concentration to see what it might tell us about human capital In volume of Capital, Marx attributes much of the success of large enterprises to how their size enables them to produce commodities more cheaply than their competitors: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labor, and this depends in turn on the scale of production Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller” (777) Few educators in traditional universities have been enthusiastic about the growth of for-profit institutions, despite how they promise to make a postsecondary degree available to far more people What the for-profits sell has seemed nothing but a “cheap commodity” indeed, produced in bulk quantity using cheaply available temporary labor for the most part In contrast, the recent growth in MOOCs (massive open online courses) has garnered relatively more positive support because of what seems their democratizing potential In addition, much of that recent growth has been driven by some of the most prestigious universities in the country, often with regular tenured faculty closely involved Given their online dissemination, the scale of MOOCs is immense, and in terms of students and aggregate teaching hours, the labor time of faculty producing such courses is enormously productive Nevertheless, critique typically returns to the idea that these courses cannot replace classroom experience At worst, like the for-profits, they reduce the complexities of education to a neatly packaged commodity that can be cheaply marketed They can also undercut the competition, however, and according to the results of a Moody’s tuition survey of colleges that was widely reported at the beginning of 2013, there does appear some evidence that high-tuition small schools and lower-rated universities are suffering enrollment difficulties “Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller,” Marx had argued Yet it would seem difficult to invoke Marx’s logic to explain why it is that prestigious universities would be offering MOOCs at all If as Donoghue argues prestige is one of the primary reasons for getting an elite education, and admissions selectivity is a primary criterion in measuring prestige, why would such universities as Harvard and Stanford offer free courses (or a line of cheap commodities, depending upon one’s own bias) to anybody? As Donoghue points out, their positions in the prestige game depend on widening the distinction James Twitchell makes in Branded Nation between “brandname universities” and “mass-provider universities” (Last Professors, 122) and avoiding practices that blur it Donoghue does not find all that plausible either the idea David Collis describes, “that the elite universities will adopt Oxford-style tutorial systems subsidized by vast online educational fiefdoms” (Last Professors, 123) Donoghue suggests instead that the real challenge for the elite universities “is to create an academic version of the distinction between Giorgio Armani and Armani Emporium,” an option that “mass-provider institutions will never be in a position to explore” (124) Unfortunately debates about whether online courses are a wonderfully democratizing educational innovation or can offer only cheap knockoffs of a priceless artisanal educational process already invite being recast into yet another version of the new versus old debates so familiar in literacy studies In the paragraph immediately preceding the passage I quoted above from Capital, however, Marx briefly discusses the way those big capitals got to be big capitals that could sell cheaper commodities His focus here is on how the process of concentration works, rather than possible quality differences among the products being sold: “The attraction of capital no longer means the simple concentration of the means of production and the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals” (Capital, 1:777) In relation to human capital and recent educational developments, two connected points stand out immediately in Marx’s description Labor appears as already a given The “command over labour” is part of accumulation, and the process of concentration has shifted to the competition among multiple capitals Capital gets bigger by “expropriating” other capitals, not by concentrating the means of production further or extending control over still more labor power Correlatively, in these collisions among multiple capitals, “individual independence” disappears No capital can set an entirely independent course irrespective of what is happening to surrounding capitals As I noted above in discussing Donoghue’s analysis of the prestige game, in such conditions there is no way not to compete, even if it is impossible to win Of course it is not quite possible either to imagine a human capital–rich individual literally getting even richer in capital by swallowing up individuals slightly less well endowed, although the image is perhaps amusingly appropriate to some of the more sardonic caricatures Marx sketched in Capital Nor can an institution that is a large producer of human capital expropriate smaller or less prestigious operations in the same way In human capital terms, the crucial step is the destruction of independence for all those less-prestigious educational institutions Whatever multiple goals or independently determined educational identities had once existed in the educational field become subordinated to the process of human capital production as developed through the more prestigious producer That is, rather than absorb “small capital” institutions in order to become some kind of immense mega-university, the most prestigious schools destroy independent goals by the colonizing power of determining what the game must be Even brands begin to matter less than the overall human capital composition of the graduating students The only game in town just keeps spreading Human capital, however, also aligns production and product peculiarly In most conceptions of human capital, educational institutions are primary producers, but in order to produce human capital wealth as embodied in individual graduates, educational institutions must employ individuals who are rich in human capital Or, to turn it around slightly, the concentration of human capital reinforces the assumption that the producers in possession of the greatest human capital wealth will in turn produce the students possessing the greatest human capital wealth “University educated” applies across the board to both educators and students in increasingly concentrated circles At the same time, after already having initiated university centers in other countries, those universities whose faculties are at the top of in terms of human capital prestige can then also make online course offerings available to potentially anyone anywhere on the planet It should not be a surprise at all that many more educators have endorsed the democratizing potential of MOOCs than have ever praised the for-profits in their outreach efforts The catch is that while anyone might well be able to participate in MOOCs, what everyone participates in has to with augmenting the flow of human capital, directly determined in the case of MOOCs in relation to the core concentration of capital Human capital continues to reinforce itself as the only game, in any town Thus in addition to concern about a commodity-like simplification of learning, critiques of MOOCs can also echo concerns such as those of Yochai Benkler about how power at the top inevitably limits diversity and individual autonomy, since the relatively few faculty and universities offering MOOCS can determine so much Students meanwhile are seen as getting only the most standardized content everywhere, despite efforts to individualize instruction In this context, however, the immediate lesson to learn from Marx is that concentration is not about imposing homogeneity, in Benkler’s or anyone else’s critical sense Further, the proliferation of the term literacy is a good reminder that concentration is dependent on diversity Literacy work makes anything potentially available to be represented for attention To put it crudely, any adjective can be attached to literacy, because potentially anything might be representationally linked to the surrounding flows of attention There is no point at all to the competition for attention if every sector looks and behaves alike Nothing can be completely independent of human capital and the process of human capital concentration, because human capital grows larger and more concentrated only by feeding on more and more of this diverse material and on more and more human capitals as they become available through literacy work Individual autonomy is Benkler’s usual pathway to diversity; diversity emerges as more individuals have a greater power of action to go their own ways and author their own stories As I argued in chapter 2, however, just-in-time-human capital represents something like the ultimate apotheosis of this principle of individual autonomy The critical issue is not the suppression of diversity and individual autonomy, but what follows from the recognition that human capital is, after all, capital It is no less an economic asset than more tangible forms of capital Among other things, this means that the diversity and individual autonomy at stake are certainly real enough and not an illusion—because they exist on behalf of capital interests, not for the benefit of any particular literacy subject Conceptions of general human capital have typically included an emphasis on the importance of flexible skills that might be adapted to different conditions, unlike specific human capital that equips an individual for only one kind of job or one employment sector Employers across a wide range of fields continue to complain about the extreme difficulties of finding appropriately skilled individuals for positions As I argued in Class Degrees, those complaints are often flatly contradictory in a way that is of little help to educators, but in fairness to employers, the rapidity of day-to-day changes in a global economy makes it difficult to determine exactly what training and skills might be needed on any given occasion This has become as true for the nonglamorous trade occupations as it is for the upper echelons of the finance world or of technological development Over the past two decades auto repair, construction, carpentry, plumbing, and so on have all changed, sometimes dramatically, as is the case for auto repair Employer needs may well change completely on the next occasion As a result, corporate complaints about finding skilled employees are likely to remain inconsistent and often contradictory The imperatives of just-in-time human capital, however, shift attention away from the flexible employee whose reserve of general human capital might enable him or her to adapt to new conditions The idea instead is to maximize the flexibility of just-in-time choices by removing constraints on the supply side No matter how flexibly skilled any individual employee might be, at any given moment any individual might become as much a drag on productivity as excess inventory Just-in-time supplyside freedom does not encourage long-term commitments to specific employees Meanwhile, intense competition in various forms puts a premium on continually outperforming the previous year Today’s financials and the prospects for tomorrow are what count Thus improved financials seem more likely to be achieved through greater availability of a large and diverse pool of human capital–rich individuals that can be tapped whenever and wherever necessary, rather than through drawing on a reserve of general human capital as embodied in flexibly skilled long-term employees After all, when they are not in paid service, all those flexibly skilled individuals can still function usefully in an attention economy as outsourced free labor, provided they are sufficiently literate in relation to new technologies Educational reform has been a perennial topic for political debate because public education in the United States sits across so many different interests and has been expected to supply solutions for any number of different problems, from racial integration to babysitting young adults, in effect to help prevent jails from becoming even more overcrowded It would be a mistake to minimize the impact of how, historically, these different ends have been sorted out and hierarchized, despite the praise that Murray heaps on the large covering fiction of a public school system that in the past served everyone equally In Class Degrees I discussed how students on a vocational education track were largely segregated from and treated very differently from academic fast trackers at the “same” high school Inner city schools with large minority populations have never been funded to anywhere near the same degree as schools in the affluent white suburbs Arguably the dominance of just-in-time human capital has simply accelerated such already existing trends by disarticulating the fiction of schools-for- everyone into a new range of entirely separate educational sectors The dynamics of those proliferating adjectival literacy sites at the educational periphery, however, suggest good reason to see that characterization as at best incomplete Such sites are not limited to educational projects that used to exist elsewhere jammed together under a common umbrella, now separated out as distinct While neither the categories focused on (different kinds of gun ammunition, for example) nor the content (the study of depression, for example) are necessarily new, the literacy work of representation is Adjectival literacies simultaneously carve out the territory designated by their adjective, solicit potential student interest, and anticipate the pedagogical practices to be engaged Hierarchies may exist across certain kinds of relatively similar sites, but for the most part the interests involved seem so diffused into disparate social sectors that hierarchy would be pointless anyway As Graff rightly speculated about the many instances of adjectival literacy, however, competition can be intense It is in the process of soliciting the attention of potential students that everyone meets competitively, much as is the case with institutional postsecondary education I argued above that these adjectival literacy sites extend the range of educational practices, and they so on behalf of promising an increase in human capital In such conditions the opposition of hierarchical dominance and subordination, like the opposition of autonomy and homogeneity that I discussed above, has little relevance Marx’s description of the concentration of capital anticipates the destruction of independent ends The intensities of competition are all about the nexus of educational production and human capital, and there is very little forced subordination going on in the process Subordinates are unlikely to survive long in their subordinate condition, or in any other condition The price of a failure to compete is disappearance, the inevitable fate of “losers” in an attention economy In contrast to the literacy-myth narrative of new and more democratic futures struggling to escape from a school system still bound to industrial-age practices, the educational periphery of literacy work highlights the emergent tendencies of the school reforms already well underway In describing just-in-time human capital in chapter and the attention economy in chapter 3, I have also tried to analyze the imperatives that drive where these reforms are going The just-in-timing of human capital means that a concentration of prestigious, innovative secondary schools as well as colleges and universities will be organized to maximize the diversity and individual autonomy of choice that justin-time human capital requires But just-in-time organization is also structured to lose excess people —both students and workers Secondary-school students are left to fend as best as they can in those school districts that rarely get any media attention about their miserable conditions for learning They are increasingly lost from view altogether, to become just more of the losers in an attention economy Similar to the adjectival literacy periphery, special-interest schools burgeon in the large vacuum between star systems and losers, but also in common with adjectival literacies, the competition among them is fierce, the danger of disappearance always imminent, human capital freedom always somewhere else One of the more dangerous assumptions of the literacy-myth narrative is that new technologies and innovative reforms, with their maximizing of student/teacher educational freedoms, are what transform a particular institution into one of the prestigious stars that visibly succeed In support of the mantra that such reforms work, case studies can document local successes easily enough The literacy myth assumes that literacy users and their experiences are primary material, and keeps the focus directly on what happens to those users in new circumstances The local successes, however, not translate into any real possibility for all school systems and students to become stars—not because other systems might resist new technologies and innovative change, but because there’s no capital incentive whatsoever to maximize benefits for everyone Just-in-time is all about supply-side choice, isolating one instance within a large field and dispensing with the rest Those programs that are capitalized typically realize the full range of technologies and innovations, but as secondary effects rather than as the cause of change They are then ready to be folded into an ongoing process of capital concentration, producing at the same time the loser systems that are subsequently discarded Just-in-time organization is never about carrying excess inventory; that applies to education exactly as it applies to any other sector The recent emphasis in literacy studies on new literacies raises significant questions of definition and boundaries as well as opening new possibilities for study At what point does it remain plausible to preserve the term literacy to describe practices that can seem light years away from the long historical connections between literacy and printed texts? More contentiously, at what point does it become essential to push educational policy much further than at present into making good use of new literacies and new technologies rather than propping up now-obsolete educational goals and methods? I hope my argument has made clear that I am not at all opposed to catching up with the new in this sense I find it difficult to imagine being able to understand much about economic relations or everyday practices in specific situations without some fundamental understanding of multiple literacies and how they work Understanding those new forms of literacy and how literacy subjects experience them, however, cannot be translated immediately into a democratizing process of educational reforms The key question is not how to initiate necessary reforms against the dead weight of past practices and institutional inertia The question is how to radically alter the direction of those reforms already transforming education into the profoundly antidemocratic narrative of human capital triumph Works Cited Adami, Elizabeth, and Gunther Kress “The Social Semiotics of Convergent Mobile Devices: New Forms of Composition and the Transformation of Habitus.” In Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to 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University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities.” January 2013 Center for College Affordability and Productivity Washington, D.C www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/research/studies/underemployment-of-college-graduates Walker, Pat, ed Between Labor and Capital Cambridge, Mass., 1979 Watkins, Evan “Academic Freedom / Academic Market.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108, no (Fall 2009), 781–96 Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education New York, 2008 Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value Stanford, Calif., 1989 Williamson, Oliver “Transaction Cost Economics.” In Handbook of Industrial Organization, ed Richard Schmalensee and Robert D Willig, 1:135–82 Amsterdam and New York, 1989 Zelizer, Viviana Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy Princeton, N.J., 2013 Index The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for terms of interest For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below Adami, Elizabeth, and Gunther Kress, 78–83, 89 adjectival literacy, 24–26, 127, 140, 142–44, 146, 147–50, 155, 157–58 Alexander, Jonathan, 47–49, 64, 97, 99 Althusser, Louis, 105, 108 ATM (automatic teller machine), 2–4, 6–9, 19, 64, 88, 89, 114, 116 attention economy, 19–22, 25, 92, 93–112, 115–22, 146–50, 155–58 See also Beller, Jonathan; Davenport, Thomas H., and John C Beck; Goldhaber, M ichael Babbage, Charles, 68 Beck, John C., and Thomas H Davenport, 19–21, 94–102, 118, 149 Becker, Gary, 4–5, 8–16, 21, 25, 26, 34–40, 51–57, 60–61, 65, 69, 72, 80–82, 85, 91, 117, 131 Beller, Jonathan, 21–22, 101–2, 108–13, 116–17, 119, 122 Benkler, Yochai, 13–16, 19–20, 37–48, 50, 52–58, 60–62, 65, 81–82, 89, 91–93, 96, 104, 107, 111, 113–14, 117, 119, 121, 155 Block, Fred, Bourdieu, Pierre, 145 Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis, 43 Brandt, Deborah, 12–15, 17, 19, 22–23, 28, 36–37, 40, 53, 62, 102, 121–23, 127 Braverman, Harry, 68 Brooks, David, 24, 134, 150 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 30 Campbell, W Keith, and Jean M Twenge, 23, 64, 66–69, 73, 75–76, 86, 110, 150 celebrity culture, 21, 100 Chakravorti, Bhaskar, and Benjamin D M azzotta, choice, as economic ideology, 7, 33, 36, 45–46, 54–58, 80–86, 89, 100, 116–17, 121–22, 142, 149, 156, 158–59 class division: and human capital, 9, 23–24, 31, 40, 123, 125–26, 128–30, 132–34, 136, 151 consumers: and literacy work, 6–7, 19, 28, 54, 64, 89–90, 106–7, 110–19, 122 Council for Economic Education, 25, 141–42, 144, 146–47 Davenport, Thomas H., and John C Beck, 19–21, 94–102, 118, 149 Davidson, Cathy, 20, 97 Deleuze, Gilles, 108–9, 110 Doeringer, Peter B., and M ichael J Piore, 70 Donoghue, Frank, 26, 31, 134–35, 137–39, 148, 152–53 Dyer, Richard, 105 Edwards, Richard, M ichael Reich, and David Gordon, 70 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich, 144 Employment and Training Administration, U.S Department of Labor, Farrell, Lesley, 148 Fernholz, Tim, For Journalists website, 143–44 Geiger, Roger L., 132 Gintis, Herbert, and Samuel Bowles, 43 Giroux, Henry, 48 Goggin, Peter N., 144, 145 Goldhaber, M ichael, 21, 100–6, 108–9, 114, 116, 118–19, 123 Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F Katz, 8, 17–18, 24, 30, 50–51, 83, 85, 124–29, 131, 150 Graff, Harvey, 11–12, 27, 117, 142–43, 145–47, 159 See also literacy myth Granovetter, M ark, Hardt, M ichael, and Antonio Negri, 108–9 human capital concentration, 9, 11, 23–26, 29, 31–32, 52, 130, 135–38, 150–51, 153–55 human communicative capacity, 13, 20, 37–40, 43, 52–53, 60, 65, 91 See also Benkler, Yochai identity education, 32–33, 92, 104, 107; and pleasures, 117–22 income inequality, 4, 8, 13–15, 24–25, 30–31, 62, 123, 125–26, 128–29 See also Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F Katz; M urray, Charles A individual autonomy, 14–16, 21, 38, 39, 40–44, 52, 54, 56–58, 61, 81–82, 92, 104, 107, 113, 117, 121, 155 See also Benkler, Yochai just-in-time human capital, 15–19, 21, 24–26, 40, 57–65, 80–91, 100, 110, 116–19, 122, 149, 155–56, 158–59 Katz, Lawrence F., and Claudia Goldin, 8, 17–18, 24, 30, 50–51, 83, 85, 124–29, 131, 150 Klein, M atthew C., 67–68, 73 Knobel, M ichele, and Colin Lankshear, 21, 48–51, 100 Kress, Gunther, 79–80, 82–83, 86, 89, 92, 141–45 See also Adami, Elizabeth, and Gunther Kress; Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street, 141–45 Kress, Gunther, and Elizabeth Adami, 78–83, 89 labor market segmentation, 70–72, 84–85, 87 See also Piore, M ichael Lankshear, Colin, and M ichele Knobel, 21, 48–51, 100 literacy myth, 11–12, 26–31, 39, 64–65, 117, 130, 142, 146, 158–59 See also Graff, Harvey marketing, and human capital, 4, 25, 28, 45–46, 57, 145 M arklein, M artha Beth, 67 M arx, Karl, 10–11, 46, 68, 84, 101, 110–12, 116, 130, 135–36, 138, 151–53, 155, 158 merit, and human capital, 16–17, 61–66, 68–77, 90–91, 123, 145 M OOC (massive open online course), 151–52, 154–55 M urray, Charles A., 24, 125–30, 132–36, 150–51, 157 Nee, Victor, and Richard Swedberg, 10 neoclassical economics, 5, 10–11, 13, 19, 25, 30, 34, 44, 49–51, 53, 55–56, 69–71, 91, 94, 97, 99, 114, 117–18, 141 See also Becker, Gary; Williamson, Oliver Occupational Outlook Handbook, Pahl, Kate, and Jennifer Rowsell, 140, 143 Piore, M ichael, 70 Prendergast, Catherine, 10 prestige, as educational commodity, 26, 31, 134–39, 152–54 See also Donoghue, Frank professional, usage compared to literacy, 144–47, 149–50 Reich, Robert, 132, 133 reserve army of labor, 116 Rowsell, Jennifer, and Kate Pahl, 140, 143 scientific management, 68 Searls, Doc, 106–7, 118, 120 Simon, Herbert A 114 Smith, Adam, 15, 33–35, 37–40, 52–55, 60–61, 65–66, 68, 80–81, 84, 91, 131 Sragow, Darry, 87–88 Street, Brian, 36, 143 See also Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street surplus labor and literacy work, 22–23, 26, 112–13, 115, 122 Swedberg, Richard, Taylor, Frederick, 96, 99 transaction costs, 44, 90, 113–15 See also Williamson, Oliver Twenge, Jean M , and W Keith Campbell, 23, 64, 66–69, 73, 75–76, 86, 110, 150 Twitchell, James, 152 Ulmer, Gregory, 47, 48 unpaid labor, 1–3, 5–6, 89–90, 112, 114–16, 150 Vedder, Richard, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe, 30 Walker, Pat, 144 Watkins, Evan, 31, 71, 156, 157 Williamson, Oliver, 44, 89, 113–14 Zelizer, Viviana, ... extends the education of the trainee from the school to an actual workplace While as yet unpaid in the salary terms of labor market exchange, the trainee is nevertheless in the process of building human. .. regard to the distribution of rewards for the effort of acquiring human capital For Becker, in contrast, the individual who chooses to invest in a human capital asset can expect only the kinds of risks... reaffirm in Human Capital: that what “distinguishes human from other kinds of capital is that, by definition, the former is embedded or embodied in the person investing” (112) Smith’s elaboration of