IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/woemps/v23y2009i4p597-615.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Whose skill is it anyway?

Author

Listed:
  • Irena Grugulis

    (Bradford University, i.grugulis@bradford.ac.uk)

  • Steven Vincent

    (University of Leeds, sv@lubs.leeds.ac.uk)

Abstract

The skills that employers require are changing, with soft skills replacing technical ones. This article draws on two detailed case studies of outsourced public sector work, where these changes were particularly marked. Here, the new skills polarized the workforces. Highly skilled IT professionals were advantaged as soft skills gave them an additional dimension to their work, while benefit caseworkers with intermediate skills were disadvantaged since soft skills were presented as an alternative to technical competences. Women caseworkers suffered a double penalty, as not only were their technical skills devalued but many were confined to traditionally ‘feminine’ and unskilled work at the reception desk. Soft skills certainly aided the acknowledgement of women’s skills but they did nothing to increase their value.

Suggested Citation

  • Irena Grugulis & Steven Vincent, 2009. "Whose skill is it anyway?," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 23(4), pages 597-615, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:woemps:v:23:y:2009:i:4:p:597-615
    DOI: 10.1177/0950017009344862
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017009344862
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0950017009344862?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andy Dickerson & Francis Green, 2002. "The Growth and Valuation of Generic Skills," Studies in Economics 0203, School of Economics, University of Kent.
    2. Brown, Phillip & Hesketh, Anthony, 2004. "The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199269549.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tracey Yeadon-Lee, 2012. "Doing Identity with Style: Service Interaction, Work Practices and the Construction of ‘Expert’ Status in the Contemporary Hair Salon," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 17(4), pages 56-66, November.
    2. Bennett, Fidel & Escudero, Verónica & Liepmann, Hannah & Podjanin, Ana, 2022. "Using Online Vacancy and Job Applicants' Data to Study Skills Dynamics," VfS Annual Conference 2022 (Basel): Big Data in Economics 264023, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    3. Malabika Sahoo & Sumita Mishra & Sasmita Mishra, 2018. "Influence of Group Composition on Participant Reactions to Training: A Study in an Indian Power Transmission Organization," Management and Labour Studies, XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources, vol. 43(3), pages 141-155, August.
    4. Huajie Jiang & Qiguo Gong, 2022. "Does Skill Polarization Affect Wage Polarization? U.S. Evidence 2009–2021," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(21), pages 1-17, October.
    5. Peter Ikeler, 2016. "Deskilling emotional labour: evidence from department store retail," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 30(6), pages 966-983, December.
    6. Ruth Woodfield, 2016. "Gender and the achievement of skilled status in the workplace: the case of women leaders in the UK Fire and Rescue Service," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 30(2), pages 237-255, April.
    7. Angela Knox & Chris Warhurst, 2018. "Occupations, the Missing Link? A New Theoretical and Methodological Approach to Product Markets, Skill and Pay," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 32(1), pages 150-168, February.
    8. Netta Avnoon, 2021. "Data Scientists’ Identity Work: Omnivorous Symbolic Boundaries in Skills Acquisition," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 35(2), pages 332-349, April.
    9. Izabela Grabowska, 2018. "Social Skills, Workplaces and Social Remittances: A Case of Post-Accession Migrants," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 32(5), pages 868-886, October.
    10. Dennis Nickson & Robin Price & Hazel Baxter-Reid & Scott A Hurrell, 2017. "Skill requirements in retail work: the case of high-end fashion retailing," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 31(4), pages 692-708, August.
    11. Dragos-Paul Pop, 2014. "Online Tool For Soft Skills Evaluation And Employee Management," Romanian Economic Business Review, Romanian-American University, vol. 8(2), pages 410-419, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Roberta Comunian & Alessandra Faggian & Sarah Jewell, 2014. "Embedding Arts and Humanities in the Creative Economy: The Role of Graduates in the UK," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 32(3), pages 426-450, June.
    2. Andrew Morrison, 2013. "Outclassed?: Undergraduates’ Perceptions of the Competition for Primary Teaching Jobs in England and Wales," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 18(3), pages 63-73, August.
    3. Nick Wilton, 2011. "Do employability skills really matter in the UK graduate labour market? The case of business and management graduates," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 25(1), pages 85-100, March.
    4. Sophie Hennekam & Dawn Bennett & Sally Macarthur & Cat Hope & Talisha Goh, 2018. "An international perspective on managing career as a woman composer," Post-Print hal-03232754, HAL.
    5. Moyo Lincolyn & Mukomana Saziso, 2021. "The use of experiential learning in effective provision of skills to secondary school learners in Zimbabwe," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 5(6), pages 155-159, June.
    6. Theocharis Kromydas, 2017. "Rethinking higher education and its relationship with social inequalities: past knowledge, present state and future potential," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 3(1), pages 1-12, December.
    7. Kim Allen & Sumi Hollingworth, 2013. "‘Sticky Subjects’ or ‘Cosmopolitan Creatives’? Social Class, Place and Urban Young People’s Aspirations for Work in the Knowledge Economy," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(3), pages 499-517, February.
    8. Johanna L Waters, 2009. "In Pursuit of Scarcity: Transnational Students, ‘Employability’, and the MBA," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 41(8), pages 1865-1883, August.
    9. Alireza Behtoui, 2013. "Social Capital and Stratification of Young People," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 1(1), pages 46-58.
    10. Gill Kirton, 2009. "Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 23(1), pages 12-29, March.
    11. Adele H. Marshall & Mariangela Zenga & Aglaia Kalamatianou, 2020. "Academic Students’ Progress Indicators and Gender Gaps Based on Survival Analysis and Data Mining Frameworks," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 151(3), pages 1097-1128, October.
    12. Ouyang Meichang & Zhu Wenzhong & Liu Dan, 2017. "Study of Motives of Chinese Business English Development Based on the Theory of Human Capital," English Language Teaching, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 10(1), pages 1-18, January.
    13. Zineb Draissi & Yu Rong & Mohammed Abker Ebrahim Suliman, 2023. "Employability and Education Mismatch in the Moroccan Urban Workplace," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(4), pages 21582440231, December.
    14. Carlos Pais Montes & Maria Jesús Freire Seoane & Beatriz López Bermúdez, 2016. "Perfiles de empleabilidad: de las competencias a las identidades," Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación volume 11, in: José Manuel Cordero Ferrera & Rosa Simancas Rodríguez (ed.), Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación 11, edition 1, volume 11, chapter 43, pages 771-794, Asociación de Economía de la Educación.
    15. Surhan Cam, 2014. "The Underemployed: Evidence From the UK Labour Force Survey for a Conditionally Gendered Top-down Model," Journal of Social Science Studies, Macrothink Institute, vol. 1(2), pages 47-65, July.
    16. Zuzana Melicheríková, 2013. "University - Business Cooperation Current Situation in Slovakia and Europe," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(1), pages 103-117.
    17. Michael Savvas, 2016. "Managerial Imagination," SAGE Open, , vol. 6(1), pages 21582440166, February.
    18. Thomas Wainwright & Ewald Kibler & Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä & Simon Down, 2018. "Elite entrepreneurship education: Translating ideas in North Korea," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 50(5), pages 1008-1026, August.
    19. Christophe Muller & Christophe J. Nordman, 2017. "Wages and on-the-job training in Tunisia," Middle East Development Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(2), pages 294-318, July.
    20. Hugh Lauder & Phillip Brown, 2011. "The Standardization of Higher Education, Positional Competition and the Global Labor Market," Chapters, in: Roger King & Simon Marginson & Rajani Naidoo (ed.), Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, chapter 28, Edward Elgar Publishing.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:woemps:v:23:y:2009:i:4:p:597-615. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.britsoc.co.uk/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.