Literacy work in the reign of human capital

Like human capital as Becker understands it, the newer, more expansive forms of human capitalalso depend on and simultaneously disguise the labor appropriated in the process of their acq

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 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

for Diane

I have mined David Ruccio’s expertise about all things economic that appear in this book, from AdamSmith and Marx to Oliver Williamson, and I have benefited over and over from his generouswillingness 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 towrite 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-rangingknowledge of digital literacies, literacy uses, and business practices that involve multiple literacieshas 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 sheknew, 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 feelvictimized The concern, of course, is that employers are simply taking advantage of the soft jobmarket 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 ofunpaid internships, and the six criteria for unpaid trainees that it spells out are strict The first of thesix 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 Neithercriterion precludes the individual from performing typical operations required at the workplace Thefourth criterion, however, forcefully states that the employer cannot gain immediate advantage fromtrainee activity and adds that from time to time employer operations may well be impeded by thepresence of the trainee Media accounts critical of the proliferation of unpaid positions question theextent to which either the first or the fourth criterion is widely observed Yet even critical accountssometimes concede that the trainee may receive intangible benefits from an internship, which mightinclude 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 thefact of being on the spot and (the trainee can hope) demonstrating his or her abilities The fifthDepartment of Labor criterion makes explicit that trainees are not entitled to a job at the end of thetraining period, but the intangibles can seem sufficient to give the trainee a vital edge over others whoapply for openings

The position of an unpaid intern may appear to have very little in common with a wide range ofordinary 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 simpleATM transaction, for example, requires at least some degree of customer knowledge, but it offersnothing 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 theATM sounds very similar to what might happen at any given moment during a temporary unpaid internposition Like a bank teller, an ATM customer taps codes into a machine (owned or leased by thefinancial institution or the network to which the institution belongs) that dispenses cash That is, theATM customer is in the position of a trainee engaged, in the words of the first criterion, in “the actualoperation of the facilities of the employer.” Our moment at the ATM is like a preview pane for somemore extended process of unpaid intern work

The Department of Labor criteria for traineeships also help pinpoint the problem with a frequentand 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 ofjobs available for bank tellers, it is because “many workers leave this occupation.” In short, what hashappened is not that the machine has replaced the teller Work practices by customers at multiplelocations 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 thetransaction, quite often in circumstances in which that customer also pays a fee Such a transaction isobviously at odds with the intent of the Labor Department’s criterion 3 for traineeships, which statesthat rather than displacing regular employees, trainees must work under their supervision Further, inviolation of what criterion 4 stipulates—and without even factoring in ATM fees—the financialinstitution, which in this comparison occupies the position of an employer, can benefit a great dealfrom these and similar kinds of transactions such as online banking, as I will discuss in subsequentchapters

At the same time, it would hardly be accurate to say that customers receive no benefits from ATMtransactions Education may not be included, but convenience is advertised as a major plus, and theconvenience depends on an expanded range of choice Many different ATMs in many differentlocations, open twenty-four hours a day, mean that to a much greater extent than in the past, customerscan obtain cash as they choose rather than in conformity with bank hours and locations and viawaiting 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 wouldseem to outweigh the relatively minor annoyance of performing the transaction oneself and paying afee According to a recent widely reported study entitled “The Cost of Cash in the United States” byBhaskar Chakravorti and Benjamin Mazzotta of the Institute for Business in a Global Context at theFletcher 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 otherpayment methods, and they pay the highest fees to obtain cash when they can Rather than thecombination of convenience and choice usually touted as an advantage to ATM users, the Institute’sresearch data suggest that in these circumstances, having “no choice” might well be a much betterdescriptor 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 ofemployees 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 representthemselves 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 andincome differentials reflect the distribution of human capital resources The contrasting directional

movements of human capital in my examples above, however, point to a more complicated situation.When structured appropriately through federal criteria, the unpaid intern scenario might lend itselfeasily enough to a human capital–based interpretation Becker understood from the beginning thathuman capital could not be treated as a commodity in the way that neoclassical economics typicallyunderstands labor and the labor market Nor is it a natural resource It must be produced in somesystematic way, and for Becker, education is the primary producer and educational attainment themost significant measure of human capital resources Ideally, an unpaid position extends the education

of the trainee from the school to an actual workplace While as yet unpaid in the salary terms of labormarket exchange, the trainee is nevertheless in the process of building human capital resources Therange of intangible benefits the individual may stand to gain contributes at least indirectly to theprocess Formal education is the primary factor for Becker, but he acknowledges that the officialmarkers of educational success, such as degrees and certificates, typically come with surroundinglayers of less easily quantifiable benefits

With respect to educational enhancement, even the lack of an immediate job guarantee as specified

in the Labor Department’s fifth criterion might be construed as a potential advantage rather than aliability Becker’s account maintains that the acquisition of general human capital as a flexiblereserve of skills and resources is almost always a better investment than the limited increase inhuman capital that can be gained from intensive training in a very location-specific set of skills.Hence the lack of a job guarantee from the particular employer offering unpaid training might beviewed as helping to fill in the educational promise of the internship, particularly if the training isstructured to extend a wide-ranging academic preparation The bottom line is that when the internshiphas been completed, the unpaid intern should embody more human capital than before taking theposition, and at least by legal standard the employer should not have received any immediateadvantage from the presence of the trainee and whatever human capital resources she or he alreadypossessed Human capital benefits must move in the direction of the unpaid trainee

Although it is a knowledge easily taken for granted, how to use an ATM after all must be learned,and for some people relearned—as part of rehabilitation programs, for example That is, an ATMtransaction also presupposes that the customer already possesses some human capital resources Insharp contrast to an unpaid intern, however, the customer can have no expectation of adding to his orher human capital Customers may feel they benefit from the transaction Nevertheless, the benefits oftheir human capital resources brought to the transaction flow entirely toward the financial institutionrather than toward the customer who does the work, and, unlike the trainee, that customer likely learnsnothing at all from the process The skills involved may seem minimal, but this is partly because they

have become so familiar, so everyday, and so widespread Huge numbers of people in the United

States know how to use an ATM

Relatively minimal skills and a large labor force employed on a temporary basis are not exactlyunheard of in U.S labor history The recent furor over unpaid interns might suggest otherwise, butunpaid labor is hardly new either Several decades of feminist scholarship have documented, forexample, the extent and economic value of women at home doing household work and child rearing.Yet unpaid labor such as housework or child rearing requires considerable skills and an oftenoverwhelming commitment of labor-intensive time—every day, all the time The obvious contrastsbetween this work and an ATM transaction involve not only the very brief time period and limitedskills necessary for the latter, but also the existence of an available range of choice and convenience,

at least for the upper levels of users.

The benefits that go in the direction of financial institutions for the unpaid customer labor of ATMuse depend on the sheer volume of transactions possible from a large population of consumers Nosingle consumer transaction contributes much, and it requires so little time and attention from theindividual that it hardly appears as work at all In the background of this individual experience,however, there can be any number of consumers at any given moment in twenty-four hours of everyday engaging in ATM transactions Even further in the background, the flow of benefits to institutionsalso depends on the elaborate production process necessary to develop the human capital resources

in a consumer population large enough that their transactions can yield tangible results from processes

of such short duration for any given individual at any moment The support structure for such aprocess requires a lot of other people doing a lot of work Human capital resources may be defined

as embodied in individuals, but they are never solely the result of individual effort, nor can they beinitiated solely by individual choice—not even at a base level of such everyday transactions as ATMuse

ATMs are hardly cutting-edge technology (most are still running Windows XP) compared withmobile banking, and the limited skills necessary for ATM use constitute only an extremely small part

of what is now often identified under such umbrella terms as digital literacy or computer literacy.

ATM use might also be folded into one tiny corner of still another familiar umbrella term such as

financial literacy As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, the use of the term literacy in all these

different conditions involving a considerable range of new and still newer technologies is for manycritics questionable Whether viewed positively or negatively, however, new literacies can involveremarkable complexity, well beyond anything required by ATMs, and, most important, the numbersand range of users across the entire field can be staggering

Despite the critical accounts directed at the terminology, literacy studies research no less thanmedia representations have spotlighted some striking individual success stories, built on observingsophisticated uses of multiple new literacies Meanwhile, however, educational reform advocates arefrustrated by how lack of funding and a divisive political situation prevent a more full-scaleincorporation of new technologies into school curricula generally where they might benefit more

people on a larger scale In The Race between Education and Technology , economists Claudia

Goldin and Lawrence F Katz’s historical account shows how educational attainment rose as literacyand other human-capital valued skills became more widespread through most of the twentieth century

At the same time, income inequality narrowed from the immense gap that had existed earlier in thecentury The alarming trend that has emerged over the last three decades reverses this pattern Byearly into the twenty-first century, income inequality had once again reached nearly the same extent as

at the beginning of the twentieth century Just at this point when human capital is becoming moreimportant than ever economically, education in the United States is failing to supply adequatenumbers of human capital–rich individuals who might contribute most to economic productivity andsimultaneously be in a position to realize the benefits of economic growth

Becker’s concept of human capital is not exclusively keyed to the workplace, but he assumes thathuman capital can pay off for the individual investor in terms of better pay and working conditions.While new literacies can have significant workplace value, their economic importance extends intomany other sectors as well Conceptions of human capital more recent and expansive than Becker’smake it easier to include not only workplaces, but also such everyday practices as ATM use—

practices that are unlikely to appear within wage/labor exchanges in any direct way Further,according to recent surveys, more and more population groups would seem to be actively involved ineveryday practices requiring the technologies linked with new literacies While the so-called digitaldivide has hardly disappeared by any means, recent widely publicized studies by the KaiserFoundation in 2010 and by Nielsen in 2011 and 2012 show much greater use of digital technologythan previously by youth in low income and minority groups The Nielsen study reveals that in factHispanic and African American youth in the United States are more likely than whites to usesmartphones It can be exciting for researchers to document the ways in which sophisticatedmultimodal users deploy emergent literacies, and more expansive concepts of human capital helpsubstantiate a claim that these uses can have high economic value In light of the directional movement

of even low-range human capital benefits in ATM transactions, however, it would be a mistake toassume that the benefits available from a range of new literacy skills naturally remain in the hands ofthe users who do the literacy work involving new technologies Nor should it be assumed thateducational reform directed at producing more human capital–rich individuals would immediatelytranslate into reducing income inequalities

Like human capital as Becker understands it, the newer, more expansive forms of human capitalalso depend on and simultaneously disguise the labor appropriated in the process of their acquisition.While human capital in whatever form appears as if it were an independent resource whose value isset by the market, its development requires an immense architecture of production and supportstructures existing in the background At the same time, because these new forms of human capital aremore comprehensive than Becker’s workplace-oriented conception, they can occupy and organize farmore social territory as they saturate the everyday lives of more and more population groups I willargue in subsequent chapters that the economic value produced by current literacies and literacy usersflows into a growing concentration of human capital and a corresponding diminishment of benefitsgoing anywhere into the surrounding territories that are increasingly organized to do little more thancontribute to human capital growth elsewhere Like any concentration of capital, the concentration ofhuman capital reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside and losers everywhereelse

Studies by economic sociologists such as Mark Granovetter, Fred Block, Viviana Zelizer, RichardSwedberg, and a number of others have enlarged our understanding of economic forces and everydaylife Their work shows how moral values, interpersonal behaviors, and social and cultural relations

of all kinds have profound effects on economic processes More specifically in relation to literacyissues, Catherine Prendergast’s study of the economics of English language learning and literacy in

Slovakia, Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World , offers an

acute multilayered analysis of attempts to rapidly capitalize new individual language skills in aglobal marketplace Contrary to the long-term project of neoclassical economics to exile as manyvariables as possible by defining them as exogenous to the operation of market forces, economicsociology demonstrates that the boundaries of the marketplace are hardly impermeable In factZelizer’s descriptions of commerce circuits, for example, posit nothing but multiple networks ofeconomic connections, without assuming any foundationally singular market at work linking economicactivities together More people in more ways function as active economic agents than neoclassicaleconomics had ever imagined

Nevertheless, while economic sociology has been a welcome challenge to neoclassical market

theories, it has relatively little to offer for framing a conception of literacy work and the production ofeconomic value Despite the promise of the title, the essays Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg have

collected in The Economic Sociology of Capitalism pursue familiar themes about capitalist

institutions, their everyday cultures, and how globalization has changed those institutions rather thanfocusing on what is specific to a capitalist economy Market-based theories are in no position toanswer the question of where capital comes from, although as Becker recognized even in 1964, theissue becomes especially crucial with respect to human capital When literacies as resources are

folded into various versions of a human-capital economics of value, it is the literacy work of literacy

users that becomes central, rather than their literacy experiences and their market behaviors

Unfortunately, introducing an idea of literacy labor by reference to a Marxian theory of valuerather than to the market is likely to conjure up little more than that same singular focus on theworkplace and wage/labor exchange that also limits Becker’s concept of human capital in contrast tomore recent conceptions The cliché about workplaces, however, barely touches on Marx’sunderstanding of the relation between labor and value, and like Marx in his much larger context ofanalysis, I want to try to track the determining directions taken by human capital in all its versionsthrough the social formation That is, rather than seeking out what by the rationalist standards ofneoclassical economics look like exotic or increasingly remote sectors of the market economy, itseems more plausible on this premise to expect literacy work to appear right under the eyes of humancapital as it were, wherever human capital is represented as important More expansive conceptions

of human capital than Becker’s help make it possible to track it straight into the everyday spaces ofnew literacies and the literacy work appropriated for human capital concentration and growth

In any case, claims for the economic importance of literacy have been made for some time instronger terms than the sociological recognition of how markets can be affected by complex

ensembles of social relations In The Literacy Myth (1979) and his subsequent work, Harvey Graff

analyzed many such claims for the special importance of literacy over several centuries and identifiedthe components of what he famously declared to be mythic explanations, because the claims werelargely unsupported by substantial data According to the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryversions of the literacy myth in the United States, education enables students to acquire the basicliteracy skills necessary for advancement On a general social level, widespread literacy is seen ashelping to boost economic productivity, and on an individual level it purportedly allows one toparticipate more fully in that productivity and to reap its rewards Educational attainment is theavenue to success in this mythic narrative of integration, which links education and the manyindividual experiences of learning to be literate with an expanding economy and the social benefitsthat come with a literate society Yet despite the critical analysis of this myth by Graff and others, theexcitement over new forms of literacy combined with the widespread representations of humancapital as more important than ever to the economy have made recent versions of this narrativeappear no less compelling in the twenty-first century than did earlier versions in the past

Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, following several decades of New LiteracyStudies research and critique by a great many scholars, Deborah Brandt’s initial definition of literacy

i n Literacy in American Lives (2001) suggests a much broader and more comprehensive kind of

resource than more traditional definitions that might fit with relative ease into a concept of humancapital such as Becker’s While at one time literacy might have been represented as a rather low-level competency, functioning in pretty much the same form in virtually any situation, for Brandt

literacy resources can appear in different and sometimes quite complex ways depending on thecontext: “For the purposes of this study, literacy skill is treated primarily as a resource—economic,political, intellectual, spiritual—which, like wealth or education, or trade skill or social connections,

is pursued for the opportunities and protections that it potentially grants its seekers To treat literacy

in this way is to understand not only why individuals labor to attain literacy but also to appreciatewhy, as with any resource of value, organized economic and political interests work so persistently toconscript and ration the powers of literacy for their own competitive advantage” (5) She recognizesthat by defining literacy resources with close attention to economic relations, she has perhaps alreadypointed some readers toward “Gary Becker’s sense of human capital,” although her definition

“invites, I hope, broader connotations that will take on resonance as this study unfolds” (6)

Much later in Brandt’s argument, surveying the importance of literacies to a twenty-first-centuryeconomy, she wants to recognize how “this intensifying worth of literacy brings renewed possibility

to the democratic hope in public education that more equal distribution of literate skill can moderate

the effects of inequality in wealth and civil rights” (Literacy in American Lives, 169) The narrowly

rational basis of Becker’s market-based concept of human capital seems inadequate to encompass therichness of Brandt’s definition of literacy or to carry that burden of hope In chapter 1, however, Icompare Becker’s concept to more recent and expansive conceptions of human capital that mightaccord better with definitions like Brandt’s, as well as help to fill in details about what a moredemocratically imagined future might be like Yochai Benkler’s key concept of human communicative

capacity in The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

offers a particularly useful beginning Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial LegalStudies at Harvard Law School and faculty co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet andSociety, and both by training and interest his primary subject matter is the management of informationresources in networked environments While Becker tends to identify and value more traditionaleducational skills, Benkler’s interests position him much closer, for example, to recent research inmultimodal communications and the affordances of different technologies in networking situations

Although he almost never uses the term human capital, with its market-based associations, human

communicative capacity plays a similar role as a primary resource in the networked society hedescribes As his title suggests, however, Benkler understands these new forms of production astransforming markets rather than conforming to market “laws” in the way Becker and otherneoclassical economists have claimed

On behalf of a commons-based peer production, Benkler’s arguments throughout The Wealth of

Networks contest the legal restraints imposed by for-profit enterprise Nevertheless, he does not see

fostering such open peer production as an end in itself In his view the greatest advantage ofcommons-based production over for-profit markets lies in the way it encourages and maximizesindividual autonomy and the diversity of people and interests that expansive networking can makepossible when there is no longer any necessity to answer directly to profit imperatives Whatevertheir personal interests, agents in for-profit markets have strong incentives to impose constraints onautonomy In commercial network television production, for example, profit possibilities depend onthe audience numbers more likely to be achieved from maintaining middle-of-the-road culturalconstructions unlikely to offend too many people In the workplace, most employers must strictlysegregate work and pleasure for employees to ensure that employees are not slacking on companytime Benkler does argue that by comparison, commons-based production can actually increase

profits more often than not, but almost as if by accident When the primary goal is an expansion ofindividual autonomy rather than profits, then lots of other things can follow In a commons-basedproduction that thrives on diversity and increasing the range of individual choices for everyone, profittoo can benefit the common good.

In the context of the passage I quoted above from Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives,

Benkler’s conception of commons-based production supplies one way of picturing in more detail how

“the intensifying worth of literacy” might well lead to a “more equal distribution of literate skill” thatcould actually “moderate the effects of inequality in wealth and civil rights” (169) that Brandt sees as

a democratic potential from literacy education Unlike most liberal conceptions of educationalreform, Benkler’s argument calls for a major economic transformation rather than focusing on changes

in the school systems to incorporate new technologies or to equip more students with human capitalassets, as Gary Becker himself has consistently recommended What Benkler outlines is peerproduction in common toward the end of fundamentally reconstructing production processes that in afor-profit system are more typically controlled from the top of a management hierarchy The success

of peer production depends on spreading the wealth of literacies, as it were

In the passage from Literacy in American Lives I quoted above, however, and after

acknowledging her hope for a more democratic future, Brandt immediately expresses considerableskepticism about any claim that educational reforms and more widespread mass literacy wouldreduce economic and social inequalities While it might seem that “the intensifying worth of literacy”should help democratize the future, “as a matter of fact, the advantage of literate skill is helping toaggravate social inequality Just as it seems, the rich get richer, the literate get more literate” (169),she writes In contrast to Brandt, Benkler recognizes no paradox at all in the democratic potential forthe future He imagines that the only real limitations on broadening the base for a massive progression

to commons-based production are the constraints imposed by those institutions and individuals withvested interests in older practices In common with a number of earlier technological visionaries in along history, Benkler remains almost oblivious to how new forms of antidemocratic controls can beproduced in current conditions, sometimes by making use of the very goals for the future that hevalues most In chapter 2 I will argue that his central ideal of maximizing individual autonomyunintentionally models perhaps the most significant recent change in the imaginary of human capital

resources, the development of what I will call just-in-time human capital.

Modern conceptions of human capital like Gary Becker’s differ significantly from the origins ofthe idea in Adam Smith and others by distancing labor as much as possible As I will describe in

chapter 1, Becker’s human capital–endowed agent seems more like an investor than the kind ofworker Smith had in mind Yet as I suggested above, labor never quite vanishes completely inBecker’s account Work was necessary at some point in order for the individual to acquire arelatively stable reserve of skills and attributes that can then, as general human capital, become anavailable resource in multiple circumstances The radical departure that distinguishes what I call just-in-time human capital from Becker’s conception is the elimination of any perceived necessity fordepending on large and available reserves Like just-in-time corporate organization that takes itsname from the minimization of inventory—no more than what is necessary on any given occasion—just-in-time human capital minimizes reserves as much as possible Rather than triggering a reserveasset of general capital skills and knowledges, just-in-time human capital leverages the power ofindividual agency on the occasion

To put it in slightly different terms familiar from Yochai Benkler’s argument that I discuss in

chapter 1, just-in-time human capital agency can be represented as a maximal deployment ofindividual autonomy as power of action In Benkler’s account, the greater the power of action on anyspecific occasion, the greater one’s individual autonomy The immediate just-in-time corollary,however, is that when reserves can be made redundant on those occasions, then just-in-time humancapital can also appear to have eliminated even the persistent vestige of past production labor stillacknowledged in such earlier accounts of human capital as Becker’s Labor may have been necessary

at some point to build an available human capital reserve, as Becker understands the process Whenpower of action no longer depends on activating that reserve, however, just-in-time human capitalappears free to stand alone as an autonomous value-producing asset, fully independent of labor

The general workplace principles that identified merit designations with the importance of a slowbuildup of exemplary skills and knowledges were congruent with conceptions of human capital thatlikewise assumed the slow buildup of a necessary reserve In personnel terms, merit named andrewarded what a high reserve of human capital was all about in terms of value to the employer Meritwas a visible sign that ratified the linkage between personal qualities and economic value Just-in-

time business management, however, moves in an entirely different direction Although the term merit

is still frequently used, the concept has been changed fundamentally As occurs with so many otherelements within a just-in-time context, merit becomes a matter of performance on the occasion ratherthan an indicator of something that can fully appear only across a considerable period of time Merit

in this new sense can yield little if any protection for individual workers, and not coincidentally, in-time organization excels in reducing the labor force Workers can become redundant in much thesame way as excess material inventory Thus among other things I intend my reference to the familiarname for business management organization of inventory and materials movement as a reminder that

just-as it hjust-as developed in the United States, just-in-time corporate management sheds people just just-aseasily as it sheds inventory

On the basis of the principles that sustain a just-in-time human capital organization, concerns likeBrandt’s about growing income inequalities appear as little more than a kind of bad memorysurviving from a very different past Inequalities may well exist, at certain times perhaps even morethan in the past In contrast to such arguments as that of Goldin and Katz about the return of wideningincome inequalities, however, inequality understood in just-in-time terms is grounded in contingentconditions of the moment rather than in any kind of permanently skewed social structure or in somelong temporal continuity Things could again change immediately, depending on the market and onactive forces of innovation From this perspective, a much-worse-case scenario than incomeinequalities can exist when past values and practices are allowed to persist into the present Theconstraints imposed by the idea of a necessary reserve of human capital would limit the futureexpansion of just-in-time human capital through more and more sectors of the social formation.Someone would always be slowing an inevitable progression on behalf of a past that no longer hasany real relevance to the conditions of the present As Benkler’s argument inadvertently anticipates,just-in-time human capital processes are born out of present conditions and identify past practices andconcepts as constituting an intolerable limit when they are continued in the present Contrary to hisassumptions, the destruction of those limits does not necessarily result in the encouragement of a moreinclusionary democratizing of production

It is not entirely clear, however, how “literacy” might function in these new circumstances On the

one hand, rapid and immediate communication is invariably touted as a primary necessity of time corporate management principles Accordingly, literacy studies research (as well as sucheconomic arguments as those of Goldin and Katz) can emphasize the growing importance ofsophisticated literacy skills in the workforce Yet on the other hand, most familiar conceptions ofliteracy involve some idea of an accumulated wealth of skills and competencies Even the pushtoward new definitions involves some sense of literacy as an acquired resource Not every literacystudies scholar or critic by any means would identify online gamers, for example, as marvelouslysophisticated in one or more forms of literacy Nevertheless, a claim that successful gamers need not

just-in-have acquired any particular reserve of skills or knowledges at all is difficult to substantiate It

would seem as if the very idea of literacy must be reconceived, not only because of technologicalinnovation and new modes of communication, but also and more fundamentally because of theensemble of social and economic conditions that have produced the new modes Literacy becomessomething like the instant communicative expressiveness of the autonomous individual that can beproduced within the terms of just-in-time human capital

I will argue, however, that the difference is less a matter of old literacies vs new literacies, or ofmultiple modes of making meanings, but rather how literacies are revalued by just-in-time humancapital principles The communicativeness of the moment appears as everything, while visibly labor-produced reserves count for little Like excess inventory, they just run up the charges Yet it does not

at all follow from the just-in-time revaluation process that the work itself has completely disappeared

or somehow been made unnecessary by new technologies Over the past few decades there has beengrowing recognition of corporate outsourcing to countries beyond U.S borders where labor ischeaper, and the practice obviously continues despite protests As whole occupations in the UnitedStates disappear with the concentrated force of just-in-time practices, however, much of the workformerly carried on by a corporate labor force is now also being outsourced to the cheapest laboravailable We as consumers perform this labor for nothing, as I suggested above in my example ofATM use As such outsourced consumer labor has become increasingly important, it is worthremembering how completely the profits available from that labor are dependent on consumermastery of sometimes quite complicated literacies

Despite the immense figure of individual agency with which it fills the literacy screen, just-in-timehuman capital cannot evade capital dependence on value-producing labor In chapter 3 I want torecover those forms of labor particularly necessary to just-in-time human capital by shifting the focusfrom information and the information production that interests Brandt no less than Benkler to what isnow often identified instead as an attention economy When grounded in neoclassical economicassumptions, the shift from information economics to attention economics has a very simple basis In

The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, for example, business

writers and consultants Thomas Davenport and John Beck explain, by invoking a bedrock principle ofneoclassical economics, that value depends on scarcity Thus it makes little sense, they argue, to think

of the present as an information economy since information is plentiful, cheap, and constantlyincreasing in quantity Plentiful it may be, but information has no value unless someone is payingattention And unlike information that can be produced in always increasing amounts in a computerage, attention is necessarily a finite resource Rather than identifying information as the key economicdeterminant of current conditions, their logic instead points to attention as at once scarce andnecessary, and therefore the truly valuable resource

The brain science that occupies Cathy Davidson’s attention in Now You See It: How Technology

and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the Twenty-First Century affords

considerably more sophisticated models of attention than the psychobiology with which Davenportand Beck attempt to ground their claim about the scarcity of attention as a resource One ofDavidson’s signal points is that the brain’s attention processes may not be as bounded as we oftenimagine According to Davidson, studies show that brains continually adapt to new technologiesrather than freezing up at a limit point Her argument can then offer strong support for literacy studiesresearch interested in educational reforms that make greater and more innovative use of multiplemedia technologies and incorporate the networking potential of the Web The general premise foreducational reform efforts is that if in fact students have a much greater and more flexible attention

“bandwidth” than is often assumed, it becomes all the more obvious that the linear progression,single-focus emphasis of educational systems is unnecessary and, finally, counterproductive In aworld in which we can now understand how much more students are capable of doing, there seemsevery reason to build an educational system that encourages those capabilities The result might wellthen look quite compatible with Benkler’s commons-based peer production Benkler’s idea of a vasthuman communicative capacity freed by the networking processes of peer information productionwould find its appropriate supporting counterpart in claims for an equally capacious capacity forattention

I am less interested in debates about capacity or the relative scarcity of attention as resource,however, than in conceptions of an attention economy focused more directly on attention flows andeconomic value In his online postings during the 1990s and in the first decade of the new century,Michael Goldhaber theorized an attention economy around the affective dynamics of attention andidentity in the process of building selves in specific configurations of social relations with oneanother The mapping and control of attention flows can yield value in an economic sense, as thesuccess of such corporations as Google and Amazon demonstrate Equally important for Goldhaber,attention creates the value of positional power that confers specific forms of self-identity In the terms

of his celebrity-culture metaphor, “stars” are the primary recipients of attention, and “fans” supply theeffort that produces the value of attention as well as the power of the star Goldhaber has no interest

at all in the supposedly unique individual qualities that make a star, or in the obsessive tabloidquestion of what the star is “really” like as a person The metaphor allows him to identify thedirectional flows of attention as they coalesce around particular poles

In The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, film

theorist Jonathan Beller also develops a metaphor drawn from media culture, and his argument offers

an even more direct contrast to conceptions of human capital The central character in Gary Becker’shuman capital paradigm is an individual investor who by educational attainment and ability acquires

a potentially high-value resource as now embodied in her or his person That is, the investor comesfirst, as an individual already in a position to make the crucial choices about whether and how toacquire human capital assets Based on very similar assumptions, Thomas Davenport and John Beckare interested in how autonomous investors get their payoffs for shrewd trading in the attentionmarket Beller inverts this basic paradigm with his recognition that an attention economy is first of allabout constituting attention workers and shaping attention-worker identities In Beller’s model theindividual autonomy of choice that I will locate at the center of just-in-time human capital turns out oninspection to involve complex constitutive processes continually making and remaking the identities

involved In an attention economy, selves are constituted as already subjects in the midst of dynamicattention flows, with multiple individual identities to follow.

In contrast to Davenport and Beck’s argument, in which attention is a scarce and valuableresource, attention figures in Michael Goldhaber’s account as a particular kind of effort, the form ofwork required to construct and sustain the self in the nexus of fan and star relations that exist withinconstantly changing attention flows For Jonathan Beller, attention work has become the basic value-producing engine of contemporary production and consumption While the everyday activities ofindustrial workers must be controlled to ensure maximum productivity on the job, attention workersare potentially available at any time, whether officially “at work” or not Everyday consumption,cultural leisure time in front of a computer screen or a television set, and so on, can all yield thenecessary labor of attention In this sense, at least, the key to an attention economy is its diffuseness

So far from having the value of a scarce resource, attention work seems to be available to be tappedanywhere at any time In contrast to the human capital story of individuals choosing to acquire andthen deploy their literacy skills as human capital, literacy subjects are always there as attentionworkers, available to perform the necessary labor of an attention economy

The connections between attention flows and literacies suggests a plausible means for extendingBeller’s argument about the attention worker’s necessary labor of self-constitution as subject, inorder to consider further how the surplus appears that can be appropriated elsewhere as humancapital Like the active processes of paying attention in Beller’s argument, literacy in DeborahBrandt’s broad-based conception can also turn up in every sector of everyday life Yet literacy is not

simply pulled into “the engines of productivity and profit” (Literacy in American Lives, 171), as

Brandt puts it, by following out the effort of paying attention Literacies shape precisely what kind ofattention on what specific occasions, at the same time that literacy work directs the ongoing attentionflows One result is that increasingly, literacies are manufactured from within the dynamics of anattention economy The appropriation of surplus labor from all the literacy labor involved in attentionflows can then eventually be capitalized elsewhere rather than returned to those most directlyinvolved in everyday literacy practices In my concluding chapter I will refocus this basic argumentabout the appropriation of literacy work toward the divide between literacy haves and have-nots that

concerns Brandt in Literacy in American Lives as a marker of social and economic inequalities In

these larger terms of surplus appropriation, inequalities can be recognized as a symptom of the classdivision produced by the concentration of human capital

During the more than a decade since Brandt’s book appeared, however, the most visible debates inliteracy studies have seemed to turn on issues of “old” versus “new” literacies rather than on thedivision between literacy haves and have-nots The central issues appear less in a socioculturalcontext of what makes it possible for certain groups and not others to accumulate literacy wealth than

in relation to what kind of literacies are being used, where, and above all, by whom Generationalpsychology then begins to factor in right alongside technological innovation in descriptions of thisdivide, as if that were an explanation for why the divide exists in the first place Utopian paeans tothe potential for new technologies that young users have embraced (and that are utilized by savvybusiness entrepreneurs, if not by very many educational institutions) pair off in nicely symmetricalcontrast to claims about the general mental deterioration and self-centeredness of the younger digitalcrowd The psychological attack reaches a kind of extreme in the wholesale pillorying of an entire

generation popularized in such books as Jean Twenge and W Keith Campbell’s The Narcissism

Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, which I will discuss in chapter 2 If literacy finally is allabout the learning processes and experiences of literacy users, as the new-versus-old debatesforeground, then of course it seems overwhelmingly important to settle the question of whether thesenew literacy users are techno-wizards leading us into a more expansive future or totally dysfunctionalnarcissists who cannot see beyond the mirror.

Elsewhere, however, growing income inequality has become a highly visible political issue, withPresident Obama in 2013 declaring it the most pressing issue of the day While it is perhaps obvious

why Obama or such liberal economists as Goldin and Katz in The Race between Education and

Technology would be concerned, even such conservatives as Charles Murray and David Brooks have

joined in Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010,

which won high praise from Brooks, is entirely about the causes and disastrous effects of incomeinequality In keeping with his libertarian beliefs, Murray looks to qualities of character andindividual attitudes for explanations of the significant events in his account of growing incomeinequality over the last two decades Doubtless in his politics the endless debates about generationalcharacter would make perfectly good sense, and indeed he supplies some arguments of his own in

Coming Apart At the same time, Murray is more willing than others to recognize income inequality

as finally an issue of class If indirectly, his stark picture of class division perhaps comes closer torepresenting the immense concentration of human capital and human capital growth over the last twodecades than Goldin and Katz’s much more nuanced historical study The proliferation of the term

literacy has a signal importance for shifting Murray’s character-based analysis of class to a more

comprehensive way of understanding that human capital concentration

In the explosion of what I will call adjectival literacy, the term-with-modifier has been showing

up everywhere with little attention to precise definitions, old or new Needless to say the migrationinto all kinds of contexts has occasioned a lot of criticism from all sides It would seem that at best

literacy has been emptied of any specific meaning, and at worst it has become a byword for

ideologues intent on imposing their point of view on the rest of us illiterates It is easy enough tojustify these critiques in specific terms If, as I will argue in chapter 3, just-in-time human capitaleliminates any dependence on a long-term reserve of skills and knowledges, it should hardly be asurprise that many of the current identifications of literacy have little resemblance to more traditionalconceptions Nor is there much incentive beyond academia to produce the kind of precise definitions

of “multiple literacies” that appear in literacy studies research Everyday usages seem instead toreduce the idea of literacy to pretty much anything one wants it to be, often in some direct relation to

ideological interests at work The definition of financial literacy, for example, that emerges from the

Council on Economic Education pretty much consigns everybody not trained in the most academicallyorthodox neoclassical theory to the role of hopeless illiterate Nevertheless, the ideological interestsbehind this “financial literacy” hardly seem the same as those behind “depression literacy” or

“palpatory literacy,” and so on Critique in this specific sense cannot really account for the generalproliferation itself and how it functions in relation to human capital concentration

Skills and knowledges are never enough in an attention economy Their realized marketplace valuedepends upon a power of representation that can produce visible elements within the surroundingattention flows Representations must focus attention from elsewhere by marketing a position fromwhich it seems possible to educate others about how and why to pay attention Thus by any traditional

human capital definition, literacy as representational practices in all of these new contexts appears at

best an empty resource with no precise definition at all The term no longer seems to identify thedepth and reserve of a traditional resource, and if there is any of that instant expressiveness valued byjust-in-time human capital principles, critics usually find it very hard to discover just what is being

expressed But as representational practices, literacy is not just a term to which something else, such

as financial or computer that points to a local context, is tacked I will argue that the proliferation of

adjectival literacy is first of all about the labor connections between education and attention in aworld in which being rich in literacies does not necessarily translate at all into human capital wealth

or position

Neoclassical economics has long been comfortable with treating labor as a commodity on the

market One of Becker’s signal departures from orthodoxy in Human Capital was his up-front

recognition that unlike labor or natural resources, human capital requires a process of production inorder to become a viable asset As I noted above, education is the primary producer for Becker,building qualities of character and personal background into a solid capital asset of skills andknowledges Just-in-time human capital only appears to have bypassed the necessity for this long-term educational production system One of the enabling conditions for a just-in-time workforce is animmense concentration of human capital, including capital in that more traditional sense that Beckerand others have explained as educationally produced The possibility of such concentration depends

on an increasingly segmented educational system, including the processes that create the continuallygrowing periphery of adjectival literacy

Human capital does not directly appear at the periphery of literacy work because it has beenconcentrated elsewhere and positioned to appropriate the surplus from the literacy work at theperiphery The more socially dominant just-in-time human capital becomes, the more widespreadeducational labor of all kinds must become in order to support that dominance and concentration atthe center Thus the educational fringe world represented by so many adjectival literacy sites still

reflects the intense competition in what Frank Donoghue, in The Last Professors: The Corporate

University and the Fate of the Humanities, analyzed as “the prestige game.” Concentration helps

produce the illusion of human capital as a producer of value, reinforced by the just-in-time dismissal

of the production system and support structure necessary to that human capital In short, while humancapital has its own specific conditions of support, the degree of concentration and the exploitativeconditions that build that concentration are very similar to those pertaining to any other form ofcapital

I would summarize what seems to me a particularly compelling current version of a literacy mythsomething like this: Redefining literacy to recognize different technologies and multiple modes ofcommunication has put literacy research and learning studies in a much better position to understand afar wider range of representational practices as significant forms of literacy The digital divide hasnot disappeared, but recent studies by the Kaiser Foundation, Nielsen, and others show increasinglywidespread use of new technologies by youth in low income and minority groups The problem is thatmany public school systems in the United States have barely begun to allow such common practices

as use of social media to play a significant role in the classroom Educational institutions properlybelong in the forefront of change, where they could direct the learning and use of all these new forms

of literacy toward productive goals for society as well as for individual users One of the manyeffects of failing in that responsibility, as the Kaiser Foundation study shows, is that low income andminority youth familiar with and using new technologies are likely to use them far more for

entertainment purposes than for productive learning In a nation of growing income inequalities andserious disparities in educational attainment, it is more important than ever to develop educationalmeans to equip all students to be full participants in a more desirable future As a now considerablebody of case studies has demonstrated, the positive effects of new learning methods for individualsare clear Large-scale school reform incorporating instruction in new forms of literacy foreducational purposes must become a reality as soon as possible.

Looking back from a perspective of thirty years of research in Literacy Myths, Legacies, and

Legends: New Studies on Literacy (2011), Harvey Graff cautions us about how to understand the

content and significance of myths: “Contradicting popular notions, myth is not synonymous with the

fictive or false By both definition and means of cultural work, myths can not be wholly false For a

myth to gain acceptance, it must be grounded in at least some aspects of perceived reality and can notexplicitly contradict all ways of thinking or expectations” (57; Graff’s emphasis) In Graff’s account,myths can also powerfully articulate expectations for a better future, and it does not seem to medifficult at all to see a great many admirable qualities about this current literacy myth with itsdemocratizing ambition The recognition of increasingly widespread use of new communicationstechnologies and the development of new practices has led to an especially important shift inunderstanding about literacy Many uses may be “merely” for entertainment or consumer purposes, butthose uses often require considerable skill and sophistication that might well be turned in otherdirections as well Literacy research and literacy training are better equipped than ever to help morepeople than ever benefit from change

At the same time, this focus on people and their changing literacies has not often been expanded

into an understanding of the economic world they inhabit Brandt’s observation in Literacy in

American Lives more than a decade ago remains far too accurate In considering the changes that have

occurred with the emergence of an information economy, she remarks: “As we know, mucheducational discussion gestures toward this change as an incentive, even an imperative, for raisingachievement in reading, writing, and other symbol-wielding skills However, we have paid lessattention to the effects of these economic changes on the status of literacy more broadly as it becomesintegral to economic relations, and as it is pulled deeply into the engines of productivity and profit”(171) In an economy in which human capital is so frequently represented as a primary resource forproduction, marketing, and consumption, literacies are not only pulled into, but also and more often

than not created for, those profit engines Brandt mentions.

So are people Like earlier versions of the literacy myth, however, this current version seemsdirectly centered within the experiences of literacy users: those who are learning to be literate, thosewho find the literacies they have learned to be a daily benefit, and very often those who areexperimenting with new forms of literacy and creating new forms on their own Theorists of howliteracies change, such as Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel in “Sampling ‘the New’ in NewLiteracies,” remark the contrast between the individuation typical of the industrial-age school modeland the collective networking more typical of digital media Nevertheless, literacy experiences andskills remain in the foreground regardless of whether identified in individual or collective terms.Likewise, while ways of understanding literacy and literacy learning have certainly changed as well,literacy experiences continue to supply the basic material for everything from case studies that lendthick texture to the reports of specific situations to empirical research that can translate surveys andobservational raw data into large-scale projections Human capital, however, is not about literacy

learning or literacy experiences or any of the really interesting things individuals and/or groups can

do with new literacies It is not about any human-embodied qualities or skills as valuable in and ofthemselves, nor does the production of human capital in current circumstances depend on peoplerandomly available out there somewhere who might then be pulled into the profit engines that drivethe concentration of human capital

In human capital terms, literacy users are constituted first as literacy subjects, that is, as resources

whose subject positions within a complex of economic relations determines potential as a capitalasset And while literacy user experiences and identities are shaped within that positioning, thereverse is not necessarily true at all The experiences of literacy users are not likely to explain verymuch about human capital and how it works This is a book about literacy subjects, not about literacyusers and their experiences I am hardly opposed to the mythic hope for educational reform and theidea that educational institutions might allow more students than ever to experience an entire spectrum

of multiple literacies far more than ever before But none of that is likely to happen without changingthe occupational structure of the economy and completely reconfiguring the reign of market forcesassumed to determine economic value

A January 2013 study entitled “Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?” by RichardVedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe, undertaken for the Center for College Affordabilityand Productivity, reports that roughly “48 percent of employed U.S college graduates are in jobs thatthe Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests require less than a four-year college education Elevenpercent of employed college graduates are in occupations requiring more than a high school diplomabut less than a bachelors, and 37 percent are in occupations requiring no more than a high schooldiploma.” Vedder’s interpretation of the data is pretty much what one would expect from an adjunctscholar of the American Enterprise Institute: Maybe we shouldn’t be so insistent on everyone getting

a college education; some people aren’t made for it; after all there will always be lower-level andservant-type jobs for those people to be doing, and so on Nevertheless, the data gleaned from theBureau of Labor Statistics do suggest solid grounds for questioning educational reform focusing oncredentialing more human capital–rich individuals without any corresponding challenge to an existingeconomic system The issues are far more wide reaching than the question of whether schools arelagging behind the times by failing to keep pace with rapidly changing technologies and the literacyexperiences of new users

Given the political dominance of neoclassical economics and a general consensus about theimportance of human capital, it might in fact seem odd that according to so many critics, secondaryschool reform has lagged so far behind the times Why wouldn’t human capital creation becomepriority number one, and why haven’t reforms been more widespread? My argument is that

educational reform and human capital creation have been occurring at a rapid pace Rather than

serving the democratizing goal of a mythic narrative about literacy users and their experiences,however, education has been conscripted instead into the making of literacy subjects The decades ofgrowing income inequality that Goldin and Katz document have also witnessed the growth of privateeducation, from preschool through graduate degrees, and the increasing allure of the most prestigiousstate universities, which remain state universities in name only; correspondingly, these decades havewitnessed the near-abandonment of many public schools, along with their students and faculty, to thefate of coming to resemble all too closely the kind of pre-prison holding tanks Samuel Bowles and

Herbert Gintis warned about several decades ago in Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational

Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (1976) Conversely, back at the top, the ruthless

escalation of what Frank Donoghue addresses as “the prestige game” has affected even the periphery

of educational practices These are all significant signs of radical educational reform, the growingimportance of human capital creation, and the power of absorbing into general human capital themultiple functions different literacies might well be able to sustain across a broad range of groupsand everyday practices

Contrary to just about any version of a current literacy myth, the most “industrial age” aspect to theformation of a widespread public education system in the United States was the importance accorded

to the basic job of producing a working class As I argued in Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed

Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education, the governing assumption was that workers

needed a great deal of disciplining, but did not necessarily need to know a whole lot in order to fillindustrial workplaces What persists from this industrial model of education in current circumstances

is less a set of outdated ideas and curricular organization or whatever, but the basic class divisionsrunning through it The renewed rise of income inequality over the last two decades of the twentiethcentury barometers a larger pressure shift away from the middle-class hopes and expectations that did

so much to shape a hopeful literacy myth in the twentieth century in the United States Theconcentration of human capital conscripts educational institutions to do the work of production,across a growing divide between that concentration at centrally prestigious locations and the immensesupport structure necessary to sustain it

In these conditions human capital dynamics suck up literacies, regardless of how literacy isdefined or what wondrously new things individual literacy users can now do when given a chance.Much of what is necessary to know now about literacy does not have all that much to do with theexperiences of literacy users and has everything to do with the labor exacted from literacy subjects Ifthere is any sense in which literacy is all about literacy learning and the experiences of literacy users,very few users are actually included in that “all about,” for reasons having little to do with theirliteracy skills and everything do with their human capital positioning It may well be the case, as theNielsen and the Kaiser Foundation studies suggest, that fewer and fewer people in the United Statesare completely excluded from some form or another of literacy What happens to their literacies isanother matter

CHAPTER 1

Capitalizing on Autonomy

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 In The Wealth of Nations Smith 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 ofsuch talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, alwayscosts a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person” (358) In thispassage Smith lays down a basic principle that over two centuries later Becker will 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 his basic point, however, will raise some considerable concern among hislater commentators: “The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as amachine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a

certain expence, repays that expence with profit” (Wealth of Nations, 358) That is, a worker’s skills

are a form of capital just like “a machine or instrument of trade,” only in this case they are “fixed and

realized, as it were, in his person.” The editors of the Bantam Classic edition of The Wealth of

Nations, echoing a long-familiar critique, remark that the difficulty is that Smith had used almost the

same comparison earlier as a justification for why certain workers should receive higher wages forthe work they do: “A man educated at the expence of much labour and time to any of thoseemployments which require extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be compared to one of thoseexpensive machines The work which he learns to perform, it must be expected, over and above theusual wages of common labour, will replace to him the whole expence of his education, with at leastthe ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital” (141)

Neoclassical economists may well be scandalized at what looks to be some confusion on Smith’spart between a labor market exchange of wages for the actual work the laborer performs, albeit morehighly skilled work than most, and a capital asset one might acquire and then embody in one’s ownperson as human capital I am not entirely sure it would be confusing to Smith, however, since in bothpassages he is clearly talking about a worker In the later passage no less than the earlier, Smithseems primarily concerned with fair recompense for the worker who has taken the individual trouble

to acquire something that will also be of value to society as a whole when exercised In the passage I

quoted above from Becker’s Human Capital, the key word instead is “investing.” Although Smith

mentions “dexterity” as well as “skill,” the significant difference is not really a matter of manualworker versus brain worker, as often implied in media representations of human capital in contrast towhat was required of industrial laborers Smith’s human capital agent is a laborer whom Smith feelsshould recover the expenses of acquiring new and valuable skills she or he uses in the work

Becker’s agent is imagined as if already an individual capitalist entrepreneur, a minicapitalist ratherthan a worker.

Smith is often lauded by later economists for his near-throwaway line about an “invisible hand”guiding the market to just conclusions, but the passages quoted above suggest some skepticism aboutwhether market forces would actually ensure fairness with regard to the distribution of rewards forthe 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 and rewards that exist for any other marketplayer She or he should be expected to bear the consequences of investment decisions At the sametime, Becker evidences a far more considerable faith in market workings than Smith Ultimately it can

be expected that human capital investors will get what they deserve in relation to the assets they bring

to the marketplace If inequalities exist, they are attributable to different skill sets and greater orlesser motivation to acquire human capital resources Becker has argued strongly that human capitalyields immense economic and social benefits as well as individual rewards Nevertheless, in contrast

to Smith’s worries about fairness to a worker whose skills benefit society as well as the individual,the point is not at issue in Becker’s basic definition

Literacy is not usually foregrounded in Becker’s argument, but his model can accommodaterelatively traditional definitions of literacy quite easily In considering family influences onchildhood investment, for example, Becker argues that while “human capital takes many forms,including skills and abilities, personality, appearance, reputation, and appropriate credentials, we

further simplify by assuming that it is homogeneous and the same ‘stuff’ in different families” (Human

Capital, 262) Before the emergence of New Literacy Studies, most definitions of literacy assumed

that it should be considered as indeed “the same stuff” no matter where it appeared, a kind ofculturally autonomous set of skills in principle available to anyone willing to do the necessary work

to acquire them Few might have doubted that literacy skills were relatively more available to certainchildren than to others given variations in childhood living conditions, but in principle again thesubstance of the acquisition was the same whether the skills were acquired with relative ease orconsiderable hardship

Background counts in Becker’s thinking about the complexities of human capital “stuff,” but theidea of individual choices made by rational investors remains the central theme: “The approachpresented here, however, offers an explanation that is not only consistent with economic analysis butactually relies on one of its fundamental tenets, namely, that the amount invested is a function of therate of return expected” (100) He may not be imagining everyone actually calculating demand curves,time units, and so on in advance, but the implication is that the closer one comes to performing suchcalculations and being guided by them, the better the investment return is likely to be Likewise, thebetter the calculations parents make in investing, for example, in their children’s education, the morelikely it will be that the children will become rich in human capital assets as they mature

New Literacy Studies, however, aimed a powerful critique at the ideological implications of

“same stuff” definitions of literacy Brian Street argued in Literacy in Theory and Practice that

dominant definitions of literacy both reflected and disguised a specific set of conditions For thosegrowing up in different conditions altogether from those silently assumed, these skills were oftenunavailable, and in any case clearly functioned very differently from the social practices in other

communities In Literacy in American Lives Deborah Brandt recognized that New Literacy Studies

set out not only to democratize the means of access to literacy as more traditionally defined, but also,

as Street’s argument suggests, to alter definitions in order to recognize multiple forms of literacyembedded within specific ensembles of social practices Thus in her account literacy invites

“broader connotations” than Becker’s concept of human capital, in ways “that will take on resonance

as this study unfolds” (6)

Since Gary Becker’s mid-twentieth-century formulation, however, human capital has also taken on

“broader connotations” that can escape some of the limitations of Becker’s model of rationalinvestment I suggested in my introduction that for my purposes, Yochai Benkler’s concept of human

communicative capacity in The Wealth of Networks offers a particularly useful avenue for exploring

the expansion of the basic idea Benkler’s definition of human communicative capacity not only seemsmore broad-based than Becker’s concept of human capital, but also more compatible with Brandt’sfar-reaching account of literacy Like human capital in Becker’s definition, human communicativecapacity is embodied in the person, but it involves all “the creativity, experience, and culturalawareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turnthem into new insights, symbols, or representations meaningful to others with whom we converse.Given the zero cost of existing information and the declining cost of communication and processing,human capacity becomes the primary scarce resource in the networked information economy”

(Wealth of Networks,52).

Benkler’s emphasis on communication practices and representations shapes his definition moreimmediately toward literacy issues, especially recent research into digital literacies, multimodalusers, and the affordances of different technologies in networking situations As the last sentence inthe passage above indicates, he recognizes direct connections to the economy, but in what seem to bevery different terms than Becker’s rational understanding of human capital investment in relation tothe market Rather than viewing human communicative capacity as an asset that, like Becker’s humancapital, benefits for-profit enterprises competing in the marketplace, Benkler imagines the fullestexpression of this capacity as developing within the emergent conditions of commons-based peer

production Perhaps not surprisingly given the title of his book, The Wealth of Networks , Benkler’s

argument owes something to Adam Smith, including Smith’s concern for a kind of fundamentalfairness in economic relations Unlike Gary Becker, who anticipates that the market will ultimatelyadjudicate just rewards in relation to human capital skills and abilities, Benkler sees the for-profitmarketplace as controlled from the top down Those at the top have every incentive to discouragediversity and individual autonomy and to waste no time at all on the process of creating conditions toensure workplace fairness As a primary resource for commons-based peer production, humancommunicative capacity becomes a primary factor in the process of transforming such an existingmarket economy

Given Benkler’s challenge to for-profit markets, it seems difficult to imagine how human

communicative capacity might then be identified as a capital asset The allusion to Smith in his title,

however, suggests that the key might be to connect his argument more closely to Smith’s interest inproduction and how it is organized, rather than to Becker’s focus on the market Like Smith’s,Benkler’s vision of any kind of long-term balance and fairness in economic relations rests on faith inthe hard work and ability of those engaged in production tasks—which is where Smith’s concept ofacquired abilities as capital fixed in the person of the acquirer comes into its own, in contrast toBecker’s tightly closed rational marketplace of investors following marketplace laws Perhaps evenmore than Smith, Benkler values the autonomy of all the individuals involved in production, while

also recognizing the social value of human communicative capacity In short, a return to Smith’s

concept of human capital at work in production provides a basis for understanding human

communicative capacity as functioning as a human capital asset—that is, as a primary economicresource embodied in a person Unlike more modern versions and in common with Smith’s concept,Benkler is interested in how such human resources can transform economic production to everyone’sbenefit

As a more expansive resource than seems possible within the limitations of Becker’s single-focusrationalism, Benkler’s human communicative capacity promises a direction that is also morecongruent with a literacy-studies account of emergent literacies His concept suggests how multipleliteracies might flourish in the midst of complex economic relations, while also highlighting theimportance of diversity and individual autonomy Indeed, he argues forcefully that for all itsadvantages over for-profit enterprise, commons-based peer production driven by humancommunicative capacity is only a means to the end of maximizing autonomy for each individual Hisargument thus seems much more immediately in line with the democratizing imperatives of recentliteracy studies and the claims for necessary educational reforms If perhaps paradoxically, Benkler’sdebt to Smith allows him to define and elaborate a capacious and flexible set of concepts that aremore suggestive in thinking about new literacies and economic value than what Becker has to offer

Smith was well aware, however, of how the efficiency of production that he admired so muchcould result at the same time in the most stultifying working conditions for many of those in thefactories Nor was he under any illusion that those working conditions were simply an unfortunatepersistence from the past that might soon become obsolete as production became even more efficient.Those conditions were created by the very same changes that made the greatly expanded productionpossible Benkler in contrast finds little to worry about in a networked future, if the constraints onindividual autonomy surviving from the past can finally be eased That is, the problems he foreseesare all assigned to the unfortunate persistence of past practices rather than to a recognition likeSmith’s of how current conditions might simultaneously produce new limitations on any kind ofdemocratic fairness As all too often in literacy studies as well, it is the divide between old and newthat occupies his attention

In his zeal for maximizing individual autonomy, Benkler installs in the middle of his map foreconomic transformation an assumption that is also a core component of the literacy myth For all thatthe name and the practices he describes would seem to identify a collective enterprise, commons-based peer production is finally all about enhancing the experiences of the autonomous individual In

my conclusion below I will argue that far from serving the democratizing of production that Benklerimagines, the principles of individual autonomy that he values so highly have become central to thetransformation of Becker’s concept of human capital into what I call just-in-time human capital In thefollowing chapter I describe some of the many differences between just-in-time principles and morefamiliar concepts of human capital, but in one significant respect at least just-in-time behaves verysimilarly Like any other form of human capital, just-in-time human capital is in the business ofconstituting economic subjects As a result, the practices Benkler hopes will democratize commons-based peer production for everyone instead re-create a familiar capital class division—not becauseBenkler’s fundamental principle of individual autonomy has been ignored, but because it hasn’t Just-in-time human capital is built on individual autonomy in order to ensure that the ghost of Adam Smithand the dream of labor fairness might be left entirely behind

Gary Becker understood that human capital is a produced rather than a natural resource, butBenkler is far from clear about the origins of human communicative capacity Unlike Deborah Brandt,

who is willing to think by analogy of literacy as if it were a “natural resource” given the current

conditions of an information economy, Benkler often seems to take the natural resource idea quiteliterally Human communicative capacity is “something each of us innately has, though in divergent

quanta and qualities” (Wealth of Networks , 52) Yet it also involves “creativity,” “experience,” and

“cultural awareness” (52), not characteristics typically recognized as innate What is clear is that incommon with both Smith’s and Becker’s definitions of human capital, Benkler understands humancommunicative capacity as embodied in the person of the individual But while Smith isuncomfortably aware of how efficient modern production can create difficult working conditions forsome individuals while enhancing the lives of others, Benkler remains insistent that commons-basedpeer production is finally all about maximizing individual autonomy for everyone

In his initial definition Benkler emphasizes a “practical” understanding of individual autonomy as

a power of action in specific circumstances, unlike “formal” definitions of autonomy that fail to takeinto account the way in which individuals actually must live their lives: “Formal conceptions ofautonomy are committed to assuming that all people have the capacity for autonomous choice, and donot go further in attempting to measure the degree of freedom people actually exercise in the world inwhich they are in fact constrained by circumstances, both natural and human” (140) Practicallyspeaking, you can know you have greater autonomy if and when your power of action increases inrelation to those circumstances, lesser when circumstances impose more constraints that close downyour range of choices and your ability to act on them In the terms of Benkler’s favorite metaphor,individual autonomy means the possibility for each person to author her or his own story “within theconstraints of context” (141) Thus constraining conditions are the crucial sector of necessary change.When an individual becomes “an object of manipulation” (141), a pawn in someone else’s story,those conditions must be removed

Benkler’s most direct examples of avoidable constraints typically involve Hollywood-basedforms of entertainment and corporate-owned mass media generally In a commonsense way, networktelevision in his example may seem a popular medium with millions and millions of viewers In fact,however, the costs are so enormous that very few people can participate as active producers.Everyone else is excluded, constrained to the position of consumer only One result is that the profitincentives of network television, rather than encouraging diversity, privilege those cultural productsleast likely to offend anybody among their consumer base: “For our purposes here, it is enough to notethat this model shows how advertiser-supported media tend to program lowest-common-denominatorprograms, intended to ‘capture the eyeballs’ of the largest possible number of viewers These media

do not seek to identify what viewers intensely want to watch, but tend to clear programs that aretolerable enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television” (165) Subsequently, asconsumers we learn our stories from someone else, rather than authoring them ourselves Because therange of available stories is so very limited, most of what we learn is very similar to what everyoneelse learns

Although his arguments occasionally sound like a cliché about mass media consumption conjured

up by the Frankfurt School term culture industry, Benkler is not claiming that consumers are all

inevitably duped or manipulated by ideologically suspect interests Manipulation is always possiblewith a Hollywood, top-down model, but not necessarily toward any ideological end Nor are

consumers necessarily passive If in limited terms, the process of listening to and trying on the storiesone receives can nevertheless engage active attention and interest The basic problem for Benkler issimply the market organization of a culture industry around profits in a way that requires massiveproduction costs With such an organization, the best will in the world would have no particularincentive to take the kind of risks that might encourage more diverse offerings beyond a set ofcommon-denominator parameters Meanwhile, little is possible by way of effective challenge fromthe consumer end precisely because individual consumers are so dramatically separated fromproduction You can talk back to the TV all you want, and it never really matters What minimalindividual autonomy you possess can only be exercised within a tiny circle.

Everything can change, however, with the emergence of networked, commons-based informationproduction organized in nonmarket ways In a story that Benkler has by no means authored alone, henotes that technological innovation and change have put a relatively cheap and available means ofproducing and sharing information in the hands of billions of people worldwide Nobody has to talkback to the TV, alone, any more At the same time, Benkler is careful to emphasize that technologycannot guarantee a different future His “practical” logic focuses on how to maximize individualautonomy by challenging constraining conditions whenever possible The idea is that imaginativelytaking full advantage of recent technologies offers a much better opportunity for positive socialchange to overcome constraints than relying on political choices based on forms of social and culturalorganization inherited from a very different past and which no longer work very well in the present

Recent technologies can be especially useful as instruments to help undo the tightly circumscribedhomogeneity imposed by for-profit cultural markets They put the means of production in individualhands and facilitate sometimes wildly diverse networking ensembles that encourage peer sharing.They allow full use of the creativity and innovation possible to human communicative capacities

Much of the detail in the overall argument of The Wealth of Networks thus involves careful

refutations of a considerable range of critiques Benkler takes on not only straightforward dystopiantechnophobes, but also those who worry about the demise of genuine community in a networkedworld In the chapter entitled “Social Ties: Networking Together,” for example, he enters the alreadycomplicated ongoing discussion about the value and the potential liabilities of more and morewidespread Internet use Even corporations, he maintains, can benefit from moving in the direction ofmore input from diverse users and more user freedom to effect consequences “The point to take homefrom looking at Google and Amazon,” he argues—from a 2006 perspective, needless to say—“is thatcorporations that have done immensely well at acquiring and retaining users have harnessed peerproduction to enable users to find things they want quickly and efficiently” (76)

In Benkler’s account, commons-based information production is not necessarily a threat to profits.What it does threaten is the attempt to monopolize the market on the part of any for-profit firminvolved in market exchanges Monopolies may be impossible in the “perfectly competitive markets”imagined by neoclassical economics, but in the real world competition “will not eliminate theautonomy deficit of privately owned communications infrastructure, for familiar reasons The mostfamiliar constraint on the ‘market will solve it’ hunch is imposed by transaction costs—in particular,information-gathering and negotiation costs” (158) In chapter 3 I will return in more detail toBenkler’s use of Oliver Williamson’s work on transaction costs in his comparison of the profitpotential of for-profit and commons-based production, but the general point for Benkler is howcommons-based production can actually increase profits by initiating good business practices that

virtually eliminate the burden attributable to transaction costs.

The real virtue of commons-based production, however, lies in the enhancement of diversity andindividual autonomy rather than in potential profit margins Maximizing individual autonomy freesproduction to work better, which in turn helps to loosen still more constraints on others, therebybroadening the base of the commons Benkler does acknowledge that the liberal political traditionsfrom which this ideal of individual autonomy emerged have always had trouble dealing with acollective politics Nevertheless, individual autonomy remains the central goal, despite the fact thatmost of his actual argument describes networking and commons-based peer production as inevitablysocial, collective, community processes Given the range of reference in the book, it is perhapssurprising that Beckler never really considers the now very available critiques of individualautonomy, including not only feminist and poststructuralist versions, but also, closer to his owndisciplinary expertise, those from within critical legal theory It is as if he imagines his “practical”definition somehow avoids the inherent difficulties in the concept

Yet arguably the most damaging omission from The Wealth of Networks is not its bypassing of

available critiques of the idea of individual autonomy, which after all may well have to do withBenkler’s having intended that his book reach a more general audience than simply other academics

If that is the case, however, it becomes even odder that he so rarely takes into account the currentsignificance of choice and individual autonomy in everyday cultures in the United States Forsomeone who wants to challenge for-profit market models on behalf of an ideal of individualautonomy, Benkler seems remarkably oblivious to the persistent selling of the idea of individualautonomy that appears everywhere in marketing—selling it for profit Individual autonomy hasbecome the number one item available for sale in the United States No matter what specific content,

or product, or affiliation, or lifestyle is marketed on Web ads, TV commercials, and so on, autonomy

—with its core of expanded choice—is the inevitable promise offered for buying into the marketingeffort Nobody goes into the anonymity business, trying to sell you ways to become just one of theherd once you get your hands on your “me too phone.” Likewise, surveys and opinion polls in everysector of everyday life continually encourage an assumption of individual autonomy and choice Even

in an election year, it is sometimes difficult to know immediately whether one’s independentlyautonomous opinion is being solicited about political candidates, toilet paper, films, or the latesttablet computers But obviously everybody really wants that opinion from you Rather than beingorganized to stifle autonomy and diversity, as Benkler argues, for-profit marketing seems to live onextending the promise

Had he bothered in The Wealth of Networks to make note of all of this going on, Benkler might

well have argued, as he has in other contexts, that it’s all just a trick An alluring appeal to

individuality disguises a dismal uniformity Despite that familiar i designator—iPod, iPhone, iPad—

individual autonomy must mean more than getting out of the two-year contract with your mobile phonecompany The tagline for the long-running commercial for Time Warner Cable’s “All the Best”service would seem to reveal the marketing deception at work, if inadvertently: “Share yourindividuality with people just like you!” For Benkler, what for-profit markets promise is notnecessarily what they deliver Yet while such arguments are of course familiar enough, they miss thepoint Whether the individual autonomy for sale is “real” or not, marketing obviously has verypowerful interests at stake in producing a wider and wider commonsense acceptance of the absolutelycentral importance of individual autonomy and choice From Benkler’s perspective, that ought to be a

much scarier recognition than anything about unreal promises.

Benkler understands well enough that for many people, change carries the risk of losingparticularly valuable elements from the past As a result he takes some care to allay worries about thesurvival of community with increased Internet use, the lifting of controls on information distribution,and the means of access to new technologies Nevertheless, in present conditions he can be as criticalabout nostalgically driven reform efforts as Marx was in his time about the type of reformer whowanted to bring back a precapitalist past destroyed by the Industrial Revolution The immediateproblem is how the logic of Benkler’s opposition between autonomy and constraint seems almostorganized to produce, instead, endless arguments about whether too much of value from the past hasbeen lost forever, or whether instead a glorious future beckons once we have been freed from the

“nightmarish” constraints holding us back That is, although strictly speaking Benkler is not atechnological determinist, his linkage of new technologies with individual autonomy and choicerequires challenging and if possible completely escaping the constraints of the past as they are carriedover into the present In contrast to Marx’s thought, there is nothing in Benkler’s model of change thatwould help him recognize a whole new set of potentially exploitative conditions developing out of anemergent order—conditions that have little if anything to do with perpetuating past practices ofconstraint

After reviewing a considerable body of work (ranging from Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The

Surrender of Culture to Technology to Gregory Ulmer’s enthusiastic Internet Intervention: From Literacy to Electracy), Jonathan Alexander acknowledges in Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web that while “it may be ‘too early in the game’ to determine which side is right—

the dystopic nay-sayers critical of technology and its deleterious impact on literacy and culture, or theutopian visionaries who applaud emerging e-literacies with their interactivity and hypertextual

complexities—it is clear that the new technologies are posing many challenges—and possibilities—

for students and other young writers” (64; Alexander’s emphasis) As Alexander shows, existingcritiques of changing conditions are almost invariably grounded in a defense of older literacypractices and laments about the loss of one thing or another with the advent of the new He points out

that both Postman (Technopoly) and Sven Birkerts (“Into the Electronic Millennium”) fear that the

simultaneity and associative freedom encouraged by new technologies are destructive of a necessarycritical intelligence: “The assumption or implication propounded here, I believe, is that such

‘associative dynamics’ are purely ‘free form’ and thus without meaning; in other words, in embracingthe freeplay of meanings, we lose our ability to discriminate, and thus to make critical judgments”

(Digital Youth, 40).

Meanwhile, in the role of “utopian visionaries,” advocates of a new and different future tend, likeBenkler, to assign all difficulties that delay the arrival of that future to the entrenched, rearguarddefense of vested interests in older, well-established traditions Thus there seems considerablereason for Alexander’s attempt to move discussion in a somewhat different direction: “More

pointedly, perhaps, I want to address what seems missing in all of the foregoing discussion—a

‘paying attention’ to what digital youth and some of our students are already doing with the newcommunications technologies, such as the Web” (65; Alexander’s emphasis) His hope is that themore we as teachers know about what our students are actually doing, the better equipped we will be

to make intelligent decisions With polemical claims at least temporarily put aside, we can focusmore directly on students themselves

Alexander’s research tends to confirm Benkler’s claims about the diversity of young Internet usersinvolved in peer sharing and commons-based production in one way or another As Benkler’sargument would anticipate, the students Alexander studies are engaged in a number of innovativeprojects that are remarkably varied in content and technological sophistication In addition Alexanderoften emphasizes political ends, by way of countering a typically negative representation of youth asbecoming more and more apolitical under the spell of technology and the Internet Like Benkler, he isscrupulous in making careful claims about his arguments, including recognition of what Benkler tends

to gloss over, the extent to which the Internet is still dominated by “images of Whites” and “writings

by middle-class consumers” in “the Western world” ( Digital Youth, 389) Nevertheless, it is difficult

for Alexander to avoid the polarization of literacy studies debates, even as he attempts to step away

Although he rarely engages in the kind of direct advocacy that Ulmer voices in Internet Intervention

or that Henry Giroux expresses in Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s

Youth, it seems clear that Alexander’s interest in finding out what students actually do online has been

tuned to respond to critiques very similar to those that Giroux and Ulmer also take on Despite hislaudable intentions, additional case studies recounting the details of student Internet use are muchmore likely to provide more ammunition for both camps than to engineer an escape from the debatesand the conditions that generate them Either way the case studies end up being used, the processkeeps the focus on the debate points of old versus new literacies

In their introductory chapter to A New Literacies Sampler, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New

Literacies,” Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel construct a convenient typology mapping the oldand new “mindsets” or basic paradigms behind the debates and note the potential effects onclassroom practices They present a table that summarizes “some dimensions of variation between themindsets” (11) at stake Because mindset 1, for example, assumes that “[e]xpertise and authority are

‘located’ in individuals and institutions,” it seems likely that a mindset 1 person will determineconsiderably different classroom goals than a mindset 2 person committed to understanding expertiseand authority as “distributed and collective” (11) Given the typical distribution of classroom powerrelations, a likely result of a mindset 1 classroom is that the instructor’s more traditional methods maynot allow recognition of actual student abilities appearing in new and very different forms becauseshaped in a very different and online world Correlatively, many students will find these methods andobjectives to be of not much use to their daily lives or their job prospects, and in consequence willrefuse the prospect of schoolwork altogether The kind of online practices Alexander documents thatencourage many student projects become impossible in a school situation dominated by mindset 1values

The discussion of “scarcity” (mindset 1) and “dispersion” (mindset 2), however, has a particularimportance for Lankshear and Knobel’s understanding of the potential economic value of new forms

of literacy Scarcity has been a bedrock principle of neoclassical market economics since thebeginning, and the authors identify a principle of scarcity as integral to the mindset 1 of an industrialeconomy All kinds of things were assumed to be especially valuable precisely because they werescarce, including “credentialed achievement” through education: “Schools, for example, havetraditionally operated to regulate scarcity of credentialed achievement, including allocations ofliteracy ‘success.’ This has maintained scarce ‘supply’ and, to that extent, high value for thoseachievements that are suitably credentialed.” They continue, however, with a distinction borrowedfrom John Perry Barlow’s speculations about physical space, where scarcity has been the norm, and

the quite different conditions of cyberspace: “In the economy of cyberspace, however, the oppositeholds” (“Sampling ‘the New,’ ” 11) In this new space, information is no longer a commodity at all,but rather a relationship: “The kind of value Barlow sees as appropriate to cyberspace has to do withmaximizing relationships, conversations, networks and dispersal” (12), in contrast to the premiumvalue placed on what is scarce in an older economy.

Like Goldin and Katz in The Race between Technology and Education , ultimately Lankshear and

Knobel are interested in moving education reforms in the direction of exploring the potential of newliteracies and new technologies They see Barlow’s opening toward cyberspace with its verydifferent value system as a viable alternative By eliminating the benefits of scarcity necessarilyaccorded only to a few, it might become possible instead to realize in practice the democraticprinciple of involving as many people as possible all the time Thus their vision of networks andrelationships seems similar to Benkler’s more elaborated account of commons-based peerproduction Benkler, however, makes a serious attempt at explaining a new nonmarket model of howeconomic value is produced Barlow does not do this, and the argument posed by Lankshear and

Knobel follows Barlow’s slide into the conceptual privileging of dispersion over scarcity, which is

not quite the same issue as how a dispersion economy might be organized to yield anything of valuefor as many people as might be involved

Lankshear and Knobel understand that scarcity does not always just happen Often it is producedunder specific conditions, as their diamond market example shows Concentration in the hands of onecompany produces a scarcity on the market that inflates the value of anything available Yet if indeedthe scarcity of certain resources is produced and not simply “a function of their degree of rarity oractual scarceness” (“Sampling ‘the New,’ ” 11), the authors should have been cued away fromBarlow’s explanations immediately Scarcity is neither a completely natural condition, asneoclassical economics frames it, nor merely part of some paradigmatic mindset that can be shifted

by coming up with another mindset, as Barlow frequently tries to do Even more obviously than is thecase with information, scarcity exists as a specific set of material relationships, no matter what spaceyou’re in

Human capital, however, works in more sophisticated ways than implied by the Goldfinger-likeexample of cornering the diamond market to produce a greater-than-normal scarcity of diamonds Inprinciple there seems nothing inherent in Gary Becker’s concept of human capital to preclude the kind

of shift that liberal economists Goldin and Katz make in The Race between Education and

Technology Becker and other neoclassical economists often distinguish between specific human

capital that involves skills required by a particular workplace, and general human capital that istransferable to other locations As human capital becomes increasingly important economically, moreand more general human capital is required that can flexibly accommodate to rapidly changingconditions This logic suggests that educational reforms should push toward higher educationalattainment for as many people as possible, who will then be able to supply these necessary resources

of general human capital In the terms of Lankshear and Knobel’s description, human capital from thismore liberal perspective should function on something more like a dispersion model of economicvalue, in contrast to the emphasis of neoclassical economics on the value of human capital resources

as linked to their relative scarcity

What Lankshear and Knobel are actually describing, however, is the more widespread dispersion

o f literacies, which is not necessarily the same thing as the dispersion of anything that might

immediately be identified as assets with human-capital value Certainly literacies can become morewidespread and more important in the production of information, but that may well be because theysupply some part of the labor of producing information or any other marketable product There is noreason to assume automatically that the value ultimately realized from the literacy labor necessary tothis production is returned to the literacy subjects In short, the contrast that interests me is notbetween the older mindset and its privileging of scarcity and the newer mindset that valuesdispersion Over the next three chapters I will examine instead the disjunction between an increasingconcentration of human capital and the far more widespread dispersal of literacies required to sustainthat concentration So far from being a self-sustaining asset located entirely in the individual, humancapital depends on a continual appropriation of labor from elsewhere, as well as the labor required

to sustain the immense educational structure necessary to produce human capital at all

Yet with Adam Smith in the background of this chapter, I have of course played my own version ofpolarizing old and new by juxtaposing Gary Becker’s narrowly rational, “mindset 1” industrialinvestor in human capital to Yochai Benkler’s freely creative Internet junkie networking the way to acommon future Given his emphasis on nonmarket production and his attention to the diversitypossible through maximizing individual autonomy for everyone, Benkler’s argument does depart inobvious ways from Becker’s model of human capital As I remarked above, Becker’s model accordsmore easily with a traditional emphasis on literacy as an autonomous skill set Benkler’s updatedversion of human capital resources as the human communicative capacity that makes networked peerproduction possible seems much closer in emphasis to emergent forms of literacy I had alsosuggested that in many ways Benkler’s interest in new forms of production and in a necessary fairnessfor all those involved in production aligns his understanding of human communicative capacity moreclosely with Smith’s concept of human capital than with Becker’s In the long arc of the history of theconcept from Smith to Becker, however, human capital has been represented at an always-growingdistance from labor For all the differences that can distinguish Benkler’s human communicativecapacity from Becker’s human capital, in this fundamental matter Benkler’s argument seems more of acontinuation of that historical arc than a break from it

Smith’s assumption was that human capital not only must be acquired by hard work, but also andmore importantly that it is itself a form of labor on any given specific occasion in production Thushis example of a worker’s high level of dexterity that I cited above gets him into trouble withneoclassical economists such as Becker, for whom human capital must be represented as, precisely,

capital, by distinguishing it from labor It is an asset that can be brought to work and not the work

itself At this level, however, Benkler’s argument suggests a strangely blank indifference to the wholeissue If taken seriously, his claim that human communicative capacity is somehow “innate” in all of

us becomes even more free from any taint of labor than anything imagined by Becker Apparently wewill be able to simply exude cultural awareness and creativity and so on when we can communicatefree of constraints Neither Becker’s account nor Benkler’s fits very well with Deborah Brandt’s

sometimes harrowing descriptions in Literacy in American Lives of literacy acquisition and use The

problem is hardly with her descriptions, but rather with the forced disappearance of laborrelationships from these other authors’ representations of human capital resources

I n The Wealth of Nations Smith had anticipated that the exchange of labor power for a wage

would likely become an even more vexed issue in the future He assumed that the value of laboremerged only in the exchange process, and rapid industrialization promised far more complicated

exchanges involving a more diverse workforce; hence in part his concern about how best in these newcircumstances to determine and maintain a fair wage for the worker who had taken the trouble toacquire special skills “embodied in his person” that were socially valuable Although his argumentrepresents a challenge to Smith’s market emphasis, Benkler seems no less concerned with fairness Incontrast to Smith, however, Benkler makes no attempt to determine a fair basis for exchange In hisaccount, these exchange processes can now almost disappear from view rather than multiply, as Smithanticipated The reason for the shift away from labor exchanges, however, has less to do withBenkler’s critique of for-profit organized markets such as the labor market that Smith analyzes, thanwith the central position of choice in Benkler’s conception of individual autonomy.

Choice, as Benkler understands it, does not depend on an exchange process to realize the value ofwhat the worker does As an expression of the power of action that defines individual autonomy,choice has value in itself that requires nothing more than the minimization of constraints in order to berealized More fully than in any of the previous conceptions of human capital, even that of Becker,who also emphasizes choice, this self-realizing value of choice effaces the kind of visible laborexchanges that exercised Smith’s attention In this context of privileging the inherent value of choice,the marketing of elaborate constructions of a common sense of individual autonomy that I discussedabove can be understood as completing the story of disappearing labor Not only do suchconstructions enable consumption, as if expanding the power of choice for consumer agents, but byforegrounding individual autonomy and choice they also make labor appear in exactly the same terms

as consumption Both seem predicated entirely on individual choice

Benkler is interested in production and in new technologies of production, but he is not reallyconcerned with labor in anything like Smith’s sense His argument represents individually ownedresources that, like human capital assets as Becker understands them, are under the command of theindividual’s autonomous choices Unlike Becker’s market model of rational investment, however, incommons-based peer production ideally there are no coercive constraints such as those imposed onfor-profit firms All individuals would have open choices about when to participate in whatnetworking processes, in contrast to for-profit configurations as Benkler describes them, whereboundaries must be set up and then policed in order to enforce time spent on the job as in fact spent

on the job, and not on something else

In commons-based production, each individual involved then becomes available at any givenmoment to “the information production process” that can “effectively integrate widely dispersedcontributions, from many individual human beings and machines These contributions are diverse in

their quality, quantity, and focus, in their timing and geographic location” ( Wealth of Networks , 100).

No outside force acting on individuals could possibly coordinate this diversity, but no suchcoordination is necessary or even possible in Benkler’s model It does not really matter for theprocess as a whole whether X at this point chooses to feed the dog or text a friend or download anecessary bit for the next collaborative project at hand When “all the inputs necessary to effectiveproductive activity are under the control of individual users” (99), some primary agents somewhereall the time are always entering in Given Benkler’s account, there seems little incentive to considerthe intricate, messy business of establishing labor-exchange relations or to trouble over their fairness,

as Smith did The corollary to this reasoning, however, never appears very clearly in the argument:There is no space or time that can ever be completely free from a choice to participate Or to put it alittle more bluntly, all of each individual agent’s labor is potentially available anywhere at any given

moment, all the time Labor that can be endlessly available can also be endlessly exploitable.

Although Benkler takes every occasion to challenge the kind of for-profit market that Beckerassumes, the equilibrium the former finds in a production process where individual users control “allthe inputs necessary” should be altogether familiar from almost any neoclassical account of marketequilibrium Like Becker in his market context, Benkler also takes it for granted in his nonmarketcontext that ultimately you get what you deserve from the choices you have made and the abilities youbring to the table Within Benkler’s set of assumptions no less than within Becker’s, wheninequalities exist, they have arisen because of different skill sets The solution is for those at thebottom of the ladder to acquire new and better skills in order to climb up

All this foregrounding of individual choice and investment looks right past the enormouslyelaborate support structure necessary for human capital formation at all Education is central to theprocess of human capital production as neoclassical economists such as Becker describe it, buteducational systems are expensive, complicated to administer, and require countless, and constant,hours of labor Schools in turn need the constant support of communities, individuals, and families.Human capital feeds on the appropriation of all this labor, including the maintenance of thosecomplex support structures on which human capital formation completely depends Further, theproduction of human capital must draw resources from everywhere in the complexities of that supportstructure In the United States, institutional education has always been expected to do a great manythings besides produce human capital, from educating a citizenry to be capable of democraticdecision-making to challenging racial and gender barriers To the extent that such a generalization ispossible, however, a plausible one-sentence summary of the more recent history of educationalreform in the United States might instead go something like this: The more economically valuablehuman capital is assumed to be as the driving force of a twenty-first-century economy, the moreeducational resources will be organized toward the top in the production of human capital As I willargue in my concluding chapter, the rest—those not at the top—will get less and less and will be in

no position at all to realize other goals and objectives

In his more “practical” definition of individual autonomy, Benkler recognizes that constraintsimposed by past practices will continue to exist in one form or another Yet like a great many others,

he visualizes the battle against constraints as a matter of maximizing individual autonomy againstlarge-scale interests rooted in the past, from the for-profit market interests of corporations to intrusivegovernment control The concept of individual autonomy plays a role here similar to that of the idea

of market equilibrium in the dreams of neoclassical economists; in Benkler’s vision the more youmaximize individual autonomy and choice, the more likely it is that things will just work themselvesout In common with most dreams of economic equilibrium, however, Benkler’s vision fails to takesomething into account Constraint can function as a polymorphous player Representations ofconstraint are obligingly available to take the villain’s role for any number of interests Benkler caststhe constraint villain as opposition to increased individual autonomy, but it’s possible for entirelydifferent forces to be villainized as constraint

In the next chapter I argue that the most significant transformation in the imaginary of human capitalhas less to do with new technologies or mindsets than with how both production and marketing havebeen reconstructed to require less and less of long-term resources The moment when “people,” ashuman capital, are so often represented as a firm’s most valuable asset is also the moment whenhuman capital as the core of this imaginary of value has been decisively transformed For Benkler, it

is corporate profit interests that impose severe limits on individual autonomy From the ratherdifferent perspective of rapidly changing business practices, however, the looming figure ofconstraint that jeopardizes further expansion of profits is dependence on long-term assets, the kind ofreserves of human capital that in Gary Becker’s conception are valuable to a business To borrow animage from that now-very-familiar form of corporate organization, just-in-time management, what is

important is not human capital as resource and long-term asset, but what I will call just-in-time

human capital.

In this just-in-time world, any long-term investment in traditional human capital resources can bedevalued, because individual agency is represented as a primary power of action to affectconsequences directly on the occasion No such power is conceivable without an always-expandingfield of choice available Constant technological innovation is required to extend the field and,correlatively, constant attention to challenging whatever constraints might limit available choices orthe capacity to innovate new ones is required as well So far from being a scarce and valuablecommodity that must be hoarded against outsiders, information should become plentiful and instantlyavailable to facilitate both a wider range of choice and more rapid choices Information of all kindsmust be made instantly familiar, dispersed across multiple, diverse networks, and produced throughthe cooperation, in effect, of multiple technologies at any number of different locations In short, aportrait of just-in-time human capital is going to appear with very much the same face as Benkler’sindividual autonomy in the midst of a networked commons The effects I will try to describe,however, will be considerably different than anything Benkler’s vision anticipates

CHAPTER 2

Arrivals and Departures: Just in the Nick of Time

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 thecorporate success and popularity of just-in-time through the 1990s and into the first two decades ofthe 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 managinginventories or materials movement Given the twin objectives of reducing waste and upping efficientproductivity, potentially unnecessary workers pose a more significant problem than unnecessary partstravel during assembly For those workers who are involved in just-in-time workplaces, theorganization requires that they play fundamentally different roles than in more traditionally organizedcorporations

Explanations of how the system functions typically emphasize that communication is the key toeverything, from materials movement to people skills The kanban cards used in the original Toyotasystem—cards signaling the need for parts or inventory—have given way to e-kanban messages andthen to increasingly sophisticated computer scheduling as the basic idea of just-in-time organizationhas been modified in the United States and internationally Rapid communication to the extentrequired by the precise timing and integrated supply chain of just-in-time production makes itessential to achieve as complete a transparency as possible, in which ideally everyone involvedwould immediately understand everything on every occasion An information glitch can have asdevastating an effect on the system as a railway or port delay, and elaborate hierarchies and commandchains multiply the chances for information misdirection or stoppage Thus workers who are used tooccupying a specific position in which the structural links are well established and information forthe most part follows a vertical line from the top down would find themselves out of place incompanies using just-in-time Individuals and worker teams in such companies must instead learn todeal with a broad range of decisions whose effects will be obvious elsewhere almost instantly

The considerable changes initiated by just-in-time organization and management suggest plausiblereasons to question whether they might also have changed the imaginary of human capital in importantways In the previous chapter I emphasized some of the significant differences involved in movingfrom Adam Smith’s idea of human capital through Gary Becker’s influential twentieth-century concept

to Yochai Benkler’s iteration of it as human communicative capacity Nevertheless, across thosedifferences human capital continued to be understood as an asset embodied in the person of theindividual, as a kind of reserve of skills and knowledges (regardless of how differently these might

be defined) available to be used on a particular occasion In the context of just-in-time organization,however, “reserve” is simply the human equivalent of “inventory,” and just-in-time has always beenabout carrying less inventory It is as if we are asked to imagine that the ever-so-flexible workers