Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital 9780823264254

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Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital

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Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital e va n wat k i ns

f or dh a m u n i v e r s i t y pr e s s New York 2015

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

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4.

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Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital Capitalizing on Autonomy Arrivals and Departures: Just in the Nick of Time Star Power Capital Divisions and Literacy Work

1 33 59 93 124

Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments

I have mined David Ruccio’s expertise about all things economic that appear in this book, from Adam Smith and Marx to Oliver Williamson, and I have benefited over and over from his generous willingness to share that expertise. I want to thank Ann Miller for a superb job of copy editing, making far more of the manuscript intelligible than I would have thought possible. I am fortunate to write surrounded by family support. I rely more than anything on my wife, Diane Logan Watkins, and my son and daughter-in-law, Christopher Watkins and Amy Marinelli. Chris’s wide-ranging knowledge of digital literacies, literacy uses, and business practices that involve multiple literacies has been especially invaluable for this book. And my wondrous and magical grandchild, Clara Bay, limns the literacies to come. I was blessed to work with Helen Tartar for more than thirty-five years and now five books. Everything seemed to belong within her vast orbit of passionate intelligence, and like everyone she knew, I’ll miss her so much.

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Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital

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Introduction: Literacy and Human Capital

Over the past decade the growing use of unpaid interns has drawn legal as well as political attention. Lengthy analyses have appeared in Atlantic and the New York Times, among other publications, and a quick Web search can turn up a number of sites that offer help with lawsuits for those who feel victimized. The concern, of course, is that employers are simply taking advantage of the soft job market to extort free labor from applicants desperate for positions. The 29 January 2010 Department of Labor guidance letter for training and employment identifies education as the primary purpose of unpaid internships, and the six criteria for unpaid trainees that it spells out are strict. The first of the six is that the training offered should be similar to what might be given by an institution for vocational or academic education. The second is that the training must be for the benefit of the trainees. Neither criterion precludes the individual from performing typical operations required at the workplace. The fourth criterion, however, forcefully states that the employer cannot gain immediate advantage from trainee activity and adds that from time to time employer operations may

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Introduction

well be impeded by the presence of the trainee. Media accounts critical of the proliferation of unpaid positions question the extent to which either the first or the fourth criterion is widely observed. Yet even critical accounts sometimes concede that the trainee may receive intangible benefits from an internship, which might include gaining a behind-the-scenes understanding of how the business or profession actually works; a pipeline awareness of key players and how they might influence job possibilities; and simply the fact of being on the spot and (the trainee can hope) demonstrating his or her abilities. The fifth Department of Labor criterion makes explicit that trainees are not entitled to a job at the end of the training period, but the intangibles can seem sufficient to give the trainee a vital edge over others who apply for openings. The position of an unpaid intern may appear to have very little in common with a wide range of ordinary activities in which a great many of us engage. The federal criteria for unpaid positions, however, help reveal some surprising connections as well as obvious differences. Even a simple ATM transaction, for example, requires at least some degree of customer knowledge, but it offers nothing by way of education, the key stipulation throughout the Department of Labor guidance letter. Yet according to the letter’s first criterion, what actually goes on in the brief period we spend at the ATM sounds very similar to what might happen at any given moment during a temporary unpaid intern position. Like a bank teller, an ATM customer taps codes into a machine (owned or leased by the financial institution or the network to which the institution belongs) that dispenses cash. That is, the ATM customer is in the position of a trainee engaged, in the words of the first criterion, in “the actual operation of the facilities of the employer.” Our moment at the ATM is like a preview pane for some more extended process of unpaid intern work. The Department of Labor criteria for traineeships also help pinpoint the problem with a frequent and convenient misrepresentation of the larger context for what is going on with ATMs.

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It is not really the case that an “automated teller machine” has replaced a human bank teller. In the recent past, new bank branches meant more teller hires, but the Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that branch growth has now slowed. “Additionally,” the Handbook continues, “online and mobile banking allows customers to handle many of the same transactions as tellers do.” While there are still numbers of jobs available for bank tellers, it is because “many workers leave this occupation.” In short, what has happened is not that the machine has replaced the teller. Work practices by customers at multiple locations have replaced typical work practices by tellers—paid employees working in the bank. Like an unpaid intern using actual employer facilities, the customer now does the primary work of the transaction, quite often in circumstances in which that customer also pays a fee. Such a transaction is obviously at odds with the intent of the Labor Department’s criterion 3 for traineeships, which states that rather than displacing regular employees, trainees must work under their supervision. Further, in violation of what criterion 4 stipulates—and without even factoring in ATM fees—the financial institution, which in this comparison occupies the position of an employer, can benefit a great deal from these and similar kinds of transactions such as online banking, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters. At the same time, it would hardly be accurate to say that customers receive no benefits from ATM transactions. Education may not be included, but convenience is advertised as a major plus, and the convenience depends on an expanded range of choice. Many different ATMs in many different locations, open twenty-four hours a day, mean that to a much greater extent than in the past, customers can obtain cash as they choose rather than in conformity with bank hours and locations and via waiting in lines at teller windows. Mobile banking—such as from one’s computer or mobile device—is becoming more and more popular, but when cash is necessary, the benefits of ATM use would seem to outweigh the relatively minor annoyance of

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Introduction

performing the transaction oneself and paying a fee. According to a recent widely reported study entitled “The Cost of Cash in the United States” by Bhaskar Chakravorti and Benjamin Mazzotta of the Institute for Business in a Global Context at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, however, there are large social costs associated with cash use. The most insidious is how it exacerbates the inequality that currently seems to be on everyone’s mind. The study concludes that the poor and the “unbanked” are the biggest users of cash in relation to other payment methods, and they pay the highest fees to obtain cash when they can. Rather than the combination of convenience and choice usually touted as an advantage to ATM users, the Institute’s research data suggest that in these circumstances, having “no choice” might well be a much better descriptor for some ATM users, as well as for those who are not in a position to use ATMs at all. As made familiar and elaborated by Gary Becker in Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (first published in 1964) and in his subsequent work, human capital can be defined as a resource that is embodied in the person of its possessor. Hence in corporate terms, the education, skills, intelligence, and even character of employees can appear as capital assets, every bit as much as a stock portfolio or a new CNC router to be used in production. As the current marketing cliché has it, people are our most important asset. The logic of Becker’s concept leads to the conclusion that potential employees who can represent themselves as rich in human capital should have a far better chance of being hired into good positions by employers eager to maximize those resources and prevent competitors from controlling them. Becker has claimed for some time that his research demonstrates the full extent of how wage and income differentials reflect the distribution of human capital resources. The contrasting directional movements of human capital in my examples above, however, point to a more complicated situation.

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When structured appropriately through federal criteria, the unpaid intern scenario might lend itself easily enough to a human capital–based interpretation. Becker understood from the beginning that human capital could not be treated as a commodity in the way that neoclassical economics typically understands labor and the labor market. Nor is it a natural resource. It must be produced in some systematic way, and for Becker, education is the primary producer and educational attainment the most 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 labor market exchange, the trainee is nevertheless in the process of building human capital resources. The range of intangible benefits the individual may stand to gain contributes at least indirectly to the process. Formal education is the primary factor for Becker, but he acknowledges that the official markers of educational success, such as degrees and certificates, typically come with surrounding layers 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 a liability. Becker’s account maintains that the acquisition of general human capital as a flexible reserve of skills and resources is almost always a better investment than the limited increase in human 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 be viewed as helping to fill in the educational promise of the internship, particularly if the training is structured to extend a wide-ranging academic preparation. The bottom line is that when the internship has been completed, the unpaid intern should embody more human capital than before taking the position, and at least by legal standard the employer should not have received any immediate advantage from the presence of the trainee and whatever human capital

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Introduction

resources she or he already possessed. 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 ATM transaction also presupposes that the customer already possesses some human capital resources. In sharp contrast to an unpaid intern, however, the customer can have no expectation of adding to his or her human capital. Customers may feel they benefit from the transaction. Nevertheless, the benefits of their human capital resources brought to the transaction flow entirely toward the financial institution rather than toward the customer who does the work, and, unlike the trainee, that customer likely learns nothing 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 exactly unheard of in U.S. labor history. The recent furor over unpaid interns might suggest otherwise, but unpaid labor is hardly new either. Several decades of feminist scholarship have documented, for example, 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 often overwhelming commitment of labor-intensive time— every day, all the time. The obvious contrasts between this work and an ATM transaction involve not only the very brief time period and limited skills 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 ATM use depend on the sheer volume of transactions possible from a large population of consumers. No single consumer transaction contributes much, and

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it requires so little time and attention from the individual 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 every day engaging in ATM transactions. Even further in the background, the flow of benefits to institutions also 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 a process 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 be initiated solely by individual choice—not even at a base level of such everyday transactions as ATM use. ATMs are hardly cutting-edge technology (most are still running Windows XP) compared with mobile 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 many critics questionable. Whether viewed positively or negatively, however, new literacies can involve remarkable complexity, well beyond anything required by ATMs, and, most important, the numbers and range of users across the entire field can be staggering. Despite the critical accounts directed at the terminology, literacy studies research no less than media representations have spotlighted some striking individual success stories, built on observing sophisticated uses of multiple new literacies. Meanwhile, however, educational reform advocates are frustrated by how lack of funding and a divisive political situation prevent a

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Introduction

more full-scale incorporation 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 literacy and 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 the century. The alarming trend that has emerged over the last three decades reverses this pattern. By early 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 more important than ever economically, education in the United States is failing to supply adequate numbers of human capital–rich individuals who might contribute most to economic productivity and simultaneously 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 that human 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 into many other sectors as well. Conceptions of human capital more recent and expansive than Becker’s make 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 in everyday practices requiring the technologies linked with new literacies. While the so-called digital divide has hardly disappeared by any means, recent widely publicized studies by the Kaiser Foundation in 2010 and by Nielsen in 2011 and 2012 show much greater use of digital technology than previously by youth in low income and minority groups. The Nielsen study reveals that in fact Hispanic and African American youth in

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the United States are more likely than whites to use smartphones. It can be exciting for researchers to document the ways in which sophisticated multimodal users deploy emergent literacies, and more expansive concepts of human capital help substantiate 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 to assume that the benefits available from a range of new literacy skills naturally remain in the hands of the users who do the literacy work involving new technologies. Nor should it be assumed that educational reform directed at producing more human capital–rich individuals would immediately translate into reducing income inequalities. Like human capital as Becker understands it, the newer, more expansive forms of human capital also 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 is set by the market, its development requires an immense architecture of production and support structures existing in the background. At the same time, because these new forms of human capital are more comprehensive than Becker’s workplace-oriented conception, they can occupy and organize far more social territory as they saturate the everyday lives of more and more population groups. I will argue in subsequent chapters that the economic value produced by current literacies and literacy users flows into a growing concentration of human capital and a corresponding diminishment of benefits going anywhere into the surrounding territories that are increasingly organized to do little more than contribute to human capital growth elsewhere. Like any concentration of capital, the concentration of human capital reinforces and extends a class division of winners on the inside and losers everywhere else. Studies by economic sociologists such as Mark Granovetter, Fred Block, Viviana Zelizer, Richard Swedberg, and a number of others have enlarged our understanding of economic forces

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Introduction

and everyday life. 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 literacy issues, 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 a global marketplace. Contrary to the long-term project of neoclassical economics to exile as many variables as possible by defining them as exogenous to the operation of market forces, economic sociology demonstrates that the boundaries of the marketplace are hardly impermeable. In fact Zelizer’s descriptions of commerce circuits, for example, posit nothing but multiple networks of economic connections, without assuming any foundationally singular market at work linking economic activities together. More people in more ways function as active economic agents than neoclassical economics 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 of economic 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 than focusing on what is specific to a capitalist economy. Market-based theories are in no position to answer the question of where capital comes from, although as Becker recognized even in 1964, the issue 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 value rather than to the market is

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likely to conjure up little more than that same singular focus on the workplace and wage/labor exchange that also limits Becker’s concept of human capital in contrast to more recent conceptions. The cliché about workplaces, however, barely touches on Marx’s understanding of the relation between labor and value, and like Marx in his much larger context of analysis, I want to try to track the determining directions taken by human capital in all its versions through the social formation. That is, rather than seeking out what by the rationalist standards of neoclassical economics look like exotic or increasingly remote sectors of the market economy, it seems more plausible on this premise to expect literacy work to appear right under the eyes of human capital 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 of new 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 in stronger 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 identified the components of what he famously declared to be mythic explanations, because the claims were largely unsupported by substantial data. According to the latenineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of the literacy myth in the United States, education enables students to acquire the basic literacy skills necessary for advancement. On a general social level, widespread literacy is seen as helping to boost economic productivity, and on an individual level it purportedly allows one to participate more fully in that productivity and to reap its rewards. Educational attainment is the avenue to success in this mythic narrative of integration, which links education and the many individual experiences of learning to be literate with an expanding economy and the social benefits that

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Introduction

come with a literate society. Yet despite the critical analysis of this myth by Graff and others, the excitement over new forms of literacy combined with the widespread representations of human capital as more important than ever to the economy have made recent versions of this narrative appear 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 Literacy Studies research and critique by a great many scholars, Deborah Brandt’s initial definition of literacy in 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 human capital 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 the context: “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 appreciate why, as with any resource of value, organized economic and political interests work so persistently to conscript and ration the powers of literacy for their own competitive advantage” (5). She recognizes that by defining literacy resources with close attention to economic relations, she has perhaps already pointed 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-century economy, she wants to recognize how “this intensifying worth of literacy brings re-

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newed 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 marketbased concept of human capital seems inadequate to encompass the richness of Brandt’s definition of literacy or to carry that burden of hope. In chapter 1, however, I compare Becker’s concept to more recent and expansive conceptions of human capital that might accord better with definitions like Brandt’s, as well as help to fill in details about what a more democratically 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 Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and faculty co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and both by training and interest his primary subject matter is the management of information resources in networked environments. While Becker tends to identify and value more traditional educational skills, Benkler’s interests position him much closer, for example, to recent research in multimodal communications and the affordances of different technologies in networking situations. Although he almost never uses the term human capital, with its marketbased associations, human communicative capacity plays a similar role as a primary resource in the networked society he describes. As his title suggests, however, Benkler understands these new forms of production as transforming markets rather than conforming to market “laws” in the way Becker and other neoclassical 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 of commons-based production over for-profit markets lies in the way it encourages and

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Introduction

maximizes individual autonomy and the diversity of people and interests that expansive networking can make possible when there is no longer any necessity to answer directly to profit imperatives. Whatever their personal interests, agents in for-profit markets have strong incentives to impose constraints on autonomy. In commercial network television production, for example, profit possibilities depend on the audience numbers more likely to be achieved from maintaining middle-of-theroad cultural constructions unlikely to offend too many people. In the workplace, most employers must strictly segregate work and pleasure for employees to ensure that employees are not slacking on company time. 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 of individual autonomy rather than profits, then lots of other things can follow. In a commonsbased production that thrives on diversity and increasing the range of individual choices for everyone, profit too 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” that could 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 educational reform, 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 capital assets, as Gary Becker himself has consistently recommended. What Benkler outlines is peer production in common toward the end of fundamentally reconstructing production processes that in a for-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.

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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 considerable skepticism about any claim that educational reforms and more widespread mass literacy would reduce 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 to aggravate 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 for the 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 with vested interests in older practices. In common with a number of earlier technological visionaries in a long history, Benkler remains almost oblivious to how new forms of antidemocratic controls can be produced in current conditions, sometimes by making use of the very goals for the future that he values most. In chapter 2 I will argue that his central ideal of maximizing individual autonomy unintentionally 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 of the 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 of worker Smith had in mind. Yet as I suggested above, labor never quite vanishes completely in Becker’s account. Work was necessary at some point in order for the individual to acquire a relatively stable reserve of skills and attributes that can then, as general human capital, become an available resource in multiple circumstances. The radical departure that distinguishes what I call just-intime human capital from Becker’s conception is the elimination of any perceived necessity for depending on large and

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Introduction

available reserves. Like just-in-time corporate organization that takes its name 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 reserve asset of general capital skills and knowledges, just-in-time human capital leverages the power of individual 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 of individual autonomy as power of action. In Benkler’s account, the greater the power of action on any specific 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 human capital can also appear to have eliminated even the persistent vestige of past production labor still acknowledged 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. When power of action no longer depends on activating that reserve, however, just-in-time human capital appears 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 slow buildup of exemplary skills and knowledges were congruent with conceptions of human capital that likewise assumed the slow buildup of a necessary reserve. In personnel terms, merit named and rewarded what a high reserve of human capital was all about in terms of value to the employer. Merit was a visible sign that ratified the linkage between personal qualities and economic value. Justin-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 other elements within a just-in-time context, merit becomes a matter of performance on the occasion rather

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than 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, just-in-time organization excels in reducing the labor force. Workers can become redundant in much the same way as excess material inventory. Thus among other things I intend my reference to the familiar name for business management organization of inventory and materials movement as a reminder that as it has developed in the United States, just-intime corporate management sheds people just as easily as it sheds inventory. On the basis of the principles that sustain a just-in-time human capital organization, concerns like Brandt’s about growing income inequalities appear as little more than a kind of bad memory surviving from a very different past. Inequalities may well exist, at certain times perhaps even more than in the past. In contrast to such arguments as that of Goldin and Katz about the return of widening income inequalities, however, inequality understood in just-in-time terms is grounded in contingent conditions of the moment rather than in any kind of permanently skewed social structure or in some long temporal continuity. Things could again change immediately, depending on the market and on active forces of innovation. From this perspective, a much-worse-case scenario than income inequalities can exist when past values and practices are allowed to persist into the present. The constraints imposed by the idea of a necessary reserve of human capital would limit the future expansion 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 has any 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 and concepts as constituting an intolerable limit when they are continued in the present. Contrary to his assumptions, the destruction of those limits does not necessarily

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Introduction

result in the encouragement of a more inclusionary 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 just-in-time corporate management principles. Accordingly, literacy studies research (as well as such economic arguments as those of Goldin and Katz) can emphasize the growing importance of sophisticated literacy skills in the workforce. Yet on the other hand, most familiar conceptions of literacy involve some idea of an accumulated wealth of skills and competencies. Even the push toward new definitions involves some sense of literacy as an acquired resource. Not every literacy studies scholar or critic by any means would identify online gamers, for example, as marvelously sophisticated in one or more forms of literacy. Nevertheless, a claim that successful gamers need not 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 technological innovation and new modes of communication, but also and more fundamentally because of the ensemble of social and economic conditions that have produced the new modes. Literacy becomes something like the instant communicative expressiveness of the autonomous individual that can be produced 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 of multiple modes of making meanings, but rather how literacies are revalued by just-in-time human capital 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 been growing

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recognition of corporate outsourcing to countries beyond U.S. borders where labor is cheaper, and the practice obviously continues despite protests. As whole occupations in the United States disappear with the concentrated force of just-in-time practices, however, much of the work formerly carried on by a corporate labor force is now also being outsourced to the cheapest labor available. We as consumers perform this labor for nothing, as I suggested above in my example of ATM use. As such outsourced consumer labor has become increasingly important, it is worth remembering how completely the profits available from that labor are dependent on consumer mastery of sometimes quite complicated literacies. Despite the immense figure of individual agency with which it fills the literacy screen, just-in-time human capital cannot evade capital dependence on value-producing labor. In chapter 3 I want to recover those forms of labor particularly necessary to just-in-time human capital by shifting the focus from information and the information production that interests Brandt no less than Benkler to what is now often identified instead as an attention economy. When grounded in neoclassical economic assumptions, 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 of neoclassical 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 constantly increasing in quantity. Plentiful it may be, but information has no value unless someone is paying attention. And unlike information that can be produced in always increasing amounts in a computer age, attention is necessarily a finite resource. Rather than identifying information as the key economic determinant of current conditions, their logic instead points to attention as at once scarce and necessary, and therefore the truly valuable resource.

20

Introduction

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 Davenport and Beck attempt to ground their claim about the scarcity of attention as a resource. One of Davidson’s signal points is that the brain’s attention processes may not be as bounded as we often imagine. According to Davidson, studies show that brains continually adapt to new technologies rather than freezing up at a limit point. Her argument can then offer strong support for literacy studies research interested in educational reforms that make greater and more innovative use of multiple media technologies and incorporate the networking potential of the Web. The general premise for educational 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 a world in which we can now understand how much more students are capable of doing, there seems every reason to build an educational system that encourages those capabilities. The result might well then look quite compatible with Benkler’s commons-based peer production. Benkler’s idea of a vast human communicative capacity freed by the networking processes of peer information production would find its appropriate supporting counterpart in claims for an equally capacious capacity for attention. 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 and economic 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 and identity in the process of building selves in specific configurations of social relations with one another. The mapping and control of attention flows can yield value in an economic sense, as the success of such corporations

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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 celebrityculture metaphor, “stars” are the primary recipients of attention, and “fans” supply the effort 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 tabloid question of what the star is “really” like as a person. The metaphor allows him to identify the directional 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’s human 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 comes first, as an individual already in a position to make the crucial choices about whether and how to acquire human capital assets. Based on very similar assumptions, Thomas Davenport and John Beck are interested in how autonomous investors get their payoffs for shrewd trading in the attention market. Beller inverts this basic paradigm with his recognition that an attention economy is first of all about constituting attention workers and shaping attention-worker identities. In Beller’s model the individual autonomy of choice that I will locate at the center of just-in-time human capital turns out on inspection 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 dynamic attention flows, with multiple individual identities to follow. In contrast to Davenport and Beck’s argument, in which attention is a scarce and valuable resource, attention figures in Michael Goldhaber’s account as a particular kind of effort, the

22

Introduction

form of work required to construct and sustain the self in the nexus of fan and star relations that exist within constantly changing attention flows. For Jonathan Beller, attention work has become the basic value-producing engine of contemporary production and consumption. While the everyday activities of industrial workers must be controlled to ensure maximum productivity on the job, attention workers are 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 the necessary 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 tapped anywhere at any time. In contrast to the human capital story of individuals choosing to acquire and then deploy their literacy skills as human capital, literacy subjects are always there as attention workers, available to perform the necessary labor of an attention economy. The connections between attention flows and literacies suggests a plausible means for extending Beller’s argument about the attention worker’s necessary labor of self-constitution as subject, in order to consider further how the surplus appears that can be appropriated elsewhere as human capital. Like the active processes of paying attention in Beller’s argument, literacy in Deborah Brandt’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 of attention on what specific occasions, at the same time that literacy work directs the ongoing attention flows. One result is that increasingly, literacies are manufactured from within the dynamics of an attention economy. The appropriation of surplus labor from all the literacy labor involved in attention flows can then eventually be capitalized elsewhere rather than returned to those most directly involved in everyday literacy practices.

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In my concluding chapter I will refocus this basic argument about 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 class division produced by the concentration of human capital. During the more than a decade since Brandt’s book appeared, however, the most visible debates in literacy studies have seemed to turn on issues of “old” versus “new” literacies rather than on the division between literacy haves and havenots. The central issues appear less in a sociocultural context 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. Generational psychology then begins to factor in right alongside technological innovation in descriptions of this divide, as if that were an explanation for why the divide exists in the first place. Utopian paeans to the potential for new technologies that young users have embraced (and that are utilized by savvy business entrepreneurs, if not by very many educational institutions) pair off in nicely symmetrical contrast to claims about the general mental deterioration and self-centeredness of the younger digital crowd. 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 all about the learning processes and experiences of literacy users, as the new-versusold debates foreground, then of course it seems overwhelmingly important to settle the question of whether these new literacy users are techno-wizards leading us into a more expansive future or totally dysfunctional narcissists who cannot see beyond the mirror. Elsewhere, however, growing income inequality has become a highly visible political issue, with President Obama in 2013

24

Introduction

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 income inequality. In keeping with his libertarian beliefs, Murray looks to qualities of character and individual attitudes for explanations of the significant events in his account of growing income inequality over the last two decades. Doubtless in his politics the endless debates about generational character 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 to representing the immense concentration of human capital and human capital growth over the last two decades 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 migration into 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 to justify these critiques in specific terms. If, as I will argue in chapter 3, just-in-time human capital eliminates any dependence on a long-term reserve of skills and knowledges, it should hardly be a surprise that many of the current identifications of literacy have little resemblance to more traditional conceptions. Nor is

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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 to reduce 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 academically orthodox neoclassical theory to the role of hopeless illiterate. Nevertheless, the ideological interests behind 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 general proliferation itself and how it functions in relation to human capital concentration. Skills and knowledges are never enough in an attention economy. Their realized marketplace value depends upon a power of representation that can produce visible elements within the surrounding attention flows. Representations must focus attention from elsewhere by marketing a position from which 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 the depth and reserve of a traditional resource, and if there is any of that instant expressiveness valued by just-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 a world 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

26

Introduction

departures from orthodoxy in Human Capital was his up-front recognition that unlike labor or natural resources, human capital requires a process of production in order 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 and knowledges. 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 an immense concentration of human capital, including capital in that more traditional sense that Becker and others have explained as educationally produced. The possibility of such concentration depends on an increasingly segmented educational system, including the processes that create the continually growing periphery of adjectival literacy. Human capital does not directly appear at the periphery of literacy work because it has been concentrated elsewhere and positioned to appropriate the surplus from the literacy work at the periphery. The more socially dominant just-in-time human capital becomes, the more widespread educational labor of all kinds must become in order to support that dominance and concentration at the 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 human capital has its own specific conditions of support, the degree of concentration and the exploitative conditions that build that concentration are very similar to those pertaining to any other form of capital. I would summarize what seems to me a particularly compelling current version of a literacy myth something like this: Redefining literacy to recognize different technologies and multiple

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modes of communication has put literacy research and learning studies in a much better position to understand a far wider range of representational practices as significant forms of literacy. The digital divide has not disappeared, but recent studies by the Kaiser Foundation, Nielsen, and others show increasingly widespread use of new technologies by youth in low income and minority groups. The problem is that many 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 properly belong 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 many effects of failing in that responsibility, as the Kaiser Foundation study shows, is that low income and minority 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 and serious disparities in educational attainment, it is more important than ever to develop educational means to equip all students to be full participants in a more desirable future. As a now considerable body of case studies has demonstrated, the positive effects of new learning methods for individuals are clear. Large-scale school reform incorporating instruction in new forms of literacy for educational 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 not explicitly contradict all ways of thinking or expectations” (57; Graff ’s emphasis). In Graff ’s account, myths can also powerfully

28

Introduction

articulate expectations for a better future, and it does not seem to me difficult at all to see a great many admirable qualities about this current literacy myth with its democratizing ambition. The recognition of increasingly widespread use of new communications technologies and the development of new practices has led to an especially important shift in understanding about literacy. Many uses may be “merely” for entertainment or consumer purposes, but those uses often require considerable skill and sophistication that might well be turned in other directions as well. Literacy research and literacy training are better equipped than ever to help more people 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, much educational discussion gestures toward this change as an incentive, even an imperative, for raising achievement in reading, writing, and other symbol-wielding skills. However, we have paid less attention to the effects of these economic changes on the status of literacy more broadly as it becomes integral 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 for production, 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 seems directly centered within the experiences of literacy users: those who are learning to be literate, those who find the literacies they have learned to be a daily benefit, and very often those who are experimenting with new forms of literacy and creating new forms on their own. Theorists of how literacies change, such as Colin Lankshear

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and Michelle Knobel in “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies,” remark the contrast between the individuation typical of the industrial-age school model and the collective networking more typical of digital media. Nevertheless, literacy experiences and skills 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 lend thick texture to the reports of specific situations to empirical research that can translate surveys and observational 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 of themselves, nor does the production of human capital in current circumstances depend on people randomly available out there somewhere who might then be pulled into the profit engines that drive the 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 capital asset. And while literacy user experiences and identities are shaped within that positioning, the reverse is not necessarily true at all. The experiences of literacy users are not likely to explain very much about human capital and how it works. This is a book about literacy subjects, not about literacy users and their experiences. I am hardly opposed to the mythic hope for educational reform and the idea 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 changing the occupational structure of the economy and completely reconfiguring the reign of market forces assumed to determine economic value.

30

Introduction

A January 2013 study entitled “Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?” by Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe, undertaken for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, reports that roughly “48 percent of employed U.S. college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests require less than a four-year college education. Eleven percent of employed college graduates are in occupations requiring more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelors, and 37 percent are in occupations requiring no more than a high school diploma.” Vedder’s interpretation of the data is pretty much what one would expect from an adjunct scholar 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 and servant-type jobs for those people to be doing, and so on. Nevertheless, the data gleaned from the Bureau of Labor Statistics do suggest solid grounds for questioning educational reform focusing on credentialing more human capital–rich individuals without any corresponding challenge to an existing economic system. The issues are far more wide reaching than the question of whether schools are lagging behind the times by failing to keep pace with rapidly changing technologies and the literacy experiences of new users. Given the political dominance of neoclassical economics and a general consensus about the importance of human capital, it might in fact seem odd that according to so many critics, secondary school reform has lagged so far behind the times. Why wouldn’t human capital creation become priority 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 of growing income inequality that Goldin and Katz document

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have also witnessed the growth of private education, from preschool through graduate degrees, and the increasing allure of the most prestigious state universities, which remain state universities in name only; correspondingly, these decades have witnessed the near-abandonment of many public schools, along with their students and faculty, to the fate 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 growing importance of human capital creation, and the power of absorbing into general human capital the multiple functions different literacies might well be able to sustain across a broad range of groups and everyday practices. Contrary to just about any version of a current literacy myth, the most “industrial age” aspect to the formation 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 fill industrial 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 divisions running through it. The renewed rise of income inequality over the last two decades of the twentieth century 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. The concentration of human capital conscripts educational institutions to do the work of production, across a growing divide

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Introduction

between that concentration at centrally prestigious locations and the immense support structure necessary to sustain it. In these conditions human capital dynamics suck up literacies, regardless of how literacy is defined 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 the experiences of literacy users and has everything to do with the labor exacted from literacy subjects. If there 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 their literacy skills and everything do with their human capital positioning. It may well be the case, as the Nielsen and the Kaiser Foundation studies suggest, that fewer and fewer people in the United States are completely excluded from some form or another of literacy. What happens to their literacies is another 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 of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expence, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person” (358). In this passage 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 his later commentators: “The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain

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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 for the work they do: “A man educated at the expence of much labour and time to any of those employments which require extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be compared to one of those expensive machines. The work which he learns to perform, it must be expected, over and above the usual wages of common labour, will replace to him the whole expence of his education, with at least the ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital” (141). Neoclassical economists may well be scandalized at what looks to be some confusion on Smith’s part between a labor market exchange of wages for the actual work the laborer performs, albeit more highly skilled work than most, and a capital asset one might acquire and then embody in one’s own person as human capital. I am not entirely sure it would be confusing to Smith, however, since in both passages he is clearly talking about a worker. In the later passage no less than the earlier, Smith seems 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 manual worker versus brain worker, as often implied in media representations of human capital in contrast to what was required of industrial laborers. Smith’s human capital agent is a laborer whom Smith feels should 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

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individual capitalist entrepreneur, a minicapitalist rather than a worker. Smith is often lauded by later economists for his nearthrowaway line about an “invisible hand” guiding the market to just conclusions, but the passages quoted above suggest some skepticism about whether market forces would actually ensure fairness with regard to the distribution of rewards for the effort of acquiring human capital. For Becker, in contrast, the individual who chooses to invest in a human capital asset can expect only the kinds of risks and rewards that exist for any other market player. She or he should be expected to bear the consequences of investment decisions. At the same time, 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 or lesser motivation to acquire human capital resources. Becker has argued strongly that human capital yields 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 accommodate relatively traditional definitions of literacy quite easily. In considering family influences on childhood 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 of culturally autonomous set of skills in principle available to anyone willing to do the necessary work to acquire them. Few

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Capitalizing on Autonomy

might have doubted that literacy skills were relatively more available to certain children than to others given variations in childhood living conditions, but in principle again the substance of the acquisition was the same whether the skills were acquired with relative ease or considerable hardship. Background counts in Becker’s thinking about the complexities of human capital “stuff,” but the idea of individual choices made by rational investors remains the central theme: “The approach presented here, however, offers an explanation that is not only consistent with economic analysis but actually relies on one of its fundamental tenets, namely, that the amount invested is a function of the rate 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 such calculations and being guided by them, the better the investment return is likely to be. Likewise, the better the calculations parents make in investing, for example, in their children’s education, the more likely 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 those growing up in different conditions altogether from those silently assumed, these skills were often unavailable, 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 literacy embedded 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).

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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 rational investment. 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 seems more broad-based than Becker’s concept of human capital, but also more compatible with Brandt’s far-reaching account of literacy. Like human capital in Becker’s definition, human communicative capacity is embodied in the person, but it involves all “the creativity, experience, and cultural awareness necessary to take from the universe of existing information and cultural resources and turn them 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 more immediately toward literacy issues, especially recent research into digital literacies, multimodal users, and the affordances of different technologies in networking situations. As the last sentence in the passage above indicates, he recognizes direct connections to the economy, but in what seem to be very different terms than Becker’s rational understanding of human capital investment in relation to the market. Rather than viewing human communicative capacity as an asset that, like Becker’s human capital, benefits forprofit enterprises competing in the marketplace, Benkler imagines the fullest expression 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 fundamental

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fairness in economic relations. Unlike Gary Becker, who anticipates that the market will ultimately adjudicate just rewards in relation to human capital skills and abilities, Benkler sees the for-profit marketplace as controlled from the top down. Those at the top have every incentive to discourage diversity and individual autonomy and to waste no time at all on the process of creating conditions to ensure workplace fairness. As a primary resource for commons-based peer production, human communicative capacity becomes a primary factor in the process of transforming such an existing market 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 in production 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 in the hard work and ability of those engaged in production tasks— which is where Smith’s concept of acquired abilities as capital fixed in the person of the acquirer comes into its own, in contrast to Becker’s tightly closed rational marketplace of investors following marketplace laws. Perhaps even more 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 economic resource 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’s benefit. As a more expansive resource than seems possible within the limitations of Becker’s single-focus rationalism, Benkler’s human communicative capacity promises a direction that is also

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more congruent with a literacy-studies account of emergent literacies. His concept suggests how multiple literacies might flourish in the midst of complex economic relations, while also highlighting the importance of diversity and individual autonomy. Indeed, he argues forcefully that for all its advantages over for-profit enterprise, commons-based peer production driven by human communicative capacity is only a means to the end of maximizing autonomy for each individual. His argument thus seems much more immediately in line with the democratizing imperatives of recent literacy studies and the claims for necessary educational reforms. If perhaps paradoxically, Benkler’s debt to Smith allows him to define and elaborate a capacious and flexible set of concepts that are more 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 much could result at the same time in the most stultifying working conditions for many of those in the factories. Nor was he under any illusion that those working conditions were simply an unfortunate persistence 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 production possible. Benkler in contrast finds little to worry about in a networked future, if the constraints on individual autonomy surviving from the past can finally be eased. That is, the problems he foresees are all assigned to the unfortunate persistence of past practices rather than to a recognition like Smith’s of how current conditions might simultaneously produce new limitations on any kind of democratic fairness. As all too often in literacy studies as well, it is the divide between old and new that occupies his attention. In his zeal for maximizing individual autonomy, Benkler installs in the middle of his map for economic transformation an assumption that is also a core component of the literacy myth. For all that the name and the practices he describes would

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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 Benkler imagines, the principles of individual autonomy that he values so highly have become central to the transformation of Becker’s concept of human capital into what I call just-intime human capital. In the following chapter I describe some of the many differences between just-in-time principles and more familiar concepts of human capital, but in one significant respect at least just-in-time behaves very similarly. Like any other form of human capital, just-in-time human capital is in the business of constituting 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 because Benkler’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 Smith and the dream of labor fairness might be left entirely behind. Gary Becker understood that human capital is a produced rather than a natural resource, but Benkler 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 quite literally. 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 in common with both Smith’s and Becker’s definitions of human capital, Benkler understands human communicative capacity as embodied in the person of the individual. But while Smith is uncomfortably aware of how efficient modern production can create difficult working conditions for some individu-

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als while enhancing the lives of others, Benkler remains insistent that commons-based peer 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 take into account the way in which individuals actually must live their lives: “Formal conceptions of autonomy are committed to assuming that all people have the capacity for autonomous choice, and do not go further in attempting to measure the degree of freedom people actually exercise in the world in which they are in fact constrained by circumstances, both natural and human” (140). Practically speaking, you can know you have greater autonomy if and when your power of action increases in relation to those circumstances, lesser when circumstances impose more constraints that close down your 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 the constraints 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-based forms of entertainment and corporate-owned mass media generally. In a commonsense way, network television 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 profit incentives of network television, rather than encouraging diversity, privilege those cultural products least likely to offend anybody among their consumer base: “For our purposes here, it is enough to note that this model shows how advertiser-supported media tend to program lowest-common-denominator programs,

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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 are tolerable enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television” (165). Subsequently, as consumers we learn our stories from someone else, rather than authoring them ourselves. Because the range of available stories is so very limited, most of what we learn is very similar to what everyone else 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 possible with 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 stories one receives can nevertheless engage active attention and interest. The basic problem for Benkler is simply the market organization of a culture industry around profits in a way that requires massive production costs. With such an organization, the best will in the world would have no particular incentive to take the kind of risks that might encourage more diverse offerings beyond a set of common-denominator parameters. Meanwhile, little is possible by way of effective challenge from the consumer end precisely because individual consumers are so dramatically separated from production. You can talk back to the TV all you want, and it never really matters. What minimal individual autonomy you possess can only be exercised within a tiny circle. Everything can change, however, with the emergence of networked, commons-based information production organized in nonmarket ways. In a story that Benkler has by no means authored alone, he notes that technological innovation and change have put a relatively cheap and available means of producing and sharing information in the hands of billions of people worldwide. Nobody has to talk back to the TV, alone,

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any more. At the same time, Benkler is careful to emphasize that technology cannot guarantee a different future. His “practical” logic focuses on how to maximize individual autonomy by challenging constraining conditions whenever possible. The idea is that imaginatively taking full advantage of recent technologies offers a much better opportunity for positive social change to overcome constraints than relying on political choices based on forms of social and cultural organization 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 circumscribed homogeneity imposed by for-profit cultural markets. They put the means of production in individual hands 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 dystopian technophobes, but also those who worry about the demise of genuine community in a networked world. In the chapter entitled “Social Ties: Networking Together,” for example, he enters the already complicated ongoing discussion about the value and the potential liabilities of more and more widespread Internet use. Even corporations, he maintains, can benefit from moving in the direction of more input from diverse users and more user freedom to effect consequences. “The point to take home from looking at Google and Amazon,” he argues—from a 2006 perspective, needless to say—“is that corporations that have done immensely well at acquiring and retaining users have harnessed peer production 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

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for-profit firm involved 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 the autonomy deficit of privately owned communications infrastructure, for familiar reasons. The most familiar 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 to Benkler’s use of Oliver Williamson’s work on transaction costs in his comparison of the profit potential of for-profit and commons-based production, but the general point for Benkler is how commons-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 and individual autonomy rather than in potential profit margins. Maximizing individual autonomy frees production to work better, which in turn helps to loosen still more constraints on others, thereby broadening the base of the commons. Benkler does acknowledge that the liberal political traditions from which this ideal of individual autonomy emerged have always had trouble dealing with a collective politics. Nevertheless, individual autonomy remains the central goal, despite the fact that most of his actual argument describes networking and commons-based peer production as inevitably social, collective, community processes. Given the range of reference in the book, it is perhaps surprising that Beckler never really considers the now very available critiques of individual autonomy, including not only feminist and poststructuralist versions, but also, closer to his own disciplinary 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

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with Benkler’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 current significance of choice and individual autonomy in everyday cultures in the United States. For someone who wants to challenge for-profit market models on behalf of an ideal of individual autonomy, Benkler seems remarkably oblivious to the persistent selling of the idea of individual autonomy that appears everywhere in marketing—selling it for profit. Individual autonomy has become 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 marketing effort. Nobody goes into the anonymity business, trying to sell you ways to become just one of the herd once you get your hands on your “me too phone.” Likewise, surveys and opinion polls in every sector 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 independently autonomous opinion is being solicited about political candidates, toilet paper, films, or the latest tablet computers. But obviously everybody really wants that opinion from you. Rather than being organized to stifle autonomy and diversity, as Benkler argues, for-profit marketing seems to live on extending 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 phone company. The tagline for the longrunning commercial for Time Warner Cable’s “All the Best” ser vice would seem to reveal the marketing deception at work,

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if inadvertently: “Share your individuality with people just like you!” For Benkler, what for-profit markets promise is not necessarily what they deliver. Yet while such arguments are of course familiar enough, they miss the point. Whether the individual autonomy for sale is “real” or not, marketing obviously has very powerful interests at stake in producing a wider and wider commonsense acceptance of the absolutely central 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 losing particularly valuable elements from the past. As a result he takes some care to allay worries about the survival 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 critical about nostalgically driven reform efforts as Marx was in his time about the type of reformer who wanted to bring back a precapitalist past destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. The immediate problem is how the logic of Benkler’s opposition between autonomy and constraint seems almost organized to produce, instead, endless arguments about whether too much of value from the past has been 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 a technological determinist, his linkage of new technologies with individual autonomy and choice requires challenging and if possible completely escaping the constraints of the past as they are carried over into the present. In contrast to Marx’s thought, there is nothing in Benkler’s model of change that would help him recognize a whole new set of potentially exploitative conditions developing out of an emergent order— conditions that have little if anything to do with perpetuating past practices of constraint. After reviewing a considerable body of work (ranging from Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technol-

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ogy 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 the utopian 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, existing critiques of changing conditions are almost invariably grounded in a defense of older literacy practices 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 necessary critical 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 embracing the 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, like Benkler, to assign all difficulties that delay the arrival of that future to the entrenched, rearguard defense of vested interests in older, well-established traditions. Thus there seems considerable reason 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 new communications technologies, such as the Web” (65; Alexander’s emphasis). His hope is that the more 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 focus more directly on students themselves.

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Alexander’s research tends to confirm Benkler’s claims about the diversity of young Internet users involved in peer sharing and commons-based production in one way or another. As Benkler’s argument would anticipate, the students Alexander studies are engaged in a number of innovative projects that are remarkably varied in content and technological sophistication. In addition Alexander often emphasizes political ends, by way of countering a typically negative representation of youth as becoming more and more apolitical under the spell of technology and the Internet. Like Benkler, he is scrupulous 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 his laudable intentions, additional case studies recounting the details of student Internet use are much more likely to provide more ammunition for both camps than to engineer an escape from the debates and the conditions that generate them. Either way the case studies end up being used, the process keeps 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 old and new “mindsets” or basic paradigms behind the debates and note the potential effects on classroom practices. They present a table that summarizes “some dimensions of variation between the mindsets” (11) at stake. Because mindset 1, for ex-

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ample, assumes that “[e]xpertise and authority are ‘located’ in individuals and institutions,” it seems likely that a mindset 1 person will determine considerably different classroom goals than a mindset 2 person committed to understanding expertise and authority as “distributed and collective” (11). Given the typical distribution of classroom power relations, a likely result of a mindset 1 classroom is that the instructor’s more traditional methods may not allow recognition of actual student abilities appearing in new and very different forms because shaped in a very different and online world. Correlatively, many students will find these methods and objectives to be of not much use to their daily lives or their job prospects, and in consequence will refuse the prospect of schoolwork altogether. The kind of online practices Alexander documents that encourage many student projects become impossible in a school situation dominated by mindset 1 values. The discussion of “scarcity” (mindset 1) and “dispersion” (mindset 2), however, has a particular importance 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 the beginning, and the authors identify a principle of scarcity as integral to the mindset 1 of an industrial economy. All kinds of things were assumed to be especially valuable precisely because they were scarce, including “credentialed achievement” through education: “Schools, for example, have traditionally operated to regulate scarcity of credentialed achievement, including allocations of literacy ‘success.’ This has maintained scarce ‘supply’ and, to that extent, high value for those achievements that are suitably credentialed.” They continue, however, with a distinction borrowed from 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 opposite holds” (“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

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as appropriate to cyberspace has to do with maximizing relationships, conversations, networks and dispersal” (12), in contrast to the premium value 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 new literacies and new technologies. They see Barlow’s opening toward cyberspace with its very different value system as a viable alternative. By eliminating the benefits of scarcity necessarily accorded only to a few, it might become possible instead to realize in practice the democratic principle of involving as many people as possible all the time. Thus their vision of networks and relationships seems similar to Benkler’s more elaborated account of commons-based peer production. Benkler, however, makes a serious attempt at explaining a new nonmarket model of how economic 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 value for as many people as might be involved. Lankshear and Knobel understand that scarcity does not always just happen. Often it is produced under specific conditions, as their diamond market example shows. Concentration in the hands of one company produces a scarcity on the market that inflates the value of anything available. Yet if indeed the scarcity of certain resources is produced and not simply “a function of their degree of rarity or actual scarceness” (“Sampling ‘the New,’ ” 11), the authors should have been cued away from Barlow’s explanations immediately. Scarcity is neither a completely natural condition, as neoclassical 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 the case with

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information, scarcity exists as a specific set of material relationships, no matter what space you’re in. Human capital, however, works in more sophisticated ways than implied by the Goldfinger-like example of cornering the diamond market to produce a greater-than-normal scarcity of diamonds. In principle 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 is transferable to other locations. As human capital becomes increasingly important economically, more and more general human capital is required that can flexibly accommodate to rapidly changing conditions. This logic suggests that educational reforms should push toward higher educational attainment 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 this more liberal perspective should function on something more like a dispersion model of economic value, 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 of literacies, which is not necessarily the same thing as the dispersion of anything that might immediately be identified as assets with humancapital value. Certainly literacies can become more widespread and more important in the production of information, but that may well be because they supply some part of the labor of producing information or any other marketable product. There is no reason to assume automatically that the value ultimately realized from the literacy labor necessary to this production is returned to the literacy subjects. In short, the contrast that interests me is not between the older mindset and its privileging

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of scarcity and the newer mindset that values dispersion. Over the next three chapters I will examine instead the disjunction between an increasing concentration of human capital and the far more widespread dispersal of literacies required to sustain that concentration. So far from being a self-sustaining asset located entirely in the individual, human capital 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 of polarizing old and new by juxtaposing Gary Becker’s narrowly rational, “mindset 1” industrial investor in human capital to Yochai Benkler’s freely creative Internet junkie networking the way to a common future. Given his emphasis on nonmarket production and his attention to the diversity possible through maximizing individual autonomy for everyone, Benkler’s argument does depart in obvious ways from Becker’s model of human capital. As I remarked above, Becker’s model accords more easily with a traditional emphasis on literacy as an autonomous skill set. Benkler’s updated version of human capital resources as the human communicative capacity that makes networked peer production possible seems much closer in emphasis to emergent forms of literacy. I had also suggested that in many ways Benkler’s interest in new forms of production and in a necessary fairness for all those involved in production aligns his understanding of human communicative capacity more closely with Smith’s concept of human capital than with Becker’s. In the long arc of the history of the concept from Smith to Becker, however, human capital has been represented at an always-growing distance from labor. For all the differences that can distinguish Benkler’s human communicative capacity from Becker’s human capital, in this fundamental matter Benkler’s argument seems more of a continuation 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 and more importantly that

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it is itself a form of labor on any given specific occasion in production. Thus his example of a worker’s high level of dexterity that I cited above gets him into trouble with neoclassical 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 whole issue. 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 we will be able to simply exude cultural awareness and creativity and so on when we can communicate free 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 labor relationships from these other authors’ representations of human capital resources. In 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 labor emerged 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 new circumstances to determine and maintain a fair wage for the worker who had taken the trouble to acquire special skills “embodied in his person” that were socially valuable. Although his argument represents a challenge to Smith’s market emphasis, Benkler seems no less concerned with fairness. In contrast to Smith, however, Benkler makes no attempt to determine a fair basis for exchange. In his account, these exchange processes can now almost disappear from view rather than multiply, as Smith anticipated. The reason for the shift away from labor exchanges, however, has less to do with Benkler’s critique of for-profit organized markets such as the

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labor market that Smith analyzes, than with 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 of what 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 be realized. 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 labor exchanges 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 discussed above can be understood as completing the story of disappearing labor. Not only do such constructions enable consumption, as if expanding the power of choice for consumer agents, but by foregrounding 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 really concerned with labor in anything like Smith’s sense. His argument represents individually owned resources that, like human capital assets as Becker understands them, are under the command of the individual’s autonomous choices. Unlike Becker’s market model of rational investment, however, in commons-based peer production ideally there are no coercive constraints such as those imposed on for-profit firms. All individuals would have open choices about when to participate in what networking processes, in contrast to for-profit configurations as Benkler describes them, where boundaries 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 given moment to “the information production process” that can “effectively integrate widely dis-

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persed contributions, 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 such coordination is necessary or even possible in Benkler’s model. It does not really matter for the process as a whole whether X at this point chooses to feed the dog or text a friend or download a necessary bit for the next collaborative project at hand. When “all the inputs necessary to effective productive activity are under the control of individual users” (99), some primary agents somewhere all the time are always entering in. Given Benkler’s account, there seems little incentive to consider the 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 a little 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 Becker assumes, the equilibrium the former finds in a production process where individual users control “all the inputs necessary” should be altogether familiar from almost any neoclassical account of market equilibrium. Like Becker in his market context, Benkler also takes it for granted in his nonmarket context that ultimately you get what you deserve from the choices you have made and the abilities you bring to the table. Within Benkler’s set of assumptions no less than within Becker’s, when inequalities exist, they have arisen because of different skill sets. The solution is for those at the bottom 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 enormously elaborate support structure

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necessary for human capital formation at all. Education is central to the process of human capital production as neoclassical economists such as Becker describe it, but educational 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 those complex support structures on which human capital formation completely depends. Further, the production of human capital must draw resources from everywhere in the complexities of that support structure. In the United States, institutional education has always been expected to do a great many things besides produce human capital, from educating a citizenry to be capable of democratic decision-making to challenging racial and gender barriers. To the extent that such a generalization is possible, however, a plausible one-sentence summary of the more recent history of educational reform in the United States might instead go something like this: The more economically valuable human capital is assumed to be as the driving force of a twenty-first-century economy, the more educational resources will be organized toward the top in the production of human capital. As I will argue 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 constraints imposed 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 against large-scale interests rooted in the past, from the for-profit market interests of corporations to intrusive government 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 you maximize individual autonomy and choice, the more likely it is that things will just

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work themselves out. In common with most dreams of economic equilibrium, however, Benkler’s vision fails to take something into account. Constraint can function as a polymorphous player. Representations of constraint are obligingly available to take the villain’s role for any number of interests. Benkler casts the constraint villain as opposition to increased individual autonomy, but it’s possible for entirely different forces to be villainized as constraint. In the next chapter I argue that the most significant transformation in the imaginary of human capital has less to do with new technologies or mindsets than with how both production and marketing have been reconstructed to require less and less of long-term resources. The moment when “people,” as human capital, are so often represented as a firm’s most valuable asset is also the moment when human 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 rather different perspective of rapidly changing business practices, however, the looming figure of constraint that jeopardizes further expansion of profits is dependence on long-term assets, the kind of reserves of human capital that in Gary Becker’s conception are valuable to a business. To borrow an image 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 be devalued, because individual agency is represented as a primary power of action to affect consequences directly on the occasion. No such power is conceivable without an always-expanding field of choice available. Constant technological innovation is required to extend the field and, correlatively, constant attention to challenging whatever constraints might limit available choices or the capacity to innovate new ones is required as well. So far from being a scarce and valuable commodity that must be hoarded against

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outsiders, information should become plentiful and instantly available to facilitate both a wider range of choice and more rapid choices. Information of all kinds must be made instantly familiar, dispersed across multiple, diverse networks, and produced through the cooperation, in effect, of multiple technologies at any number of different locations. In short, a portrait of just-in-time human capital is going to appear with very much the same face as Benkler’s individual 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 the corporate success and popularity of just-in-time through the 1990s and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, it has become ever clearer that the various versions of a just-in-time model are about managing people and people skills as much or more than about managing inventories or materials movement. Given the twin objectives of reducing waste and upping efficient productivity, potentially unnecessary workers pose a more significant problem than unnecessary parts travel during assembly. For those workers who are involved in just-in-time workplaces, the organization requires that they play fundamentally different roles than in more traditionally organized corporations. Explanations of how the system functions typically emphasize that communication is the key to everything, from materials movement to people skills. The kanban cards used in the original Toyota system— cards signaling the need for parts or

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inventory—have given way to e-kanban messages and then to increasingly sophisticated computer scheduling as the basic idea of just-in-time organization has been modified in the United States and internationally. Rapid communication to the extent required by the precise timing and integrated supply chain of just-in-time production makes it essential to achieve as complete a transparency as possible, in which ideally everyone involved would immediately understand everything on every occasion. An information glitch can have as devastating an effect on the system as a railway or port delay, and elaborate hierarchies and command chains multiply the chances for information misdirection or stoppage. Thus workers who are used to occupying a specific position in which the structural links are well established and information for the most part follows a vertical line from the top down would find themselves out of place in companies using just-in-time. Individuals and worker teams in such companies must instead learn to deal 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 plausible reasons to question whether they might also have changed the imaginary of human capital in important ways. In the previous chapter I emphasized some of the significant differences involved in moving from 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 those differences human capital continued to be understood as an asset embodied in the person of the individual, 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 been about carrying less inventory. It is as if we are asked to imagine that the ever-so-flexible workers who belong in just-in-time processes with their ever-more-rapid

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decision-making powers and transparent team dynamics somehow have much less reserve-inventory of skills and knowledges than workers in a more traditionally organized corporation. This is certainly not because such workers are less educated or intelligent, or because traditional skills and knowledges have become obsolete in a digital age. The just-in-time version of human capital is not about targeting the obsolescence of any specific skill or knowledge. I want to argue instead that it is the very idea of human capital as a reserve that has been made obsolete. In a just-in-time system, human capital is individual power of action on the occasion, rather than the individual acquisition of a reserve that can be mobilized for an occasion. For Adam Smith, human capital was evidenced by the possession of new skills or at least a relatively higher degree of skill. By drawing on the reserve of skills embodied in his or her person, a laborer with advanced skills could accomplish more than others, just as that laborer might were he or she using a machine, while others were not. As a kind of final abstraction of the idea, however, just-in-time human capital appears as if it involves nothing but that individual power of action on a given occasion. Benkler’s “practical” conception of individual autonomy offers a more useful guideline for understanding this abstraction of agency than Smith’s (or Becker’s) emphasis on an embodied reserve of skills and knowledges. For Benkler, in order to be genuinely productive, a networked environment requires an individual autonomy in which the fewer constraints there are on individual power of action, the better. This is exactly what just-in-time human capital is all about. Given how often and in how many different contexts the term merit continues to appear, it may seem odd to think of the concept as disappearing, but the shift toward just-in-time human capital affects merit principles directly. Like human capital in definitions such as Becker’s, merit depends on duration. It cannot be demonstrated overnight, any more than a human capital reserve of skills and knowledges can be accumulated instantly. By eliminating the temporal basis of human

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capital reserves, just-in-time human capital simultaneously undermines the fundamentals necessary for merit principles to remain operative. While clearly the word survives, its meaning has already morphed into the just-in-time-compatible idea of recognition for immediate, punctual performance. In this chapter, however, I will argue that despite the range and volume of dystopian fears that attach to the various symptoms of change, the erosion of merit principles is itself a symptom of larger issues. Historically the basic social and economic functions of merit had more to do with the constructed disparities of the labor market and the protection of corporations and professional institutions than with the recognition of individual abilities. In undermining the temporal grounds for merit, just-in-time human capital also shreds the mysteries of expertise that have kept those social and economic functions hidden and sustained their authority. The problem lies in what just-in-time produces in their wake. Benkler imagines that constraints persisting from the past are the primary limits on the democratizing potential of new conditions and technologies as he sees them implemented in commons-based peer production. Just-in-time models can facilitate the dismantling of a great many limits, including the temporal requirements inherent in merit principles, but not necessarily for the purposes of realizing democratic potential. In my introduction I located my general argument by means of the paradox Deborah Brandt had expressed in Literacy in American Lives: that the “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,” followed immediately by her recognition that instead, “the advantage of literate skill is helping to aggravate social inequality” (169). In this chapter I want to explore a somewhat smaller version of that paradox, but one that is central nevertheless to understanding the “intensifying worth of literacy”: the democratic potential of recent literacies to demystify the ideological merit

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wrappings of expertise is effectively negated by being subsumed within the just-in-timing of human capital and the organizational framing it serves. Given the importance of communication to just-in-time business models, it should be no surprise that literacies are more valued than ever. Highly sophisticated, specific forms of literacy are integral to such models every step of the way. Yet on the face of it, the linkage of literacies with the assumptions of justin-time human capital sounds even more implausible than trying to imagine a core idea of human capital without assuming an embodied reserve of skills and knowledges. No form of literacy can be acquired so easily that it might become immediately available and then used up, as it were, in the next moment, when no longer needed. Obsolescence, however, is not quite the same as disappearance. Literacy skills and knowledges, so often represented as contributing to a reserve of human capital, have not necessarily disappeared at all. Instead, like older technologies made obsolete, they have been radically devalued. It is the poor and those perceived as second-tier players who must make use of technologies discarded by first adopters and the wave that buys cutting edge. Similarly, literacy as a human capital resource begins to identify a second and third tier of labor as no longer privileged in any way. At the same time, within the conditions of just-in-time human capital, literacies are abstracted to mean an instantly expressive communicability, a sort of literacy equivalent of power of action on the occasion. Whether the expression is long deliberated and edited before being shared or tweeted on the spur of the moment makes little difference. Literacy lies in the instant of expression. From a perspective shaped by long-standing merit principles, all this looks to be a double disaster. Significant and still highly useful skills and knowledges are ignored, as if no longer economically or socially productive. Even worse, those who have worked long and hard to acquire these skills and pass them on are often dismissed as irrelevant. So far from being accorded merit distinction and treated as privileged, they are at

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best condescended to and at worst seen as an impediment to getting things done. A backlash against this dismissal of merit has been well underway for some time, foregrounding such claims as those of Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement that I will discuss below. After all, the logic of merit builds on an assumption similar to that of the literacy myth: Like the literacy user, the meritorious individual is imagined to belong center stage. Thus if demonstrably meritorious individuals are displaced, that must be because some other individuals or groups have illegitimately taken over that center-stage position. Apparently lots of aggrieved merit subjects are not at all happy with their current lot and are ready to blame others. More often than not, as in The Narcissism Epidemic, the digitally savvy younger generation becomes the immediate target of the backlash, justifying Jonathan Alexander’s worst fears as expressed in his Digital Youth. In tandem with its conceptual twin, the old-versus-new debate, this generational opposition serves little purpose at all other than to obscure a whole complex of significant issues produced by the emergence of just-in-time human capital. The idea that new technologies cost workers their jobs is hardly new, but just-in-time human capital involves a lot more than replacing humans with machines. Just-in-time corporate organization pares down inventory, the work force, and the need for capital investment in massive new technologies of production by eliminating whole occupational processes from the firm. It is not as if corporate headquarters replaces the lowerlevel staff workers in the travel department by purchasing a complex and expensive set of machines to arrange travel. Instead, the process of arranging travel becomes just one of many matters for the executive assistant to handle via his or her smartphone. On a larger scale, much of the work of all kinds is simply outsourced—not always to cheaper labor overseas, but to the cheapest labor around. We as consumers do it for nothing and sometimes, as I argued in the introduction with respect to ATMs, willingly pay a fee for the privilege, thereby

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nearly eliminating the need for the bank to hire tellers and pay them. All of these changes depend on sophisticated literacies, widely practiced throughout large groups of the population. One of the core claims of the literacy myth is that widespread literacy boosts overall economic productivity. Nobody bothers to add the just-in-time rider to the myth, about how the economic benefits of increased productivity are by no means necessarily returned to the literacy subjects most involved with new literacy practices. Benkler’s conception of human communicative capacity may differ considerably from Smith’s or Becker’s conceptions of human capital, but human communicative capacity is still understood as embodied in the person as a reserve, a capacity to do things. If, as I am suggesting, the just-in-time conception of human capital refuses to acknowledge any need for a reserve of skills and knowledges embodied in the person, then this would seem to be a complete break with the past. A capital asset would require only the active agency of the individual, not his or her reserve capacity, as it were. As I argued in the previous chapter, however, the defining condition for earlier conceptions of human capital is the distinction between such capital and the actual work performed. Smith’s confusion of the value of human capital with wages paid to the laborer for the work he or she performs gets “cleared up” during the twentieth century, when marketplace forces come to seem far more important than labor in determining what counts as a capital asset and producer of value. Rather than being seen as a dramatic break from this long history of labor slowly disappearing from view, just-in-time human capital might be better understood as something like the culminating development of that initial distinction between human capital and labor. By utilizing a concept of human capital in which it can seem as though labor has disappeared entirely, the just-in-time version of capital in its human form can finally at least be represented as standing entirely on its own. Merit principles supplied one possible answer to Adam Smith’s concern over whether the worker who has acquired socially

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valuable expertise would be adequately compensated for the extra time and trouble that had been necessary to their acquisition. Under the basic idea of merit, such workers would be rewarded appropriately. According to what Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell argue in The Narcissism Epidemic, however— their 2009 follow-up to Twenge’s Generation Me—Smith would not have any grounds for that particular concern with today’s students anyway. Taking extra time and trouble to acquire job expertise is right out of the picture; merit recognition is simply taken for granted as an entitlement rather than viewed as something to be earned through hard work. Inflated and totally unrealistic job expectations on the part of the “me” generation appear as primary indicators of what the authors identify as an “entitlement” mentality. As a demonstration of their point, Twenge and Campbell offer a brief report of Campbell’s lecture about how to succeed in an academic career (delivered in much the same form in which he himself had heard it earlier, they proudly underline), followed by a summary of student response: “In short, to master any semicomplex profession takes at least ten years of effort. The usual formula for success in academics (and many other fields as well) is 1) find the best person in the field who is willing to let you work with him or her, 2) do whatever that person says for five years and work your butt off, 3) and finally, after you have earned that person’s confidence and respect, you establish yourself in the field over five or more years with that person’s support. Then 4) return the favor by mentoring newcomers to the field. Being successful is a ‘war of attrition’—you get rejected a lot, but if you keep plugging away you will likely move ahead.” Needless to say, the authors did not like the majority response to the story from current students: “They thought success should come quickly and didn’t like the idea of learning from people smarter than them. In other words, they thought they were special” (Narcissism Epidemic, 84). Later in the argument the authors return to the topic of job entitlement with more detail from student surveys: “At the same time, they were

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more likely to want a job that pays a lot of money and is viewed by other people with respect. Unfortunately, wanting more money for doing less work is a fairly succinct definition of entitlement. As we noted in Chapter 5, young people have been conditioned to expect this: younger generations have gotten better grades in high school even though they do fewer hours of homework” (237). By shedding millions of jobs in the United States and causing a continuing recession, however, corporations have hammered such job expectations far more successfully than any hectoring like that delivered by Campbell and Twenge could accomplish in their wildest dreams. A lot of students have been forced to get “totally real” indeed, as attested by Matthew Klein in a 20 March 2011 New York Times opinion piece. At age twenty-four Klein is at the young end of Twenge’s “generation me,” a fact of considerable significance for him, since those under twenty-five have been hit worst by the recession, according to his argument. Profiling a generation is no more accurate than any other form of profiling, and Klein’s account differs markedly from that of Twenge and Campbell: “My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work.” Instead they got immense college debts, severe underemployment, if lucky, and an official unemployment rate of 11.2 percent for college graduates under the age of twenty-five. According to Klein that figure is likely low “because it fails to account for those who went to graduate school in an attempt to ride out the economic storm or fled the country to teach English overseas.” Even the official figure is substantially higher than the unemployment rate of 4.5 percent among college graduates over twenty-five. More recently, a USA Today story (Martha Beth Marklein, 28 January 2013) helped publicize the results of the study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity about underemployment that I cited in my introduction. “Nearly half of working Americans with college degrees are in jobs for which they’re overqualified,” the USA Today story dramatically begins.

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In their contrasting blasts of generational anger, however, both Klein and co-authors Twenge and Campbell manage to ignore a long, complicated, and specific history of the production of a scarcity of good employment positions that has far more to do with the rise of merit principles than with Adam Smith’s well-developed sense of fairness. By the mid-nineteenth century, the division of labor in industrial production was grounded in what Marx referred to as the Babbage principle. Rather than dividing workers according to the skills individual workers might possess or acquire, Charles Babbage had proposed instead a finer and finer segmentation of tasks in production. Using among other things Smith’s famous pin factory example, Babbage had calculated considerable savings by dividing up the production process to minimize the number of positions requiring great intelligence or physical strength and maximizing those that could be done with a minimum of either, in the most routine of ways. A few workers in higher positions would have to be paid more than might be expected in a more craft-oriented form of production based in shared worker skills, but the much lower wages that could be paid to the large majority of other employees more than compensated for the minimal number of high-salaried employees. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century this basic form of division of labor underwent some significant changes. These included the refinements introduced by scientific management in the first few decades of the twentieth century, which applied to office labor no less than to factory labor, as Harry Braverman explained in Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974). The constant across the changes was the production of a scarcity of good jobs, irrespective of how many people might actually be capable of learning the necessary skills and acquiring the human capital resources to use them appropriately— or how many had college degrees. In his New York Times opinion piece Klein often seems to attribute recent college graduates’ difficulties in finding good jobs to a general corporate malevolence toward

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young people, while in The Narcissism Epidemic Twenge and Campbell simply assume natural market conditions are to blame, but the scarcity of high-level positions has been a crucial structural element of job division for some time. A division of labor based on the segmentation of tasks, however, does not translate automatically into the division of laborers. As I argued in Work Time, the ideological authority of merit, with its various versions of “only the best at the top,” was able to supply a comprehensive rationale for how people were effectively sorted out into jobs. Correspondingly, the public educational system had to administer a continual “cooling out” of expectations to those obviously not destined for the higher benefits of top occupations. Somebody always has to inhabit the bottom rungs of a merit ladder. The idea of human capital as developed by Becker and generally taken up by other neoclassical economists dovetailed nicely with the development of merit principles. Position and compensation as grounded in merit could be understood as singling out the individual who has acquired valued humancapital skills, and comparatively ranking that individual higher than those that have not acquired such skills or have acquired fewer of them. In Becker’s model, wise human-capital investment decisions recognize both sides of how merit functions. Acquiring human capital is an individual decision, but one that is rationally best made in relation to a specific context of other individuals. If one wishes to become part of a workgroup all of whose members usually hold Ph.D.s, for example, earning a Ph.D. might help guarantee acceptance but not individual distinction; if one anticipates joining a workgroup in which only a few hold postsecondary degrees, earning a Ph.D. might confer individual distinction, but might also generate suspicions of various kinds. Such investment decisions are not always easy, because one must make them on one’s own responsibility while also estimating best return in relation to the other individuals involved in the same situation. At roughly the same time as Becker began publicizing his concept of human capital, however, what soon came to be

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known as labor market segmentation theory initiated a major departure from neoclassical orthodoxy by challenging the fundamental assumption that worker success in the labor market is a matter of individual motivation, decision, and ability. Arguments like those of Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore in Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (1970) and Richard Edwards, Michael Reich, and David Gordon in Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1982) shifted the supply-side focus of neoclassical economics to the demand side of labor markets. These authors and other researchers into labor market segmentation were able to show how a great many different kinds of conditions, in addition to the characteristics and choices of individual workers, had immediate effects on the determination of jobs. Rather than a single labor market affecting everyone in roughly equal ways, they posited an overarching division between primary and secondary markets. Further, they argued that a secondary labor market involving relatively low pay, low prestige, and positions characterized by high turnover was not necessarily populated only by those workers who for whatever reason could not really do or did not want to do work requiring more skills. As Michael Piore emphasized in his 1983 keynote address to the American Economic Association, “Labor Market Segmentation: To What Paradigm Does It Belong?” understanding labor market segmentation requires “a paradigm which recognizes and encompasses social, as opposed to individual, phenomena” (252). By focusing only on individual sellers in a labor market, neoclassical economics had avoided altogether the social densities and networks organizing the conditions of demand for labor. Looked at from the demand side of a labor market, as labor market segmentation theory would insist we do, merit practices register a massive institutional presence that is not directly in the ser vice either of distinguished individuals or comparative rankings among individuals. To put it bluntly, merit practices may be about individuals, but they are constructed to

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represent the interests of the institution. I argued in “Academic Freedom / Academic Market” that tenure, for example, as a form of protection for academic freedom, exists as an institutional prerogative. Tenure may reflect an individual’s professional standing, but the decision-making power to award tenure on the basis of demonstrated merit rests with the institution. Thus within the terms of a logic of merit, the safeguarding of academic freedom has protected as much as anything the institution’s right to make merit decisions and adjudicate the issues raised in contexts in which academic freedom is at stake. Outside of academic workplaces, institutional authority is if anything even more directly exercised. While pay and benefits have been obvious goals of union negotiation, the adjudication of merit-based pay in some form or another, the steps of a pay scale, the prerogatives of seniority, and so on have also been key negotiating points. The necessity for bargaining about all these elements at the negotiating table is recognition of the considerable authority that merit principles vest in institutional control over workplace hierarchies and worker distribution. The typical picture of negotiations, however, represents the issues as a matter of union demands and corporate concessions in a way that helps make the authority of the institution virtually invisible. It is as if power over wages, seniority, and other forms of merit recognition just naturally belongs to the institution. Even at best, unions are then represented as negotiating to give at least some of that authority to workers. Unless forced into visibility, as it were, merit principles thus doubly reinforce the basic labor market focus of neoclassical economics on the supply side, on individual workers. The mapping of comparative differentials among individuals intensifies the scrutiny of individual characteristics while completely ignoring the larger social determinants, such as race and gender, that interested labor market segmentation theorists and researchers. Correlatively, the naturalizing of institutional power helps limit scrutiny of even the most obvious elements of that power, such as hiring practices. Often when “problems” appear,

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they can be explained as a matter of individual prejudice, or what Gary Becker in The Economics of Discrimination (1957) described as a kind of taste for discrimination. Everyday hiring and job practices grounded in merit principles bear a considerable responsibility for the kind of labor market segmentation documented through the 1970s and 1980s. Before potential workers even arrive in the labor market, school systems have done much of the necessary sorting out of student abilities and aptitudes. Without my reentering the arguments about the extent to which education simply “reproduces” already existent social divisions, it should be clear, as I argued in Work Time, that merit principles require finely differentiated distinctions among students. In a twist of logic, however, by the 1970s this relentless focus on the individual helped set the stage for new forms of individual protection by bringing larger social categories back into the picture. Legal questions could be raised about whether certain individuals had in fact been judged primarily on racial or gender grounds rather than as individuals. In the terms I have been using, merit principles supplied a rationale to claim that certain individuals had not had the same opportunities as others to accumulate the human capital resources deemed necessary for higher-level jobs. Thus throughout a now well-publicized history, merit principles proved a useful weapon in a whole series of difficult challenges to labor market inequities. The focus on the individual inherent in merit principles could be pushed to the point where the flip side, as it were, seemed suddenly visible, in the form of constraints imposed by invidious distinctions based on group identities rather than individual qualifications. Part of the legal challenge involved identifying discriminatory processes at work, but the other and no less important part required evidence of long-term human capital assets or, alternatively, evidence that the individual had been prevented from acquiring those assets or had not been given credit for them. In other words, duration was a key factor throughout the process, on both sides of the issues. Merit principles and the idea of in-

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dividual human capital assets are linked most strongly across the element of time. Stripped of all the mudslinging generational psychology in The Narcissism Epidemic, the immediately striking differences between Campbell’s lecture on success in academia and the student responses to it that Twenge and Campbell report in the book likewise involve the element of time. The authors seem to have assimilated merit-based principles completely, with the result that in his lecture Campbell is adamant about the ten-year time frame. If nothing else, the principle of duration will ensure the departure of those unwilling to plug away during the entire ten years. In the authors’ eyes, the “me” generation’s problem is that they cannot seem to grasp a basic principle of merit, that high-skill, high-prestige jobs require a kind of expertise that takes a long time to acquire and that perhaps may be achievable at all only by a very few. Instead, the generation Twenge and Campbell profile all seem to feel entitled to such jobs simply by being who they are. Each one feels that he or she is a “special” person and thereby obviously deserving of the rewards such positions bring, without really doing any of the work and enduring the lengthy probation time reaching a high-paying job demands. The students the authors describe, like Klein in his opinion piece, see nothing whatsoever of value in that extended time. Hard work over time may earn you a certain kind of expertise, but not necessarily a job in which that expertise will be utilized. Klein’s anger at the lack of jobs does not seem to have much to do with refusing to learn from people who may be smarter than he is, or indeed with expertise at all. Expertise arrives with the hard work and the time necessary to get an education. Jobs do not. For all the disapproval that Twenge and Campbell direct at students who do not respect expertise and people smarter than themselves, there seems remarkably little in Campbell’s lecture as reported in The Narcissism Epidemic that has much to do directly with job skills and expertise, anyway. Given the four recommendations for success he offers, it sounds as if the process

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of mastering “any semicomplex profession” has less to do with the actual complexities of the work than with acquiring a very traditional, workplace literacy, largely in the ser vice of someone already established. The phrase workplace literacy does not stretch the term literacy too much, for one could say that Campbell’s lecture continually references representational skills and knowledges about the everyday practices necessary to navigate a complex ensemble of conditions specific to a particular worksite. Despite the Great Man sycophancy of Campbell’s mentor-mentee account, it would be unfair to say that Campbell is simply advocating a form of “working the system” for individual benefit. Workplace literacy, as he has indirectly described it, did become increasingly necessary as the professions grew in importance throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in human capital terms, this kind of workplace literacy also represents a considerable long-term investment for the individual worker, as Campbell’s lecture inadvertently emphasizes. While job skills are not always perfectly transferable, by any means, it seems relatively easy to recognize that similar kinds of job, though at different employment locations, might require skills that are at least very similar. General human capital is often considered more fundamental than specific human capital because the former identifies the assets necessary to adapt skills to different jobs and different types of workplaces, in contrast to specific skills keyed to a single job or single type of workplace. In these terms, site-specific workplace literacy is specialized enough to be unlikely to transfer with anything like the same ease as general human capital. In rough proportion to the invisibility of the knowledges involved, it may well not transfer at all. Thus as a human capital investment, a worker’s acquisition of site-specific workplace literacy appears particularly fraught, a classic double bind: without it, one’s chances of achieving whatever may be that worksite’s major merit points are seriously threatened, but acquiring it will have value only if one can assume both eventual merit success and the long-term stability of the institution for which one

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works, no less than the field of work. To an outsider to the academic profession and workplace, Campbell’s lecture would surely have sounded more than a little grimly masochistic, as apparently it did to his students. For merit purposes, site-specific workplace literacies have traditionally supplied a large ensemble of everyday details surrounding explicit merit decisions for everyone involved. A growing awareness of these details, acquired over an extended period of time in the kind of academic setting Campbell’s lecture alludes to, for example, would mean that central participants in any merit decision in that setting—both those making the decisions and those decided about—would already have a reasonably accurate understanding of those decisions. For example, the participants would have a good sense of whether the case for X’s receiving tenure was likely to present an easy decision, a fraught one, or was unlikely to go through at all. The direction of the explicit decision would already have been shaped and indicated by the buildup of detail. The linkage of merit and duration has never been simply about making sure someone has proven her or his valuable expertise over time, by any means. Time has also been an element necessary for a whole set of unofficial processes of assessment (rarely apparent to anyone from the outside)—including of course assessment of the workplace literacy of the potential candidate—to reach a decision point. Contrary to the assertion of Twenge and Campbell, in occupations outside of academia things do not work quite the same way as described in Campbell’s lecture. Yet as a clearly identifiable element in any number of workplace determinations such as seniority, experience ladders, union benefit steps, tenure, and so on across a number of different occupations, duration has been a necessary component. It is true enough that the time element so vital to both merit principles and the acquisition of traditional human capital resources has been under attack, but hordes of dysfunctional student narcissists are not exactly in the forefront of the battle. Corporations, conservative politicians and funding sources, and

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a considerable media sector have been leading the charge. So far from being a reward for careful preparation followed by exemplary work, as Campbell’s lecture assumes, the various protections that come alongside a specified merit step involving duration are instead made to appear as impediments to productivity and shields for inefficient workers. Public-sector workers (many so-called private-sector corporations having decided some time ago not to keep anybody long enough to worry about anyway) are represented as seeking to protect themselves from rigorous scrutiny of what they do, escape the effort required when pay and job benefits are linked to actual performance, and avoid responsibility for taking on innovative new projects—all the while looking on their jobs as if they were permanent sinecures. Given the ferocity and pervasiveness of such attacks, it should not be a surprise that students can feel wary about passive acceptance of Campbell’s time frame as naturally appropriate. Even when put in the psychological terms offered by Twenge and Campbell, the students’ reasons might well have more to do with a critically attentive anxiety than with any long-standing conviction of entitlement. Despite the continuing use of the term merit, the importance of merit principles in the workplace and in the classroom continues to decline. The attacks on seniority, tenure, and the other duration-related workplace rewards; the increasingly anachronistic status of accounts such as Campbell’s success lecture; and the problem of “grade inflation” that so irritates Twenge and Campbell are all strong indicators of a significant shift in direction. The shift suggests that the intricate hierarchies of merit determinations are no longer considered necessary to rationalize social divisions and inequalities. And whatever else is at work cannot be explained by simply positing some perversely dysfunctional generational psychology. Just-in-time organization would seem to require forms of worker literacy that are as different as possible from the kind of site-specific workplace literacy that is important to merit practices as described above. A great many workers do not inhabit a

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long-term workplace with a relatively stable structure and employee base where such literacy can be shaped. Rather than being deeply rooted in the specific worksite, the literacies they develop must travel, crossing all kinds of boundaries between occupational positions and communicative situations, between sometimes very different technologies, even between work generally and pleasure or leisure time. Rather than being developed over a considerable period of time, the literacies that are part of the work itself must be able to mutate immediately, often in completely unexpected ways, to address new needs or to meet the constant demands for innovation and augmented performance. Even the most recondite and site-specific form must share infrastructural similarities to other forms. A particular literacy construction may permeate an entire field or specialty through and through, and yet must be transportable elsewhere. Most importantly for my purposes, the kinds of literacies demanded by many contemporary workplaces are not those that wrap expertise in mystery and thereby preserve the merit principle of a necessary scarcity of high-level positions. They are very much a part of many different forms of expertise, and they function to make that expertise visible. Anybody throughout the organization can see what expertise looks like, even if he or she is not an expert or is not really interested in a particular form of expertise. In describing these new literacies, however, I have already gone far enough afield that theorists such as Gunther Kress might well become suspicious immediately. As I will discuss further in my concluding chapter, Kress as well as a number of other literacy theorists and researchers deplore how the term literacy has been stretched almost beyond recognition by recent technologies and casual modes of use. In his recent book Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication (2010), Kress protests, “The term ‘literacy,’ whatever the prefix (e-, media-, mobile-, computer-, visual-, emotional-) becomes ever more vague the further it is extended. In the end it obstructs the uncovering of central aspects of meanings that

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ought to be transcribed in any culture, whatever the means of representation and dissemination” (102). Nevertheless, he finally admits that the use of the term “has one advantage: it draws attention to the fact that ‘there are things to attend to here’ ” (102). More exactly, the proliferation of usage signals that there are things of value to attend to here. When extended in the way Kress criticizes, literacy may well lose a capacity to designate a specific form of meaning-making with any precision. In these new contexts, however, the primary function shifts. The term becomes instead an operator designating that a considerable range of meaning-making processes have potential value as human capital. A term such as mobile literacy, for example, may not necessarily tell you much about how a specific process of making meanings works, but it does draw attention to how this particular communicational ensemble now belongs securely within a powerful value axis. Kress’s Multimodality includes a chapter written with Elizabetta Adami on “convergent mobile devices” that offers what I find to be a useful image of the paradoxical “convergence” of new literacies with just-in-time business models. As Kress and Adami point out, with the Web capacity of smartphones, “interpersonal mobility and connectivity afforded by the mobile phone joins the mobility of ubiquitous information access, so that planning of either is becoming less necessary.” Smartphones help reduce the time necessary for a detailed process of long-term planning, and in general such planning “may come to be felt as a constraint on the freedom to follow the desires of the moment in real time. Where timetables and activities are predetermined, in the context of institutions—such as the school for instance, as in many forms of work, this may produce tensions and have consequences in terms of affect” (190). In terms of value, all the signifiers of carefully planned future meetings or calculations projecting a likely future move that loom so large in a more traditional workplace literacy suddenly seem a waste of time, with little or no productive content. The potential for reducing or in certain cases even eliminating advance

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planning focuses and magnifies the value in “the desires of the moment in real time,” as Kress and Adami put it. Kress and Adami’s primary interest, however, lies in how meanings are produced in this new configuration, and their account of the process might well seem to confirm the worst suspicions of anyone deeply invested in a more traditional conception of meaning-making. If the making of meaning is understood as an expression that emerges from an individual process involving hidden in-depth skills and imagination, then the contrast is that the relevant operations of smartphone meaning-production appear immediately visible. Further, these operations are not governed by any assumption that meanings must be developed through some new resolution of integrated form/content in a specific situation, such as a written text. An often quite complex and elaborate architecture of framing representations seems available to anyone involved at any time. As Kress and Adami go on to explain: “More and more representations are selected and re-used in different contexts rather than transducted or produced for each new context; recontextualization of signifiers (form) becomes more usual than the production of new content and form in each context. It is a foregrounding of the function of framing as production over more traditional production of content—as in writing, for instance” (Multimodality, 190). From the perspective of a “more traditional production of content,” their description tempts the obvious rejoinder that this is not really meaning-production at all, but simply a realigning of already existent pieces that neither delivers serious content nor involves real skill. After all, hardly any human resources are brought into play. It’s all in the technology and the preexistent elements. For Kress and Adami, in contrast, the priority of “framing” over “content” does suggest that the process must involve at least a scale translation, as it were, toward the specifics of an individual situation: “We can say that mobile (learning) environments are now (more) constituted through: how to access, select, capture, use and transform global/collective information

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and events for local/individual aims, relations and activities in real time” (194; authors’ emphasis). For Kress and Adami, individual agency is an important element in this scale translation, but agency is understood as “first of all a matter of selection among template-based options, from software tools to commodities and ser vices” (193). That is, their emphasis falls on what is selected and how it must then be tailored to the scale of the individual situation at the moment. In the terms I have been using in my argument, they read these new processes as if still governed by a more traditional conception of human capital resources at work. Consequently they worry that the potential to operate “in real time” also negates the value of those long-term skills and knowledges that are central to human capital resources. For my purposes, however, their key phrase “in real time” might better be understood as “just-in-time,” pointing to the very different process of just-in-time human capital, where individual agency counts for everything. Just-intime human capital shifts the emphasis from content as the product of specific capital resources put into use, to content as expansion of the power of agency. Thus what matters most is not really what the individual selects and proceeds to modify, as Kress and Adami assume, but the choices available at any given point that might function either to expand or to constrain individual power of action. Yet individual agency and choice also loom large in more traditional conceptions of human capital. Adam Smith felt that workers who embodied valuable productive skills deserved higher pay not only because of the extra work of acquisition, but also because of their initiative in making the choice to proceed in the first place. Individual agency as exercised in active choices is often simply presupposed in Gary Becker’s argument. In order to act, however, individuals must feel themselves to be enough in control of their surroundings to initiate the process of building capital assets. It could well happen instead that market conditions or iniquitous laws might eventually prevent Smith’s worker from receiving properly deserved

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compensation. Becker’s investor could eventually find herself or himself in wholly unexpected conditions, very different from what was imagined in the process of acquiring human capital. Both Smith and Becker assume that certain risks are involved, but they do not view potential for the unexpected as precluding either the acquisition process or the projection of future goals. In determining both appropriate occasions and directions, individuals make at least an initial assumption that they will be able to exercise enough control over their surroundings to follow through on their decisions. The special privilege accorded individual autonomy by Yochai Benkler and his definition of autonomy in relation to constraints make his model an immediately useful way to understand how just-in-time human capital agency differs from these earlier conceptions. Benkler acknowledges “formal” definitions of individual autonomy “committed to assuming that all people have the capacity for autonomous choice” (Wealth of Networks, 140). That is, in his argument formal definitions seem tied to an already existent identity, or at least to an ideal conception of what human identity should involve. Autonomy is a formal power belonging to an essential core of identity. In the “practical” terms of what one can actually do in the conditions in which one exists, however, any foundational assumption about a preexistent identity is basically irrelevant. Individual autonomy as power of action in specific conditions exists in strict relation to the constraints imposed by those conditions. Like Benkler’s practical definition of individual autonomy, just-in-time human capital is also defined in relation to conditional restraints rather than in terms of a preexistent identity possessing an assumed freedom of action. Individuals may well choose to acquire a considerable reserve of skills and knowledges, but their power of action does not depend on exercising that reserve. On the one hand, just-in-time human capital thus seems to have magnified the importance of agency beyond anything conceivable in either Adam Smith’s model or Gary Becker’s. So

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far from simply the trigger action to put a capital reserve of knowledges and skills into use or to make crucial selection choices, as in Kress and Adami’s account, agency is just-intime human capital, the power of action in the moment. Yochai Benkler’s insistence that commons-based production is finally all about maximizing individual autonomy offers at least some approximation of what that difference involves. The agency of production is of primary significance, not what is produced. Production is finally realized in that individual power of action. On the other hand, however, Benkler’s “practical” concern about constraints suggests how it is that the magnification of agency in just-in-time human capital also means, if perhaps paradoxically, that the individual seems far more completely at the mercy of surrounding conditions. Should anything about those conditions suddenly intrude to constrain power of action, tapping a reserve of human capital would do no good. Just-in-time human capital thus seems to lack one of the signal advantages of general human capital. As Becker would explain, when conditions change, the individual who is rich in general human capital is already equipped to wait it out if necessary, or to take advantage of the flexibility of general human capital to maximize the benefits of the new situation. Anything on any given occasion that constrains choice, however, simultaneously reduces just-in-time human capital. Facing constraining conditions just-in-time is like having to start over every time. Kress often insists on the importance of understanding how technologies such as mobile devices are embedded in specific social contexts: “[T]he facilities/affordances of the new technologies can only be used along the lines that social conditions make possible” (Multimodality, 184). As Kress and Adami recognize in their emphasis on the selection and re-use of different framing contexts, the widespread use of mobile devices requires social conditions in which the idea of choice has become a kind of cultural common sense. The newer version of the smartphone is always there to expand your choices. I argued in Class

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Degrees that changing social and economic conditions have made individual choice, rather than the wage contract, into the primary ideological imaginary of contemporary capitalism. The just-in-time human capital relation between individual power of action and constraints on choice suggests still another of those necessary “lines that social conditions make possible.” It involves not only how new technologies can be used, but also how they can appear in the first place. Since constraints become evident when anything is perceived as limiting the field of choice, then the more limited the field of choice, the less one’s power of action. As a result, technological innovation must be continual, and continually directed toward reopening the field and expanding choice. The new smartphone is always just around the corner. Choices seem most immediately at stake with the “templatebased options” (Multimodality, 193) Kress and Adami remark, but the hardware devices, the communicational networks, and the various forms of mobility possible are also all caught up in constant processes of innovation. In aggregate terms it is as if some portion of the totally available potential power of action of all individual agency possible must be dedicated to the always necessary task of enlarging fields of choice. When that enlargement is realized through technological innovation and change, a still larger portion becomes available to drive still further change, and so on. In these macro-scale terms there remains nevertheless an often-debated question about whether the innovation of new technologies really has accelerated over the last few decades. In The Race between Technology and Education, for example, Goldin and Katz argue that it has actually been the slowdown in educational achievement rather than an accelerated pace of technological change that has widened the gap in that “race.” Yet for a great many people, it must feel like technologies are changing more rapidly because so many everyday practices seem affected. An ideology of choice cannot become cultural common sense unless it seems “common” enough to affect more and more

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people, more of the time, in more and more areas of their lives. Expectations are shaped so that everyday practices accommodate what begin to seem like everyday changes— every June there is another Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and so on. In other words, while it is debatable whether some general rate of technological change has been accelerating (or what exactly constitutes real change anyway), it seems to me quite plausible to argue that the locations of change have expanded. Changes have as much or more to do with individual daily choices as with large-scale production processes. Looking ahead from his own time, Karl Marx frequently explored the ways in which industrial production machinery was in actuality a kind of “congealed labor.” But I doubt whether analogously Adam Smith could ever have imagined the human capital worker he described as now congealed into the just-ready-for-just-in-time form of the next generation of tablets. By encouraging a more flexible work schedule to accommodate the different momentums of multiple production projects, just-in-time corporate organization has helped reinforce the now quite familiar perception that there are no longer any clear boundaries between work and leisure time. I think it unlikely, however, that a great many people in a great many jobs cannot really tell much difference between when they must be working on something for pay and when they may be enjoying themselves for no particular reason. The idea of a disappearing boundary, of the erasure of the differences between work and leisure, seems more like an inadequate shorthand account of how choice has been positioned to govern the differences between work and leisure indifferently. Whether involved in work or leisure or both, individual choice becomes the arbiter of what happens next. A diminished field of choice reduces the power of action of just-in-time human capital agency, regardless of where it is exercised. In these new conditions, however, labor market segmentation theorists might still remind us that while technologies may expand fields of choice under certain conditions, that expansion does not happen the same way for everyone.

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One of the basic claims of labor market segmentation research is that differentials in human capital cannot really explain all the differentials in pay and occupational status. At the same time, these accounts do also recognize that, ideally, investing in the work of acquiring more or acquiring very different forms of human capital might address problems that are exacerbated by a low reserve of long-term human capital. The result would not necessarily guarantee better job and pay possibilities becoming available, but it might well offer a better chance if and when they do. In other words, while beginning from a very different premise than Becker’s emphasis on human capital assets as the primary determinant of pay and status differentials, labor market segmentation theory can still supply strong support for liberal reformers such as Goldin and Katz in their attempts to push educational institutions toward change. The just-in-time model, however, produces very different conditions. If you feel you have no choice about having to work at this time in this way at this job, just-in-time offers little incentive at all to acquire more human capital reserves as a potential solution. Your situation signals a severely diminished power of action in which you are constrained by surrounding circumstances. Thus, in contrast to the everyday common sense encouraged by more traditional conceptions of human capital, it would seem as though there is no work you can do that will change these conditions. If you work more or harder or in ways that build a new capital reserve of skills and knowledges for the future, just-intime conditions supply no reason to assume that more choices will become available to you. You’ll just be blamed for already having made the bad choices that got you into this fix. Theorists describe the development of labor market segmentation as produced by unequal market conditions that must be changed to ensure a fair chance for everyone. Just-in-time segmentation, in contrast, appears by market design, with no recourses available for improving equality under the ideological rule of choice. The rewards of “winning” choices remain as narrowly distributed as ever, and the primary promise of change is the promise of new technologies. Technological innovations

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made widely available might make it possible for fields of choice to be expanded, constraints lifted. The recent Nielsen studies about the high rate of smartphone and Internet use among minorities and inner city youth reflect the effects of that promise. It should not really be a surprise that dreaming in techno, hoping to get the next innovation, occupies so much of the time of so many who live in poverty and near-poverty conditions. For Kress it is a mistake to identify the meaning-making practices associated with such new technologies as mobile devices as a form of literacy. Use of the term to describe such practices, he feels, obscures profound differences in the production of meaning. He does not press a claim that the literacies that belong within a more traditional conception are becoming obsolete, but for those of us who are educators it is perhaps all too easy to focus on what can seem an immense loss of human abilities with the emergence of the new literacy meaning-making practices I would link with just-in-time human capital. Or alternatively, it is all too easy to see the just-intime imperative for expanding individual agency as if it were some kind of psychological dysfunction bred by a feeling of entitlement, as do Twenge and Campbell. As Jonathan Alexander recognizes in Digital Youth, the chorus of dystopian critique can be deafening. Thinking of literacies as human capital resources magnifies this kind of zero-sum logic of gains and losses. As all of the elements of what I have been calling just-intime human capital seem to occupy more and more privileged sectors in the social formation, particularly for younger generations, then it must be the case that other skills so much a part of more traditional forms of human capital are disappearing. As I argued above, however, understanding literacies as value producers suggests that whatever the differences that are involved in meaning-making practices, more traditional skills have not necessarily disappeared by any means. Their market value as computed within an imaginary of human capital resources has diminished, sometimes dramatically, with the declining importance of dependence on long-term resources. One

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result is diminished prestige or positional security for their possessors. If it might be possible to re-imagine labor market segmentation theorizing about a primary and secondary labor market in these human capital terms, then the market-value slippage has also produced a slippage of what used to be confidently identified as primary labor market positions into positions that more closely resemble those that labor market theorists earlier described as belonging to a secondary labor market. Within academia, my own home field of English, in which there has been a significant loss of tenured positions, is an unfortunately obvious example. Adjunct and temporary appointments are now filled with people possessing the same skills and knowledges as tenured professors would be expected to have. Nevertheless it does seem clear to a great many commentators that whether literacy skills are disappearing or not, specific occupations are disappearing every day. The continued high rates of unemployment and underemployment even after the “official” end of the recession has occasioned growing concern that a great many jobs may never come back, despite how the rhetoric has it, including a great many relatively well-paying middle-class jobs for both women and men. Just-in-time human capital is certainly not about a middle-class world. For example, in his 8 January 2011 Sacramento Bee guest editorial titled “Viewpoints: Many Jobs Gone Forever Despite Onset of Recovery,” California Democratic Party strategist Darry Sragow reminds us what the process of getting an airline ticket used to be like in the heyday of travel agents. The cockpit of the airplane you subsequently boarded used to include a flight engineer along with a pilot and co-pilot. In banking, travel, and office work it would seem that new technologies have made it possible to cut any number of positions permanently. In law offices, from the standard of one secretary for every attorney, the standard now “is one legal secretary for every four attorneys,” something also soon to change: “Think of it as a dramatically escalating trend that started with the elimination of ser vice station attendants, elevator operators and bellhops. . . .

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Employers forced to cut costs or fail during the Great Recession are now slashing jobs that have been unnecessary for a long time” (A13). In the terms I have been using here, Sragow’s claim is that the trend that began with the slashing of lowskill, low-paying ser vice work that had often been done by women (and hence, one might add, that went largely unremarked on in the major media for some time) has now accelerated and spread into occupations that require a fair degree of those literacy skills, both verbal and mathematical, usually associated with long-term human capital. As I suggested above, the just-in-time business model sheds people every bit as much as it sheds inventory. Members of both of the large political parties have made observations similar to those of Sragow, largely in agreement that many of the jobs under discussion seem likely to have disappeared permanently. While the jobs may disappear, however, it is not necessarily the case that the work disappears along with them. In any number of instances that work has simply been outsourced, and not necessarily overseas. It has been outsourced to us. As I argued in my introduction, it has become work that you and I do every day, for nothing. Sragow’s examples might then be revisited, but with a somewhat different emphasis, on where the work has gone rather than on disappearing occupations. There is self-service check-in, not only for airline flights, as Sragow recounts, but also for rental cars; self-checkout and bagging at the grocery store, at do-it-yourself building supply stores, and so on; navigation of layers of automated phone menus for appropriate prerecorded customer ser vice messages; attending to seemingly endless computer updates along with keeping in mind such tasks as replacing ink cartridges so that you can print your airline ticket at home (or maintaining the battery charge in your smartphone so you can show your pass as you board), and the typical volume of Web traffic at any given time when you’re trying to book your flight or your car; banking by ATMs and online, paperless statements, and online investments; music and video downloads and streaming on de-

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mand; GPS navigation—and who knew that the work of figuring your average daily water intake as well as keeping track of your heart rate and how many steps you take in a day (synched with your smartphone, so that you have a record) are essential components to maintaining good health. Such lists could go on and on, of course, and many of these examples pertain especially to people with fairly high levels of consumption. Toward the other end of that buying-power spectrum, a great many people must work a great deal more for less and less on an always-growing range of technologies—for someone else. It’s not as if the technologies replace paid personnel and then do everything all by themselves, while also taking care of their own maintenance and upkeep. Whether these new devices are marketed as time- or laborsaving tools (for example, the robot vacuum cleaner, which saves nothing of the sort) or simply promise convenience (ATMs conveniently located in convenience stores), using the technologies requires more or less sophisticated literacy work, which is sometimes very similar to what Kress and Adami describe with respect to mobile devices. Rather than being paid in terms of time or money, consumers are compensated by the usual promise of just-in-time human capital, the expansion of a field of choices. As automatic phone answering, for example, has improved through newer and more sophisticated technologies, the process has not gotten any shorter or easier. What has “improved” are the choices available through the proliferation of menus and menu options. And needless to say, computer software can layer menus as far as needed on even the smallest tablet or smartphone. Within just-in-time business models, multiple literacies are a necessity, integral to every step in any given process of production or ser vices. What I am suggesting is that literacies as unpaid labor, outsourced to consumers and others, contribute an ever more necessary value-producing foundation. Following Oliver Williamson’s theorizing of transaction costs, Yochai Benkler had claimed that such costs would always cripple for-profit production in contrast to networked

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peer production, where they almost disappear. In the next chapter I will argue instead that by precisely this kind of consumer outsourcing, firms can cut both production costs and transaction costs. Occupations may have disappeared, but in some form or another, the work remains. As unpaid value-producing labor, literacies can be made almost invisible. Unlike so many other forms of work, there seems nothing workplace-specific about them; there is nothing about the skills and knowledges involved that suggests that a real payoff arrives for someone else. In fact, when the consumer labor required becomes too visible, shoppers often rebel. Under the governing rhetoric of do-it-yourself, for example, self-checkout remains an ongoing and relatively popular option at home improvement stores such as Home Depot. Self-checkout at grocery stores, in contrast, seems on the way out. When in addition to employing the literacy skills required for checkout shoppers must also load, scan, and then bag a considerable number of everyday items, it becomes much more obvious to them that they are performing actual work for the store. The use of justin-time human capital may succeed in making literacy labor invisible, but it doesn’t succeed in making invisible the physical process of bagging up canned goods and the like. Unpaid and invisible literacy labor, however, is one of the elements significantly missing from the way in which representations of justin-time human capital project an imaginary of freedom from the ties to labor and the divisions of labor that the concept of long-term human capital could never quite escape. Just-in-time models function as if all the temporal complications and densities of connection to systems of occupational position and labor markets that exist for models utilizing long-term human capital could be made to vanish into the past in the single breathtaking abstraction of agency as immediate power of action. The merit-based mystification of expertise supplied a powerful ideological rationale for linking human capital differentials with differentials in pay and occupational status. By cracking

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the security systems of that rationale, just-in-time human capital processes also scramble the hierarchical gradations of merit classification. Benkler is only one of many who can look at the effects produced by the market-value shift from long-term to just-in-time human capital and see more communicational transparency as multiple networks grow, and in the long run a much greater potential for the democratizing of production and access to resources. The mystification of labor relations, however, suggests that the just-in-time version of human capital represents an intensification of the concept of long-term human capital, rather than the kind of break that could revitalize and sustain democratizing forces. Modern conceptions of human capital have continually de-emphasized both the work of acquiring that capital and the use of that capital in the kind of everyday labors that interested Adam Smith. Having eliminated the last visible traces of labor, the concept of just-in-time human capital, as individual power of action in the moment, is better understood as a completion of that long arc rather than as a dramatic break and a new direction altogether. In short, the shift from long-term to just-in-time human capital is finally about the emancipation of capital, not about citizens, and certainly not about workers. In pointing to the individual as not only a worker but also a capital asset, Gary Becker pushed neoclassical economics toward an understanding of human capital as a means of production that must itself be produced in some way. That meant that qualities of character, motivation, personal background, and above all, for Becker, educational attainment had to enter into economic analysis in new ways. At the same time, his central emphasis on firms and markets kept the range of his interests largely limited to valuable market behaviors and the characteristics of relatively traditional workplaces. Yochai Benkler’s argument broadens the scope by placing the individual with her or his asset of human communicative capacity directly in the midst of multiple forms of networking, engaged in a range of activities having little necessarily to do with markets

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and workplaces. Information production is the primary characteristic of the age for Benkler, and commons-based peer production can involve the whole individual in the process in all-new ways. At the same time, however, Benkler’s primary abstraction of individual autonomy keeps his focus on a relatively narrow band of everyday practices, and his emphasis on information production limits any understanding of how the emergence of new literacies shapes the individuals connected with them. In the next chapter, with the goal of recovering the visibility of literacy work as value-producing labor, I want to move away from the nexus of connections among technological innovation, literacies, and information production that interests Benkler and such literacy studies researchers as Gunther Kress. In several recent alternative conceptions of current economic relations, “attention” replaces “information” as the primary signifier of economic organization. We should learn to recognize ourselves as living in an attention economy rather than in an information economy. The linkages between literacy work and attention have everything to do with identity education as a production process, producing human capital as a means of production. I will deliberately use the term identity education rather than the more familiar identity formation, which already assumes that identity is possible and attempts to plot a recognizable trajectory toward some actual realization. While an attention economy continually educates about identities and their importance, formation in that sense is not a prerequisite. An ongoing identity education, however, is a requirement for the literacy labors necessary to produce and sustain human capital in the complex dynamics of attention flows.

chapter 3

Star Power

At the beginning of the 1990s Google had not yet made a fortune in the attention market (and had not yet confounded common business sense) by giving away services for which other enterprises charged a considerable amount. The infamous attention-tracking ads of remarketing initiatives were still a ways into the future. Throughout the decade, however, there were abundant Internet examples that seemed to demonstrate the importance of attention as a primary and still underexploited resource available to those best able to track attention and measure its flows. Within this attention-centered business logic, the initial mistake made by theorists of an information society such as Yochai Benkler is a failure to locate the significant variable of scarcity. If indeed resources become valuable when they are scarce, then surely there is something very odd about the constant reiteration that we live in an information economy. So far from being scarce in the economic meaning of the term, information seems plentiful and proliferating all the time, to the point that nobody can really begin to process all of what is already out there. And that, of course, is the point.

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Information is valuable only when it can be put to use, and it cannot be put to use unless someone pays attention to it. According to this logic, it makes a lot more sense to think of current circumstances as an attention economy than as an information economy. In comparison to information, which seems plentiful and cheap, attention seems scarce and therefore valuable. In The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, published in 2001, business writers and consultants Thomas Davenport and John Beck echo neoclassical orthodoxy in their emphasis on scarcity: “Economies based on any scarce good have certain recognizable characteristics. For example, every economy has markets in which its key goods are bought and sold. No, there’s no New York Attention Exchange, but markets for attention do exist both inside and outside organizations. Both on the Internet and in more traditional media like television, viewer attention is exchanged for money thousands of times a day. Anyone who wants to sell something or persuade someone to do something has to invest in the attention markets” (9). Their claim is that attention has always been a decisively important element of market exchanges. It’s just that now it has visibly emerged as a marketable currency in its own right. The significant conceptual innovation that brings the idea of an attention economy into this business focus requires a reversal of the mushy epistemology of commonsense empiricism in the United States. Rather than thinking of attention as simply something that goes on “in here,” in your own head, you must learn to treat attention as if, like any other resource (minerals, water, information), it is also available “out there.” Obviously everyone must allow for the special conditions of attention as a resource. It is not exactly possible to stake out a territory in the same sense as with, say, valuable mineral deposits. Nevertheless, while attention may “happen” only in people’s heads, like any natural resource attention enters the market through the efforts of those who locate and identify it, extract it from surrounding conditions, trade on it, chart its flows, sell data about it, and so on. The more you know about where people’s atten-

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tion goes and on what occasions, the better you will become at profiting from attention as a resource. The less you know, the more likely it is you will disappear into the pre-Google Internet dustbin of corporate failures. While Davenport and Beck follow orthodoxy in their emphasis on scarcity, in their initial definition of attention they challenge the orthodox assumption about the foundational importance of rational choice. Attention is best understood as the intervening phase “between a relatively unconscious narrowing phase, in which we screen out most of the sensory inputs around us (we are aware of many things, but not paying attention to them), and a decision phase, in which we decide to act on the attention-getting information. Without both phases, there is no attention. A causal relationship exists between awareness, attention, and action” (Attention Economy, 20–21; authors’ emphasis). Attention is the center of the sequence, a necessary step in moving from a more-or-less unconscious sorting of sensory input to a deliberate choice of actions to take. Unlike reasoned decision-making, however, attention is a natural process, a proper subject for psychobiology rather than logical analysis: “The psychobiology of attention may seem an esoteric topic for businesspeople, but every business discipline, from economic forecasting to corporate strategy to marketing, relies on assumptions about this very topic. Many businesspeople have an unexpressed concept of attention that approximates the Enlightenment image of humans as purely individualistic, ‘rational’ beings. In this view, each individual is supposedly motivated by opportunities to maximize his or her material advantage” (56). In the alternative view outlined by Davenport and Beck, such a model of rational, self-interested motivation is hopelessly out of step with the information-saturated workplace: “The industrial-era approach is ineffective because it ignores the way attention works; the industrial-era view is that human beings will focus on any task for a simple reward. The strategy of the information age— deluging every individual with enormous amounts of information—is wildly counterproductive, overloading workers’ built-in attention bottleneck and thwarting productivity” (67).

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Yet despite their frequent criticisms of these “industrial age” models, Davenport and Beck’s own more contemporary-tuned language still suggests a number of strong parallels with older assumptions. As a natural process, attention takes place in Resource Central for attention, the human brain: “If I want the attention of a large group of customers, I try to get it by paying to monopolize their TV screens, Web pages, mailboxes, and ultimately their brains” (9). Attention happens “in the brain,” and the authors are interested in the brain’s processes in something of the same way Frederick Taylor was interested in bodies moving pig iron. Had he known the term, it is very likely that Taylor would have agreed that the movements of the bodies he studied were enabled by a “psychobiological” process just as much as the brains that concern Davenport and Beck. At one point they come close to marking the connection themselves: “In the farms and fields of primitive societies, and in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, physical manpower drove the economy. In the information era, knowledge was power— the more a company had, the more successful it could be. But now, as flows of unnecessary information clog worker brains and corporate communication links, attention is the rare resource that truly powers a company” (17). Taylor appropriately enough studied the natural processes involved in that “physical manpower” that drove industrialization; Davenport and Beck suggest that the same effort is now necessary to understand the brain’s natural processes of attention. In nicely parallel fashion, brain replaces muscle in an attention economy. Davenport and Beck often claim to prefer more immediately practical terms, however, and the substance of their book (and the primary reason for bothering to theorize how an attention economy works) has to do with corporate reorganization and efficiency. In contrast to Yochai Benkler, who wants to think away from the very idea of the firm toward forms of commons-based production, their interests lie in updating a long-standing corporate model. What they have to offer is a series of recommendations to employers and managers about

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keeping employees’ attention on their work. The perspective they draw on for their recommendations differs strikingly from the scientific studies Cathy Davidson explores in Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, since that perspective is shaped in relation to neoclassical economic theorizing rather than scientific studies. On their premises, in contrast to Davidson’s argument, each individual has a relatively fixed capacity for attention. This general human attention capacity cannot be stretched beyond narrow limits, and the scarcity of attention as a resource means that corporate leadership must develop ways of encouraging maximal employee focus on the job at hand. That means integrating employees into the decision-making process: “When an individual has created something, the person feels a natural sense of ownership and belonging. We are biologically predisposed to pay attention to our own products. To the extent that a leader can tap into the attention-keeping nature of co-creation, the leader’s organization will be allotted more directed attention to the right kinds of issues” (Attention Economy, 147). A college instructor who has shifted her or his classroom from primarily lectures disseminating information to more discussion-based focus groups linked across a course Web site that encourages student blogs may well have come to similar conclusions. That is, once translated out of management-speak and into academese, the model proposed by Davenport and Beck is not nearly as foreign to education as it might seem. Sometimes hardly any translation is necessary. The administrative representation of students as consumers, in which we as teachers are in constant competition with others (both inside and outside of educational institutions) for student attention, seems to have been extracted directly from Davenport and Beck’s account. It is not too difficult to see fears about losing the competition for attention as one of the driving forces in those debates between old and new that Jonathan Alexander describes in Digital Youth. If unintentionally, the debates echo Davenport and Beck’s basic scarcity premise with regard to

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attention. Individuals cannot simply expand their attention potential whenever they want, because “as much psychological research attests, attention has its definite limits” (Attention Economy, 9). If students are busy playing video games and texting and so on, they will not have time for their studies. Or, conversely, if they are forced by instructors to learn now-obsolete school material, they will not have time or opportunity to develop their new forms of literacy into productive directions for their future working lives. As Davenport and Beck might put it, the classroom has always involved a primary attention market. Nevertheless, it is only now that we are really learning what is at stake in how the currency of attention changes hands. At the same time, however, the comparison to the classroom immediately exposes some of the many problems in Davenport and Beck’s account. Even within the very dated science scheme they deploy, it is not as if attention can really just appear somewhere in a vacuum between sensory screening and decisionmaking, obligingly waiting to be claimed and marketed. Student attention in a classroom is always interconnected, in often quite complex ways, with specific skills. Debates about literacy may emphasize the necessity for students to be paying attention in order to learn anything, but the reverse is no less true. Students already have to know a lot in order to focus their attention in class. What they know—and consequently what they attend to—may not be exactly what the instructor would wish, but connections exist everywhere between skilled knowledges and attention. The same point can be made about any of the attention markets that interest Davenport and Beck. Attention is always linked with specific skills and knowledges for anyone who is paying attention. It is not quite clear to me exactly what they mean in the recommendation I quoted above, about how we are all “biologically predisposed to pay attention to our own products” (147). It seems a safe guess, however, that no “co-creation” of products— or attention—would happen at all without a great deal of knowledge on the part of the workers incorporated into the process, including some considerable skills

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in the social complexities of cooperation. Likewise the success of any given Internet ad or video posting depends on a significant framing of viewer knowledge. In short, the question of how to determine what it is that people will likely focus their attention on presupposes a prior question of what skills and knowledges will enable people in any given situation to pay any attention to anything at all. More often than not in the kinds of situations that interest Davenport and Beck, the answer to that prior question involves specific forms of literacy. I hope it has been evident that I agree with Alexander’s point in Digital Youth, that the many debates over which literacy skills are most important for classroom learning can sometimes seem tiresomely repetitive. Yet those debates do help emphasize the signal importance of literacies in the classroom no less than in the world after class. If often for polemical purposes, the debates foreground the complex connections between attention and literacies. Davenport and Beck’s understanding of psychobiology is very similar instead to Taylor’s efforts at finding Schmidt, his ideal pig-iron mover. Both approaches depend completely on the functional isolation of single factors, as if such factors would be immediately usable in that isolate form. At least it seems to have been pretty clear to Taylor that that was exactly what he was doing. In contrast, the projection of attention as an economically valuable natural resource, like most assumptions grounded in neoclassical economics, requires a prodigious abstraction from the ensemble of actual conditions in which attention exists. Once disengaged from neoclassical assumptions, however, the idea of an attention economy offers a potentially much better angle of entry for understanding how literacies produce economic value than does any available version of human capital. I argued in the previous chapter that the story of human capital is a narrative of removal, the progressive elimination of any actual labor from the concept of a human capital resource. Thus the concept prevents any inquiry into how literacy work produces value before the question can even be raised. The

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assumption is that market forces determine the value of a human capital asset, and thereby determine the ultimate economic value of literacies as well. Like human capital, attention can be linked with a range of skills and knowledges, but unless you imagine attention as already commodified, in the way Davenport and Beck do, attention is far more clearly an ongoing, everyday process. Attention’s connections with specific forms of literacy work can then appear immediately more obvious than when one thinks of human capital as a kind of available asset one possesses, or as an embodied power of action on the occasion. Further, paying attention is already involved in countless daily practices, requiring none of the metaphysical trappings necessary to the abstraction of agency and choice in the operations of just-in-time human capital. Rather than focusing as do Davenport and Beck on converting attention from an “in here” to an available natural resource “out there,” Michael Goldhaber is interested in how the affective dynamics of attention flows reconstitute the conditions of subjectivity. In a series of highly original Web postings beginning in the late 1990s, Goldhaber drew his representative image of an attention economy from celebrity culture as an obviously high-value attention spectacle. Goldhaber’s insights have been recognized in literacy studies thanks to the work of Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. In New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning, they summarize his central claims succinctly: “Stars have large amounts of attention paid to them. Fans pay their attention to the stars. Because paying attention requires effort, fans supply most of the effort in the attention economy. Unlike most workers in the industrial economy who had/have only one boss, fans will typically devote their attention-paying effort to multiple stars. While stars are the great winners in an attention economy, the losers are not necessarily the fans. Fans may receive sufficient illusory attention to meet their attention needs” (119; authors’ emphasis). For my purposes the most immediately important element of Goldhaber’s argument is his recognition that attention re-

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quires effort. The work that fans put into paying attention supplies the dynamics of a star system. In The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Jonathan Beller recasts a similar insight about attention work into a much larger theory of how labor functions in a nowpervasive economy of spectacle and attention. As a film theorist Beller is not well known in literacy studies, but like Goldhaber he locates his interest in an attention economy within media culture. Rather than using the image of star and fan to focus his discussion as does Goldhaber, Beller considers cinema as an appropriate descriptor for the entire “mode of production” sustaining an attention economy. Citing the well-known passage from the Grundrisse in which Marx explains the importance of understanding how the “valorization process of capital” produces both capitalists and workers (Cinematic Mode, 204), Beller claims that attention is now necessary to the constitution of workers and their worlds in a form available to the valorization process of capital. The dominance of visual culture and its “cinematic mode of production” explain how capital interests colonize and reshape the formation of subjectivities in a postmodern and postindustrial attention economy. Capital, to put it crudely, needs your attention. When not intent on fetishizing the idea of scarcity, even Davenport and Beck recognize that attention is everywhere and is potentially valuable in a wide range of circumstances beyond the management/employee relations in a corporation. Although, as they remark, a New York Stock Exchange of attention may not exist, they recognize that every marketing process requires a considerable effort of attention. You hardly need cocoa beans in your head in order to bid on cocoa futures, but you cannot bid on cocoa futures or attention futures—or watch a movie for fun, or stream some new music—without paying any attention. Both Goldhaber and Beller understand the significance of the fact that attention is involved in the most inward of pleasures, no less than in the most routine manipulations of external solidities. Beller in particular argues very

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powerfully that an attention economy is as much about the constitution of attention workers as it is about the payoffs for trading in attention. Over a decade ago, in Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt had already emphasized the intensifying economic value of literacy. In human capital terms, however, any increase in value is a function of market laws of supply and demand. By theorizing attention as work, Goldhaber and Beller open the alternative possibility of recognizing literacy labor as a valueproducing force in an attention economy. Following out their logic, if the value of literacy has gone up, that is because literacy labor is producing more value than before. In an attention economy, literacy exists at the nexus of work and value, throughout everyday practices every bit as much as in the workplace. At the same time, that pervasiveness also makes literacy labor more available for exploitation, particularly within the conditions imposed by the dominant ideological imaginary of human capital, in which literacy as labor has been made invisible. Goldhaber’s terminology of stars and fans may seem so familiar from so many different contexts that it can be difficult to understand how it might yield any descriptive complexity or precision. Goldhaber is not interested in fan psychology, however, or in the endless tabloid question of what stars are “really like” off screen. In common with Davenport and Beck and any number of others, he realizes that attention is always on the move, going somewhere else past the current focus. Star/fan then becomes a way to identify a polarizing directional flow, without necessarily also assuming some intrinsic nature to either position that compels the flows to move in one direction and not the other. Attention flows create “star power,” not the other way around. Yet at the same time and equally important, the idea of star/fan dynamics registers a way of locating where subjectivities are forming in relation to the flows of attention. Attention may always be going somewhere else, but the flows subsequently generate the new directions from these respective positions. Fans attend to stars, but stars attend to other stars,

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and so on, as Goldhaber will explain in speaking of the attention fans feel they get from stars as “illusory.” Finally, as I emphasized above, Goldhaber understands that attention is work. The identification of star/fan polarities also identifies who does that work. As he stated in “An Attention Economy Will Change Everything,” a 1998 interview with Florian Rötzer, fan effort drives the system, but doing the work does not equate to holding power: “Paying attention takes effort; it’s not the passive kind of activity that is sometimes imagined. Also, whoever you are paying attention to has power over you, as long as you pay it.” As basic literacy became more widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States, and as the conditions of wage labor continued to reorganize both work processes and consumption generally, large groups of the population were left out of the circuits of literacy and positioned at the low end, or were dropped entirely from wagelabor production. The consequences could be devastating for them. In the online interview from which I quoted above, Goldhaber hints at a similar kind of result in the current circumstances of an attention economy. In response to a question about the fate of “losers” in the competition for attention, he suggests that they “will be ignored, first of all, and that means to have less of a clear identity or place in the larger community. As more and more comes to us in proportion to the attention we get and as a result of it, those who don’t get any attention will be deprived of almost everything. The extreme case is that of someone such as the homeless person in Los Angeles, who died in plain sight of hundreds of passers-by, and yet was completely ignored for days.” While privacy issues remain a central focus of both legal experts and the news media, Goldhaber implies that perhaps a greater danger lies in the emergent mechanisms of an attention economy by which whole groups “will be deprived of almost everything” as attention flows pass them over. Rather than being victimized by Internet social connections by losing their privacy, as dystopian commentators so often claim is happening

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to youth, perhaps those young people have recognized that becoming an attention loser may be a worse fate. When attention becomes a primary currency of your identity, then warnings about the loss of privacy and the dangers of identity theft, geotargeting, government spying, and the like cannot really seem quite as menacing as the fear that no one at all is paying attention to you anywhere. Goldhaber knows better than to imagine that fans are simply manipulated into idolizing stars. Unlike Yochai Benkler, he is under no illusion that if we could just get rid of the concentrated power of Hollywood studios and the like, then individuals could fully act out their autonomy as authors of their own lives. At the same time, however, fans are not at all “losers” in the way that those Goldhaber describes as bypassed by attention flows are losers. Fans are fully integrated into the circuits of attention. They are necessary to supply the work of attention and in so doing to constitute the ruling power of the stars to whom they attend. Fans are on the inside, visible in a way that the losers in an attention economy cannot possibly be. Indeed, updating Golhaber’s insights further into the world of social media, a “star” by his definition could easily emerge from a YouTube video or Facebook success initially produced by a “fan.” Goldhaber’s star/fan dynamic does not assume already existent identities, but rather describes a polarity of attention flow. Thus while Goldhaber does not often emphasize the point, one powerful appeal in doing the work of being a fan is the liminal possibility at any time of suddenly re-emerging as a star oneself. Nevertheless, there exists no two-way street between the position of star and the position of fan. In Goldhaber’s account fans get only “illusory” attention from stars. His explanation of illusory in the interview, however, involves some rather curious examples: “For instance, if you read a book, you must have some semi or unconscious feeling that someone has written specifically for you, or you would get nothing out of it. (TV makes this even clearer. A news reporter seems to be talking to you, looking right at you.) But the star you pay attention to has no knowledge of your existence, and generally knows nothing

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about you. That is why the attention you feel from them is illusory.” Yet by Goldhaber’s own logic, if the news reporter only “seems” to be talking to you and looking at you, then television news would simply involve a more deceptive process than the blank stare you get back from stars. Neither the author of the book you are reading nor the news reporter you watch and listen to is likely to know any more about your existence than does any other star. In the more recent social world of networked stardom, the almost-on-scene responsiveness available from all kinds of different postings can give considerably more detail to the “illusion” than might be available from the TV news reporter who seems to be looking right at you. As a fan you can get immediate tweets from the star that she or he is just fine, even before TMZ breaks the story about the accident that just occurred on set during the making of the star’s current film project. All these interchanges seem designed to encourage the kind of fan quest Richard Dyer describes in Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. According to Dyer, fans obsessively pursue the question of what a star is “really like”—who is the real person behind the star persona? More importantly, however, social networks, tweets, blogs, fan sites, and so on involve a sense in which the star and often the star’s specific roles seem to speak uniquely to each fan in whatever existent context of star/fan interaction. Rather than constituting the anomaly Goldhaber claims it to be, fan attention to stars can construct and encourage a feeling very similar to what he describes in his other examples as the sense that someone is there “specifically for you.” If you replace the policeman and his hail (“Hey, you there!”) of Louis Althusser’s famous example of interpellation in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” with Goldhaber’s star, now regularly tweeting to fans, then Goldhaber’s description can sound quite similar to Althusser’s. At the same time, Althusser can remind us that while the fan’s sense of getting attention may be an illusion, as Goldhaber argues, it is also an allusion. The power to command reciprocal attention from the star may be only an empty embodiment, yet it points to a

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complex organization of power relations. The dynamics of star/ fan power relations have become one of the primary elements of an attention economy. Because of its everydayness for a wide spectrum of population groups, online marketing is a useful indicator of how pervasive these dynamics have become. Even longtime companies still doing catalogue business have been caught up in the change, as in the now-emblematic formula that appears, for example, in an otherwise quite traditional L. L. Bean 2011 Fall Preview catalogue selling men’s shirts: “You asked, and we listened— we’ve brought back the original relaxed fit of this shirt, a longtime customer favorite.” Similar statements can be found in one form or another in millions of other places. This imaginary of consumer power implies that the fan-consumers spend a lot of time paying attention to the star-company selling products, and then let their demands be known (“you asked”). The star in turn reciprocates the attention (“we listened”) and acts accordingly, “specifically for you,” as Goldhaber would put it. The process differs markedly from older customer relations surveys and the like, carried out by phone or mail, because of the relative public transparency as well as the potential volume of response. Any consumer can read thousands of other responses to a product online if he or she wants; consumers often follow an ongoing situation or controversy. This public airing of controversies can seem to indicate that the principle of consumers’ “asking” and the “we listened” corporate response has been extended so far as to suggest a reorganization involving new fan-consumers / star-company power alignments. The dramatic price increase that Netflix announced in 2011 was followed by an immediate slide in subscribers, and the company had to quickly abandon its “Quikster” plan for separate DVD and streaming accounts due to consumer outrage. As a Huffington Post headline had it, “Quikster Goes Quikly.” In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal (21 July 2012) extolling the inevitability of new power alignments, Doc Searls upped the ante on the classic marketing hook that the “the customer is king”

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to represent instead “the customer as God.” Like Benkler a fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he runs ProjectVRM (Vendor Relationship Management), Searls followed up publication of his The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (2012) with this paean to the individual autonomy of consumers that goes beyond Benkler’s most expansive vision. In the essay Searls claims that by now we should all recognize the insanity of businesses that still think of the individual consumer as just a number among millions of other individuals they are busy tracking. It’s time to take charge and “start showing up as human beings instead of just as cattle to be herded.” Doubtless the Wall Street Journal was delighted to publish the essay, having always had a good instinct about when it was on to a good thing for corporate business interests. There are downsides for the businesses involved. According to now-frequent online stories, a number of merchants whose businesses are reviewed regularly on Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other such sites are reporting blackmail attempts by consumers— threats that they will post bad reviews unless comped for products and ser vices. Even corporate CEOs get caught up in the fray, as for example in the recent exchange between angry consumers and the CEO of Highland Woodworking over the CEO’s nasty personal response to a negative review. Any conclusion that power has begun to shift from “star” to “fan,” however, seems premature at best. In these configurations of power dynamics the customer is hardly a king, let alone a god. Despite the potential for public relations disasters, corporate rhetoric continually solicits comments from consumers, and websites are configured to make commenting easier and easier, almost obligatory in some cases. I find it rather difficult to think that these elaborate processes are put in place because corporate executives are terrified of the now-mighty consumer. By making use of Jonathan Beller’s theorizing of attention and identity formation that I describe below, I will sketch an alternative explanation in the next section of this chapter that puts a little

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more emphasis on the financial reasons for corporate insistence on these forms of attention-tracking. Althusser’s conceptual range broadens Goldhaber’s star/fan dynamic in a way that can help identify the complexity of power relations, and his concept of ideology also anticipates Beller’s use of media culture and an attention economy in The Cinematic Mode of Production. Beller is certainly alive to the importance of Althusser’s essay for his project: “For Althusser the question of politics involved the question of the production and reproduction of subjects, not only through wage labor and the necessities that could be purchased with the wage, but psychologically, as it were, through a process he called interpellation— the calling of the worker-subject into being by ideological apparatuses. These were exemplified in his work by the ‘Hey you’ of ideology, in the mouth of the police officer, or of God (to Moses), but generally also uttered by licensing boards, politicians, television—all of the techno-material structures that daily produced and reproduced the subject through various modes of instantiation” (Cinematic Mode, 291–92). Things are now even “more complex,” Beller suggests, but by beginning with Althusser in these terms he can also begin to specify the power relations Goldhaber often leaves vaguely defined or simply dismisses as illusory. In particular, the issue of fan identity (“specifically for you”) and fan attention is worth rethinking in relation to the new terminology introduced in Beller’s argument. In “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990), Gilles Deleuze argued that there seem to be fundamental changes going on in the disciplinary institutions that had interested both Foucault and Althusser. In Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri develop Deleuze’s account to suggest that among other things, this means that individual identities no longer seem constituted in strict relation to institutional settings: “Certainly in disciplinary society each individual had many identities, but to a certain extent the different identities were defined by different places and different times of life: one was mother or father at home, worker in the factory, student at school, inmate in prison, and mental patient in the asylum. In the society of

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control, it is precisely these places, these discrete sites of applicability, that tend to lose their definition and delimitations” (331). As Deleuze had already recognized, the immediate question is how control and discipline now happen without the external guarantee of authority supplied by multiple institutional presences; or perhaps more exactly, how all this happens in ways that do not always require institutions to function as external determinants. If not from God, cops, or even institutions, where’s all the shouting coming from? The answer suggested by Goldhaber’s star/fan dynamic points to an enigma, a reversal of noise polarities. Fans do the hailing, not the stars. Given his insistence on the feeling of individual specialness, Goldhaber’s account hardly implies some carryover from nineteenth-century theories of crowd psychology and the like to explain the shouting. Hardt and Negri’s conception of “multitude” is not much help either, since attention in the circumstances Goldhaber describes works as powerfully individuating, despite the sheer numbers of shouting fans. The logic of Beller’s argument suggests a different kind of answer. He no longer relies on the concept of identities as being explainable in terms of their constitution through “self-disciplining” in relation to specific institutions. In his argument the work of attention might best be understood as a process that constitutes selves to provide value-producing labor, at the same time that the work also yields its own containing habitation and environment. That is, in contrast to the institutions that subjects inhabited and which conferred distinct identities on individuals (worker in the factory, student in the school, and so on), attention as work constitutes and fills in what you attends to as yours, as “specifically for you” in Goldhaber’s phrase. The “reality” may involve an anonymous corporation or an immense state university system or a star’s Hollywood publicity machine, but nevertheless the immediacy of a lived environment looks to be “personalized,” to be an extension of self through and through. I am what I pay attention to, and I live where I am. It is only at the fan’s hail (or fingerprint) that every anonymous me-too phone turns around to respond as an iPhone.

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Perhaps it should not be so surprising after all that to social science methodologies inherited from the early twentieth century, all this looks like the kind of absorbed attention to self that identifies the emergence of a new “me generation” narcissism. Twenge and Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement that I discussed in the previous chapter is a good example of this view. What Twenge and Campbell identify as the face of narcissistic dysfunction, however, appears in just-in-time human capital as an ideal of unconstrained agency. The reversal can happen easily because both faces of this double-sided representation depend on a radical abstraction from an emergent fundamental form of twenty-first-century labor required by a wide range of diverse conditions. An attention economy is not really about any particular, visible focus of attention, which is substantively irrelevant despite being center stage. And while fan-consumers may not be the delusional narcissists Twenge, Campbell, and others imagine, neither is an economy of attention constructed to benefit fan-consumers, let alone those who are discarded as losers and left out of the attention economy altogether. Beller’s significant insight is that attention is first of all built on the labor that makes and remakes fan-consumers as the primary workers producing an attention economy. Marx was not as directly interested in consumers as he was in workers, so perhaps he could not have foreseen how the reproduction of workers and the reproduction of consumers would become nearly the same process. Toward the end of The Cinematic Mode of Production, that consumer/worker identification becomes one powerful implication of Beller’s economic turn on Deleuze’s “desiring-production.” The consumer, Beller argues, begins “as a spectator, who produces and reproduces him/herself by exercising the ‘freedom reflex,’ desire, intention, the unconscious, what-have-you, while valorizing the media pathways; s/he produces value for capital through attention— both as a commodity that is bought and sold in advertising, is speculated on via the promotional budgets of blockbusters, and

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as a medium that remakes, reconfigures various corporealmental-chemical structures that allow him or her to go back to work in a situation of hyperflexible accumulation” (293). Consumers, that is, learn to be consumers through paying attention as spectators in a way that constitutes a self in and through the “freedom reflex,” like that “specifically for you” that Goldhaber talks about. In turn, this attention labor of self-constitution becomes not only a commodity on the market, but also and more importantly for Beller a continual process of reconstituting the consumer as now also a worker within the same medium of attention practices, in order to accomplish the immediately required work of the occasion. Like Yochai Benkler’s networked citizens of commons-based production, she or he is available all the time as either consumer or worker, in conditions where the self as attention worker is also a significant medium of value. Beller begins The Cinematic Mode of Production, however, with a larger conceptual aim than explaining the self-constitution of workers. The idea is that since attention as labor has become so pervasive, theory must first redefine “the labor theory of value that has been in Marxism the basis on which capital was valorized during the production process and also the basis on which revolutionary action was predicated.” More specifically, Marx’s labor-based principles “must be reformulated as the attention theory of value, that is, as the productive value of human attention. This reformulation leaves labor as a subset of valueproductive attention while positing the development of a new order for cementing of the socius” (28; Beller’s emphasis). The subsequent description Beller offers of attention labor suggests a significant development and extension in contemporary circumstances of what Marx identified as socially necessary labor, the labor necessary to reproduce the conditions of production. Beller notes as much at one of the significant points in his argument: “Television and other mass media are, more than anything else, technologies of social organization. What we do ‘there’ today (moving our heart strings, internalizing rhythms,

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learning the codes of fashion and behavior, learning, above all, to fit in) is partially in Marx’s language ‘necessary labor’ ” (112– 13). The difficulty lies in understanding how attention becomes “value-productive” other than through some version or another of its labor “subset.” If only part of what we are doing in front of the TV is socially necessary labor, how does surplus labor appear? Later in his argument Beller returns to the television-viewing example to explain further: “One can easily see that not all of the productive value of television time (labor time or what I am calling attention time) need accrue to capital for the proportional increases here to exceed increases in productivity engineered by capital during the working day. Television, as a sort of second job, creates surplus value for capital that allows it to combat the falling rate of profit. . . . The increasing efficiency and development of new attention-siphoning technologies becomes the central province for later twentieth-century capital” (206). Through the identification of labor time with attention time, his explanation helps elaborate his earlier discussion of socially necessary labor as very much involved with the constitution of bodies and subjectivities. In his example, bodies are constructed to exist in the vicinity of the TV set by among other things “siphoning” their attention from elsewhere. What remains unclear is the idea of a surplus that could be appropriated elsewhere. Beller’s claim is that this extended time in front of the television becomes a second working day that functions as a kind of surplus labor simply by being in excess of the ordinary working day. Yet his own analysis in the passage quoted above suggests instead that the time expended is devoted to that continuing process of self-constitution he has already identified as the socially necessary labor of an attention economy. In contrast, his logic about the simultaneous reproduction of consumers as also workers anticipates a different form of explanation than the second-job emphasis in the passage I quoted above. In the examples of unpaid literacy labor that I discussed briefly in chapter 2, consumers in their everyday practices are

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engaged in a form of socially necessary labor as Beller understands the process, in the constitution of bodies and subjectivities. Yet at the same time and as part of the same processes they are also engaged as workers, as outsourced labor for whatever corporation has done the outsourcing in the specific instance. Over and above the socially necessary labor involved in consumer practices, the literacy work embedded in such practices yields a surplus of labor available to be appropriated by the corporation. The corporate benefits can be considerable, including savings in those transaction costs that Benkler argues must always plague for-profit enterprises. For Benkler the primary virtue of commons-based production over for-profit market systems lies in the maximizing of individual autonomy and diversity. Yet he also claims an economic advantage through the virtual elimination of the transaction costs that Oliver Williamson identified. In “Transaction Cost Economics” (1989) and elsewhere, Williamson explains his research focus on the often-considerable costs to the firm in sustaining the daily culture required by corporate governance structure as well as the costs associated with going about everyday business. From the perspective of a corporation organized through just-in-time business management principles, transaction costs might well appear a particular affront to innovation and efficiency. These costs can offset the savings of inventory reduction, and perhaps even more importantly, transaction processes introduce complications that can clog both communication and the finalizing of sales. Corporations can eliminate whole sectors of transaction costs, however, and even cut production costs, by means of outsourcing labor to all those people out there that Benkler imagines as exercising their individual autonomy while engaged in commonsbased production. As Beller’s consumer-workers, we take care of business. Under the Go Green banner and the usual hype about customer choice, for example, the shift by banks to paperless statements solves the double transaction-cost problem of first processing and then mailing statements, while simultaneously motivating consumer agents to choose the ethically

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sound, eco way to do things. Mailroom costs go down, and production costs are lowered elsewhere as well, most obviously perhaps by shifting other kinds of transactions from tellers to consumer-operated ATMs and mobile banking, as I described in the introduction. Presumably we consumers are happy because now we have more convenient choices to fit our own schedules rather than being constrained by bank hours or mailservice rounds. Benkler may be less interested in such matters as the processing and mailing of statements than in Williamson’s search and information-gathering sector of costs, but the story of outsourced labor remains the same. Benkler argues that commonsbased production succeeds by making information easily available and shareable and by refusing to control production from the top. Any number of autonomous individuals can be involved at any given moment as each one chooses, without at all jeopardizing the equilibrium of the whole. Yet shifting the focus slightly by way of Goldhaber’s terms, it is easy enough to recognize in Benkler’s description the “star/fan” dynamic of company and consumer that I discussed above. The continuous processes of online ratings, discussion threads, and so on reduce the search and information costs for the firm while also keeping it centered in the “star” spotlight of consumer attention. Gathering information about consumers is no longer an in-house problem at all. The boost in corporate financial advantage by means of the available unpaid labor easily outweighs the occasional publicity glitches. In contrast to a more orthodox neoclassical economics and its reliance on an assumption of rational decision-making, Williamson borrowed the concept of a bounded rationality from economist Herbert A. Simon to talk about the constraints imposed by actual working conditions. One can never really assume that even someone with extremely high cognitive ability will always be in the right position to make completely rational decisions on the basis of perfect information and a necessary amount of time. Yet the potential for boundary-condition dif-

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ficulties might seem to rise exponentially when companies rely for information on the wayward behaviors of all those fanconsumers out there. I mentioned above the risks incurred by the relative transparency of communication processes and how public relations disasters happen, as a number of firms have discovered. More significantly, in terms of the information they supply, fan-consumer behaviors after all might well give good cause to question any notion of rationality at work, no matter how bounded. Fan-consumers, however, do not make corporate decisions. It does not really matter if droves of individual fan-consumers react totally irrationally. The imaginary of consumer power, or of any kind of power shift from star-company to fan-consumer, falls apart with the recognition that first of all, what consumers supply in this instance is an unpaid surplus labor that takes care of an important sector of transaction costs for the firm. In the socially necessary labor of making themselves active “fans” in their everyday attention practices, consumers simultaneously make available, as unpaid workers, a surplus of labor to be appropriated. From a corporate perspective, if the star boardroom players then make decisions that yield higher profits or stock value, the whole show seems simply a triumph of just-in-time innovation and efficiency. Information received has been acted on appropriately. Bad decisions that lower stock value suggest instead that performance has slipped, requiring the current star be paid off and a different one imported into the boardroom. Current forms of just-in-time organization are not only about new ways of appropriating surplus labor, but also about what these specific channels of surplus enable in terms of further cost savings. As I have often had occasion to repeat, just-intime organization sheds people no less than inventory. The potential to appropriate surplus labor from vast numbers of available consumer-workers has effects inside the corporation, allowing it to operate with a newly pared-down workforce, more and more reliant on the new technologies also made more possible and available under just-in-time imperatives to innovate. Needless

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to say, that workforce no longer appears wrapped in the glow of cooperative involvement, in the way the famous Toyota worker teams were often represented at the beginning of that corporation’s massive reorganization around just-in-time principles. To a workforce more anxious and aware of their precarious situation, efficiency and production incentives appear less as goals than as veiled threats. Marx talked about the creation of a reserve army of labor as, among other things, a mechanism for reducing wages and ensuring efficient job performance without any disruptions. In the new circumstances produced by just-in-time management, the mass of consumers for whom corporations supposedly supply ser vices become an element in the structural equivalent of a reserve labor army. More importantly, however, there is an invisible accompaniment to that reserve army: the people dropped from the attention economy via the process that Goldhaber could identify as the production of “losers.” Attention dynamics play out across circuits of shifting occupations and the unpaid labor that often come from those able to engage in relatively high levels of consumption. The armies of losers in an attention economy are simply vanished from view and officially forgotten. Among other things, Beller’s argument, like Goldhaber’s, is a reminder that attention is always embedded in the complex ensemble of skills, knowledges, and everyday practices required to make paying attention a possibility at all. Regardless of how ATM machines are tricked out to catch the eye, it is doubtful you would pay them any detailed attention whatsoever unless you already know what they are for and how to work them. Attention requires a complicated support structure, but the conception of choice that figures so centrally for just-in-time human capital also requires a complicated infrastructure of support in which attention is a necessary element. As an everyday process, attention becomes visible first of all through a form of labor. That is, the skills and knowledges that enable attention processes function as labor, more specifically as literacy labor, in any number of contexts such as the unpaid daily practices of

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consumers. In the next chapter I want to look at the proliferation of literacies in more and more sectors in educational terms, as having become another integral and invisible element in the imaginary of economic value as grounded in and ultimately produced by human capital. Yet Beller’s account of the self-constitution of consumerworkers in an attention economy has still another and perhaps more immediate relevance to conceptions of literacy and how literacies function. As I remarked in my introduction, one of the foundational grounds for the literacy myth that Harvey Graff criticizes remains in current circumstances: the assumption that literacy is all about literacy users and their experiences. As an attention economy reconstructs the processes of what I will call identity education, it also reinforces this foundation of the literacy myth. In this sense at least literacy may well be all about literacy users, so long as they are constituted as subjects who do the work of an attention economy. The idea of just-in-time human capital simultaneously narrows the scope and range of current versions of the literacy myth by purging from it any democratizing articulation of hope. Identity education is never really about developing democratic citizens. Most conceptions of human capital have assumed individual identities as a given. The individuals need not be the rational investors Gary Becker describes, nor even the more flexible network citizens Yochai Benkler imagines, for whom constraints on individual autonomy have been lifted. Identities can change, grow with education, shrink—whatever—but for most theorists someone has to be there in advance, as it were, to make an initial choice and then acquire human capital resources. Davenport and Beck think of attention in very similar terms, as if were a finite capacity constituted in different ways across different individual identities. They assume, in good neoclassical fashion, that attention is a valuable resource because it is scarce. Each individual has only a finite amount, and hence individuals must be solicited, enticed, framed, tracked, and so on, by employers and by those who would profit from the market in attention. The

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unstated assumption in this focus on the individual, however, is that attention is a resource that potentially can be tapped in every individual. Thus in terms of Davenport and Beck’s own neoclassical economic principles, their view of attention as a scarce resource becomes immediately dubious. It may be that each individual can pay only a finite amount of attention, but if it is potentially available from every single individual, then in aggregate terms a great deal of attention must be available. Attention appears as a limited and scarce resource when the individual is assumed as the ground for calculation, an individual whose identity exists prior to the market exploitation of attention resources. The market value of tracking attention flows, however, is not constituted on the basis of assuming a bunch of individuals in place who can be abstracted into data generalizations. In contrast to traditional conceptions of human capital, in an attention economy there is no necessary assumption of someone “already there.” Given even the most critically generous take on his claims for consumers, Doc Searls’s premise that each of us needs to begin asserting godlike power as an individual against the corporate imposition of a herd-of-cattle mentality is a stunningly off-base conclusion. So far from dictating the anonymity implied by the herd-of-cattle analogy, an attention economy foregrounds identity. Identities are everywhere at stake, and identity education is a continuous and ongoing process. In other words, although there is no necessary assumption of someone already there, who might eventually show up at any given moment is crucial—as is who does not, or cannot, show up. In the expansion and development of an attention economy since the 1990s, when Goldhaber began addressing the issue of who gets left out, the manufacturing of “losers” has become far more systematic. Political policy often seems organized around who can be affordably forgotten. Corporate policy not only continues to follow a now long-standing practice of circling the globe for cheap labor, but also, as I argued above, continues the just-in-time imperative for efficiency by shedding workers daily.

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Both Beller and Goldhaber recognize the sense in which an attention economy is always about identity, and when the manufacture of attentionless losers is a daily affair, then daily attention (and lots of it) becomes the inevitable requirement for the never-ending process of identity education. Consumer self-constitution is also worker self-constitution, as Beller demonstrates, but arguably, consumer pleasures have a more direct role in identity education. An identity business cannot exist without a pleasure business, and perhaps more importantly, the mapping of attention to pleasures that Beller describes is crucial to an attention economy. The linkage of pleasures and identity education produces a double effect. On one hand, as Yochai Benkler’s argument anticipates, pleasures can proliferate and diversify. Having choices between a Hollywood blockbuster and a mere three TV channels seems already part of a remote past. As Benkler also anticipates, the production and sharing of information can easily become a source of pleasure and satisfaction in commons-based networks. Benkler could have pointed also to the inclusion of more and more people in pleasure processes, as constraints on individual autonomy are gradually eroded. Attempts to control the markets in pleasure and entertainment would seem to have even less chance of success than attempts to exert control over the markets in information. On the other hand, however, Jonathan Beller’s argument is a reminder that an attention economy is not really about pleasures any more than it is about identities. Despite Benkler’s conviction that corporations place limits on diversity, for-profit interests in the pleasure market have little reason to police your appropriate individual identity or to control your pleasures by defining what they can be. When enough somebodies are paying attention among the millions and millions of possible consumers, the elements important to marketing are the direction and force of attention flow, not individual pleasure or identity. That is, plotting the flow of attention is not a matter of collecting millions of bits of data about individuals and then

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generalizing the individual into an anonymous abstraction, as Searls’s herd-of-cattle image suggests. The direction of flow and the ability to predict in relation to any given subset of consumers are the significant variables. It has become a truism that very similar literacy skills can be involved in work and in multiple forms of individual pleasure. The visible technology overlaps and the implications of multimodal mobilities, however, tend to obscure the far more significant mediating functions of literacy. Literacy practices are the crucial connectors between individual experiences of pleasure and identity, and the market exchanges of an attention economy. Specific literacies must be built into pleasures and identity education in order for these processes to appear as transparent as possible within the vast mapping of attention flows that sustains the attention economy. The transparency necessary to identity education does not depend upon some prior invasion of privacy, one of the typical dystopian fears about encroaching technology. The idea of privacy in these dystopian nightmares presupposes some pre-existent identity whose secret inner contents are ruthlessly exposed to various information engines (or much worse) made possible by the pervasiveness of technology. The transparency I refer to, however, is not about turning formerly private recesses into publically available visibilities. What I am describing above suggests instead that privacies are being constructed right along with pleasures and identities. Identity education includes lessons in how to build and protect a privacy cell. Rather than existing as some special enclave of already existent individual property, privacy becomes simply another element of how attention flows are mapped. Such privacy construction is already linked to attention in its very construction. The connections by no means eliminate the dangerous potential for a private cell built in the process of identity education to become available to ideological interests or criminal practices. The basic business of an attention economy can sustain a considerable range of interests, to say the least. The map-

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ping of attention, however, concerns how the flow of attention is built into that private cell and how that cell affects the surrounding elements, not necessarily what is “in” the cell. Rival claims about the amount of time children spend with video games afford a useful example. The debates usually polarize at the extremes: gamer skills involve children in complex socializing relationships and at some point translate effectively into adult work skills; or, video games turn children into violent psychopaths or dysfunctionally obese, isolated narcissists. The effects of game-playing on individuals can vary significantly, however, and as is often the case, no straight line of cause to effect appears that is obvious enough to warrant the assertion of a proven trajectory. In relation to the conditions of an attention economy, the more immediate issue is that video games do require specific literacy skills. In learning those skills, gamers become available to the mapping of attention flows in ways that might not have been possible had they been engaged in unsupervised outdoor play, say, or even in television watching. No matter how various or how focused the specific effects of gaming might ultimately prove to be, the economics of attention support a massive transformation of the ensemble of pleasures, identity education, and marketing into a form of coherence in which each element depends on the others. Rather than Benkler’s nightmare of constraints preserved from the past severely limiting individual autonomy and controlling diversity within narrow parameters, this coherence thrives on both the “autonomy” and “diversity” that are essential to a dominant ideology of choice. In Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt had argued that literacies are being “pulled deeply into the engines of productivity and profit” (171), and it seems to me important to recognize that they are also pulling a lot of other things in with them—including pleasures and identities. In this chapter I have discussed three different ways of thinking about the “intensifying worth of literacy” that Brandt observes (169). Rather than assuming that the economic value of literacies appears as

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a human capital resource, I have argued that in an attention economy, literacies produce value. The increase in the value of literacy is not determined by the rising market value of human capital, but by the increase and productivity of literacy labor. In the workplace, literacies have become significantly more valuable in a number of different ways, not only through the elaborately precise communications required by just-in-time corporate management, but also in design processes, in organizing routine ser vices, even in heavy manufacturing with the use of CNC routing and the like. As Brandt emphasized over a decade ago, such a list could become quite extensive. The role of literacies in the process that Jonathan Beller describes as a socially necessary labor of self-constitution has become equally central. Constructed in specific ways around the just-in-time human capital ideology of choice, selves yield surplus labor through and by means of literacy skills, as both workers and consumers. Finally, as I argued in the section above, literacies make basic processes of attention flows available to an attention market by coordinating the linkages between those larger dynamics of attention and the pleasures and dramas of individual identity education. But what about the paradox Brandt poses so effectively, about how it is that despite the democratic potential of literacy, in fact literacy skills with their intensified value seem only to be reinforcing a familiar rich-get-richer social division? In previous chapters I have developed multiple lines of analysis about the social inequity she identifies. The assumption that literacy has human capital value prevents any understanding of the growing value of literacy work. As an abstraction from labor and a mystification of the basic idea of labor power, human capital subsumes literacy into a thoroughly antiegalitarian market dynamics. More specifically, as I argued in chapter 2, the just-in-timing of human capital operates at an even more abstract level around the central core of human agency as choice. Just-in-time thereby provides powerful ideological justification for the elimination of jobs, and people, assumed to be inessen-

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tial or inefficient. Literacy skills, even to a very sophisticated degree, do not necessarily provide any protection at all from elimination once the complicated structures of merit and seniority have been demolished. As Brandt’s paradox anticipates, the dismantling of merit-based elitism has led to an even greater concentration of wealth at the top rather than to any democratization of either wealth or privilege. Goldhaber’s star/fan analysis represents accurately enough the scarcity of those “star” positions in an economy where multitudes of fans supply the work. Being pulled “into the engines of productivity and profit,” however, also means that at the same time literacies are being pulled into class divisions and conflicts. Or more exactly, as I will argue in the next chapter, it means that specific forms of literacy are constituted to produce and sustain these class processes within a basic configuration of economic relations. Over and above the everyday political rants about which political party really is fomenting class division, rising poverty levels and growing income inequality have brought class back into at least a kind of public focus. Liberal critics and, surprisingly, at least some conservatives as well have found recent statistics too obvious to ignore. Not surprisingly at all, the idea of human capital plays a central role here. The promise of capitalist economics has always been carried on the pairing of individual qualities of character with the acquisition of wealth. Within the conception of human capital, this pair becomes a singleton. In conservative accounts especially, discussions of class then quickly become little more than descriptions of group character traits. By focusing instead on literacy labor I want to begin at another point entirely, by challenging the assumption shared by liberals and conservatives concerned about income inequalities—that human capital has emerged as the single most important productive source of economic value in contemporary conditions.

chapter 4

Capital Divisions and Literacy Work

In The Race between Technology and Education, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz document a relatively long period beginning early in the twentieth century during which income inequality in the United States gradually diminished. This did not always happen at the same rate, and certainly did not happen everywhere at the same time for everyone, but according to their account, the overall picture from after the Depression until around 1980 shows a continual reduction. Their claim is that in this century of human capital, the lessening of income inequality can be correlated generally with the gradual climb in educational attainment, if again not always in a smooth curve. Beginning early in the last two decades of the century, however, conditions were reversed. Educational attainment lost its momentum. Arguably human capital became even more important, but growth in human capital was increasingly concentrated in certain sectors of the population. By the end of the twentieth century, disparities in income had returned to almost the same levels seen during its first decades. Goldin and Katz draw the title of their book from their basic thesis about the relations among education, technology, and income ine-

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quality. During much of the twentieth century, when income inequality was lessening, the educational system was meeting the economy’s increased demand for more highly educated individuals. Education was keeping up in the “race” with technological change. While technological innovation continued at a rapid pace during the last two decades of the century, educational attainment lagged behind, resulting in the reversal of the progress made in reducing income inequality. It is hardly surprising that liberal economists such as Goldin and Katz focus on rising inequality in income. It has been unusual, however, to find much interest in the issue among conservatives, and it is perhaps particularly surprising that longtime libertarian Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve (1994), has taken an interest in what income inequality means for the future of the United States, as demonstrated in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. The book does contain some very visible graphs and statistics, but in contrast to Goldin and Katz, who present a meticulously researched account, Murray is far more intent on explaining character and motivation than on presenting plot details. Like Goldin and Katz, he identifies the last two decades of the twentieth century as a period when income disparities began to increase once again. Income inequality, however, is only a symptom of the story that really interests him: the disintegration of American society and the threat to the exceptionalism of the American project posed by the growing class divide. The “coming apart” that Murray sees as having occurred by the first decade of the twenty-first century seems far more intensely imagined than anything he can summon in his putatively hopeful “alternative futures” conclusion. In his view, the dominant elite is now so completely segregated from the working class that they have no idea at all about everyday lives and interests beyond their own class locations. The book’s famous quiz, highlighted in a 16 April 2012 Time Magazine story on Murray, is intended to encourage those in the elite to recognize the completeness of their own “bubble” of isolation. Given Murray’s interests, the role of human capital is rather more ambiguously implicated than in Goldin and Katz’s highly

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optimistic account of the potential for an increase in educational attainment and more widely distributed human capital resources to once again reduce income inequality. Nevertheless, like Goldin and Katz he accepts the self-sustaining economic productivity of human capital as a given. While not as inclined to provide statistical data as are Goldin and Katz, he does often point out, for example, how the smallest differentials of individual cognitive skill and ability in the highestplaced decision makers can produce huge differences in corporate profits, given the scale of the financial stakes. Human capital wealth in effect not only sustains itself, but also produces a competitive edge that pays off directly. The qualities of character and what Murray calls “cognitive talent” that characterize the explosion of human capital, however, were set in motion by economic dynamics that have led to class polarization and the destruction of fundamental American virtues: “The economic dynamics that brought about the class society I deplore have, paradoxically, fostered the blooming of America’s human capital. Those dynamics will increase, not diminish, our competitiveness on the world stage for the years ahead. Nor do I forecast decline in America’s military and diplomatic supremacy. But the American project was not about maximizing national wealth nor about international dominance” (Coming Apart, 12). The economic productivity of human capital will keep the United States ahead internationally; the problem lies within. The economic importance of human capital allows possessors of high quantities of it the luxury of hanging out together, like with like, rather than having to mix with the more cognitively challenged, and this creates a class divide that is growing wider all the time, according to Murray. Goldin and Katz are hopeful about the potential of a renewed national commitment to higher educational attainment for everyone. Yet they often seem as puzzled about the attitudes of youth toward education and its effects on income over the last two decades as they are confident in their plotting of the reduction of income inequality through much of the twen-

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tieth century. In their relatively brief concluding chapter, after reiterating the familiar human-capital mantra that educational attainment pays off for individuals, they ask: “What is keeping young people from choosing to further their education?” (Race between Technology and Education, 337). The question is repeated several times in various versions, and they find no easy answers. In contrast to Murray’s exclusive focus on white groups until nearly the end of his argument, Goldin and Katz recognize a signal failure of the K-12 public education system to prepare nonwhite students in particular for college: “The K-12 system is less than perfect for many students, but it is important to recognize that schools are essentially failing particular students. Those left behind by the system are mainly minority children in inner-city schools who become the youths who are not college ready” (348). Lack of preparation is crucial, and specific groups suffer the worst. Nevertheless Goldin and Katz must also admit that levels of K-12 educational attainment in the United States, as mea sured by graduation rates, have remained generally flat in comparison to those in other developed nations. New definitions of literacy that include many different modes and practices point toward part of the story that seems to baffle Goldin and Katz even more, the disengagement of many youth from seeking educational attainment. Studies such as the widely publicized 2011 Nielsen survey, for example, report higher rates of smartphone adoption among minority groups than among whites. A follow-up survey in 2012 turned up virtually the same results. A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study reported similar results for poor children and minorities with regard to Internet usage generally. Thus if smartphone and Internet use can be understood as dependent on specific forms of literacy, then indeed literacy skills appear far more widespread than in the past, across a greater range of population groups. Even the use of the term literacy has increased exponentially, picking up more and more adjectives along the way. In line with Brandt’s recognition of a potential democratization of literacy skills, the

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hopeful conclusion would be that despite the flattening out of the rise in formal educational attainment that Goldin and Katz document, perhaps the “race” between technology and education might already be on the way to peaceful settlement outside the classroom. Educators simply have not caught up as yet. A less-than-hopeful skepticism, however, shifts the focus away from more and more young people with multiple literacy skills, to the issue of how this apparent democratizing of a human capital resource nevertheless occurs simultaneously with the continuing increase in income inequality. From his libertarian point of view, with its emphasis on individual character, Murray has no trouble at all with the question of why so many young people choose not to further their educations, whether they can use smartphones or not. He argues that in fact the children of the elite do get all the schooling they need, and it is the best schooling, even better than in the past. The basic problem is that working-class young people lack the motivation and the necessary character traits to succeed educationally. According to Murray, in part this is because they no longer have the support of close-knit communities with shared religious beliefs in which they could learn those traits from birth. But Murray also assigns blame to the usual libertarian target, the Nanny State, which in his view undermines initiative or willingness to work hard. Beyond both of these causes for young people’s purported lack of motivation, however, Murray presents the larger and more inclusive vision of a class divide that has grown worse and worse, cutting across both race and gender lines. In contrast to what he sees as some relative progress in racial desegregation, the dominant elite and the working class have grown further apart than ever. Members of this elite have long since ceased to mingle in any kind of common social space, and class divisions have now become so entrenched that there appears little interest in or reason for crossing class lines, let alone for challenging the boundaries. Educational attainment is central to human capital for Murray no less than for Goldin and Katz, but in his

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argument it does not necessarily follow that school reform would spread the wealth of human capital more widely by making higher educational attainment available to more people. The immediate problem is that educational attainment is not the same across the board for a range of students, even when the results among them, in terms of years of schooling, look similar on paper. More significantly, the payoff for certain kinds of elite educational attainment is not, in any case, primarily a matter of income. Murray is willing to make the conceptual leap from the data about income inequality to the idea of a kind of class division more fundamental than that keyed to disparities in material wealth. In his view, income inequality is only a symptom of a much larger class divide, not a paradigm for how to understand or to change that division. Given his belief in individual character as a kind of final cause, however, Murray’s analysis of this “coming apart” ignores far too much about larger social and economic processes to be particularly useful as an explanatory framework. Nor does his skepticism about the democratizing role of human capital extend to questioning the assumption that at the present time human capital is the primary producer of economic value. I have argued throughout that human capital value represents an abstraction from all the labor processes necessary to its production. Human capital is far from being an immediate source of value; the process through which it is produced itself draws on considerable resources. As Goldin and Katz at least realize, the educational attainment of individuals is achieved only through a pervasive structure of educational institutions and the work of an immense number of people, both inside and outside those institutions. I would add to their account that in the United States, public school systems have always been expected to do many more things than produce individual human capital resources. The more important the production of human capital as an economic asset becomes, however, the less likely it is that other educational goals, from citizenship

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training to arts skills and appreciation, can be met at all. Even if, as Murray calculates, a slight uptick in individual human capital at the upper corporate level may make a major difference in profits, this profit increase does not come without a price that others must pay. Given how social and economic pressures concentrate educational focus on producing human capital assets, that price is largely exacted from the white working class Murray worries about and from the racial minorities he mostly ignores. In the first volume of Capital, Marx described the concentration of capital as a transformation of many smaller capitals into a much larger capital, with a resulting loss everywhere else. The greater this capital concentration becomes, the higher the level of capital necessary to assume a role in the central concentration. Meanwhile on the periphery, he argued, competition becomes far more intense, and a great deal of capital loss occurs, at the same time that smaller capitals are taken over by the larger capital at the center. For Marx the middle class is increasingly squeezed out of existence as concentration builds. Considered in relation to its massive educational production system and the support that educational institutions require, human capital, I will argue below, follows a trajectory very similar to that described by Marx. A high concentration of human capital is impossible without class division and polarization. The enclave living pattern of the high cognitive achievers that Murray describes is a fundamental result of human capital abstraction from the specific forms of labor available for exploitation and from the production and support structures required to create that capital. In terms of education, the problem is not that school reforms have yet to be seriously implemented. Dominant class interests depend on radical reforms that have already had great success in their own terms, if obviously not in line with the democratization and increased equality promised by current versions of the literacy myth. One of the great illusions about human capital is that almost everything that matters depends on the individual psy-

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chology of its possessors. Because of how human capital has been theorized across the centuries, from Adam Smith to Gary Becker, as embodied in a person, it seems natural enough to assume that the person must have specific motivation and abilities in order to take on the difficulties of acquiring human capital resources. In one sense, the story is familiar with respect to virtually any form of capital. Apologists for capitalism have always argued that high capital formation depends on very special people whose efforts then benefit the entire society in ways no one else’s efforts can. At the same time, however, individual success in the acquisition of tangible, material capital assets has also proven easy to criticize—in personal, moral, and political terms. Every representation of the ambitious, hardworking individual deservedly getting ahead can easily be matched by other representations of financial terrorists carving their way to the top through the rapacious destruction of others, or soulless automatons living only for wealth. Generally speaking, human capital fares better on all counts. In personal terms, its acquisition is represented as broadening character rather than narrowing the individual’s interests to a single focus on wealth. It is obviously true enough that certain individuals may be more advantageously placed than others for becoming rich in human capital, by having a supportive family life, access to a good education, and so on, but the process of human capital acquisition does not lend itself to the imagery of a zero-sum game in quite the same way as does the acquisition of material wealth. The potential moral and political liabilities attendant on the amassing of material capital thus seem diminished with respect to human capital. Taking advantage of position to increase one’s human capital does not necessarily take material goods away from other people, and Goldin and Katz, like a great many others, have argued that productivity in the twentieth century and beyond has depended more and more on developing greater individual human capital. Since human capital is assumed to be a means of production that needs to be produced, there is every reason to improve the educational

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system and make access to higher education more available to more people. In short, in contrast to their counterparts who are rich in material assets, individuals rich in human capital have received reasonably good press from many quarters—with the major recent exception of Charles Murray. He is not entirely alone in this by any means, having been preceded by over two decades by the closing argument of liberal economist Robert Reich in The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for TwentyFirst-Century Capitalism (1991), about “the secession of the successful” from the life of the nation—an argument Murray quotes with strong approval (Coming Apart, 70). But Murray is especially adamant about the division of classes as fundamental groundwork for the general increase in human capital value. For Murray two congruent processes are at work to separate out an elite upper class from others and bind the individuals together in a kind of “bubble” isolation. “The college sorting machine” not only brings together “people with distinctive tastes and preferences” (Coming Apart, 52), but even more importantly facilitates “the interaction between high cognitive ability and education in general, and more specifically between high cognitive ability and elite colleges” (52–53). In his account, this elite college sorting machine was built with incredible speed between 1950 and 1960: “The average college freshman at Harvard in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960” (53). Citing Roger Geiger’s “The Competition for High-Ability Students: The University in a Key Marketplace,” Murray wants to show that by the end of the twentieth century, cognitive ability had been overwhelmingly concentrated in a top tier of colleges. Geiger used data for 1997 to calculate approximately how many high-scoring students (those scoring 1400 and above on the SAT or 30 and above on the ACT) attended the thirty-five highest-ranking public universities, the thirty-five highest-ranking private universities, and thirty-five highly selective small colleges. Murray notes that “[a]ll 105 schools, which accounted for just 19 percent of all freshmen in 1997, accounted for 74 percent of students

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with SAT or ACT scores in the top five centiles” (56). Ten schools alone took up 20 percent of that top group. What follows for Murray is the intensification of “cognitive homogamy,” the inevitable result “when individuals with similar cognitive ability have children” (61). Turning to where the upper-class elite lives, Murray explains the complementary work of what he calls “the residential sorting machine” by developing an index of education and income to map every zip code in the United States. The goal is to locate and identify those “SuperZips” where the combined score extends from the 95th through the 99th centile. Sounding as implacable as Pierre Bourdieu in Homo Academicus, with a much broader scope to his generalizations from the data, his conclusion is that “the college sorting machine replicates itself with remarkable fidelity as the residential sorting machine” (88). Through their educational experiences, marriages, and residential living patterns, an upper-class elite shares a culture and a broad outlook on life despite significant political differences. They are not by any means homogeneously liberal, as the usual cliché about overeducated snobs would have it. Murray’s point is that because members of this elite live largely isolated from the rest of the country, surrounded only by one another, they can have little idea about the political motivations of all those others out there somewhere. Murray sees little hope of tempering that isolation by political reform of any sort. An upper-class elite “will continue to congregate in the nicest places to live, with nicest defined as places where they can be around other talented, wealthy people like themselves, living in the most desirable parts of town, isolated from everyone else. It is human nature that they should do so. How is one to fight that with public policy?” (120). The economic and social benefits derived from the productivity of that upper class are considerable, and it seems likely that the benefits will continue to include the best international economic positioning for the United States. For Murray, as for Reich earlier, one can only hope that at some point the members

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of this upper class will realize that their own broad-based interests ultimately should line up with the larger interests of the country in which they live. Apparently Murray has persuaded a few other prominent conservatives, such as David Brooks, to join him in his representation of basic character flaws in the current elite. Yet after all the marshaling of argument to represent a class divide with its potentially devastating effects on the nation, the story nevertheless just trails off finally into this political version of a weepie. Gee, if they could just learn to be better people. Frank Donoghue’s account of what he calls “the prestige game” in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities productively complicates Murray’s description of that college sorting machine. By keeping his focus on institutions rather than speculating about the human nature of individuals in a dominant elite, Donoghue can help explain both the stakes in the game and the intense internal competition involved. Interestingly enough, if for different reasons, Donoghue also insists, like Murray, that financial incentives are not really the primary issue. While some researchers such as Carolyn Hoxby have tried to demonstrate that an education at a highly selective university pays off materially in eventual earnings, Donoghue argues that her conclusions are skewed by too many variables. In fact, he notes, “an earlier study of a comparable time frame by economists Alan B. Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale contradicts Hoxby’s basic conclusions” (113), suggesting instead no increase at all in earnings due to a degree from a prestigious school. At that extreme upper level of selective schools, the stakes are finally not about money. For Donoghue, prestige has a singular meaning in the United States that is very closely tied to consumer status: “[T]he American version of prestige is distinctive: it is not perceived as a natural quality or necessarily as an aspect of long-standing, time-honored traditions; rather, it is integral to consumer culture” (111). The prize is first of all ownership status, not monetary rewards. For individuals, an elite college degree is a rare

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kind of commodity indeed, its material invisibility (in contrast to many other commodities) one sign of its special value. For institutions, prestige marks out membership in an elite. Thus from Donoghue’s institutional perspective, the real mystery about prestige is less a matter of top-tier players than of those in the middle ranks. Given the consumer stakes of prestige and the difficulty of quantifying it (as U.S. News and World Report attempts to do in its notorious rankings), Donoghue asks: “What motivates state universities without money or selective admissions to compete for prestige, a contest they are bound to lose every time?” (112). Donoghue recognizes that prestige is about institutions as well as individuals. Like individual earnings, however, prestige, in Donoghue’s sense, is commodity or product-oriented; it involves product comparison—a degree from this institution is better, or worse, than a degree from that institution, and the better commodity carries more prestige. But human capital, as capital, is not a commodity; it is an economic asset in a different sense than either earnings or prestige in that commodity sense. Prestige may be embodied in a person, but its value can be realized somewhere else, in another form altogether. When Murray’s architecture of education and living patterns is understood as describing a concentration of human capital rather than as a matter of individual likes and dislikes, how prestige functions as human capital becomes clearer. As Marx explained in talking about the concentration of capital generally, everything about the structural organization of the world of human capital sustains an imaginary, for those living within the inner circle of concentrated human capital, of how the forces driving everything are centered here. Thus in larger terms, the prestige bestowed by having an elite education translates, as if it were possession of a rare kind of consumer good, into a position within the inner circle. The puzzle Donoghue presents about second-tier schools makes more sense when viewed from this perspective of capital concentration. From within the inner circle, human capital

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appears as if it were the only game in town, deleting all connections to dependence on anything beyond itself. Whether motivated to compete in this game or loath to do so, “state universities without money or selective admissions” have little option except to compete as best they can in these impossible circumstances. In the middle is no place to try to survive the forces at work in the concentration of human capital that is taking place. Human capital conditions, in other words, are simply another form of the conditions of capital generally that, as Marx anticipated, offer little security at all and intense competitive pressures throughout a middle sector. Material resources and labor as a commodity may not always directly involve an educational support system, but human capital requires a quite extensive process of education in order to be represented as a productive resource assumed to yield value. A prestige education is dedicated to precisely that educational process. In his emphasis on how an elite education is about more than money, Murray as usual explains the issue in terms of character. An upper-class elite, he argues, “is enabled by affluence—people with common tastes and preferences need enough money to be able to congregate—but it is not driven by affluence” (120; Murray’s emphasis). Put another way, however, the point is that human capital is no more about hoarding than is any other form of capital. The process I am describing involves the simultaneous expansion and concentration of human capital value, not affluence or its displays. Likewise, despite the efforts of researchers such as Carolyn Hoxby to locate material economic benefits in terms of higher incomes for the recipients of an elite education, there seems nothing beyond the self-enclosing circle of human capital production. Outcomes are no more commodified than the labor resulting from the educational process. Input and output become virtually indistinguishable in the equilibrium of prestige. In contrast, like openly for-profit educational institutions, a number of postsecondary schools that are in the middle in terms of prestige do make direct claims about the training in

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job skills they provide. While job training is sometimes assumed to be incompatible with the prestige game, Donoghue points out that in fact these schools in the middle very frequently attempt to market themselves as providing both training and the prestige of a college education. In isolation, promotions concerning job training for specific occupations regularly include salary range and job availability information, and that kind of information indirectly functions as a reminder that the work at issue already appears as a labor market commodity through the anticipated wage/labor exchange process. Job training as such promises to improve the student’s position, not to exempt him or her from the labor market exchange. When job training is linked to the promise of a college education, however, educational institutions—particularly the large state universities that do attempt to compete in the prestige game— can suggest that something more is at stake, beyond these market exchanges. The very idea that a college education will get you a good job is already linked to prestige, even in the case of the most blatant claims about job training from the for-profits. Ideally, college does not simply equip you to do better in the job market. Its further promise is an endowment of human capital resources that will allow you to better control your own destiny. Possession of a college degree might indeed improve your odds for job advancement or for job mobility in specific circumstances, but such human capital resources might equally well assure an ability to handle the retraining necessary to change and grow along with the needs of that occupation, or the flexibility to move to another occupation altogether, with the accompanying sense of greater autonomy to command whatever life choices you anticipate in your future. When the significance of the college degree is advertised in tandem with the promise of training, as is so often the case with institutions in the middle tiers, the training in specific job skills continues to connect to the labor market, while in contrast the promise of the degree tracks powerfully toward the prestige-game concentration

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of human capital. As Donoghue’s logic anticipates, such promises from institutions in the middle can make little sense if they are imagined to be an aspect of direct competition with the most selectively prestigious schools, for that is “a contest they are bound to lose every time” (112). But while the gravitational pull at the top is toward prestige, middle-tier schools are perhaps better understood as competing sideways and below— competing against other middle-tier schools, and against schools in the lower tier, despite what administrators may say about aiming at elite-school standards. The situation of such institutions is much like what Marx had described as the fate of those in the middle of intra-capital competitive struggles. At the same time, for all the internal intensities at any given point, the important general effect of these competitive pressures is to extend human capital domination well beyond the concentration at the upper-class level. Even wage labor and the training for wage labor can be made to reappear in the form of the individual’s investment in his or her own human capital. The only game in town keeps right on going, through the town and beyond. Across the spectrum of postsecondary educational institutions, for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix and DeVry Institute, with their more obviously direct appeal to job training, are likely to seem at the furthest remove from prestige schools. Donoghue describes their astonishingly rapid growth as well as reporting on the financial and student-recruiting scandals that were making headlines by 2008, when The Last Professors was published. For Donoghue the most significant element of the story is not necessarily the rise and subsequent troubles of specific for-profits, but the portability of their organizational systems when public funding for universities has been declining for some time: “The real legacy of this industry, I believe, is its lasting and widespread influence on traditional universities. Whatever the fate of specific campuses of the University of Phoenix, Career Education, or DeVry, these companies have demonstrated that it is possible to operate a university

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as a business. . . . The business model for higher education devised by the for-profits has tremendous appeal to administrators and lawmakers in an era of steadily declining public funding and tuition increases that are quickly becoming prohibitive” (104). The for-profits’ recruiting practices were a major target of inquiry and a source of scandal about them, but Charles Murray’s account of the building of the college sorting machine shows targeted recruiting as a central element for more traditional schools as well. For some time, schools have solicited groups of new students with specific interests and abilities as, in effect, a way to establish a university “brand” that will distinguish them from other schools. Such branding practices have become a common discussion thread on university sites as well as on sites dedicated more specifically to business practices. The business model Donoghue describes as imported from the for-profits, including the practice of recruiting students on the basis of who will be paying more, and targeting more out-of-state and foreign students, has now become an established practice of traditional public universities. The University of California, my own home system, has recently joined other top-tier public universities in aggressively going after groups of students who must pay many times more than in-state California students. Prestige universities have operated as businesses for some time—they are in the business of producing human capital. Literacies play important roles throughout the entire range of educational institutions, from the for-profits to the most elite colleges. Sometimes specific literacy skills are prominently featured as a part of special training and certificate programs, especially in community colleges and technical institutions. In the upper reaches of the prestige game, the emphasis might well fall on superior, cutting-edge technological sophistication instead of job-related literacy skills. The idea is to make these technologies routinely available to students who are likely already very familiar with how all this works and tuned to expect

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the latest innovations to be part of their disciplinary training. Beyond such familiar institutional practices, however, literacies figure significantly within a whole complex sector of educational processes that extend, rather than duplicate, the many areas in which literacies function institutionally. In one sense the content of a local Parks Department evening class in “smartphone literacy for seniors,” for example, might be said to duplicate the learning of skills that most people in the community already possess. Yet considered as a specific process of education, its function seems different. The class exists in the first place because for this clientele the learning is not easily available anywhere else. It extends the range of educational processes. Further, for all the individuals involved it also temporally concentrates and systemizes an education that might otherwise have been quite diffuse and unfocused, or focused somewhere else altogether. Education is expanded both spatially and temporally, with a form of literacy appearing centrally in the process. By now such phrases as computer literacy and digital literacy are long familiar; Congress has declared that April is officially “financial literacy month,” and so on. The immediate issue for a number of critics is how this practice of attaching adjectives to literacy has proliferated to the point that the general picture of the spread of literacy has become an incomprehensible jumble rather than an example of the process of education at work. Web searches involving the term literacy, for example, are almost impossible to narrow unless you already have a pretty good idea what you are looking for. Even theorists and researchers who have argued powerfully for accepting the principle of multiple literacies against more traditional conceptions have become concerned about the difficulties raised by what I call adjectival literacy. At best, these critiques claim, adjectival literacies empty the term of meaningful content, and at worst they use the terms literacy and illiteracy to disguise specific ideological interests. Writing together in the foreword to Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell’s Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies, a collec-

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tion of essays intended to explore productive connections between New Literacy Studies (NLS) and multimodal communications research, Gunther Kress and Brian Street express considerable concern about the proliferation of literacy as a term of identification for a wider and wider range of skills: “For instance, in both approaches there is a worry about the stretching of the term literacy well beyond the NLS conception of social practices of representation to become a metaphor (and often much less than that) for any kind of skill or competence. One needs to ask whose interests are advanced and in what ways by the use of labels such as ‘palpatory literacy’ (skills in body massage), ‘emotional literacy’ (skills in affective massage?), ‘cultural literacy’ (skills in social massage??), and so on” (Travel Notes foreword, vii; Kress and Street’s emphasis). After all, marketing a particular set of ideological values as if it were a “literacy” makes it much easier to criticize those with other interests as not yet educated enough to understand the real issues: “[W]here a ‘literacy’ is identified, those with an interest in finding the corresponding illiterates are never far behind with their remedies” (vii). The Council for Economic Education provides some strong justification for the fears Street and Kress express about ideological interests intent on providing remedies for the illiterates among us. The Council proudly boasts on its website’s home page that it has been “leading the charge for economic education and advancing financial literacy for over 60 years,” particularly during April, which is “financial literacy month.” Among other resources available on its website(www.councilforeconed .org) is a series of carefully elaborated lesson plans designed for K-12 students (complete with content standards for teachers) that teach them, in increments, the basics of neoclassical economics. According to these plans, already by the fourth grade students should have grasped central concepts about scarcity and free markets. In addition, by the fourth grade they must learn to practice new skills, thereby starting to build their human capital early. It’s good for them, and good for the country.

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Over the last few years the Council has developed more and more online resources, including Gen i Revolution, an online game for middle and high school students in which they are introduced to characters facing a specific financial crisis: “[T]he student learns about the crisis, strategically selects ‘Operatives,’ and then completes activities with the ultimate goal of solving the mission” (Gen i Revolution, “Overview”). You just have to learn to make the right choices. Frequent surveys during the sixty years of the Council’s existence have attempted to document the persistence of financial illiteracy, which needless to say comes down to an inability to grasp fundamental neoclassical economic doctrines. Despite the Council’s best efforts in the past, clearly more work is necessary. Street and Kress are not the only ones to express criticism about increasingly widespread use of adjectival literacy terms. When longtime literacy historian Harvey Graff turns to the present in Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons, he devotes much of a chapter to distinguishing between the idea of multiple literacies that he supports and the process whereby nearly every kind of adjective gets attached to literacy: “ ‘Many literacies’—a conception I have long supported—sits precariously between an essential, and a necessary recognition, and the dangers of trivialization and debasement of literacy. Overuse of the word ‘literacy’ and the concept empties it of value and useful meanings” (22). Later, in a footnote, he is rather more emphatic: “I have a list of more than 500 ‘literacies’ that I’ve seen mentioned in print. Although I support notions of ‘many literacies,’ I do not endorse the ceaseless, confusing, critically uncontrolled, and potentially dangerous proliferation of ‘literacies’ ” (34, n 32). From a disciplinary angle different from Graff ’s, Patrick Goggin in Professing Literacy in Composition Studies wastes no time in attacking how the term literacy has been trivialized by leaving definitions basically a matter of whatever anyone wants to make up on any occasion: “Another side of the ‘literacy is whatever anyone wants it to be’ perspective is that it represents the trivialization of literacy and the perpetuation of what Graff (2006) calls a ‘new’ literacy myth” (5).

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Powerful ideological interests certainly helped shape the older, exclusionary definitions of literacy that Street and other New Literacy Studies critics began to challenge several decades ago. Specific interests are also at stake among the labels and categories Street and Kress instance in their foreword to Pahl and Rowsell’s Travel Notes, and quite likely with all five hundred adjectival literacies that Graff reports having seen in print. Yet once one identifies the ideological claims in definitions of “financial literacy” or “cultural literacy,” to pick obvious examples, it does not follow that the same interests are shaping the definitions of “palpatory literacy” or “depression literacy.” Even within a single category such as “gun literacy,” where one might well expect a powerfully concentrated ideological focus, especially in light of recent events, there seem to be a range of interests at work, as evidenced by various websites devoted to the subject, and often a single link on a site may lead to multiple and very different threads. A number of sites devoted to “gun literacy” appear to be dedicated to little more than a kind of basic knowledge of the field, exchanging information about the terminology associated with various weapons and ammunition, such as caliber and cartridge size and so on. Yet terminology is never really an ideology-free zone, and even under the guise of simple instruction in the fundamentals, issues of terminology can easily appear more fraught. For example, on a page of the For Journalists website intended to educate journalists in the basic literacy about guns necessary for covering firearms-related stories, it would be difficult not to recognize a tone familiar from other uses of these terms in more directly obvious propaganda pieces. The website instructions for journalists (which have since disappeared from the site as I had originally accessed it) came complete with insider warnings about how those in the know would “cringe at the Georgia newspaper’s story about 16mm mortar fins, or the Boston television station’s report on a guy being caught with a .50-caliber assault rifle, which actually turned out to be a .30-caliber belt-fed, tripod-mounted machine gun—some 30 pounds of equipment that absolutely nobody is going to put on

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their shoulder in an ‘assault’ ” (Gun Guide: Basic Gun Literacy, at www.forjournalists.com). Whatever ideological work Street and Kress’s comments might accurately anticipate are at work within individual categories such as “financial literacy” or “gun literacy,” however, the same specific interests will hardly appear across the entire spectrum of adjectival literacies—hence the conclusion that Goggin draws, that literacy now appears as little more than an honorific attached to altogether separate activities. In these recent circumstances, in which adjectival attachments to the term continue to proliferate, the identification of any given set of interests at work in assigning a particular label cannot really address the issue of what drives the process of proliferation in the first place. The kind of ideological critique New Literacy Studies had directed at the exclusive, hierarchical control exercised by traditional definitions of literacy is unlikely to have the same force that it once did. Specific critique directed at any one category remains basically nontransferable to the others, especially given that new categories continue to appear. The immediate issue is less the efforts of the Council on Economic Education or anyone else to indoctrinate and drive home a single point of view—no surprise there—than why the term literacy might feature so prominently across so many different sites, with the numbers increasing all the time. How is it that literacy seems an ideal cover for ideological or any other interests? Recent history offers some guidance. “The Professional-Managerial Class” by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, which appeared as the lead article in the collection Between Labor and Capital (edited by Pat Walker,1979), helped generate a lot of interest among academic critics trying to define and understand what the rise of a professional class was all about. As with the term literacy in current circumstances, academic critics often did not agree at all on basic definitions of professional. Meanwhile, however, outside of academia the term seemed to have multiplied. Professional was appearing everywhere, from glossily expensive ad campaigns to the Yellow Pages and the classifieds.

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To critical eyes the result could easily be seen as a trivializing of the term almost to the point of meaninglessness, to little more than the empty honorific Goggin claims literacy has become in many situations today. Like the loosening of the meaning of literacy later, the term professional appeared in relation to jobs and people that had little grounds to be recognized as professional, becoming no more than a metaphor “for any kind of skill or competence,” as Street and Kress remark about literacy. In an age of human capital built on the credentialing of expertise, principles of merit, and the idea of personally embodied capital skills, the proliferation of the term professional signaled something like the emergence of a black market in facsimile goods. People were marketing themselves and their job skills as if “the real thing,” with no credentialing, no guarantee at all of authenticity. At the same time, charges hurled at others of being “unprofessional,” like charges of “illiteracy,” could mask a lot of different ideological interests. Yet despite the similarities, Graff ’s own example of “depression literacy,” as well as the websites I have instanced above, suggests a key difference. Even in the Yellow Pages or in classified ads, the use of professional made a human capital claim, in effect, for the individual or the firm’s workers. It implied a higher level of specially acquired skill and accreditation than that offered by competitors. To some people these claims may have been suspect or empty or whatever, but they pointed first toward the speaker. Graff ’s example of depression literacy, in contrast, similar to financial literacy or gun literacy or the other uses mentioned above, does not seem to involve much emphasis on the speaker’s qualifications. Graff reports that he discovered the term depression literacy in the Medical Journal of Australia. Beyond Blue, in a statement of the organization’s objective on its website (beyondblue.org), emphasizes that depression literacy involves a struggle against public apathy and avoidance of the issues, that it is a means to help improve awareness and understanding of depression by educating a larger public. That is, the statement takes for granted that those in

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the organization understand a lot about depression, as the Council for Economic Education assumes its members possess knowledge of economics, and so on. Unlike the typical use of the term professional, uses of the term literacy such as this are not primarily part of an individual’s or a firm’s self-representation. Literacy in these contexts is all about an audience and audience education. Educational directives about literacy aimed at a particular potential audience are hardly new, but as Graff acknowledges, the market has changed when the many literacies around must “struggle to bloom and for recognition, often competing for attention and privilege in curricula, budgets, standards, tests, even law and policy—and for mention in print and other media” (Literacy Myths, 21). In an attention economy it is never enough to know about something— depression, or emotions, or body massaging, or whatever. It is also necessary to develop a power of representation that can command attention elsewhere and educate others about how and why to pay attention. The proliferation of adjectival literacies is also the proliferation of representational practices and educational imperatives. It may occur very much at the periphery of educational institutions in their many different forms, but adjectival literacy is no less an educational project. Some organizations, such as the Council for Economic Education, use their websites to extend their educational reach, as I mentioned above, by directly offering resources to the public schools for K-12 instruction. Others, such as Beyond Blue, are more intent on educating the general public and acting as a clearinghouse for information. For the maze of websites devoted to gun literacy, the audience seems composed of individuals and groups already interested in firearms, often already affiliated with some form of gun organization, and wary about outsiders who might have different values and interests altogether. The specific educational practices can vary a great deal, but pedagogical processes remain central. At the same time, the claims to attention represented by adjectival literacies typically encourage some sense that the po-

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tential audience should want to educate itself about the issues and knowledges involved. From web pages devoted to newbie gun instruction to a relatively massive website such as that of the Council for Economic Education, the expectation is that audiences should buy in to the education on offer. If use of the term professional seems a matter of selling the self or the firm as rich in human capital and thereby qualified to do the job especially well, websites devoted to adjectival literacies, in contrast, are selling an audience on acquiring a form of socially or individually valuable knowledge. Thus in some baseline sense, the pitch is little different from that of any postsecondary educational institution. The idea is that you should spend time and expend effort here as a student in order to receive something important for your future. As Graff acknowledges, the competition has come to be intense, as it often is among educational institutions in recruiting students. What you get from this paying of attention and learning at the periphery, however, is not always clear, by any means. This is not a matter of defining literacy carelessly or not at all, although cogent definitions may well be lacking. To use Graff ’s example of depression literacy again, it seems true enough that a better-educated general public might in the long run benefit medical research and those who suffer from depression. But given that the education offered by the idea of depression literacy is one without degree, accreditation, or the promise of a job, the open question is what’s in it for those members of the general public who do follow through. Even relatively sophisticated sites like that of Beyond Blue, built around a generally recognized “good cause,” seem to imply that somehow what you will acquire through attending to its resources will be, just like a college degree, a kind of human capital good. As I remarked above, acquiring human capital resources is usually represented as a process that broadens the individual, unlike the acquisition of material capital. In addition to educational institutions and organizations operating at the periphery to offer adjectival literacy education,

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businesses often develop new literacies in house, as Lesley Farrell and other workplace researchers emphasize. Rather than depend on schools to produce skilled, or “literate,” workers and to determine the norms of usage, businesses engage in their own development and education programs. As Farrell argues in “Texting the Future: Work, Literacies, and Economies,” literacy researchers have been slow to catch on to what has been happening: “To date, most empirically based literacy studies have occurred in school and community settings. This is understandable; schools are recognized as places where children and young people learn the valued literate practices of their societies and community settings are the well springs of local literacies. Workplaces have only relatively recently been understood to be sites in which literacy is not only used but also learned and produced” (182). Although literacies developed in the workplace are hardly adjectival literacies in the same sense as those discussed above, the development of such literacies adds a whole other sector to the range of literacy education occurring beyond schools and local communities. In comparison to the scale of the already existing network of charter schools, private schools and colleges, and for-profit universities, the pedagogies of adjectival literacy exist very much at the periphery of an increasingly privatized education in the United States. The pedagogical efforts of even relatively large institutions with strong funding such as the Council for Economic Education and the Powell Institute are dwarfed by the size of the private educational sector that Donoghue and others have described. At the same time, however, taken all together, adjectival literacies, along with the literacies developed internally by large corporations, can affect a remarkable number of people living in a wide range of circumstances. An attention economy is also an education economy, and educational projects are spread throughout the periphery as well as located in highly visible educational systems. As the mapping of attention flows involves more and more sophisticated processes and is targeted at continually larger and more diverse markets, human capital is more frequently repre-

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sented as crucial. In the marketplace terminology of business writers Davenport and Beck, both paying attention and getting paid by knowing who is paying attention seem dependent on instant recognition of the shifts in human capital direction and momentum. As I argued in the previous chapter, the autonomy of choice identified with just-in-time human capital may well be the most dramatic representation, but more traditional forms of human capital resources remain significant, even if they are now accorded far less importance in terms of market value than they once were. In short, human capital has become a fundamental value nexus in an attention economy. The range and diversity of adjectival literacy education at the periphery is a demonstration of just how fundamental and pervasive that value nexus has become. In the context of an attention economy it becomes easier to recognize the import of earlier concerns about the over-use of the term professional. The proliferation of the term occurred at the same time that human capital assumed a heightened importance in economic analysis. Once human capital began to be represented as a primary source of value in more and more sectors, an immediate danger appeared to be the potential for false representation, the promise of human capital that is not really there. Similar to the indiscriminate use of the term professional, current uses of literacy can seem empty of content, merely metaphors or inventions of the moment, meaning pretty much whatever one wants. The immediate difference from the case of the word professional is that in human capital resource terms, what adjectival literacies have to offer are indeed empty categories from the beginning. Unlike unwarranted uses of professional, adjectival literacies do not falsely represent their individual or organizational sources as possessing genuine human capital assets for hire. Adjectival literacy is directed instead at the audience that is being recruited. It is about future human capital. The larger difference is that while adjectival literacies may promise to that audience a future full of human capital assets, in the moment what they offer is an invitation to do some

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work. That is, in contrast to professional, which identifies a supposedly human capital–rich individual who then may or may not be hired for a job or into a profession, adjectival literacies are through and through about doing literacy work. Human capital remains in the distance. Adjectival literacies are a form of conversion labor that streams attention flows as widely as possible by offering to capitalize anyone and everything in the intensely competitive peripheral zones outside the central concentrations of human capital. They may be at the pedagogical periphery, but they supply a vital component of the immense educational machinery necessary to produce and support a central concentration of human capital. They extend the range of human capital dominance and shape the largely unpaid labor that helps make human capital possible somewhere else. Focusing on character as they do, Charles Murray and fellow conservative David Brooks are rather more direct than are Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in insisting that human capital is all about smart people, those with “high cognitive ability,” as Murray usually puts it. The passive-voice assumption underlying Goldin and Katz’s argument (human capital is about lots of people learning more skills and acquiring more knowledges) becomes the active equation of human capital with intelligence. Such a visible parading of individual intelligence as a natural paradigm, however, then invites an easy symmetry for explaining all those familiar Sarah Palinesque responses (“well I’m dumb as dirt and proud of it”) as if they expressed little more than resentment about smart people. In much the same way as Twenge and Campbell see their students in The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, in Murray’s vision it is assumed to be the case that lower-class people just do not like anyone smarter than they are. The various versions of this narrative link with the endless old-versusnew debates I discussed in chapter 1 to obscure the radical school reforms that have been taking place. Murray, in contrast, does recognize well enough how the college sorting machine in tandem with a residential sorting

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machine has concentrated human capital–rich individuals in isolated enclaves. Following through on that recognition, he also understands that among other effects, this concentration of human capital has required significant changes in education. The only explanation he can offer, however, is that these individuals with high cognitive ability naturally behave “like that,” in a way that political policy can never change. And naturally enough, some business leaders have been smart enough to take advantage of the competitive edge that human capital supplies. In previous chapters I have argued instead that human capital functions pretty much the same as any other form of capital, as a material economic asset. Thus rather than attempt to explain Murray’s picture of class division by pointing to qualities of individual character and intelligence, as he does, I think it worthwhile instead to explore Marx’s analysis of capital centralization and concentration to see what it might tell us about human capital. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx attributes much of the success of large enterprises to how their size enables them to produce commodities more cheaply than their competitors: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labor, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller” (777). Few educators in traditional universities have been enthusiastic about the growth of forprofit institutions, despite how they promise to make a postsecondary degree available to far more people. What the for-profits sell has seemed nothing but a “cheap commodity” indeed, produced in bulk quantity using cheaply available temporary labor for the most part. In contrast, the recent growth in MOOCs (massive open online courses) has garnered relatively more positive support because of what seems their democratizing potential. In addition, much of that recent growth has been driven by some of the most prestigious universities in the country, often with

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regular tenured faculty closely involved. Given their online dissemination, the scale of MOOCs is immense, and in terms of students and aggregate teaching hours, the labor time of faculty producing such courses is enormously productive. Nevertheless, critique typically returns to the idea that these courses cannot replace classroom experience. At worst, like the forprofits, they reduce the complexities of education to a neatly packaged commodity that can be cheaply marketed. They can also undercut the competition, however, and according to the results of a Moody’s tuition survey of colleges that was widely reported at the beginning of 2013, there does appear some evidence that high-tuition small schools and lower-rated universities are suffering enrollment difficulties. “Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller,” Marx had argued. Yet it would seem difficult to invoke Marx’s logic to explain why it is that prestigious universities would be offering MOOCs at all. If as Donoghue argues prestige is one of the primary reasons for getting an elite education, and admissions selectivity is a primary criterion in measuring prestige, why would such universities as Harvard and Stanford offer free courses (or a line of cheap commodities, depending upon one’s own bias) to anybody? As Donoghue points out, their positions in the prestige game depend on widening the distinction James Twitchell makes in Branded Nation between “brand-name universities” and “mass-provider universities” (Last Professors, 122) and avoiding practices that blur it. Donoghue does not find all that plausible either the idea David Collis describes, “that the elite universities will adopt Oxford-style tutorial systems subsidized by vast online educational fiefdoms” (Last Professors, 123). Donoghue suggests instead that the real challenge for the elite universities “is to create an academic version of the distinction between Giorgio Armani and Armani Emporium,” an option that “mass-provider institutions will never be in a position to explore” (124). Unfortunately debates about whether online courses are a wonderfully democratizing educational innovation or can offer only cheap knockoffs of a priceless artisanal educa-

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tional process already invite being recast into yet another version of the new versus old debates so familiar in literacy studies. In the paragraph immediately preceding the passage I quoted above from Capital, however, Marx briefly discusses the way those big capitals got to be big capitals that could sell cheaper commodities. His focus here is on how the process of concentration works, rather than possible quality differences among the products being sold: “The attraction of capital no longer means the simple concentration of the means of production and the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals” (Capital, 1:777). In relation to human capital and recent educational developments, two connected points stand out immediately in Marx’s description. Labor appears as already a given. The “command over labour” is part of accumulation, and the process of concentration has shifted to the competition among multiple capitals. Capital gets bigger by “expropriating” other capitals, not by concentrating the means of production further or extending control over still more labor power. Correlatively, in these collisions among multiple capitals, “individual independence” disappears. No capital can set an entirely independent course irrespective of what is happening to surrounding capitals. As I noted above in discussing Donoghue’s analysis of the prestige game, in such conditions there is no way not to compete, even if it is impossible to win. Of course it is not quite possible either to imagine a human capital–rich individual literally getting even richer in capital by swallowing up individuals slightly less well endowed, although the image is perhaps amusingly appropriate to some of the more sardonic caricatures Marx sketched in Capital. Nor can an institution that is a large producer of human capital expropriate smaller or less prestigious operations in the same way. In human capital terms, the crucial step is the destruction of independence for all those less-prestigious educational institutions.

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Whatever multiple goals or independently determined educational identities had once existed in the educational field become subordinated to the process of human capital production as developed through the more prestigious producer. That is, rather than absorb “small capital” institutions in order to become some kind of immense mega-university, the most prestigious schools destroy independent goals by the colonizing power of determining what the game must be. Even brands begin to matter less than the overall human capital composition of the graduating students. The only game in town just keeps spreading. Human capital, however, also aligns production and product peculiarly. In most conceptions of human capital, educational institutions are primary producers, but in order to produce human capital wealth as embodied in individual graduates, educational institutions must employ individuals who are rich in human capital. Or, to turn it around slightly, the concentration of human capital reinforces the assumption that the producers in possession of the greatest human capital wealth will in turn produce the students possessing the greatest human capital wealth. “University educated” applies across the board to both educators and students in increasingly concentrated circles. At the same time, after already having initiated university centers in other countries, those universities whose faculties are at the top of in terms of human capital prestige can then also make online course offerings available to potentially anyone anywhere on the planet. It should not be a surprise at all that many more educators have endorsed the democratizing potential of MOOCs than have ever praised the for-profits in their outreach efforts. The catch is that while anyone might well be able to participate in MOOCs, what everyone participates in has to do with augmenting the flow of human capital, directly determined in the case of MOOCs in relation to the core concentration of capital. Human capital continues to reinforce itself as the only game, in any town. Thus in addition to concern about a commodity-like simplification of learning, critiques of MOOCs can also echo concerns

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such as those of Yochai Benkler about how power at the top inevitably limits diversity and individual autonomy, since the relatively few faculty and universities offering MOOCS can determine so much. Students meanwhile are seen as getting only the most standardized content everywhere, despite efforts to individualize instruction. In this context, however, the immediate lesson to learn from Marx is that concentration is not about imposing homogeneity, in Benkler’s or anyone else’s critical sense. Further, the proliferation of the term literacy is a good reminder that concentration is dependent on diversity. Literacy work makes anything potentially available to be represented for attention. To put it crudely, any adjective can be attached to literacy, because potentially anything might be representationally linked to the surrounding flows of attention. There is no point at all to the competition for attention if every sector looks and behaves alike. Nothing can be completely independent of human capital and the process of human capital concentration, because human capital grows larger and more concentrated only by feeding on more and more of this diverse material and on more and more human capitals as they become available through literacy work. Individual autonomy is Benkler’s usual pathway to diversity; diversity emerges as more individuals have a greater power of action to go their own ways and author their own stories. As I argued in chapter 2, however, just-in-time-human capital represents something like the ultimate apotheosis of this principle of individual autonomy. The critical issue is not the suppression of diversity and individual autonomy, but what follows from the recognition that human capital is, after all, capital. It is no less an economic asset than more tangible forms of capital. Among other things, this means that the diversity and individual autonomy at stake are certainly real enough and not an illusion—because they exist on behalf of capital interests, not for the benefit of any particular literacy subject. Conceptions of general human capital have typically included an emphasis on the importance of flexible skills that might be adapted to different conditions, unlike specific human

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capital that equips an individual for only one kind of job or one employment sector. Employers across a wide range of fields continue to complain about the extreme difficulties of finding appropriately skilled individuals for positions. As I argued in Class Degrees, those complaints are often flatly contradictory in a way that is of little help to educators, but in fairness to employers, the rapidity of day-to-day changes in a global economy makes it difficult to determine exactly what training and skills might be needed on any given occasion. This has become as true for the nonglamorous trade occupations as it is for the upper echelons of the finance world or of technological development. Over the past two decades auto repair, construction, carpentry, plumbing, and so on have all changed, sometimes dramatically, as is the case for auto repair. Employer needs may well change completely on the next occasion. As a result, corporate complaints about finding skilled employees are likely to remain inconsistent and often contradictory. The imperatives of just-in-time human capital, however, shift attention away from the flexible employee whose reserve of general human capital might enable him or her to adapt to new conditions. The idea instead is to maximize the flexibility of just-in-time choices by removing constraints on the supply side. No matter how flexibly skilled any individual employee might be, at any given moment any individual might become as much a drag on productivity as excess inventory. Just-in-time supplyside freedom does not encourage long-term commitments to specific employees. Meanwhile, intense competition in various forms puts a premium on continually outperforming the previous year. Today’s financials and the prospects for tomorrow are what count. Thus improved financials seem more likely to be achieved through greater availability of a large and diverse pool of human capital–rich individuals that can be tapped whenever and wherever necessary, rather than through drawing on a reserve of general human capital as embodied in flexibly skilled long-term employees. After all, when they are not in paid service, all those flexibly skilled individuals can still function use-

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fully in an attention economy as outsourced free labor, provided they are sufficiently literate in relation to new technologies. Educational reform has been a perennial topic for political debate because public education in the United States sits across so many different interests and has been expected to supply solutions for any number of different problems, from racial integration to babysitting young adults, in effect to help prevent jails from becoming even more overcrowded. It would be a mistake to minimize the impact of how, historically, these different ends have been sorted out and hierarchized, despite the praise that Murray heaps on the large covering fiction of a public school system that in the past served everyone equally. In Class Degrees I discussed how students on a vocational education track were largely segregated from and treated very differently from academic fast trackers at the “same” high school. Inner city schools with large minority populations have never been funded to anywhere near the same degree as schools in the affluent white suburbs. Arguably the dominance of just-intime human capital has simply accelerated such already existing trends by disarticulating the fiction of schools-for-everyone into a new range of entirely separate educational sectors. The dynamics of those proliferating adjectival literacy sites at the educational periphery, however, suggest good reason to see that characterization as at best incomplete. Such sites are not limited to educational projects that used to exist elsewhere jammed together under a common umbrella, now separated out as distinct. While neither the categories focused on (different kinds of gun ammunition, for example) nor the content (the study of depression, for example) are necessarily new, the literacy work of representation is. Adjectival literacies simultaneously carve out the territory designated by their adjective, solicit potential student interest, and anticipate the pedagogical practices to be engaged. Hierarchies may exist across certain kinds of relatively similar sites, but for the most part the interests involved seem so diffused into disparate social sectors that hierarchy would be pointless anyway. As Graff

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rightly speculated about the many instances of adjectival literacy, however, competition can be intense. It is in the process of soliciting the attention of potential students that everyone meets competitively, much as is the case with institutional postsecondary education. I argued above that these adjectival literacy sites extend the range of educational practices, and they do so on behalf of promising an increase in human capital. In such conditions the opposition of hierarchical dominance and subordination, like the opposition of autonomy and homogeneity that I discussed above, has little relevance. Marx’s description of the concentration of capital anticipates the destruction of independent ends. The intensities of competition are all about the nexus of educational production and human capital, and there is very little forced subordination going on in the process. Subordinates are unlikely to survive long in their subordinate condition, or in any other condition. The price of a failure to compete is disappearance, the inevitable fate of “losers” in an attention economy. In contrast to the literacy-myth narrative of new and more democratic futures struggling to escape from a school system still bound to industrial-age practices, the educational periphery of literacy work highlights the emergent tendencies of the school reforms already well underway. In describing just-intime human capital in chapter 2 and the attention economy in chapter 3, I have also tried to analyze the imperatives that drive where these reforms are going. The just-in-timing of human capital means that a concentration of prestigious, innovative secondary schools as well as colleges and universities will be organized to maximize the diversity and individual autonomy of choice that just-in-time human capital requires. But just-intime organization is also structured to lose excess people— both students and workers. Secondary-school students are left to fend as best as they can in those school districts that rarely get any media attention about their miserable conditions for learning. They are increasingly lost from view altogether, to become just more of the losers in an attention economy. Similar

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to the adjectival literacy periphery, special-interest schools burgeon in the large vacuum between star systems and losers, but also in common with adjectival literacies, the competition among them is fierce, the danger of disappearance always imminent, human capital freedom always somewhere else. One of the more dangerous assumptions of the literacymyth narrative is that new technologies and innovative reforms, with their maximizing of student/teacher educational freedoms, are what transform a particular institution into one of the prestigious stars that visibly succeed. In support of the mantra that such reforms work, case studies can document local successes easily enough. The literacy myth assumes that literacy users and their experiences are primary material, and keeps the focus directly on what happens to those users in new circumstances. The local successes, however, do not translate into any real possibility for all school systems and students to become stars—not because other systems might resist new technologies and innovative change, but because there’s no capital incentive whatsoever to maximize benefits for everyone. Just-in-time is all about supply-side choice, isolating one instance within a large field and dispensing with the rest. Those programs that are capitalized typically realize the full range of technologies and innovations, but as secondary effects rather than as the cause of change. They are then ready to be folded into an ongoing process of capital concentration, producing at the same time the loser systems that are subsequently discarded. Just-in-time organization is never about carrying excess inventory; that applies to education exactly as it applies to any other sector. The recent emphasis in literacy studies on new literacies raises significant questions of definition and boundaries as well as opening new possibilities for study. At what point does it remain plausible to preserve the term literacy to describe practices that can seem light years away from the long historical connections between literacy and printed texts? More contentiously, at what point does it become essential to push educational policy much

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further than at present into making good use of new literacies and new technologies rather than propping up now-obsolete educational goals and methods? I hope my argument has made clear that I am not at all opposed to catching up with the new in this sense. I find it difficult to imagine being able to understand much about economic relations or everyday practices in specific situations without some fundamental understanding of multiple literacies and how they work. Understanding those new forms of literacy and how literacy subjects experience them, however, cannot be translated immediately into a democratizing process of educational reforms. The key question is not how to initiate necessary reforms against the dead weight of past practices and institutional inertia. The question is how to radically alter the direction of those reforms already transforming education into the profoundly antidemocratic narrative of human capital triumph.

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Index

Adami, Elizabeth, and Gunther Kress, 78–83, 89 adjectival literacy, 24–26, 127, 140, 142–44, 146, 147–50, 155, 157–58 Alexander, Jonathan, 47–49, 64, 97, 99 Althusser, Louis, 105, 108 ATM (automatic teller machine), 2–4, 6–9, 19, 64, 88, 89, 114, 116 attention economy, 19–22, 25, 92, 93–112, 115–22, 146–50, 155–58. See also Beller, Jonathan; Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck; Goldhaber, Michael Babbage, Charles, 68 Beck, John C., and Thomas H. Davenport, 19–21, 94–102, 118, 149 Becker, Gary, 4–5, 8–16, 21, 25, 26, 34–40, 51–57, 60–61, 65, 69, 72, 80–82, 85, 91, 117, 131 Beller, Jonathan, 21–22, 101–2, 108–13, 116–17, 119, 122 Benkler, Yochai, 13–16, 19–20, 37–48, 50, 52–58, 60–62, 65, 81–82, 89, 91–93, 96, 104, 107, 111, 113–14, 117, 119, 121, 155 Block, Fred, 9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 145 Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis, 43 Brandt, Deborah, 12–15, 17, 19, 22–23, 28, 36–37, 40, 53, 62, 102, 121–23, 127 Braverman, Harry, 68

Brooks, David, 24, 134, 150 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 30 Campbell, W. Keith, and Jean M. Twenge, 23, 64, 66–69, 73, 75–76, 86, 110, 150 celebrity culture, 21, 100 Chakravorti, Bhaskar, and Benjamin D. Mazzotta, 4 choice, as economic ideology, 7, 33, 36, 45–46, 54–58, 80–86, 89, 100, 116–17, 121–22, 142, 149, 156, 158–59 class division: and human capital, 9, 23–24, 31, 40, 123, 125–26, 128–30, 132–34, 136, 151 consumers: and literacy work, 6–7, 19, 28, 54, 64, 89–90, 106–7, 110–19, 122 Council for Economic Education, 25, 141–42, 144, 146–47 Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck, 19–21, 94–102, 118, 149 Davidson, Cathy, 20, 97 Deleuze, Gilles, 108–9, 110 Doeringer, Peter B., and Michael J. Piore, 70 Donoghue, Frank, 26, 31, 134–35, 137–39, 148, 152–53 Dyer, Richard, 105 Edwards, Richard, Michael Reich, and David Gordon, 70

168 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich, 144 Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, 1 Farrell, Lesley, 148 Fernholz, Tim, 4 For Journalists website, 143–44 Geiger, Roger L., 132 Gintis, Herbert, and Samuel Bowles, 43 Giroux, Henry, 48 Goggin, Peter N., 144, 145 Goldhaber, Michael, 21, 100–6, 108–9, 114, 116, 118–19, 123 Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F. Katz, 8, 17–18, 24, 30, 50–51, 83, 85, 124–29, 131, 150 Graff, Harvey, 11–12, 27, 117, 142–43, 145–47, 159. See also literacy myth Granovetter, Mark, 9 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 108–9 human capital concentration, 9, 11, 23–26, 29, 31–32, 52, 130, 135–38, 150–51, 153–55 human communicative capacity, 13, 20, 37–40, 43, 52–53, 60, 65, 91. See also Benkler, Yochai identity education, 32–33, 92, 104, 107; and pleasures, 117–22 income inequality, 4, 8, 13–15, 24–25, 30–31, 62, 123, 125–26, 128–29. See also Goldin, Claudia, and Lawrence F Katz; Murray, Charles A. individual autonomy, 14–16, 21, 38, 39, 40–44, 52, 54, 56–58, 61, 81–82, 92, 104, 107, 113, 117, 121, 155. See also Benkler, Yochai just-in-time human capital, 15–19, 21, 24–26, 40, 57–65, 80–91, 100, 110, 116–19, 122, 149, 155–56, 158–59 Katz, Lawrence F., and Claudia Goldin, 8, 17–18, 24, 30, 50–51, 83, 85, 124–29, 131, 150 Klein, Matthew C., 67–68, 73 Knobel, Michele, and Colin Lankshear, 21, 48–51, 100 Kress, Gunther, 79–80, 82–83, 86, 89, 92, 141–45. See also Adami, Elizabeth, and Gunther Kress; Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street

Index Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street, 141–45 Kress, Gunther, and Elizabeth Adami, 78–83, 89 labor market segmentation, 70–72, 84–85, 87. See also Piore, Michael Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel, 21, 48–51, 100 literacy myth, 11–12, 26–31, 39, 64–65, 117, 130, 142, 146, 158–59. See also Graff, Harvey marketing, and human capital, 4, 25, 28, 45–46, 57, 145 Marklein, Martha Beth, 67 Marx, Karl, 10–11, 46, 68, 84, 101, 110–12, 116, 130, 135–36, 138, 151–53, 155, 158 merit, and human capital, 16–17, 61–66, 68–77, 90–91, 123, 145 MOOC (massive open online course), 151–52, 154–55 Murray, Charles A., 24, 125–30, 132–36, 150–51, 157 Nee, Victor, and Richard Swedberg, 10 neoclassical economics, 5, 10–11, 13, 19, 25, 30, 34, 44, 49–51, 53, 55–56, 69–71, 91, 94, 97, 99, 114, 117–18, 141. See also Becker, Gary; Williamson, Oliver Occupational Outlook Handbook, 3 Pahl, Kate, and Jennifer Rowsell, 140, 143 Piore, Michael, 70 Prendergast, Catherine, 10 prestige, as educational commodity, 26, 31, 134–39, 152–54. See also Donoghue, Frank professional, usage compared to literacy, 144–47, 149–50 Reich, Robert, 132, 133 reserve army of labor, 116 Rowsell, Jennifer, and Kate Pahl, 140, 143 scientific management, 68 Searls, Doc, 106–7, 118, 120 Simon, Herbert A. 114 Smith, Adam, 15, 33–35, 37–40, 52–55, 60–61, 65–66, 68, 80–81, 84, 91, 131 Sragow, Darry, 87–88

169

Index Street, Brian, 36, 143. See also Kress, Gunther, and Brian Street surplus labor and literacy work, 22–23, 26, 112–13, 115, 122 Swedberg, Richard, 9 Taylor, Frederick, 96, 99 transaction costs, 44, 90, 113–15. See also Williamson, Oliver Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell, 23, 64, 66–69, 73, 75–76, 86, 110, 150 Twitchell, James, 152

Ulmer, Gregory, 47, 48 unpaid labor, 1–3, 5–6, 89–90, 112, 114–16, 150 Vedder, Richard, Christopher Denhart, and Jonathan Robe, 30 Walker, Pat, 144 Watkins, Evan, 31, 71, 156, 157 Williamson, Oliver, 44, 89, 113–14 Zelizer, Viviana, 9