Reviews for Class degrees

The average rating for Class degrees based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-04 00:00:00 Brent Rasch I really, really hate post-structural-ese. I kept going, sure that the book had some interesting things to say, but *man* they were hard to untangle from the complicated syntax and vague generalities with big words. So: the overall argument is that person-succeeding-against-the-odds is a -- or the -- paradigmatic narrative of our time. He points out the irony of this, as multitudes of undergraduates sit watching movies, etc. with such narratives, always identifying with the sole succeeder and never with the "mass of characters whose sole purpose is to establish that there are odds in the first place." Well, it's an interesting hypothesis/thought experiment, although the social scientist in me wants some kind of data on the actual trends over time in frequency of such narrative, and the literary critic in me wants to argue that that's how narrative *works.* There has to be conflict; there have to be stakes; and the protagonist must protag (thank you, Sarah Prineas, for that lovely phrase). That's how stories work, from the author of Job to Herman Melville and onward: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." But I digress. "Rather than the traditional incentive to hard work, the against-all-odds plot supplies a necessary accelerator for the heating-up [of career expectations] process. Across the endless identity representations made endlessly available, the process of relating to or identifying with this one or that one against the odds is what turns up the heat" (6). Huh? I think maybe what he's trying to say is: it used to be that people were told to work hard and they could succeed, a road that was available to many people, a broad road. Whereas now success is portrayed as something that only heroic individuals can achieve, although multitudes of lonely heroes are all trying to do it at once, so it doesn't make much sense. But if that's what he's trying to say, why doesn't he for God's sake just say it? So, how does this relate to vocational education? In the 80s, the narrative shifted to the "post-industrial economy" where "smart workers" would innovate and be part of flexible workplace teams, all assuming that their choices mattered and made a difference to the outcome. Instead of being trained for roles as extras, they were being trained to be the stars (8). Okay, makes sense. And even though few of us actually believe the old technobabble that "a new economy would simultaneously democratize the workplace and empower everyone inclusively as democratic citizens," vocational ed is still heating up expectations as though that were true, and no institution serves a "cooling out" function. (Here I would argue that the cooling out happens to the millions -- 60% of community and tech ed students -- who don't finish their vocational certifications. Though they're led to interpret this as their individual fault, since no one *officially* told them they couldn't take that path, they just couldn't make it work for financial/academic/family etc. reasons.) So -- he uses voc ed as a lens to look at the processes of class formation. In the "old days" when there were voc ed tracks, students learned explicitly how to be working class. I think he's arguing that the heating up of expectations still plays a role in class formation, though differently. Then he does something that this kind of post-structuralist author often does in my experience: says something interesting and provocative, but without any kind of citation or substantiation, so that it has t be accepted on faith and becomes less interesting: The heating up of vocational expectations "seems simply an expansion of the long-familiar educational ideology of false promises that has now become so much an institutional and perceptual norm that it is only barely recognizable as either false or ideological" (10). I wanted to hear more about this history of education's false promises. It's interesting. I suspect I agree. But I don't know enough to really be sure what he's talking about. So if voc ed reform led to an "idea of class inclusiveness," that is in contrast to the one class-based analysis that still gets made in the US -- that of being middle class, which about 80% of people consider themselves to be. Under Reagan, "schools and workplaces were pressured to redesign toward the ends of maximizing corporate and military imperatives rather than serve as the necessary framework of individual democratic citizens." With little state authority to be more inclusive or protect excluded groups, from politics or market competition, "more and more individuals were simply cast aside with no chance of a future middle-class life." (11). Right. Okay. And some thinkers predicted that this abandonment of the middle class by the wealthy is a problem. Sure is. The optimistic language "given the new organizational flexibilities and the obsolescence of rigid hierarchies emerging in more and more industries, every worker would have some considerable say in decision-making processes required by the onetime customized product runs that were replacing standardized mass production. The workplace itself [could be] a model for a more genuinely inclusive citizen politics rather than one of the most rigid sources of exclusion and inequality. An inclusive middle-class dream could reemerge in these profoundly altered circumstances of a postindustrial economy" (12). So the rhetoric of middle-class decline sees the individual as "isolated and beleagured," "living in a world shaped by Reaganism and its unfettered capitalist expansion [and finding] their choices more and more constrained. In contrast, to the extent that future smart workers could be educated to mirror the ideal self of new voc-ed programs, they would seem to have grown up within the endlessly replicable identities in all those new versions of against-all-odds plots, saturated with choices and expecting more and more to come. It is as if they were built and educated from the beginning to be at once continually changing and yet always available as an inexhaustible resource for changing forms of production" (12). Even while educators realized that not all -- or even most - of their students, would attain such high-level, high-reward jobs, with chosen mobility, they "could not afford not to train students as if they might" (13). Educators must gamble on the possibility students will win the job lottery, or they doom the students to failure before they even enter. That makes sense. But it's then followed by this sentence, which doesn't exactly seem to follow: "Educators face a representational system where school dropouts and the disenfranchised in every sense are rarely represented directly at all, except when made to appear as if some obscure and now obsolete holdover from a past rapidly receding from view." What? Does this just mean that we as a society tend to ignore dropouts and the disenfranchised, or pretend they don't exist? "Job mobility means not only searching for jobs but also dealing with the pressures that come with feeling that one *ought* to be searching." Everything becomes competition, job search as shopping/consumption, with the result that "choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor power as the central ideological building block of a contemporary class formation. What the intensification of competition produces, however, is the residual labor that the foregrounding of choice obscures, as if nothing but a kind of waste labor left behind by competitive processes. Exploitation then becomes a second-order operation whereby labor as waste can be effectively reclaimed as a motor force of labor power for the future." -- So, does this mean that everybody has to be highly educated in order to have a chance at the good jobs, though those just below the cutoff are about the same as those above, so there's tremendous waste labor (i.e., surplus BA's) in the stream? I think so, because the next paragraph is: Functions of management (not clear whether academic or business): 1. oversees competitive practices toward the end of separating out the agency of 'the winner' from the crowd of losers. 2. reclaim waste labor: highly skilled, lots of labor time already, very similar to the competitively successful. 3. Preserve the emotional intensity of hyperindividualism as a class process. The production of skilled labor requires similarities between winners and losers, but the emotional intensities require an image of absolute distance between the winner and everyone else, as mediated through elaborate, extended rituals of competition throughout the organizational structure of postsecondary education" (16). Interesting critique of standardized testing, "The conservative assumption of a hierarchy of inherent abilities among students appeared to Tucker as a direct reflection of the Taylorized conditions of industrial production. Given a labor market that required relatively few high-skill workers, it could seem natural enough that educational assessment practices yield relatively few students with exceptional abilities. On inspection, the 'natural' is revealed to be nothing more than a set of conditions specific to a particular form of production in the past. Conservative ideology perpetuates these conditions of an industrial economy into present circumstances where they become both an economic liability and an antidemocratic form of political elitism" (27). What has replaced standardized workplace testing is simulations, where the criteria for success shift over time, an endless series of assessments rather than a single point in time. Always more opportunities for success - and failure. He asserts that, in some way, manual work used to "transitively valorize" a concept of citizenship, but that "symbolic work" does not "activate" concepts of citizenship in the same way. It's an interesting theory about why democracy is breaking down, but it seems to me to be a claim in need of support, not a self-evident conclusion to be built on. Traces the source of "cooling out:" Burton Clark in The Open-Door College: A Case Study charged that counselors cooled out students by encouraging them to recognize how difficult it would be to get a 4 year degree and shifting them to the career track. "Counselors thus enabled community colleges to [solve the dilemma of] a culture that encouraged individuals to expect visible success in their careers and . . . an economic system that afforded relatively few high-level positions" (40). But W. Norton Grubb argues that "as Clark (1980) himself has argued [in "The Cooling-Out Function Revisited"], any relatively inegalitarian society that promotes high aspirations among its young people must eventually reconcile the two." We can (a) provide more places at the top (unlikely), (b) use soft methods to reduce aspirations ("cooling out"), or (c) use hard methods, like high-stakes exams that deny places in post-secondary once and for all (41). And then there are things that sound like Buddhist koans: "In these new circumstances of vocational training reform, you must *endlessly* prepare yourself for being the winner you already are, for winners always seem to be where you are not, and wherever you are now isn't for winners" (45). 52: notes that some employers bemoan lack of very specific skills, like "semiconductor processing, lithography, or impurities diffusion" while others bemoan the lack of "soft skills" like motivation, initiative, good judgment, or even common sense. While Grubb attributes this to the differing positions of informants (those closer to the line want specific skills; those closer to management want soft), Watkins suggests it actually has to do with shorter and bifurcated "career ladders." There is now little middle management, and the work tends to be done by temporary or contract workers who have no path to advancement, and even the "higher" positions can disappear due to buyouts, etc. Love this analogy of education as casino, in the sense that not everyone will win, but you can't win if you don't play: "the long-term productive work of education seems sacrificed to a gambler's market built on pure speculation and the deployment of whatever leveraged assets might on the occasion fall on the right place on the wheel" (55). There seems to be something interesting here, even if I can't quite grasp what it is: "If career-education developments enable one to imagine the choice of work and career as on the same plane of freedom as any other consumer choice [at the same time] in contrast to bedroom suites and the like one cannot choose not to consume work, with all the inequities and hierarchies of labor organization." So: labor as consumerism, endless shopping -- doesn't really work, because you can't choose not to consume work. "A quick sketch of how consumption works in order to grasp what is at stake as work becomes consumable" (61). Student-as-consumer metaphor "suggests the extent to which consumption has become a normal frame in which to consider educational policy" (61). Students therefore must learn the responsibilities that go with choice. Interesting observation: quoting Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: "public policy increasingly emphasizes the workforce and economic development roles of higher education, yet in their recruitment efforts institutions are increasingly addressing students' desires as consumers of various consumption item services, as if colleges were a combination of private-sector enterprsises and services such as [country clubs]". Suggests that universities are the new factory towns: "the university becomes like a factory less because it mass-produces thousands of degree-widgets than because it can continue to exist in its present form only to the extent that the surrounding environment is transformed into a complex network of job-specific living arrangements." At the end, he takes what seems a wild left turn into the economics of academia and its entanglement with neoliberal education, then a weirdly specific investigation of the labor politics of writing programs and the way in which Comp/Rhet PhD's become administrators managing the "waste labor" of non-tenure-track waste labor faculty with other kinds of English degrees. He does say some interesting things about the potential of studying business literacies and the actual texts students mostly produce and use, but he doesn't take it far.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-09 00:00:00 Cory Carter One of those books in the category 'good book with a terrible cover'. The cover indicates the style -- very thorough, sober minded [a message in itself regarding decision making really!] and a little bit dated. This style won't be for everyone. But persevered with there is gold in those hills in terms of biblical parameters, principles, perspective as well as personal evaluation. It is Christ-centred which is great. It is not mechanistic though it is challenging in the depth of thinking it encourages us to understand as truly 'spiritual'. The good thing is it provides lots of help along the way - encouragements, wise warnings and practical 'tools'. The chapters are as follows: 1. Foundation Principles 2. The Christian Value of Work and Career 3. Elements of the Lord's Will 4. The Person God has made 5. Decision Making 6. Spiritual Gifts and Career Choice 7. Circumstances 8. The Call 9. Being a Whole Person