Workplace Competence: integrating social and personal perspectives

Understanding what constitutes workplace competence stands a key concern for those who rely on and aim to develop and/or sustain that competence. Without a comprehensive understanding of this competence, it is difficult to advise individuals, enterprises, and governments how they should, respectively, plan their development throughout working life, manage the continuity of their workforce‟s skills, and organise how education systems can prepare and further develop individuals‟ capacities for work. Yet apprehending what constitutes workplace competence is not so easily undertaken. Rather than being uniform across an occupation or even nationally consistent, competence is shaped by situational factors, emerging technologies, specific occupational requirements, and the capacities of those who enact those requirements. Moreover, both the requirements for performance and personal capacities are dynamic, being shaped and remade by workers in response to the changing and particular demands of work performance. Yet, ultimately, competence at work is something enacted: a performance and judgements about that performance that can only be made through accounting for the circumstances of the performance and also the capacities of the performer. In this way, there is a need to understand to competence from both socially shaped and personally constituted perspectives. Competence as a personal practice Workplace performance Remaking work Changing requirements for competence WORKPLACE COMPETENCE Understanding what comprises competence at work needs to accommodate both socially derived and personally constituted perspectives of that competence. From the socially derived perspective, there is need to account for occupational requirements and situational factors that together constitute competent performance at work. This performance has occupational, cultural, and situational dimensions that collectively constitute what Searle(1995) refers to as institutional facts; those that are a product of the social world. Reflecting societal needs, cultural factors shape the need for and shape the kinds of tasks that comprise occupational roles. The need for and form of the services and goods that cultures want and require shapes the form of and delineation amongst occupations. For instance, while requiring healthcare most countries delineate doctors‟ and nurses‟ work. Yet, beyond the cultural manifestation of occupations, situational factors shape the particular form of workplace requirements and, in doing so, articulate the diversity of occupational performance requirements (Billett, 2001). For instance, nurses in remote communities have to perform a range of healthcare tasks that cross boundaries with medical (i.e., doctors‟) work in ways that are distinct from what occurs in metropolitan centres. So, although statements about occupational requirements can helpfully inform the efforts of governments, education systems, enterprises, and individuals, these accounts need to accommodate the diversity of the situational factors that shape what constitutes workplace competence. However, these socially derived bases for understanding workplace performance requirements represent only one of the two dimensions of what constitutes workplace competence. There is also the more subjective and person-dependent bases by which individuals make sense of, interpret, and undertake their work. Yet, considerations of how individuals exercise their capacities in work activities and interactions are not usually included in analyses of work requirements that typically focus on workplace tasks and activities as observable facts. However, ultimately work is something undertaken by individuals as they engage in and complete tasks and interactions by deploying their understandings, procedures, and valuing of those activities. That is, work is defined by how individuals construe and enact their work. Hence, human engagement in and conduct of work is an essential facet of all work and contributes to what constitutes workplace competence. To elaborate this dual conception of workplace competence, this chapter first discusses what is often taken as the objective account of the requirements for performance at work, as an institutional fact, including is cultural and situational variations. Then, the subjective and personal dimension of workplace competence is discussed. These dimensions are then brought together and articulated through categories of activities and interactions that constitute a more comprehensive and relational account of workplace competence. OCCUPATIONAL AND WORKPLACE REQUIREMENTS Much of the requirements for performance in workplaces are expressions of the social world. Searle (1995) refers to these as facts that require human institutions for their existence. These facts include sets of human needs for survival, reproduction, order, and care that often find form as paid occupations. Occupations arise, decline, or are sustained through history and changing cultural needs (Billett, 2006). Characteristics of these constantly transforming requirements include: new products and technologies; short production cycles; changing production concepts, such as a high discretion workforce, and strategies of rationalisation (e.g. Darrah, 1996; Ellstrom, 1998). Bailey (1993), for instance, refers to accelerated production cycles, a proliferation of products, heightened levels of uncertainty, and changing work practices. Equally, the forms of available work can change. The shift to service industries, changes to the character of employment, down-sized workplaces, and non-standard forms of employment all serve to transform and make dynamic (and, therefore, more demanding) the requirements for performing work (Noon & Blyton, 1997). Some of the driving forces behind these changes are attempts to reorganise work. These changes include those intended to increase the outputs of paid labour and reduce cost. Then there are those changes that seek to enhance and fully utilise workers‟ skills to achieve greater competitiveness through improved performance. These changes to the kinds of work being undertaken, the requirements for work, and how individuals engage in work shape occupational practice, and this occurs in particular ways in the circumstances where those occupations are practiced. Indeed, firm bases for understanding the requirements of particular workplaces are still elusive because of the diversity of occupational requirements across workplaces. Bernhardt (1999) found that more upscale retail work or selling products requiring degrees of expert advice, including building relationships with customers – led to retail work that is highly demanding and complex. Home Depot (a hardware chain store) workers earn more than the industry average, and enjoy extra benefits and experience a low level of staff turnover compared to workers in other retail workplaces. Moreover, distinctions amongst different kinds of workers, such as tradespeople, technicians, professionals or „un-skilled‟ workers are often based on assumptions rather than evidence about the required competence. For instance, assumptions about the levels of competence required for kinds of work categorised as low skill are questioned by accounts of their actual requirements (e.g., Billett, 2000; Darrah, 1997). Indeed, the technology pervading many forms of contemporary and emerging work often requires symbolic knowledge that makes work tasks more demanding (e.g., Martin & Scribner, 1991; Zuboff, 1988) because workers across a range of occupational classifications are required to represent the structures and processes of their machines symbolically (Berryman, 1993). For instance, Martin and Scribner (1991) note that the requirements for operating a computer numerically controlled (CNC) lathe are now closer to the skill requirements of a computer operator than a manual lathe operator, thereby challenging existing (and unhelpful) distinctions between manual and mental labour. Consequently, and generally, for many categories of workers, the requirements for competent work practice are probably greater than they have been credited, and perhaps for all they are growing, albeit shaped by the particular circumstances of their employment and their workplace. These requirements for workplace competence can be found in the need to accommodate constant change, and the intellectual demands for work in terms of its conceptual (symbolic) requirements and procedural bases. Indeed, the need to accommodate for constant change can render work practice to be inherently nonroutine and demanding. Because of this constant transformation, changes to work include relinquishing past practices and the displacement of existing competence and confidence. In these ways, the requirements for competence are increasing in many forms of work. In sum, these changes are making the requirements for work more complex in their formation and more demanding in their enactment. Yet, the scope and form of these changing requirements are not uniform; they are shaped by societal and situational factors. DIVERSITY IN WORK REQUIREMENTS A complex of societal and local factors shapes the diversity of the requirements for competent performance across workplaces even for those enacting the same occupational practice. stated Darrah (1997, p. 249) claims “... jobs seem so diverse as to obviate the need for generalisations about how people perform work.” Rather than being uniform across occupations, the requirements for competence are quite diverse across workplaces (Billett, 2001). Although there are occupationally common concepts, values, and practices – the canonical knowledge of the occupation – across workplaces in a particular country, their application likely differs quite widely. This is because there are quite distinct performance requirements in specific work situations. Consequently, understanding what constitutes workplace competence cannot rely on occupational-level analyses. Instead, national, cultural, local, and enterprise-level factors all shape workplace performance requirements: the „objective‟ account of workplace requirements. Therefore, it is helpful to understand something of the range of factors that make particular workplace requirements distinct. Across different countries and cultures there are particular premises for the requirements of work, thereby making analyses at the occupational level problematic. For instance, Japan has a highly automated and computerized car manufacturing industry, where that routinely uses robotics. Yet, clothing manufacture in Japan is often undertaken in the oldfashioned bundle production system (Bailey, 1993), where component parts are bundled together by machinists and then passed to another who first unbundles them and performs an operation and re-bundles and so on, thereby requiring high levels of handling and highly specific machining skills. So in the country that developed the „Just -In-Time‟ approach to work processes and maintaining low work-in-progress inventories, there are garment factories where large amounts of stock are in production at any one time. The logic for the production processes in the Japanese garment industry is shaped by the limited working life of female Japanese garment workers, who are expected to give up work upon marriage. Hence, these workers are skilled only in specific operations that allow them to be replaced. Yet, in contrast to the Japanese approach, the German garment manufacturing industry is highly mechanised and uses automated equipment to construct the garments and move garment components through the manufacturing process to minimise handling time by relatively highly paid garment workers (Bailey, 1993). Hence, in distinct ways, technological developments and cultural mores, such as those referred to above, shape how the same work is organised in two distinct societal milieus, and what counts as competent work performance. The national differences in work may also extend to the climate. For instance, the requirements for occupations are often played out differently in countries that have hot summers and frigid winters. Some of the mechanical tasks required of automotive engineers in northern Europe, Canada, and northern American states are unlikely to be undertaken by their counterparts in most places in Australia, southern American countries, or other warmer climates, and vice versa. So, occupational requirements may differ markedly across and with countries as shaped by brute facts of climate. Yet, other differences shape occupational requirements within work in the same country. As noted, in America, some retail work is highly segmented and routinised, as is the case in pharmacy chain stores. Yet in hardware stores, retail workers‟ expertise is prized because they are expected to provide advice to customers about products (Bernhardt, 1999). Other workers who provide advice and regulate sales in the retail settings also attract higher levels of remuneration. For instance, pharmacists provide similar services, yet would not be labeled as retail workers – their knowledge is codified as professional, in contrast to that of hardware retail workers. Further, retail workers in exclusive fashion stores are often paid on a commission-only basis. Their workplace competence is directed towards making sales and selling the kinds of garment that offer good margins between wholesale and retail price, and sustaining all of this through establishing relations with clients. Yet, despite the prestigious place of employment, their remuneration can be perilous because it is on a commission-only basis. Consequently, in work categorised as comprising the same occupation, there are variations in occupational practices that necessitate particular forms of workplace competence. Local factors also shape these workplace competencies. When investigating what comprised hairdressers‟ work, it was found that the goals for hairdressing had distinctive features across four salons, three in Australia and one in the United Kingdom (Billett, 2003). The characteristics of the hairdressing practice included each salon‟s requirements for performance that where identifiably local and clientele based. In a fashionable inner city salon, the key goals for performance were to transform the clients‟ appearance, and to offer new cuts and colours. The interactions between clients and hairdressers were a product of their particular interests and values. In a salon in a low socio-economic suburb, an important work requirement was to manage a precarious business with an absent owner, two part-time senior hairdressers, and a clientele that included those who demanded complex treatments, yet did not care for their hair. A key requirement here was to manage these „awkward‟ customers, particularly when they complained about their treatments. In another salon, the clientele comprised elderly women who came to the salon fortnightly, perhaps as much for companionship as for haircuts. Here, the hairdressers‟ knowledge of clients‟ personal histories, knowing the names and circumstances of family and friends, was an important component of practice. The fourth salon was in a provincial town in a rural region that was enduring a three-year drought. The goals here included providing good value to maintain the clientele and managing the difficult balance between eliciting additional service (e.g., colours and perms) yet not causing clients to choose between the cost of a hair treatment and groceries for home. In this way, localised factors shaped what constituted workplace competence in quite distinct ways. Similarly, across six open cut coalmines owned by the same mining company, different performance requirements were evident (Billett, 1994). Each mine site‟s work practices were premised on particular histories of industrial affiliations and demarcations. These had developed over time in each particular mine site, shaped by the age and production stage of the mine (e.g., the depth of the coal seam below the ground). The history of mine ownership had also led to particular workplace arrangements and union affiliations that also shaped the work practices. Moreover, beyond these institutional facts was the brute fact of the direction and angle of the coal seam that shaped the production costs and viability of the mining operation, and the timing of the shift from open cut to underground mining operations, which require quite different occupational skills. So again, the requirements for work performance differed across these work sites as did the kinds and extent of change, which are products of situational factors. The analysis above has emphasised the objective socially derived view; that is, the observable and quantifiable changes to work requirements and their diversity are proposed as a set of objective requirements for participation in paid work. These are the institutional facts (Searle, 1995) that comprise paid work. It has been proposed that the requirements for performance – expertise if you like – are likely to be highly situated. Yet, these are also fleeting. This is because the circumstances that constitute the requirements for performance in particular workplace settings are subject to constant transformation. However, although there are many variations in work requirements, even in the same industry sector or occupational practice, there are also requirements that are more or less common. These are the canonical knowledge of the occupation and trends in the changing character of work requirements that need to be understood. Notwithstanding all this, there remains a significant gap in understanding the requirements for work and its diversity, that is, the subjective and person-dependent basis upon how individuals engage in work. Therefore, before proceeding to identify ways of understanding what constitutes workplace competence, it is important to include the persondependent and subjective process that shapes individuals‟ engagement in and performance at work. WORK REQUIREMENTS AS SUBJECTIVE AND PERSON DEPENDENT