Untitled - socium.ge

Labor in the network society 179of firm formation and firm dying. As just an indicator, for example, in 1998dozens of prominent Silicon Valley firms announced major lay-offs oftenamounting to more than 10 percent of their total workforce, and yet totalemployment grew by 5 percent. Or, as another indicator of firm churning, ofthe one hundred largest Silicon Valley companies in 1985, only 19 still existedand were in the top hundred in 2000 (Benner, 2002).Rapid skill changes: Debates on the relationship between technologicalchange and skill typically focus on relative levels of deskilling or skillsupgrading over time (Braverman, 1975; Smith, 1994; Murnane et al., 1995;Handel, 2000) or the ways in which the value of skills is shaped by socialstruggles and power relationships (Derber et al., 1990; Gee et al., 1996;Wenger, 1998). More important from the perspective of flexible work,however, is the pace of change in skill requirements. This includes bothdeskilling and skill upgrading tendencies, as well as changing terrains inwhich social struggles over the value of skills are played out. In Silicon Valley,the pace of change in the skills workers need to be effective in their work isvery rapid, and the pace seems to have quickened over time. Short productlife-cycles, constantly shifting technological developments, wholesale shifts inthe core subsectors of the region’s information technology industries (evolvingfrom defense, through integrated circuits, personal computers, Internet,bio-tech and nanotechnologies in the space of a generation) means that theskills that people may have learned in the past can quickly become obsolete.In the words of Michael Curran, director of the NOVA Workforce InvestmentBoard, an award-winning training center and workforce development resourcein the Valley: “The nature of industry in the Valley is constantly changing, andemployers just can’t tell you what skills they’re going to need two years fromnow . . . In the past, the skills that employees had lasted longer, maybe 8–10years. Now a current skill set might be valuable for only 18 months” (interview,June 1999).The tendency toward rapid skills obsolescence in high-tech fields is furtherreflected in national earnings trends in high-tech industries, in which a studyin 1996 (prior to the economic downturn) found that the earnings of engineersand managers actually started to decline for people with 24 years’ experienceor more (see Benner, 2002).Reflexivity in work tasks: In addition to an unstable demand for work andrapidly changing skill requirements, work is becoming more volatile due to theincreasing reflexivity of work tasks (Lash and Urry, 1994). This reflexivityrequires workers at all levels to examine their own work activities in an effortto improve their work processes. The increasing importance of meetingrapidly shifting consumer demands in a range of information commodities and