One of the most significant general failings of English skills policy over the last quarter of a century has been a refusal by those in charge to acknowledge and confront the realities of the labour market as it currently exists and as it is liable to continue to exist in the short to medium term. The tendency has instead been to view employment through rose-tinted spectacles, to concentrate attention and comment on growth at the upper end of the occupational spectrum, ignore the persistence of a large body of low paid employment at the bottom of the labour market, and to allude to universal increases in the demand for skills and qualifications being generated by an all-encompassing knowledge-driven economy which has either already arrived or whose achievement lies just around the corner. Policy makers’ belief in this tale of a smooth progression to the sunny uplands of high skill, presumably high wage employment has been supported by a narrative produced by various commentators (for instance Leadbeater, 2000; Giddens, 1998) whereby the forces of globalisation and technological change are inevitably driving all developed economies in this direction.

One of the biggest problems with this approach to conceptualising the future is that it very often falls into the trap of creating a universal narrative, that offers little nuance and which suggests convergence round a single trend or set of conditions. This makes for a neat and simple story, but arguably does so at the cost of doing significant damage to the inherent complexities of the labour market and employment. Many of the papers prepared for the work strand of BCH have tried to grapple with what multiple, different and divergent futures may look like. At any given moment, very different conditions may pertain across the occupational spectrum.

The approach taken here is somewhat different from the guru literature. Rather than predicate predictions on the arrival of an episode of universal, discontinuous change, the author of this paper has chosen to extrapolate from past and current trends, and to use these as a guide to what the future may look like. This approach may provide a picture that is at once complex and diverse, but also more familiar (ie looks more like the present), and less entertaining and novel than many others. It does at least have the virtue of being founded on a somewhat more robust empirical base.

The value of pessimism

The assumptions upon which what follows are centred are pitched somewhere between mild pessimism and reasonable caution. As suggested above, much of the ‘future industry’ relies upon the sale of ‘happy ever after endings’ whereby a knowledge driven economy will make all jobs satisfying and well-paid. Given the trend of developments over the last quarter of a century, this seems an unwise basis for developing policy. The benefit of a slightly more pessimistic view of likely developments is that, if it should prove incorrect, policy can easily be adjusted to accommodate a faster and wider pace of change towards better and more knowledge intensive work. If, on the other hand, policy scenarios are founded on expectations that there will be a uniform and widespread demand for a more skilled and certified polyvalent workforce and this assumption proves unfounded, adjustment to policies and programmes may be much harder to achieve. In other words, it might be best to plan policy on a failsafe basis, not least as one of the central messages of what follows is that the differentiated incentive structures that the labour market may be producing will often tend to militate against, and undermine policies based around, assumptions of universal participation and achievement.

A key focus for such concerns is the distribution of rewards for those in employment. The last two decades have seen a widening disparity between the rewards of those at the bottom of the labour market and those accruing to employees at the very top of the occupational hierarchy. What assumptions are we to make about trends in the future? For instance, the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s recent paper on social mobility (2008) chooses mildly optimistic assumptions that suggest a narrowing in the distribution of income as a result of the government’s educational policies and moves up the value chain by UK employers in the face of the challenges of globalisation. Other scenarios are less optimistic (see Brown et al, 2008). These issues matter because there is relatively strong evidence (Green, Preston and Janmaat, 2006) that lower levels of income inequality (plus other measures of social equity) tend to be associated with higher levels of educational participation and achievement, whereas high levels of income inequality are often found in countries that have fairly polarised patterns of educational achievement (for example, the USA). At the very least, a highly polarised earnings distribution may produce weak incentives to engage in learning for those who expect to be heading towards jobs at the bottom end of the income distribution (see below).

The short term policy goals

Before looking at what may happen, it is worth reminding the reader of the scale of short term 14-19 policy objectives for which the labour market is expected to act as the motor and with which employers are expected to actively engage. These include:

• Far higher levels of achievement of Level 2 (GCSEs and/or Diplomas) at age 16

• Far higher levels of post compulsory participation, with the aim of reaching 90% in the near future.

• Far higher levels of achievement at Levels 2 and 3 (A Levels, Diplomas and NVQs) at age 18/19

• Diplomas (at both Levels 2 and 3) to have achieved parity of esteem with GCSEs and A Levels, both in terms of entry into HE, and also in terms of the esteem with which they are held by employers and the size of the wage premia they are willing to offer to those who hold them.

• The provision of high quality work experience to all youngsters, and the embedding of such provision within the Diplomas.

• An expanded, vibrant and high quality apprenticeship system as the sole means of acquiring vocational qualifications for 16-19 year olds.

• An end to jobs without formalised, certified training for young people under the age of 18 as part of the move to a raising of the compulsory learning leaving age to 18.

Taken individually, each of these objectives might be deemed ambitious when judged against our performance over the last 25 years – this despite the fact that this period as a whole witnessed levels of growth in higher end occupations (and hence a labour market ‘pull’ for more qualified young people) that current projections suggest will not be matched in the short to medium term. Taken together these policies represent the expectation that reforms will deliver nothing less than a step change in participation and achievement that will enable England to match the kind of performance found in other developed countries and to move us from the lower end to the upper quartile of the OECD league tables on secondary education.

Labour market structures and the incentives they create

The changing labour market

As noted in the Introduction, current English 14-19 policy assumes that the trajectory of structural changes in the labour market is creating demands for skill that render it imperative that participation and achievement undergo a step change (Leitch, 2005 and 2006; DfES, 2007). From this follows an associated belief that the labour market and employers’ patterns of recruitment are creating material incentives (in the shape of positive wage returns to qualifications) that will drive young people to make choices that will enable the desired change in 14-19 achievement to be brought about. Unfortunately, both of these policy ‘givens’ may be partially mistaken.

In reality, the much-vaunted knowledge-driven economy is, and is liable to remain, in part a mirage (Nolan and Wood, 2003; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Thompson, 2004). There are knowledge driven sectors, occupations and firms, but the effect has not been uniform or general across the entire labour market and while there has been, and will continue to be, growth at the top end of the labour market in the professions and managerial work, large swathes of low paid employment remain (and are set to remain) in areas such as personal services, cleaning, retail and wholesaling (which now employers about 15% of the workforce), and hotels and restaurants. At present, about 22% of the entire UK labour force are low paid on EU definitions (ie it earns less than 60% of the median hourly wage), with a third of all female workers being low paid (Lloyd et al, 2008). Compared to countries such as France and Denmark, the percentage of our labour force who are low paid is relatively high (Lloyd et al, 2008).

Calculations by the IPPR (see Cooke and Lawton, forthcoming) suggest that between now and 2020 occupational change will not produce any significant reduction in the overall proportion of the workforce that is liable to be low paid – in other words almost a quarter of the entire workforce and about a third of all female workers will remain low paid. They also note that occupational projections for the UK tend to point towards a continuing polarisation in the occupational structure, with growth in many top and bottom end occupational groups and a relative ‘hollowing out’ of the overall proportion of middle tier occupations, which suggests that demand for vocational Level 3 qualifications may remain limited (Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007). It also means that progression out of bottom end jobs may be hard to contrive as the occupational ladders needed to make this happen are largely absent. This problem is already acute, as analysis by Cooke and Lawton (forthcoming) also demonstrates that, at present, those who find themselves in low paid employment are often unable to progress out of such work, and for those that do manage to move up the job ladder, the amount of progression (in terms of any improvement in earnings) is often small and the longevity of any upward mobility uncertain.

The other point to make about the labour market is that it is not a uniform phenomenon across the UK. Different parts of the UK have labour markets that vary across a range of dimensions, not least the range of occupational openings that they offer and the proportion of jobs in different sectors and at different wage levels that they support. There is some evidence (Local Futures, 2006; Green and Owen, 2006) that good, high paying, high skill jobs and low paid, low skilled work are both becoming more concentrated in certain localities, leading to a polarisation of the employment options facing some communities. This has two implications for educational provision. First, the range and quality of opportunities available to young people via the work-based route in areas with a concentration of poor jobs may be attenuated, and that similar problems may attend the provision of an adequate number and quality of work placements for those pursuing education-based vocational offerings. Second, in certain localities the incentives on offer to youngsters to remain in post-compulsory E&T from many of the openings in the local labour market will be weak – a point expanded on below (see also Keep, 2009).

The experience of work and the workplace

Just as low paid work is not set to vanish, there will remain significant, perhaps widening, variations in many other aspects of how employees experience work and how they are managed. Just as the idea of the universal knowledge worker, with high levels of autonomy and ‘authorship’ (to use Leadbeater’s ghastly phrase) over their job tasks is liable to remain a distant vision for many workers, so too is the prospect of everyone being employed in workplaces that value creativity, and manage their employees using sophisticated human resource management techniques that aim to develop and sustain high levels of commitment and innovation (Kersley et al, 2006).

Put bluntly, the experience of work will depend in future, as it does today, on occupational labour markets and even more importantly on the identity of the individual employer and their product market strategy and models of work organisation, job design and employee relations policies (Ashton and Sung, 2006). Rather than universal convergence around a high norm, the most likely outcome is a large, possibly growing range of variance between different workplaces. Being employed by Deloitte Coopers is and will remain very different from working for a budget hotel chain (at whatever level in the organisation), in terms of:

• What one is paid
• How one is managed and motivated
• What training and development opportunities are on offer
• What career pathways can be accessed

In other words, the gap between work in ‘leading edge’ employers and work in ‘trailing edge employers’ may be liable to widen rather than diminish, which poses major challenges for policies that seek to meet the needs of both categories through raising skills and aspirations.

Many employers will continue to view the vast bulk of their workforces as an easily substitutable factor of production, or as a cost to be minimised, rather than as assets or sources of competitive advantage in their own right. This is particularly liable to be true for those working in organisations that cater to cost-conscious customers via price leadership strategies (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008). It is hard to see what will change this situation.

Recruitment, selection and qualifications

The clash between official expectations of the labour market and what are, and will continue to be, sometimes less glossy realities is made manifest via the recruitment and selection process. Insofar as official policy has a view of the processes whereby young people gain entry into paid employment, there is a strong presumption that formalised, ‘best practice’ personnel management textbook methods are an almost universal norm and that these revolve around a meritocratic model based on the possession of formal qualifications (Keep, 2005). Unfortunately, what evidence we have available (and it is patchy and poorly synthesised – see James and Keep, forthcoming) tends to paint a somewhat different picture.

The textbook model does apply in some cases, but tends to do so more for jobs at the upper end of the occupational spectrum, and operates alongside other, less formalised approaches to the process. Data from the large-scale Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) shows that these informal processes include the use of word of mouth advertisement of vacancies (used by 44 per cent of workplaces) and the recommendation of candidates by existing employees (used by 45% of workplaces) (Kersley et al, 2006, pp72-73). At present, what evidence we have (Kersley et al, 2006) suggests that use of these informal approaches may be increasing. Moreover there is often a strong logic to the use of such methods, not least in using social networks to secure information on candidates’ generic and social skills and work ethic that are weakly assessed by formal qualifications (Lockyer and Scholarios, 2007; Iles and Salaman, 1995).

This in turn underlines the fact that employers are aiming and liable to continue to aim to acquire a range of skills, attributes, and attitudes through the recruitment process, many of which bear a weak relationship with formal certification and which often lie outside the spectrum of skill that qualifications (as currently configured) assess (Payne, 1999; Keep and Payne, 2004; Warhurst and Nickson, 2001; Bowles and Gintis, 2002). These include creativity, physical strength and resilience, manual dexterity, social and communication skills, appearance, voice and accent, effort (eg willingness to ‘put in the hours’), and a positive attitude towards authority.

There is also a wealth of evidence that suggests that the part played by qualifications in the recruitment and selection process for many jobs at the lower end of the occupational spectrum is patchy (Evaluation and Development Agency, 1997; IFF Research, 2000; Jackson, 2001; Jackson et al, 2002; Johnson and Burden, 2003; Miller et al, 2002; Spilsbury and Lane, 2000; Newton et al, 2005; Bunt et al, 2005). The CBI claim that their members are often operating a 80/20 rule in recruitment, whereby employers afford an 80% weighting to uncertified generic and soft skills, and 20% to hard skills (CBI, 2007, p13). These preferences and patterns of behaviour on the part of employers do not seem likely to undergo radical change in the foreseeable future, unless interventions such as a widespread use of licence-to-practice are introduced by government or some other agency.

None of this is to suggest that qualifications are or will be unimportant, merely that they represent one factor among a number within decision making in the recruitment and selection process, and for many jobs at the lower end of the labour market that process itself may be relatively informal and may rely upon social networks and forms of skill and job-readiness indicators that lie outside the ambit of formal certification (for a fuller discussion, see James and Keep, forthcoming). What it does mean, is that lower level qualifications, particularly vocational qualifications, produce weak and uncertain returns in the labour market and that the average wage premia they attract is often limited (Jenkins et al, 2007; Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007). Again, it is hard to see how this is liable to change dramatically in the near future. Policy makers appear to be pinning their hopes on the idea that if employers are allowed to re-design vocational certification to suit their needs, they will be more willing to offer a wage premium to those who hold such qualifications. The problem with this scenario is that what we know about such jobs suggests that the skill requirements (in least in terms of certifiable skills) are often so limited in scope and nature, and the supply of labour that holds such skills so relatively abundant, that employers may see no need to pay more for them however well they are covered by a qualification (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008).

This somewhat depressing picture concerning low paid work, the hetrogeneity of what work will be like, and the nature of the recruitment and selection process has a number of serious but frequently unappreciated implications for policy on initial education (and Education and Training policy more widely). These implications stem from the way in which the structure of labour market opportunities, the pay levels they generate, and hence the returns they offer on the acquisition of various types and levels of qualification produce an incentive structure that may not be particularly conducive to the kind of high participation, high achievement future to which policy makers aspire (Keep, 2005 and 2009).

Thinking about incentives

In trying to think about the many different forms of incentives that face individuals when they contemplate engaging in Education and Training (E&T), the following typology may be of use (for a fuller exposition, see Keep, 2009):

Type 1 Incentives are generated inside the E&T system and are designed to create positive attitudes towards the act of learning through intrinsic interest. Type 1 incentives are bound up with things such as the curriculum, pedagogies, assessment regimes and opportunities for progression.

Type 2 Incentives are generated in wider society and the economy and the rewards they confer are external to the learning process itself. They include wage returns to particular types and levels of qualification, access to higher status employment associated with higher educational achievement, cultural expectations (including those of parents) about the value of learning, and forms of labour market regulation (such as licence to practice) that make the acquisition of particular qualifications a prerequisite for access to particular forms of employment.

Increasingly, government has noted that neither of these incentive categories has produced signals that are sufficiently widespread or strong to engender the desired step change in participation. It has therefore increasingly come to rely on Type 1b Incentives, which provide government subsidy to act in lieu of Type 2 Incentives from the labour market – Educational Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) would be a prime example here (Keep, 2005, 2009).

Incentive patterns and their impact on initial education

As hinted at above, what we know about both the evolving structure of the labour market and the recruitment and selection behaviours of many employers suggests that the incentives on offer to those youngsters not following the ‘Royal Route’ through post-compulsory education of A Levels and HE entry, may be facing Type 2 incentives that are both weak and uncertain.

This suspicion is confirmed by the mass of data generated by many studies of the rates of return (in terms of higher average lifetime earnings) that accrue to different levels and types of qualification.

Overall, the message from this research is fairly simple and fairly stark – at every level academic qualifications appear to generate higher average returns than their vocational counterparts. In addition, for lower level vocational qualifications the pattern of wage returns is extremely complex and confusing and often depends on the form of E&T through which the qualification was achieved, but in many instances the returns (especially to NVQs) are either somewhere between very low and nil, or in some cases actually negative (having an NVQ Level 2 sometimes appears to be associated with earning less than someone with no qualifications) (see Dearden et al, 2000; Dearden et al, 2004; Jenkins et al, 2007; and Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007).

It might be noted in passing that we have no very reliable means of knowing how effective or otherwise the sequence of attempts at creating a set of general vocational qualifications (of the type represented by GNVQs, AVCEs, vocational A Levels) has been, since no iteration of this project has lasted long enough for a significant cohort of its ‘graduates’ to be absorbed into the labour market and to therefore generate robust data on the rates of return to the qualification. Obviously from the perspective of current reforms, a key issue is the wage returns that will accrue to the Diplomas at all levels. If the mantra of ‘parity of esteem’ with the academic route (ie GCSEs and A levels) is taken seriously, this means that Diplomas will need to generate broadly similar labour market returns to their academic counterparts – something that the vast bulk of non-academic qualifications have never achieved. At the very least, the Diplomas need to appear worth studying, and to offer positive enhancements to lifetime earnings. Even this test may prove a demanding one where Diplomas are leading candidates towards families of occupations in lower paying sectors of the economy (eg retail, health and beauty).

Moreover, the law of unintended consequences comes into play when we consider the unfortunate juxtaposition of developments in the labour market (growing polarisation in job growth at the top and bottom end, hollowing out of middle level jobs, poor progression opportunities from low paid work, and rising geographical concentrations of bad jobs), with policy developments which have placed a heavy emphasis on the massification of HE. This is because as graduates cascade down through the labour market the range of relatively highly paid job opportunities available to those without degrees is gradually being reduced. This means that the incentives to going down the Royal Route are if anything strengthening (not because the returns to degrees are necessarily improving, but because a whole range of career routes are otherwise closed off), while at the same time the incentives confronting those who cannot or do not wish to enter HE are becoming less powerful in terms of what labour market opportunities non-HE learning routes and qualifications will lead to (Keep and Mayhew, 2004). It should be noted that these opportunities will not only generally offer lower lifetime earnings, but also reflect weaker levels of other Type 2 Incentives, such as opportunities for career progression and development, social status, and intrinsic job interest (see Keep, 2009).

In summary, what we appear to be faced by is a situation where the strength and reliability of Type 2 Incentives tends to fade as we progress down both the occupational ladder and the levels of qualification. As the incentives weaken, so does the logic for post-compulsory participation, so that for young people who live in communities where the range of local job openings is narrow and often leads to lower end occupations, and for whom escape via HE entry appears an unrealistic or unappealing prospect, the reasons to stay on and try to achieve a qualification may not appear particularly compelling.

In many other developed countries, including the USA, Canada, and Australia, as well as North European countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a very different Type 2 Incentive structure pertains, because of the extensive use of licence to practice labour market regulation. In these countries, youngsters wanting to enter particular occupations (car mechanic, builder, plumber, retail assistant, bank clerk) know that in order to stand any chance whatsoever of pursuing this goal, they must obtain the required Level 2 or 3 vocational qualification. Such expectations are often reinforced by other, wider societal and cultural expectations and norms, and in the case of some countries, by wage systems that mean that even lower occupational category employment secures relatively generous rewards. All this delivers a strong, absolute form of incentive to both participate and achieve. Much of the difference in the levels of post-compulsory participation and achievement that the UK tends to register vis-à-vis other OECD countries can arguably be put down to this absence of labour market regulation rather than to other countries necessarily having more sophisticated and engaging curricula, assessment system and pedagogies that are delivering relatively more powerful Type 1 Incentives than are found here (Keep, 2005). If this is the case, then it suggests that much of the effort expended on English 14-19 reform over the last quarter of a century may have been, at least in part, misdirected.

The consequences of all this are that for far too many youngsters, the Type 2 Incentives that they face, particularly in terms of pay and career prospects, are fairly weak, especially for those following many Level 2 vocational courses. As a result, the following quote, from a study sponsored by BP some 16 years ago remains depressingly apposite:

“Much has been made of the need to place greater emphasis on post-compulsory vocational studies. The business community has been particularly vocal. The message is clear: in order to compete, we must improve the skill level of the British workforce. However, financial incentives to pursue these courses contradict the message … the expected lifetime earnings associated with lower level vocational qualifications …. generally fall below those of school leavers with only GCSEs. Employers do not seem to place a high value on low level vocational skills and, as a result, young people are acting rationally in not participating in training to the same extent as on the Continent. Quite simply, as long as some employers contradict the message through their pay and recruitment policies young people will continue to spurn such training.” (Bennett et al, 1992, p12)

Despite a whirlwind of activity and reform within the field of 14-19 policy, the problem neatly outlined above remains every bit as important now as it was then.

Indeed, it could be argued that the government’s decision to compel young people to remain in learning until 17 (and within a few years 18) simply reflects an implicit admission of failure on this point, and, rather than regulate the labour market, they have chosen instead to regulate young people, who are deemed easier to coerce than employers. The most likely outcome of this policy, besides a considerable level of non-cooperation on the part of some young people, is that participation may rise, but achievement may not. In other words, young people will be more or less grudgingly warehoused in some form of ‘learning’ experience until 18, but without necessarily experiencing any very compelling incentive to achieve anything during their post-compulsory phase.

Employer expectations

Much of the policy rhetoric has surrounded education policy, and skills policies more generally, has placed great stress on the centrality of education, training and skills to business success (at the level of the national economy, sector and individual enterprise). The corollary, it is believed, is that business leaders will inevitably be extremely concerned about skills, and will be willing to devote large amounts of time, energy and company resources to co-operating with government to redesign the education and training (E&T) system, to participating in the governance of the publicly-funded E&T system (eg Sector Skills Councils, the LSC, Regional Development Agencies, etc), and in helping to deliver the myriad of (often somewhat short-lived) government schemes and programmes that this system revolves around. Given official assumptions about the centrality of skill to future competitive success (Leitch Review, 2005, 2006) it seems reasonable to suppose that the official belief must be that employers’ interest in skills and initial education and training will intensify further.

There are a number of points that can be made in relation to these beliefs about the present and future. First, when it comes to young entrants to the labour market, particularly those aiming to enter occupations where high levels of qualification are not a prime requirement, we need to remember that employers have, and will continue to have, access to many alternative sources of labour, such as HE students working part-time, women returners, older workers, and migrant labour, all of which may offer a more socially-skilled and flexible labour force. In other words, rather than expend time and energy trying to help reform and support 14-19 provision, or target the outputs of that phase of education for recruitment purposes, employers will be able to look elsewhere. Moreover, for many occupations, the development of mass HE will enable employers to recruit for a broad range of jobs at age 21-plus, rather than from 16-19 year olds, and earlier phases of education will matter to them only insofar as it helps equip enough young people to enter the degree courses from which they recruit.

Second, and more fundamentally, there is much evidence that skills are often, for businesses, a third or fourth order issue (Ashton and Sung, 2006; Keep and Mayhew, 1999; Keep et al, 2006; Grugulis, 2008). If this is and remains the case then initial education is but one, often minor, sub-section of what for many employers will be a relatively marginal set of issues. Acceptance of this reality has tended to be strongly resisted by policy makers,

And this raises a range of issues about what can or should be expected of and from employers in future.

Meeting the needs of employers

Unless policy trajectories change dramatically in the future, one of the key goals of government activity is liable to be ‘meeting the needs of employers’. As has been suggested on a number of previous occasions, the policy maker’s notion of ‘employers’ as a meaningful and homogeneous collective category is open to serious question (Huddleston and Keep, 1999; Gleeson and Keep, 2004). The skill needs of employers will continue to vary across sector, sub-sector, occupational grouping, firm size, and product market strategy. As noted above, divergence, rather than convergence may be the story of labour market developments over the next twenty years.

As a result, different employers will want varied outcomes and outputs from the education system, and insofar as the volume and/or quality of the supply of those requirements are finite at any given moment, they may well find themselves in competition with one another for a limited supply of suitable young people. As a result, the idea of ‘meeting employers’ needs’ (often specified as a simple and unproblematic goal for policy), is in reality liable to be extremely problematic, since different employers want divergent outcomes and to satisfy one set of demands may well be to dissatisfy another (Huddleston and Keep, 1999).

The upshot of this will be (as now) positional competition between sectors and occupations for particular segments of the ability range. History tells us that some forms of employment tend to be much less attractive to bright youngsters than others, and sectors at the losing end of the spectrum have a tendency to blame the education system (in the shape of poor or inappropriate careers guidance and teacher bias) for their woes. There is a strong likelihood that these issues will impact on the Diplomas, in that some of the lines of study will attract those of higher levels of ability and others will not. Lines that are linked to employment opportunities in sectors and occupations that are associated with relatively low pay, weak career and progression opportunities, and poor working conditions (eg unsocial hours) are liable to struggle to recruit students in sufficient numbers and of a quality to satisfy the expectations of some employers. The CBI has called for the numbers of young people opting to go down each Diploma line to ‘match’ the size of demand from employers (CBI, 2007). The danger is that, as has often been the case in the past, when employers’ expectations are not met, the temptation (on the part of both employers but also government) will be to blame the education system and its staff for failing to meet the needs of the labour market (Huddleston and Keep, 1999; Gleeson and Keep, 2004).

Conclusions

The foregoing poses some major challenges for policy development. In essence what it suggests is that a future labour market that offers divergent opportunities and rewards is liable to create an incentive structure that is similarly polarised. Those who know they are heading for A Levels (or their future equivalent), an elite university and employment in a well-paying occupation with a sophisticated employer will have very strong incentives to participate, to develop a wide range of skills and attributes, and to achieve. Those who live in localities with a concentration of low paid employment, who do not see themselves going on into higher education and entering what is in effect a national (or even international) labour market, and whose pathway is therefore down a vocational route (broadly defined) will often be facing much weaker and more uncertain incentives. When issues such as parental class are added in (see Keep, 2009) the outcomes may create major challenges for policy.

In formulating scenarios of the future and using these to plan E&T policies, there is an urgent need to come to terms with the deficiencies that exist and will continue to exist in the demand for skills from employers. At the lower end of the occupational spectrum demand will be weak, patchy and limited, and there will remain a large number of jobs that will be low paid and essentially low skilled.

A polarised and highly differentiated labour market poses major challenges for the construction of a common educational experience within state education, not least given that the compulsory phase of this is now going to be expected to last from 3 to 18. Constructing a unified, common platform of learning that can meaningfully occupy this 13 year period, and fit people for a very varied set of labour market destinations and trajectories, as well as prepare them to be responsible citizens and parents, and provide a foundation for lifelong learning (which may be nothing to do with their jobs), will plainly be a challenging exercise.

There are, in essence, two ways that policy could address these issues. The first is to assume that the answer will lie in further reform of pedagogy, curricula and assessment regimes, and that these can produce internal (Type 1) incentives within the learning process that will be sufficient to motivate more young people to participate and to achieve.

The second way of viewing the problem (ie the one adopted in this paper) would suggest that the heart of the problem lies outside the classroom, and that a polarised labour market will produce strong incentives at the top, and weak incentives at the bottom, and the E&T system cannot necessarily entirely compensate for this state of affairs. While further tinkering with qualification design might help to ease problems at the margin, the real obstacles to progress lie in the structure of occupations, their associated wage premia, and limited ladders for progression. In other words, it is reform of the labour market rather than of education that will be needed.

In taking this line, the author is not suggesting that a better curriculum offering and improved forms of pedagogy, coupled with a more nimble assessment system are not worthwhile and valuable goals in their own right, but on their own there is a strong likelihood that they will prove insufficient to power us towards the kind of policy goals currently being espoused. Only in combination with a reformed labour market and more uniform demand for skills across all occupations can they do that. We have changed curricula, qualifications and pedagogic regimes for this age group many times since the middle of the last century, and yet world-class levels of participation and attainment have continued to elude us. In a sense an analogy can be drawn with an attempt to design the perfect car, wherein ceaseless efforts are made to perfect the bodywork, upholstery and instrumentation, but with little if any attention paid to the design of the engine – which is small and low powered. The result is something that looks quite nice parked on the drive, but which is unable to travel any great distance at a reasonable speed.

The key issue for the construction of the scenarios is that they engage with a labour market and workplaces that encompass extremely diverse experiences and outcomes. These, in turn, will tend to create incentive structures that for upper level occupations and good employers will support policy, and in the case of lower end employment and bad employers will tend to undermine the rationale for participation, achievement or a rich and inclusive curriculum. If we are thinking in terms of universal educational norms or minimum entitlements, this raises some very big questions about at what level these should be pitched in the face of a spectrum of labour market opportunities and needs. Some employers will want creative, polyvalent knowledge workers. Others will want people who don’t expect too much, have limited ambition to progress (since opportunities to do so may be low), and who do what they are told. One response might be a highly differentiated set of educational experiences and streams of provision. The future is not going to be simple!

References

Ashton, D. and Sung, J. (2006) How Competitive Strategy Matters. Understanding the Drivers of Training, Learning and Performance at Firm Level’. SKOPE Research Paper No. 66, Coventry, University of Warwick, SKOPE.

Bates, P., Johnson, C. and Gifford, J. (2008) Recruitment and Training Among Large National Employers. Coventry, Learning and Skills Council.

Bennett, R., Glennerster, H. and Nevison, D. (1992) Learning should pay. Poole, British Petroleum.

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (2002) Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited. Sociology of Education, 75 (1), pp.1-18.

Brown, P., Ashton, D., Lauder, H. and Tholen, G. (2008) Towards a High-Skilled, Low Wage Workforce? A Review of Global Trends in Education, Employment and the Labour Market. SKOPE Monograph No. 10, Cardiff, Cardiff University, SKOPE.

Brown, P. and Hesketh, A. (2004) The mis-management of talent. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Bunt, K., McAndrew, F. and Kuechel, A. (2005) Jobcentre Plus Employer (Market View) Survey. London, Department for Work and Pensions.

Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (2008) Getting on, getting ahead – A discussion paper: analysing the trends and drivers of social mobility. London, Cabinet Office.

Confederation of British Industry (2007) Shaping up for the future – The business vision for education and skills. London, CBI.

Cooke, G. and Lawton, K. (forthcoming) Working Out of Poverty: Paper Three. London, Institute of Public Policy Research.

Dearden, L., McIntosh, S., Myck, M. and Vignoles, L. (2000) The returns to academic, vocational and basic skills in Britain. DfEE Research Report RR 192. Nottingham, DfEE.

Dearden, L., McGranahan, L. and Sianesi, B. (2004) An in-depth analysis of the returns to National Vocational Qualifications obtained at Level 2. London, London School of Economics, Centre for the Economics of Education.

Department for Education and Skills (2007) Raising Expectations: staying in education and training post-16. Cm 7065, London, The Stationery Office.

Dickerson, A. and Vignoles, A. (2007) The Distribution and Returns to Qualifications in the Sector Skills Councils. SSDA Research Report 21, Wath-upon-Dearne, Sector Skills Development Agency.

Evaluation and Development Agency (1997) Employability phase 1: the skills and attributes Tyneside employers look for in school leavers. Newcastle, The Evaluation and Development Agency.

Giddens, A. (1998) The Third Way: Renewal of Social Democracy. London, Polity Press.

Gleeson, D. and Keep, E. (2004) Voice without accountability: the changing relationship between employers, the state and education in England. Oxford Review of Education, 30 (1), pp.391-413.

Green, A. and Owen, D. (2006) The geography of poor skills and access to work. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Green, A., Preston, J. and Janmaat, G. (2006) Education, Equality and Social Cohesion. London, Palgrave.

Grugulis, I. (2008) Skills, Training and Human Resource Development: A Critical text. London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Huddleston, P. and Keep, E. (1999) What do employers want from education? – a question more easily asked than answered. In: Cramphorn, J. (ed) The Role of Partnerships in Economic Regeneration and Development – International Perspectives. Coventry, University of Warwick, Centre for Education and Industry.

IFF Research (2000) Learning and training at work. DfEE Research Report RR 202, Nottingham, DfEE.

Iles, P. and Salaman, G. (1995) Recruitment, selection and assessment. In: Storey, J. (ed) Human Resource Management: A Critical Text. London, Routledge, pp.202-233.

Jackson, M. (2001) Meritocracy, education and occupational attainment: what do employers really see as merit? Working Paper 2001-03, Oxford, Oxford University, Department of Sociology.

Jackson, M., Goldthorpe, J. and Mills, C. (2002) Education, employers and class mobility. Paper presented at the Oxford meeting of the International Sociological Association, Research Committee 28, Oxford, UK, April.

James, S. and Keep, E. (forthcoming) Recruitment and Selection – Towards a New Research Agenda. SKOPE Research Paper, Cardiff, Cardiff University, SKOPE.

Jenkins, A, Greenwood, C. and Vignoles, A. (2007) The Returns to Qualifications in England: Updating the Evidence Base on Level 2 and Level 3 Vocational Qualifications. London, London School, of Economics, Centre for the Economics of Education.

Johnson, S. and Burden, T. (2003) Young people, employability and the induction process. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Keep, E. (2005) Reflections on the curious absence of employers, labour market incentives and labour market regulation in English 14-19 policy: first signs of a change in direction? Journal of Educational Policy, 20 (5), pp.533-553.

Keep, E. (2008) From Competence and Competition to the Leitch Review – The Utility of Comparative Analyses of Skills and Performance. IES Working Paper No. 14, Brighton, Institute of Employment Studies.

Keep, E. (2009) Internal and External Incentives to Engage in Education and Training – A framework for analysing the forces acting on individuals? SKOPE Research Paper, Cardiff, Cardiff University, SKOPE.

Keep, E. and Mayhew, K. (1999) The Assessment: Knowledge, Skills and Competitiveness. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15 (1), pp. 1-15.

Keep, E. and Mayhew, K. (2004) The economic and distributional implications of current policies on higher education. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 20 (2), pp.298-314.

Keep, E., Mayhew, K. and Payne, J. (2006) From skills revolution to productivity miracle – not as easy as it sounds? Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 22 (4), pp.539-559.

Keep, E. and Payne, J. (2002) Policy interventions for a vibrant work-based route – or when policy hits reality’s fan (again). In: Evans, K., Hodkinson, P. and Unwin, L. (eds) Working to learn: Transforming learning in the workplace. London, Kogan Page, pp.187-211.

Keep, E. and Payne, J. (2004) I can’t believe it’s not skill: the changing meaning of skill in the UK context and some implications. In: Hayward, G. and James, S. (eds) Balancing the Skills Equation. Bristol, Policy Press, pp.53-76.

Kersley, B., Alpin, B., Forth, J., Bryson, A., Bewley, H., Dix, G. and Oxenbridge, S. (2006) Inside the Workplace: Findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey. London, Routledge.

Leadbeater, C. (2000) Living on Thin Air. London, Viking.

Leitch Review of Skills (2005) Skills in the UK: The long-term challenge. London, H M Treasury.

Leitch Review of Skills (2006) Prosperity for all in the global economy – world class skills. London, H M Treasury.

Lloyd, C., Mason, G. and Mayhew, K. (eds) (2008) Low waged work in the UK. New York, Russell Sage Foundation.

Local Futures (2006) State of the Nation 2006. London, Local Futures.

Lockyer, C. and Scholarios, D. (2007). The “rain dance” of selection in construction: rationality as ritual and the logic of informality. Personnel Review, 36 (4), pp.528-548.

Miller, L., Acutt, B. and Kellie, D. (2001) Minimum and preferred entry qualifications and training provision for British workers. International Journal of Training and Development, 6 (3), pp.163-182.

Newton, B., Hurstfield, J., Miller, L., Page, R. and Akroyd, K. (2005) What employers look for when recruiting the unemployed and inactive: skills, characteristics and qualifications. DWP Research Report 295, London, Department for Work and Pensions.

Nolan, P. and Wood, S. (2003) Mapping the future of work. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 41 (2), pp.165-174.

Payne, J. (1999) All things to all people: changing perceptions of skill among Britain’s policy makers since the 1950s and their implications. SKOPE Research Paper No. 2, Coventry, University of Warwick, SKOPE.

Spilsbury, M. and Lane, K. (2000) Skill needs and recruitment practices in Central London. London, FOCUS Central London

Thompson, P. (2004) Skating on thin ice – the knowledge economy myth. Glasgow, University of Strathclyde.

Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2001) Looking good, sounding right. London, Industrial Society.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

2.1 The avoidance of technological determinism

Technological determinism essentially is reflected in the idea that, if we have the capacity to develop technology in a certain way, then we will or should do it and that this development will have an ‘impact’ on the rest of our social and economic life. Technological development thus becomes both an imperative and a determinant. Here our actions are reduced to those behaviours that will ensure the speedy uptake of the new technological possibilities (Brown et al, 2000) and any objections can be tagged as ’standing in the way of progress’, usually with some reference to the Luddites.

In reality, of course, human agency does steer the course of take-up and diffusion. We are able to make decisions about which applications seem relevant or useful: a good example is the poor take-up of 3^rd generation mobiles compared to the unexpectedly rapid diffusion of the relatively low-tech text messaging (Cliff et al, 2008). Having said this, we also need to recognise that the majority of such decisions will be made by those in society with the economic and social power to define what is ‘useful’ and what is a problem worthy of a technological solution. Not all problems get technology thrown at them: in our society we can conveniently get money from a hole in the wall, but two thirds of the world has trouble in getting a clean water supply.

Past mistakes in forecasting often stem from a failure to acknowledge this inter-relation between the technical and the social. However, to say that technologies, once the decision has been made to develop them in a particular way, have no effects beyond those which have been planned is equally delusory. We have to avoid both technological determinism on one hand but also the view which sees technology solely as a social product on the other. While technologies are undoubtedly shaped by the processes of social and economic decision making they, in turn, affect the policies, the users and the infrastructure associated with them – thus technologies reflect society but also shape and modify it (McKenzie and Wajman, 1987; de Laat, 2000).

For example, the path or trajectory may be influenced in this way by non-technological factors but, once a step is taken for whatever reason at the time, further developments will often follow on from it in a pattern of irreversibility and path dependency. A good example is the QWERTY keyboard which was originally developed to slow the pace of typists down because of the technical limitations of the early mechanical typewriter, yet which remains the dominant model for all digital keyboarding. We therefore need to appreciate the consequences of existing or emerging technological trajectories as, once established, their inertia may limit the possibilities of choice.

We can say therefore that technological trajectories are constructed by societies in an interactive process between scientific innovation, citizens’ demands, the intervention of relevant actors such companies or government, and the responses of economic and legal institutions (Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008).

2.2 Taking a broad definition of technology

What we mean by ‘technology’ is in reality a socio-technical system. A purely ‘hard’ scientific/technical view of technology as essentially ‘tools’ is too narrow, for hardware only becomes a particular technology (for example, the assembly line, the call centre) when it is made part of social and economic life and organisation. The ’soft’ aspects of technologies are the other side of the technological coin to the hardware; soft aspects are the capabilities such as knowledge, skills, processes and values which are needed to apply the hardware within specific socio-economic contexts. To develop soft technology can require training, organisational change, or the provision of new services.

This is because technology is how we apply scientific and empirical know-how to meeting and fulfilling economic goals and social needs in real life. Thus, to plot the trajectory of change we need to identify likely technical advances, and map them against the developing socio-economic needs.

3.0 What is the connection between technological development and economic activity?

Lee and colleagues for the Work Foundation point out that the neoclassical economic model saw technological change as an exogenous variable, external to the working of the economy. Newer economic approaches (endogenous growth theory) see a growth in knowledge affecting both technological change and economic growth (Lee et al, 2007). This conception of growth thus places a high value on the role of innovation.

When looking at technological trends in the context of the economy, the popular focus is often to concentrate first on:

a) new products (such as PCs or DVD players) and the sectors which produce them.

Actually it could be argued that equally important changes to our way of life have been through

b) modifications to existing products (phones) and

c) to the application of technology to change the ways we do things (shopping, banking). Indeed ‘innovations are framed in terms of letting us do things faster, over a greater distance and more conveniently than they are done today’ (Brown et al, 2000).

Using the past experience of ICT we can, in Table 1 below, identify three related areas where technological development will affect economic activity (modified from Brinkley, 2008).

Table 1: Technological development and economic activity

In 2 and 3, the ‘technological frontier’, the boundary of what can be produced with current resources (including knowledge), is pushed outwards as new methods of production and new products are created (Lee, Schneider and Brinkley, 2007).

In addition, the degree to which any of these will flow from any particular technological development will depend on several contextual factors including:

• The business environment (including labour, product and financial markets)
• The education system.

4.0 Looking ahead to 2025

The task of predicting where technological change is going to transform our patterns of work and employment is complicated by several factors.

• Technological convergence and blurring of the boundaries between technologies
• The technology/social need interface
• The increasing difficulty of defining discrete sectors of economic activity
• Public attitudes towards particular technologies
• Exogenous factors which may have an equally strong effect on patterns of employment (Cliff et al, 2008).

5.0 The path of technological development and convergence

5.1 Increasing levels of automation

Ever since the industrial revolution and the demise of the handloom weavers technologically-enabled labour displacement has always generated both negative and positive scenarios. In the short term large-scale job shedding in declining or outmoded sectors has created undoubted emiseration for whole occupations, and the prospect of technological change is inevitably seen with some foreboding by many sectors of the workforce. It can be argued that to focus solely on this immediate effect is to assume that there is a fixed amount of output to be produced and that the replacement of labour by technology will yield a zero-sum end result: the machines will get a bigger slice of the economic activity cake but the cake will remain the same size. Against this, the positive scenario argues that realistically we should adopt a positive-sum model as, in the long term, the increases in productivity stimulate the economy and create jobs often in totally unforeseen industries: the ‘cake’ gets bigger. However, even if true, we should note that this is not quite comparing like with like: when occupations die, the negative effects (loss of income, career, status and hope) are often concentrated in specific geographical localities, whereas the consequences of growth are usually more widely dispersed.

Existing predictions concerning labour substitution through automation see a trend of intensification in existing semi-automated sectors and the diffusion of automation to previously untouched sectors as the cost of intelligent automation continues to fall. Extracting from the graphical projections produced by Peláez and Kyriakou (2008) Table 2 indicates the following approximations for different sectors for the year 2020:

Table 2: Predictions of sectoral levels of automation in EU countries by year 2020

[Source: Figures adapted from Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008]

It is clear from the above that even sectors previously immune to labour displacement are likely to experience this within two decades.

5.2 Technological convergence

The above, however, is a prediction for a single category of technology. We know from our two decades’ experience of digital technologies that key technologies have a tendency to converge and that, when technologies do converge, the pace of technological change speeds up and the uses of the technologies become more diffused throughout different areas of social and economic life. For example, the convergence of IT and telecoms has meant that the same technologies are now used for work, consumption and entertainment and the same services (voice, internet, video) can now be provided through several different technologies – mobile, optical fibre, co-axial cable TV, fixed radio and satellite.

Current predictions indicate that technological convergences in the next two decades may prove even more dramatic as scientists from different disciplines perceive complementary lines of development. For example, the prospects for robotics and advanced automation will include improving robotics with the addition of more ‘human’ capabilities: eyesight, intelligent interaction, integration in a language system and mobility in open spaces. In industrial biotechnology, it is predicted that we could be using biological processes in the transformation of materials that at present require high energy and pollutant-emitting processes (Sager, 2001). When these two trends converge we will see the development of biological-computer interfaces (Cliff et al, 2008) and eventually of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) convergence, with the time horizon for such convergence of biotechnology, robotics and nanotechnology estimated to be 2025 (Sager, 2001; Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008).

It must be stressed that these are technical predictions: whether these possibilities are taken up and disseminated will depend on the social and contextual factors indicated above.

5.3 The technology/need interface

This raises the question of whether the task of prediction should start from the science/technology end or from the social need/market end? Is it a question of problems searching for solutions or solutions looking for problems to be solved? Realistically, it is safe to assert that it has always to be a combination of both. An interesting approach to mapping this comes from the French Foresight exercise which used socio-technical grids to identify what were going to be key technologies.

Here (Table 3) the grid example is showing the relationship between fuel cells and economic developments on one side and technical/scientific developments on the other. The grid represents the recognition that, as discussed above, the path of technological development is the result of an interaction between social-economic need, the state of technological knowledge and the critical developmental issues that must be overcome. The underlined category is described as the ‘flag’: in identifying a flag for a key technology we can either flag the social need (column 3) or the technology need (column 4). In other words we cannot start with applications (Column 2) or even sectors for application (column 1) as these are unlikely to be causal in their operation. Similarly, while critical technology points (Column 5) are also seen as key to development, the areas of scientific domain (Column 6) are too far removed to be causal in their operation.

Where we can identify a need but, as yet, there might be a range of technological solutions, the flag stays in column 3. Once a clear lead is taken by one of the technologies (as in this example) the flag shifts to column 4. The process produced a list of ‘key technologies’ which were key either for their attractiveness (a potentially favourable application of some kind) or their effect on competitiveness, or were seen as key with primary reference to the dynamics of technology.

Table 3: Identification of key technologies: the example of fuel cells

[Source: from Durand, 2003]

Biotechnology, new materials and ICTs were seen as the three ‘enabling’ technologies whose presence is evidenced across a wide number of traditionally separate product sectors, although ICTs were pervasive in the technology mapping in that they seemed to colonise the entire field. Biotechnologies were the second major area but with a longer ‘wavelength’ and less immediate effect and penetration power into other fields. (This may be a little faster in the UK as we have been ahead of other EU member states in developing specialist biotechnology companies, particularly in biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics and agri-environmental areas (DTI, 1999)).

5.4 The difficulties of defining sector boundaries

Our task in this paper is to predict where such key technologies will be deployed (in other words, Column 1 in the grid) and here it becomes even more difficult. Our experience of IT diffusion has demonstrated how a common technological base allows the blurring of once-discrete employment areas – supermarkets now act as banks, for example, and TV companies supply phone and internet services. This often makes it difficult to identify those new employment sectors which will require different skills from those which are current in the sector from which they emerge. Few people in the 1980s foresaw the expansion of call centres, and call centre work as a distinctive area of employment did not immediately show up in the employment figures, as banking call centres were counted as banking employees and utilities call centres as utility employees.

This suggests that, in thinking about potential future economic activity, traditional economic and employment segmentations are often misleading. For many years we have popularly used classifications which derive from the traditional threefold division of the workforce into:

Primary (such as agriculture, lumbering, mining and other extractive processes)

Secondary (industrial manufacturing, engaged on transforming raw materials into products), and

Tertiary (engaged in providing not products but services, such as transport, finance, and retailing).

This classification is first credited to the New Zealand economist A.G.B. Fisher, writing in 1935, but was later refined by Colin Clark in 1940. The coming of the information revolution prompted some 1980s authors to suggest the addition of a fourth category of

Quaternary or information workers, involved in the transmission, processing and receiving of information.

This concept has more recently been replaced by that of knowledge workers, who are said to take their identity from the existence of a Knowledge Economy. Most current predictions are predicated upon the existence of the knowledge economy, a frequently vague concept which has, however, been usefully operationalised by the Work Foundation:

‘The knowledge economy is a story of how general purpose technologies have combined with intellectual and knowledge assets – the ‘intangibles’ of research, design, development, creativity, education, science, brand equity and human capital – to transform our economy’ (Brinkley, 2008, p9).

The Knowledge Economy (KE) is seen as comprising technology and knowledge-based industries reflecting R&D intensity, high ICT usage, and the development of large numbers of graduate and professional workers. The Work Foundation correctly observe that these characteristics cut across most sectors and industries, at the same time blurring the traditional boundaries between sectors such as manufacturing and services and enabling the emergence of previously marginal sectors such as the creative industries. In this, technological development is seen as a supply-side enabler of the KE (Brinkley, 2008).

Eurostat continues to use sectoral boundaries for measurement purposes and sees the KE as comprising high to medium tech manufacturing and communications and a knowledge service sector broken down into four groups: high tech services (R&D and computing), financial services, market-based knowledge services (communications, travel and business) and other knowledge services (education, health, recreational and cultural services). Table 4 shows that using this break-down, the composition of the knowledge industries in Europe (EU15) in 2005 was as follows:

Table 4: Europe’s knowledge industries (2005)

[source: Eurostat, quoted in Brinkley and Lee, 2006]

The role of knowledge, however defined, reminds us of the importance of soft technology. Soft technology, when interpreted into the jobs people do, translates as service employment and most predictions agree that services will constitute the heart of the economies of the 21st century.

In their analysis of the service sector, Miozzo and Soete (2001) have shown how ICT has allowed services to be produced in one place and consumed simultaneously in another. This has increased service transportability, changing modes of delivery and contributing to a new technical division of labour. ICT applications are particularly apparent in key sub-sectors in services, namely:

a) information network services (finance, insurance, telecoms) which involve large-scale information processing, and

b) physical network services (transport, travel, and wholesale and retail distribution) which involve support for logistics and route planning (Miozzo and Ramirez, 2003).

What is significant here is that this has restructured not only the service sector but has affected all other economic activities. The service content of many manufactured goods has increased through an expansion in ‘front-end’ employment such sales, technical help, product development and marketing. Many producer services, which were historically internal to large organisation (accounting, advertising, distribution), are increasingly externalised so that those knowledge-intensive activities previously classified as manufacturing are now service activities. As the authors comment:

‘Contrary to the alleged ‘de-industrialisation’ of industrialised countries, technological change is leading to a ’splintering’ and ‘disembodiment’ process whereby goods spring from services, and services, in turn, from goods’

(Miozzo and Soete, 2001).

This analysis of the blurring of traditional economic boundaries very much coincides with the current policy model of High Value Manufacturing (HVM). The IfM/DTI report on HVM points out that, whereas the traditional definition of manufacturing was the transformation of raw materials into finished products (the basis for the old Standard Industrial Classification of jobs), today there is blurring of boundaries between production and services. The broad definition behind HVM sees manufacturing as a broad cycle of activities from R&D, production, logistics and services to end of life management, all within a socio-economic context (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A Broad definition of manufacturing

[Source: DTI/IfM, 2006]

What this means is that production and manufacturing are not the same: production becomes only one activity of a manufacturing company (and indeed production itself may be outsourced); a high technology company like Rolls Royce actually obtained half its revenue from services in 2004 (DTI/IFM, 2006).

5.3 Diffusion and public attitudes

The diffusion of the kinds of converged technologies indicated above may take longer than the very rapid diffusion of ICT over the past two decades. For one thing the developmental time-frame for biotechnology is much longer and slower paced, but for another thing it may involve a greater degree of organisational learning on the part of management and employees: whereas many of the younger generation of IT workers saw working with IT as a logical extension of their home and school IT experience, the diffusion of biotechnology into working life may require the diffusion of values promoting acceptance.

This was recognised a decade ago in the DTI’s report on biotechnology (DTI, 1999), where one of the major variables affecting whether diffusion was ’steady , fast, slow or failed’ was seen to be consumer and manufacturer attitudes and acceptance/rejection of biotechnology (the example of GM crops was clearly to the fore at this time).

6.0 Exogenous factors

6.1 The economic, financial and physical environment

Contemporary work arrangements have been made very insecure and volatile by the accelerated pace of technical change and by the volatile nature of world economic systems (see Taylor et al, 2005). While foresight exercises attempt to systematically relate key technologies to the major challenges faced by society such as environment, education, health, security, working conditions, there will clearly be some that we cannot accurately predict and which will inevitably skew the direction of technological and economic development. The full consequences of climate change, for example, we can only guess at, although there have been calculations of the effect on the world’s growing zones and consequent arguments in favour of GM as a means to combat future agricultural crisis. Similarly the moment when ‘peak oil’ is reached is bound to affect where the links in global supply chains become located as higher transport costs may cancel out lower production costs.

6.2 Transnational flows

However, much of the discussion of new employment sectors is still bounded by notions of a national economy: this no longer corresponds to economic reality. New products will be manufactured and new services provided but where will this take place in terms of employment? As the current international financial crisis demonstrates, we are locked into transnational flows of finance, capital, goods, services and labour.

While we have become familiar with this as it applies to production supply chains, less commented on has been the degree to which mergers and acquisitions have created international service conglomerates providing a diversified range of services (such as management and computer services) which are traded across national borders and subject to FDI. These organisations have become increasingly diversified as the incremental cost of adding additional information-based services is very low but at present such advanced and specialised business services remain highly concentrated in developed countries. Future trade is as much likely to involve the ‘movement of people as carriers of expertise as much as the movement of material objects’ (Miozzo and Soete, 2003).

We may have to reverse our thinking about the role of ‘labour intensive’ and ‘capital intensive’ processes. According to a recent Japanese view, labour intensive processes will be knowledge-intensive, requiring a high education base and will be retained in the advanced economies, while capital intensive processes will be those subject to automation and will be located in Asia and Eastern Europe (Fukutani, 2008).

7.0 Implications for education and skill development

Another caveat in prediction making is to avoid the common assumption that technological change will entail a qualitative paradigm shift from the work we know today. In other words, to avoid the tendency to focus on the new and ignore those continuities with the present and the past (Baldry et al, 2007). Thus, in talking of future or emergent high tech or knowledge intensive sectors of the economy we should remember that this by no means implies that all jobs in those sectors will be empowered and knowledge-based. Recent work on local labour markets has shown that by the early 21^st century many ICT-based jobs were low skilled and relatively low paid (Warhurst et al, 2006; Baldry et al, 2007).

Having said this, the pointers toward a greater economic reliance on a range of knowledge-based service sectors have several implications for the future of the educational system. We can envisage alternative educational scenarios.

One issue that has already been noted is the relationship between the highly remunerated knowledge/technology sector of the labour market and the relatively lower paid non-knowledge sector, forming the so-called ‘hour-glass’ workforce. Several current predictions on work futures see this as inevitable or remaining for the foreseeable future:

‘Affluent workers at the top of the glass will continue to buy restaurant, care and other services from people on low pay at the bottom’.

(Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, p2).

If this pessimistic view holds true this, in turn, has implications for the education system. A polarised education system which, to a greater extent than even is the case at present, places its priorities and resources towards ‘meeting the needs of the economy’ by supporting the brighter pupils while consigning those who cannot play the educational game to the uncertainties of the low-pay sector, would simply continue and promote acute social divisions within society.

Conversely, an educational system that was genuinely aimed at developing the potential and worth of all young people may be out of kilter with the labour market unless we revise our approach to job design. Otherwise we may witness the sort of mismatch between skills and jobs that we have seen in some areas of call centre employment: call centre managers in some customer-facing services like to hire graduates because they have better language and social skills, yet the stressful and repetitive nature of call centre jobs are not what graduates expect to do with their intellect, and the flat organisational structure offers no career prospects, contributing to very high turnover rates.

It is also clear from the discussion in this paper that the idea of our education terminating at the current conclusion of secondary or tertiary education (in other words, essentially nothing after age 22, and for most young people a lot earlier) is unlikely adequately to equip future citizens for the volatile and rapidly changing world they will inhabit. New challenges – whether from technologies, climate change, or the exhaustion of finite resources – will require frequent new learning.

These points raise more philosophical questions which lie outside the remit of this paper:

• Is the primary job of an education system to meet the ‘needs’ of the economy?

• If so, do those needs include both design engineers and care-home staff, both biotechnologists and baristas?

• If not, how do we educate our citizens so as to empower them with control over their learning throughout life?

• What kinds of jobs would such learning-empowered citizens expect to take up and find personally fulfilling?

References

Baldry, C. (1988) Computers, Jobs and Skills. New York, Plenum Press.

Baldry, C., Bain, P., Taylor, P., Hyman, J., Scholarios, D., Marks, A., Watson, A., Gilbert, K., Gall, G. and Bunzel, D. (2007) The Meaning of Work in the New Economy. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

Brinkley, I. and Lee, N. (2006) The Knowledge Economy in Europe. London, The Work Foundation.

Brinkley, I. (2008) The Knowledge Economy: how knowledge is reshaping the economic life of nations. London, The Work Foundation.

Brown, N., Rappert, B. and Webster, A. (eds) (2000) Contested futures: a sociology of prospective techno-science. Aldershot, Ashgate.

Cliff, D., O’Malley, C. and Taylor, J. (2008) Future Issues for Socio-Technical Change for UK Education. BCH Briefing Paper, Futurelab

Geels, F. and Smit, W. (2000) Lessons from failed technology futures: potholes on the road to the future. In: Brown, N., Rappert, B. and Webster, A. (eds) (2000) Contested futures: a sociology of prospective techno-science, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp.129-155.

De Laat, B. (2000) Scripts for the future: using innovation studies to design foresight tools. In: Brown, N., Rappert, B. and Webster, A. (eds) (2000) Contested futures: a sociology of prospective techno-science, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp.175-208.

Department of Trade and Industry (1999) Genome Valley: the economic potential and strategic importance of biotechnology in the UK: Report. London, DTI.

Department of Trade and Industry (2006) Defining High Value Manufacturing: Final Report. London, IfM/DTI/CBI

Durand, T. (2003) Twelve lessons from ‘Key Technologies 2005′: the French Technology Foresight Exercise. Journal of Forecasting, 22, pp.161-177.

Fukutani, M. (2008) Changes in Human Resource Management with the Transformation of Technology Management Strategy. Japan Labor Review, 5 (iii), pp.7-32.

Lee, N., Schneider, P. and Brinkley, I. (2007) R&D, ICT and Productivity: an evidence paper for the Knowledge Economy Programme. London, The Work Foundation.

Miozzo, M. and Ramirez, M. (2003) Services innovation and the transformation of work: the case of UK telecommunications. New Technology Work and Employment, 18 (i), pp.62-79.

MacKenzie, D. and Wajman, J. (eds) (1985) The Social Shaping of Technology. Milton Keynes, Open University.

Miozzo, M. and Soete, L. (2001) Internationalisation of services: a technological perspective.Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 67, pp.159-185.

Moynagh, M. and Worsley, R. (2005) Working in the Twenty-First Century. Leeds and Kings Lynn, ESRC/The Tomorrow Project.

Peláez, A.L. and Kyriakou, D. (2008) Robots, genes and bytes: technology development and social changes towards the year 2020. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 75, pp.1176-1201

Sager, B. (2001) Scenarios on the future of biotechnology. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 68, pp.1-9-129.

Taylor, P., Gall, G., Bain, P. and Baldry, C. (2005) ‘Striving under chaos’: the effects of market turbulence and organisational flux on call centre work. In: Stewart, P. (ed) (2005) Employment, trade union renewal and the future of work. Basingstoke, Palgrave, pp.20-40.

Warhurst, C., Lockyer, C. and Dutton, E. (2006) IT jobs: opportunities for all? New Technology Work & Employment, 21 (i), pp.75-88.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

A key feature of early factories and offices was that they gave individual workers a spatial fix. The allocation of each person to a place and each place to a person was the foundation of regulation and control embedded in the physical construction of assembly lines and ‘personal offices’. ‘Placing’ workers made the security of materials and regulation of work flows much easier to achieve. More subtly, it made possible the introduction of disciplinary devices associated with panoptical surveillance, the normalizing gaze and the regimentation of time. The design of offices played an important role in the emergence of this regime of discipline, policing and control. A cube of space in the workplace (desk, bench or machine) became synonymous with a unit of labour on the payroll. ‘The industrial and engineering metaphors of so much organizational theory have been mirrored by the functionalist design dogma of Modernist, hard-edged, rectilinear offices’ (Turner, and Myerson, 1998, p20). Tayloristic management practices were applied in, indeed constituted by, Taylorized buildings (Baldry, 1999; Baldry et al, 1998). The term ‘office’, which had once meant a position or function, increasingly referred to a place. Furthermore, in the ‘personal office’, an individual worker became synonymous with a designated space. One consequence of industrialization was that the majority of workers became engaged in work activities outside the home. In the years before industrialization households were simultaneously places of social reproduction and production. Farms, workshops, manor houses and palaces were household economies. As a result, domestic and economic relationships were closely integrated; home and workplace were not separate spheres of social life. Farmers and rural labourers occupied the same buildings as agricultural machinery and livestock. Apprentices slept beside their benches in artisans’ workshops. Industrialization also raised the speed and flexibility of travel leading to the compression of time and space: that is, greater distances could be travelled in a given amount of time (Harvey, 1989). Despite frequent cries that urban travel speeds have reduced as road traffic has grown, the overall picture of the contemporary world is one in which time and space have become more compressed and journeys longer. Whereas in 1950 the average person in Britain travelled five miles per day, half a century later it was 28 miles and by 2025 it is forecast to double (Adams, 1999). At the same time, the pace of travel has quickened. Car speeds on trunk roads and motorways have increased, rail journey times have shrunk and jet aircraft transport people across the globe in a matter of hours. Modern travel, then, allows links to be made between places inaccessible in the recent past and in timeframes unimaginable even a few decades ago. Set against this backdrop, recent developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have led to a weakening of the spatial fixity of the workplace with workers increasingly detached from their personal cubes of space. This has made it possible for professional and managerial workers to share space and facilities in ‘collective offices’, allow more work to be done at home, and permit work to be carried around and completed wherever and whenever possible. This section, therefore, examines the statistical evidence on the spread of ICT in the workplace. It then goes on to outline recent historical evidence which shows the extent to which work is being detached from place. Figures for the spread of ICT are startling. The mobile phone, for example, has become a mass consumer product within the space of two decades. Worldwide, in 1990 there were 11 million mobile phone subscribers; by 2001 this had risen to 961 million, with 3,305 million by the end of 2007 (ITU, 2003 and 2007). In Britain, ownership of a mobile phone was relatively rare twenty years ago, but by 2001 official figures showed that 67% of adults owned one. The penetration level has continued to rise; in 2003 it stood at 75%, with 21% of adults using their mobile as their main method of telephony (ONS, 2004). Clearly, mobile phones are used for work as well as pleasure (Wacjman et al, 2008). Unfortunately, it is only relatively recently that surveys have asked specific questions about the use to which they are put. For example, a random survey of 2,466 workers in 2000 found that around half of all professionals and managers used a mobile phone in the course of their work (Taylor, 2002a: Table 7). Data series which chart the use of ICT for work purposes more generally, however, have a longer genealogy. They strongly suggest that there has been a rapid increase in the use of computers at work. In 1986, two-fifths (40.3%) of employees reported that they used computerized equipment in the course of their daily activities. By 1992 the proportion had risen to over half (56.0%) and by 2006 it was more than three-quarters (77.4%). Furthermore, by 2006 it was very rare for nonmanual workers to report that they did not use computers at all in their work. Indeed, their use was regarded as ‘essential’ to the conduct of non-manual work activities by around two-thirds of those surveyed (Felstead et al, 2007, pp95-99, Tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5). As with the fixed line telephone, the computer has also become mobile with the invention of the laptop. These developments have opened up the possibility that office workers can do their jobs in a much wider variety of locations and times. There is no technical necessity for most non-manual workers to be in a particular building, office or desk for most of the time. This is not to suggest that we are entering the era of the paperless office or the virtual meeting; there are circumstances where presence in a designated place is desirable and/or required. However, the number of such instances is drastically reduced by the mobile phone and the laptop (Worthington, 1997; Zelinsky, 1997). Unfortunately, surveys that carry questions on where people work are few and far between. Moreover, data collection processes lack subtlety and may not always detect the fine grain changes to people’s working lives that the mobile phone and laptop bring. However, in what follows we try to piece together currently available data. One source of evidence is the Change in Employer Practices Survey (CEPS) (White et al, 2004). This survey was carried out between July-September 2002 and comprised telephone interviews with 2,000 senior human resource/industrial relations managers in a nationally representative stratified random sample of workplaces in Britain. The CEPS covered all sectors of the economy and was constructed to collect evidence from both large and small establishments provided they employed at least five workers. Around two-thirds of managers approached took part in the survey with interviews lasting around 30 minutes (Taylor, 2002b). The survey was designed to assess recent changes in employer practices and indicate expected changes in the near future. Respondents were accordingly asked to report on ‘change over the last three years’ and plans for change ‘over the next 12 months’. The topics covered included numbers and types of employees, promotion and recruitment, staff working conditions, employee involvement, the use of information technology, the legal and regulatory environment, and last but not least, the management of space at work. With respect to the latter, respondents were asked: ‘Over the last three years have any of the following things happened at your establishment?’ Options included: ‘Increased use of open plan offices’ and ‘The use of hot desking’. They were also asked: ‘Are you planning to introduce/extend use of [each practice] during the next 12 months?’ In this survey, around one in six establishments reported an increase over three years in the use of open plan offices (17.4%) and hot desking (15.6%) (hot desking was defined in the survey as the situation where ’staff have no fixed personal workspace and use any available desk as needed’). A smaller number of managers said they intended to extend or introduce such changes in the next twelve months. These proportions are sizeable and are indicative of substantial changes to the physical layout of offices and factories (cf. Vallentine, 2008 on changes to the layout of formal educational settings). In reviewing this evidence one commentator was moved to concede that ‘we are going through a radical transformation in the physical shape of offices and plants’ (Taylor, 2002b, p12). Furthermore, the authors of the survey conclude that ‘not only have recent changes in workspace been substantial, but it is relatively easy to predict that they will continue’ (White et al, 2004, p82). CEPS was an establishment-level survey. The Location of Work Survey (LWS) was conducted at an organizational level. The LWS polled the views of 128 senior facilities/property managers in large organizations in the first six months of 2002 (see Felstead et al, 2003b, 2005b). The information gathered provides a high level organizational view across many establishments of past, current and future changes to the physical layout of workplaces and offices in particular. This does mean that organizations are more likely to report change occurring in at least one establishment under their ownership, even though this change may only affect a small proportion of the total workforce. LWS respondents were asked at the beginning of the interview to think ‘about the staff that work for your organization in the UK’ and to answer a series of questions. These included whether they had introduced a number of new ways of reconfiguring office space, the extent to which these internal changes to the layout of their offices had occurred over the last five years, and whether they had plans to roll-out these changes throughout the organization’s offices. The results suggest that many large organizations have already experimented with some reshaping of their office real estates. The penetration of collective office arrangements was high and almost half of large employers expected to institute these changes in other offices under their control in the near future. For example, ‘hot desks’ (that is, ‘desks which workers have to book in advance to use’) were present in three out of ten (31.3%) large organizations, rising to almost two out of five (39.6%) large private sector employers. However, the extent of their use was quite modest – in almost all cases less than 5% of office staff were actually reported to be hot desking. Nevertheless, a sizeable proportion (30.0%) of hot desking employers had a formal policy or guidelines on the use of bookable desk space which, in many cases, they were willing to share with the research team. Furthermore, backwards and forwards-looking questions suggest that hot desking has recently become of interest to large employers. A quarter (27.8%) reported increased use over the last five years; nearly half (44.6%) planned to make greater use of hot desking in the near future. A similar, if slightly more pronounced, picture emerges with regard to the use of ‘touchdown desks’ (that is, ‘desks that are set aside for drop in use by anyone in the organization’). According to the LWS this arrangement was used to some extent, albeit in only a limited way, in two-fifths (43.3%) of large organizations. Many expected to roll-out their use even further in the next few years. Overarching redesign of office space was also being considered by almost two-thirds (64.6%) of the organizations surveyed. Almost half of these organizations (47.2%) had formal plans in place at the time of the interview. Respondents explained in some detail what these redesigns entailed. They ranged from equipping particular areas such as restaurants, cafés and breakfast bars with internet access and laptop plug-in points, through to wholesale reviews of space usage and identification of ways in which space per office worker could be reduced. Respondents who reported that the organization had changed the location of work in the last five years or planned to do so in the future, were asked to indicate the main drivers behind these decisions. Two factors were prominent: the need to economize on property costs, and the desire to promote greater work flexibility and social interaction. The latter was cited by over half of respondents whose organizations had increased or planned to increase use of touchdown desks. This reflects other research findings that suggest the further apart people sit and the greater the physical barriers between them, the less likely they are to interact. In personal office environments workers are four times more likely to talk to someone sitting six feet away than they are with someone sitting 60 feet away; any further away and they are unlikely to interact at all. Similarly, personal offices reduce the chance of chance meetings taking place – research suggests that two people working on different floors in the same building where individuals are allocated their own desk space have only a 1% chance of meeting in the course of a day (Nathan and Doyle, 2002). The need to save on property costs was also a strong factor driving the introduction of collective office arrangements, particularly among respondents who reported recent increases or planned extensions to their hot desking programmes. Almost a half of these respondents cited property costs as one of the main drivers behind such programmes. Fortunately, we are blessed with more historical individual-level data on the extent to which work is carried out at or from home. The key one is the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Each LFS contains data on a random sample of individuals throughout the UK. Almost 60,000 households are contacted and information is collected on a total of 150,000 people, of whom around 65,000 are aged 16 and above and are in work at the time of interview. The LFS series benefits from the regularity with which the relevant data are collected. In 1981, the LFS carried its first question on the location of work. Respondents were asked ‘do you work mainly’ in one of four locations: in your own home, in the same building or grounds as your home, in different places using home as a base, or somewhere quite different from home. Despite offering a unique perspective on the location of work, and providing a sift survey for a study of ‘home-based’ workers (Hakim, 1987), eleven years were to pass before the question was repeated. It reappeared in 1992 and has been asked quarterly in every LFS since. Further questions were added to the Spring 1997 quarter, which identified those who worked at least one full day at home in the week before interview. Respondents were also asked whether the use of a computer and telephone was necessary for them to work in this way (see Felstead et al, 2000: Table A1). Each LFS provides a snapshot picture of the state of the labour market. Stacking the results from each LFS alongside others in the series provides an insight into changes over time. Given the frequency with which questions on the location of work are asked, the analysis for this paper is based on 18 surveys – the 1981 LFS and Spring quarters for the years 1992-2008. However, some of the analysis reported here is restricted to shorter time periods given data availability. For example, the partial use as a workspace and the importance of ICT data were only collected from 1997 onwards. According this evidence, then, where do people mainly work? The short answer is that around nine out of ten people – for most of the time at least – carry out their work somewhere separate from where they live. These locations include a shop, office or factory. However, the proportion doing so has declined over time. Those working mainly at home now accounts for one in forty workers (2.8% in 2008), rising from 1.5% in 1981, although it has changed little over the last decade and a half (see Figure 1 and Table 1). On the other hand, the proportion of workers mainly using their home as a base of work has increased every year until 2006 when it peaked at 8.6%. Nevertheless, in 2008 8.2% of workers (or one in twelve) carried out their work in a variety of places using their home as a base, up from 2.8% in 1981. Taking these two pieces of evidence together, we find that in 1981, 4.3% of employed people in the UK carried out their activities mainly at or from their own home. Over a quarter of a century later, this proportion had risen to 11.0%, representing 3.2 million workers who worked outside a conventional workplace, triple the number recorded in 1981. Since 1997 the LFS has added additional questions which make it possible to track the extent to which work is being carried out at home for at least one full day a week. This question is asked in order to identify those people who work at home occasionally rather than permanently. For example, a respondent who spends four days a week working in an office, but spends one day a week working at home would be captured by this question. However, working at home for periods of less than a full day would not be captured nor would several hours over the space of a number of days even if over the course of a week they amounted to a full day’s work. As a result, the data captured by this question produce conservative estimates. Nevertheless, these data along with data on those who work mainly at and those who work from home suggests that around one in seven (14.8%) workers in the UK use their home to some extent as their place of work each week. This equates to around 4.3 million people in 2008 (see Table 2 and Figure 2). The analysis can be taken a step further by examining the trends in those who report that it would be impossible to work ‘off-site’ without the use of a telephone and a computer. When these results are examined, it is interesting to note the growing reliance and importance of these kinds of devices to this way of working. Whereas in 1997 a third (33.0%) of those working at or from home for least one day a week reported the centrality of information and communication technology (ICT) in allowing them to do so, by 2005 the proportion had exceeded a half and by 2008 it was nearer three-fifths (55.4%). This provides some empirical evidence for the ability of technology, via the ‘electronic envelope’, to stretch the reach of the conventional workplace well beyond its physical boundaries (Felstead et al, 2005a). This table is based on the spring Labour Force Survey for each of the years which carried the work location question. For each year, the data have been weighted by the appropriate variable to compensate for differential response rates to the survey. Only those aged 16 or over and in paid employment have been selected and the percentages are based on those who gave valid responses to the question. The table presents data for the UK. Source: own calculations from the spring Labour Force Survey for the years 1981 and 1992-2008. # From this evidence, it is clear that changes are taking place in the location of work and that ICT is increasingly being used to bridge the physical gap between those working at home and the conventional workplace. However, the data we have relates to working at or from home and does not allow us to assess the extent to which the conventional workplace is itself being used differently – possibly as a base from which to visit clients or as a drop-in centre – or the full extent to which people are working on the move. This kind of data is not collected by the LFS. Instead, we have to rely on other sources of information – such as the employer data reported above – in order to gain insights into these issues. One individual-level exception is the Skills Survey series (see Felstead et al, 2007). In 2001 and 2006, a couple of work location questions were added. These were designed to capture the main and occasional work locations of individuals – such as those discussed above – along with a number of additional response options. These included working in a variety of places (using either home or the office as a base) and working on the move. Neither of these options is fully captured by the LFS questions discussed so far. The results corroborate the conclusion that the conventional workplace is not the one and only place of work for a sizeable minority of those who work in the UK. Around two out of five workers (37.8%) reported working in locations outside of the conventional office, factory or shop in the week before interview. Moreover, in the space of five years this proportion had risen by a couple of percentage points. While recognizing that a gradual shift has taken place in the location of work for many workers, one objection is that it has had the greatest impact on those with a long tradition of working outside the conventional physical boundaries of an office, factory or shop. The implication is that if the trends presented so far can be attributed to more of the self-employed working in this way, then there is little evidence that conventional workplaces are losing their centrality as places of work for employees. It is true that a sizeable proportion of the people using their home as a place of work belong to categories of employment, occupations and jobs that have a long history of working in this way. Nevertheless, the majority of newcomers come from groups with far weaker traditions of this style of working. Between 1997 and 2002, for example, two-thirds of the rise in the number of people working for at least one day a week at or from home were employees – representing an additional half a million employees as opposed to an additional quarter of a million self-employed (Felstead et al, 2005b). Similarly, non-manual workers have been heavier contributors than their manual peers to the rise in the absolute number of people who use their home as a place of work. Depending on the measure used, it is estimated that between two-fifths and two-thirds of the 1997-2000 increase, for example, came from the managerial, professional and technical groups. Moreover, the proportionate changes are even more dramatic since the largest absolute increases in the number of people involved are among employment types, occupations and jobs that do not have long a pedigree of carrying out work away from the conventional workplace. Only one in thirteen employees, for example, regularly work at or from home, yet the number doing so has risen by almost a half over the 1997-2002 period. The number using ICT to do so has doubled over the same period (Felstead et al., 2003b: Table 3).

What does the future look like?

In the past forecasters and futurologists have produced estimates of the numbers of people working at home which have failed to materialize. For example, back in 1999 and looking forward to 2010, it was estimated that ‘40 to 50% of the work activities of many managerial and professional activities (sic) are likely to be undertaken at home’ (Scase, 1999, p28). According to some estimates around 32% would be doing so by 2006 (estimates reported by Lees, 1999, p14). Taking even the widest of interpretation of home-located working reported earlier in this review, it is difficult to reconcile these predictions with current estimates which put the use of the home as a place of work for at least one day a week at 14.8% for all workers rising to around a fifth for professionals (cf. Felstead et al, 2003b, Table 5). Nevertheless, predictions that the ‘growing capabilities of communication technologies are likely to shift the emphasis towards the home’ and that ‘individuals will become more mobile in all spheres of life including work and employment (Scase, 1999, p28, p5) have been confirmed by evidence that has subsequently emerged, some of which has been reviewed above. More recent predictions of the future, then, have been influenced by the proposition that the spatial fluidity of work will increase: ‘for a substantial proportion of workers, work in 20 years time will be more about movement than staying put’ (Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, p101; Urry, 2000, chapter three). However, at present, many of the data sources on which this review draws remain steeped in a tradition that sees a clear divide between home and work. We can, therefore, only catch a glimpse of these particular changes. Nevertheless, the steady rise in the use of the home as a place of work and as a place from which to work is a notable development that has affected managerial, professional and technical workers in particular. These are the very occupational groups that are predicted to grow in number in the period up until 2014 (Wilson et al, 2006, pp67-72; Wilson, 2008). It is likely, therefore, that the trends presented so far in this review can be extended forwards to 2025. If we assume that historic data trends will continue into the future, the proportion using their home as a place of work for one day a week will rise to around a fifth by 2025. It may turn out to be even higher given that up to one in five managerial, professional and technical workers tend to work in this way and the occupations predicted to decline most are those which are least likely to use off-site working. However, based on historic data trends stretching back to 1992, the proportion using their home as the place of work is likely to rise by fraction of a percentage point (see Figure 3). These predictions are in line with others who have also ventured to speculate 20 years into the future (eg Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, pp101-106). Nevertheless, such predictions are highly sensitive to the period selected as the basis for extrapolating the future (see Table 3). For example, were we to take the 2003-2008 period as the basis for predicting the proportion of workers using their home for at least one day a week, then the predicted rise would be a couple of percentage points smaller than shown in Figure 3. This is because the rises over the last five years have been smaller than they have in the past. Even so, this prediction would still mean that by 2025 almost a fifth of workers would be using their home in some way as a place of work for one day a week or even longer. On the other hand, the prevalence of working mainly home has fluctuated up and down by a fraction of a percentage point since data collection restarted after an absence of eleven years. As a result, it began and ended the period 1992-2008 at more or less the same point (2.7% in 1992 and 2.8% in 2008). Based on this evidence, only a very small change in the numbers working mainly at home can be expected as we move towards 2025. However, predictions based on the longer time series (stretching back to 1981) suggest that the rise may be much greater. Similarly, using the last five years as the basis for future trends it is estimated that 4.2% of people will be working mainly at home by 2025. Having said this, the expectation is for a continuation of the muted growth experienced since the early 1990s (cf. Figure 3). This is because those who do most of their work at home is a narrow categorization which excludes the use of intermediate spaces which cannot be classified either as the home or the office, working on the move or working in a variety of places within the workplace by, for example, hot desking. Nevertheless, the ICT devices – mobile phones in particular – provide a ‘digital umbilical cord’, connecting those who work detached from a particular place of work to wider networks of relationships (Townsend, 2001, p70). It is these uses of space which have the greatest consequences and challenges for learning at work.

What are the consequences for learning at work?

Despite our somewhat patchy evidence base on the location of work, it is clear that the future of work will be spatially diverse. Greater connectivity will mean that workers will be able to maintain a virtual presence wherever they happen to be – on the train, in the car, a motorway service station or at home in the garden. This is what Gergen (2002) refers to as balancing ‘absent presence’ in one world, while being ‘tele-present’ in another. What consequences might this have for how and what learning goes on? This the question to which we now turn. Increasingly, learning is conceptualized as comprising much more than simply counting the number of times someone goes on a training course, for how long and at what cost. Most notably, this is encapsulated in the term ‘learning as participation’ as distinct from ‘learning as acquisition’ (Sfard, 1998). The former refers to a conceptualization which views learning as a process in which learners improve their work performance by carrying out daily work activities via interacting with people, tools and materials. The latter perspective, on the other hand, views learning as a product with a visible, identifiable outcome, often accompanied by certification or proof of attendance. Nevertheless, empirical measurement still tends to concentrate on collecting data on ‘learning as acquisition’ with counts focused on qualification attainment, years spent in formal education, and the incidence and length of off-the-job training (see Felstead, 2008). The detachment of work from place has consequences for how and what the workers involved have to learn to survive and prosper in such a world. Increased geographical dispersion of workers from one another, for example, makes the induction of newcomers into a community of practitioners more difficult, but not impossible, to achieve (see Jewson, 2008. for a fuller discussion). Physical proximity with co-workers facilitates serendipitous contacts and promotes non-verbal communication through body language, eye contact and touching rituals such as the handshake. However, this problem can be overcome, at least in part, by the scheduling of face-to-face interactions between colleagues, clients and superiors. Some organizations with ‘location independent working’ schemes have taken this a stage further by requiring employees to spend time on-site prior to being formally based off-site (Felstead et al, 2003a). However, difficulties remain. First, the impact and relevance of attitudes and information transmitted in the early stages of employment gradually diminishes over time. Initial on-site induction offers a fixed reference point that can become dated. Second, for on-site induction to be effective, a substantial proportion of the workforce – old timers needed to induct newcomers – also have to be physically present. Third, a requirement that new staff report on-site for several months at the start of their employment may not helpful in wooing potential recruits attracted by the prospect of working without having to be physically present on a daily basis at a particular site. Without these constraints workers may be able to avoid relocating their families and households, thereby maintaining an acceptable work-life balance. Elsewhere (Felstead et al, 2005a; Jewson, 2008) we have identified three ideal types of spatial working arrangements: working in ‘collective offices’; working at home; and working on the move. Like all places of work, each has its own set of ‘learning affordances’; that is, ‘opportunities for individuals to participate in activities and interactions’ (Billett, 2004, p109). In each the physical distances from colleagues and clients together with the physical closeness to others such as family, friends and even strangers poses particular difficulties. We take each ideal type in turn. Working in ‘collective offices’ requires that workers have to find a work station, whether it be hot desk, hot room, touchdown desk, seat in the atrium, couch in the lobby, or table in the coffee bar. By contrast workers in ‘personal offices’ have their own desk where their activities and interactions with others can be monitored and observed. The shift to ‘collective offices’, then, prioritizes ‘change over stability, process over structure, mobility over stasis, and uncertainty over predictability’ (Felstead et al., 2005a: 80). This means that workers from across the organization from different levels and from different departments are constantly bumping into one another as they move through the building seeking a place to work. The affordances of these workplaces are that informal and unplanned encounters between different types of workers become an institutionalized part of this place seeking behaviour. Individuals who succeed in such an environment develop the capacity to plan their work schedules, match their work tasks to appropriate places and anticipate their future spatial requirements. Working at home, on the other hand, requires that workers learn how manage the twin pressures of isolation from co-workers and the need to fend off interruptions from family and friends who are brought into close proximity when work is brought home. Those who succeed in managing these pressures deploy particular practices that are self-imposed. These include marking spatial and temporal boundaries around workstations, using personal cues to switch between domestic and employment activities, defending working space and time from the invasion of other household members, and developing the ability to alter the plans of other household members in the light of their work commitments (see Felstead and Jewson, 2000, pp120-160). A different set of practices is associated with working on the move. This involves the simultaneous occupation of transitional spaces that are shared with strangers and the completion of work tasks. These spaces include the means of transportation such as planes, cars, trains and stop-over points while en route such as hotels, service stations and departure lounges. Each has particular affordances that facilitates or hinders the execution of particular work tasks. Getting to know what can be done where is a crucial skill that needs to be acquired. For example, securing temporary access to a space that is wired to the electronic envelope is not always easy. Locations with good connections are increasingly provided in public places, such as railway stations, waiting rooms and intercity carriages. However, access is often limited, noisy and crowded. Moreover, connections while in transit may be frail and subject to disruption. Furthermore, once acquired, space itself needs to be defended from unwanted incursions from others travelling in the same shared space such as the train carriage or aircraft cabin. Social distance, too, has to be maintained and protected from intrusion. Books, newspapers, documents, laptops and mobile phones are often used to signal when interaction is not welcome. Working in each of these unconventional workplaces calls for a distinctive repertoire of skills and practices that has to be acquired (Jewson, 2008). Increasing heterogeneity in the spatial and temporal contours of the future of work makes these challenges more pronounced since workers also have to learn how to switch between sharply contrasting work locations with different affordances to paid work.

Conclusion

Discussion of the changing place of work tends to excite hyperbole, exaggerated claims and wild predictions. This type of reporting – often emphasized by attention-grabbing newspaper headlines – over-emphasizes the rapidity of change. However, the evidence reviewed here suggests that changes in the location of work are more gradual with work becoming increasingly, but slowly, detached from conventional places of work. This change is affecting office workers in particular who historically have been given individual and personalized cubes of space marked by a walled cell or by an allocated desk. Instead, office work can now, with the help of ICT and the mobile phone and laptop in particular, be carried out in a variety of different places – in the home, in an assortment of locations within the office and in ‘third places’ such as the train, the car and the plane. Faced with rising real estate costs, employers are reconsidering the value of ‘personal office’ space which is often left vacant while individuals are away from their desks. As a result, employers are increasingly turning to use of ‘collective office’ space in which facilities are shared and used on an as needed basis. This development is typified by ‘hot desking’ which has grown in the past and is expected to grow in the future. Evidence of change also comes from individual-level surveys of where people work. This shows that in 2008 around one in seven (14.8%) workers used their home, for at least one day a week, as a place of work or as the start point from which to work outside the conventional workplace. Back in 1997, when data on this issue was first collected in the UK, the proportion stood at 11.3%. Based on this trend, the proportion will have risen to around 20% of workers by 2025. Effective functioning in such multiple places of work requires heightened levels of self-discipline and the ability to make places amenable to work as well as doing particular work tasks in appropriate places. Both of these abilities require workers to learn about the affordances of particular places in order to understand what works where and how, and therefore cope with being ‘always on, always ready, always connected’ wherever they happen to be.

Acknowledgements

Material from the Labour Force Surveys is Crown Copyright and has been made available by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) through The Data Archive and has been used by permission. Neither the ONS nor The Data Archive bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here. Special thanks go to Birgit Austin at The Data Archive who facilitated swift access to the LFS data for 2008. The review develops, adds and updates some previously published research carried out by the author along with colleagues, Nick Jewson and Sally Walters.

References

Adams, J. (1999) The social implications of hypermobility. In: OECD (ed) The Economic and Social Implications of Sustainable Transportation. ENV/EPOC/PP/T(99)3/FINAL/REV1. Baldry, C. (1999) Space – the final frontier. Sociology, 33 (3), pp.535-53. Baldry, C., Bain, P. and Taylor, P. (1998) Bright Satanic offices: intensification, control and team Taylorism. In: Thompson, P. and Warhurst, C. (eds) Workplaces of the Future. London, Macmillan Business. Billett, S. (2004) Learning through work: workplace participatory practices. In: Rainbird, H., Fuller, A. and Munro, A. (eds) Workplace Learning in Context. London, Routledge. Bridges, W. (1995) Jobshift: How to Prosper in a World Without Jobs. London, Nicholas Brealey. Felstead, A. (1996) Homeworking in Britain: the national picture in the mid-1990s. Industrial Relations Journal, 27 (3), pp.225-238. Felstead, A. (2008) Workplace learning and training: knowledge-rich or knowledge poor? Mapping a research agenda. In: Hogarth, T. (ed) Skills in England 2008. Coventry, Learning and Skills Council, forthcoming. Felstead, A. and Jewson, N. (2000) In Work, At Home: Towards an Understanding of Homeworking, London, Routledge. Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007) Skills at Work in Britain, 1986 to 2006. Oxford, ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2003b) The changing place of work. ESRC Future of Work Programme, Working Paper No 28, June. Leeds: University of Leeds. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005a) Changing Places of Work. London, Palgrave. Felstead, A., Jewson, N. and Walters, S. (2005b) The shifting locations of work: new statistical evidence on the spaces and places of employment. Work, Employment and Society, 19 (2), pp.415-431. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., and Walters, S. (2003a) Managerial control of employees working at home. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 41 (2), pp.241-262. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., Phizacklea, A. and Walters, S. (2000) A statistical portrait of working at home in the UK: evidence from the Labour Force Survey. ESRC Future of Work Programme, Working Paper No 4, March. Leeds: University of Leeds. Felstead, A., Jewson, N., Phizacklea, A. and Walters, S. (2001) Working at home: statistical evidence for seven key hypotheses. Work, Employment and Society, 15 (2), pp.215-231. Gergen, K.J. (2002) The challenge of absent presence. In: Katz, J.E. and Aakhus, M.17 (eds) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Haddon, L. and Brynin, M. (2005) The character of telework and the characteristics of teleworkers. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20 (1), pp.34-46. Hakim, C. (1987) Home-based work in Britain: a report on the 1981 National Homeworking Survey and the DE research programme on homework. Department of Employment Research Papers, No. 60. London, Department of Employment. Hakim, C. (1998) Social Change and Innovation in the Labour Market: Evidence from the Census SARs on Occupational Segregation and Labour Mobility, Part-Time Work and Student Jobs, Homework and Self-Employment. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Halford, S. (2005) Hybrid workspace: re-spatialisations of work, organisation and employment. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20 (1), pp.19-33. Harrison, A. (2008) Changing spaces, changing places. Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_andrew_harrison.pdf, Accessed 11 September 2008. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Post Modernity. Oxford, Blackwell. Hotopp, U. (2002) Teleworking in the UK. Labour Market Trends, 110 (6), pp.311-318. Huws, U., Jagger, N. and O’Regan, S. (1999) Teleworking and globalisation. Institute for Employment Studies Report No 358. Brighton, Institute for Employment Studies. ITU (2003) Key global telecom indicators for the world telecommunication service sector. Available from http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/KeyTelecom99.html Accessed 20 March 2003. ITU (2007) Key global telecom indicators for the world telecommunication service sector. Available from http://www.itu.net/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/KeyTelecom99.html Accessed 12 September 2008. Jewson, N. (2007) Communities of practice in their place: some implications of changes in the spatial location of work. In: Hughes, J., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (eds) Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives. London, Routledge. Lees, C. (1999) The age of the homeworker? In: Myerson, J. (ed) Work at Home: The Proceedings of the Thinktank on Home-working at the Royal College of Art. London, Royal College of Art. Mitel (1999) Virtually There – Evolution of Call Centres: A Study into Virtual Call Centres and the Opportunities and Challenges for Teleworkers and Employers, Mitel, Momouthshire. Moynagh, M. and Worsely, R. (2005) Working in the Twenty-First Century. King’s Lynn, The Tomorrow Project. Nathan, M. and Doyle, J. (2002) The State of the Office: The Politics and Geography of Working Space. London, The Industrial Society. Office for National Statistics (2004) Social Trends 34. London, The Stationery Office. Scase, R. (1999) Britain Towards 2010: The Changing Business Environment. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Sfard, A. (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27 (2), pp.4-13. Taylor, P. (2008) Pack a punch while on the move. Financial Times, 23 September. Taylor, R. (2002a) Britain’s World of Work – Myths and Realities. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Taylor, R. (2002b) Managing Workplace Change. Swindon, Economic and Social Research Council. Townsend, A.M. (2001) Mobile communications in the twenty-first century city. In: 18 Brown, B., Green, N. and Harper, R. (eds) Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age, London, Springer-Verlag. Turner, G. and Myerson, J. (1998) New Workspace, New Culture. London, Design Council / Gower. Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London, Routledge. Valentine, G. (2008) Changing spaces, changing places? Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_gill_valentine.pdf. Accessed 11 September 2008. Wajcman, J., Bittman, M. and Brown, J.E. (2008) Families without borders: mobile phones, connectedness and work-home divisions. Sociology, 42 (4), pp.635-652. White, M., Hill, S., Mills, C. and Smeaton, D. (2004) Managing to Change? British Workplaces and the Future of Work. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, R.A. (2008) The future of work: what does work mean 2025 and beyond? Beyond Current Horizons Review Paper. Available from http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_work_wilson.pdf Accessed 15 September 2008. Wilson, R., Homenidou, K. and Dickerson, A. (2006) Working Futures 2004-2014: National Report. Wath-on-Dearne, Sector Skills Development Agency. Worthington, J. (1997) Reinventing the Workplace. Boston, Architectural Press. Zelinsky, M. (1997) New Workplaces for New Workstyles. New York, McGraw-Hill.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.