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Information literacy

and the future of work

Stéphane Goldstein

InformAll

European Conference

on Information Literacy

ECIL2017

Saint-Malo

19 September 2017

Photo: John Fielding, on Flickr –CC-BY 2.0

The past future of work…

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…and the current future of work

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• Organisational structures much flatter than in the past

– Increase in number or organisational positions reporting directly to CEO

– Decrease in number or organisational levels between junior managers and CEO

• Work becoming less routine

– Growth in non-routine tasks outpacing routine tasks by 20 percentage points over

40 years

• Increase in project work

– Project work has increased 40-fold over 20 years, making teamwork and

collaboration more important than ever

Some long-term trends in workplace organisation

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• Less secure, more casualised

• More entrepreneurial

• Fragmented in terms of attention, tasks, work-time and space

• Multiple and hybrid

• Dislocated from traditional workplaces, often characterised by

home working

• Automated or at risk from automation

Emerging and future characteristics of work…

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“The growing use of technology may influence the continuing demand for generic skills,

e.g. autonomy, initiative taking, problem solving, self-management, team working,

flexibility/adaptability, communication (including inter-cultural communication), and

media literacy. Similarly, working in chains, networks and clusters creates requirements

for team-working skills.”

“Increasingly there is a view that education in the future should provide resilience, social

skills, intelligence, interest, responsibility, understanding and awareness. Teachers will

need to make available a wider range of social services, including mentoring.”

Adding reasoning, relationships, responsibility and rights to the standard educational

curriculum

(UK Commission for Employment and Skills)

What might be expected of the workforce…

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• ‘Ageless’ workforce

– Longer working lives, extended use of lifelong knowledge and skills

• Mindful workforce

– Prioritising personal fulfilment and well-being

• Intuitive workforce

– Monitoring moods, wants and needs to foster intuitive, responsive work environments

• Collaborative workforce

– Openness, social exchange, collaborative culture, conviviality

A rather rosy view of the future, which glosses over risks and downsides

Pressures on individuals to work longer than they need, or would like

Intrusiveness of monitoring, confidentiality, data protection

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…and possible characteristics of the workforce

• Workplaces less hierarchical – lattice rather than ladder

– Zig-zag pathways to career progression, not straight lines to the top

– Decentralised working practices, greater autonomy for teams

– More inclusive and collaborative, greater scope for employee

participation and contribution

• Working environments characterised by widespread sharing

of information, diffusion of knowledge (not just top-down),

harnessing creativity

– All this suggests a culture of information-savviness and information

resilience

Lattice, not ladder

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• The lattice is another rather rosy view of workplace

inclusiveness…

• But what about workers not on the ‘inside’: cleaners, catering

staff, security personnel, warehouse attendants…?

– How do they fit into allegedly inclusive and participatory environments, and what

are their information needs?

– Do they really form part of their organisation’s information culture?

– Information exclusion? Remember that a large proportion of the population has

few or no digital skills (almost a quarter in the UK)

The lattice has glass walls

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• In theory, greater flexibility for workers, opportunities for

fitting work as needed in daily lives, experimentation…

• Work broken down into individual discrete ‘gigs’, reduction of

overheads and employer obligations

• The gig economy is characterised by workers opting to

assume temporary, often ad hoc, work contracts (or ‘gigs’)

sourced online through digital, cloud-based marketplaces.

• Opting or pressured ?

Flexibility…

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• Greater insecurity for workers

– Casualisation

– Driving down wages

– Loss of traditional work-related benefits

• Rise of the ‘human cloud’ – huge pool of freelancers

available to work on demand from all over the globe

– Amazon Mechanical Turk

– Upwork

– Taskrabbit

… but insecurity

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• On the one hand, the phenomenon may be said to encourage

global entrepreneurship and spread wealth from richer to poorer

countries

– New, highly distributed workforce, operating independently and remotely – what

might be their information skills and know-how?

• On the other hand, emergence of ‘precariat’ – emerging global

class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career

progression

– What type of information know-how needed by workers to protect their position,

ensure fairness and defend their rights?

– How does a culture of information sharing and views of IL as a collective

endeavour relate to a workforce often characterised by fragmentation and

isolation?

Information literacy and casualisation

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• Fragmentation, isolation, the drive to phoney ‘self-employment’

– The flipside of teamworking and inclusive working practices

• Legal challenges to exploitative practices in the gig economy

– Successful action brought against Uber by GMB Union (2016) (details)

– Similar ruling against delivery firm CitySprint (2017) (details)

– Action being brought by Deliveroo riders (2017) (details)

• Standing up for employment rights in context of evolving

workplace practices – requires information know-how, awareness

of complex issues on the part of gig economy workers

– How might IL contribute to industrial relations and the role of trades unions?

Defence of employment rights

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• Increasingly, the workplace is no longer a physical reality – or

at least not as a physical space where colleagues interact

• Is IL contained and defined by the physical workplace?

– The importance of virtual professional environments, a context that goes

beyond physical space

• But what happens when there is neither physical space nor

real professional environment?

– How can IL help the atomised, isolated workforce?

– How can IL help create new virtual professional environments – e.g.

homeworkers, Uber drivers…?

A sense of space

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• More and more data/information being generated about work

behaviour

– Workplace performance monitoring is not new…

– … but new technologies, the internet of things, including wearable self-tracking

devices, are pushing the boundaries of what can and is being monitored

• For employers, better understanding of productive behaviour

patterns

• But what does this mean in terms of intrusiveness, control,

work/non-work divide, anxiety, autonomy, data protection?

• Workers becoming accountable for attitudes and behaviours that are

recounted by algorithm? Becoming accessories to technology?

The quantified self

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• Large quantities of personal data being generated about workers

• Ethics of information and data usage – data protection

• Information literacy and the law

• Data literacy

Big data, ethics and IL

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The rise of the robots

• But this is not just about robots in manufacturing processes

and repetitive jobs

• In the service sector of the economy, with regard to any

intellectual task, convergence of two factors:

– Massive availability of data: on a huge scale, extremely varied, from variety of

devices and sensors

– Machine learning: organising this data to get actionable intelligence, through the

use of algorithms

• Disappearance of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs –

outsourcing to machines

– Vulnerability of labour, potential for increase in inequalities

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Automation and artificial intelligence

• What space will automation leave for humans? What are the

skills, abilities, experiences that will be needed to colonise

this space?

Critical thinking

Creativity

Personal interactions

Networking & collaborative abilities

Roles involving emotional intelligence

• IL is clearly relevant for such abilities

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What’s left: IL in an automated world

Relating IL to the new paradigm

• How can IL relate to large-scale retraining programmes for

evolving workforces?

• How might IL fit with other literacies in the context of lifelong

learning?

• What can IL contribute to individuals having to navigate

complex, sinuous and sometimes disjointed career paths?

– In this context, individuals must increasingly commit to career management

and lifelong learning - what is the place of IL in this?

• How might individuals learn about IL, to thrive (or just survive) in

fast-changing work environments? What role for IL educators?

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What place for information literacy?

How can information literacy address not just the opportunities,

but also the threats of the future of work?

• Opportunities: dynamism, innovation, creativity,

entrepreneurship…

• Threats: atomisation, inequality, exploitation of the

vulnerable, loss of traditional workplace rights,

social/informational exclusion…

New research perspectives for IL?

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And for the really political question…

References

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• Beetham H. (2015). Deepening digital know-how: building digital talent. Jisc

• Benko C., Anderson M., Vickberg S. (2011). The Corporate Lattice – a strategic response to the changing world of work.Deloitte – https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/deloitte-review/issue-8/the-corporate-lattice-rethinking-careers-in-the-changing-world-of-work.html

• Fox, K., O’Connor, J. (2015). Five ways work will change in the future. The Guardian. 29/11/2015 –https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/29/five-ways-work-will-change-future-of-workplace-ai-cloud-retirement-remote

• Moore, P. (2017). The quantified self in precarity – work, technology and what counts. Routledge Advances in Sociology –https://phoebevmoore.wordpress.com/2017/08/11/quantified-self-in-precarity-work-technology-and-what-counts/

• Rajan R. G. and Wulf J. (2006). The Flattening Firm: From Panel Data On The Changing Nature Of Corporate Hierarchies. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2006, v88(4,Nov), 759-773 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9633

• Sayyad Abdi E. (2017). Virtuality at work: an enabler of professional Information Literacy. In Forster M. (Ed.). Information Literacy in the Workplace (pp. 57-66). London: Facet Publishing

• Tilley, J. (2017). Automation, robotics and the factory of the future. McKinsey & Company –http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/automation-robotics-and-the-factory-of-the-future

• Trades Union Congress (2016). Home working up by a fifth over the last decade – https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/home-working-fifth-over-last-decade-tuc-analysis-reveals

• UK Commission for Employment & Skills (2010). ‘Horizon Scanning and Scenario Building: Scenarios for Skills 2020’ –http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140108090250/http://www.ukces.org.uk/assets/ukces/docs/publications/evidence-report-17-horizon-scanning-and-scenario-building.pdf

• Unum/The Future Laboratory (2014). The future workplace: key trends that will affect employee wellbeing and how to prepare for them today – http://www.unum.co.uk/hr/the-future-workplace

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Stéphane Goldstein

sg@informall.org.uk

https://www.informall.org.uk

@stephgold7

Thank you for your attention!

Photo credit: Erwan Lehérissé, on Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0