ILPC 2026

The question about skill requirements and skill formation and, particularly, its changes related to material transformations of the labour process has been an issue of debate in labour studies literature. One of the key works that intended to shed light on the matter has been Braverman’s thesis about the deskilling of work as an inherent tendency under capitalism, mainly due to the progressively increasing subdivision and specialization of tasks and the control of the process in hands of management. Linked to this thesis, evidence on the increasing of schooling and the labour market demand for higher education credentials is often understood as a degradation of both schooling and, as a consequence, credentials.

Since then, and within the revolutionary material transformations of work related to the increasingly automatization of the labour process and the development of a new international division of labour, a line of research has focused on the question about effects of technical change in skill requirement, its formation and also its management. This led to the development of multiple works that intended to show a general upgrade effect on skills due to the need of more intellectual capacities. Although many of these works have differences among them and do not necessary belong to the same theoretical framework, one of the conclusions in which they tend to converge is that technological change demands progressively more qualified and educated workforce.

The discussion generally tends to place both positions as opposite.  However, a third type of recent works have made effort on showing how both deskilling and upskilling take place as an effect of the development of productive forces, not as a matter of coexistence but as the dialectical form in which this movement unfolds.

In the framework of this third group of works, this dissertation seeks to address the question of the effects of the material transformations of work on the labour force skills, focusing especially on the issue about the extension of schooling and the labour market increasingly demand for higher education credentials. The analysis will focus, on the one hand, on the general determinations of schooling on the production of productive attributes of the labour force. Secondly, on the historical determinations of labour process transformations on education and schooling. Finally and most important, the main part of the dissertation will focus on the case of one automotive company in Argentina in the context of a productive transformation. By the analysis of workstations, tasks and skills involved within different aspects of the changes in the labour process, effort will be made on understanding the determinations of technical change in the demand for a workforce with more years of schooling. The hypothesis that guides the analysis is that as development of material transformations of the labour process has a deskilling effect on manual and generally intuitive skills (or as it is put it in some research, tacit knowledge) often produced through experience, it requires an increasingly set of capacities which tend to be produced exclusively in the process of schooling.