ENSKILLMENT INHIBITED: “INDUSTRIAL GARDENING” IN

BRITAIN

ABSTRACT

Horticulture – like many other traditional crafts in the UK – is said to suffer from

a “skills problem”. A recent survey suggests that one of the reasons for this is

increased outsourcing of horticultural work from public employers to private

contractors. While anthropologists have generally acknowledged the politics of

learning, they have had little to say about enskillment in work contexts which have

been reconfigured in a way that leaves hardly any room for institutionalised ways

of learning. Private gardening contractors are an example for such a work context,

and in this article I scrutinise their practices to show the various ways in which

enskillment is inhibited. Rather than referring to the concept of “deskilling” –

usually evoked in discussions of skills problems –, I employ the notion of an

inhibition of enskillment in order to emphasise that every feature that fosters skill

also has a “shadow side” to it which bears a potential to inhibit skill. Implicit in

this argument is a critique of neo-liberal work practices which shape enskillment

as well as the natural environment.

KEYWORDS

Enskillment; knowledge; skill; situated learning; deskilling; gardening; Britain

Introduction

There is general agreement in Britain that skills problems exist in various areas

and that traditional crafts are in decline. In his foreword to the report Crafts in the

English Countryside (Collins 2004), HRH The Prince of Wales warns that ‘[t]here

has been a gradual and widespread loss of the family firm and master craftsmen,

where traditional skills were passed down from generation to generation and from

master to apprentices. The risk is that some skills could disappear and local and

regional styles of workmanship be lost forever’. He is not alone in this opinion.

Reports and consultation exercises by The Countryside Agency, English Nature, English

Heritage, Lantra (the Sector Skills Council for environmental and land-based

industries), CABE Space (the British Design Council) and others confirm a

suspicion held by many professionals that Britain is experiencing a shortage of

skills in practitioners and a problem with the training of new skilled craftspeople.

This suspicion is part of a larger skills debate that has been conducted for more

than a decade. It gained momentum with the Government’s initiative to raise the

skills capacity of Britain in order to become recognised as an efficient economy

based on “world-class skills” by 2020 (see Leitch 2006). Public bodies such as the

sector skills councils have been created in order to promote skills in various areas

and research the skills problem through consultation exercises and surveys. Local

Authorities, as major stakeholders and employers, have responded to these

consultations and taken the opportunity to make a case for additional funding,

arguing that financial cuts and diminishing budgets further exacerbate any existing

skills problems. Finally, the trade unions, as another major stakeholder in the skills

debate, have been active in stressing that the current skills shortage is only one of

the symptoms caused by increased outsourcing and a drive to reduce workers’

rights and welfare.

One of the crafts with a highly apparent skills problem is horticulture (National

Audit Office 2006). As a key craft in the so-called land-based industries,

horticulture has gained significant importance in recent years. It plays a major part

in the creation and maintenance of urban green spaces which are said to be vital

to the new urban design and the creation of sustainable communities. In a survey

distributed to Head Gardeners in England, 68% agreed with the statement that

skill standards in professional gardening were declining nationally (Collins 2004).

The research report Parks Need People: The skills shortage in parks (CABE 2004) finds

that the skilled gardening workforce is ageing rapidly, resulting in a shortage in the

number of skilled gardeners and, implicitly, a shortage of skilled trainers for the

next generations.

This perceived skills problem has implications for those working in the fields of

an anthropology of knowledge, learning and skill. I believe that anthropologists

are equally concerned about a loss of craft skills, although we see it as a world-

wide phenomenon as opposed to a specifically British problem (see Marchand

2008). In addition, anthropologists are equally interested in the process of

enskillment and the mastery of skills (Boyer 2005, Downey 2005, Dilley 2009,

Marchand 2007). Enskillment, as the path of learning from novice to expert, is

usually considered to be institutionalised in a craft. It is a path not free of

problems, obstacles and challenges, with its own politics of knowledge, its own

constraints, problems of access to and dissemination of knowledge, and social

tensions to be negotiated among practitioners. Yet in the end, routes to

knowledge and expertise exist, and the continued existence of a craft relies on at

least some novices making it through all the stages of learning. What are the

consequences if a craft is reconfigured so that these routes to knowledge are no

longer considered relevant? What are the results of a craft being turned into a

standardised industry? This has obviously already happened in craft sectors other

than horticulture during the Industrial Revolution and thereafter. But are we

perhaps witnessing a new wave of craft industrialization with the neoliberal

reconfigurations of the economy since the 1980s?

In sociology these questions have a long history, going back to Marx’s critique of

the industrialisation of the workplace, but emerging fully only after Braverman’s

book Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) (see Heisig 2009 for a current review of the

debate). Since then, “labour process theory” in the fields of industrial sociology

and the sociology of work has provided heated discussions on the notion of

“deskilling”, most often in connection with either the mechanisation of work

procedures or the installing of new “scientific management” regimes in factories

and workshops. The main tenet of these discussions has focused on finding

answers to the questions of whether we, in the industrialised West, have really

experienced a loss of skill (similar to the findings of the cited reports above), and

whether workers have turned from skilled craftspeople to low-skilled machine

operators. Answers to these questions have been sought by references to changes

in modes of production nested within larger socioeconomic changes, including

globalisation.

In social anthropology, the notion of deskilling is virtually absent from discussions

on knowledge and skill. It only appears in studies of those who deal with the

anthropology of industrial work (see e.g. DeNeve, Mollona and Parry 2010) or

those working on industries and crafts in socialist or post-socialist countries (e.g.

Eyferth 2006, Flitsch 2007). Other, more theoretically inclined anthropologists

like Tim Ingold (2000, 2011) or Francois Sigaut (1993) take a rather more positive

stance in the debate, arguing that – by and large – skills are not (and cannot be)

lost; they merely change and are adapted to fit new circumstances and necessities

(see also Harris 2005). Among the very few critical voices in anthropology

Michael Herzfeld (2007) is the most notable. One of his contributions is the

presumed link between deskilling and the political-economic implications of an

all-pervading “global hierarchy of values” (Herzfeld 2004). The more interesting

avenue he opens up for discussion, however, considers deskilling as a general

possibility in many forms of apprenticeships.

In this article, I will also explore ways in which enskillment might become

inhibited. I deliberately chose not to use the term “deskilling” here as I would like

to draw attention away from the effects of mechanisation. Neither did I mean to

frame the skills problem within the hitherto unsolved problem of how a loss of

skill should actually be measured over time. I argue that the issue of deskilling and skills

problems can be addressed more appropriately by focusing on the process of enskillment and the

challenges of creating opportunities for learning that are essential to a craft’s “sustainability”.

This approach links the sociological notion of deskilling (with its focus on

reconfigured working conditions) to the anthropological notion of enskillment

(with its focus on learning).

Up to now, the skills shortage in the British horticultural sector has not been

studied under these premises. For example, in the previously cited survey, Head

Gardeners see mainly four reasons for the lack of skill in today’s professional

gardeners and the limited number of skilled gardeners in general. Firstly,

gardeners are paid poorly (the economic factor). Secondly, gardeners are

perceived as having a low professional status in society (the social factor). Thirdly,

gardening is not seen as a highly skilled occupation (the cultural factor), and,

fourthly, public bodies increasingly “outsource” gardening to private contractors

(the political-economic factor). While I agree with the results of this survey in

general, I strongly believe that the fourth reason demands much more attention as

the likely root cause of the skills problem. My aim is therefore to explain how

working as a gardener for a grounds maintenance contractor may inhibit the acquisition of

horticultural skills, or, more generally, how institutionalized features of an industrialized practice

inhibit enskillment.

I will therefore first recapitulate certain core tenets of skill and enskillment that

will help identify both the lack of learning opportunities and factors inhibiting an

enskillment of gardeners. I will then introduce the setting for my case study,

including the reasons and problems of gardening outsourcing, private contractors’

organisation of work and its implications for enskillment. After these introductory

contextualisations, I will present various factors that lead to an inhibition of

enskillment in this field of horticultural working practices, ranging from

horticultural award judging practices to the limited seasonality of bedding plants. I

conclude by presenting arguments for a critique of a neoliberalization of this craft

and an accompanying neoliberalization of nature.

The Nature of Skills

In order to analyze the skills problem as one of enskillment rather than deskilling,

a definition of skill is required first. In what follows I introduce several features of skill,

arguing that each of these can either enhance or inhibit learning. Rather than understanding

enskillment as a pre-planned route to learning I thereby emphasize the uncertainties of the

process. This approach encourages researchers to pay close attention to

institutionalized routes to learning and to tease out their potential problems.

Leaving aside a long-standing interest in technology, processes of production and

material culture (the products), skills and enskillment per se have only been studied

intensively by anthropologists since the 1980s. With the “practice turn”, skilled

practice and skilled practitioners made it into the limelight of our attention (see

Coy 1989 or Pálsson 1994). This shift of focus has resulted in a new appreciation

of processes and contexts of learning. Following the new understanding of skill as

“embodied practice” or “embodied knowledge”, anthropologists now study the

role of the body, of perception, of dexterity in enskillment. In addition to factual,

propositional knowledge (e.g. knowledge of materials or design), skills consist of

bodily gestures and postures (certain kinds of hexis) and exhibit a particular habitus

(Bourdieu 1977). In other words, there is a skill of the body (or a bodily way of

knowing, see Harris 2007), although it is not accumulated in the body (Ingold

2000 and see below).

In terms of perception, we recognise the contribution of a sensory education (or

“education of attention”, see Gibson 1979, or “skilled vision” – but also other

skilled senses –, see Grasseni 2009) to skilled action. To learn a skill is thus not

only to learn skilled movements/gestures but also to learn how to perceive.

Indeed, one could envisage skill as a close coupling of attention (to tools,

materials and richly structured environments) and dexterous movements (Ingold

2000), not to forget that dexterity itself relies heavily on forms of perception, such

as kinaesthetics, proprioception and balance (see e.g. Downey 2009).

Furthermore, closely connected to perception and dexterity is another sense, a

sense of care and judgement that informs skilled movements and assesses

progress (Crawford 2009, Keller & Keller 1996, Sennett 2008).

The notion of a coupling of perception and dexterity leads to the processual (or

processional) character of skilled action. When, as Bernstein (1996) has shown,

practitioners have to make minute adjustments with every new movement, guided

by perception and attuned to the slightest changes in their own bodily position,

tool position, or in material, then skilled action unfolds over time and has its own

phases, speeds and rhythms. Ingold (2011:53-55), for example, distinguishes four

(not so sharply demarcated) phases which follow and flow into each other –

getting ready, setting out, carrying on and finishing off. Each of these phases is

characterised by its own pattern of particular movements (single, unique ones or

repetitive ones) which gives rise to a rhythm of work. As musical rhythms are

created by the interplay of sounds and silences, so are rhythms of work created by

a procession of movements and moments of stillness, thereby displaying a specific

tempo.

Further to the diachronic development of the action as such, we could also look

at the development of enskillment in the practitioner. A well-known model for

learning stages is that of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980, see also Dreyfus 2005). It

begins with the novices who are taught the key features of a skill and

accompanying rules that help them to determine appropriate actions based on

these features. To improve, novices must either monitor themselves or receive

feedback in order to adjust their actions where necessary and comply more fully

with the rules. Once novices have become competent, instructors begin to draw

attention to particular patterns of features as they show themselves in specific

situations. Context-free rules are substituted with context-dependent guidelines

which outline the important and meaningful connections between features. As

proficient learners, more and more attention is placed on the achievement of the

goals of the tasks rather than on the specific features or patterns of features of

individual actions. Looking at typical, whole situations, proficient learners assess

every single new situation for similarities with past ones in order to create maxims,

a memorised principle shorter than a guideline and a cue for specific actions that

only make sense to someone who is familiar with the kinds of situations the

maxims refer to.

This learning model already shows the importance of context. Learning is

understanding in practice and as such it is a “situated practice” (Lave & Wenger

1991). It is not an inner, mental process but located in ‘relations among persons,

activity, and situation, as they are given in social practice, itself viewed as a single

encompassing entity’ (Lave 2003:7, see also Gieser 2008). According to these

researchers, participation in a situated practice for novices is peripheral, meaning

that they tend to engage in simple tasks that contribute little to the overall

completion of work. The more they learn the more complicated and central their

tasks can become, thus shouldering more responsibility for the completion of the

whole. As I will demonstrate in the pages to come, this aspect of participation in a

situated practice is a key problem of the enskillment of contractual gardeners in

Britain these days. To understand how that might be so, let me now introduce the

ethnographic field.

Industrial Gardening in Britain: Fieldwork as a Park Keeper

This case study draws on my (auto-ethnographic) experience, observations and

conversations during 21 months I worked full-time as a gardener and Park Keeper

for a large grounds maintenance contractor who worked “in partnership” with a

Local Authority. Altogether there were more than 50 members of staff, but only

10 were qualified gardeners (and out of this 10, five received their qualification

through the Government’s Train to Gain scheme while I was working there). The

company claimed on their website to employ only high-skilled staff which stands

against 40 (horticulturally) unskilled labourers out of 50 staff in the borough I

worked in. The Head Gardener of my team, for example, received his first

horticultural qualification, a Level 2 Certificate in Practical Horticulture from the

Royal Horticultural Society, just months before I left.

Nevertheless, our parks received Green Flags and came out with Gold or Silver

awards in the annual In Bloom competitions on a regular basis (see below for an

explanation of awards). Many times my colleagues and I were complimented and

congratulated on our beautiful planting schemes. Yet there were also critical

voices. The Local Authority’s Parks Department saw a decline in horticultural

standards (although they were pleased with the results in the competitions so far,

they always worried about next year’s) and handed out fines for the contractor not

upholding the agreed standards, for instance when smaller parks were occasionally

not staffed (when, for example, a Park Keeper called in sick and no other

gardener could be spared elsewhere – the teams operated with a minimum

number of staff), bins were not emptied, seasonal beddings not planted according

to schedule, and so on. The Parks Department’s Grounds Maintenance Manager

and Parks Manager inspected the parks, especially the award winning ones, on a

regular basis, which often resulted in hectic phone calls to the grounds staff from

our supervisors who asked us to ensure that our park looked tidy for the

upcoming visit. Shortcomings were nevertheless found frequently and the Parks

Department contemplated whether they should renew the contract with this

particular company (but then, other contractors were not necessarily better).

According to the Ecology Services Manager, the Local Authority was frustrated

with the foot-dragging they encountered whenever they asked the company to do

something that went beyond the routine (i.e. the contract).

Faced with such problems one may wonder why Local Authorities have opted to

outsource the grounds maintenance of their green spaces in the first place.

According to a UNISON report (2003), grounds maintenance is one of the most

heavily privatised functions of local government. Privatisation is part of a wider

process which started under the New Right Conservative administration (1979-

1997) and its neoliberal agenda of introducing market-based principles into public

sector management. This had the double goal of reductions in public spending

and weakening of trade unions (which had a strong standing among public sector

but not private sector employees). Following privatisation, contracts had to be

awarded through a tendering process adhering to principles of efficiency,

competition and entrepreneurialism. Where private contractors won bids, it

usually led to cuts in rates of pay, loss of workers’ rights (such as pension

schemes), an erosion of work ethos and quality of work (Sachdev 2001, IPPR

2001). The Government supported these developments by denouncing ILO

Convention No. 94 and the Fair Wages Resolution, amongst others, which

enabled private contractors to offer working conditions that were inferior to those

offered by the former public employer (Davies 2007:8). Private contractors in the

labour-intensive horticultural sector relied on such Government interventions for

their profitability, as they spend almost 50% of their turnover on wages.

The successive New Labour Government retained the privatisation policy in

principle. Promoting “Best Value”, it aimed at a maximisation of efficiency in

services, especially by outsourcing them to contractors working “in partnership”

with public bodies. These partnerships normally require the private contractor to

improve the level of service while minimising costs. As this is hardly sustainable in

the long run, contractors often cut the workforce, increase working hours and

establish controls to speed up the work process (Guy 2000). This was the

situation in 2004 and thereafter when many Eastern European immigrant workers

entered the UK labour market and the horticultural sector in particular. According

to Nowicka (2012), many Polish immigrant workers in the UK were working

“deskilled”, i.e. in jobs that require less qualifications than they possessed,

especially in low-skilled and low-paid jobs. Unsurprisingly, most of my colleagues

were from Eastern Europe, as such jobs were becoming less and less attractive for

British workers. In the gardening workforce of the borough I worked for, British

colleagues were a minority who either worked in management or were older

gardeners who had started as public service employees and were then “inherited”

by the private contractor. Under the coalition Government in the UK today, the

situation of outsourced services remains unchanged if not escalating, as a recent

article in the Financial Times (Plimmer and Warrell 2012) announced the ‘Biggest

wave of UK outsourcing since the ‘80s’.

Work in a company of this type (as opposed to a “traditional” craft or trade in

Britain) is organised around the principles of “scientific management”. Developed

by Fredrick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th, beginning of the 20th century, it is a

systematic attempt to apply “scientific” principles to the reorganization of work in

order to make it more efficient and cheaper by increasing control over work and

workers while concentrating knowledge in the hands of the management. It is

based on three principles. First, it attempts to dissociate the labour process from

the skills of the workers. This means that work tasks are observed, analysed and

finally put together again as a list of propositional formulae. Second, having thus

turned the workers’ skills into the management’s knowledge, work is then

separated out into conception and execution. The unity of the labour process is

broken up as the “experts of the labour process”, i.e., the management, is now in

a place in which it can pre-plan work tasks, schedules, quantity of output and so

on, and the workers are tasked with the execution of these plans (following the

written or verbalised instructions). Third, with the use of this monopoly over

knowledge the management can now control each step of the execution as well as

the mode of execution.

The grounds maintenance company I worked for can serve as an illustration of

these principles. I will begin with the second principle as its application will

explain the others. Almost all of the practical gardening is done by the

groundsmen who are manning the parks or form the Mobile Teams. They work

on their own or in pairs. Their superior is the Head Gardener who supervises the

practical work on a daily basis and who is, in turn, subordinate to the Area

Supervisor. The Area Supervisor can be considered the lowest level of

management and he or she plans and organises work for their teams. Although

individual gardening tasks are not (in line with the first Taylorist principle) broken

down into segmentary instruction, the whole work year is broken down into 52

“Weekly Task Sheets”. Each specifies the individual tasks to be completed by the

groundsmen in a given week, to be signed by the Head Gardener and checked by

the Area Supervisor. However, the groundsmen are not left to their own devices

with these “tick sheets”, as they were called. Once a day, the Area Supervisor

(and/or the Head Gardener) comes around to give instructions for the day, based

loosely on the tick sheet. The control thus exercised by management was

manifested in giving instructions and checking results next day. The actual

execution and mode of execution could not be controlled by management due to

the lack of supervisory staff and the fact that supervisors could only briefly visit

each groundsman.

I will now specify how this framework of contract gardening is what facilitates an

inhibition of enskillment in a workforce where teams of low-skilled labourers are

able to deliver horticultural work at cheap costs and to largely satisfactory

standards. In what follows, I will address the factors which lead to such an

inhibition of enskillment and illustrate them with examples from my work as a

Park Keeper and gardener.

The Inhibition of Enskillment

The Visual Regime of Horticultural Award Judging

In CABE Space’s Skills to grow (2009) strategy paper a connection is made between

‘low public aspirations and expectations’ and the decline in green space skills. In

this context I argue that low expectations of quality have become institutionalised

in public horticultural award judging. Horticultural contractors work towards the

quality and standards of certain awards that are recognised by their contract

partners as hallmarks of achievement. Gardening practices are therefore geared

towards fulfilling the criteria set out in these awards. However, I argue that both

the judging criteria and the visualist bias in the actual judging practice leave little

room for “achievement” and thus have a negative impact on horticultural practice

and the enskillment of gardeners.

There are two main awards for urban green spaces which Local Authorities

actively seek, the Green Flag and the In Bloom awards. The Green Flag is less relevant

for my purposes as horticultural standards only feature as a subset of one out of

eight judging criteria, namely “clean” and “well-maintained”.i The more important

horticultural award is the In Bloom award. Yet horticultural achievements account

for only 50% of the award criteria, the other 50% being given to “environmental

responsibility” and “community participation”. Within “horticultural

achievements” there are five subcategories (contributing 10% each to the overall

score), two of them solely dedicated to gardening, “impact” (judging colour and

design, choice of plants, special design features, presentation and innovation) and

“horticultural practice” (judging cultivation and maintenance, quality of plants,

sustainability of planting scheme and new planting schemes installed).

Given that only 20% of the In Bloom award is exclusively dedicated to horticultural

criteria, it becomes clear that it is not necessarily horticultural excellence that is

judged here. It is possible to achieve Silver or Gold awards with excellent

“environmental responsibility” and “community participation” but only sufficient

horticultural standards. From the perspective of an inhibition of enskillment of

gardeners, it might also be noted (as will be explained in more detail below) that

the “impact” category is usually determined by the skill of the Head Gardener or

Area Supervisor, and that thus only 10% of the whole award’s “horticultural

practice” component is influenced by the gardening grounds staff. Furthermore, a

look at the marking sheet for judges reveals that “horticultural achievement” is to

be found on one A4 page only, where half of the page is dedicated to the

recording of scores for the five subsections, followed by roughly a third of the

page reserved for two boxes for comments, one for “areas of achievement” and

one for “areas for improvement”. This leaves the judges with hardly any space for

the actual assessment of horticultural excellence as outlined in the judging

guidelines. This demonstrates how the general skills debate’s focus on green space

quality and sustainable communities has redefined horticultural excellence in line

with its greater societal utilization.

Taking a closer look at the actual process of judging “impact” and “horticultural

practice” reveals further reasons for a lack of appreciation of craftsmanship. In

2009 I walked three judges around the park I was currently working in. The whole

visit took 20 minutes, 10 of which were spent standing and talking at the entrance,

overlooking the park. We were accompanied by my Area Supervisor and a

member of the Local Authorities’ Parks Department. Our conversation touched

especially on the facilities of the park, recent improvements in infrastructure and

planned works in the near future. During the conversation we pointed out

important features of the park and the judges surveyed the park from a distance,

glancing over everything briefly. We then proceeded over the amenity lawn that

made up the largest area near the entrance and stopped at the new adventure

playground where we spent the rest of the 20 minutes. Two thirds of the park had

not been seen by the judges and no flower or shrub bed had been scrutinised in

detail.

A small green space full of cottage-style flower beds near the park, maintained by

my colleagues and me, was entered into the competition as well. However, the

judges were late already (as it is often the case, the Area Supervisor told me) and

so they just slowly drove past the space and looked at it through the car windows.

These flower beds in particular had without doubt been expertly designed (so

visitors and local residents often told us when they approached us as we worked

on site). However, a closer look would have revealed weeds and self-seeded

flowers from last year’s display that had now visibly colonised every bed. It might

have been noticed, too, that some plants were not in their best condition or that

the planting pattern had left some areas more dense and others sparser. All of that

could have been observed by a close, attentive look but was virtually invisible

from a passing car.

In award judging the time factor seemed crucial. None of the site visits was

scheduled to last longer than 20 minutes, most even less than that. There was

hardly any time for detailed inspection, only for general vistas and first

impressions. Christopher Tilley has argued that ‘for gardeners vision or sight

dominates the overall perception of the garden, when forced to express this in

words’ (2006:316). Horticultural judging is no exception in this regard. Concurring

again with the results of Tilley’s research (2006:317) on gardeners’ perception, the

awards focus on the visual aspects of design, colour, tidiness and order (see also

the award criteria above). Yet no plants were approached and scrutinised or

focused. Impressions were given through whole units or patches of plants (beds,

borders and lawns), not through individual specimen. Aesthetically, these visual

impressions based on wide vistas were reminiscent of the picturesque, the green

spaces were viewed as paintings, and the designs laid out so as to be seen from

certain vantage points (see also Tilley 2006:322).

It is this rather detached practice of judging that paves the way for similarly

detached gardening practices which are preoccupied with the visual and leave less

room for the ‘rarely acknowledged, thought about or discussed’ (Tilley 2006:314)

multisensory or even synaesthetic knowledge that might turn an unskilled labourer

into a full-grown plantsman (see below).

Standardisation of tasks and the “workmanship of risk”

The repertoire of horticultural practices comprises diverse tasks, such as ground

preparation, planting, weeding, watering and pruning. Each of these tasks needs

skill, and the results vary with the level of skill that was brought to the task. This is

already apparent in something presumably simple like watering. Too much or too

little water can kill a plant. A powerful jet of water might wash a plant or the

surrounding soil away. Watering when the sun is strongest can burn a plant. How

soaked with water should the soil be? What are the water needs of a particular

plant on a specific site (sunny or shady, sheltered or open)? The skill of watering

demands knowledge of place, weather conditions, tools (garden hose or

sprinklers), water “behaviour” (in relation to tools, plants and soil), as well as the

tool handling skills and perceptual skills that tells the gardener when the optimal

watering level is achieved. Plants will therefore thrive (or not) according to the

level of the gardener’s watering skill.

I argue that contract gardeners do their tasks with some skill, but not with too

much – they tend to standardise. They work according to rules of thumb (if not to

individual instructions from their superiors), they generalise and group plants very

loosely in broad categories, they pay less attention to individual variations or

anything out of the ordinary which could interfere with the routine treatments.

The consequence of this standardisation of their practices, in short, is a perceptual

inattentiveness and a decoupling of perceptual acuity and manual dexterity and

handling. An example will illustrate this.

Of all gardening practices, pruning is amongst the most skilled and difficult. It

presupposes good plant knowledge as different plants have to be pruned

differently and at different times of the year. In my own training for an NVQ

Level 2 qualification in amenity horticultureii I was told that most roses are cut in

early spring. Wisteria can be cut twice, once in summer (to cut off long shoots)

and once in winter (summer-cut shoots further shortened). Cherry trees are best

pruned after the harvest of the fruit, and so on. Good judgement is also needed as

it must be decided which stems or branches be cut – dead ones, damaged ones,

diseased ones, ones rubbing against each other, ones crossing over one another,

misshapen ones or ones that go against the shape you want the plant to grow in.

Once you have identified what needs to be pruned, the next difficult task is to

know where to cut and how to cut. Concerning the “where” of cutting, one has to

take the plant species into account. Some roses (e.g. hybrid tea roses) can be cut

down to about 15 centimetres above the ground, others (e.g. Floribunda roses) to

20 centimetres above the ground (Crosbie 2007). Concerning the “how” of

cutting, as a rule, the cut is placed about half a centimetre above a bud, cutting in

an angle away from the bud, unless there are two opposing buds which need a

horizontal cut.

One should also use the appropriate cutting tool. As a general rule of thumb,

secateurs are for stems smaller in diameter than a little finger, loppers for anything

up to thumb’s size, and a pruning saw for anything bigger. As the aim is to

achieve a “clean” cut, it is recommended to use the bigger part of the blade rather

than the tip and to check the sharpness of the blade regularly. Some expert

gardeners sharpen their blades several times during the day. By contrast, in the

grounds maintenance company, we never sharpened our blades on site, lacking

the tools to do so. We hardly ever used pruning saws. Instead, secateurs and, most

of all, loppers were the standard tools for pruning, especially since it is possible to

cut even through thicker-than-thumb stems with loppers (although with

considerable effort and force and with likely damage to the blades and to the

screws holding the tool together). Gardeners distinguish two types of loppers

(“anvil type” for cutting dead wood and “bypass type” for cutting green wood).

This played no role in our pruning practice, either, which often led to cuts with

frayed ends and squeezed, broken stems (which are potential entry points for

diseases or fungi).

At this point, one might already suspect that “industrial pruning” as practiced by

us groundsmen is not quite the same as the complex matter described above. The

task is simplified mainly through standardisation. Plants are divided into rough

groups, at the most basic this would be roses and everything else. Roses are to be

cut halfway down, everything else at knee-height. Every other point mentioned

above is optional. To be fair, there is horticultural research that indicates that

roses indiscriminately cut with a chainsaw grow back just as well as under a careful

pruning regime. However, without establishing a horticultural argument here, it

might suffice to say that a standardised pruning technique seems to produce

satisfactory results (that is, in terms of horticultural awards), although I suspect

that hardly any of the roses we maintained would win a prize in a Royal

Horticultural Society gardening show.

As we only cut the main stems of roses, there was no time (nor need, nor skill) for

“spur pruning”, either. This technique encourages bud formation and is done by

cutting side shoots back to a few inches (the spurs) that will produce lots of

flowering stems next season. Neither were we asked to do “form-correcting

pruning”, which means cutting back some parts of the plant harder than other

parts in order to encourage more vigorous growth to fill gaps in the not yet

balanced shape of the plant.

To summarise, pruning skills were inhibited by standardisation in the sense that

we, first, engaged only in the most basic style of pruning and ignored others;

second, we neglected to acknowledge plant-specific pruning rules and needs;

third, we often pruned regardless of season or weather conditions; fourth, we did

not always use appropriate tools or properly maintained tools; and, fifth, we often

did not know what exactly to prune (i.e., which stems to cut). In the face of all

these drawbacks, practices were nevertheless standardised because management

had to produce satisfactory results with low-skilled staff who worked on their own

most of the time. In these circumstances, standardisation was used to produce a

“workmanship of certainty” (Pye 1968). Low-skilled staff cannot be trusted to

have enough control over the task so that they can use their own care, judgement

and dexterity to successfully deal with the risks inherent in any skilled work.

Context-independent rules are therefore formulated in order to predetermine the

operational sequence and dispense with care, judgement and experience. The skill

necessary to carry out such context-independent rules (or brief one-off

instructions) is low and focuses on compliance rather than a self-guided

exploration of task-relevant patterns of features that might improve performance

and skill (see Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980). Therefore in order to become enskilled,

one has to work in a context of a “workmanship of risk” which does not limit the

creativity of practitioners to the narrow confinements of context-independent

rules, standardisations and certainties.

Division of labour and situated learning

With only Area Supervisors and Head Gardeners being qualified skilled gardeners,

the unskilled majority of grounds maintenance staff is limited in the complexity of

tasks they can perform. While they may do the actual planting, the planting design

(and often, the actual placing of the plants where they are to be planted in the

flower bed) is carried out by their superiors. While the groundsmen may be

trusted with the planting of flowers, the planting of trees is delegated to another

contractor, a tree surgeon. While the groundsmen may be able to cut a few low-

hanging branches of a tree, crown lifting (the cutting of a tree’s lower branches in

order to make the main trunk more visible) is done by the Head Gardener. While

a groundsman may be able to notice a pest on a plant, the Head Gardener will

come and spray with the appropriate pesticide. In other words, instead of giving

staff the opportunity to develop skills in increasingly complex tasks, these tasks

are taken out of their hands, responsibility is handed over and participation

(however peripheral) is inhibited.

Let me distinguish between two problems regarding this division of labour. The

first is that supervisors, as the skilled gardeners, are hardly ever working together

with the low-skilled groundsmen. Instead, their interaction is one of instruction –

supervisors might leave a rough sketch on paper showing where to work, briefly

outlining the tasks in a few words, or they might give instructions via mobile

phone or come by for a quick visit. When they do come, instructions are given

according to a “show-and-tell” principle, combined with a visual inspection which

is reminiscent of the judging practice discussed above as to its preference for

vistas. What distinguishes the supervisor’s inspection from judging is that more

scanning is involved. This scanning orients itself on the instructions of the

previous day (and hence the question whether all tasks were completed) and the

tick sheets. Furthermore, the purpose of this inspection is to notice potential tasks

for the current or next day, which are communicated to the groundsmen during

this visit. The actual work, however, is done after the inspection and therefore not

under the supervisor’s control and observation. As a result, there cannot be any

form of peripheral participation in a work activity in which the low-skilled

gardener might observe and imitate more skilled others. When groundsmen do

the work, there is no one to monitor, give feedback, “scaffold” their actions and

draw attention to relevant features or patterns, all of which is crucially important

to progress in skill (see Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980).

The situation does not improve, and this is the second problem, when supervisors

and groundsmen occasionally do work together. While a first stage of peripheral

participation is given, there is no progression to more central roles, to more

complex tasks, to more responsibilities. In some cases only, as in spraying

pesticides, this is a problem of lacking appropriate formal training and the official

licenses that go with it. But in most cases, the problem centres on the

groundsmen not being adequately trained to complete the tasks and on an

unwillingness to teach them (along with a lack of time for the supervisors to do

so). When supervisors do teach – as they do, for example, during the first day

inductions – it is done quickly and with the attitude that to be shown once is to

understand all. That gardening skills (rather than factual knowledge) are taught,

and that skills develop over time, is never acknowledged in these inductions. In

other words, gardening was considered by our supervisors as a “knowing-that”

rather than a “knowing-how” (Ryle 1956).

Time pressure and the rhythms of work

It is in the context of planting seasonal beddings that I heard the term “industrial

gardening” for the first time. I was supporting the Mobile Team (gardeners

working on various sites and not based in one park) in autumn and had started

planting primulas and daffodil bulbs according to the method in Hessayon’s

gardening book The Flower Expert (1984). I lifted a plant carefully out of its plastic

tray (so as not to injure stems or roots), checked quickly the condition of the plant

(looking for dead or diseased parts) and loosened up the root ball slightly to

prevent roots from growing in circles once planted in the bed. Then I dug a hole

with my trowel, put the plant in and carefully put the soil back in, pressing down

on the soil to firm in the roots. Next to it, I dug a hole for a bulb, roughly three

times as deep as the bulb’s height, put it in and covered it with soil.

While I did this, the Head Gardener was watching me, shaking his head. He then

explained that whatever I was doing there took far too long. We had to plant

thousands of plants in a few weeks, according to a strict time schedule (the

company would be fined if we did not adhere to this schedule). This was

“industrial gardening” and he showed me what that meant. He took a tray of

plants, turned it upside down and shook all the plants out so they tumbled in a

heap to the ground. With the trowel in his left hand he hit the ground hard once,

opening a gap, and, with his right hand, stuck a plant in the gap. He quickly closed

what remained of the gap with soil and hit the ground next to the first plant to

produce a second gap for a second plant. Continuing in this tempo, he planted

around ten plants in a minute. Then he used two of his fingers to push holes in

the ground and stuck bulbs in them. Done!

Time pressure is ever-present during the planting season. It is handed down from

the Local Authority to the contract management, from management to Area

Supervisors, from Area Supervisors to Head Gardeners, from Head Gardeners to

grounds staff. The time frame of planting is fixed to the day and the Local

Authority does not respond well to delays; they can hand out heavy fines for not

adhering to the time plan set out in the contract. When the planting for a new

herb garden in the main park of the borough run late, for example, the Mobile

Team and my park’s team were called to help out. More than a dozen

groundsmen worked without breaks for hours to get it done by the end of the

day. Our company’s manager paced nervously up and down the beds, worried

about the potential fines awaiting him. A few times, the Local Authority’s Parks

Manager and Grounds Manager could be seen leisurely strolling nearby, observing

our progress, chatting with us or our manager, and thereby reminding him of his

obligations. Although we got it done by the end of the day and everyone seemed

relieved and happy about the results, this episode showed the pressure the

company is under to fulfil its contract and how the pressure is handed down and

affects the work style of groundsmen.

With this amount of time pressure, the need for standardisation seems justified –

standardised treatment of plants, standardised easy and fast techniques. However,

as a result, less attention is paid while working, less care, less judgement in

workmanship and therefore fewer opportunities to develop horticultural skills in

all their aspects. When looking at the rhythms of work, several points can be

made in this regard. The gardening tasks presented above focus primarily on

tempo, i.e. speed. This time pressure compresses the process of work and focuses

attention on the aim. In terms of the phases outlined by Ingold (2011) this means

that there is a shift in attention and intention towards “carrying on” and “finishing

off” (the completion of work). We usually were keen to start as this meant we

could finish sooner! Accordingly, only a limited amount of time was spent on

preparations, i.e. the phases of “getting ready” and “setting out”. The main

concern was to develop tempo by getting into the speedy working rhythm that I

described in the primula-and-daffodil-planting example above. The careful and

considerate movements that define the “setting out” and “finishing off” phases

were subsumed in speed. To decrease speed in order to increase attention and

leave time for judgement and care was considered unnecessary and

counterproductive as the end results were not that different either way (at least

this was the common assumption).

But I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that a typical work day

was ruled by externally-imposed time pressure. While our superiors were pressing

us on in order to get things done on time and according to schedule, we pressed

on ourselves in order to have longer breaks or, sometimes, to go home earlier.

Alternatively, when we worked alongside our superiors, we would speed up as

long as they were with us, only to slow down or have a break whenever they left

us for a shorter or longer period. While the speed of work demanded from us

prevented us from doing things correctly and with care, the speed at which we

chose to work ourselves in order to have longer breaks was indicative of a lack of

interest in our work and therefore also a lack of interest in learning. Doing what we

were told to do was our main concern. This attitude points towards problems in the

areas of motivation, dedication and care.

Motivation, dedication and care

‘They are overpaid anyway.’ This is what, according to one of my supervisors, a

senior company manager once said to him in reference to groundsmen. And,

indeed, from the perspective of management this statement makes sense, as the

whole object of employing low-skilled labourers is to save on wages for skilled

qualified gardeners. Yet among the groundsmen the feeling was naturally quite

different. Being paid on an hourly basis of £7, we made slightly under £1,000 a

month with a 40-hour week (the industry average in 2003 was £12,000 to £13,000

per year, UNISON 2003). ‘The pay is sh*t!’ was the nearly unanimous verdict of

my colleagues, many of whom were from Eastern European countries and had

come to the United Kingdom for mainly economic reasons (see also Nowicka

2012). While the exchange rate between the Pound Sterling and their own

currency was still good, there was not much of a problem. But when the Pound

Sterling kept losing its strength, complaints were voiced more and more often. My

colleagues would always compare their current pay with the pay in their home

countries and with the pay in other sectors in the UK. Many of them had

previously worked in construction and were used to higher rates. In general, my

colleagues felt that they were being paid poorly because the company ‘doesn’t give

a sh*t’ about them since it knew that there were many job seekers out there who

could do their job just as well as they could (thereby implying that it did not take a

lot of skill to do their job). This impression was intensified by the high staff

turnover in our teams. There was a constant coming and going, especially in the

Mobile Team, less so in the Park Keepers who often stayed put without

progressing for many years (I will discuss this problem in more detail below).

My colleagues did not feel appreciated or that their (however limited) skills were

valued by the company. This was not restricted to the low-skilled labourers. For

example, one apprentice with the company, who progressed into full-time

employment after his apprenticeship ended, complained to me that even with his

horticultural skills, knowledge and qualification he was supposed to work on the

same level as all the unskilled labourers in his team, and with no difference in pay.

Although the company was keen to advertise their apprenticeships and therefore

their efforts in enskilling their staff, they were not willing to honour the extra

skills of their employees with a salary increase. A seeming exception is the increase

in salary that my team’s Head Gardener received after gaining his Level 2

qualification. However, until this time, our Head Gardener had been paid less

than another team’s Head Gardener (who was qualified). This situation could

have continued indefinitely had not the Local Authority’s Parks Department

strongly advised the company to pay for our Head Gardener’s course and

qualification. The initiative to train staff in this case (as in the case of the

apprenticeships) came from the Local Authority. Therefore, company support

from superiors in the internal training process was either minimal or non-existent,

again leading to the employees feeling neither valued nor appreciated. In addition,

the Parks Department only concern lay with “qualifications” (the quantifiable end

product of learning) rather than the process towards a qualification (which is

learning) or the application of the learned skills.

Another factor leading to a lack of motivation was a lack of career progression.

Those who stayed with the company most often remained in the same position

the whole time, while people in higher positions usually came from outside the

company. This was particularly frustrating for those who had completed further

training like the apprentices or those participating in the Train to Gain scheme.

A sense of stagnation was also felt more generally. My colleagues had the

impression that their work life was not developing, given that they received hardly

any formal or informal training and developed no expertise or specialist

knowledge. Even if they did develop their skills, they would still be required to do

the job in the same way as before. After our NVQ assessor had shown us how to

plant flowers correctly during the Train to Gain scheme, we still had to go back to

work and do it the “industrial” way for time reasons (now being fully aware of the

detriment we might be causing). Training thus seemed a pointless exercise.

My colleagues did not consider their work to be – in William Morris’s words –

“worthy work” which is “pleasurable” in itself. This thought has most recently

entered the anthropological arena in Trevor Marchand’s inaugural lecture The

Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: an Anthropology of Craft and Craftspeople (2011).

Intrinsically motivated, skilled craftspeople are in “pursuit of pleasurable work”,

are proud of their achievements and enjoy working “in the zone” (or “flow”).

Admittedly, my groundsmen colleagues and I had our moments of pride (in

finishing an immense task, in being complimented on our planting by the public,

etc.), and we even had moments of “being in the zone” occasionally when got

into our speedy working rhythm. But against the lack of acknowledgement and

respect from our superiors (the extrinsic motivational factors, so to say), a feeling

of doing “worthy work” could not establish itself.

Richard Sennett (2008) would have attributed our work attitude to a lack both of

the ability to do good work and the desire to do good work which he sees as the

hallmark of craftspeople. Skill alone is hence not enough; craftspeople are in

pursuit of quality and consider the quality of their work as a sign of distinction

and pride. They identify with their work and craft and consider each work project

as a chapter in their life. When the situation is such that not only learning to do

good work is inhibited but also the desire to do good work is sacrificed to time

pressure, standardisation and lack of interest because good work or quality is not

asked for, it is highly unlikely that today’s contract gardeners are motivated and

dedicated to a job with low reputation that they do not identify with.

Limited seasonality of bedding and the sense of care

The bedding scheme in the borough I worked in changes twice a year. In May, the

summer display is planted and removed around October when the winter display

has to go in (which in turn will be pulled out by the end of April). This means that

one of the most visible, beautiful and prestigious (in terms of horticultural awards)

aspects of an urban green space is planted “not to last”. It has a lifespan of up to

six months, even though a large proportion of bedding flowers are perennials.

Winter bedding, for example, often includes perennial flowers like primulas and

spring flowering bulbs like daffodils, tulips, crocusses and hyacinths. In one

instance, even young Eucalyptus trees were used in seasonal bedding. At the end

of a season, plants are often discarded; sometimes they are replanted in shrub

beds (bulbs are usually “recycled” this way) or given away to local residents. In

most cases, what happens with the plants after their season is of no concern, as

they have fulfilled their purpose in flowering and contributing to the visual

aesthetics of a design scheme once. Only recently has the borough agreed to

replace some seasonal beddings with more sustainable perennial schemes

(although only on less prestigious, small beds on the street side and not in high-

class entry areas of parks).

Limited seasonality has significant consequences for planting and maintenance

practices because with a very limited plant life expectancy comes a lack of care.

While established gardens like the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, Kew

Gardens or the Eden Project depend on long-term development of the sites and

proper maintenance regimes of specimen plants, seasonal bedding plants do not

usually live long enough to develop major problems. Even if they do, they can

easily be replaced. With this in mind, contract gardeners on sites which mostly

consist of seasonal bedding schemes can focus on a very basic watering and

weeding regime without having to consider how to bring the plants through

winter, deal with pests or diseases, mineral deficiencies, collecting seeds or

dividing clumps. The actual planting can be simplified and sped up as most

problems caused by incorrect planting would either appear in the long term only

or can be rectified by replacing the plant. The general public (and horticultural

award judges) will only see them briefly and from a distance, so it is irrelevant if

an individual plant is planted too deep or too shallow, too far leaning to the side,

too close together or too far apart.

Alongside the previously mentioned lack of motivation and dedication, the above

is one of the reasons why an “industrial gardener” is no plantsman, that is

one who loves plants for their own sake and knows how to cherish them.

This […] concept […] may include a botanist: it certainly includes a host of

admirable amateurs who may not know what a chromosome looks like or

what taxonomy means, but they know the growing plant, wild or cultivated,

first-hand. To my mind they are the cream of those in the plant world, a

fund of invaluable first-hand information (McClintock 1976, cited in

Raphael 1979:104).

These enthusiastic expert gardeners that are plantsmen “know how to cherish”,

that is care for plants, not just whole beds or borders, but individual ones, each

with its own specific life history. They engage with individual plants, develop

relationships with them and work with them experimentally, that is, they derive

their “first-hand knowledge” not from books, nor from general rules or

standardized techniques, but from this close coupling of perceptual attentiveness

and manual dexterity that makes and unmakes skill. “Industrial” gardeners, on the

other hand, do not see plants through their whole life span, are less concerned

with individual specimen and do not much maintenance apart from watering and

pruning. The temporal horizon of their work is not long- or mid-term and their

outlook is more “instant” than “developmental”, that is, they get done what they

are told to do in the moment and do not have to plan ahead (in contrast to the

Head Gardener or Area Supervisor). In that sense, they are more task-oriented

than plant-oriented. Work is “earning one’s living”, not a vocation or calling.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, I argued that the skills problem (in British horticulture but also in

other contexts) may be more appropriately framed as a problem of enskillment

rather than deskilling. Taking up the contention of the skills debate stakeholders

that a problem with skills exists, I proposed to scrutinize opportunities of and

challenges to learning in regard to the features of skill as identified in the

anthropological literature. I argued that each feature of skill might be utilized

either to encourage or discourage learning. Enskillment might therefore be either

fortified or inhibited through a craft’s institutionalized working practices. By

elaborating on a case study of British “industrial” gardening, I showed how

working practices as observed at a private grounds maintenance contractor are at

the root of the skills problem in the British horticultural sector. Between their

commitments to a world-class skills economy and a longstanding neoliberal policy

of privatisation, the British Government and its public bodies have so far only

scratched the surface of the skills problem. It has been my intention to

demonstrate that these commitments are in fact conflicting and that, moreover,

privatisation is a major obstacle to achieving a meaningful skills economy.

As a consequence of the privatisation trend, the craft of horticulture becomes

increasingly “industrialized” along Taylorist principles. Most gardeners had been

employed in the public sector and since an estimated 50% of public employers

have outsourced their horticultural services by now, industrialized working

conditions are becoming the rule rather than the exception. I therefore attest a

skills problem for the whole craft of horticulture which may have a negative

impact on its long-term sustainability. A re-appraisal of the value of craftsmanship

and enskillment would be needed to counter this problem. One might also

wonder if we see a transfer of horticultural skills from the professional to the non-

commercial domain since home gardening is becoming more and more popular in

Britain (Ellen and Platten 2011). Although not without its own skills problems

(Gilbert 2013), it is here where a great number of people still have opportunities

to learn horticultural skills in formal (e.g. through the training programs and

qualifications of the Royal Horticultural Society) or informal settings (e.g. from fellow

gardeners in community gardens or allotments).

I would like to conclude by pointing out one more implication of the skills

problem in industrialized horticulture, one that falls under the heading of the

neoliberalization of nature (Castree 2007; Igoe, Neves and Brockington 2010).

Until now, I have focussed the enskillment discussion on the practitioners. But, as

Ingold (2000) has argued, skills are not embodied (in the sense of being inside the

body) but are more like skilled systems that comprise practitioners, tools and

materials, all within an environment. So what happens to the environment and

practitioners’ engagement with it when their work becomes industrialized? Scott

(1998) argues that technical knowledge (e.g. of a Taylorist kind) transforms nature

so that it corresponds more closely to the underlying principles of said knowledge.

In industrialized gardening, public green spaces unsurprisingly have to be

designed for planting and maintenance by low-skilled gardeners. What is perhaps

more unsettling is that these gardeners lose touch with nature. They know less

and less about plants, soil, weather and climate, as they increasingly rely on

standardized rules of thumb which are not born out of their own experience but

are acquired as bits of information out of context. Yet, as Scott (1998) has

remarked, such formulaic knowledge nevertheless relies on practical knowledge

(mētis) without which formulaic knowledge could not be brought to work. My

contention is, however, that this practical knowledge is mainly geared towards

skills relating to tool use and plants-turned-material/objects rather than to skills

related to features of the environment. In other words, industrialized gardening is

losing touch with what we might call “the garden”.

REFERENCES

BERNSTEIN, N. 1996. On dexterity and its development. In Dexterity and its

Development (eds) M. Latash & M. T. Turvey, 3-244. Mahwah, N. J.:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

BOURDIEU, P. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: CUP

BOYER, D. 2005. The Corporeality of Expertise. Ethnos 70, 243-266

BRAVERMAN, H. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review

CABE. 2004. Parks need People – The skills shortage in parks: a summary of

Research. London: CABE

CABE. 2009. Skills To Grow: Seven priorities to improve green space skills.

London: CABE

CASTREE, N. 2007. Neoliberalizing nature: The logics of de- and re-regulation.

Environment and Planning A 40, 131–152

COLLINS, E. 2004. Crafts in the English Countryside: Towards a Future. Wetherby:

Countryside Agency Publications

COY, M. (ed). 1989. Apprenticeship: from theory to method and back again. Albany: State

University of New York Press

CRAWFORD, M. 2009. The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is

Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. London: Viking/Penguin Group

CROSBIE, C. 2007. Easy Pruning: simple steps to success. London: Dorling Kindersley

DAVIES, S. 2007. UK Municipal Waste Management: From a Public Service to a

Globalised Industry. Competition and Change 11

DENEVE, G., MOLLONA, M. & J. PARRY (eds). 2010. Industrial Work and Life: an

Anthropological reader. Oxford: Berg

DILLEY, R. 2009. Specialist Knowledge Practices of craftsmen and clerics in

Senegal. Africa 79, 53-69

DOWNEY, G. 2005. Learning Capoeira: lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art.

Oxford: Oxford University Press

DOWNEY, G. 2009. Seeing with a “sideways glance”: visuomotor “knowing” and

the plasticity of perception. In Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and

Standards (ed) C. Grasseni, 222-241. Oxford: Berghahn Publishers

DREYFUS, H. L. 2005. Merleau-Ponty and recent Cognitive Science. In The

Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (eds) T. Carman & M. Hansen, 129-

150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

DREYFUS, S. & H. DREYFUS. 1980. A five-stage model of the mental activities

involved in directed skill acquisition. Operations Research Center, University of

California Berkeley

ELLEN, R. AND PLATTEN, S. 2011. The social life of seeds: the role of networks of

relationships in the dispersal and cultural selection of plant germplasm.

JRAI 17, 563-584

EYFERTH, J. 2006. Socialist Deskilling: the struggle over skills in a rural craft

industry, 1949-1965. In How China Works: Perspectives on the twentieth-century

industrial workplace (ed) J. Eyferth, 41-58. London: Routledge

FLITSCH, M. 2007. Knowledge, embodiment, skill and risk: Anthropological

perspectives on women’s everyday technologies in rural northern China.

Paper presented at the East Asian Science, Technology and Society Conference, Taipei,

August 2007

GIBSON, J. J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin

GIESER, T. 2008. Embodiment, emotion and empathy: a phenomenological

approach to apprenticeship learning. Anthropological Theory 8, 299-318

GILBERT, P.R. 2013. Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from

contemporary British allotments. Agriculture and Human Values 30, 101-114

GRASSENI, C. (ed). 2009. Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards.

Oxford: Berghahn Books

GUY, F. 2000. Technology, planning, bargaining and the growth of inequality since 1980.

Mimeo: London

HARRIS, M. 2007. Introduction: “Ways of knowing”. In Ways of Knowing: New

Approaches in the Anthropology of Experience and Learning (ed) M. Harris, 1-24.

Oxford: Berghahn Books

HARRIS, M. 2005. Riding a Wave: Embodied Skills and Colonial History on the

Amazon Floodplain. Ethnos 70, 197-219

HEISIG, U. 2009. The Deskilling and Upskilling Debate. In International Handbook

Of Education for the Changing World of Work: Bridging Academic and Vocational

Learning (eds) R. Maclean & D. Wilson, 1639-1652. Amsterdam: Springer

Netherlands

HERZFELD, M. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of

Value. Chicago: Chicago University Press

HERZFELD, M. 2007. Deskilling, ‘dumbing down’ and the auditing of knowledge

in the practical mastery of artisans and academics: an ethnographer’s

response to a global problem. In Ways of knowing: new approaches in the

anthropology of experience and learning (ed) M. Harris, 91-110. Oxford:

Berghahn

HESSAYON, D. 1984. The Flower Expert. Waltham Cross: pbi Publications

IGOE, J., NEVES, K. AND D. BROCKINGTON. 2010. A spectacular eco-tour around

the historic bloc: Theorizing the convergence of capitalist expansion and

biodiversity conservation. Antipodei 42, 486–512

INGOLD, T. 2000. The Perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and

skill. London: Routledge

INGOLD, T. 2011. Being Alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London:

Routledge

INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH. 2001. Building Better Partnerships: The

Final Report of the Commission on Public Private Partnerships. London: IPPR

KELLER, C. M. & J. D. KELLER. 1996. Cognition and tool use: the blacksmith at work.

Cambridge: CUP

LAVE, J. 2003. The practice of learning. In Understanding practice: Perspectives on

activity and context (eds) S. Chaiklin & J. Lave, 3-32. Cambridge: CUP

LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Cambridge: CUP

LEITCH, S. 2006. Prosperity for all in the global economy – world-class skills.

(available online: hm-treasury.gov.uk/leitch)

MARCHAND, T. 2011. The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: an Anthropology of Craft and

Craftspeople. Inaugural Lecture, SOAS, University of London, 11th May

2011

MARCHAND, T. 2008. Muscles, Morals and Mind: Craft Apprenticeship and the

Formation of Person. British Journal of Educational Studies 56, 245-271

MARCHAND, T. 2007. Crafting knowledge: the role of ‘parsing and production’ in

The communication of skill-based knowledge among masons. In Ways of

knowing, new approaches in the anthropology of experience and learning (ed) M.

Harris, 181-202. Oxford: Berghahn

MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge

NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE. 2006. Enhancing Urban Green Space. London: The

Stationery Office

NOWICKA, M. 2012. Deskilling in migration in transnational perspective: The case

of recent Polish migration to the UK. Bielefeld: COMCAD

PÁLSSON, G. 1994. Enskilment at sea. Man (N.S.) 29, 901-27

PLIMMER, G. & H. WARRELL. 2012. Biggest wave in UK outsourcing since ‘80s.

Financial Times, July 16

PYE, D. 1968. The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge: CUP

RAPHAEL, S. 1979. A Plantsman defined. The Plantsman 1, 26

RYLE, G. 1956. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchison

SACHDEV, S. 2001. Contracting Culture – From CCT to PPPs: The private provision of

public services and its impact on employment relations. UNISON

SCOTT, J. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human

Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press

SENNETT, R. 2008. The Craftsman. London: Penguin Books

SIGAUT, F. 1993. Learning, teaching and apprenticeship. New Literary History 24,

105-114

STONE, G. 2007. Agricultural deskilling and the spread of genetically modified

cotton in Warangal. Current Anthropology 48, 67-87

STRATHERN, M. (ed). 2000. Audit Cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics,

and the academy. London: Routledge

TILLEY, C. 2006. The sensory dimensions of gardening. Senses & Society 1, 311-330

UNISON. 2003. GROUNDS MAINTENANCE SECTOR REPORT.

NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR

Thorsten Gieser, PhD, is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at

the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His specialised fields include

cultural phenomenology, embodiment, enskillment, perception, empathy and the

self. He has recently edited (with Hubert Hermans) the Handbook of Dialogical

Self Theory, published by Cambridge University Press.

Address:

Thorsten Gieser

Department of Social Anthropology

Universitätsstr. 1

56070 Koblenz/Germany

Email: thgieser@uni-koblenz.de

i It is interesting to note, however, that the New Labour Government has moved this award in line with its “audit culture” (see Strathern 2000). It thus presents a means to quantify and thereby assess “value for money” (National Audit Office 2006). ii When I hereafter compare our work practices with “correct” practices I usually refer to what I was taught during my NVQ assessment. This was part of the Train to Gain scheme, a Government-funded initiative to deliver vocational training to low-skilled workers and thereby tackle the skill deficiency in the UK. It enabled me and a few of my co-workers to gain a qualification in horticulture by being assessed during work. The scheme was promoted by the Local Authority but the company I worked for adopted it rather reluctantly. Therefore, training was kept to a minimum and it was expected that the assessment would not disrupt our work. We were lucky, however, to have an empathetic assessor who nevertheless taught us as much as his and our time permitted.