The New Work Order by James Gee

Author:James Gee [Gee, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780813332611
Google: FXCotAEACAAJ
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 1996-10-15T04:42:23+00:00

V A training class

Perhaps the best place to go to get a sense of the cultural change initiated at Teamco is the training room, where the workers went to be introduced to the notion of SDWTs and to begin acquiring the skills they would need in functioning as teams. This is one crucial site in the ongoing creation of the new capitalist Discourse and its new ‘kinds of people’. As always, however, a new Discourse arises in dynamic and complex interactions with older Discourses and other identities.

The curriculum of an educational program presumably embodies the core values of a Discourse and thus offers us a chance to understand key assumptions about learners, knowledge, and identity. Teamco’s SDWT training program ought, then, to reveal the new roles that workers were expected to construct, the new identities or ways of thinking, acting, talking, and valuing that they were expected to take on. We start with a brief overview of the curriculum and its organization, to be followed by a detailed description and analysis of one classroom session.

The training classes at Teamco took place in a well-lit, high-ceilinged room that was cool, clean, and well appointed with black metal, cushioned chairs and several rows of gray formica tables configured like the letter E. Two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows covered by light gray blinds. In the front of the room were a television set with a VCR mounted on a cart, a dry-erase board, an easel, an overhead projector, and a 10 by 12 foot high-quality projection screen. Along the fourth wall, placed well above eye level, were a series of posters articulating Teamco’s SDWT philosophy, including the definition and goals of self-directed work teams. Overall, the room had a modern, high-tech feel, and to those accustomed to the aging infrastructure and scant resources of public schools it appeared very inviting.

During classes there were approximately 15 to 25 front-line employees present. In the classes observed there was an even mix of women and men; nearly all were Asian-American, about 80 percent Vietnamese, with a sprinkling of other ethnicities, including Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. All these workers spoke languages other than English as their first language, and many were bilingual or trilingual, speaking, for example, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and English, or Tagalog and English, or Spanish and English.

Some workers were quite proficient in English, as was Juan, who will be introduced below, but others had grave difficulties in understanding lectures and reading materials and participating in classes, which were carried out in their entirety in English by official policy. Interestingly, in the recent past Teamco had conducted at least some parts of its quality enhancement programs in four different languages—posters and other literature were written in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

But the SDWT effort would be in English only. ‘We consciously made the decision that we would not ESL this program’, explained one member of the training department. The rationale was that, first of all, given the structure provided by

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