Skills in service work: an overview - Wiley Online Library

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Skills in service work: an overview Marek Korczynski Loughborough University Business School Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 15 No 2, 2005, pages 3-14

hy a special issue of HRMJ on this subject? Debates on skills within both policy circles and academia have too often leapt from a focus on manufacturing to a focus informed by the all-embracing new paradigm of the knowledge economy. In this breathless journey, there is one notable segment of the workforce that tends to be left by the wayside – service workers, particularly those in direct contact with service recipients or customers. There is little place for these frontline service workers – for instance, in the debates on forms of high-performance work systems in which the research concentrates on manufacturing settings. Similarly, when positions are contrasted in debates on skills in the nature of the ‘knowledge economy’, one factor that unites different schools is a shared marginalisation of frontline service workers. Where are the homecare assistants, the nurses, the restaurant waiters, the retail store workers, the call-centre workers and the job-centre workers in these important debates? As Bolton (2004a: 21) puts it: ‘The rhetoric concerning the ‘high skills’ economy is amazingly adept at avoiding the fact that the largest area of growth is in poorly rewarded front-line service jobs (Brown et al, 2001)’. With the numerical importance of frontline service jobs (henceforth just service jobs), this neglect seems surprising. However, it may be that this neglect is not important. It may be that there is nothing specific about the nature of frontline service jobs, despite their number, that makes their separate analysis worthwhile. It may be that the knowledge economy paradigm and perhaps even the high performance work systems literature can tell us all we need to know about service work skills. It may be that the same principles apply equally from manufacturing to services, and from knowledge work to services. Or it may be that this neglect is important. There may be something about the presence of the customer within the labour process of service work that means the separate analysis of service jobs is essential. For instance, within customer-facing service work issues of emotional labour and aesthetic labour arise. In both of these aspects of labour, there is a lack of clarity of what we even mean by ‘skill’, let alone what can be done about skill levels in these jobs. Further, there may be good theoretical grounds for suggesting that the basis of the division of labour – a key factor influencing skill – may be subtly, but importantly, different in customer-facing jobs. Indeed, Anne McBride’s paper in this special issue takes this point one step further. Her study shows the active involvement of patients in the NHS in reconfiguring the basis of the division of labour for a number of roles. Another important reason to focus the analytical lens on skills in service work is that much of this work is highly gendered. At the most basic level, for instance, many of the key service occupations are held primarily by women. Now we also know that the social processes of defining and rewarding skills are also often highly gendered. Putting these two points together suggests that many aspects of service work skills may be highly gendered – indeed, even the very marginalisation of these jobs in key literatures might be seen as informed by gendered processes. There

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are certainly good empirical reasons, and there may be good theoretical reasons, then, for at least opening up to the possibility that skills in service work deserve their own separate analysis. 1 This special issue is based on this very premise. I have written this introduction to give a context for the papers that follow. It does not summarise these papers, but places them in the context of wider issues concerning skills and service work. The rest of this introduction is structured as follows. The next section gives a definition of the terms ‘service work’ and ‘skills’. The following two sections – on task complexity and on discretion – flow from these definitions. These sections together give an overview of the nature and levels of skills in contemporary service work in the UK. The following section, on influences on skills in service work, allows a more dynamic picture to emerge on what skills in service work might look like in the short and medium term. KEY CONCEPTS It is easy to become lost in the discussion of skills in service work without a firm understanding of the first-order concepts involved – namely, service work and skills. Each will be addressed in turn. Service work here means work involving interaction with a customer or a service recipient. Our focus in this special issue is particularly on service work below the level of the professional occupations – we are therefore excluding doctors, accountants, lawyers, academics etc. The service work we are focusing on invariably involves both a tangible element and an intangible element. To take an example, the tangible element of a bank clerk’s work involves information processing – perhaps of an account transfer or the sale of a financial product. The intangible element relates to the ‘people work’ aspect of the job – how the bank clerk interacts with the customer in the processing of the task. Indeed, over the past two decades management and management academics have increasingly focused on this intangible element of service quality (Heskett et al, 1997). Increasingly, service firms compete not just on the basis of the tangible, usually information-processing, element but also on the basis of the intangible element – the service quality experienced by the customer (Lashley, 1997). So what of skills? As Payne (2000)) argues, the term ‘skill’ is increasingly being used by managers, policy-makers and even academics in more and more amorphous ways – to the extent that it risks coming to mean everything yet nothing. It is particularly important, therefore, to be clear on what we mean by the term. Spenner’s (1990) classic overview of studies on the trajectory of skill levels shows that there existed a useful and broad consensus that skill should be considered to have two key elements – job complexity and task discretion (see also Felstead et al, 2004). Job complexity relates to the dimension of simplicity/difficulty in a job. Task discretion refers to the degree of latitude in decision-making given to a job-holder. Does the worker have the latitude to choose from a range of techniques in diagnosing and addressing a problem, or does s/he have to check with a supervisor first, or pass the problem on to an expert worker? The more choice or latitude for the job-holder, the higher skilled the job. One quick way to become lost in the debate on skills is to concentrate solely on the proxies used to measure skill, and to lose sight of the core concept that various proxies are used to measure. The most common measures used to assess skills are level of required qualifications and time taken for full training. These in themselves are not skills but are partial measures of skills. Moreover, as Grugulis et al (2004: 5) note, 4


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‘proxies are not always reasonable substitutes for the skills they are intended to represent’. This is particularly important to bear in mind when carefully considering skills in service work. With these important points established, it is clearly logical to discuss skills in service work in terms of job complexity relating to both tangible and intangible elements, and in terms of task discretion also relating to the tangible and intangible elements. This is the task of the following two sections. Note that the labels of the tangible and intangible aspects of service jobs are preferable to the commonly used labels of hard and soft skills. The latter labels have more potential for pejorative and gendered connotations. JOB COMPLEXITY First, we will focus on the job complexity of service work in relation to tangible elements of service jobs – that is, the work on information or materials. This is a relatively uncontroversial area, and one where there appears little reason to see any difference between service jobs and jobs in the rest of the economy. The consensus picture of skills rising in the UK economy generally, but from very low base levels (Warhurst et al, 2004), is one that transposes well to this aspect of skills in service work. For instance, take the case of call-centre jobs. There is a consensus of research showing that, for the majority mass-customisation segment of call-centre work, workers tend to be ‘information receivers rather than knowledge creators’ (Korczynski et al, 1996: 83; also Thompson et al, 2001). Service workers’ jobs tend to concentrate on the assimilation of information and information systems rather than on the more complex task of the analysis of information. Although less systematically researched, it is also easy to see how the complexity of information (system) assimilation has risen for call-centre jobs compared with the non-mediated customerfacing jobs – for instance, bank clerks – that they replaced. This is because of the ongoing increase in flexibility and variation in products offered to customers and because of the increased information available on the IT systems around which callcentre jobs tend to be designed. What, then, of job complexity in relation to the intangible element of service jobs – the emotional and aesthetic labour directed towards customers? This is where matters become somewhat more complicated, where consensus breaks down into debate and confusion. On the one hand, there is a tendency for some writers implicitly to belittle such social ‘skills’ (and the quotation marks are not uncommonly used here) as not being real skills, but mere personality traits or personal attributes. On the other hand, some writers and observers argue that emotional labour, in particular, is fundamentally a skilled form of labour for it involves the reflexive use of quite complex social skills. It is useful to draw out the positions in this debate more fully. It is rare to find writers explicitly denying that social skills in service work are not real skills, but rather it is a position that many writers adopt implicitly – it appears as an unexpressed assumption within their work. Take the case of Caroline Lloyd’s article on skills and training within the industry. Lloyd focuses on the technical aspects of skill within the fitness industry. Her article, excellent in its own terms, shows the limited degree of technical skills and training required of instructors in even the most upmarket fitness clubs (more on the implications of this important insight below). However, note that it does not seek to assess the recruitment and training of social skills relating to emotional and aesthetic labour. The implicit position here is that it is the technical skills that are the real skills. Two key factors tend to inform the position of HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 15 NO 2, 2005

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writers who adopt this position. One is that such policy-oriented writers tend to focus on, and define, skills in relation to labour market outcomes. There is a desire to influence policy to help raise the wage levels of currently low-paid service workers. An established literature shows that the higher the technical skills, the higher the wages, while such a relationship between social skills and wages has not been established. In immediate policy terms, then, it seems to make sense to prioritise technical skills. In addition, there is a tendency to marginalise social skills because of a belief, following Hochschild (1983), that emotional labour demanded by management is essentially fake, invasive and demeaning. The implicit position is that such demeaning management demands should not be legitimised by applying the label of ‘skills’ to the area of emotional labour. Bolton’s (2004a, 2004b) work can be taken as an exemplar of the position that emotional labour is skilled labour. Although Bolton argues more about task variety and discretion than job complexity in her discussion, there are key elements in her arguments that have clear implications for the dimensions of job complexity. Bolton’s starting point is the classic work of Goffman in the 1950s on everyday interactions. Building on Goffman’s insights about the multiple layers of rituals and implicit rules underpinning social interactions, Bolton argues that service workers’ emotional labour involves an often unrecognised degree of complexity both in choosing between appropriate emotional labour rituals and in enacting these rituals. Complexity, or difficulty, exists both at the diagnosis level (the retail worker must often decide by the initial body language and tone of the customer what body of emotional labour approaches are likely to be needed) and at the enactment level (the retail worker must then put on a convincing display of empathy towards a complaining customer, even though the previous customer may have been abusive). Bolton also makes the point that another factor that makes this skilled work of service workers invisible to observers, and especially management, is that it tends to be overwhelmingly undertaken by women. Service occupations, below the level of professional jobs, demanding emotional labour, are dominated by women (Korczynski, 2002). Bolton argues that the labelling of often complex social skills as the innate qualities, traits or attributes of women, rather than skills per se, is the key contemporary example of the gendered political processes underlying the application of the label ‘skilled’ to a job. There are a number of important strengths in Bolton’s arguments in comparison with the position that implicitly marginalises social skills. Consider again the two factors underpinning this marginalisation. On the issue of policy and labour market outcomes, a number of points can be made. The first is that, in the USA and Canada, and even recently in the UK, there have been a number of cases in which the issue of skilled emotional labour in service jobs has been raised as a key factor in claims of equal pay for jobs of equal value/worth (Arthurs, 2004). The point is that, although skilled emotional labour may have been unrecognised and unrewarded in the past, this position should be actively challenged. Another way of putting this is that, although the prioritisation of technical skills over social skills matches the UK’s certification system relating to skills, this does not mean that it is appropriate. A possible pragmatic middle ground between the two positions on the status of social skills is suggested by Green’s (1999) finding that emotional labour attracts wage rewards only when it is tied to a recognised technical skill. The middle ground is that if service workers’ technical skills are raised and certified then the recognition of their accompanying social skills should follow. There is an obvious danger in this logic, however. Further, as Lindsay’s recent work (Lindsay and McQuaid, 2004, and the article in this issue) implies, it is not 6


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that these social skills are without any labour market pay-back. Lindsay’s study of unemployed Scottish people found that many people ruled out the prospect of entrylevel service jobs because they considered themselves as lacking the ‘necessary skills’. In other words, the labour market prospects of these people were made worse because 2 they lacked, or at least considered themselves as lacking, emotional labour skills. Indeed, the relationship between wages and social skills is an area that needs considerably more research – not least because the way in which skills have been measured in the past, often relating to certification, has meant that social skills may not have been properly measured. On the second point underpinning the marginalisation of social skills, namely the fake and demeaning nature of emotional labour, there is now a convincing counterargument that Hochschild’s fundamental premises were misplaced (Wouters, 1989; Bolton, 2004b; Korczynski, 2002), and that emotional labour can be enacted in a number of ways by service workers. Crucially, what makes emotional labour harmful to workers is not emotional labour per se, but when it is tied to a lack of discretion (see review in Korczynski, 2002: ch.8). The lack of discretion, however, cannot be assumed to be necessarily a part of jobs involving emotional labour. It is an issue for empirical enquiry. There is nothing fundamentally harmful in seeking to bestow the label of ‘skill’ upon enacted emotional labour. An implication of taking up the Bolton argument is that we are left with the potentially important observation that many service work jobs may be low paid and low status, but they may not be low skilled. This has important policy and research implications – a point taken up below. Note that this discussion of the debate between camps relating to skills in the intangible element of service work has focused on the area of emotional labour. A debate also needs to take place on the aesthetic labour aspect of service work. The discussion by Nickson et al (2004) is an important first step here. TASK DISCRETION First, it is necessary to nest our discussion of the discretion element of skills in service work within the wider picture of skills in the economy. Here, we are confronted with two sets of evidence that tend to jar with each other. On the one hand, Felstead et al (2004) report, on the basis of their longitudinal statistical analysis of a number of large data-sets, that discretion in UK jobs has fallen over the past 15 years. On the other hand, there are a number of studies of empowerment policies enacted by HRMoriented management that suggest that, although it is dangerous to be taken in by the full rhetoric of empowerment, there is evidence of some rises in task-level discretion for workers (Wilkinson et al, 1997; Edwards et al, 1998). A possible way into understanding the conundrum presented by these two sets of findings will be suggested below – at least for service work. In addition, it should be noted that, although the two sets of evidence may differ on the direction of the trend in discretion levels, they come together in presenting a shared picture of the general absolute level of discretion levels – here the evidence is that the majority of workers in the UK work in low-trust settings (Fox, 1974) where they are given low levels of discretion in their jobs (Grugulis et al, 2004). Turning now to the specifics of discretion in service work, it is useful to conceptualise the issues in terms of the customer-oriented bureaucracy ideal-type, or 3 theoretical model, of work organisation in service work (Korczynski, 2001, 2002). Despite hard-line insistence by Ritzer (2000) that service work is strictly McDonaldised or Taylorised, it is more useful to see the organisation of service work HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 15 NO 2, 2005

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FIGURE 1 Relevant dimensions of the customer-oriented bureaucracy model Dimension of work organisation

Customer-oriented bureaucracy

Dominant organising principle

Customer orientation and rationalisation

Labour process focus

Quality and quantity focus

Basis of division of labour

Customer relationship and efficient task completion

Form of control

Use of customer-related norms, and bureaucratic measurement

Affect

Rationalised emotional labour

as informed by two logics: the logic of bureaucratisation, of cost-minimisation and efficiency; and the logic of customer-orientation, of needing to structure work to appeal to customers not just through low price but also through service quality. The dual, simultaneous presence of these two, potentially contradictory, logics has implications for each aspect of work organisation. Figure 1 outlines the dimensions of work organisation within the customer-oriented bureaucracy model that have most relevance to our discussion. This approach suggests an organisation of frontline service work in which the nature of task discretion is structured by the rationalising imperative of imposing rigid, repeatable procedures and the customer-orientation imperative of allowing scope for worker discretion to alter tasks in accordance with variable customer behaviour and perceptions. The approach sits well with recent studies that suggest that frontline service workers have more discretion in their jobs than in the recent past at least. This evidence comes from a range of settings: hospitality (Lashley, 1997; Jones et al, 1997), retail (Rosenthal et al, 1997; du Gay, 1996), airlines (Wouters, 1989) and public welfare workers (Foster and Hoggett, 1999). Lashley’s (1997: 47) discussion of task empowerment in the hospitality context brings out aspects common to many of these instances of increased discretion: Empowerment is largely related to attempts to generate improved service quality by improving responsiveness of frontline employees in the immediate service situation. Empowerment consists chiefly of authority to operate within prescribed boundaries. This could be a cash value to be given to the guest as a refund for a complaint, a reduction on the bill, a free meal, a complimentary drink or bottle of wine ... In the main this form of empowerment consists of empowering employees to provide extra service.

Our analysis, however, should not overstate the moves to greater task discretion. Three points are important here. First, although there is widespread case-study evidence that discretion has increased, it must be borne in mind that, in many cases, increases came from a very low starting position, suggesting that the levels of discretion remain circumscribed to an important degree – see, for example, Rosenthal et al’s (1997) careful study of empowerment in a supermarket chain. Secondly, many of the cases of task empowerment concentrate on the ‘service recovery’ (Bowen and Lawler, 1995) aspect of the job, such as resolving a customer’s complaint or taking ‘ownership’ of a particular customer ’s problem. The rise in discretion and latitude tends to be concentrated in these areas. A key question, not properly addressed in studies so far, is, therefore, how far discretion has risen in the original ‘service offer’, rather than in the service recovery aspect of the job. 8


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The third, and most crucial, point is that the discussion on task discretion so far has concentrated on discretion in the tangible aspect of service work. What is rarely addressed in the studies noted above is the degree to which there is discretion in its intangible aspect, ie in the social skills. As we have suggested throughout, the intangible element of service work should not be ignored. Concentrating on the emotional labour aspect of social skills, we can return to Bolton’s argument that within the service interaction the service worker’s skills involve choosing between a range of potential emotional labour rituals. The key word here is ‘choosing’. There can be an important degree of discretion for the service worker in choosing between a range of (managerially approved) options. Indeed, the scope for a degree of systematically circumscribed discretion is suggested by other dimensions of work organisation in the customer-oriented bureaucracy model. Control, it is suggested, cannot function by bureaucratic measurement and observation alone in service work. There are problems of observation of the labour process for management, and there are problems in measuring outcomes in terms of the customer’s experience of the service interaction. These are key factors that have been overlooked in the flawed rush to analyse the apparent operation of the panopticon in call centres and to generalise to the rest of service work on the basis of this. The problem of management observing the labour process in which the customer is also present, for instance, informs the common finding that enacted forms of service work tend to differ systematically from those that may be narrowly prescribed in organisational scripts, rules and procedures (Paules, 1991; Frenkel et al, 1999; Adler, 1986). Because of these problems, management recruit service workers on the basis of candidates holding customer-related attitudes and norms, in the hope that when they are faced with the choice of emotional labour rituals they will make the sort of decision of which management would approve. The shift in service work towards recruiting on the basis of attitude (Sturdy et al, 2001) speaks to an essential degree of discretion in the intangible element of this work. Finally, an observation that may help us come to terms with the conundrum left with us by the two bodies of evidence with contrasting findings on trends in discretion. As Fineman (1996: 557) has forcefully argued, it is ‘in the last decade or so [that] we have witnessed an acceleration in the institutionalisation of managerial control over emotional display. What was once intuitive ‘good sense’ to the effective shopkeeper or door-to-door salesman is now a commodity which is subjected to the full rigours of corporate training and control’. Over this period, then, service workers have experienced greater management intervention in the emotional labour aspect of their work, leading to diminishing discretion in this element of their work over this time. A degree of empowerment may have occurred for service workers in relation to the tangible aspect of their jobs over the past two decades, but in the intangible element a significant decrease is likely to have occurred.

INFLUENCES ON SERVICE WORK SKILLS With an understanding established of the broad picture of service work skills, we now turn to examine the factors that drive the nature of skills. This is a crucial issue for practitioners, policy-makers and researchers. If there are under-recognised and underrewarded skills in service work, we should ask: what can be done, what is likely to be done and, if it is agreed that it is desirable to move to a high skills economy, how can skills in service work be raised? We will now briefly review the key factors informing HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 15 NO 2, 2005

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the level and nature of skills – product markets, the labour market, HRM policies and regulation through government and trade union action. Product markets Greater emphasis on service quality within product market competition has been seen as informing key changes in service work skills in the past two decades, with a greater emphasis on social skills, and the trend towards greater task discretion – at least in the service recovery aspect of service interactions. However, intensified globalised competition in service industries, captured in the popular imagination through the migration of some UK call-centre jobs to India, will mean not just an increase in competition based on service quality, but also an increase in price-based 4 competition. The tensions captured by the model of the customer-oriented bureaucracy are likely to resound for some time. Competition will mean that management will need skills to lead to service quality, but will need to minimise the costs involved in creating these skills. This sounds very much like a scenario for a continued, and intensified, use of the low-cost skills provided by many women who enter the service labour market. Product market competition is unlikely to lead to a (required) step change in either the valuing of service work or in the level of service work skills (see Hughes et al (2004) for exactly this argument in relation to service 5 work in Ireland). This argument is in line with the view that the product market is unlikely to transform the UK economy, as a whole, to a high skills economy in the foreseeable future (Warhurst et al, 2004). Labour markets While the product market relates centrally to the demand for skills, the labour market relates centrally to the supply of skills. The key point to make here is that there is a growing consensus among observers that the problems with skills in the UK economy are not primarily ones of supply – indeed, in some senses there can be seen to be an over-supply of skills (Felstead et al, 2004). In the specific case of the service economy, there has been no significant problem, for instance, in the supply of social skills, not least because of the rising participation of women in the service workforce. Further, the dramatic, and continuing, expansion of higher education in the past decade and a half has brought with it a significant body of part-time student workers with good aesthetic and emotional labour skills, who will undertake service jobs for two or three years and then seek to move on. This gives employers an incentive to continue with the status quo regarding skills. Why design higher-skilled service jobs, and train workers accordingly, if there is a ready supply of cheap and willing labour under the current system? HRM policies In almost every normative presentation of the HRM project, training – ie the generation of skills within the organisation – takes a central place. Within the USAbased new service management school, for instance, ‘high-quality training’ is listed as a key part of the HRM ‘cycle of capability’ in service work (see Korczynski, 2002: ch.2). The logic here would appear to be that as HRM becomes more widespread, so skill levels in service work will rise. While empowerment policies do seem to have had some effect in some organisations, two important caveats must be added. One is the well-worn observation that the adoption of systematic HRM policies in the UK tends 10


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to be a very restricted phenomenon (Grugulis, 2003). The low-trust, short-term nature of key aspects of the UK political economy tends to work against the widespread adoption of systematic HRM policies (Hutton, 1997). Further, even if more firms followed the advice of the new service management school writers, it is not clear that this would have a substantial effect on service work skills. For under closer examination, what these writers describe as ‘high-quality training’ actually often constitutes little more than a dressing of rhetoric added to the existing system of skill utilisation (Korczynski, 2002). Regulation: government role If there is little in the above factors that is likely to alter substantially the position of skills in service work, this begs the question of what role the government could have in ameliorating skills in service work. Keep (2003) has argued that the government should move away from a focus on creating new schemes for the creation of skills: ‘The skill shortages that the government harps on about are not a major issue’. Rather, what is needed is a much wider, more thorough-going engagement with core elements in the political economy of the UK. Firms need to be pushed into moving from a low-cost, low-skills strategy towards higher-value product markets where higher skills will be needed (see also Lloyd and Payne, 2002). Part of a government’s reconceptualisation of its approach to skills could also involve a re-assessment of the role of the present system of skill certification. The issue of skills in service work is particularly germane here. As Grugulis et al (2004: 2) note, ‘The pragmatics that drive policy-makers privilege definitions of skill that can be more readily achieved or measured’. Skills that cannot easily be judged by their ability to generate numerical outcomes (qualifications or parts thereof) rest very uneasily with the manufacturing-centred Vocational Education and Training system. Skills relating to emotional and aesthetic labour are just such skills. Because they cannot be easily measured and quantified in the present system, they tend to be marginalised by policy-makers. Regulation: union role There is evidence that training has risen considerably on the agenda for trade unions. Take the case of the GMB, for instance. Heery (1993: 290) noted that the generalsecretary of the GMB ‘stated that promotion [of union officials] will increasingly depend on success in recruitment among ‘the new servant class’ and negotiation claims are monitored to ensure they incorporate demands for training and gender equality’. The ensuing decade, meanwhile, has seen a flowering of workplace-based learning representatives within the union. Given this, it could be that a revitalised union movement could play an important role in addressing the problems of skills in service work. Where partnership agreements exist, for instance, training is often a central part of the platform for cooperation between management and the union (Knell, 2001). Indeed, the article by Anne McBride in this issue on the development of skills in experimental new roles in the NHS brings out a case in point. The piloting of new skill-mixes in new roles was made possible only through a framework that involved union cooperation. However, while there may be more willingness on the part of unions to address the sorts of issues raised in this overview, this willingness is not necessarily matched by an ability to act in the areas that really matter. It is a cold fact that outside of the public sector unionisation of service jobs tends to be very low. The very workers who need to have the union working for them on skills issues tend not to have representation. HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 15 NO 2, 2005

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CONCLUSION Overall, then, we are left with a picture suggesting little likelihood of a significant change from a position where much of service work can be seen as low paid and low status, but not necessarily low skilled. This analysis suggests three crucial future areas of attention for both researchers and practitioners: the recognition of skills in service work, the rewarding of these skills, and the development of skills. For practitioners and researchers alike, a key issue is clearly how to recognise skills in service work – recognising in the sense both of seeing them for what they are, and in the sense of their formal accreditation or other form of formal recognition. The discussion above, with the emphasis on the tangible and the intangible aspects of service work cross-cut by the dimensions of job complexity and task discretion, provides only a starting point. The specifics of skills in different service occupations need to be analysed in context. The issue of recognition is the first point to be addressed, for it is only after these have been resolved that proper debate on the rewarding of service work skills can begin. An important research agenda here concerns the relative weight of rewards given to the tangible and intangible aspects of service work skills – exactly how far are social skills under-rewarded in relation to technical skills in service work, and are there important differences between occupations? Management and labour movement practitioners need to be similarly concerned with these issues. If there is proper recognition of existing skills in service work, we can also turn the agenda more proactively towards the development of service work skills in the future. Policy-makers, in particular, need to map out a realistic vision of service work skills in the medium term, with a clear map of how to get there. Platitudes about the knowledge economy are likely to get in the way here. In each of these areas, there are important agendas to be pursued, and important debates to unfold. For, in each, there are vested interests to be met – vested interests that benefit from the current situation of under-recognised, under-rewarded and underdeveloped service work skills. How long will these interests hold sway? Our own actions as researchers and practitioners may have an important influence on the answer to this crucial question. Notes 1. The articles assembled here came out of a seminar on skills and training in service work, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance and held at the University of Warwick in 2004. It was jointly organised with Ewart Keep, to whom I would like to record my thanks. Thanks also to John Purcell for helpful comments on a draft of this article. All errors remain my own. 2. Further, see Scott (1994) for a study which also implies that social skills do have some wage implications. 3. See Sturdy and Korczynski (2005) for a discussion of task discretion, or participation in service work, that also makes a useful distinction between discretion in service work and discretion in sales work. Discretion tends to be higher in sales work. 4. In fact, Taylor and Bain (2003) argue that the main migration in jobs has not involved front-line jobs, but rather has involved the traditionally bureaucratised back-office service jobs. 5. See also Caroline Lloyd's discussion, in this issue, on the importance of unpacking the notion of service quality when looking at the impact on skill levels. 12


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