According to Ivar Berg's performance criteria, over half of the North American workforce is now underemployed. Confronting conventional wisdom, Livingstone argues that the major problem in education-work relations is not education, but work. Formal schooling, further education, and informal learning have continued to increase while the knowledgeable and skilled are increasingly underemployed. Using analysis based on Canadian and U.S. large-scale surveys of work and learning experiences, the first representative survey of underemployed people, and in-depth interviews at university placement off
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According to Ivar Berg's performance criteria, over half of the North American workforce is now underemployed. Confronting conventional wisdom, Livingstone argues that the major problem in education-work relations is not education, but work. Formal schooling, further education, and informal learning have continued to increase while the knowledgeable and skilled are increasingly underemployed. Using analysis based on Canadian and U.S. large-scale surveys of work and learning experiences, the first representative survey of underemployed people, and in-depth interviews at university placement offices and food banks, the author exposes the myth of the 'knowledge economy' and the limits of human capital theory. The author assesses six facets of the underemployment of knowledge: the talent-use gap, structural unemployment, involuntary reduced employment, the credential gap, the performance gap, and subjective underemployment. He explains the wastage of workers' useful knowledge in terms of the conflicting forces driving current economic restructuring. Finally, he provides a critical review of basic economic alternatives (shareholder capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, and economic democracy) and gauges their prospects for overcoming the education-jobs gap.
Published abstract.
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