When Adam dalf and Eve span

Chapter 3. When Adam dalf and Eve span


Occupational literacy and democracy


Nick Pollard





Delving into power, games and literacy


If the mark of civilization is an interest in the political values of citizenship (Aristotle, 1962 and Arendt, 1998), then education and literacy must be a prerequisite for democracy (Friere, 1972 and Mill, 1991) as they form the basis for access to political discourses and thus the enactment or pursuit of full citizenship rights. This is especially so if democracy is to enable social change through opportunities for civil participation (Friere 1972). That this social change should come from the grass roots of society is a long established discourse against privilege and the exclusions it creates. In 1381 the rebel priest John Ball, a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt, is reputed to have made the point that all people were naturally equal but inequalities were imposed through social structures. This was the tenor of his provocative ‘When Adam dalf and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman?’ (Dobson 1970, p. 374). With this rereading of the Bible Ball challenged the most widely distributed text underpinning the authority of the church and king, and the key passage illustrating God’s moral authority over men. At the same time access to this knowledge was restricted to those who knew Latin in a society where most people were illiterate in their own tongue. This simple couplet cut through all that to give a short education in the politics of both equality and, since a ‘gentilman’ by definition did no work, the occupational nature of humans.

Another lesson in the practice of moral authority can today be derived from The Sims (Electronic Arts 2002), a computer game in which players create and manipulate families of individuals in an environment that is also designed by the player. If the player fails to endow the characters he or she creates with life skills, they have accidents, fail to eat or drink, and die. Their ability to participate and respond to events in their virtual environment depends on their ability to interpret the phenomena around them. Without being able to understand how what they do affects their world, their behaviour quickly becomes chaotic.

An antecedent to The Sims occurs in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Dick 1973). Here the players are linked to each other through taking a drug that enables them to assimilate the roles of the figurines that are used to play the Perky Pat game in a simulated environment. The Perky Pat layout provides an exciting and absorbing alternative reality to the occupationally deprived conditions of the protagonists, whose main motivation in life becomes the pursuit of the game and the accessories linked to it. This dystopia explores a recurrent theme of Dick’s novels, a view of social participation being largely centred on the pursuit of trivia to the extent that it becomes hard for the characters to distinguish what is significant and meaningful in their lives from the fantasies in which they are enmeshed. Essentially they are faced with the problems of literacy and interpretation that confined the lives of the serfs whom John Ball addressed. The unequal distribution or restriction of knowledge to prevent the realization of natural rights is a concern of the Declaration of Persepolis (International Symposium for Literacy 1975), a call for the development of literacy for human political enablement. That access to power should begin with commonplace activities (such as digging and delving) is reflected in Heath’s (1983) study of the relationship of language use to daily occupations. She found that the most frequent uses of writing, for example, were in the writing of personal correspondence and lists, such as shopping lists, which reflected immediate functional concerns. Perhaps through more recent technological advances these phenomena would be replaced by mobile phone texts (Ofcom 2003).


Occupational literacy — not just workplace literacy


The development of literacy to encompass not just reading and writing but a new range of skills to meet the requirements of industrial and socioeconomic change (Hull and Grubb, 1999 and Smith, 1999) has led to new concepts such as ‘workplace literacy’ and ‘occupational literacy’. Often, however, it is difficult to show that the changes brought about by these literacies have resulted in changes in the relations of power that govern occupations, because they have been developed with built-in limitations.

Occupational literacy has emerged out of workplace literacy, one definition of which is ‘written and spoken language, math and thinking skills that workers and trainees use to perform specific job tasks’ (Stein 2000, p. 3). The definitions of occupational literacy that are available so far also relate to a whole range of work-related skills such as a personal work ethic, business-like appearance and time management (Carvin 2000), but also to the competent reading of documents associated with work (Rush et al 1986).

For occupational therapists and occupational scientists, whose prime concern is with ‘occupation’ (Gray 1998) or ‘the human as an occupational being’ (Yerxa et al 1990, p. 6), the term has a much broader range of application than the narrow sense of work, ‘including the promotion of health and wellbeing’ (Rebeiro 1998, p. 13). In this wider scope the complementary ideas of occupational justice (Wilcock 1998) and social justice (Townsend 1993) consider the need for ‘ethical, moral, and civic principles associated with fairness, empowerment, an equitable access to resources, and sharing of rights and responsibilities’ (Wilcock & Townsend 2000, p. 84). Occupation is not merely related to work but to a political notion of having choice, participation and sharing in the community, making changes and requiring ‘social revolution’ (Wilcock & Townsend 2000, p. 85) to address issues of disadvantage, from individual through to political and organizational expression. Wilcock and Townsend apply ‘meaningful occupation’ as a ‘practical means’ for ‘personal and community transformation’ (2000, p. 85). This theme is further explored throughout the practice section of this book. In their discussions on empowerment through occupation, Kronenberg and Pollard (2005a, p. 5; see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) derived from Molinas Maldonaldo and Monroy Peralta (1999) the following principles:



Everybody is responsible for everything



Think locally, act globally



Nothing changes if nothing is done to change



The aim is not to attain the goals proposed, but the process above all



There is no public ethic without a personal ethic.
Occupational literacy in this context then refers to a set of navigation skills (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 9) to explore and make use of contextual factors in order to access occupation of need and choice.


A critical tool — for whom?


We argued earlier that civil participation depends on literacy and education. If so, there is a need for a wider view of ‘occupational literacy’ as a critical tool if people are to be enabled to make informed choices about their social participation. Furthermore, as both Mill, 1991 and Friere, 1985 make clear, this should not necessarily be entrusted to the state, the interest of which is more efficient control. The problem has been, however, as we shall discuss, that perceptions of a literacy skills gap have produced strategies for individual responsibility in meeting new demands (Jackson, 2000 and Sandlin, 2000). Occupational literacy, workplace literacy and a plethora of similar literacy demands — even agricultural literacy (Frick et al 1995) — have produced methods and mechanisms for the internalization and self-administration of controlling behaviours and the dissemination and interpretation of knowledge in the interests of private enterprise, state organizations and governments (Jackson, 2000, McLaren and Baltodano, 2000, Iedema and Scheeres, 2003 and Sandlin, 2004). The participation that is being urged results not from the critical consciousness anticipated by Friere (1972) but from demands of efficiency and the maintenance of the social and economic order (McLaren & Baltodano 2000), demands that are produced by social and technological change rather than a decline in literacy (Sandlin 2004). None the less, the literacy project on which Friere embarked is one that encompasses an awareness of human beings and human development, a critical exploration of being (Peters & Lankshear 1994), and therefore parallels the concerns of occupational science. Depending on its use, and mechanisms of control constructed around it, an occupational literacy could be a resource for social change towards a society that values difference and promotes the right to occupation.


Apprenticeship


A parallel illustration in health, albeit based in neither Friere nor occupational science, is provided by the work of Ville (2005). In a study on the use of biographical approaches in the reintegration of people with paraplegic conditions to work, she describes a process of ‘apprenticeship’ (p. 340). This is used to describe the process by which people come to terms with their own changed story at their own pace. Ville (2005) suggests that this period of reassessment of priorities and life objectives is often constricted by the pressure to return to employment or meet externally imposed goals. Her study includes interviews with rehabilitation professionals who admit that the effect of setting goals for integration can be to compress the ‘biographical time’ (Corbin & Strauss 1987, p. 253) the person needs to the detriment of their success in making adjustments. Cole (2004) uncovered similar experiences in his collection of narratives by people living with spinal cord injury. This might be interpreted as a conflict of interests between the rehabilitation process demanded by a cost-driven health care system and the need for people with paraplegic conditions to read and interpret their new situations, thus restricting the extent to which they can effect choice in determining their lives.

Earlier work by Sartain and colleagues (2000) with chronically ill children also drew on the importance of narrative in enabling young people to articulate and interpret the disruptions created by hospitalization and so emerge as active participants in the process of determining their needs. Galvin (2005) similarly explored the value of biographical approaches in addressing a richness and complexity in the ‘disabled identity’ (p. 393), which is produced through negative social attitudes and reductive approaches to health and social care (see also Chapter 13 and Chapter 14). As Corbin herself (2002, p. 259) says, ‘When the body becomes severely disabled, there is often a body/mind split. People start saying “I am more than my body.”’ In her analysis of the limitations that impact on people through illness, she lists a set of dimensions in ‘time, space, aesthetics, morality, technology, information, and interpersonal relationship’ (Corbin 2002, p. 259).

We might interpret this list as a set of dimensions in which the membranes of two universes intersect, akin to the multidimensional view of the universe presented in M theory (Duff 2003). M theory proposes that there are multiple, intersecting universes. We might see one universe as that in which the healthy person perceives a certain set of principles and the other universe, occupying much the same space, as that of people with disabilities (this idea is implied in the title of David Hevey’s (1993)The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery). In M theory it is possible that what is perceived as size in one universe is understood as density in an intersecting universe (Duff 2003). Here, in the colliding universes of occupational literacies, although social actors within them perceive slightly different sets of principles, conducting operations in the ‘disabled’ universe is dependent on the set of principles being operated in the dominant ‘healthy’ universe. Thus, although invisible much of the time to the prevailing level of occupational literacy in the ‘healthy’ universe, people with disabilities confound the ‘healthy’ universe’s principles by popping up unexpectedly and presenting situations that do not fit with the normative principles operant there. These situations, e.g. problems arising from exclusion by the physical design of the environment, lack of hearing induction loops, unavailability of large print, might well be normative to the ‘disabled’ universe experience. The perception of two universes is maintained where people in the dominant universe do not have to read the phenomena of the disabled universe, but this is a situation that repeated contact would weaken (see Ch. 14). As Duff (2003) illustrates, the development of a multidimensional M theory has occurred through the need to explain and incorporate the understanding of increasingly complex phenomena.


The gaze of the other


However, the metaphor of colliding universes does not accommodate the complexity that the concept of ‘reading the phenomena’ raises. To begin with, the two universes are not distinct but overlap — not everyone recognizes the same degree of disability or health and people with disabilities and illnesses conceal or make explicit their circumstances to differing degrees. Added to this is the issue of contact. The intermeshing of the two universes operates at different strengths; in other words both the contact between them and the interpretation of that contact is managed by many individuals according to their particular characteristics. One of the lenses through which that contact is managed is ‘the gaze of the other’ (Galvin 2005, p. 397). People with disabilities or chronic illness often experience feelings of rejection or being made to feel invisible and develop a ‘diminished sense of self’ (Galvin 2005, p. 398) in response to the disabling attitudes of others (Murphy, 1990 and Sontag, 1991; see also Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 14).

A precondition for an occupational therapy reconceptualization of ‘occupational literacy’ is the recognition of attitudinal barriers to enabling the development of an empowering literacy. Many of the social networks that operate in society work along lines of communication that are based in whether or not people share interests or like each other, usually on the basis of reciprocated values (Goffman, 1968, Goffman, 1971, Rogers and Kincaid, 1981, Allan, 1989 and Putnam, 2000). Therefore one of the problematic issues is that, although literacy may give access to knowledge, the ability to use that knowledge and express what has been synthesized from it still depends on access to social networks. Whether a person is liked or respected, or whether others feel that they will agree with the message, determines how they are able to communicate their needs.

The identification, admission and expression of interests or needs make them available for the information of and interpretation by others. For example, by telling their stories people with disabilities can challenge dominant and normative social and cultural forces (Galvin 2005; see Chapter 13 and Chapter 14). In view of this capacity to challenge cultural dominance, literacy has always been a political and economic issue, which has been both restricted and encouraged across many societies (Hoyles, 1977a and Manguel, 1996) and, as Friere and Macedo (1987) acknowledge, has been used both to empower and to disempower. Where the growth of literacy has been encouraged, those in power have sought to manage the range of cultural expression that has resulted (James, 1963, Williams, 1965 and Hoyles, 1977b). Capitalist society requires literacies for particular types of occupational functioning. Williams, 1965 and Williams, 1966 suggests that industry was (as with the new literacies) a driving force in their growth. However, this development, often in answer to new technological demands, has been accompanied by concerns about the kinds of culture, thought and understanding to which literacy gives access and the need to preserve power relations (Engels, 1973 and Smith, 1993).

Under the guise of increasing participation through the closure of a mythical knowledge gap, industry and governments are using these new literacies for the purposes of surveillance and control. Rather than enabling openness, consistency and quality, they provide managers who fear loss of control with a data-driven governing apparatus (Jackson, 2000 and Iedema and Scheeres, 2003), one that is in some fields, such as health and social care, actually called governance.


More power to those in power


Although there have been developments in the apparatus, the managerial culture has not changed. Workers are suspicious of management, managers fear loss of control and the very participation the new literacies are designed to produce (Jackson, 2000, Scheeres, 2002 and Iedema and Scheeres, 2003). The availability of so much data increases the identification of error and lower productivity, the voicing of dissent, while demanding more improvement in productivity, more evidence in behaviour and attitude of workers’ adherence to corporate cultures and official ideologies, with a concomitant increase in lower-status workers’ fear of job losses or other retaliatory measures for expressing criticism, failure or mistakes, and stress (Jackson, 2000, Scheeres, 2002 and Iedema and Scheeres, 2003). It is a climate for occupational injustices (Townsend & Wilcock 2004a), a new totalitarianism that echoes the dystopian experiences of Winston Smith (Orwell 1954) and D-503 (Zamyatin 1972), the internalization of the regime in which the workplace as a social community (Handy 1996) is one of many sites of social control. Workplace literacy has actually handed more ‘power to those in power’ (Darville 1995, p. 250), a psychological panopticon in which individuals focus the lens upon themselves. While it apparently offers a more open and blame-free social culture of individual self-reliance, it actually exposes and problematizes differences (Jackson, 2000, Iedema and Scheeres, 2003 and Sandlin, 2004).

Through concepts such as occupational justice (Townsend & Wilcock 2004b), occupational deprivation (Whiteford 2000) and occupational apartheid (Kronenberg & Pollard 2005b; see Ch. 4) occupational science offers a critical process for exploring and redirecting the scope of occupational literacy to recognize and decode conflict and cooperation situations, or everyday political situations, in order to address inequalities, enable empowerment and promote occupational justice through the recognition of shared social responsibility. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (see also Kronenberg and Pollard, 2005a and Kronenberg and Pollard, 2005b) the authors suggest that occupational therapists can use these principles and the pADL framework tool to enable people to make active choices about their empowerment, a catalytic function of the practitioner in cooperation with others. An occupational literacy may be the result of this process, entailing a critical awareness of the occupational nature of being, one that enables the making of life choices and works for democracy.

If one of the problems resulting from the plethora of workplace literacies has been the ‘textualization’ of work into readable and recordable and standardizable data (Darville, 1995, Jackson, 2000 and Iedema and Scheeres, 2003), a wider occupational literacy limited to mere consumption of information without critical understanding would be pointless.


Widening literacies


Iedema and Scheeres (2003) point to the dangers in widening these limited literacies that reach beyond defined areas of practice such as work. One of the examples they use is medical practice. In remodelling their work practices clinicians begin to adopt altered identities and reshape themselves in line with the new interdependent relationships that are produced by the changes.

When people are asked to take ownership of new practices at work, they lose the distinction between their personal and their working lives; their working lives appear to them to be consequent upon personal decisions rather than structural ones. Being involved in the decision processes entails being implicated when problems arise (Jackson 2000). When workers are asked to collaborate on process improvements, it becomes harder to identify oneself as exploited by a process that is still, after all, dominated by capital (Sandlin 2004).

When these processes of conceptualizing the self are managed by an industrial or work-related literacy system, developing a critical occupational literacy becomes more urgent. The market and process demands of the new capitalism threaten to compromise and limit the expression of individual identity. It is not merely an issue of workplace literacy how we perform as an interdependent functionary in a productive process, but also as consumers of that process in other areas of our lives; for example, lifestyle choices that affect our health and may therefore impact on sickness rates are also connected to purchasing behaviours. On the one hand there are advocates of libertarianism, for example those who wish to lift restrictions on smoking, drinking, drug use, the sex industry and gambling, while on the other there are arguments for preventive legislation and health measures to limit the damage resulting from these activities (Laurance & Stevenson 2004). The debate is between those who maintain that there is a need to protect the vulnerable and reduce pressure on public services through legislation and education about health risks, as well as an economic argument based on the costs to both industry and the taxpayer. The opposing view maintains that these risks are overstated, that the occupations generate substantial tax revenues and that the consequences are a matter of individual responsibility (Laurance, 2004 and Luckhurst, 2004).

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Jun 4, 2016 | Posted by in MANUAL THERAPIST | Comments Off on When Adam dalf and Eve span

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