Improving Mathematics at Work

The Need for Techno-Mathematical Literacies

Celia Hoyles, Richard Noss, Phillip Kent, Arthur Bakker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136992070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Improving Mathematics at Work questions the mathematical knowledge and skills that matter in the twenty-first century world of work, and studies how the use of mathematics in the workplace is evolving in the rapidly-changing context of new technologies and globalisation. Through a series of case studies from the manufacturing and financial service sectors, the authors argue that there has been a radical shift in the type mathematical skills required for work – a shift not yet fully recognised by the formal education system, or by employers and managers.

Examining how information technology has changed mathematical requirements, the idea of Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL) is introduced to describe the emerging need to be fluent in the language of mathematical inputs and outputs to technologies and to interpret and communicate with these, rather than merely to be procedurally competent with calculations. The authors argue for careful analyses of workplace activities, looking beyond the conventional thinking about numeracy, which still dominates policy arguments about workplace mathematics. Throughout their study, the authors answer the following fundamental questions:

• What mathematical knowledge and skills matter for the world of work today?
• How does information technology change the necessary knowledge and the ways in which it is encountered?
• How can we develop these essential new skills in the workforce?

With evidence of successful opportunities to learn with TmL that were co-designed and evaluated with employers and employees, this book provides suggestions for the development of TmL through the use of authentic learning activities, and interactive software design. Essential reading for trainers and managers in industry, teachers, researchers and lecturers of mathematics education, and stakeholders implementing evidence-based policy, this book maps the fundamental changes taking place in workplace mathematics.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book presents a report on a three-and-a-half year research project, ‘Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace’, that was conducted by the authors between October 2003 and June 2007. This chapter introduces the key ideas and aims of the project and some of the main theoretical and practical approaches adopted. Chapters 2 to 5 of the book present the body of research findings from the different industry sectors that we studied: manufacturing (Chapters 2 and 3) and financial services (Chapters 4 and 5). Each chapter consists of ethnographic observations of companies, and accounts of the design and development of new learning materials undertaken with companies. Chapter 6 concludes the book by bringing together key findings and observations across all the industry sectors covered in the research, the challenges of researching the workplace and the implications for improving ‘techno-mathematical’ learning at work.

New demands on commerce and industry

This book is about understanding and improving mathematical skills in the workplace. We begin by describing the shifts that are occurring in the mathematical skills required in UK workplaces, set against the broader picture of business and employment in companies in the manufacturing and service sectors.

Globalisation and free market competition have become commonplace ideas that are used to account for the changes that are occurring in economics and business, and the working lives of individual employees. We do not propose to comment on the effectiveness of these concepts in explaining current trends, and it is well beyond our remit to analyse globalisation as a broad phenomenon: we are neither economists nor sociologists. What we can certainly say from our direct experience is that the forces of globalisation do exist: every company that we worked with during the research project reported in this book (between 2003 and 2007) told us how its products and practices were changing significantly as a result of global markets and competition, the associated ubiquitous use of computer systems to improve efficiency of production and quality of products, and how these two phenomena shaped the mathematical skills required by employees.

An example of these trends involved a company making plastic films (see Chapter 2: Filmic) which had closed down production of the most basic polythene film because it could not compete on price, the only market factor in that case, with competitor manufacturers in Eastern Europe. Packaging does have some unique characteristics that affect costs and support localised production: given its nature as a protective container, packaging is mostly empty space, so long-distance shipping costs are generally prohibitive, although not for the most basic types of film. For Filmic, manufacture of complex films continued to be profitable, since higher technical skills were demanded of employees and a high market price could be achieved.

A second example, concerned with the price of labour, was expressed by a senior training manager from one of the top five financial services companies in the UK. He acknowledged that the need for mathematically based technical skills in customer services was increasing, in order to understand and sell products more effectively. His company intended to satisfy this need by large-scale outsourcing of its customer service work to other countries, with UK-based call centres handling only low-level administrative tasks. At that time the customer service work was being done in India, though in the future it would be moving to the Eastern states of the EU, where there was an expected growth in English-speaking, technically capable and relatively cheap graduate employees.

This latter example illustrates a key concern in this book: the perception amongst employers and policy-makers of a serious ‘skills gap’ in the UK workforce for understanding and dealing with technical information expressed in symbolic form. In our observations, some companies avoided this skills gap by outsourcing – as above; some hired specialists to set up and operate their IT systems (who inevitably lacked the knowledge and practical experience of the business). Others recruited graduates directly into management positions rather than, as in the past, allowing employees to progress in a ‘time-served’ manner. Both these tendencies have worrying implications for the career and development prospects of time-served employees, and for companies who fail to achieve an optimal balance of graduate and time-served employees in management teams. In this book, we will describe, for different industry sectors, how we sought to understand the nature of this skills gap, and explored ways of developing skills through in-work training.

Another key driver of change is that the nature of the relationship between manufacturer or service provider and customer is changing – from mass production to mass customisation, where it is possible for automated processes to produce single items that are customised to the needs of particular customers (Victor & Boynton, 1998). As with globalisation, there is a tendency in the business and management literature to over-simplify arguments about the nature and the speed of change. But mass customisation is certainly happening, as we witnessed in several companies. In the manufacturing context, one example was Classic Motors (Chapter 3), where production lines had been modified to produce more than one type of car at the same time, so that each car could be customised to a particular buyer’s order. In this situation, production-line employees had to do far more than repeat the same basic sequence of actions (with the repetitive work increasingly done by robots).

Another example, in the financial services context, occurred where the shift to mass customisation was connected to a business perception that competitive advantage came from offering customers a greater degree of flexible communication. For example, much customer service work in the pension and insurance business had been production-focused: employees were given targets to process a certain number of cases per day, moving enquiries through the system, largely irrespective of the needs of customers. In the emerging way of working, under slogans such as ‘customer focus’, straightforward customer enquiries were, if possible, resolved immediately on the phone, requiring employees to work as a team with distributed knowledge, rather than passing the case on to specialist, technical employees (cf. Chapter 4).

A result of these new ways of working was that employees at many levels in a company needed to understand some elements of what is behind the interface of the IT system with which they interacted on a daily basis, so that they could communicate with other employees in different parts of the workplace, and (in some sectors) with customers who were demanding more information and more transparency. Increasingly, these elements involved the quantitative or symbolic data processed by IT systems. A key finding from the project’s ethnographic work was that new skills were needed in IT-rich workplaces that are striving for improvements in efficiency and customer communication; that is where management and employees were under pressure to move beyond routines to cut down wastage of time and product and advance the quality of products or services.

This book focuses on these new skills, what they are and how they might be developed to improve working practices.

Information technology and the changing nature of work

The introduction of information technology into workplaces, in the form of computers or computerised machinery, is one of the most important trends of the past 25 years. Nowadays, a computer running more or less specialised workplace software is the central desktop tool of every administrative or service employee. In manufacturing companies, every new machine introduced to the shop floor will have a computer-based control and monitoring interface (whether this is a standard computer monitor and keyboard, or a specialised machine interface). Dealing with the inputs and outputs of this interface is becoming part of the job role of an increasing number of shop floor and middle-management employees.

Some broad statistics for the UK, based on large-scale employer surveys conducted by Felstead et al. (2007) between 1986 and 2006, are suggestive of this IT trend (Table 1.1).

Despite the increasing presence of IT in workplaces, the extent of actual changes to workplace practice is often less marked. For example, one major survey (Nathan, Carpenter, & Roberts, 2003) reported that 75% of employees surveyed were using a computer or other IT equipment at work, and 70% saw the computer as essential or important to the job. Yet, the ubiquity of IT was not matched by corresponding changes in the ‘organisation, management and style of work’ (2003: 2). From a US perspective, more evidence is provided by Handel (2003, 2004).

A major issue for organisations is to decide how to exploit IT-based systems to enhance the efficiency of the work process. In both industry and commerce, there are enormously complex software systems for information management and process control – a trend that first began in companies whose business was abstract ‘information’, such as financial services, but has spread more and more into manufacturing industry and beyond. Wherever the introduction of information systems takes place, decisions need to be made about different users’ relationships with the information system. Among these are two addressed in this book: (1) what is the relationship between the interface of the computer’s model of the workplace and the workplace’s actual operation and how is this relationship perceived

Table 1.1 Trends in the use of IT in workplaces

by different groups of employees? And (2), to what degree and, specifically, which employees are required to possess some model of the internal workings of the system in order to use it?

Zuboff (1988) usefully depicts these issues in terms of the dual potential of information technology to automate and to informate: on the one hand, the potential of technology to replace human work, and on the other hand its potential to inform human work by making information more accessible and usable. Computerisation therefore requires choices to be made about which processes to automate, and to what degree, and which processes will benefit (in terms of efficiency or productivity) by ‘informating’ the employees involved. This is not an either–or choice, it is a matter of striking a balance for any particular process. It is important to note that informating is not something that only depends on IT – it is arguably an attitude towards the management of processes and process information. The idea of informating is inherent to process improvement methods, as we describe in Chapters 2 and 3.

Zuboff provides detailed case studies of IT implementations during the 1970s and 1980s, and notes how the importance of informating was often missed, leading to alienation of employees and flawed implementations. Similarly, Mathews (1989) provides an interesting overview of IT trends in service industries during the 1980s, and describes how some bank IT systems became highly automated in the name of efficiency, but were extremely sensitive to input errors made by ‘de-skilled’ bank clerks that could rapidly propagate through the IT system.

In our own observations of workplaces, it was evident that companies were increasingly careful in the design and scoping of IT systems, and in seeking to marry IT development with employee development; none of the companies with which we were involved was undertaking developments on the large scale which, for example, Zuboff describes in her case studies. However, it is still the case that many companies do not seem yet to have achieved a satisfactory balance between automation and information, leading to tensions and ‘skills gaps’ which companies come to live with, yet which can become acute problems and potential sources of breakdowns in work processes. For example, we have observed cases of situations (e.g. in automotive manufacturing and mortgage retailing) where a company had recognised a training need to informate its employees, but decided that it did not have the resources to deal with it. Our contention in this book is that achieving this required balance is indeed challenging, not least since it requires some appreciation at some level of the mathematical models relevant to each case. This appreciation we will term techno-mathematical since, for the majority of employees, the mathematical models are never dealt with in isolation from the IT system that executes them. (See below for an expanded discussion of this point under ‘techno-mathematical literacies’.)

It is useful to consider the implementation of IT systems in terms of models; that is, systematic descriptions of the relationships between inputs, outputs and controlling parameters, which are used inside IT systems to calculate, control and analyse processes. To automate or to informate requires different models of the process to be constructed by different actors. The designers of an IT system must create a computational model of the process that can be implemented. At the same time, different users of the system must develop mental models of the system in order to engage with it. Such models are inevitably mediated by the artefacts of the IT system, the explicit operating procedures of the workplace, and the tacit knowledge of workplace practices of individuals and teams. Designers are largely mathematically educated professionals who deploy mathematical techniques and ideas in the development of models. Intermediate-level users, in contrast, will generally be expected to build their mental models from a basis of relatively limited mathematical education, but combined with a great deal of workplace experience, and knowledge of the IT systems in use. This leads to the development of personal models that we call techno-mathematical, and it is the characterisation of these models that will form a basis for our discussion throughout this book.

Background to the research

Mathematics in the workplace: evidence from educational research

In many countries, mathematics is widely considered a problematic subject in workplaces, and employers have for a long time been reporting ‘skills deficits’. In the UK, a month seldom passes without the publication of another survey that shows that some large fraction of the UK adult population is ‘incapable’ of dealing with basic mathematics (and usually also, to a lesser extent, basic literacy). National governments in many countries, the UK included, have put forward waves of policy and curriculum innovations to address the problem of ‘numeracy’ in the school and vocational education system as well as in lifelong learning (see, for example, FitzSimons, Cob...

Table of contents

• Improving Learning TLRP
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Manufacturing 1
• Chapter 3 Manufacturing 2
• Chapter 4 Financial services 1
• Chapter 5 Financial services 2
• Chapter 6 Summary, reflections and conclusions
• Appendix Details of fieldwork
• Further reading on the Techno-mathematical Literacies research
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index