different types of work, they tend to define skill as though it were the property of an
individual. Thus, they play-down the influence of the context of work and the division
of labour upon the development of skill and, moreover, imply that once individuals
have developed, for example ‘problem-solving’ capabilities, they will be able to freely
deploy such abilities in any context.
Rather different conceptions of generic skill have emerged in the organizational studies
and in socio-cultural activity theory. These conceptions are less individualistic and try
to take greater account of the influence of the context of work upon skill development.
The term intellective skill (Zuboff 1988) has been coined to refer to type of skill
required to respond to the challenge of working in environments that provide access to
encoded knowledge (i.e. symbolic data) compared with working in environments that
do not provide access to such data. Zuboff argues that one of the defining
characteristics of intellective skill is working collaboratively with others to interpret
‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ knowledge and to use it to broker solutions to problems that
arise within workplaces.
In contrast, the type of skill required for working in flat, team and network-based
organisations has been defined to as polycontextual skill (Engestrom et al 1995).
(Engestrom et al employ this term to refer to the increasing demand on members of
work teams to engage simultaneously in multiple activities, enter ‘territory’ with which
they are unfamiliar and, in the process, call upon and utilise different forms of
expertise to resolve workplace dilemmas. Furthermore, Engestrom et al, in common
with other researches (Guile and Young forthcoming), argue that polycontextual skill
presupposes that people have the capability to cross ‘organisational boundaries’ in
order to collaborate with other ‘communities of practice’ in order to mediate between
different forms of knowledge. Engestrom et al note that this ‘boundary crossing’
appears to be as much a feature of new product development and technological
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