This book addresses the subjects of literacy. It explores how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself. As this book shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed not only in relation to technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced consid ... More

This book addresses the subjects of literacy. It explores how literacy workers are subjected to the relations between new forms of labor and the concept of human capital as a dominant economic structure in the United States. It is about how literacies become forms of value producing labor in everyday life both within and beyond the workplace itself. As this book shows, apprehending the meaning of literacy work requires an understanding of how literacies have changed not only in relation to technology but also to labor, capital, and economics. The emergence of new literacies has produced considerable debate over basic definitions as well as the complexities of gain and loss. At the same time, the visibility of these debates between advocates of old vs. new literacies has obscured the development of more fundamental changes. Most significantly, the book argues, it is no longer possible to represent human capital solely as the kind of long-term resource that Gary Becker and other neoclassical economists have defined. Like corporate inventory and business management practices, human capital e.g. labor now also appears in a “just-in-time” form, as if a power of action on the occasion rather than a capital asset in reserve. Just-in-time human capital valorizes the expansion of choice, but it depends absolutely on the invisible literacy work consigned to the peripheries of concentrated human capital.