Presentation given as invited talk at the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), October 2017. The presentation explores the possible relevance of information literacy to the changing nature of work, and how it might contribute to equipping workforces to deal with the opportunities and threats associated with rapidly-changing economic environments - including flexibility, innovation, the gig economy, casualisation, insecurity and employment rights.

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Information literacy
and the future of work
Stéphane Goldstein
InformAll
European Conference
on Information Literacy
ECIL2017
Saint-Malo
19 September 2017
Photo: John Fielding, on Flickr –CC-BY 2.0

2. The past future of work…
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3. …and the current future of work
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4. • Organisational structures much flatter than in the past
– Increase in number or organisational positions reporting directly to CEO
– Decrease in number or organisational levels between junior managers and CEO
• Work becoming less routine
– Growth in non-routine tasks outpacing routine tasks by 20 percentage points over
40 years
• Increase in project work
– Project work has increased 40-fold over 20 years, making teamwork and
collaboration more important than ever
Some long-term trends in workplace organisation
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5. • Less secure, more casualised
• More entrepreneurial
• Fragmented in terms of attention, tasks, work-time and space
• Multiple and hybrid
• Dislocated from traditional workplaces, often characterised by
home working
• Automated or at risk from automation
Emerging and future characteristics of work…
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6. “The growing use of technology may influence the continuing demand for generic skills,
e.g. autonomy, initiative taking, problem solving, self-management, team working,
flexibility/adaptability, communication (including inter-cultural communication), and
media literacy. Similarly, working in chains, networks and clusters creates requirements
for team-working skills.”
“Increasingly there is a view that education in the future should provide resilience, social
skills, intelligence, interest, responsibility, understanding and awareness. Teachers will
need to make available a wider range of social services, including mentoring.”
Adding reasoning, relationships, responsibility and rights to the standard educational
curriculum
(UK Commission for Employment and Skills)
What might be expected of the workforce…
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7. • ‘Ageless’ workforce
– Longer working lives, extended use of lifelong knowledge and skills
• Mindful workforce
– Prioritising personal fulfilment and well-being
• Intuitive workforce
– Monitoring moods, wants and needs to foster intuitive, responsive work environments
• Collaborative workforce
– Openness, social exchange, collaborative culture, conviviality
A rather rosy view of the future, which glosses over risks and downsides
Pressures on individuals to work longer than they need, or would like
Intrusiveness of monitoring, confidentiality, data protection
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…and possible characteristics of the workforce

8. • Workplaces less hierarchical – lattice rather than ladder
– Zig-zag pathways to career progression, not straight lines to the top
– Decentralised working practices, greater autonomy for teams
– More inclusive and collaborative, greater scope for employee
participation and contribution
• Working environments characterised by widespread sharing
of information, diffusion of knowledge (not just top-down),
harnessing creativity
– All this suggests a culture of information-savviness and information
resilience
Lattice, not ladder
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9. • The lattice is another rather rosy view of workplace
inclusiveness…
• But what about workers not on the ‘inside’: cleaners, catering
staff, security personnel, warehouse attendants…?
– How do they fit into allegedly inclusive and participatory environments, and what
are their information needs?
– Do they really form part of their organisation’s information culture?
– Information exclusion? Remember that a large proportion of the population has
few or no digital skills (almost a quarter in the UK)
The lattice has glass walls
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10. • In theory, greater flexibility for workers, opportunities for
fitting work as needed in daily lives, experimentation…
• Work broken down into individual discrete ‘gigs’, reduction of
overheads and employer obligations
• The gig economy is characterised by workers opting to
assume temporary, often ad hoc, work contracts (or ‘gigs’)
sourced online through digital, cloud-based marketplaces.
• Opting or pressured ?
Flexibility…
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11. • Greater insecurity for workers
– Casualisation
– Driving down wages
– Loss of traditional work-related benefits
• Rise of the ‘human cloud’ – huge pool of freelancers
available to work on demand from all over the globe
– Amazon Mechanical Turk
– Upwork
– Taskrabbit
… but insecurity
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12. • On the one hand, the phenomenon may be said to encourage
global entrepreneurship and spread wealth from richer to poorer
countries
– New, highly distributed workforce, operating independently and remotely – what
might be their information skills and know-how?
• On the other hand, emergence of ‘precariat’ – emerging global
class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career
progression
– What type of information know-how needed by workers to protect their position,
ensure fairness and defend their rights?
– How does a culture of information sharing and views of IL as a collective
endeavour relate to a workforce often characterised by fragmentation and
isolation?
Information literacy and casualisation
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13. • Fragmentation, isolation, the drive to phoney ‘self-employment’
– The flipside of teamworking and inclusive working practices
• Legal challenges to exploitative practices in the gig economy
– Successful action brought against Uber by GMB Union (2016) (details)
– Similar ruling against delivery firm CitySprint (2017) (details)
– Action being brought by Deliveroo riders (2017) (details)
• Standing up for employment rights in context of evolving
workplace practices – requires information know-how, awareness
of complex issues on the part of gig economy workers
– How might IL contribute to industrial relations and the role of trades unions?
Defence of employment rights
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14. • Increasingly, the workplace is no longer a physical reality – or
at least not as a physical space where colleagues interact
• Is IL contained and defined by the physical workplace?
– The importance of virtual professional environments, a context that goes
beyond physical space
• But what happens when there is neither physical space nor
real professional environment?
– How can IL help the atomised, isolated workforce?
– How can IL help create new virtual professional environments – e.g.
homeworkers, Uber drivers…?
A sense of space
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15. • More and more data/information being generated about work
behaviour
– Workplace performance monitoring is not new…
– … but new technologies, the internet of things, including wearable self-tracking
devices, are pushing the boundaries of what can and is being monitored
• For employers, better understanding of productive behaviour
patterns
• But what does this mean in terms of intrusiveness, control,
work/non-work divide, anxiety, autonomy, data protection?
• Workers becoming accountable for attitudes and behaviours that are
recounted by algorithm? Becoming accessories to technology?
The quantified self
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16. • Large quantities of personal data being generated about workers
• Ethics of information and data usage – data protection
• Information literacy and the law
• Data literacy
Big data, ethics and IL
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The rise of the robots

18. • But this is not just about robots in manufacturing processes
and repetitive jobs
• In the service sector of the economy, with regard to any
intellectual task, convergence of two factors:
– Massive availability of data: on a huge scale, extremely varied, from variety of
devices and sensors
– Machine learning: organising this data to get actionable intelligence, through the
use of algorithms
• Disappearance of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs –
outsourcing to machines
– Vulnerability of labour, potential for increase in inequalities
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Automation and artificial intelligence

19. • What space will automation leave for humans? What are the
skills, abilities, experiences that will be needed to colonise
this space?
Critical thinking
Creativity
Personal interactions
Networking & collaborative abilities
Roles involving emotional intelligence
• IL is clearly relevant for such abilities
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What’s left: IL in an automated world

20. Relating IL to the new paradigm
• How can IL relate to large-scale retraining programmes for
evolving workforces?
• How might IL fit with other literacies in the context of lifelong
learning?
• What can IL contribute to individuals having to navigate
complex, sinuous and sometimes disjointed career paths?
– In this context, individuals must increasingly commit to career management
and lifelong learning - what is the place of IL in this?
• How might individuals learn about IL, to thrive (or just survive) in
fast-changing work environments? What role for IL educators?
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What place for information literacy?

21. How can information literacy address not just the opportunities,
but also the threats of the future of work?
• Opportunities: dynamism, innovation, creativity,
entrepreneurship…
• Threats: atomisation, inequality, exploitation of the
vulnerable, loss of traditional workplace rights,
social/informational exclusion…
New research perspectives for IL?
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And for the really political question…

22. References
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• Beetham H. (2015). Deepening digital know-how: building digital talent. Jisc
• Benko C., Anderson M., Vickberg S. (2011). The Corporate Lattice – a strategic response to the changing world of work.
Deloitte – https://dupress.deloitte.com/dup-us-en/deloitte-review/issue-8/the-corporate-lattice-rethinking-careers-in-
the-changing-world-of-work.html
• Fox, K., O’Connor, J. (2015). Five ways work will change in the future. The Guardian. 29/11/2015 –
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/29/five-ways-work-will-change-future-of-workplace-ai-cloud-retirement-
remote
• Moore, P. (2017). The quantified self in precarity – work, technology and what counts. Routledge Advances in Sociology –
https://phoebevmoore.wordpress.com/2017/08/11/quantified-self-in-precarity-work-technology-and-what-counts/
• Rajan R. G. and Wulf J. (2006). The Flattening Firm: From Panel Data On The Changing Nature Of Corporate Hierarchies.
Review of Economics and Statistics, 2006, v88(4,Nov), 759-773 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9633
• Sayyad Abdi E. (2017). Virtuality at work: an enabler of professional Information Literacy. In Forster M. (Ed.). Information
Literacy in the Workplace (pp. 57-66). London: Facet Publishing
• Tilley, J. (2017). Automation, robotics and the factory of the future. McKinsey & Company –
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/automation-robotics-and-the-factory-of-the-
future
• Trades Union Congress (2016). Home working up by a fifth over the last decade – https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/home-
working-fifth-over-last-decade-tuc-analysis-reveals
• UK Commission for Employment & Skills (2010). ‘Horizon Scanning and Scenario Building: Scenarios for Skills 2020’ –
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20140108090250/http://www.ukces.org.uk/assets/ukces/docs/publications/evid
ence-report-17-horizon-scanning-and-scenario-building.pdf
• Unum/The Future Laboratory (2014). The future workplace: key trends that will affect employee wellbeing and how to
prepare for them today – http://www.unum.co.uk/hr/the-future-workplace

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Stéphane Goldstein
sg@informall.org.uk
https://www.informall.org.uk
@stephgold7
Thank you for your attention!
Photo credit: Erwan Lehérissé, on Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0