Final Discussion

Abstract

Before embarking on a reappraisal of skill in the context of these papers it is necessary to remind ourselves of the limited range of human activities under discussion. It was a deliberate decision that this book should be restricted to the individual coping with the physical world. There are reasonable grounds for assuming that this is the simplest way of entering the enormously complex field of human skill. Such individuals currently rely heavily on hardware technology and this at least is something we understand thoroughly. The skills are shaped, and sometimes almost created, by the technology and thus we have one anchor from which to extrapolate to the human activity. Some authors such as Taylor (machine tools) and Whitfield and Stammers (Air Traffic Control) have carefully explained the current state of the technology as it influences the tasks, while others such as Miller (Information Systems) and Thorne and Charles (Aircraft) while acknowledging its importance, have assumed that the reader knows enough to appreciate how the hardware affects the tasks. For some jobs technology has initiated enormous changes which are still in progress, notably the forest worker (Pettersson) and the farm worker (Matthews), for others technology has had little impact for a long time, e.g. the sewing machinst (Singleton) and the tea-blender (Lacy). Branton suggests that the skills of the train driver have not changed as much as one would expect given the dramatic changes in railway engines, perhaps because the remainder of the system ; the track, the stations, the signalling and so on, has not changed very much.