Paper short abstract:

In the absence of formal jobs skills development programs become sites of brokerage. State bureaucrats recruit participants to be upskilled. Participants in turn use the teleology implied by their new ‘papers’ as a moral resource to make claims on the state – with implications for their inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

While commentators warn of employment’s endangered future in Africa, ‘skills development’ is still represented in teleological terms as the key to building a waged, industrial society. But what does the concept of ‘skill’ actually do in shaping thinking and practices on the ground, and with what potential for formal inclusion of the unemployed?

This paper draws on 7 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a state-led skills development program in South Africa. In the absence of formal jobs, ‘skills development’ comprises a set of negotiated meanings and strategies converging on the goal of ‘attaching people to a piece of paper’.

Bureaucratic legitimacy rests on making the unemployed legible. With much effort, bureaucrats recruit participants, provide accredited training, and administer qualifications. Lists of the newly (‘re’/’up’) skilled underpin state assertions to create working populations.

For participants, this process bodes a kind of formal inclusion in a population otherwise ‘surplus’. For some, being registered, attending graduations, and having papers (updated CVs and certificates) means being ‘ready’ for the market, offering a sense of security with uncertain material gain. For others, a more substantive inclusion is brokered through intimate personal relationships with bureaucrats. Here, the teleology inherent in the concept of ‘skills development’ serves as a kind of moral resource to underpin opportunistic claims on bureaucrats’ time, expertise, and office supplies.

In a context normatively oriented around formal jobs, despite their absence, inclusion might be more broadly understood to include brokered dynamics of social obligation between state bureaucrats and the unemployed.