dequalification

English

Etymology

de- +‎ qualification

Noun

dequalification (usually uncountable, plural dequalifications)

1. A change so as to require less skill and knowledge, often leading to less responsibility and control.
   • 1990, Federico Butera, Vittorio Di Martino, Eberhard Köhler, Technological Development and the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions:

     Middle management is particularly threatened with dequalification (reduction in decision-making, supervision and control) .

   • 2016, Lorraine Giordano, Beyond Taylorism, page 28:

     According to Braverman's thesis, Taylorism, or scientific management, has been the key feature in the devaluation and dequalification of work.

   • 2018, Mats Alvesson, Organization Theory and Technocratic Consciousness:

     However, here it may be noted that dequalification does often happen when new technologies replace older ones in one and the same field of activity.

   • 2023, Guglielmo Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes:

     This implies a dequalification of positions, dequalification which can be either only technical or both technical and social.

2. The process by which someone is forced to work below the level of their skills and qualifications.
   • 1978, R. A. de Moor, Changing Tertiary Education in Modern European Society: Report, page 187:

     Along the same lines, it appears that by accepting some degree of occupational dequalification in relation to real educacional level, and a more or less precarious situation, most young people managed to find work after leaving school, although for the most part by themselves, the ANPE having little effect and then only in cases of particular difficulty.

   • 2008, Joyce Marie Mushaben, The Changing Faces of Citizenship, page 110:

     Dequalification is an imposed status, hitting women hardest in fields historically dominated by men, e.g,, medicine and engineering.

   • 2016, Joachim J. Savelsberg, Constructing White-Collar Crime, page 20:

     They interpret the liberal code reform as an attempt to reduce dequalifications, especially of the young labor force, by avoiding incarceration ( Steinert 1978).

   • 2018, Ayhan Kaya, Turkish Origin Migrants and Their Descendants:

     Apparently, this has become a common phenomenon in the migration context, as many skilled and highly skilled migrants are being employed in under-qualified positions—a widespread practice which feeds into their dequalification and deskilling.

3. The change in status from qualifying (for something) to not qualifying.
   • 1976, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Subcommittee on Health, Health Maintenance Organization Amendments 1975, page 407:

     Thus, it is impossible to create any objective standard as to what particular conditions would justify dequalification of the HMO.

   • 2000, Report of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, page 121:

     If the “fiscal requirement” were left open as to content, it would require Fund negotiation ("conditionality" ) of precisely the type that the major rejects — as well as the strong likelihood of periodic dequalifications and requalifications of countries that would be immensely destabilizing.

   • 2016, Stephen K. Badzik, Josef B. Binter, Karl E. Birnbaum, Towards a Future European Peace Order?, page 121:

     One of the consequences of this division was the moralistic dequalification of neutrality by both superpowers.

4. The removal of distinctions; homogenization
   • 2012, L. Augustin-Jean, H. Ilbert, N. Saavedra-Rivano, Geographical Indications and International Agricultural Trade:

     This 'dequalification', which is equivalent to a loss of memory, is also a cultural process.

   • 2017, Christopher Braddock, Animism in Art and Performance, page 250:

     For Guattari this democratization is fundamentally capitalist because the systematic dequalification of expression, and its sectorization and bipolarization of values in capitalism, treats everything as formally equal and so 'puts differential qualities and non-discursive intensities under the exclusive control of binary and linear relations.'

   • 2020, Linda Mcdowell, Undoing Place?: A Geographical Reader:

     We may recall the opposition he drew between Temne conceptions of the landscape – a poetics of space – and Western surveying grounded in a massive 'dequalification' of this poetic character.