Coloniality of Skill Codification: A Decolonial Feminist Analysis of “Ideal Workers” in the “Future of Work” Policy Discourses
分析了25份国际政策文件，揭示“未来工作”话语如何通过技能编码将殖民等级重新嵌入对“理想工人”的想象，对研究劳动市场、性别与科技政策的学者有参考价值。
ABSTRACT Over the last decade, policy actors have produced a surge of “future of work” reports that reimagine workers through the dual logics of digitalization and human capital. Drawing on 25 policy documents (WEF, World Bank, OECD, EU, and major consultancies) and combining Bacchi and Goodwin's WPR approach with decolonial feminist theory, this paper demonstrates how these imaginaries construct an “ideal future worker” that reinscribes colonial hierarchies through a process we term the coloniality of skill codification . This concept describes the translation of embodied, historical, and relational differences (race, gender, caste, disability, age, and geopolitics) into ostensibly neutral, measurable skill categories that naturalize Global North standards and colonial hierarchy. Our analysis uncovers three interlocking mechanisms: (1) construction of workers as techno‐neoliberal skill bundles (relational human–machine codependency), (2) commodification of social difference (inclusion framed as extractable competitive advantage), and (3) technical‐statistical indexation (national human capital metrics that rank countries and workforce potential). This paper intervenes in the emerging field of Feminist AI by arguing that the policy discourses surrounding AI and automation in the workplace are actively constructing a new, insidious form of the “ideal worker” that rearticulates colonial‐gendered power structures.