Gee

James Paul Gee places New Literacy Studies as one movement among many in the larger social turn of the 80s and 90s, reporting its stance on reading and writing as sensible only "when studied in the context of social and cultural (and we can add historical, political, and economic) practices of which they are but a part" (1293).

Gee gives brief descriptions of thirteen other movements that comprised this social turn. He notes that many, including himself, assumed the social turn was inherently progressive even though some movements didn’t openly discuss politics (1296). It seems that old capitalism had no use for collective or social thinking: solated individuals are easier to control; modern globalization, however, has fostered the development of niche markets catering to particular "consumer identities and values," which is "heavily social and contextual and semiotic" work (1297). 

The workers, then, must not be the rigid cogs with specific, narrow knowledge that dominated early industrialism but easily retrainable knowledgeable of the "big picture," able to work collaboratively, and think innovatively (1298). 

That does not mean, however, that individual workers are more valuable now than in a 1920s Ford factory because no one of them has specialized knowledge or skills, leaving them essentially no more secure under the new capitalism. The values and methods of the social turn movements are readily "recruited" into the practice of new capitalism, with its focus on constructed identity and change. In response to this, Gee wants to make "enactive and recognition work" the center of New Literacy Studies: that is, our attempts to make others recognize things as particularly meaningful in certain situations and configurations. Individuals help create and uphold these configurations (1302), and by working within and outside of these configurations, we can both adapt to and alter their recognition (which differs by interpretive perspective anyway); in a pragmatic example, Gee mentions the work “to get 'local literacies' recognized as 'literacy'" by changing how that particular configuration was recognized (1304).

Gee argues that even the social movements are susceptible to capitalism, albeit a new form of it. His solution, if I understand it, is: “one way we can analyze people, words, and deeds is to task what they seek to project into the world, what political projects they implicate” (1303). Though I recognize that Gee is addressing a new type of capitalism, the similarities he draws to the old model make me question how new this "new" capitalism is, at least as it applies to us.