Workplace Learning and Social Change: What is the Link

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Workplace Learning and Social Change
What is the Link?
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While contingent jobs were constructed as
unskilled and requiring little training, workers
in fact draw continually on prior skill,
experience and learning in order to fulfil the
requirements of their jobs. Workers skills and
expertise are essential to their jobs and yet
systematically devalued. Mirchandani, Ng,
Coloma-Moya, Maitra, Rawlings, Siddiqui, Shan,
Slade
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Although training for precarious jobs is
limited, workers in fact engage continually in
self-initiated lifelong learning to gain job
related skills in order to perform their jobs to
the best of their abilities as well as to survive
the dismal conditions of their work
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By becoming adaptable, continual and
self-reliant learners, workers inadvertently
support a work organization within which they
serve as disposable and transient labour. As a
result, contingent workers experienced few
material or social benefits over time as a result
of their learning. Mirchandani, Ng,
Coloma-Moya, Maitra, Rawlings, Siddiqui, Shan,
Slade
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Precarious employment thus threatens to deepen
polarization in the labour market between workers
with relatively secure jobs (a shrinking group)
and those with precarious jobs, divisions that
are already shaped by gender, race, age, and
immigrant status
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Considered in practice, the reality of
precarious employment is at odds with
employability security as a paradigm for future
labour and social policy tied to the lifelong
learning agenda. Leah F. Vosko
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John Shields, a researcher who analyses
restructuring, suggests that in the post-Fordist
economy, capital tends to maximize investment in
skills training for a select few and
under-invest in skills development for the
majority.
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If underemployment of peoples knowledge and
skills in the legal labour market economy of
advanced capitalist societies as extensive as the
prior analyses suggest, recommendations that
stress need for more and better education miss
the point.
Our primary emphasis should rather be on
reorganizing work to enable more people to apply
in legitimate and sustainable ways the knowledge
and skills they already possess. David
Livingstone
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De-skilling can be understood... as a concept
that theorizes formal disempowerment,
appropriation and, in a wider sense, cultural
disinheritance, as old skills forms are displaced
and the new ones that emerge are both limited and
limiting in terms of anything but exchange-value
generation. Peter Sawchuk
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If we understand work relations in the context of
capitalism, the worker cannot be confused with
the idea of capital. To understand the
relationship between the worker and capital, we
must recognize that labour power is a commodity
in the capitalist mode of production. As a
commodity, labour power is subject to the law of
supply and demand, and workers arein direct
competition with one anotherto sell their
commodity
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In the configuration, knowledge and skill
acquisition can become part of the competition.
The more the concept of lifelong learning
becomes synonymous with market requirements, the
more it becomes commodified, and alienated from
the learner. Shahrzad Mojab
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Why this meteoric rise of interest in skills
development across industrialized nations? To
answer this question we need to pay attention to
wholesale changes underway in the nature of
work itself the organization or work the tools
of work the look, feel and smell of work the
location of work the hours of work the chances
of finding work the demands of work the
opportunities at work and the expectations about
who we are at work. Nancy Jackson
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
Women paid the price of public-private
partnerships and Information Technology reforms
as welfare clients and as front-line welfare
workers Jobs are routinized, tasks sped up, and
quality of work life diminished. Yet women were
not mere passive receptacles of technology but,
rather, active agents making a complicated IT
system work for their clients. Trish Hennessy
14
The discourse of skill is "a socially necessary
technology for reproducing the diverse subjects
necessary for filling out the many rungs within
the capitalist division of labour. Melissa
Wright
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The labour market is segmented along racial
lines, with racialized group members
over-represented in many low paying occupations,
with high levels of precariousness while they are
under-represented in the better paying, more
secure jobs. Teelucksingh Galabuzi
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The fact that half a days labour is necessary to
keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in
any way prevent him from working a whole day.
Therefore the value of labor-power, and the value
which that labour-power valorizes in the labour
process, are two entirely different magnitudes
and this difference was what the capitalist had
in mind when he was purchasing the
labour-power. Karl Marx
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Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine
and, with a good deal of huffing and puffing,
have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell
us that nowhere at all have they been able to
locate and classify a class. They can only find
a multitude of people with different occupations,
incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of
course they are right, since class is not this or
that part of the machine, but the way the machine
works once it is set in motion not this and
that interest, but the friction of interests
the movement itself, the heat, the thundering
noise. Class is not a thing, it is a
happening." E.P.Thompson
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Effects of modernist thought and liberalism
within some popular and union education theory
and practice recognize and support the
counter-hegemonic possibilities of popular and
labour education. However, power differences
and oppressions can go un-addressed within groups
using popular education or within union
settings. Matthew D. Adams
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
There is a gap between social justice
principles and practice, in which workplace
inequity is produce in unionized, social justice
organizations. Starting with the experiences of
racialized, rank-and-file union workers, the
research considers how organizational and social
practices produce racial, gender, and class
inequality among some unionized, social justice
organizations in Canada. Nancy Slamet
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
What are the social barriers that impede the
career mobility of aspiring elementary educators,
with a specific focus on race and gender?
Previous research in the field of mobility and
leadership in education has rarely brought
together issues of race, gender and identity
politics with notions of human, social and
cultural capital accumulation Respondents show
reluctance to acknowledge under-representation of
visible minority groups/ethnicities in school
leadership positions Danielle Hyles
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
Ethnic minority women, especially immigrants,
encounter various adverse job conditions while
pursuing their career in Canada. These barriers
not only affect the level of work satisfaction of
these women, but may also change their own
perception of job skills they possess, resulting
in unforeseeable obstacles for them to fulfill
their career and personal goals. Learning as a
source of empowerment may help ethnic women to
attain their unfulfilled goals and dreams
together with a better understanding of their
situation in relation to their minority status.
Tammy Y. Chan
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
Research findings indicate both labour market and
household factors contributed to shape the labour
market experience of immigrant women
professionals of recent years. Their experiences
reveal the complicated social relations of their
doubly burdened and triply oppressed location
Hui Wang
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Both regulatory bodies and racism in immigration
policy play critical roles in the marginalization
of immigrant women engineers. Within the
literature, issues of gender and race have been
conceptualized independently. There has been
little focus on the ways in which gender and race
interact as relational processes in shaping
access to professional engineering. Bonnie
Slade
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Volunteer work is posited by many as a good
strategy for immigrants to get established in the
labour market often through co-op programs
Immigrant professionals with graduate degrees and
years of international experience are put through
curriculum designed for adolescents with limited
work experience, and often perform over 400
hours of unpaid work in private manufacturing
companies, banks and other for-profit ventures.
Treating highly skilled immigrants as
inexperienced high school students is itself a
process of racialization, but one that is cloaked
behind the ideological construction of Canadian
work experience. Bonnie L. Slade
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It is clear that the non-recognition of the
qualifications, prior skills and work experiences
of professional immigrant women and the lack of
specialized programs in Canada for these
immigrants have led to a huge waste and
under-utilization of human resources, which
contradicts the intent of the current immigration
policy to recruit highly trained foreign
professionals
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Sadly, in spite of their desire to fit into
Canadian society and become good citizens, they
learned their marginality in a society that
claims to be open, tolerant and multicultural.
Much work remains to be done by governments,
professional, educational and service agencies to
make the state policy of multiculturalism a
reality. Roxana Ng, Guida Man, Hongxia Shan,
Willa Liu
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While there are significant differences in power
over information, resources and decision making,
we all retain the bounded freedom to make our own
individual, social, national and transnational
histories. The boundaries and conditions of this
freedom are changing with ferocious speed, but
globalization is not, as it is often portrayed,
an all-powerful Godzilla. J. Wiseman
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Research enterprises that are collaborative
between researchers and between researchers and
their participants so that people can engage in
information exchange with the goal of producing
more complete and comprehensive maps of how
abstract global processes are played out in local
places and given local expressions. Roxana Ng
Kiran Mirchandani
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
Western, organization development (OD)
practitioners may assist non-Western countries
and regions such as Africa in their efforts to
improve their organizations An Afrocentric OD
approach comprises personal de-colonization,
cross-cultural communications, African cultural
values and Afrocentric perspective, de-colonizing
OD approaches and indigenous knowledge and
approaches. Catherine A. Gibson
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Dominant discourse still typically equates paid
employment with work, and research and policy
about learning and work relations is commonly
reduced to versions of vocational education. But
large-scale changes including global economic
restructuring, environmental threats such as
global warming and an explosion of information
technologies have stimulated reforms in both paid
work organizations and education/training systems
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Alongside ever heightening inter-capitalist
competition, these conditions provoke rethinking
of dominant notions of work, learning and their
relations. Livingstone, Mirchandani, Sawchuk
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Workplace language education has assumed new
prominence in restructuring workplaces where
textual practice has become the new work
practice and learning, the new form of
labour. Lesley Farrell
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The last 25 years, intense theoretical debates
have fueled workplace research examining the
changing nature of work and organizations, the
ambiguity and political nature of notions of
skills and knowledge, and many changes in the
workplace around power, control, and
decision-making. Most recently, these debates
have included a focus on issues of subjectivity
and identity at work. Nancy Jackson
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Nationalistic (and corporatist) aspirations
relating to competitiveness in global commodity
and knowledge markets are shown to be far from
new when we revisit experiences of colonialism,
both in relation to dispersed labour forces,
production, markets and trade, as well as the
political/cultural project of disseminating
western knowledges and views of the world through
eurocentric institutions of education and
training. Elaine Butler
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Team learning occurs in teams that are
differentiated from natural working groups (such
as a unit or department) by the fact that they
are meeting to work on specific goals for which
they are mutually accountable
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Systemically, shared or distributed leadership
enables continuous informal learning through
autonomy on the job and opportunities to
participate in organizational decision-making...
What we have termed formalizing the informal
seems to be essential in order to embed the
learning organizationally. Marilyn Laiken
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We need to be aware of the complex relations
among formal, non-formal and informal learning,
and we need to know especially their social and
historical contexts. Complex division of labour
and overspecialization create conditions that
demand formal learning This raises the issue
of the role of the state and the market in the
provision of training, the creation of skills,
and the structuring of the job market, and the
place of informal learning in this complex set
of relations. Shahrzad Mojab Susan McDonald
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S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
The nature of the team within an aspiring
learning organization, and the nature of the team
learning activities focusing on the use of
knowledge are not isolated, but rather are
intermingled and represent the learning and
functioning of a well-established,
multi-professional, healthcare team The role
of leaders is crucial in the outcome of teams
learning to work together Carole L.
Chatalalsingh
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
In workplace trainings, skills cannot be isolated
from their social environment. In order to be
more effective, workplace programs need to adopt
an expanded, integrated approach to training that
is based on the social practice/transformative
view of literacy as well as on several
well-accepted principles of adult education.
Shannon E. Wall
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Participants in cultural diversity training
programs adopted an awareness-based anti-racist
approach that was aimed at getting employees to
identify how the goals of anti-racism could be
achieved within their organizations. The two main
strategies the participants used were
organizational analysis and personalization
through critical reflection and dialogue. The
findings suggest alternative approaches for
workplace cultural diversity training in the
corporate sector Alana C. Butler
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The general work/learning process is crafting the
self through everyday strategies of coping with
and coming to understand what is suggested in
these conflicts. Tara Fenwick
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Nonprofits and cooperatives are frequently
acknowledged as organization with a social
purpose, but their economic impact is often
ignored or trivialized.Conventional accounting
misses critical aspects of their operations, and
the process of rectifying this oversight is a
challenging task. Jack Quarter, Laurie Mook,
Betty Jane Richmond
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Adult literacy is a powerful idea that ignites
hope around the world. It has mobilized the
efforts of national governments, international
organizations, humanitarian agencies, scores of
educators and volunteers and, most recently, the
business community. As business interest grows,
so does the focus on workplaces as the site of
both the literacy problem and its hoped-for
solutions. Nancy Jackson
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For me, adult education is about the business of
building democracy. It is the struggle whether
in the workplace, in community, or in society
to become informed and critical decision-makers
in matters affecting our day-to-day lives. Its
purpose is the democratic fulfillment of human
potential for freedom through social means.
Tom Heaney
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Transformative learning is the process of
developing emancipatory identities through
engagement in political and cultural practice.
Analyzing the life history of four Korean labour
activists I demonstrate not only how
transformative learning has been accomplished in
the workers political practice, but also how
much the learning results could also be
progressive and holistic with the potential to
change their mind, body, and soul altogether.
Sukkyu Kim
S T U D E N T R E S E A R C H
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Art that expresses the conditions, struggles, and
victories of workers is essential... But whenever
people take up art use art as a tool to mediate
future actionthe byproduct is learning and
change. Peter Sawchuk
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To exist humanly, or to engage in the process of
humanization, we need not wait for a revolution.
Even in the most limiting situations we can begin
to perceive those limits, our reality, critically
and engage in the struggle to transform our
societies Paula Allman
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There are businesspeople who have thrown their
support behind movements for social justice or
have taken a leadership role in them. In
exceptional cases, their business is used as a
laboratory for social innovation. They are not
only business entrepreneurs, but social
entrepreneurs. Jack Quarter
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Workplace democracy contributes to the attainment
of societal democracy, and societal democracy
contributes to the attainment of societal
democracy. The elements of workplace democracy
are identical to those of societal
democracy Our use of self-consciousness and
human agency to construct and refine these
democratic concepts may be essential for our
continued evolutionary development and the
survival of our species. William J. Benet
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Canadian trade unions and their pension funds are
on the threshold of developing more innovative
investment practices of long-term benefit to
members as well as the broader community.
Indeed, it can be argued that the country itself
will benefit from more productive approaches to
investment with goals of job creation, community
development, corporate accountability and
long-term sustainable growth. Isla Carmichael
and Jack Quarter
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
The industrial age organization focused strongly
on controlling workers behaviours, and by
extension, controlling the behaviours of people
throughout the society With a fundamental
reversal of conception of organization, from a
purposeful focus to one that first considers
human interactions and interpersonal dynamics,
every aspect of management practice can be
probed, challenged and potentially changed
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S T U D E N T R E
S E A R C H
Rather than living in a world in which people are
wittingly or unwittingly controlled by
organizations, a Valence Theory conception of
organization reverses this dysfunctional dynamic,
enabling people to be in charge of creating
relationships and perceiving effects in the
context of our contemporary world. Mark L.
Federman
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True adult education is social education social
education for the purpose of social change.
Eduard C. Lindeman