Informal Learning in the Workplace: : Unmasking Human Resource Development

Citation

Clegg, S. (1999), "Informal Learning in the Workplace: : Unmasking Human Resource Development", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1999.12.3.1.1

For readers of JOCMwho are researching, teaching or practicing change management through HRM, this book is a “must‐read”. Let me elaborate why. The first chapter addresses the question: “What is informal learning in the workplace?”. It doesn′t really answer it ‐‐ but it does succeed in making it problematic. It is made problematic by juxtaposing conventional, principally North American, conceptions of informal learning, that link it to notions of human capital formation, with conceptions influenced by European social theory ‐‐ notably the work of Michel Foucault ‐‐ which link it with conceptions of “performativity”.

In the second chapter “learning informally” is distinguished from “informal learning”. To make it clear, what the latter refers to is very much concerns of aligning informal learning with competency‐based standards, “seeking an alignment between industry demands for efficiencies and productivity, and education goals for self‐directed learners, and indeed, new markets”. What gets neglected in this are the tensions that might exist between individual values and workplace ideologies, suggests Garrick, at both the macro and the micro level. But he resists the temptation of settling down for an ideological slanging match, where the committed HRD professional is told what their appropriate ideology should be ‐‐ if they are to be authentically unmasked, according to some dogma or other. That would be too easy and too glib ‐‐ I agree ‐‐ although it does not stop lots of people doing it. So what is to be done? The famous question of political strategy Garrick answers by delving into postmodernism in chapter three.

It is only through an appreciation of the postmodern condition, he suggests, that we can begin to understand the context of “informal learning” today. He begins by re‐looking at themes of Taylorism, flexible specialization and the learning organization, but the main focus of the chapter is on “discourses of competitiveness”. Here, changes in training and education systems are linked to changes in the structures of society characterized by postmodernization: the increasing fragmentation, de‐differentiation and blurring of past certainties. While these often become the subject of collective bargaining, more often than not, though, they become the task of the trainer, assigned to develop competencies within the framing assumptions of human capital theory:

“Human resources” are very costly and on the job training is one of the central mechanisms used to “manage” these resources. This is, in part, why competency‐based systems have proved to be so popular. Mistakes made by employees can be expensive, and expensive mistakes contradict market demands for ever‐increasing efficiencies. This translates to the need for skills to be pre‐defined and for knowledge to be packaged to meet the demands and desires of the consumer age. Such are the cultural shifts within which HRD practitioners are required to perform (page 57).

What does it mean to mediate between competency‐based standards and the exercise of power and learning in the new work order? Enter the subject ‐‐ actually six subjects: Maria, Christine, Simon; Michael, Vinod and Jodie. Through accounts from these people the hidden curriculum of learning at work is explored in chapter four. This hidden curriculum hinges on their experiences of:

1. 1.

   the language of difference;

2. 2.

   the language of empowerment;

3. 3.

   the promise of belonging;

4. 4.

   the promise of reward.

Garrick concludes with a chilling description of some of the implications of the so‐called “humanization of work”, taken from David Boje, that reflect the experiences of the subjects, as including:

A seamless web of instructional apparatus where we are taught to be “politically correct” bureaucrats. The learning occurs in the minute‐by‐minute interactions and the spaces along the hallways, lunchrooms and e‐mail networks. The iron cage of the bureaucratic teaching machine is so ubiquitous and [seemingly] benign that the prisoners of modern learning no longer see the bar, the gears, or question the learning agenda (Boje, 1994, p. 447).

From here on in the plot thickens. We are by now entirely sceptical about the, if I may use the term, “objective” outcomes of human capital formation by the informal learning paradigm. In chapter five we explore how the informal learning paradigm is experienced in the intersubjective life‐worlds of two employees of a large multinational that is called Phaedrus. These employees, Marta and David, are HRM professionals working on the Olympics site, implementing the new paradigm in what is probably one of the worst industries in which to do so, at least where the contract is what in the industry is called a typical hard‐money contract. David and Marta turn out to be embedded in complex networks of power where what ends up being at issue are, more and less, issues of their degree of reflexivity and identity. As postmodern subjects they are active co‐producers of the workplace reality that they sustain and that sustains them as it questions them and they question it. They are inscribed within a culture of performativity where the central issue is one of competence. David chooses to enter into a compact with the corporate culture, even as he realizes the toll that it takes on him personally. Marta battles the dark side of the dialectic between her professional culture and the corporate culture. Neither seem to be the happy self‐actualizing professionals of the dominant paradigm, any more than do those with whom they work.

The final chapters of the book relate the narrative back to the dominant paradigm of human capital theory. In chapter 7 assumptions of this theory about subjects ‐‐ employees ‐‐ and about work ‐‐ an exploitative and profit‐driven activity ‐‐ are interrogated. While Garrick′s disdain for the instrumental rationality that he finds so pervasive is evident, he is far too smart ‐‐ and too postmodern ‐‐ merely to condemn or moralize about it. He would rather leave that to the wishful thinkers of the various critical theoriesˆthose who know the answers before they even know the questions. So, just as his subjects are not treated either as instrumental effects of human capital theory or as its cultural dopes, neither is the trainer, which gives rise to the final coda: in this, in a postscript in chapter 8, the author expresses “doubts about postmodern doubt”. He wants to go beyond skeptical subjects and paradoxical practice and ironical enquiry ‐‐ but he realizes that for this to happen postmodern reality has to change first. Accounting systems that define training as a cost need to be replaced by activity‐based costing systems. HRD professionals could become creative deconstructionists who aid corporate managers in seeing that the shallowness of their prescriptions means that the diagnoses are inept and the cures frequently oversold and that realities are always more complex and creative than they might otherwise appear to be. However, in the words that David used to describe himself on the construction site, the agency that might achieve this seems somewhat of a “phantom”. Perhaps, in this respect, we should revisit and take seriously the notion of creating a learning environment‐‐ but not as one subordinated to the efficiency imperative defined only in terms of costs and deductions from a bottom‐line. Two things, in particular, stand out from the best practitioner‐oriented literature, as reported in New Workplace (New South Wales Department of Industrial Relations, 1999):

Senior management must:

1. 1

   Demonstrate a commitment to implementing change to inspire other staff to follow.

2. 2

   Encourage creative thinking and challenge entrenched individual and organizational assumptions.

If organizations commit to these parts of the learning package then HRD professionals may no longer have to hide behind masks or see their authentic self perish in the process of being who they can be, rather than what they might be. The real truth of the postmodern condition is that there are no agents in history but us: ordinary people like you and me doing ordinary things, not as the essence of grand narratives or as the vessels of huge forces. These are the old stories and we need them no more. What we need, instead, is a realization that, as Garrick intimates in his postscript, management paradigms can change and HRD professionals can help that change ‐‐ where management is willing and able to do so.

This is an excellent book: it makes a great contribution to many literatures, as I have tried to suggest. It offers much to organizational ethnography; it draws on, enriches and applies postmodern theory, and it is an exciting contribution to human resource management. It should give cause to some of the senior managers of universities that are committed to the recognition of “workplace‐based learning” to think deeply about how they do the things they do. I hope that they do. I commend it to you.