Editorial

Citation

Dymock, D. (2006), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 18 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2006.08618eaa.001

Editorial

Sometimes we become so involved in our particular professional practices or in our particular research that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We focus on what we are doing as if that is all there is. So when someone comes along and asks basic questions about the basis on which we practice or research, we might shake our heads and say, “Well, I’ve never thought about it”. So it is in this issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning. It is Tara Fenwick who asks the basic questions. Tara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research and teaching focuses on changing forms of work with particular interest in learning processes, identity issues, and knowledge politics. In this paper, she asks such questions as: “What do you mean by ‘learning?’” and “What do you mean by ‘workplace?’”. These she says, are problematic terms, and we cannot simply report our research using them without considering how we are using them. This is a revealing article, since it draws on a meta-review of ten journals over a six year period, examining how the authors have used such terms. The findings are a challenge to all of us working and researching in the field of workplace learning.

The article that follows presents research that was conducted in a wine company in New Zealand, a workplace some may regard as an idyllic context for research, and it well may be. However, one significant feature of this paper from a research point of view is that it utilises the research of others in order to explore how the workplace supports the development of the capability of its employees. The authors draw particularly on the work of Stephen Billett, a member of this journal’s Editorial Advisory Board, to explore the concept of “affordances” in a real-life situation. The lead author, Jane Bryson, is at the Victoria University of Wellington, while her colleagues, Karl Pajo, Robyn Ward, and Mary Mallon are at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

The third paper in this issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning is also a team effort, and it reports on an investigation of the operation of erstwhile “communities of practice” and cautiously advances the suggestion that such communities “are not always stimulating forces for organizational learning”. The co-researchers and writers in this instance are all from The Netherlands: Kariene Mittendorff, who works as a researcher and teacher at Fontys University of Professional Education; Femke Geijsel is a researcher at the SCO-Kohnstamm Institute and the Graduate School of Teaching and Learning, both at the University of Amsterdam; Aimée Hoeve and Loek F. M. Nieuwenhuis work at Stoas Research; and Maarten de Laat not only works as a researcher at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter, but also at the Centre for ICT in Education at IVLOS, University of Utrecht.

Finally, the journal’s Professional Practice Editor, Richard Dealtry, Managing Director of Intellectual Partnerships, contributes yet another thought-provoking paper to end what I hope you will find is a challenging but useful issue. Good reading!

Darryl Dymock