Selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Researching Work and Learning

Citation

Walters, S. and Cooper, L. (2008), "Selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Researching Work and Learning", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 20 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2008.08620gaa.001

Selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Researching Work and Learning

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 20, Issue 7/8

About the Guest Editors

Shirley WaltersProfessor of Adult and Continuing Education, University of Western Cape, Cape Town, and Director of the Division for Lifelong Learning. Her main ongoing scholarly interest relates to the social purposes of adult education and training from majority world perspectives.Linda CooperSenior Lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Development at University of Cape Town. Her primary scholarly interest relates to conceptualising knowledge and learning across different contexts of adult education.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning features selected papers from “Rethinking the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Margins’ in Researching Work and Learning”, the 5th International Conference on Researching Work and Learning, co-hosted by the Universities of Western Cape and Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa in December 2007. This conference attracts scholars from many diverse fields, including adult and vocational education, human resource development, labour studies, gender studies, sociology of work, and learning theory, amongst others. The diversity of interests that converges under the rubric of researching work and learning is evident from the papers included in this special double issue.

The 2007 Researching Work and Learning Conference aimed to provide the space for rethinking “work”, “knowledge” and “learning” within a context where the global economy increasingly challenges the traditional dichotomies between home-life and work-life, between employment and unemployment, paid work and unpaid work.

The conference took place against a background where globally and locally, in both the “North” and “South”, the social and economic impact of globalization has been uneven and contradictory, drawing new lines of inequality between “core” and “periphery”, between insiders and outsiders – those at the centre and those at the margins of contemporary society. As Bauman has noted, despite the new freedom of mobility at the centre of globalisation, this freedom to move is a scarce and unequally distributed commodity: “‘Being on the move’ has a radically different, opposite sense for, respectively, those at the top and those at the bottom of the new hierarchy” (Bauman, 1998, p. 4).

There is a new diversity of work, with growing flexibilisation, virtualisation and rationalisation of work, blurring of boundaries between work and non-work, and increasing spread of non-standard forms of work. Some developments which at first might seem remote from the labour market (such as ecological changes) will be of great significance for the future of work (Beck, 2000, pp. 72-7).

In Southern Africa, as in many parts of the world, the social and economic impact of globalisation has been uneven and contradictory. A core of “insiders” who form part of global economic networks, or have been drawn into new regional elites represents the “centre”; the “margins” comprise a growing proportion of people who have lost their formal jobs and are precariously attached through activities in the informal economic sector, or are excluded as part of the unemployed periphery. In this part of the world, poverty and unemployment are the major social issues, compounded by the HIV/Aids pandemic.

The conference posed the question: what theoretical perspectives and evidence from empirical research might allow us to think more inclusively about work, knowledge and learning, and in a way that is able to capture the diversity of experiences that constitute work and learning internationally?

The conference clustered around the following sub-themes, and papers in the journal are drawn from these.

Learning in formal and informal work contexts

Barbara Barter describes a research study which takes as its starting point that most educational research has an urban bias, and that there is very little high quality rural education research. It argues that such research can inform the alternative epistemological and pedagogical approaches needed in teaching, leading and learning if rural schools and educators are to benefit.

Learning and social development

An example in this category is Astrid von Kotze’s paper, which was also the winner of the Emerald Best Paper Award. It is concerned with how technical and vocational education and training can help address poverty by focusing on work and learning in the informal sector, particularly the livelihood activities of women. She argues that “sustainable livelihoods depend on an enactment of values beyond self-interest and competitive individualism, beyond profitability, beyond the exploitation of environments and people, beyond the sexual division of labour, and towards community as shared forms of living with strong ties and emotional security”.

Two other papers focus on learning in the context of trade union organisation and campaigns. Peter Sawchuk and Arno Kempf highlight the position of guest workers in Canada and illustrate the confluence of “race”, class and citizenship. They emphasizes the importance of the contextualization of work and learning, and describe the complex circuit of networking and learning that is critical to understanding work and learning both amongst guest workers and more broadly.

Tony Brown presents a case study of informal learning in a trade union campaign to organise private-sector child care workers, and uses this case to explore the issue of how trade union movements need to invent new ways of organising in order to grapple with the impact of re-ordered economic relations within advanced economies.

Re-theorising knowledge

An example in this sub-theme is the paper by Kaela Jubas and Shauna Butterwick, who focus on alternative, informal learning pathways travelled by women in the information technology industry. They argue for challenging theories which conceptualise knowledge in terms of “binaries” such as hard/soft, formal/informal, work/learning.

Working and learning in higher or further/vocational education institutions

The paper by Mary Johnsson and Paul Hager (runner up in the Emerald Best Paper Award), explores an unusual learning transition: the learning to become a “whole musician” by recent graduates of a symphony orchestra-initiated development programme, designed to nurture them through the transition of becoming professional orchestral musicians.

Work, learning and policy

Papers in this sub-theme grappled with policy issues such as the impact of globalisation on education and training policies; labour markets and training policies, and education and training policies in relation to women and work. Shahrzad Mojab, a keynote speaker (whose paper will be published in Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 21 No. 1, 2009), invited the research community to “turn work and lifelong learning inside out”. She argued that we cannot understand the significance of current conceptions of knowledge and learning, or current practices of work-related education and training, unless we are able to uncover and critically analyse the social relations that underpin these conceptions and practices. Sometimes this is only possible by turning current conceptions of learning “on their head”. For example, it is widely accepted that the current era of globalisation has hastened the process of commodification of learning – that is transforming learning into a possession, something to be traded for gain in the market-place; at the same time – and less visible – is the parallel process of “learning as dispossession”, where people are stripped not only of their individuality, but also of their very understanding of their own exploitation.

Overall, this Special Issue provides an overview of a diverse range of research interests represented in the 2007 Researching Work and Learning Conference. It challenges us to rethink some taken-for-granted assumptions. We recommend it to readers.

Shirley Walters, Linda CooperGuest Editors