Informal Learning in the Workplace: Unmasking Human Resource Development

Read Informal Learning In The Workplace Unmasking Human Resource Development 1998

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Informal learning cannot be simplistically Theorising informal learning 21 defined by a set of curricular aims. What discourses are holding sway? Are concerns primarily about the structures and purposes of workplaces? Is it about organisational narratives or managerial story-telling? And how are people portrayed when engaged in day-to-day situations and interventions, trying to make sense of their lives? These questions represent cultural forms that remind us of the reflexive nature of social life — that social life has the capacity to change as our knowledge and thinking changes.

HR managers, practitioners and educational thinkers must cope with this reflexivity see Glossary. Their practices need to be seen as located in particular historical circumstances, discourses and social contexts. Cervero notes that current researchers are not the first to observe that learning from experience is a central way that people create their world and give meaning to it: John Dewey most recently made this point and David Hume before him and Aristotle before him.

However, for the better part of this century, our society has given legitimacy to knowledge that is formal, abstract and general, while devaluing knowledge that is local, specific and based on practice. For this we owe a debt to Plato and Socrates, who believed that for something to count as knowledge it had to be de-contextualised, generalised and abstracted to cover a range of situations. Cervero , cited in Beckett But to use reflection for learning, one must consciously become aware that one is actually learning.

Experiential learning Experiential learning or experience-based learning is based on a set of assumptions identified by Andresen, Boud and Cohen An individualistic-humanist discourse of adult education seems incompatible with a critical social-transformation practice, but both hold meaningful ideas about work purposes for many HRD managers and practitioners. On the surface these assumptions appear to represent a dichotomy; important differences exist between adult education as practised within an individualistic discourse of personal empowerment, and a pedagogy of critical social theory.

That both are assumed as underpinning experiential learning is intriguing as they carry such different implications for practice. What is personally meaningful is thus critical to learning, and problematic to any reconciliation of the above assumptions. Whoever wants to know a thing has no way except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living practising in its environment. Andresen, Boud and Cohen Weil and McGill hold that a person or organisation which knows only their own village, cannot understand it. These traditions highlight the main conceptions of experiential learning, sharing autonomy as a central notion.

Usher problematises this notion in his influential post-modern critique: In this sense, adult education is part of the educational 24 Theorising informal learning project of the Enlightenment and because of this is cast in and expresses itself through a discourse of individual agency. Reflection and the autonomous subject As we have seen, it can be argued that experiential learning theory presupposes too much about individual agency.

Proponents of the humanistic adult education theory argue, however, that it does not. They claim that reflection is the bridge between experience and learning. Boud, Cohen and Walker, for instance, say that reflection consists of those processes in which learners engage to recapture, notice and re-evaluate their experience, to work with experience to turn it into learning. Boud, Cohen and Walker It also requires feeling and remembering, using beliefs to make interpretations, analysis and judgments, however unaware one may be of doing so.

As Mezirow points out, if reflection is understood as an assessment of how or why we have perceived, thought, felt or acted, it must be differentiated from an assessment of how best to perform these functions when each phase of an action is guided by what we have learned before. Action can be a creative process that involves our prejudices and distortions but reflection requires conscious attention to those distortions in our reasoning and attitudes.

Attending to our reasoning and attitudes requires what C. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of the individuals. She identifies five dimensions of learning, sometimes operating individually, sometimes together: It could be argued, for instance, that particular types of discourses, social conditions and context can and do systematically exclude some groups from learning and developmental opportunities.

Subsequent studies have refined this hypothesis. This discourse celebrates experience and learning through experience as means of individual empowerment. It is a discourse whereby learners actively define their own experience by attaching meaning to events. As Boud et al. It is this meaning-giving status accorded to the person which postmodern views of experiential learning seriously dispute Usher, Bryant and Johnston For instance, Foucault Commonly, reflection is seen as taking place when we look back on something and question the assumptions which guided it. But there is no clear way to determine at any point the ways in which external authority shapes the mind Lacan For example, what are the goals of empowerment underlying learning at work?

But experiential learning in organisations, defined in often well-intentioned humanistic terms, might ultimately be disabling rather than enabling — even though most staff developers, learning facilitators and HRD practitioners would most likely dispute this. Such an analysis can have demoralising effects according to recent empirical work on training practices in multinationals see Boje ; Casey ; Garrick and Solomon These things are not made as a means to an end, they are not made to any preconceived plan, they are not made by imposing form on a given matter.

Yet they are made deliberately and responsibly, by people who know what they are doing, even though they do not know in advance what is going to become of it. Such dualisms are inadequate for making sense of life as, inter alia, there is always some form of politics accompanying experience. The politics of learning from experience Knowledge acquired from experience is far from unproblematic even though much of the current research on workplace-based learning tends not to acknowledge this.

Theorising informal learning 29 This section is not going to be turned into a political science treatise, but the tensions between the values of individuals and the ideologies of their workplaces require scrutiny. For instance, looking at what managers actually do rather than what they hope to do can be a useful exercise. How do organisational contexts frame outcomes of learning and of practice? How does corporate philosophy actually affect practice? Beckett suggests that explicitly surfacing managerial processes is a key to further learning, and can be examined through three deceptively simple questions: What are we doing?

Why are we doing it? Underlying these tensions are personal and professional beliefs, convictions and values. These are influential factors on individuals at work and Brookfield describes some of the strategies used to deal with everyday tensions and dilemmas: Indeed, HRD practitioners and learning facilitators have theoretical orientations in their everyday practices whether they realise this explicitly or not. Making sense of what to do in the face of conflict and ethical dilemmas at work can highlight how problematic meaning giving can be.

But this is not a purely internal psychological process. Reflexivity is like language itself: So, how is one being influenced? What discourses are shaping the decision-making processes at work? How is power 30 Theorising informal learning functioning among the relationships involved? How are you being affected? These are the types of questions that can help in our attempts to unmask informal learning.

If learning is to be a meaningful workplace purpose, an examination of the values held by individuals and how these can clash with workplace ideologies at both macro- and micro-levels is essential. The various political philosophies like liberalism, capitalism, feminism, socialism and so on offer their adherents cogent but different explanations of the causes and nature of social problems. The grand theories can give rise to significant clashes between personal perspectives and work requirements: For managers and HRD practitioners, workplaces are not always conceptually malleable or as flexible as their rhetoric might suggest.

Work imperatives can, at times, fully test ideological resolve and there is no easy answer. If one adopts a conceptually malleable position, one runs the risk of being viewed by some other employees, managers and colleagues as uncommitted to anything i. The exploited subject has their experience: This influential theory is based, however, on the binary of social construction versus individual agency.

HRD practices that are based on the binary opposition of individual— social are problematic, particularly as practitioners today face the daunting task of helping bridge the gap between the workplace-based learning and formal education institutions. HRD personnel are expected to complement the drive for competitive workplaces, improved productivity, worker empowerment and worker satisfaction. Many HRD personnel have actively promoted such concepts, often taking them up without calling into question their underlying values and epistemologies.

In conditions of postmodernity crises of allegiance are likely to occur quite frequently. Postmodernism and informal learning Burbules summarises the postmodern critique of education in this way: These theories are particularly indebted to the European philosophers Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard.

More recently, their writings have been applied to the philosophy of education by Burbules and Rice , Lather , Usher , Usher and Edwards , Boje , and Burbules For Usher and Edwards, postmodernism encompasses: In other words, there is no uniform, unified postmodern discourse of education. The story-teller, for instance, is positioned in relation to events and other selves , and an identity conferred. In this way, discourse displaces knowledge as the object of study. She is also critical of aspects of postmodernism, arguing that there is an often obscured meta-narrative of postmodernism which describes a universal Truth: The range of claims for postmodernism has given rise to the criticism that it is too relativistic Mongardini ; Mestrovic ; Himmelfarb Mongardini goes so far as to argue that postmodernism is: Like it or not, postmodernism marks the end of the old order.

This criticism may be rather extreme, however, as Foucault rejects the notion of a monolithic discourse of postmodernism , and Burbules drawing upon Derrida argues that: But because our languages are diverse and noncongruent, there will always be a limit upon any particular discursive system as a standpoint, in a place and time, within which one can try to describe all matters of truth, value and so forth; such matters will always be to some extent the expressions of this language, and this place and time. It lives under the modern Constitution, but it no longer believes in the guarantees the Constitution offers.

The villages are underpinned by a conception of learning as a process whereby: A number of problems exist with this conception. First, there is the issue of the integration of different ways of knowing. The conceptual pathways within and between the villages are relatively undeveloped, leaving the notion of experiential learning as a collection of ideological standpoints rather than a coherent theory. Notions of community action and social transformation the third village have become increasingly problematic as radical frameworks have become increasingly fragmented.

As Acker, Barry and Esseveld and Ellsworth point out, an emancipatory intent is no guarantee of an emancipatory outcome. The implication of this for practice is that research needs continually to demystify the reality of its own practice, or, as Edwards and Usher suggest — texts are always open to challenge.

Truth is a thing of this world: And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth. In the current world, technical systems of surveillance, manipulation and control are increasingly widespread and subtle. Even with an emancipatory intent, they can end up having oppressive effects. The marshalling of informal learning contains potential for the experience of some marginalised groups to be formally recognised and accredited.

The world, and the structure of knowledge that goes with it, already exist and therefore there is no Archimedean point from which we can know the world by standing outside it — hence situated selves. But this pre-knowing is never an explicit conscious knowing. See also Glossary of terms.

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It is affected by volatile labour markets, fast switches from one product to another, niche marketing, everincreasing consumer orientations, new patterns of management, new technologies and global interconnections. Increasingly the possession of transferable skills is viewed as vital to workers who are to service and expand the market economy.

Contemporary approaches to the organisation of work contain much rhetoric about education and training. The transformation of education and training makes it important to distinguish between the language about how training will benefit workers, improve worker conditions and prospects for advancement, on the one hand, and corporate realities in which knowledge about worker competencies informs decisions about downsizing and redundancies on the other. Many views and theories exist about work as a learning environment. Zuboff for instance presents an influential argument about modern technology in the workplace, suggesting that unprecedented developmental opportunities now exist for workers.

She argues that the new communication and computer technologies allow for more intellectual activity and therefore superior forms of work. From the many divergent views about work and its educative effects I shall address three broad approaches to the organisation of work. Each offers powerful conceptions that have direct bearings on how one might view learning at work. From a Foucauldian perspective we can say that the ways in which we talk about learning at work reflect certain kinds of dominant interests.

The approaches to work organisation considered are: The propositions raised are that this remains a prevalent curricular structure, with de-skilling the pre-eminent method for workplace design Boje and Winsor The proposition here is that one can no longer talk of a unified type of rationality that organises and governs the spheres of work.

There is no overriding claim as to how work should be organised in the face of constant and rapid change, but to survive in competitive markets the rhetoric holds that the workforce is required to be highly skilled, flexible, innovative and mobile. Is Taylorism alive and well? Boje and Winsor Their thesis is that activities such as total quality management have been positioned as a carefully engineered set of technological process modifications that promise a range of efficiencies and competitive advantages, but they are actually resurrecting Taylorism.

Braverman was never convinced that learning can be plausibly applied to the workplace, claiming: Work as a learning environment 41 the unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from its beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it.

The subjective factor of the labour process is removed to a place among its inanimate objective factors. This is the ideal towards which management tends in pursuit of which it uses and shapes every productive innovation furnished by science. Braverman in Welton Contemporary philosophers including Foucault, Barthes, Touraine, Gorz and Toffler no longer treat labour, and the position of the worker in the productive process, as the chief organising principle of social structures.

Arguing from different theoretical premises, they hold that the industrial form of rationality — linear, logical, scientific — no longer offers social development that will free workers from the conditions that fundamentally constrain them. Indeed, the post-industrial changes in production and consumption — from mass production, mass market, machine-paced systems — to the production of specialist, niche and luxury goods as well as production systems based on information technology, have led to new forms of economically active labour: Increasingly labour is required to have specialised yet highly transferable skills, hence flexible specialisation.

In the post-Fordist context,1 the vocationalist discourse personalises economic competitiveness by stressing the need for individual employees to be motivated and continually up-skilled or re-skilled, and made more flexible. For Usher, Bryant and Johnston this meaning is onedimensional.

They point out that the new attitudes and competencies required by employees change the relationships between pedagogy, knowledge and labour processes. What is foregrounded in the drive for flexibility and continuous learning, they argue, are social skills and flexible competencies rather than subject-based knowledge. Lee and Zemke He argues that to maintain control over the labour process, capitalist operations de-skill work and limit worker discretion on the job, with new technologies being a potent example. Berryman points out that this de-skilling theory was based on the existence of: Thus, [Braverman] replaced a technological determinism with an organisational determinism that emerged from the fundamental characteristics of capitalism.

That is, skill requirements are a function of the way that work is organised rather than of the technologies used. This emphasis accepts phenomena such as human emotions and desires generally ignored, or treated as anomalies by economic theories. A key analytical implication of these two perspectives is that how workers, managers and firms conceive of their strategies of work organisation and workplace socialisation are very influential in shaping how workers and firms respond to market conditions. The learning organisation, or a new operationalism? The more deeply we scratch the surface, the more difficult it is to find a line where one begins and the other ends: Indeed, this seamless quality is precisely the way that power struggles at work are experienced in the ordinary routines of everyday life.

You had to pull a grid out. It was a real struggle every time. There was always a knack. Workplace learning initiatives are being used to reorganise trade work and multiskilling and job enhancement programmes are being introduced. Training is also used to introduce management philosophies stressing new corporate cultures — flatter hierarchies, work teams and quality circles — largely inspired by Japanese models of industrial relations.

Senge and Ford follow Japanese managerial concepts which assert that individuals, teams and enterprises are continually learning to meet internal and external changes. This is an important goal of workplace reform in most industries, but few organisations, according to Ford, have fully achieved continual learning. In practice this means that all members of the workforce share in some or all of the following: Kornbluh and Greene Empowerment has deep political implications.

As Jackson points out: This is one reason why trade unions can have, on occasion, vested interests in preserving the Taylorist status quo. Rainbird asserts that unions increasingly regard training issues as central to their own interests. These issues include not only technical upgrading to protect current jobs and clarify career pathways, but also longer-range policy issues like plant-based involvement and worker participation in job design and labour force planning.

Senge fashions his arguments from organisations that operate within the commercial market place, but his idealism is not tempered by the day-to-day realities of competitive work practices, conflicts, gender, politics and power issues. Set against postmodern conditions, including increasing social fragmentation and global market competitiveness, this language increasingly appears to offer more refined technologies for engineering an economically active, smiling, but politically passive compliant workforce, rather than its promised autonomous self-directing, empowered workers.

Work as a learning environment 47 Discourses of competitiveness As society becomes more complex its professional labour becomes more differentiated, more fragmented, more subject to change. No longer are the pools of knowledge and expertise acquired in initial education sufficient for the new order. Barnett goes as far as to assert that: Also required are the abilities to jettison that learning over the lifespan, to be prepared to take on new forms of experience and knowledge and to develop these skills anew.

In other words, the regeneration of capital requires not knowledge per se, but abilities to exploit, and if necessary, discard knowledge. We are in a throwaway society, cognitively speaking. Indeed, OECD reforms commonly include improving the training opportunities for adults. The notion of skill formation is central to this transformation, and HRD personnel are thus located strategically in a discourse about economic competitiveness.

It is not only employers who are urging a stronger relationship between industries and education. It is on the agendas of big business, unions and governments. OECD nations are currently considering changes required to work organisation to be competitive beyond the s. For manufacturing, Bolwijn and Kumpe in Hayton describe a four-phase model, 48 Work as a learning environment outlining structural and cultural requirements of each phase see Table 3.

Bolwijn and Kumpe are promoting a discourse of industry competitiveness that encourages workplace cultures based on participation and democratisation. Their theory holds that people in the innovative firm need to be empowered to take responsibility and set organisational goals see Table 3. Bolwijn and Kumpe, in line with many other post-Fordist writers, interpret current changes in the workplace as part of a widespread trend towards flatter management structures with greater autonomy and responsibility being given to trade and non-trade operative level staff.

Maurice, Sellier and Silvestre The firm specialises in a narrow range of products or services. Work organisation is based on standardisation of tasks and specialisation of labour.

All efforts are directed at the pursuit of quality while recognising the still necessary efficiency improvements. The many changes necessary to achieve this are a cultural shock to the efficient firm. Many firms are pursuing this through the total quality management strategy. As well as cost reduction and quality improvement, efforts are directed at increasing speed. This means faster delivery of service, faster adaptation to market changes, and offering greater variety in services.

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To achieve this a flat management structure is used and most work is carried out by small multiskilled teams. The team-work concept is used to its fullest extent to tap the creative abilities of the workforce. There are few distinctions between managers and workers. This has major implications for any long-term trend of skill upgrading or multi-skilling, and for programmes seeking to recognise informal learning. It also raises some fundamental questions about: Critical social theorists including Habermas ; Rainbird ; Pateman ; Welton ; Wexler ; Hart ; Horkheimer and Adorno and Casey have variously observed the effects of the authority structure of institutions on psychological qualities and attitudes of individuals.

Because of this, contemporary Marxist scholarship which addresses structural deficiencies and the theme of alienated labour in the context of technical change retains analytical power. Welton and Mezirow both emphasise that human beings can learn to be helpless when confronted with structures that block scope for their imagination or action. Work-based learning is now firmly on the political agenda and is viewed as a way to promote workplace communicative processes. Feminists such as Pateman She claims it is precisely the socialisation dimension of workplace learning that has never been fully appreciated by political theorists.

Unions and management frequently engage in negotiations about extending worker skills so that workers can undertake a wider range of tasks. Multi-skilling is an essential part of the workplace reform strategies of many organisations. The popular rhetoric about multiskilling is that it enables small teams of workers to be largely selfsufficient in carrying out a range of production or service functions. It is thus associated with structural changes in work organisation, involving a move away from centralised to decentralised management and the formation of supposedly semi-autonomous work teams.

Communication skills and interpersonal skills are held by senior managers to be increasingly important to decentralised work organisation structures. Learners are now required to adapt, in increasingly subtle ways, to the competencies needed for optimal capital efficiency. In a vocationalist pedagogy, learning means proceeding to the correct answer in the most efficient way. This in turn means that adaptation and application provide little space for experimentation, open-endedness and unforeseen outcomes.

Experience at work is only valued if it contributes to learning about the most efficient outcomes being sought. If it does not, it is discounted. Thus experience has no inherent value other than as a tool for enhancing motivation and achieving behavioural competencies, even though, in the post-Fordist context, skills are meant to be empowering.

Experience and knowledge of learners and knowledge arising from this becomes a device, a means for best achieving a pre-defined end. Learner experience appears to be valued, but its use is instrumental, selective and at best illustrative. Traditional emphases on language, formal subject and discipline-based conventions and critical enquiry provided outcomes which could be tentative, ambiguous, uncertain, contradictory. The new terminology suggests that knowledge 52 Work as a learning environment is related to observable outcomes, the doing, the actions and transdisciplinary forms of skill.

Employers want to be more certain of what their workers now do. Aligning educational goals with industry needs The beliefs that knowledge is no longer the special province of formal institutions and that learning in the workplace is valuable and assessable, form an overarching rationale for national reforms of education and training. Big business and unions support them in this. Workers and others within many sections of industry assume that competencies assessed in the workplace are or at least should be automatically transferable to courses within formal institutions, and more generally recognised by employers.

Such assumptions are aligned with successful movement in a flexible labour market. Proponents of the reforms, however, argue that there can be no objections in principle to the application of competencies and work-based learning outcomes to educational processes. In this corporatism, specific mechanisms such as skill-based pay and embedded training — doing by learning — will supposedly increase the amount of learning at work.

The notion of a work-smart or clever country, founded on economically competitive practices, has important ethical dimensions. For instance, will the new conceptions of knowledge, education and training reward Work as a learning environment 53 human capacities that improve economic competitiveness — at the expense of other kinds of virtues such as friendship, altruism, kindness, ethical concern, generosity, cultural understanding and so on?

What form of society might the valorisation of instrumental knowledge lead to? Will the reforms widen our sense of rationality, or lead to new forms of epistemological closure? The standards may be either difficult or easy to attain. This work is judged, usually with the aid of a standardised checklist, and forms a basis for progression.

Supporters of the notion of competency-based standards argue that outcome statements can be created for all learning which is considered important or for what people want. Jessup, cited in Barnett Acker claims there is an ample body of evidence to show that without the presence of a strong union, the procedures that recognise and value worker skills will represent capital interests.

She further asserts that the training of workers has most commonly been formalised where unions have a strong hand. The problem is that management may impose new skills on workers and resist acknowledging their existence if training is very short, or if informal training takes place outside the ambit of union control and initiatives. In many countries, including South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Latin America, the restructuring of industrial awards is intended to provide for the establishment of skill-related career paths.

Major unions argue that skill-related career paths give employees incentives such as increased pay, more satisfying jobs and clearer career pathways. The provision of vocational education and training at various levels is required to support this argument and trade unions demand that education and training opportunities are provided for workers. A central mechanism underpinning contemporary vocational education and training approaches is competency-based standards.

The idea of an objective approach to workplace training and worker development schemes is appealing to the agendas of both business and trade unions. But the notion of objectivity in recognising and promoting workplace skills and learning warrants interrogation. Habermas , , , Bernstein and Wexler variously assert that if labour is envisaged as a set of competencies, of performance to a prescribed external standard, then the person is diminished. Their argument is that for work, issues of ownership, authenticity, care, craft and identification are of critical importance.

Without these elements, labour faces alienation, estrangement and commodification. It is therefore curious that trade unions have combined with business over competency-based standards — because the standards are defined externally by others and have a tendency to reduce the authenticity of human actions. By definition, competencies require a degree of predictability they have to in order to be prescribed, observable, assessable standards.

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The idea of a competence which is unpredictable is ultimately incoherent. Supporters of competency-based training usually argue that when fully implemented it will impact significantly on entry-level training Work as a learning environment 55 such as trade apprenticeships. Defining competence in a broad way, assert these writers, should allow a wide variety of delivery mechanisms, in particular skill formation in workplaces, to be made more systematic and accredited.

Competency-based training and assessment is, however, a slippery notion. Hager and Gonczi This focuses on the performance aspect of a competent worker. This focuses on the attributes of a competent worker. This integrates attributes and performance into a single framework. The third approach — the most holistic interpretation — offers the strongest conception of competence, argue Hager and Gonczi , as all occupations involve performance of generic tasks such as planning or contingency management in addition to specific tasks.

Just as abilities or capabilities are necessary, but not sufficient for competence, so the performance of tasks is also necessary but not sufficient for competence. Thus, they argue, any satisfactory account of competence must include both attributes and tasks. Only by recognising the relational nature of knowledge, attributes and task performance can competency standards capture the richness of work.

Any approach which ignores this will lead inevitably to impoverished competency standards. With their concentration on outcomes, and essentially performance outcomes rather than inputs and processes , competency-based approaches tend not to differentiate workers on the basis of any characteristics other than what workers are capable of doing.

Age, gender, cultural and ethnic background are irrelevant in the determination and assessment of competencies. But of course these factors will be highly relevant to the processes leading to the achievement of competencies. But this so-called democracy does not address the issues of control, management and integration of workers into the production process.

The surface appearance of objective competencies conceals the ways power functions in the construction of competence. Thus questions of how to assist people of varying age, language, gender and experience to achieve the relevant occupational competencies foreground issues of domination and control rather than of civil liberties and individual opportunity. Although labour time remains a key aspect of production, it is the new knowledge which becomes an increasingly significant productive force.

Further, there is conflict between linking the acquisition of competencies with remuneration and employer desire to keep production and labour costs to a minimum. In some organisations this can easily result in the wish not to recognise and reward skill development. However, as Foucault a reminds us, powerful discourses do not talk directly of power. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive as approaches to the organisation of work. Recognition of these links corresponds to a re-configuration of the meaning of knowledge in society.

Contemporary knowledge, in the context of workplace and education and training reforms, is being re-moulded — increasingly aligned with the skills and assessments of competent performance — to pre-specified industry standards. 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. However, the connection between professional power, knowledge and control is apparent. On this reading, competencies can be viewed as a fairly prescriptive technology for getting workers to perform to predefined standards. From the perspective of the various governmental and industry regulatory authorities, however, competency-based standards are a useful embodiment of instrumental reason.

The competencies provide a blueprint of industry standards and thus training regimes which are intended to promote internationally competitive economies. But this shift has important epistemological implications. I have argued that the reforms of education and training — based upon competency-based standards — are intended to serve workplace and industrial efficiency. The justification of such reforms is grounded in human capital theory and its accompanying economic rhetoric. As rhetoric frequently conflicts with individual experience, critical questions are raised about the underlying links between competency-based standards, the exercise of power, and learning in the new work order.

Inevitably, this raises further questions. Does the discourse of competence marginalise knowledge and understanding unrelated to workplace performance? Might competencies represent relatively benign manifestations of attempts at industrial relations harmony between unions and business? Power exercised in the search for normalised and governable people? Chapter 5 then goes on to explore how such discourses and the exercise of power affect individual HRD professionals performing their daily roles in the context of the Sydney Olympic Games construction sites.

Shifting boundaries, changing values and purposes of work and learning are also related to modern forms of governance. In the state of de-differentiation, the metaphors of markets, competence, quality, and the management of learning, which their proponents argue transcend boundaries, are providing the language of practice, policy and study. Increased flexibility is now held by influential commentators see Reich to be an essential labour form to match the requirements of capital accumulation, but the trends for flexible labour are not experienced evenly across the globe Edwards Work as a learning environment 59 5 This phenomenon is common to most modernised Western countries e.

Flexible and distance training packages are now being aggressively marketed by Western universities and technical education systems to most developing nations. Practical wisdom — phronesis — became wisdom once the ethical virtuous purpose had evolved for an individual. Discourses on industrial work have long held the belief that there are many processes that socialise people at work. Yet we know little about the socialisation effects of post-industrial work. These are both symbolic and practical tools of communication in many post-industrial workplaces and can be described as discursive institutional practices.

Theorisations that generalise about contemporary workplace learning can be problematic. Deliberate or overt educational activities at, or for, work only comprise the manifest curriculum of work. There is always much more to learning than that which is directly observed or stated: The hidden curriculum of learning at work 61 corporate educational activities include the collection of deliberate learning activities that the company or company approved educators provide and in which workers participate knowingly for the perceived advantage of both themselves and the company.

The shaping of worker identities requires compliance with corporate objectives and directions, but a compliance that involves active subjects making choices and decisions about their place in the new corporate culture. High-tech corporate workplaces are facsimiles of these postindustrial conditions. At least that is how the rhetoric has it. It includes a socialisation that enables new ways of performing. But a hidden part of the learning curriculum for post-industrial work is its rarely surfaced disciplinary agenda.

Such terms are thus set against a highly problematic social backdrop. The analysis acknowledges that structures of power and dominance are always contested, with new alliances forming to challenge existing ones. These discourses actively create new ways for people to be at work. Workers learn productivity, not just the skills and competencies necessary to perform the job. These technologies are not merely repressive and it is precisely their positive aspects which make them appear so plausible, so seductive.

To illustrate how the technologies work I have integrated extracts from interviews with six corporate HRD managers into the text. For the sake of the narrative I have located the interpretive methods of this aspect of the study in the Appendix. The extracts presented here provide data on their professional roles, critical incidents they had experienced, and, consequently, a range of workplace influences on their own informal learning.

The six interviews were with pseudonyms: Metaphors and metonyms for power relations at work are sought, and in several instances, dramatic gulfs between the stated ideals of management and actual workplace practices are revealed. That such gulfs occur when training others can provoke ethical tensions for the trainers, as Vinod pointed out: There is a goods train line which runs between the workshops and the administration office where the top-brass sit. This symbolises the divisions which still exist between the workers and managers.

There is still us-and-them thinking that is difficult to get rid of. My mission is across the track. Getting total quality management while such a division exists makes the talk of TQM more like rhetoric. This poses an additional challenge for trainers like me — we need to facilitate a more trusting environment. This approach acknowledges that practice is governed by an ever-moving agenda to which one contributes. The retrenchments and other things which management did undermined some of our [training] initiatives. The culture of this place is, in fact, very hierarchical and the moves to change that are still fairly much on the surface.

It was frustrating in a way. She made a particular point about the importance of this terrain for the success of her professional practice. I think there are areas of court operations which are close to the raw emotions of the clients. There is a natural scepticism on the part of those closer to those emotions about how objective the system can be. Dealing with difference and diverse needs requires creativity and this requires resources.

The hidden curriculum of learning at work 65 Globalisation can also be seen to fuel a homogenisation of values, organisational cultures, languages and work practices, producing unified and integrated common cultures. Paradoxically, globalisation has, at the same time, strengthened the processes for establishing and maintaining local cultures and local differences.

This illustrates the coexistence of seemingly contradictory processes. Despite the movement towards a global culture, local differences are becoming increasingly defined. Nation states, regions and organisations are constructing boundaries and images defining their uniqueness, but at the same time it is precisely through attempts to define uniqueness that cultural complexities can be highlighted.

This is illustrated in workplaces as they compete for a market share — to meet the particular needs of niche consumer groups.

Increasingly, the relationship between production and inter-cultural marketing involves dialogues across national and local borders. For instance, are the systematic and standardised training nomenclature actually recognising different knowledges and values? Or do they have the effect of homogenising? Do management, work and training practices realise, or conflict with, the rhetoric of valuing difference? Yet industry competency standards, a key technology for the construction of skilled workers, prescribe singular ways of performing.

They provide templates for training that will regenerate the same ways. But when this meaning is recognised and assessed it is being framed within monocultural classifications of competence. In the rhetoric of workplace culture there is much promise of recognition of diverse experiences and knowledges. This is reinforced in a number of workplace practices. Increasingly, job application processes include personality tests, even extending into family interviews, reflecting a further blurring of public and private domains.

Accompanying these processes are recruitment practices and criteria that reflect very specific kinds of attitudes and values — those that match the imaging and reproduction requirements of the corporate culture. The organisation is very hierarchical and the ownership of training has included major political battles. You have to observe the hierarchy to get things done. This is very political and carries with it a real tension. With the hierarchy, I have learned to ask a lot of questions to ensure the design of new programs clearly reflects developmental expectations.

Her professional practice is inscribed in a never ending process to which everyone at work is, in some way, a party even if it is oppositional. Rather, it is an apparatus that does not have an identifiable locus of control. The dollar sign is the only thing which drives this organisation. Not so much in terms of the overall training program, as this is a cost centre rather than a profit making centre. But the whole thing which drives this is the dollar sign. That is what it is all about.

Of his purpose as a national professional development manager, he said: Our mission statement says we have to develop our people, but that means nothing to the partners really. But if you describe the training philosophy as: He suggested that this principle is: But you have to understand and respect the culture of the organisation for it to move towards a learning environment. Simon characterises the HRD function as seeking to maximise bottomline productivity.

Communication systems and practices, motivated by the need to improve information flow, are being standardised. At the same time as the increase in written documentation, spoken information continues to be communicated through powerful informal networks.

Communication training thus tends to focus on individual language skills that empower, rather than examine the power relations within the organisation that empower some while disempowering others. Cultural knowledge is frequently utilised for productivity purposes. This is illustrated by the cultural knowledge of migrant employees that is often drawn upon in shaping and producing products and services for local or international niche markets and for communicating with multinational partners as well as the local community.

Subsequently, individual initiatives in meetings and other decisionmaking forums can be withdrawn. Much of the rhetoric around difference is about obtaining compliance with corporate objectives and production imperatives. Valuing diverse knowledges and skills contradicts the organisational culture in which pre-defined values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours sameness are rewarded. The language of empowerment Along with the new global markets, flexible accumulation of capital, volatile labour markets, quick switches from one product to another, The hidden curriculum of learning at work 69 niche marketing and ever greater levels of consumerism postmodern society come new patterns of management.

The new forms of postFordist management are technologies designed to transform organisational and corporate cultures in order to capitalise on global conditions of competitiveness. The re-configuration assumes worker autonomy, dynamic decisionmaking and more democratised work arrangements.

Workers are trained to be empowered. Trainers are thus temporary sources of the empowerment text. The message of training is, however, one that seeks compliance. HRD practitioners are not empowered to demand any significant changes. Developing listening skills, particularly with line managers, and questioning skills to ensure there are no gaps in my understanding of what needs to be done.

I now have what I call a strong customer focus. I now apply these people skills to identifying what customers want. Not so much how to satisfy the customer with methodologies but to go the step further and sell our training. This is exciting for me in so far as I have been successful at it. This happened to Michael whose words illustrate how he had been seduced by corporate rhetoric that failed to live up to its promises: My values were actually aligned with the rhetoric of the workplace reform — to promote self-direction, participation in decision-making and team-work. But management were unwilling to relinquish tight control.

The reality was their words were complete and utter bullshit. My one regret is that, before I left, some of my work colleagues may have associated me with the cynicism of the corporation. I knew that my anger needed to be channelled appropriately, otherwise it could make the situation worse. The situation had to be diffused. If my anger contributed to my retrenchment then so be it. I have no regrets about being a person who stood up for what I The hidden curriculum of learning at work 71 believed in.

It was more economically based and training might have been politically easier to cut that somewhere else. Questioning must take appropriate forms or it is rendered inappropriate, thus attracting corporate sanctions. The denial of negativity is meant to offer new forms of liberation for workers. It rests upon a logic of human consciousness that is purely positive.

Informal Learning in the Workplace: Unmasking Human Resource Development

The new knowledge of the learning organisation does not contain its own negation. Besides, the rhetoric is easy to play along with — it contains the humanistic qualities that have, in the past, motivated many corporate trainers. It also contains a rhetoric derived, ironically given its location in highcapital, from socialism — about working more co-operatively in teams — becoming more a part of the corporate family. The promise of belonging Planned training activities that take place at work, or for work, comprise what Casey This is accompanied by the hidden curriculum that socialises adult workers.

Much more is learned than the material and physical acts of doing work. But this can be problematic, as Brooks found in her research on collective team learning in organisations: Resistance in the new workplace has shifted significantly away from union-based opposition to managerial directions towards a simulated solidarity based on corporate teams.

Unions are being increasingly marginalised and in some industries are virtually powerless. Simultaneously, belonging to a team is now a career prerequisite. A range of standard training practices teaches employees the competencies necessary to perform in their team situations. These practices are manifest at the professional level, where managers and team leaders are being trained in valuing diversity, how to work in teams, how to communicate and negotiate more effectively.

But this training reduces these skills to the competencies required to perform work tasks. Knowing, or understanding, may well be unvoiced. The expression of professional judgment is not, however, immune from the powerful lure of belonging. This is symbolically represented in the proliferation of logos and corporate images that are embedded within all written documentation and realised in the selective use of democratic language such as we, our, shared.

This helps to foster a sense of community with its accompanying, yet perhaps mythical, characteristics of belonging and security. The corporate family with its multiple and complex levels, departments and relationships may capture a sense of an extended family. But workers also belong to teams, a tighter nuclear family equivalent, and these teams are sold as autonomous units, promising a kind of boundary, belonging and protection from the potentially chaotic, dispersed, fragmented workplace in which flexibility, changing The hidden curriculum of learning at work 73 roles and responsibilities result in unpredictable social relationships.

Belonging to the corporate family and to the team rides on the notion of reciprocity where employee commitment to the new partnering and team arrangements result in increased participation, energy and output, rewarded by whatever the organisation has to offer, in this case a sense of autonomy, protection, responsibility and financial rewards. However, such reciprocity has its costs. There are problems with the protection offered by the promise of belonging. How does protection figure in a workplace where information technologies monitor input and output on an individual basis?

How does protection figure where your colleagues are assessing your competencies? Even with the competency-based approach to training and assessment, workers are learning more than the skills and competencies that are necessary to perform the job. Contemporary management and training and development literature continues an almost exclusive coverage of building learning organisations and family-style participatory structures, glossing over deeper issues such as the emotional toll upon selves.

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