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This paper explores how the report Learning through Life exemplifies the dominant policy discourse on lifelong learning emphasizing strongly individual social mobility. The paper explores further how this functionalist and reductionist turn in (adult) education has come about and how concepts of democratic citizenship and education may create new perspectives on how to deal with important challenges of society today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today’s post‐modern world of difference, and amidst globalising forces of insidious convergence, this paper explores how far the concepts of lifelong learning and learning society embrace international worldviews. It conducts a brief excursion into literature that has explored learning society models. It also looks at an increasing number of voices from across the developing world, especially Africa, where a more globally aware and context sensitive agenda for lifelong learning is advocated. Definitions of lifelong learning and related policy papers from Scotland, England and Finland in response to the European Memorandum for Lifelong Learning are compared with definitions of lifelong learning and related policy documents from South Africa, Namibia and Botswana in relation to the Southern African Development Community’s equivalence to the EU document. To broaden the picture, reference to recent historical analyses of polices in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong will also be made. The core questions, drawn from a broadly critical theory perspective, ask: what kind of learning societies are being envisaged as a result of national and international policy statements? What are the implications for global understanding, tolerance of difference and education for all? How global is our vision? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace learning is identified by UK and Scottish governments as an important means of achieving social mobility, and therefore producing a more equal society. However, there appears to be a patchwork of provision and funding arrangements, making it difficult for employers and employees to identify suitable routes. Analysis of large scale survey data at European and Scottish levels shows that existing inequalities are further entrenched by differential access to and participation in workplace learning, where those with existing high levels of qualification have far greater opportunities. This paper draws on data drawn from an EU Sixth Framework funded study of lifelong learning, focusing in particular on case studies of six Scottish SMEs which are used to identify some of the reasons underlying inequalities in access to workplace learning. Whilst all of the SMEs had a positive approach to employee development, they differed in the type of work they undertook and the composition of the workforce. Employees in knowledge intensive organisations were immersed in a culture where on-going learning was an expected part of working life, and was driven by both employers' and employees' expectations. By way of contrast, more traditional manufacturing and training organisations had a more restricted approach to learning, encouraging employees to undertake courses which would give them the skills to do their jobs more effectively, but with less focus on their wider growth and development. All firms treated lifelong learning with some degree of scepticism, ultimately prioritising company profitability over individual employee development and seeing the two as sometimes at variance. Given the Scottish government's desire to promote the demand side of skill development, the barriers posed by employers' attitudes need to be addressed, particularly in relation to lower-skilled workers in manufacturing firms, who might have less intrinsic motivation, but are also less likely to receive encouragement and support from their employer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault’s conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each other while avoiding the excesses that plagued Marxist analyses in the later 20th century, which represented such processes as the outcome of a necessary determination. Lifelong learning will be identified as a specifically neoliberal form of state reason in terms of its conception, emergence and development. Although it has manifested a uniformly consistent – albeit not exclusive – concern of serving dominant economic interests, the prospects for moving beyond it depend, I argue, on whether the structures of learning created can be harnessed for other ends; that is, whether embryonic within the discursive programme of lifelong learning is the possibility of linking the discourse to a progressive emancipatory project based upon egalitarian politics and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the social determinants of lifelong learning histories as uncovered in a largescale survey and interview analysis carried out as part of the ESRC Learning Society Programme, and previously reported in this journal. The statistical 'determinants' of adult participation in learning as described there, such as family background or gender, are examined here in terms of individual stories as well as theoretical models derived from earlier phases of this project. The two forms of data and their analyses appear to accord, suggesting perhaps that concepts of structure (determinants) and agency (choice) are not mutually incompatible in explaining patterns of adult learning. Choices are anyway made within subjective opportunity structures (which include notions of what is 'appropriate' for each person). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]