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Work communities are powerful sites of identity, practices and knowledge systems in which individual workers' desires for recognition, competence, participation and meaning are imbricated. In the new times of increased flexibility and rapid transmission of information, people and capital through globalised networks, worker subjectivity arguably has become a primary target of work learning to ensure organisational survival. The researchers contributing to this volume have explored how particular subjectivities are constituted among these varied coordinates, and how learning processes are implicated in individuals' subjections, negotiations, assertions and shifts of subjectivity. Butler (1992:13) maintains that the `subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process'. In this possibility, in this ongoing constitution, lies the agency of the subject. Subjects are intertwined with the social practice of work in which they participate and from which they learn, reflecting a complex interaction between subjects' sense of knowledge, agency and desire with their immersion in cultural images, invocations and social activities that bring forth practices of subjectivity. These shape how people engage with and make sense of what they experience and perform socially. But clearly, subjects participate in their own constitution in psychic, social and material ways, raising questions about the precise nature of agency and the possibilities of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of the role and place of farming women is essential to understanding farming families, farm life and farming communities. This is particularly so when changes to farming and rural communities stand to threaten their continuities and prospect for survival. The traditional family farm relies heavily on the ‘farmer's wife' and her many roles for its very existence and its viability. Yet these women's roles are often taken for granted, without their full contributions and the impact of rural life on these women being understood. Here, the experiences and changes in subjectivity of farming women are learned from the women themselves. In an earlier study (Allan 2005a), the ‘place of' and ‘value of' farm women (farmers' wives) in a farming operation was repeatedly described by the men as one of ‘helper' and ‘sounding board'. These terms fail to empower the women or endow them with anything more than partial participation. Yet from these farming women different and distinct patterns of women's subjectivities emerge. A view arises of hardworking women who toil to support their farm and families in their many roles with little time left for self until over time for some, often due to emotional exhaustion, their positions cannot be maintained. Negotiation of tensions in their everyday life can shape transformative journeys to selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores ways in which renewed attention to the worker's subjectivity in the course of education, training and learning interventions can widen the personal and collective possibilities for workplace development and for enactment of decent work. The chapter critiques the prevailing focus on techno-economic imperatives and of obscured managerial elite interests in organizations that currently circumscribe and delimit worker subjectivities and their learning at work. The chapter also critiques the managerial notion of the human resource and proposes an alternative conceptualization of the worker as agentic subject. It proposes that active worker subjects may re-imagine and re-orientate organizational and worker learning to improve work practices and generate expanded horizons for decent work and civilized organizations [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter calls for a deeper understanding of workplace learning, one that expands from the local conceptualisation of learning in terms of literacy, skills building, and corporate training to a more global view informed by the movement of people in workplaces across national borders. With the increasing movement of people from developing countries to more modern societies, it is important to move beyond static notions of work and learning to discourses that acknowledge the subjectivities of foreign-born workers. Using narratives of immigrant women of colour in white academic spaces, this chapter highlights the shifting notions of identity and place as they inform realities of life and work across national borders. It makes the argument that workplace learning must be understood within the broader concepts of Diaspora and migration, place and the politics of location, and the negotiation and re-negotiation of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Rose and actor-network theory this chapter examines some of the methodological and theoretical implications of this work for conceptions of workplace learning. We suggest that workplaces need to be examined for the spatio-temporal ordering of practices and the actors drawn into them in order to move beyond the totalizing discourses of for instance, the knowledge economy, globalization, performativity and even workplace learning itself. We argue that there is no single trajectory for workplace subjectivities and that pedagogic practices are embedded in the actor-networks of specific workplaces. These networks can be formulated as part of those actions at a distance associated with the development of governmental power in contemporary social orders. This is illustrated by way of a critique of discourses that posit a move from disciplined, Fordist work to flexible Post-Fordist forms of work. In this way, we seek to locate discussions of workplace learning within the wider debates in the social sciences about changing practices of governing and the differing forms of subjectivity associated with them. The chapter is intended to illuminative and is theory driven [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores the mutually constitutive relationship of the individual and the social context. In the analysis of our empirical data on teacher students we shall ask how individual students were able to exercise their personal agency in the two learning communities within a university context, and the context of authentic working life. We shall look more closely at the kinds of continuities and transitions that can be identified in a subject's personal goals, and how these relate to their learning and developing a professional identity. Based on a critical review of the conceptions of identity and teacher identity, the chapter addresses the critical characteristics of professional subjectivity and the emotional nature of teacher's work. Continuities and transitions in teacher student identity construction are described using three particular cases to exemplify the mutually constitutive role of the community and the individual subjects. Our cases demonstrate that in order to negotiate and redefine one's personal and professional identity in the learning community, there have to be mutually constitutive spaces for learning in terms of developing professional subjectivity. In such spaces, the learner's personal goals, plans and intentional projects come together in a favourable environment, one which offers resources for realising them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on studies of learning in workplaces, this chapter discusses the central role of individuals' agency and epistemology to their participation in and learning through work, and the remaking of work practices. Learning through work is proposed as being the process and outcome of a relational interdependence between individuals and the social practices that comprise their workplaces. This interdependence is necessary as neither the social suggestion nor individuals' agency alone is sufficient to secure the learning and remaking of the practices that constitute paid work. The social suggestion (comprising societal norms, practices and values, and their enactment) as manifested by localised workplace factors, is never potent or comprehensive enough to project its intent or secure the faithful and comprehensive transfer of knowledge to individuals, should this be its intent. Therefore, the exercise of personal agency is required to make sense of what the immediate social experience comprising the workplace projects. Moreover, rather than merely being subjected to what is experienced immediately (i.e. in the workplace) and culturally, individuals also exercise their agency in mediating their construction of what they encounter and how they respond to those experiences. Participation, learning and the remaking of work are, therefore, active and personally and culturally transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work, occupation and daily working life are important for adults in several ways. This chapter focuses on a single component of learning, professionals' epistemological beliefs which include an understanding of the nature of knowledge and knowing and professional learning and development, in order to analyse the individual parameters of work, subjectivity and learning: The field of university teaching with particular reference to the implementation of e-teaching is used to provide empirical evidence on the nature and impact of epistemological beliefs upon teachers' work. In this domain, epistemological beliefs play a two-fold role, because they influence both teaching concepts and concepts about learners and their learning (Hasanbegovic et al. in press). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter presents gender as a concept and perspective by discussing learning and doing gender at workplaces. The focus is on workplace change, particularly technological change, and its implications for workers' subjectivity and construction of masculinity. The empirical base is a study on mine workers in an underground iron ore mine in Kiruna, in the very north of Sweden. Changes at the underground mine in Kiruna during the last 50 years, with new technology and new qualification demands, have step by step challenged the local hegemonic masculinity rooted in the old type of mining work and identity. This has been met by restoring responses. Still there are a lot of old and new masculine `hero stories' around that the male workers use to construct identities and to learn and to restore the connection between mining work and masculinity. This can be seen as an identity lag, as an asymmetry between structural changes and cultural changes. But it is not only a question of defending and restoring the old culture or identity. Workplace change necessitates the remaking of work practices and work identities and provides a space, and probably a need, for renegotiation of gendered identities. Some of this is done within the prevailing gender order, but there are also new types of masculinities (and femininities) that share the space with the old and perhaps fading macho-masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary changes in what constitutes work are producing different kinds of people in organizations and thus workers can be understood as engaging in ongoing identity work (Scheeres 2003; Solomon 2005). In this chapter we examine how this is played out in two workplaces focussing on one worker in each organisation. The first workplace is a further education institution that is increasingly commercialising its services. The second workplace is a large manufacturing company that is moving from being an autocratic hierarchical organisation to one where all workers are deployed in teams as part of the new participative management structures. Drawing on our ethnographic research and discourse analysis we foreground some of the complexities involved in worker-learner identity work, and in doing so problematise the idea that this identity work is transparent and that new identities are homogenous and easily produced. Further, work as a source of ‘learning self', and as meaningful and as essential to self fulfilment (du Gay 1996; Usher and Solomon 1999) is seen as leading to a maximisation of people's capacities in the workplace. This can be understood as a kind of identity work that incorporates desires as well as disciplines. For Foucault (1988), this entails the complexities of technologies of the self and we use this theoretical idea to discuss how the two workers govern or take care of themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is an experiment in writing subjectively about subjectivity. It gives an account of a four year study that was designed to discover the learning strategies used by disabled employees within a major financial institution that I refer to as Everybank. By "playing" with the research team's experience as female academics -- our bodies, our wardrobes, our clothing practices -- I explore what my co-investigators and I learned of our own subjectivity in the course of researching "corporate disability." Even as we attempted to maintain an external focus on the learning practices of disabled employees, we were compelled to attend to what we ourselves were being taught through an unfamiliar set of relations. Inhabiting corporate spaces and interacting with corporate managers meant learning new practices of communicating and interacting: speaking, writing but also dressing. For members of the research team, passing through corporate environments has given new meaning to the term "self-study." I conclude that learning by watching and learning by doing have not yet given way to computerized self-directed learning, at least not when it comes to the acquisition of work-able workplace subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking it's point of departure in some critical remarks to some of the most important recent theorizing of learning in the workplace, this chapter presents an alternative framework for theorizing learning as a subjective process in a social and societal context, based in life history research. Key concepts derived from European critical theory, subjectivity and experience, are briefly introduced with a view to their intellectual background. The chapter elaborates the implication of these concepts in relation to the understanding of emotional aspects of learning in everyday work life and in relation to the understanding of knowledge, based on examples from the author's research into professional learning (general practitioners). The pivotal role of language use and language socialisation is explained in brief, developing a psychodynamic complement to a language game concept of language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, I will use the strategy of placing the body at the centre of inquiry (Grosz 1994) in order to articulate issues about the relationship between work, subjectivity and learning. I will refer to ethnographic studies about learning safety in mining and aged care workplaces, to explore bodies, spatiality and learning in neoliberal workplaces. Learning safety at work was found to involve the formation of embodied subjectivities in profound and fundamental ways. Studies of experienced mine workers and trainees in aged care revealed different aspects of the formation of embodied subjectivities. Using the feminist poststructural analytical strategy of storylines with this ethnographic data reveals collective storylines through which the workers take up their subjectivities. The collective storylines involve practices that are antithetical to learning safety. A vertical analysis of individual stories however, also reveals the ways in which some individuals change, resist and take up agency in relation to these collective storylines. Understanding the simultaneous processes of the subjection of `docile bodies' and the embodied learning of physical actors, is necessary to address the practical problems of teaching and learning safe work practice and the theoretical problem of theorising the individual and the social in workplace learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores the learning processes by which people come both to recognise and constitute their subjectivities at work. Subjectivity is realised through enactment: articulations meshed with the boundaries defining the conditions, activities, geographic locations and positions that they find themselves negotiating in different work environments. Always, subjectivity is produced by power and acted on by power. And usually the subject exercises power, sometimes to resist the very power that is shaping it, but always from within the socio-psychic forces and resources that constitute it. Agency, it is argued here, is articulated in the subject's recognition of both the processes of its own constitution, and of the resources within these processes through which alternate readings and constitutions are tivity, agency finds openings for resistance and subversion of these discourses. In this chapter, the focus is upon so-called ‘boundaryless workers', those relying for their income upon a series of contracts with different employers. Drawing from a study of professional workers (nurses and adult educators) in boundaryless employment, the chapter examines their dual movements of constituting subjectivity through both lines of anchorage and lines of flight animating their daily negotiations of tasks, objects, knowledge and relationships. These dual movements of ‘escaping/becoming' in work, and the boundaryconstitution supporting them, are unlikely to be restricted to contract workers. However, their explicit activities of boundary work help amplify a phenomenon that may well be shared more broadly among workers in the new economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]