Purpose
– This article aims to review the changing demographics of employment and it proceeds to critically examine the existing literature on later-career workers’ experiences of training and development. Population ageing in developed economies has significant implications for workplace learning, given suggestions that most occupational learning for later-career workers occurs on-the-job within the workplace. The literature suggests that later-career workers receive very little formal occupational training. However, significant gaps are revealed in the existing research knowledge of the extent and nature of older workers learning particularly with regard to incidental learning in the workplace.
Design/methodology/approach
– A qualitative empirical investigation has been conducted among later-career managerial workers and the visual elicitation methodology adopted is detailed.
Findings
– The results of the investigation show how the later-career managers in question were learning extensively, albeit incidentally, from workplace challenges specifically those associated with their responsibilities and from interacting with their managers, teams and external stakeholders.
Originality/value
– The article draws conclusions for policymakers and those tasked with ensuring the continued learning and development of an ageing workforce.
In this article, we focus on the knowing of experienced middle managers in later career and make a twofold contribution to management learning research. First, we critically examine the construct of wisdom as a way of deepening understanding of such managers' knowing and we respond to the call to provide empirical evidence of the manifestations of wisdom in contemporary management practice. Second, we assess the managers' engagement with wisdom as a resource for identity-work. Management is increasingly conceptualised as an identity project, and we examine how managers deployed wisdom as a discursive identity resource. We show how wisdom was used to counter currently favoured normative narratives of evidence-based management and the associated subject position of the omniscient and rational, but never quite adequate, manager. We reveal how narratives of wisdom were drawn upon in constructing distinctive, valued and preferred managerial subjectivities sustainable in later career. Finally, we propose implications for management learning and manager education.
While the literature of mentoring is extensive, the theorization of mentoring is a noted deficiency. In addressing this deficiency, this conceptual article begins with a brief critical analysis of the extensive corpus of mentoring inquiry and discerns emerging theoretical trajectories as a foundation for the distinct theoretical focus adopted. The social constructionist approach to understanding identity, and Lacanian psychodynamic identity theorizing, is critically developed. The conceptualization of identity as a discursive construct, emerging from a balance between conscious identity-work and unconscious identity-regulation, is examined. These theoretical tools are then applied to mentoring. The article demonstrates that for both mentors and protégés, mentoring involves mutually beneficial identity-work, but that this identity-work can readily go awry with both parties potentially succumbing to forces distorting desired identities and negating the good intentions of mentoring. The implications for mentoring practice are detailed, and trajectories for empirical inquiry with identity are outlined.
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