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The wilderness is often conceived as a place where persons can become confused or get into a wild condition (Nash 1982) and the 'wilderness years' as a time of uncertainty where the vastness of life, choices and roles bewilder actions that could be taken. Such spatial and temporal conditions could aptly be applied to graduates making the transition from safe contexts of educational preparation to becoming professionals at work. Our paper examines the nature of learning discovered by recent graduates participating in a symphony orchestra-initiated development program designed to nurture them through the transition to becoming professional orchestral musicians. We argue that this empirical example helps to support a conception of learning as an embodied and constructed experience with others in context. Here, learning to become 'a whole musician' is facilitated by guided contextualisation, a process that differs from conventional discussions of skill-based novice learning and mentorship. The competency that is being developed is one of learning how to become, forming a sense of identity as broader musical citizens as well as becoming members of more instrumental communities. Such attributes of graduateness are less about applying disciplinary or generic skills and more about committing to a form of lifelong learning that is relationally-based, a critical part of graduates developing a fitness for professional practice and the persistence to emerge from the wilderness to becoming professional.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge models of workplace learning that seek to isolate or manipulate a limited set of features to increase the probability of learning. Such models typically attribute learning (or its absence) to individual engagement, manager expectations or organizational affordances and are therefore at least implicitly causative. In contrast, we discuss the contributions of complexity theory principles such as emergence and novelty that suggest that learning work is more a creative and opportunistic process that emerges from contextualized interactional understandings among actors. Using qualitative case study methods, we discuss the experiences of workers in two organizations asked to 'act up' in their managers' role to ensure work continuity. We believe the differences in how workers take up these opportunities result from a complex combination of situational factors that generate invitational patterns signalled from and by various understandings and interactions among actors doing collective work. Rather than a deficit view of learning that needs fixing, an emergent model of learning work suggests that learning develops as a collective generative endeavour from changing patterns of interactional understandings with others. This re-positioning recognizes that although invitational qualities cannot be deterministically predicted, paying attention to the patterns of cues and signals created from actors interacting together can condition ways of understandings to expand what is possible when work practices also become learning practices.

This article examines the meaning of organizational learning (OL) from a MacIntyrian perspective. Key MacIntyrian terms such as practice, institution and relational dependence are explained and related to OL. It is argued that much of the literature concerned with OL, including that concerned with Communities of Practice, misses the moral and relational dimensions of organizations. An alternative MacIntyrian perspective considers the enduring nature of practices which transcends both individual and organizational interests. The notion of relational dependence extends practical involvement to consideration of what is in the collective interest even where people fundamentally disagree. Such dependence involves generosity towards others and the recognition that conflict is inevitable and desirable. The article concludes with an outline of what OL might be and some indicators of success.

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