Toward Enriched Conceptions of Work Learning: Participation, Expansion, and Translation Among Individuals With/In Activity

Abstract

Despite the long recognition in HRD theory that learning is socially and materially situated in activity and relations, HRD literature indicates a continuing strong emphasis on individualistic theories representing learning as knowledge acquisition or individual development. It is argued here that understandings of work learning within HRD theory can be fruitfully enriched by more fully incorporating practice-based perspectives. Three contemporary theories that analyse learning as a relation of individuals with/in activity have been selected for discussion here: the participational perspective of situated cognition, the notion of expansion from cultural-historical activity theory, and the constructs of translation and mobilization presented by actor-network theory. While these are not particularly new to HRD, the contribution of this discussion is to bring together these theories, along with published empirical workplace research based on them, to highlight selected dynamics that may be useful tools for HRD theory development. One element in particular is read across the three theories: the dialectic of 'flying' and 'grounding', or lines of discontinuity and continuity characterising work learning. The argument is theory-driven, drawing from HRD literature of work learning and practicebased theories of social activity and knowledge production.In the human resource development field, learning embedded in everyday work practice has been long recognized. Much HRD research has employed theories of informal and incidental learning, action learning, and conceptions of the 'learning organization' as a site of continuous collective knowledge-production. What these theories all have in common is emphasis on joint work activity as an important site for learning. This site exists alongside, but certainly not subordinate to, formal instruction such as training interventions. Practice-based theories also insist that learning cannot be considered solely an individual process. Learning is understood to emerge from relations and interactions of people with the social and material elements of particular contexts. Context is thus considered carefully in terms of its divisions of labour and power relations, environmental affordances, cultural disciplines, language, and so forth.These arguments have also occupied researchers in the broader social sciences, particularly in new sociology, feminist studies, cultural studies, critical management/organization

Negative Knowledge: Understanding Professional Learning and Expertise

“…Yet, a concern about the concept might be that it advances a notion of workplace learning as an overly individualistic project and thereby neglects the growing importance of socio-cultural perspectives (Fenwick 2006). Such critique does not fully recognize the potential of the concept.…”

Positive Human Tacit Signal Approach and Competence System Intelligence in Organization

“…Blanchart and Thacker (2004) point out that performance problem may or may not actually exist; it is enough that one or more decision makers believe it does. Fenwick (2006) argue that the traditional assumption that observed problem, such as a task being carried out incorrectly, can be corrected simply by training is flawed. The performance problem -observed or suspected -can be due to wide range of factors and therefore it is difficult to isolate (Wexley & Latham, 2002;Gilley et al, 2002;McClernon, 2006).…”

“…High performance organizations prevent possible problems in advance (Blanchart & Thacker, 2004;Fenwick, 2006;Mankin, 2009). This requires the organization culture where certain triggering events are enough for starting the improvement actions for preventing the performance problem.…”

Women’s Learning in Contract Work: Practicing Contradictions in Boundaryless Conditions

“…Other useful perspectives include Wenger's (1998) constructs of engagement, belonging and identity in communities of practice, Latour's (2005) emphasis on 'translation' and mobilisations of both human and non-human actors in networks of action, and Davis and Sumara's (2006) application of emergence, complicity and simultaneities from complexity science. Each has its limitations, but all share a focus on material practice as embedding symbolic and discursive practice, an analysis of power dynamics constituting forms and recognition of knowledge and practice, a systemic view of learning collectives, and insistence upon tracing inter-objectivity in practice formation rather than stopping at the social constructivist level of inter-subjectivity (Fenwick 2003(Fenwick , 2007a.…”