Informal Learning in the Workplace

Unmasking Human Resource Development

John Garrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134667208
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Informal learning has become an extremely important issue as post-industrial workplaces seek to harness its productive potential. Managers and HRD practitioners have attempted to deploy informal learning in the design of corporate cultures, however, most discussions of the subject have tended to be uncritical expositions which do not challenge the underlying economic, philosophical and organisational rationale. Uniquely, this book goes against this tendency. It critically examines definitions of informal learning, and focuses on its application in a variety of workplace contexts. It features:

* theories of informal learning
* the unmasking of contemporary corporate rhetoric
* the implications for accounts of workplace learning of poststructuralist and post-modern perspectives.

Incorporating case studies based on interviews with practising managers and HRM practitioners, and a detailed glossary of key concepts and issues, this book will be a valuable reference for students of workplace learning.

1 What is informal learning in the workplace?

‘The postmodern perspective’ to which this study refers means above all the tearing off of the mask of illusions; the recognition of certain pretences as false and certain objectives as neither attainable nor, for that matter, desirable.

(Zygmunt Bauman 1993: 3)

Introduction

This book examines informal learning in various industrial contexts. It focuses primarily on everyday experience at work, exploring the effects of workplace practices on one’s learning. I make two main assumptions about informal learning: that there are indeed rich sources of learning in day-to-day practice situations and that what is learned from experience is dynamic and open to multiple configurations. In particular I draw on examples of human resource (HR) managers and practitioners’ negotiations, dilemmas, conflicts, successes and ‘failures’ in organisational and training developments, and also their personal and professional desires to illustrate the dialectical nature of informal learning.

The term dialectic is not used in the Hegelian sense of a synthesis of opposing tendencies in the thesis and antithesis. Here the term ‘dialectical’ needs to be distinguished from the conventional Hegelian and Marxian usages of dialectic which would relate learning to a privileged ‘system’ of needs and societal class divisions. I have drawn on Foucault’s post-structuralist theory of power, which represents a major departure from both Marxist and Freudian understandings of power. Critical theory (before Foucault) tended to conceive of societal construction as a composite of economic, cultural and psychological activities. Post-structuralism, however, abandons the idea of universals, holisms and composites, in favour of fragmentation and discontinuity.

Foucault viewed the individual as constituted by power, and the relations of power cannot be ‘established, consolidated nor implemented without the production … and functioning of a discourse’ (Foucault 1980; in Casey 1995: 13). The discursive practices of contemporary work are examined in this study through the stories of HRD practitioners who are caught in discourses which ‘frame’ their learning in very particular ways, for instance as ‘competence’. At the same time they experience informal learning in the everyday so that their stories represent an intersection between discourses and lived realities: they speak the tensions. Their stories are discursively constructed at one level and they live them at another.

Post-industrial corporations now use communication practices based on ‘team work’, self-direction, empowered workers and non-hierarchical work arrangements to design organisational ‘culture’. These practices are, in this study, viewed as shapers of the informal learning of employees. They are discursive practices, and their effects on working selves are described systematically. I am more interested in the construction of meanings than with the materiality of construction, although these are interrelated. For instance, material production today is characterised in many workplaces by e-mail networks, various computer and information technologies and automation. New forms of production have resulted in restructuring of work tasks, occupations and organisational practices. But as Casey (1995: 5) points out, the relationships between the institutional processes of the new work – particularly in ‘post-industrial corporate culture’ – and self-formation, have not yet been adequately described.

‘Self-formation’ is an astonishingly complex notion. It is deeply problematised by some writers such as Derrida (1982) and Lyotard (1984). Rorty (1989) and Aronowitz (1992) say ‘the self is a convenient ‘modern’ fiction contingent upon innumerable forces and identity processes. Some philosophers, including Marx, Durkheim and Freud, variously point to the social and historical conditions that pattern the self, whilst Sartre espoused the existential project of self-creation. Foucault, however, contends that the self is ‘an abstract construction, continually being redesigned in an on-going discourse generated by the imperatives of the policing process’ (Hutton 1988: 135). For Foucault, theories of the self are a kind of currency through which power over the mind is defined and extended. Whereas Freud sought to explain how knowledge gives us power over the self, Foucault seeks to demonstrate how power shapes our knowledge of the self.

For this text I am particularly interested in subjective experience. However, the capacity to act and the authenticity of subjective experience will be viewed with postmodern doubt. Such doubt treats modern identity significantly as a social outcome of contemporary discourses and the language of industrialism. A view of self that encompasses both identity-making processes (including cultural, psychological, biological and multilinear) and outcomes (self-strategies), remains useful in understanding a person’s informal learning.

Tensions between individuals and their workplaces raise many questions about the intersubjective nature of human discourse.¹ The dialectical relationship between the self and society, inherent in social action, is described by Lee (1992: 7) as ‘a complex process of negotiating a pathway through the circulating discourses which produce the possibility of meaning … for the world as well as for the “self”’. To address the dialectical relationship between the self and society and its inherent multiple meanings, I examine various theories about how we learn in the world of work and how workplaces are being organised to ‘facilitate’ learning organisations.

The various perspectives on work-based learning raise questions about the inextricable connection between learning at work and society. These are questions which should have been central to the massive growth in writing and research on work-based learning in the past ten years. Yet they have not. This ‘massive growth’ is what constitutes the new ‘workplace-based learning’ discourse, and its effects are significant within managerial practices, workplace reforms, organisational theory, the sociology of organisations, systems theory, adult education and training. Notwithstanding such powerful effects, this new discourse can either bypass or obscure what actually happens to individuals at work.

In the field of practice of HRD, it appears that many researchers are either satisfied with the literature’s concentration upon technical aspects of training and learning at work, or are lured (directly or indirectly) by their institutions or outside funding bodies to write about ‘exemplary practices’. Examples of ‘successful’ practices which empower or make one’s organisation, enterprise, workforce – indeed one’s country – ‘more clever’, are prevalent. Perhaps such themes attract a greater likelihood of funding from both government and private sources.

Many contemporary texts on learning at work focus on the range of ‘enhancing’ procedures and techniques such as coaching, mentoring, job rotations, trial and error, and so on. These ‘educative’ processes are convenient to assess and amenable to the instrumental requirements of ‘flexible specialisation’, ‘transferable skills’, ‘performance appraisals’ and ‘enterprise objectives’. This cluster of terms constitutes a language in which desired human resource products are highly-trained, flexible and competent. It is the dominant language of ‘human resource development’, and has the backing of industry, governments and unions. The language of experiential or ‘experience-based learning’ is being promoted as a valid form of knowledge acquisition. ‘Talk’ about work-based learning is thus in the terms of a discourse about human experience that is inseparable from power relations.

I argue in Chapter 2 that influential notions of informal learning have been located under the theoretical umbrella of ‘experiential learning’. The distinguishing feature of experiential learning according to Andresen, Boud and Cohen (1995), is that the experience of the learner occupies the central place in all considerations of teaching and learning. They add, ‘the ultimate goal of experiential learning involves the learner’s own appropriation of something that is to them personally significant and meaningful (sometimes spoken in terms of the learning being “true to the lived experience of learners”)’ (1995: 208). These standpoints serve as the ‘ultimate’ (and most ‘truthful’) justifications of experience-based learning. But this study argues that these standpoints are problematic at several levels, especially at the assumed levels of learner autonomy and intentionality (see Glossary).

Powerful shaping influences, such as local organisational or site power relations, and more broadly industry discourses, cast doubt on the degree to which one should accept the notion of ‘the learner’s own appropriation of something which is to them personally significant or meaningful’. Not only is the subject’s sense of meaning mediated, it is socially as well as personally constructed. Andresen, Boud and Cohen (1995) to an extent acknowledge this by arguing that learning is a ‘holistic process’, but the extent and effects on the person of the discontinuity of contemporary society, the strategies of flexible accumulation and the pragmatic world of labour markets should not be underestimated.

The philosophy of experiential learning somewhat rests upon Kierkegaard, who wrote in his Journals:

in order to help another effectively I must understand what he [sic] understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no use to him…. Instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.

(Kierkegaard 1959, cited in Kegan 1995: 278)

It is not enough to know what a person knows, or the way they may understand because the person is being continuously (and discursively) shaped. Their ‘own’ ways of knowing are immersed in discourses, power relations and local networks. The comfortable cohabitation of the valuing of experience in learning with a period of deeply conservative Western governments in which market economics rules is worth noting. Indeed, a dramatic blind-spot would exist if the direct and indirect influences of market economics on informal workplace learning and its growing links with formal education were not acknowledged.

With the powerful influence of market economics on workplace learning and its purposes in mind, my examination of everyday experience at work features several contextual questions. For instance, do HRD practitioners actually ‘help’ workers with their learning? Or are they managers of subtle technologies that help meet economically based objectives of the organisation? Why is it that informal learning is, at this particular moment, a focus of industry’s gaze? Indeed, how is this text and its field research constructed through discourses of informal learning? Of course, such questions need not be mutually exclusive. But they highlight the problematic, at times binary, nature of worker and manager perceptions about the purposes of learning, and the discursive construction of its meanings. The complexity of learning at work is such that there are multiple answers to each of the above questions – there is no overriding ‘truth’. Here, however, it is the question of what shapes informal learning that is of particular interest rather than narrow questions that seek to quantify, assess or measure it.

The discourses that shape informal learning

Contemporary HRD knowledge frameworks are unashamedly linked to market economics. It is the master discourse of market economics which gives the cues to the sub-discourses of HRD practices: consultancies, re-engineering, downsizing, outsourcing negotiations and image making on one hand, and discourses of quality performance on the other – capability, competence, total quality management (TQM), empowerment, self-direction, learning organisations, and so on. Economic and instrumental rationality are at the heart of the knowledge frameworks associated with each of these discourses as they are applied in Western societies. Knowledge is prized in so far as it can generate a market advantage (or service an operational area that has the capabilities to bring the organisation a market advantage). It is the generation of efficiencies, profit and institutional or organisational prestige that is primarily valued. This, of course, is not a bad thing per se, but in such a regime knowledge becomes characterised by what people actually do – and are seen to be doing. ‘Performativity’ requirements (Lyotard 1984) including financial and numerical performance indicators, become valorised. If something cannot be shown to be effective, it becomes dubious. Dubious corporate overheads are not carried for long in the postmodern world.

A contemporary epistemology of HRD practice is highly performance-based. Yet HRD practices are set against a backdrop of postmodern conditions – globalisation, discourses of ‘market penetration’, deregulation, privatisation, marketisation, dispersal of authorities (and of knowledge formation) and the feverish search for new ‘self’ definition. Bauman (1997: 14) describes these characteristics of the world we live in as ‘a polyphony of value-messages and the ensuing fragmentariness of life’. Power structures are changing, decision-making centres are shifting and traditional notions of knowledge construction, such as through universities (and their research) are being radically challenged. Postmodern ideas bring a set of epistemological challenges – a questioning of anything that suggests absolute principles of reasoning. Yet, ironically, even with postmodern doubt, faith in market economics at political and national policy-making levels appears to have reached a virtually unchallenged position in framing thought and action. What is constituting ‘valid’ knowledge is the direct and measurable link between thought and action; the idea and the market power of the product. Such a link, by definition, permeates the processes of self-identity formation, including the attempt to locate where one ‘belongs’ in the work maze.

What tends to be required of HRD practices is not a promotion of doubt or any problematising of cultural projects or of ethical or social justice issues. It is assumed in a market forces ideology that via ‘the market’ such issues will be resolved ‘naturally’, by the ‘natural order’. In other words market economists make the ontological assumption that ‘free market’ economics is close to or even reflects ‘human nature’. The outcomes of the ‘market place’ are thus reflections of nature and not manifestations of culture, history, power and language. Considering the assumption that the market economy reflects ‘human nature’, any trust in the so-called market place to determine ‘valid’ knowledge would appear to any sceptic to be naive at best.

Following Foucault’s propositions about the intimate connections between power and knowledge and considering scientific discourse as linked to the tightening of surveillance and control, the possible outcomes of market forces determining ‘valid’ knowledge become disturbing. For example, HRD knowledge and practices can be read as technologies of compliance and control – a techno-science that refines self-regulation and dependency in the guise of worker ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-direction’. Chapters 5 and 6 illustrate how these technologies can work. HRD practices are placed in a paradox by their intimate ties with the determining criteria of market economics. The paradox rejects the principles of absolute reason and yet they are subject to the governing rules of market economics – rules which apply, at this historic moment, almost absolutely.

Most advanced economies are encouraging their industries to make changes that will enhance worker productivity. The changes include:

• the introduction of competency-based standards for workers in most industries

• a greater emphasis on training, work-based learning; experiential learning; and recognition of prior learning

• demands from government, business and trade unions for ‘greater relevance’ of formal tertiary education courses to industry requirements.

Alone, each of these points carries enormous implications for HRD practices, including the reform of training methods to align with strategic organisational change processes, innovative curriculum development and assessment methods. Associated with the training reforms is a ‘master discourse’ about economic imperatives (Marginson 1997) including the need to seek greater productivity and competitiveness in the workplace. In the US, Britain, Canada, South Africa and Australia, large-scale foreign debt and poor competitive performance in a range of industries are perceived by the various national governments, unions and industry leaders as significant concerns for standards of living for future generations.

It is precisely this language which is prevalent in current industrial and workplace reforms. However, assumptions underlying economic imperatives should always be questioned. For instance, the widely accepted assertion that industry and workplace reforms are required to compete succ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is informal learning in the workplace?
• 2 Theorising informal learning
• 3 Work as a learning environment: unmasking the language of HRD
• 4 The hidden curriculum of learning at work
• 5 Professional identity and self-regulation at work
• 6 The performativity principle in informal learning
• 7 Retheorising informal workplace learning
• 8 Doubts about postmodern doubt: postscript
• Appendix: the research methods
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index