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This is the first analysis of professional classes, their differing job control and skill utilization. Professional employees especially face declining job control, diminishing use of skills and increasing barriers to continuing learning. The book is an original guide for further studies on professional classes, job design, and training.

The last fifteen years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse, bringing both fresh insights and new dilemmas. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. The works of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard have variously found their way into the canons of educational research, and in more recent years, the influence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has also grown. This work has proved controversial both in the challenges it has raised for the purposes and practices of education and training but also over the assumptions underpinning such work. As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in our understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences. This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations: complexity science cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) actor-network theory (ANT) spatiality theories. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia this vital guide to understa

Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganisation and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.

The last fifteen years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse, bringing both fresh insights and new dilemmas. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. The works of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard have variously found their way into the canons of educational research, and in more recent years, the influence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has also grown. This work has proved controversial both in the challenges it has raised for the purposes and practices of education and training but also over the assumptions underpinning such work. As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in our understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences. This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations: complexity science cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) actor-network theory (ANT) spatiality theories. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia this vital guide to understanding fresh ways of conducting and understanding educational research will prove essential reading for everyone undertaking educational research in the modern world. 1. Introduction: Why Socio-Materiality in Education? 2. Emergence and Perturbation: Understanding Complexity Science 3. Complexity Theory in Educational Research 4. Contradiction and Expansion: Understanding Cultural-Historical Activity Theory 5. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory in Educational Research 6. Translation and network effects: Understanding Actor-Network Theory 7. Actor-Network Theory in Educational Research 8. Spatiality and Temporality: Understanding Cultural Geography 9. Spatial Theory in Educational Research 10. Socio-Material Approaches: Contributions and Issues for Educational Research Tara Fenwick is Professor of Professional Education at the School of Education, University of Stirling, UK. Richard Edwards is Professor of Education and Head of The School of Education at the University of Stirling, UK. Peter Sawchuk is Associate Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada.

In this thesis I explore the class dimensions of adult computer learning amongst industrial workers in Southern Ontario (Canada). My interests are to understand the full range of computer learning that working-class people engage in which is largely obscured by a coherent set of universalized, individualized, pedagogically-oriented tendencies that run through conventional adult learning theory. I use historical materialist and neo-Vygotskian frameworks in an integrated analysis of in-depth interviews (n = 73), case studies of micro-interaction as well as original analysis of large-scale survey data. I argue that computer learning is deeply embedded in relations of advanced capitalism. Central concepts include “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971), working-class learning “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1984), and “frame analysis” (Goffman, 1974). The material structure, orality and commodification in working-class computer learning are considered. Combining this analysis with a careful consideration of social standpoints in everyday activity we are able to understand computer learning as composed of differentiated and differentiating patterns of participation. Focusing on everyday practices, I claim that class standpoints provide the starting point for understanding a working-class learning habitus. When fully expressed in materially stable conditions this habitus gives rise to spontaneous, mutualistic and democratic learning communities. The establishment of these conditions is also influenced by gender and racial standpoints. Working people's computer learning activities centre around tactical methods, interstitial locations of practice, and class-based cultural networks. At the same time, computer learning activity is mediated by a highly fragmented and contradictory technological common sense which is dominated by individualized consumption, mystification of technology, exchange-value oriented activity and a process of incorporation into capitalist political economic relations.

This thesis explores, through semi-structured life-history interviews (11 industrial production workers; male and female; plus spouses; n = 20), the extended social relations that surround the efforts of working-class people and households as they take up the issue of computer literacy. Key aspects of these efforts are documented (personal histories; learning content and processes) with an emphasis on the role of informal, class-specific, learning networks. Secondary variables of gender, ethnicity, and household type are included within the analysis. The relevance of this research arises from the gap in the scholarship concerning the areas of: (a) informal learning; (b) computer literacy; and (c) working-class ethnography. The central claims I make through this research is that working-class people are actively and creatively taking up the issue of computer literacy; through a series of basic insufficiencies, the literature does not meaningfully reflect this process; and finally, I claim, through this research, to begin to outline a more generalized argument that the ways that working-class people take up the issue of computer literacy are mediated by historical class relations and associated contextualizing factors.