Work, Subjectivity and Learning : Understanding Learning through Working Life
This shift acknowledges a broader set of workplace factors that shape workers’ learning and development. Yet equally, it acknowledges that this learning through engagement is also necessarily shaped by the diverse ways that individuals elect to engage or participate in workplace activities. Central here is the issue of individuals’ subjectivity and how this is shaped by but shapes engagement in work and, therefore, what learning flows from their participation. It is in considering the relations among subjectivity, learning and work that it is possible to advance both the conceptual and procedural bases for understanding learning through and for working life. Moreover, the focus on relations among subjectivity, work and learning represents a point of convergence for diverse disciplinary traditions and practices that are provided by the book’s contributors.
Work, Change and Workers
Provides a fresh account of the changing nature of work and how workers are changing as result of the requirements of contemporary working life. It explores the implications for preparing individuals for work and maintaining their skills throughout working life. This is done by examining the relations between the changing requirements for working life and how individuals engage in work. An analysis that engages the psychological, sociological, philosophical and anthropological literatures as they relate to work as well as recent empirical research that examines and elaborates perspectives of work and work practice as social institutions and as a vocation that individuals exercise with intentionality and agency. So a key basis for considering changing work and changing workers is the relationships between the social institutions and cultural needs and practices that necessitates and constitutes paid work and how individuals engage and elect to participate and learn in that work. Implications for vocational education, professional development and on-going learning throughout working life are addressed.

