12 - CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF WORKPLACE LEARNING Helen Bound Institute for Adult Learning Singapore In this book, our understanding of workplace learning moves far beyond the individual acquiring knowledge and competencies, or updating skills. Eteläpelto (this volume) for example, reminds us that human actions have a social genesis, but as emphasised also by Billett (this volume), the individual worker’s engagement is essential for learning. It follows however, that engagement is not entirely related to an individual’s disposition; the circumstances of work also mediate such engagement. As Eteläpelto notes, “work identities are negotiated interdependently within the local sociocultural and material context of the workplace.” Billett (this volume) expands this understanding beyond the context of the workplace using Searle’s (1995) term, “institutional facts” (societal factors); comprising “norms, practices and privileging that can be identified as sets of cultural, historical, societal and situational factors”. This entwinement of context in learning through, for, and at work beyond the immediate context of the practice setting is referred to by Evans as the social ecology metaphor consisting of the relatedness between the socio-political and organisational scale (inclusive of national policies and regulations); the immediate work environment and the activity of the individual worker and their dispositions to learn. Gog approaches this expanded understanding of context from the perspective of what she calls “sectoral institutional logic”. It is institutional logic within a sector, argues Gog, that has a major bearing on the industry operating as a low-skills or high-skills industry. Using the security industry as an example, she illustrates the effect of an industry being entrenched in low-skills equilibrium, using price cutting as their dominant competitive strategy, on the limited affordances for workplace learning
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