described as exercising considerable agency as they exercise choice over their activities and actions and thus, are not constrained by the structures and institutions they are a part of or that in some way influence their activity.
1.3.2.
Implications for methodology
In the literature, many studies of non-permanent workers have focused on particular groups; it is rare to find a study that looks systematically across different groups as we did. This is the first point of difference and what contributes to the uniqueness of our study. Another critical point refers to the debate in the literature mentioned above that categorises non-permanent workers as either precarious or contingent. This debate reflects theoretically a dichotomy between structure (the precarious workers at the mercy of the structures within which they work) and agency (the contingent workers who exercise choice). In our study we privileged the concept of identity as this was core to the research questions we addressed, but we also work from a socio-cultural and socio-material perspective that meant we sought to understand the industry sector, its ways of working and what mediates the identity and learning of these workers. Consequently, from the individual respondents, we gathered data capturing their experience, their story and the context in which they work. This provided data that we analysed through multiple theoretical lenses but always letting the ‘data speak’. Our theoretical lenses include practice which does not separate out agency and structure but rather embeds each in the other, identity, socio-cultural and socio-material perspectives of learning,as well as some borrowing from cultural historical activity theory, namely the concept of mediation. However, given the strong theme in the data of precarity and contingency we also posed questions of the data in relation to these concepts, and found that in our sample, ‘non-permanent’ workers are neither contingent nor precarious, rather they experience aspects of contingency and precariousness to varying degrees, thus these labels are not helpful as binary definitions, which hide the reality of the lived experience of these workers.
1.4. Methodology This large qualitative study used semi-structured interviews of non-permanent workers (n=97) to understand the identity, learning and development of nonpermanent workers in three different sectors (see Figure 1).Our qualitative analysis was an iterative one. As each sector was completed, we built on the understandings we had gained from the previous study to inform the study in the next sector. The findings in this report are a result of further building on this iterative analysis where we undertook a systematic approach across all of our studies, explained further below. The research questions we sought to address are: 1. How does the experience of non-permanent work contribute to or constrain the learning of workers? 2. How do non-permanent workers identify with their work and how does this influence learning opportunities?
Developing non-permanent workers in Singapore
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