Learning and Work and the Politics of Working Life

Global Transformations and Collective Identities in Teaching, Nursing and Social Work

Terri Seddon, Lea Henriksson, Beatrix Niemeyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135190767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Large scale changes in work and education are a key feature of contemporary global transformations, with a pervasive politics that affects people's experiences of workplaces and learning spaces.

This thought-provoking book uses empirical research to question prevailing debates surrounding compliance at work, education and lifelong learning, and emphasises the importance of debate and dissent within the current terms and conditions of work. Examining a number of types of work, including teaching, nursing and social work, through a transnational research space, the contributors investigate how disturbances in work both constrain and enable collective identities in practical politics.

Structured around three main themes, the book covers:

• 
  
  

• Disturbed work: with cases of occupational reform in nursing and vocational teaching in Finland and re-regulating work in Australia

• 
  
  

• Disturbing work: examining contested occupational knowledge in German school to work transitions, paraprofessional healthwork in the UK, social work in Finland, and mobilising professional expertise in US Community College faculty and Australian adult literacy

• 
  
  

• Transforming politics: negotiating an ageing workforce in Germany, young adults moving through identities and careers, building a politics of 'we' through a global book project

An enlightening collection of international contributions, this book will appeal to all postgraduate students, researchers and policy makers, in education, work, and lifelong learning.

Chapter 1
Disturbing academic work

Theorising a global book project

Terri Seddon, Lea Henriksson and Beatrix Niemeyer

This chapter considers the way work is disturbed in global times by examining the process of preparing this book. We – the editorial group – reflect on our cross-national collaboration with the chapter authors to document the way work has been disturbed, and has been experienced as disturbing, as a consequence of what Sennett (1998) calls ‘flexible capitalism’. Reflecting on this case has allowed us to investigate the way these disturbances in the way work is organised also prompts people to work together in transforming politics. The chapter also serves as background to the other chapters in the collection, which provide further cases of disturbing work and evidence of transforming politics in working lives.

Building a platform for inquiry

We began work on this book at a Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Culture workshop by a lake in Finland. A group of eight researchers coalesced, talking about changes in the way work and education were organised. Two days in a workshop with intense discussions left us enthusiastic about doing cross-national collaborative research. The group made commitments – to prepare accounts of disturbing work in flexible capitalism from different occupational fields, educational settings and national jurisdictions and bring them into conversation with one another. Three of us agreed to take on the editorial role.

Yet once we got home, the impetus faltered. Six weeks on, with little to show, a tentative email conversation began amongst the editors. ‘How do you feel about this book project?’ we queried. ‘Ambivalent,’ we agreed. It all seemed so hard. There was so much else to do. This project came on top of other responsibilities – to work, families and other academic priorities. ‘A transnational, even transcontinental, book project is a very ambitious aim,’ said Beatrix. Lea responded, valuing the ‘opportunity to reflect on why I have been so silent on this book project’. Yet, she said, ‘I am also very eager to know how this book processing could be possible.’

We confronted a dilemma. On the one hand, we each faced our own university’s institutional duties and performance demands. On the other, we glimpsed the tantalising possibility of an academic adventure that would engage us intellectually in new conversations, ideas and knowledge building. It was these activities that we each understood to lie at the heart of an academic’s work. Yet it was these activities that were proving too hard to do in the face of workplace demands.

There were also practical challenges in actually doing this academic work across continents. It required us to find new ways of working across space, time and our separate academic cultures. Beatrix captured this. She noted that the book project had grown out of the general VET and Culture network rather than our common research experience. ‘We have had no chance so far to experience ourselves as a “community of practice”.’ She was also unsure that just working via virtual communication would sustain our commitment. So:

We should be aware that we need time and space to transform this general network ‘spirit’ into a working atmosphere of our editorial community. The practical question resulting from this: when and where will we meet again? How can we organise space and time for common reflecting? Will the network-meeting next year [at the VET and Culture conference] in Konstanz be early enough? I would be very happy if we could allow ourselves this time!

As this conversation progressed we became aware of interconnections. There were similarities between our own personal experiences in workplaces, occupations that were being re-ordered, and our research and writing. We agreed to read Sennett as a shared text, which provided a way of reflecting on our own working lives in academic terms. We recognised ourselves in his description of flexible capitalism:

[The] emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and so the words we use for it. ‘Career’, for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits. Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another. The word ‘job’ in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece of something which could be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime.

(Sennett 1998: 9)

Working together across continents, we came to see the way contemporary changes in work and education have created a new global political regime that endorses flexibility and learning, albeit with national and local variations. Moreover, as researchers, educators and citizens, we have become as much subject to this regime as those that we talk about in the empirical studies that make up the later part of the book.

Yet it was Sennett’s (1998: 148) concluding comment that resonated with our sense of frustration arising from the difficulties of doing our academic work. It focused our discussions and energies and gave this book its core agenda.

If change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don’t know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.

As a result of these discussions and our practical experiments in doing academic work by email, our work developed along three separate lines of inquiry:

• We dipped into various literatures in order to develop a lexicon to talk about our experiences of disturbing work, and to anchor and authorise our understandings and interpretations, in line with conventional research practice.

• We engaged with the various empirical studies that make up the body of this anthology – written from particular places across Europe, the US, UK and Australia and from across a range of human service occupations – from nursing, social work and education.

• And we talked together, mainly by email, sharing stories of our personal working lives and comparing our different experiences of flexible capitalism as it infected our academic workplaces and our country contexts.

We each saw the way different authors who wrote the empirical studies for this book sometimes took contexts for granted when interrogating their data, reworked concepts handed down from the past to fit new times and reproduced old silences by using old but authorised frameworks. Talking cross-nationally about these things made us aware of dissonance – in experience, histories and cultures and ways of understanding. These dissonances highlighted contradictions, jogged memories and pushed us back to ways of understanding that we felt we could trust outside the ‘weasel words’ of neoliberalism and managerialism.

Strikingly, we recognised that we, editors as well as chapter authors, were competent describing and analysing disturbing work, but much less able to see and discuss transforming politics. We began to see the way our work together, anchored in occupational fields, national contexts and disciplinary traditions, was constrained by place, time and culture, but also how that anchoring provided resources for understanding transforming politics, particularly when we worked with those resources across boundaries. Slowly, we realised that through our book project we were building important relationships, creating a space for transgressing familiar norms, and engaging in a ‘politics of we’. In what follows, we review the literature we found most useful and then describe how we came to reposition ourselves as editors and to see our own professional locations and experiences as a valuable resource for analysing our own project.

Dipping into literatures

Sennett’s idea that people come together in troubling times to ‘speak out of inner need’ provided a provocative starting point for our reflections on the heavy literatures that the social sciences has handed down to us from the past. This phrase captured something about being caught in dilemmas, having ‘no place to go’, struggling to negotiate somewhere to stand and to act. It suggested the idea of ‘contradiction’.

Points of contradiction when people experience disjuncture and speak out of inner need have long been recognised as a locus for collective coalescing and mobilisation. Marx (1845/1976: 619), for instance, talks of the ‘inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness’ within social life that revolutionises practice. Giddens (1984: 165–166) gives voice to this theme, saying:

We have to grasp how history is made through the active involvements and struggles of human beings, and yet at the same time both forms those human beings and produces outcomes which they neither intend nor foresee.

C. W. Mills (1971) describes the articulation of inner need as a process of moving from personal troubles to public issues. Troubles afflict individuals, in their sense of self, their immediate relationships and in those environments in which they are directly involved and aware. They give rise to the individual’s sense of being caught in a trap, locked in by larger-scale processes over which they have little control. In this respect troubles are private matters, an individual’s recognition that cherished values are threatened. Issues transcend these local personal environments and are instead evident in broader aspects of social life, in organisations and institutional arrangements, and in the way these coalesce to form larger social structures and histories. Issues are evident in the public domain, as publics become aware that their values are threatened. Initially this awareness may be diffuse and almost unarticulated, a pervasive ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) that is ephemeral and hard to pin down.

Yet as threats to values becomes more evident, this diffuse unease crystallises, sometimes in withdrawal and passivity and sometimes in talk and action. This awakening marks the recognition that each of us stands at the intersection of biography, history and social structure and that a self-consciousness of ourselves in history and society gives us more embracing ways of understanding the world and sharper insights into sensible courses of action. Mills describes this awakening:

[People] whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound, now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values.

(Mills 1971: 14)

Haug and her colleagues (1987) argue that these processes through which people awake from their personal troubles to see public issues can become a transforming politics. Yet whether and how this happens depends upon the way subjects actively write themselves into social relations of domination and subordination, and the practical work of turning heteronomy, ‘a state of social relations that marks out barriers to women’s [and men’s] strivings for autonomy and liberation’ (Carter 1987: 18) into autonomy or self-determination. They argue that we are not victims in these processes, as subjects subordinated to social structures. Rather, we are active makers of our subjectification as a consequence of the process through which we ‘perceive any given situation, approve or validate it, assess its goals as proper or worthy, repugnant or reprehensible … [which sets up] a field of conflict between dominant cultural values and oppositional attempts to wrest cultural meaning and pleasure from life’ (Haug et al. 1987: 41).

This tension between living dominant cultural norms compliantly or in conflict with them creates contradictions in experience which are felt in embodied ways as well as being evident in language and action. The challenge, Haug argues, is not to harmonise these contradictions, finding ways of living that erase their disturbing impact, creating numbness and amnesia and confirming our subjection within relations of power. Instead, the task is to ‘live historically’, refusing ‘to accept ourselves as “pieces of nature”, given and unquestioned’, and ‘to see ourselves as subjects who have become what they are and who are therefore subject to change’ (Haug et al. 1987: 51). This process of living historically means becoming aware of the way changes in work and life are formed historically, contextualised and experienced across social divisions. This awareness forms a basis for an everyday practical politics of working life – what might once have been called a ‘politics of liberation’ that contests social relations of domination and subordination as an everyday pursuit of social justice and collective happiness.

Yet as Haug (1984) argues, living contradictions through practical politics rather than accepting subjectification is not easy, especially given the slipperiness of norms within flexible capitalism. Dominant cultural norms are embedded in language that is mediated through texts and text-based systems of communication. ‘Information, knowledge, reasoning, decision-making, “culture”, scientific theorising, and the like become properties of organization’ and coordinate and regulate activity across local sites (Smith 1999: 79). These ‘textual practices of power’ create the familiar world of talk and tradition, becoming part of everyday life and lived in ways that are taken for granted, unless we are prompted to actively consider and question them. Even then, the experience of dissonance may not be enough to prompt us to live contradictions historically by asserting our own meanings and pleasures from living. As Haug (1984: 79) says, while changes in work and life may rupture established forms of living, this does not necessarily lead to change:

Whether people grasp the ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – disturbing work and transforming politics
• Chapter 1 Disturbing academic work
• Part I Reconfiguring occupational orders
• Part II The politics of expertise
• Part III Navigating work-learning careers
• Part IV Coda
• Index