Session Information
19 SES 01, Network 19 Session 1
Paper Session
Time:
2008-09-10
09:15-10:45
Room:
A1 316
Chair:
Dennis Beach
Contribution
Adult education in Sweden in the 20th century has been dominated by three sorts of provisions, a humanist, a leisure/recreational and a qualification/vocational geared towards perceived labour market needs, which is currently in ascendancy. A fourth perspective, a political-ideological and classically social democratic one has also been present in trade union educations - particularly in the more radical interpretations of the ideological foundations courses for union functionaries. It is concerned with providing ideological and technical skills and knowledge sufficient for union functionaries to represent workers interests in salary and working environment negotiations with employer representatives, but it is now being reconstructed through the direct involvement of employer associations in course design, delivery and evaluation.
The paper focuses on the collaboration introduced above and considers some of the observed effects in order to assess in whose or what interests these new developments seem to work. Recent agreements about the training of union officials developed between the Swedish Building and Allied Trades Union (SBAF) and branch employers are considered in particular, and one particular trade union education that is being given in this new partnership is focused on.
At the centre of our analysis are the documented social practices in the lived moments and historical ‘situatedness’ of the education offered and formulated between two discursive articulations: the ‘traditional’ social democratic educational discourse of the original trade union movement in Sweden and a new ‘post-Fordist’ education discourse that is currently gaining increasing purchase within this terrain and that is also currently strongly advanced from the political right, the Swedish Employers Association and the Building Trade Branch Organisation (BI-Building Industry). What we have termed ‘traditional trade unionists’ struggle to assert the first discourse in practice, albeit in some instances with some internal contradictions, whilst ‘new trades unionists’ and employer organisations assert the second. A hybrid discourse and habituated social practices have ensued. Our research has been about aspects of the formations of content and operational interests in this education discourse and the social practices it relates to.
Critical ethnographic methods have been used in data production, representation and analysis. This approach to ethnography relates closely to (and is also informed by) Habermas’ declarations concerning Freud’s psycho-analysis. It aims to open up for critical scrutiny the ideological processes through which actors carve out and stabilise particular forms of behaviour and develop understandings to provide a concrete examination of the conditions that give rise to and ‘normalise’ the rules, actions, beliefs and social relations in a social order and the forms of behaviour and belief this order engenders and benefits from.
The new education concord in the context researched by us has been shown to reawaken a political struggle within the labour movement. This struggle is on the one hand between a marginalised conflict perspective and a socially dominant consensus one. These conflicts have been present within union education really since the thirties. That’s one side of the picture. The other side has to do with opening up union education as a site for private educational (and economic) interests. This is the side that has been most clear in the present instance.
Method
Ethnographic methods have been used.
Expected Outcomes
The new neo-Fordist concord as it is currently formulated and operating seems able to act as a trigger in the interests of a movement back to a critical union movement and mission. But at present it seems to operate more as a foil of the dominant class interest.
References
Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 4: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge. Gustavsson, B. (1991). Bildningens väg. Tre bildningsideal i svensk arbetar-rörelse 1880 - 1930. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. LO (1976). Fackliga studier. Rapport till LO-Kongressen 1976. Stockholm: Prisma.
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