This symposium builds on a cross-national collaborative research project which has been investigating the way globalisation, welfare state reform and neo-liberal discourses are reconfiguring occupational and educational orders in human services work, based on case studies from teaching, nursing, academic work, vocational education and social work. Building on Richard Sennett’s (1998) Corrosion of Character, we have used a book project to develop an argument about the way human services work is being disturbed by flexible capitalism and its intensified work practices, and is experienced as disturbing by practitioners within these workplaces. Our interest is in the way this ‘disturbing work’ constitutes a place for everyday practical politics that contribute to transformations of work, occupations and education. Sennett captures this notion by talking about people ‘speaking out of inner need’ in the context of corrosive new capitalist work practices. Our cross-national engagement, which has involved reflecting on a range of research-based chapters and our own experiences in our academic work and working together, has provided a fruitful site for interrogating changes in human services work. We have become aware that much conventional workplace politics involving traditional actors (employers, unions) is difficult to sustain or has limited effects today, and we have begun to identify a proliferation of other kinds of political practices – what we have termed a ‘politics of we’. This reflection on ‘we’ helps us to move back from the contemporary concerns with individuals and, instead, locate processes of individuated and individuating human service work in meso-level occupational structures and arrangements. It gives us a potential to speak up for the communal ‘we’. We consider ways of generating belonging in working life and the processes through which collectivities are fabricated. It also encourages us to reflect on and problematise the diversity and fragmentation embedded in contemporary occupational and educational orders and related categorisations. The old boundaries of work, education and welfare are being disturbed through these processes and this is evident in the changing nature of the categories of ‘truly professional’ and of ‘less-than professional’ (untrained, unqualified, non-professional, non-expert). Our argument is that these processes of fabrication and fragmentation are fundamental to the politics of working life today. This point goes beyond considerations of de- and re-professionalisation within an occupation. Instead it goes to the way institutional and workforce designs generated through cross-scale policy processes impact on the politics of occupation-making in everyday working life. Our research shows that this reshaping of occupational frames, organisation of working knowledge-knowing bodies, and processes that organise and resource capacity-building. impacts on occupational politics and reorders working life. The symposium outlines the major findings arising from our work in the production of our book, ‘Disturbing Work: Approaching Agency’ (Henrikkson, Seddon & Niemeyer) and documents the way our theorisations of disturbing work and the politics of ‘we’ are being developed in new research agenda in our respective fields of inquiry: lifelong learning, sociology of occupations and sociology of education.

The symposium outlines the major findings arising from our work in the production of our book, ‘Disturbing Work: Approaching Agency’ (Henrikkson, Seddon & Niemeyer) and documents the way our theorisations of disturbing work and the politics of ‘we’ are being developed in new research agenda in our respective fields of inquiry: lifelong learning, sociology of occupations and sociology of education.