The focus of the paper is to highlight the way in which different industrial production strategies (flexible mass production, flexible specialization, diversified quality production, etc) influence workers motivation to engage in learning on shop-floors and differentially predispose them to want to participate in new forms of working and learning. The issue of the relation between context, motivation and the development of work practice has been explored by a number of writers (Lave and Wenger 1991; Guile and Griffiths 2001; Boreham, Samurçay et al. 2002; Huys and van Hootegem 2002; Fischer, Boreham et al. 2004; Fuller and Unwin 2004; Harteis and Gruber 2004; Rainbird, Fuller et al. 2004; Evans, Hodkinson et al. 2006; Billett et al. 2007). Most writers, with the exception of Fuller&Unwin and Huys&van Hootegem, treat production contexts as invariant rather than differential influences on learning. This paper offers a new conceptual framework, based on ideas from Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and the Sociology of Work (SoW), to analyzing the mechanisms that connect individuals, their motives and contexts. From CHAT, it uses the concept of the object of activity to explain the driving force behind human activities. From SoW, it uses the idea of production strategies to take into account firms’ market strategies as a condition for work design and workplace organization. Taken in combination, this allows me to interpret workers’ motivation to learning in shop-floors as connected to the object of industrial activity (flexible mass production versus flexible specialization) which is the motive of the activity. The relation between workers’ motivation and the object/motive of the activity is mediated by workplace organization and in particular by the organizational principle of separation between conception and execution. This relation is not deterministic as workers retain the possibility of electing to engage in learning at work. In this study workers’ subjectivity is conceptualized as hierarchy of motives, which is seen as having its ontological grounding in the involvement in collective, historical and transformative processes of material production (Leont'ev; Stetsenko and Arievitch). This conceptualization of subjectivity and motivation offers an understanding of dispositions towards learning that is not based only on how they have been shaped by biographies (Hodkinson and Hodkinson), but as related to the activity object in which workers are participating. I distinguish degrees of relation with the industrial activity object on the basis of the workers’ possibility of influencing the design of their own jobs.

The case study method has been selected as a means of developing ideas about the relation between workers’ learning at work and strategies of production and to generalize its direction (Hammersley, Gomm et al. 2000; Mitchell 2000). I have selected mass production and flexible specialization for their contrasting features, in terms of object/motive of the production activity and organization of work set up to act on the activity object. I selected case studies in the region of Piedmont, in the area of Turin. The ethnographic study is the most appropriate method to investigate my case studies. I observed the workplaces, talked informally with workers, managers, trade unionists, interviewed them and collected various documents and observations of artefacts. Accordingly, the design takes the form of being multiple embedded, where the two enterprises count as the two case studies, and individual as units of analysis embedded in these (Yin 2003).

The expected outcome is some ways forward the understanding of the mechanisms that explain the relation between workplace organizations and learning. On the basis of the analysis of the data carried out so far, learning engagement in shop-floors is not only explained by expansive learning environment and individual dispositions. The engagement with object of activity – when this latter finds correspondence in the workers’ hierarchy of motives - can change the dispositions themselves as well as the work environment. Interviews of workers in the two case studies show that the engagement with the activity object (as possibility of influencing the design of their own jobs) plays a role in prompting learning activity. The poor engagement in dealing with the activity object not necessarily causes disaffection towards learning: it can bring about frustration which in turn causes resistance towards formal learning.