The research project is interested in the occupational participation of persons with mental illness. Thereby it focuses the learning processes of the involved organizations. It asks how companies or other employment-giving organizations learn to form and develop themselves (organizational learning) as such workplaces that they enable and promote the occupational participation of persons with mental illness and if necessary their individual learning.

Compared to other parts of the (here: German) population, the group of persons with mental illness are particularly confronted with occupational exclusion and the social, financial, and health effects linked therewith (DGPPN 2015: 19). Given both, this fact and the increase of mental illnesses in our society (von Kardoff & Ohlbrecht 2006; Seyd 2015) it is urgent to push on the basic research on working worlds regarding their answer to this question. So our project is to investigate organizational learning processes in workplaces that offer ‘supported employment’ and in ‘inclusive workplaces’ that integrate the mentally ill or individuals recovering from a mental illness. The funding for this research project has been applied at the German Research Foundation which decides in May on the funding. At ECER 2018 we would like to present the theoretical and methodologic framework of the project.

Beside its organizational education core, the project is theoretically linked to four discourses in particular: to the theory and research on supported employment (e.g. Becker & Drake 2003; Bejerholm et al. 2015; BMAS 2014; Marshall et al. 2014; Schaufelberger 2013), to the theory and research on explicitly inclusive companies (Galvao et al. 2005; Gehrmann 2015; Gericke 2010; Klein & Tenambergen 2016), to the educational theory and research on inclusion, particularly in company context (Boban & Hinz 2003; Hinz & Boban 2001), and to organizational socialization as a topic of organizational education research (Engel & Koch 2017; Göhlich & Schöpf 2011; Harney 2007).

Understanding organizational education as the science which studies organizations and their learning processes from an educational perspective (trying to understand these processes as foundation for developing options to support both the organizational learning and especially the organization’s development as learning environment for its members) the project’s core frame is an organizational education perspective: studying how organizations design the learning environment at the workplace to facilitate the learning processes required to fully integrate people with mental illness into the world of employment thereby enabling their occupational socialization.

The project approaches its investigation via two sub-projects. The first sub-project focuses on workplaces offering ‘supported employment’, and examines the rehabilitative cooperation between employers and social services providers (represented in the workplace by the job coach) within the occupational learning environments. Accordingly, it also looks at the related practice of working together under the conditions of the job market at large. The second sub-project studies ‘inclusive workplaces’ that specifically provide a customised environment tailored to meet the needs of specific individuals. These workplaces foster (supportive) learning environments on the threshold to the job market at large.

In each sub-project, three different workplaces have been chosen (sub-project 1: workplaces with supported employment, sub-project 2: inclusive workplaces) to explore the inclusionary logic behind learning environments in the workplace. The study will use methods of organizational ethnography combined with participatory observation, discussion analysis and artefact analysis. Phases of explorative ethnography will be followed by and linked with phases of focused ethnography (Knoblauch 2005). Thereby the field stays may be shorter than in traditional ethnography. To capture the complex processes of organizational practice despite the shortness and discotinuity of the field stays, we focus on scenes of company learning worlds. As „scene“ we term a eventlike – narrowly limited regarding time, space, actors, and actants – connection of interactions, which distinguish themselves by bodily performance and social reference (Göhlich, Engel & Höhne 2012; Engel 2011). The methodologic category ‚scene‘ offers the possibility to describe both performances of single actors related to the project’s issue and the interactions between the actors and their reference to a common third, and to situate the „Praxismuster“ (Göhlich 2014). As „Praxismuster“ (‚pattern of practice‘) we term a – visible, recurring, timely-spatially limited, performed by participation of more than one member of the organization, modally fixed and for its participants self-evident – segment of cooperation which in its recurrings is recognizable as a mode of practice of the respective organization shaping the organization’s further practice and its identity (Göhlich 2014). So, in the scenes of practice of the studied organizations, interactions with the employee with mental illness may be captured as patterns of practice characteristic for the studied company as inclusive (or exclusive) living and learning world. With the recurring field visits, the research questions and the gained hypotheses are precisingly reformulated by the layered data, until a thick description (Geertz 1987) of the object-founding hypotheses is possible.

The research project’s findings will contribute to the interdisciplinary debate about occupational inclusion as well as to discussions on learning within organisations as seen from the point of view of organizational education. Even though the pedagogical debate on an inclusive participation in work life is intensified since this is internationally stated as a human right, it is yet unclear which conditions are necessary to further the recognition of both equality and difference – here precisely: the non-discriminating participation of persons with mental illness - inside companies. The project will contribute to the clearing of those conditions. Our presentation at ECER 2018 will outline and discuss the theoretical and methodological frames of the project.

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