Session Information
32 SES 12 A, Shadows of the Future - Organizational Learning in the Context of Digitalization and other Challenges in the Workplace
Paper Session
Contribution
The current era is characterized by a situation of deep uncertainty that impacts on personal lives and society as a whole. One of the elements of the main crisis is the insecurity linked to one's working life, often characterized by precariousness and forced choices in directions other than those desired.
The public debate questions the adequacy of training systems for the integration and retention in the world of work, in particular by young people; training and work, however, are not two diachronic and consecutive moments in the life of an individual, but can penetrate, both in time and space through permanent education, formal training provided by companies, personal experiences and so on.
One of the most interesting areas, even if not very developed until the Nineties, is the role of the workplace not only as a living space for learning in adulthood, but as an opportunity for a type of learning that has no place in formal education systems, and as an environment that promotes the creation of new knowledge through the set of factors that generate learning.
Difficulties or delays in entering the labour market means for young people to be deprived of the chance to complete their professional development as they miss out on key competences available in workplace learning only.
The potential of the workplace as a place of learning can be inhibited or developed depending on the combination of different factors that relate mainly to individuals, to the organization, but also more broadly to the context in which the organization is placed; this means that the agency of a workplace as learning site is bounded by individual and organizational agency.
For crafting a framework for studying the interplay of individual and organizational bounded agency in workplace learning, strands of the literature on workplace learning (Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Koike and Inoki, 1990) and on organizational institutionalism (Scott, 2014) are combined with approaches to individual bounded agency in workplace learning (Evans, 2007; Evans, 2017).
The term “bounded” refers both to the opportunities (opportunity structures) given and the opportunities constrained by a particular environment. In other words, the framework aims at explaining variability and creativity in human and organizational behavior while accounting for the effects of the environment on the opportunities at hand as well as the ways actors respond to these opportunities (Hefler et al. 2019).
An organization expresses its agency for example through the way the jobs are designed, the work is organized into workplaces, if training is provided or not, HRD strategies and so on.
On the other hand, for understanding the role of individual bounded agency in workplace learning, the framework proposed by Karen Evans (2007; 2017) is merged with concepts from adult development psychology, in particular the concept of ‘life structure’ introduced by Daniel Levinson (Levinson, 1981; see also Hefler, 2013).
This paper presents findings of 8 organisational case studies designed to shed light on the interplay of individual and organisational agency in workplace learning, applying a cross-country comparative framework and focusing on the workplace learning available within the first ten years of occupational careers in the Adult Education Sector in Austria, England (UK), Italy, and Slovakia.
This study was realized as part of a 3 years research project funded by the European Commission.
How different individuals apply their agency for realising the learning potential of workplaces is at the heart of each organisational case study.
Method
The research intended to shed some light on the interplay between individual and organizational agency and how this bounded agency affects the learning potential of a learning place in particular for workers in the first years of their career. For this purpose, a cross-sectoral (Adult Education, Retail, Metal) and cross-country analysis was conducted within a European research project on 17 case studies developed in 8 European countries. In this paper we will focus on the Adult Education sector, for which 8 case studies were carried on in 4 different European Countries (Italy, Slovakia, Austria and United Kingdom). Following the theoretical framework, the fieldwork was preceded by a context analysis in order to identify the sites for the case studies that permit to frame the organizational field of each sector (i.e., Adult Education) and its sub-sectors as (i.e., General Education (Schools for Adults/Evening Schools), Vocational Education (for Adults), Active Labour Market Policies, Corporate Training, (Liberal) Adult Education). Each of the case studies implied a first round of interviews with four workers in their first 10 years of career, the General Director, the HRM, the Line Manager, the Employee’s representative (when possible) and a second round after the implementation of a learning project (that means 8 months between the two rounds of interviews) for a total of 16 interviews. The implementation of a ‘learning project’ represents an experimental, innovative approach to deepen access to knowledge about the organizations studied, though on-site participatory observation. It consists in the negotiation with the company and the workers of a topic they are interested in to develop in a small project team (5 to 8 workers) while researchers facilitate the process and carry on observation of the group dynamics related on learning processes on workplace. The learning project can lead to a training session, a workshop, a study visit, an international skype conference and so on. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded through Nvivo, together with the fieldnotes.
Expected Outcomes
By the time of writing we are finalizing country reports, so the comparative analysis needs to be completed. However, the organizational case studies allow us to stress out some preliminary findings that, following Fuller and Unwin, we have organized in an expansive/restrictive continuum in order to identify some features of the workplace that can expand or restrict their learning options. In our analysis a key role is played by non-routines activities that the worker has to face in the workplace and could be important sources of learning. Some companies deliberately assign non-routine activity in order to encourage learning, while others don’t, but working as adult educator opens to the chance to face unexpected events that can occur in the classrooms. Another important element is the so called “shadow of the future” that means the perspectives each worker has regards his/her own professional career, that in the case of adult educators is particularly varied. Frequent patterns of precarious employment limits agency and personal investment on professional identity. In addition to these, there are other elements that influence the learning potential of a workplace like the quality of intergenerational exchanges, HRD strategies, and management. The cross-comparative analysis will shed light on the effects organizational structures in different cultural and normative contexts can take regards the learning potential for early careers workers in adult education sector.
References
Evans, Karen (2007). Concepts of bounded agency in education, work, and the personal lives of young adults. International journal of psychology, Vol. 42, No 2, pp. 85-93. Evans, Karen (2017). Bounded Agency in Professional Lives. In: Goller, Michael and Paloniemi, Susanna (eds). Agency at Work: An Agentic Perspective on Professional Learning and Development. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 17-36. Fuller, Alison and Unwin, Lorna (2004). Expansive learning environments: integrating organizational and personal development. In: Rainbird, Helen; Fuller, Alison and Munro, Anne (eds). Workplace Learning in Context. London: Routledge; New York, N.Y., pp. 126-144. Hefler, Günter; Wulz, Janine; Steinheimer, Eva ; Studena, Ivana und Fedakova, Denisa (2019). The Intersection of Individual and Organisational Bounded Agency in Workplace Learning - A Comparative Approach - Background paper on the conceptional and theoretical framework of workpackage 5 and 6 of the ENLIVEN Project [unpublished draft version]. Vienna. Hefler, Günter and Markowitsch, Jörg (2012). Bridging Institutional Divides: Linking education, careers and work in ‘organizational space’ and ‘skill space’ dominated employment systems. In: Brooks, Rachel; Fuller, Alison and Waters, Johanna (eds). Changing Spaces of Education - New Perspectives on the Nature of Learning. London: Routledge, pp. 160-181. Levinson, Daniel L. (1981). Exploration in Biography: Evoluation of the Individual Life Structure in Adulthood. In: Rabin, A. I.; Aronoff, Joel; Barclay, Andrew M and Zucker, Robert A. (eds). Further explorations in personality. New York ; Chichester: Wiley, pp. 44-79. Scott, Richard W (2014). Institutions and Organizations - Ideas, Interests, and Identities. (4th extended edition ed.). London: Sage.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.