Within the workforce, workplace bullying is understood to be a serious issue that has both short and long term effects for individuals, organisations and society more generally (Keashley, 2001; Leymann, 1997; Mayhew, 2002; McCarthy, 2004).  Given the complexity that exists in relation to the early childhood education (ECE) workforce, research eliciting practitioner understandings of workplace bullying and its prevalence are essential to expanding awareness of the variation that exists in the way that practitioners experience and conceptualise the impact that such a phenomenon has on them as practitioners as well as the broader impacts on the field in terms of addressing workforce capacity building.  As such, the study reported in this paper addresses the dilemmas of individual practitioners in their understandings of workplace bullying and the implications of their experiences in aggregate. 

In light of the uncertainty that can surround the identities of ECE practitioners, in terms of disparate professional standing and workplace conditions, it is critical that investigations into workforce capacity issues focus on how individuals mobilise discourses to create, affirm and sustain themselves within the workforce.  Through examining the diverse yet interrelated contexts against which practitioners experience workplace bullying and participate in ECE services, poststructuralist theory assisted in understanding the production of self in relation to power within the ECE workforce.  From such a standpoint, the process of identity formation is clearly related to the subjectivity and formation of selves (Martin, Gutman & Hutton, 1988; Weedon, 1997), so it is the constructedness of personal and professional identity that is central.  What is important in this paper is how the ECE pracititioners understand how they engage with, accept, reject, resist or create particular subjectivities as a result of their direct experiences of workplace bullying.  The research questions that framed this study were therefore two-fold.  First, how do ECE practitioners experience workplace bullying? Second, what are the incidence and prevalence of ECE practitioner-perceived experiences of workplace bullying?

Such a focus, situated within this Austalian workplace context, sheds light on important themes that are also relevant to the broader ECE sector globally.  It is anticipated that the findings from this study will stimulate further in-depth discussions about workplace bullying generally as well as that which takes account of practitioner experiences of workplace bullying in ECE contexts in an attempt to promote social capital in ECE. If improvements are to be made, future policy and reform initiatives need to focus on the creation of positive environments through building positive social capital as well as organisational capital.  That is to say that individual pracititioner needs to be considered within ECE contexts because the consequences of not doing so not only affect the individual practitioners but also are connected with wider human resource management and organisational issues across the sector.  Declining workforce capacity also has the potential to affect adversely the physchological and educational outcomes of children.  In fact, Agyeman and Evans (2003) highlighted that there can be no environmental quality without social quality. 

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