Learning Organisations and Child Protection Agencies: Post-Fordist techniques?

Reforms currently taking place in organisations and their implications for education, training and learning in these organisations requires new and different ways of understanding. The recent focus on workplace learning and notions of "the learning organisation" raise challenges to understanding their significance as "technologies of training" applied within organisations. In social services organisations struggling with decades of reforms pushing them to be more "competitive and business-like", these reforms are even more complex. This paper, based on a study of child protection agencies in the state of New South Wales, Australia, indicates the ways in which the notion of the "learning organisation" is used to "govern" child protection services and workers. Rather than being a technique for encouraging team-work and increased participation by workers as part of post-Fordist forms of work organisation, as described by many commentators, this research indicates the ways in which it has been adopted as a technique in making neoliberal reforms practicable in organisations. It opens new questions in how we understand new "technologies of training", the way they are made practicable in work organisations and the changes demanded in the identity and character of the worker.