The Researching Work & Learning (RWL) International Conference Series is the world’s longest, continuously running international research conference series serving the field of workplace learning. It was initiated in 1999. By 2022 it will have visited ten countries in five continents. The conference series as a whole is organised through the work of the RWL International Advisory Committee. This committee is composed of leading international scholars in the diverse field of workplace learning; www.rwlconferences.org is the standing organisational website of this committee. The 11th RWL conference took place at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in Germany in July 2019. The head of the local organising committee was Bernd Käpplinger and Anika Denninger was a key person within the local organising committee.
The major theme of the conference was on Configuring Enterprises as Spaces for Learning: Possibilities, Risks and Limits. Enterprises are crucial places and spaces for learning at work. They offer chances and possibilities to learn. Progressive enterprises make resources (money, time, mentors, learning circles, staff, etc.) available for their employees and configure themselves as learning organisations. Other firms can be less interested in the learning of their employees and do little to support learning. Digitalisation offers chances for blended and hybrid forms of learning in virtual spaces. A less optimistic prognosis envisages a loss of jobs or dramatic changes with risks of de-skilling. The whole development requires attention, thus the need for research.
This special issue contains papers presented in an earlier form at the conference and developed further for this issue. Soila Lemmetty considers employees’ opportunities for self-directed learning at technology organisations. Her study uses an ethnographic approach to examine situations in which self-directed learning is realised as an individual or collective phenomenon. Bill Esmond’s paper reports a qualitative study with two case studies, located in Germany and England, of the way vocational teachers’ understandings of facilitating learning across domains are constructed.
Felix Lukowski, Myriam Baum and Sabine Mohr focus on evidence of the provision of employer-provided training in times of technological change. The paper investigates German firms’ employer-provided continuing training provision for employees with different skill requirements. It uses firm-level data from the BIBB Establishment Panel on Training and Competence Development and a fractional logit model. Zan Chen, Arthur Chia and Xiaofang Bi write about ways in which innovative learning has been promoted for training and adult education in Singapore. They present findings from three projects. These show that a good proportion of training providers and adult educators are adopting blended learning to respond to changes and new demands.
Asmita Bhutani Vij ‘s paper is located in the education-based Non-Government Organisation (NGO) sector in India, a large sector that depends on activities of learning, training and motivation to sustain its underpaid and overworked workers. It argues that the notion of ‘permanent pedagogy’ is an essential strategy of NGOs to position the worker in a deficit perspective and trade their services for low employment, low wages, precarious work and often intensive emotional labour. James Garraway examines academics’ learning in times of change through a Change Laboratory approach. Academic work in universities is in flux with staff increasingly being confronted with multiple and conflicting roles, often leading to academics experiencing feelings of fragmentation and despair. In this paper the sequential and structured cycles of learning within three academic Change Laboratories are described and compared with reference to the main conflicts arising and their potential resolutions.
Joy Rosenow-Gerhard considers Innovation Labs as spaces for intrapreneurial learning. She discusses the question, ‘how is learning supported within innovation labs and what are its impeding factors?’ based on three case studies carried out in innovation labs in the social welfare sector in Germany. Amanda Lizier explores learning in complex adaptive organisations. Learning through work is often rather invisible within organisations. The article presents findings from an interview-based study of professionals in Australia which investigated their experiences of work and learning in complex adaptive organisations.
Overall, this collection of papers should encourage an open-minded but also critical discussion on the wide range of possibilities to learn or not to learn within enterprises. Approaches and research results which supported a progressive, sustainable and humanistic configuring of enterprises as spaces for learning were especially appreciated by the internationally diverse conference audience and are reflected here.