Interaction among employees: how does learning take place in the social communities of the workplace and how might such learning be supervised?

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to look at the senses in which everyday workplace interactions can be considered manifestations of learning at work and the ways in which such activity could be supervised. Our data consist of discussions between employees taped in two technology enterprises and three municipal youth centres, analysed from an ethnographical and an ethnomethodological perspective. The paper concludes with a discussion of how learning at work—seen as a contextual activity bound up with the work process itself and with the communities that operate within the work process—could be taken into account in the practices of fostering and supervising such learning.

Acknowledgement

The present paper is part of a larger research project ‘Learning and development of expertise in the interaction between higher education and working life’, funded by the Academy of Finland (project no. 78033).