Labouring in the knowledge fields: researching knowledge in globalising workspaces

Abstract

While research on globalisation can hardly be said to have ignored the phenomenon of the global corporation or the globally distributed supply chain, the focus has overwhelmingly been on ‘globalization from above’—on corporate structures and on the movement of global capital in global ‘knowledge economies’. My focus in this paper is on the challenge of researching what Appadurai calls ‘globalization from below’: on researching the knowledge‐building activities of people working in their own particular corners of global networks as they create the knowledge, language and practices that join up (however transiently) global workspaces. My interest is in the development of an ‘ethnography of circulations’ which takes the role of language seriously in the global circulation of ideas. Workplace education is implicated in the development of new global language practices that promote the circulation of certain ideas and working knowledge, and the restriction of others, in local/global workplaces. A more developed approach to an ethnography of circulations would contribute to our understandings of the potential of workplace education to be transformative as well as its predilection for being reproductive.

Keywords:

• Ethnography
• Globalisation
• Language
• Work‐related learning

Notes

1. In his 2001 article, Appadurai calls for ‘an architecture for area studies that is based on process geographies’—one that focuses on circulations rather than stabilities. For reasons that I hope this paper makes clear, that insight raised a compelling question for me—how do you do that? —but this is a question that was not addressed in any detail in that article. Appadurai (2002) directly addresses that question by articulating an ethnography of circulations so I have decided to make it my direct point of entry into this discussion of Appadurai's work on research and globalisation.