Learning in portfolio work: anchored innovation and mobile identity

Abstract

Portfolio work has become recognized as a significant if under‐researched form of work emerging in changing work structures. This article presents findings of a qualitative study of nurses and adult educators who function as ‘portfolio professionals’, in that they contract their services to multiple employers and organizations. Proceeding from interpretive analysis of their narratives, the focus here is their learning processes, particularly in relation to innovation. It is argued that they must learn how to perform innovative work while learning and acting within innovative work. Three learning/acting processes are identified: discerning and rendering something that others understand to be innovative, mobilizing others' activities around the innovation, and anchoring or integrating the innovation within existing systems. These processes inevitably entwine portfolio professionals' identities (as innovators) and their knowledge (as innovative models). Thus they are in danger of becoming fixed or anchored along with an innovation, and an important contrary movement is slipping away and beyond the very anchors they work to render.

Notes

University of Alberta, Ed North 7‐104, Faculty of Education, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G5, Canada. Email: [email protected]

An additional group of 20‐plus immigrant Canadian portfolio workers in garment, custodial, hospitality and other lower paid services are currently being interviewed in a second phase of this study.

Subsequent in‐depth analysis is being undertaken for each individual's history, examining connections between their actions and their particular social, economic and cultural contexts, and interpreting their changing meanings of these experiences and their identities. However, this analysis is not the focus of the present article.

The term portfolio professional is treated here as a category of portfolio work, and is used interchangeably with the terms ‘contractor’ and ‘independent’ nurse or educator, as the study participants often referred to themselves using these terms. In the following discussion, these different terms are employed to highlight different aspects of the employment relation.