Abstract
The concept of ‘negotiation’ is often used to describe and explain the interactive nature of vocational learning. Such learning is accomplished as workers engage in the joint activities that comprise their occupational practice. In doing so they interact with the material and cultural resources that enable their work to produce and develop the objects and skills of their labour. The concept of negotiation offers a valuable means of addressing the contested and interdependent qualities of these activities when seeking to understand them as co-participative learning practices. However, too often in work-learning literature, the concept of negotiation remains under theorised and over reliant on generic understandings that do not sufficiently account for what workers do and how this can be understood as negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken with 12 workers from 4 different work places, this paper proposes that overcoming some of this lack of specificity can be achieved by viewing negotiation as comprising four forms of joint activity that workers are engaged in through the enactment of their work-learning. These forms are realised, discovered, concealed and protracted negotiations. The research focused on workers’ self description and explanation of the particular ways they went about their work and the purposes and outcomes accomplished through their personal practice. With this strong focus on the personal enactment and accounting of work practice, the findings indicate that negotiation can be used to conceptualise personal learning practices as social processes of engagement in joint activity when the four forms of negotiation are used to analyse and categorise workers’ personal practices.
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Smith, R. Conceptualising the Socio-Personal Practice of Learning in Work as Negotiation. Vocations and Learning 7, 127–143 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-013-9109-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-013-9109-1