Abstract
This chapter concludes Part I of the book (Chaps. 1, 2, 3 and 4) and outlines how the ethnographic research investigation that generated The Three Dimensions of Negotiation framework was constructed and conducted. It explains and justifies the qualified ethnographic approach taken and the collaborative measures adopted. The chapter introduces the men and women who opened their working lives to examination through research participation and outlines what that participation involved. A focus is on the comparative and the personal and contextual differences that sit at the heart of seeking to engage people in accounting for and critically reflecting on their experience as both personal and social practice. How people are viewed and understood is central to work-learning research and the extended ethnography – 18 months of observation and interview – outlined in this chapter offers insight into how the significance of the personal, and its acceptance and characterisation as the dynamic self-in-action (see Chaps. 1 and 3), can generate rich and robust data that begins to accurately identify and explore the nuances and subtleties that assist both personal and professional understanding of learning practices that are enacted within and incidental to the necessity of work. The guiding question of the research is outlined – How is learning negotiated in work – and the resulting framework is briefly discussed in terms of how its three dimensions relate to the perspectives taken and advanced through the first three chapters of the book. This outline becomes an introduction to the full elaboration of the framework through Chaps. 5, 6 and 7.
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Smith, R. (2018). Exploring Negotiation Through Personal Work Practice. In: Learning in Work. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75298-3_4
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