Proposal for Paper

Researching Learning/Working Lives: Issues of Identity, Agency and Changing Experiences Of Work

Irene Malcolm and John Field, University of Stirling, Scotland

Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK

Much has been written about the changing nature of work (see e.g. Pahl 1988; Erikson and Vallas 1990) and such changes have had a considerable cumulative impact on the world of adult education. They play a central role in discussions of lifelong learning, where they are held to require new and far- reaching changes in policy. They are often quoted in pedagogic debates, where new approaches are justified by reference to the new requirements of the contemporary economy. Much adult education scholarship refers to the transformation of the labour market in advanced capitalist societies. However, it is important to recognise that the changing nature of work is not a uniform process: it affects different groups of workers in different ways and we can see important elements of continuity, as well as change.

Work has always been an important aspect of how people see themselves, how they relate to others, and how they experience control and power. This paper examines continuity, difference and diversity in respect of learning, agency, and identity in working lives. It examines whether the changes in work are affecting our sense of who we are, our belief in our ability to get things done, and our general approach to learning. For illustrative purposes, we draw on evidence from a systematic and large scale study of life history interviews with British adults.

Changing working life – changing worker identities? A number of recent accounts of workplace change have addressed questions of identity and learning. However, relatively few have tried to address the relations between these areas in any depth. Claude Dubar’s analysis of the impact of changing patterns of employment on learning and identity is an important exception (Dubar, 2000). In his recent study, Dubar suggests that Western societies are facing a crisis of identities, brought about by a comprehensive transformation in all of the most important agencies of socialisation, the workplace included.

According to Dubar, recent trends in the employment relationship and in the nature of the job have combined to erode the centrality of work to individual and collective senses of self-identity. Where craft skills rested on an identity which was shared and embodied, more recent trends have undermined the stability both of the skills and the communities that support them, as well as destroying the institutions that articulated collective aspirations (Dubar 2000, 116-7). In addition to the wide changes noted by other commentators, Dubar points to two further factors that have been relatively neglected. First is the development of work as a service relationship, so that each worker provides for clients and indeed is a client of others, in which Dubar believes to be a “conversion identitaire” (2000, 113). Second is the replacement of generalised labour struggles by mobilisations of a particular occupation, frequently against the State rather than a private employer, as well as a series of defensive struggles aimed – with little success – at protecting jobs. Dubar sees these new struggles as signs of a shift in relations of power at work in favour of the employer (2000, 118-20).

Dubar’s argument is that these patterns have consequences for learning. First, it creates considerable tension between two conceptions of competence (Dubar 2000, 110-11). On the one hand, competitive pressures force enterprises to seek skills that are developed and applied to particular jobs; work process knowledge is created by problem solving in a specific workplace, with all its formal and information hierarchies of relationships. On the other hand, educational institutions are under pressure to produce a high volume of qualified labour, which is defined as people possessing a bureaucratised set of competences, sanctioned by a credential of some kind. Second, it creates contradictory pressures on workers’ motivation to train and update their skills (Dubar 2000, 112). While companies and the State place a high priority on (generic) employability, and call upon individuals to take responsibility for ensuring that their labour market value remains current, workers themselves may identify less and less with their occupation. So workers may be less inclined to invest in learning for specific occupations, but may come under increased pressures to invest permanently in their (generic) employability.

Dubar’s analysis crystallises a line of thought that can be found elsewhere. Richard Sennett’s (1999) argument about the consequences of flexibility and mobility for the formation of character in the USA seems to rest on similar foundations to Dubar’s diagnosis of a crisis of identities. Like Dubar, Sennett points to a loosening of workers’ sense of attachment to the ‘community of practice’. “The short time frame of modern institutions”, moreover, “limits the ripening of informal trust”, which can only arise from long and repeated association (Sennett 1999, 24-5). This threatens the “ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives” (Sennett 1999, 31). Jim Crowther (2004) has taken up Sennett’s argument in the UK, applying it to the emergence of recent policies promoting lifelong learning.

The Learning Lives project This paper examines the interplay between changing employment patterns and agency, identity and learning. It illustrates these themes through two biographies of working learning lives. It draws on a much larger body of data, consisting of multiple interviews with individuals, as well as a quantitative analysis of household panel datai. The qualitative data are being gathered in two phases: first, individuals are interviewed twice about their life histories, which are considered retrospectively; second, the same people are interviewed several times about ‘real time’ changes in their life course. The household panel data are being examined with a view to establishing whether they show patterns of connection consistent with our findings from the qualitative evidence. This paper draws on life history interviews with two workers among our interviewees in Scotland.

The life history interviews are intended to explore the place of learning in people’s lives, with particular reference to their experiences of work. We are interested in learning biographies, and use intuitive definitions of agency (= control over life) and identity (= sense of self); we argue that these have a narrative component, in terms of stories people tell about themselves. However, the way that these stories are framed in connection with work raises important questions about agency and identity in a context that is often characterised by hierarchy, continuity and regulation, as well as by deregulation, individualisation and change.

In respect of agency and learning, our research raises the questions of (a) whether you have to be agentic to decide to learn, (b) what does learning do for people’s sense of self/agency, and (c) what is the place of work in relation to identity, agency and learning? These issues manifest themselves in the interviews in complex and multiple ways. The interviews cover a variety of different kinds of job, including those that are in sectors that have typically been labelled as part of the ‘new economy’ as well as those that stereotypically belong in the Fordist era; they also explore diverse experiences of employment and non- or un-employment.

John: Fordist craft worker turned trainer John was initially trained as a skilled engineer in manufacturing. Today, though, he is a training officer based in a large engineering company where many of the components and service functions are contracted out. Indeed, John was himself outsourced to a sub-contractor. As he described it, a human resources company contacted his then employer, “then went into talks and that was it, the company was set up, they identified a number of people to transfer in . . . and we were some of them”. Those who had transferred employer were protected under European legislation for the time being; when the contract expires, “Well, that’ll be up for renegotiation, we’ll just have to wait and see”. His own view was that “it hasn’t really affected us a great deal because terms and conditions are still the same; we’re just bossed or governed, if you like, from England now”. The one change, in his judgement, was boundary drawing: “See, they still think we are part of their business, and we’re not, we’re a support service and, you know, you get caught in it yourself, where do you have the fine line you know”. John’s view, though, was that over time “we’ve learned what to get involved in and what not to get involved in”. Indeed, it conferred a degree of control: “I’m probably like any other human being, I start to play on them, because that’s the way we’re getting played”. When workers from the engineering company stepped over the mark, he was able to remind them: “‘we don’t work for you’ (laugh)”. Conversely, at times, he felt his status as an outsider to be excluding: “You know, we’re a service provider now, but some people still think you’re part of the company, so you know you’ll get consulted on some things but not on others”. When decisions were criticised by employees of the engineering firm, “you tend to start to distance yourself”.

But the outsourcing was only part of a general process of change that John had experienced with the company. He had started out as a craft apprentice in the early 1980s, but market changes meant that he was constantly working on different engineering products. Subsequently, as a fitter then a craft trainer, he had watched the workforce “dwindle from the thousands to the hundreds”, as the company switched production elsewhere and concentrated its Scottish activities on research and development and contract management. As well as finding that his employer had been changed through outsourcing, he had witnessed considerable change in the training function. It had been through a number of name changes, for one thing: training, learning and development, human resource development, and finally learning development. The apprenticeship system, for example, was increasingly regulated by government agencies; SVQs, overseen by the Scottish Qualifications Agency, had become central to the new certification process; funding and monitoring were managed by the local enterprise network; and the sector skills council defined and monitored occupational standards. Yet compared to his own training, “with the type of work in here, the apprenticeship is very diluted”.

John had evidently proven himself adaptable and flexible, and he had adjusted to changes in his job and working environment. He had derived a strong sense of satisfaction and self-respect, from mastery of his craft: “you get a wee bit of pride seeing something … and you could say ‘I built that bit’”. The craft knowledge is helped by college attendance, but it was experience – putting things into practice – that counted. Needless to say, he thought that today’s apprentices could not feel the same, not least because they never saw the completed product. John had undertaken some taught programmes, including a qualification in training and development and the ECDL. At the time of the first interview he was “doing something on health and safety”. His attitude towards his own learning was, though, not a simple one: To go back and do something at a college, oh no, I don’t think I could do that now (laugh), you know, a day release type thing or a night school, I don’t think I could do it now. I’m just too old, too busy doing children’s homework as well, keeping them in the straight and narrow (laugh).

John is an archetypal Fordist manual worker in some respects. He has considerable pride in his craft skills, he took a traditional apprenticeship, he worked in an assembly line context, and now is responsible for the training of others in the same industry. He certainly shared some of the values and attitudes that Dubar identifies: for example, he feels sorry for today’s apprentices, who are subjected to the formal (even bureaucratic, in a Weberian sense) requirements of the Modern Apprenticeship scheme, but whose practical skills are developed by simplistic repetition of a specified set of highly specialised routines; unlike him, they work solely on one or two components. Sue: the Nomad in HR Sue is also employed in HR, but in the service sector. She described her job as consisting of “problem solving”, and covering a variety of issues including “new employees coming on board, performance issues, absence issues, sickness problems, disciplinaries, grievances”. Sue was in her late twenties, but had moved companies several times before taking up her present role in the call centre industry.

On leaving school, Sue found work as an office junior in a large tea company; after nine months, still aged only 17, she then became secretary to the R&D Director, and acquired increasing responsibilities, eventually supervising a clerical team. She then moved to a recruitment company but found it “too salesy”, and joined a computer games firm, running the administration and HR function. She found the company owners “excellent at what they did”, which was writing software, but hopeless organisationally, so she took on the job of making sure that they turned up for work and of dealing with poor performance. The company starting falling behind on contracts, and Sue had a number of arguments over what she regarded as unnecessary expenditure; in the end she walked out. She then spent a few months in the States, working in her uncle’s bar, came home and found a job in the training centre of a banking call centre for a few months, followed by half a year in an office in Greenock, before returning to HR in IT, a job which came to an end when the company relocated in England. Sue moved into her present post, initially as cover for maternity leave.

Experience is a persistent theme throughout Sue’s learning. Sue described the tea company as an extremely old-fashioned and patriarchal environment, where she initially thrived because she could use a PC; marked as a bright young worker, she acquired additional responsibilities on a very ad hoc and informal basis. Reflecting on this process of incremental but rapid career development, Sue was conscious of the fact that “I never, ever thought about the fact that I was doing it. It just happened while I was there and I just kind of grew with it”. Despite the patriarchal nature of the work environment, Sue had the confidence to try new roles, though again in retrospect she reflected that “I couldn’t do it now (laugh) because I’d probably cause chaos, but then it was fine because, you know, it was giving me the opportunity to learn so much, em, and get involved with so many things”. She left when things “had gotten to the point where, as a female in the business, I couldn’t go any further”. Of her other earlier roles, the job in computer games in particular had been “a real eye opener”. After the tea company and recruitment agency, this was “a totally different working environment . . . jeans and trainers every day and all these geeky games guys who worked bizarre hours and very, very much a laid-back working environment”.

Like John, Sue stressed her practical expertise: “I suppose I’m qualified by experience more than anything else”. Sue’s valuing of experience was, and is, important to her sense of self-worth. She had picked up HRM by a mixture of trial and error and talking to her mother, who was an HR manager in another company. She also described herself as “part qualified academically”, having taken several modules of a university course that led to CIPD membership, but never having completed it; she left the course when she changed employer and when her grandmother became seriously ill. Sue had found herself building up a network of contacts through her course, as well as by moving around: “ah’ve got about 4 or 5 other people in HR in other businesses . . . that ah can phone and say what would you do with this”. At the time of the first interview she was planning to take a graduate diploma.

At first sight, Sue seems very much at ease with constant change. She enjoyed the informality and challenge of working in the IT industry; she described the call centre industry as “a very young, a very busy, a very fun environment”. Work and lifestyle were not separated in any clear-cut way. For example, Sue had refused one job because “like ah it just wasn’t me and it was you must wear a white shirt and either a navy or a black suit everyday and ah’m like oh god ah can’t do that, ah can’t do that, I’ve got lots of nice coloured t-shirts to wear to work”.

However, she had started to question her ability constantly to find new positions. At one stage, she said she had asked herself : “it was like oh my god, ah need to look for another job, what if ah can’t do it, what if ah don’t know as much as ah think I know?” She had felt particularly nervous on returning to the call centre industry after four years in other jobs, since “the technology and the way things were done had moved on in leaps and bounds”. She was also aware that much of her specialist knowledge was context-specific: “Ah knew everything about my last company, they could say to me do you remember we did a tender for business and Sky and there was a guy whose CV we looked at? And ah’m like, oh yea, Jim Smith, ah’ll get you his CV”. She was already speculating on what would happen if she left her present employer: “that’s the scary thing about what ah do because you can go and you can take all your knowledge to another business and it’s, but it’s the, it takes you longer to learn these things”. While she could “rhyme off” legislation, it’s “the way we implement that into our business and the things we add to that as a value added best practice, that’s what’s difficult to learn”.

Sue, then, expresses many of the attitudes that Dubar has suggested as characteristic of the new economy. She shares with John a high opinion of experience as a source of expertise, as well as some scepticism about bureaucratised academic qualifications. Her experiences also include a certain amount of participation in formal training that was motivated simply by compliance with her employer’s decisions rather than her own learning aspirations (in her third interview, she expressed serious criticisms of the university course that she had continued to attend until she left the firm). She is also aware of, and starting to worry about, the limited portability of her experiential knowledge: it is quite one thing to memorise the codified provisions of employment legislation, and quite another to know how it is implemented in specific organisational settings. Conclusions Any concluding comments must necessarily be tentative, in view of the relatively limited evidence base that we can call upon at this stage of our research. Nevertheless, the illustrative life stories do suggest some further lines of enquiry. Our analysis suggests that while Dubar is probably right about the general tendencies that he describes, these broad trends conceal a range of different experiences. This is not in itself surprising, since much of Dubar’s own research took place among particular groups of male workers whose experiences since the 1970s have been of steep secular decline; in particular, he and his collaborators have conducted a number of studies of coal miners in the Pas-de-Calais region. While these are certainly not the only focus of his empirical work (he has, for example, also studied social class in the Lebanon), his general argument about identity – and, more implicitly, agency – appears to be much more characteristic of these declining, male- dominated, manual groups than of workers in the ‘new economy’, particularly women.

Perhaps this helps to explain why it is not clear that he fully considers the role of agency in these processes. While the changing nature of the contemporary workplace may undermine some established sources of workers’ agency, the same processes may also be eroding some established constraints on agency; conversely, workplace change may be creating new sources of agency while also establishing new constraints. The seeming feminisation of work in the “new economy” will affect men and women differently and may have implications for agency. The role of formal training and education within these processes may also be quite complex and sometimes unexpected. Such an opening up of the occupational space produces uncertainty (see some of Sue’s comments about her own future), but workers appear to negotiate the processes of change and transition in an agentic manner. By contrast, we would expect a clear collapse of agency and an erosion of identity among male manual workers in declining industries, who are also experiencing a loss of political mobilisation, and collapse of father-son relations, with few network resources or skills assets that can be transferred. The capacity for mobility and flexibility is indeed a critical one in the new capitalism, but it is not one that is universally shared.

Crowther, J (2004) ‘In and Against’ Lifelong Learning: flexibility and the corrosion of character, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 23, 2, 125- 36

Dubar C (2000) La crise des identités. L'interpretation d'une mutation, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France

Erikson, K and S P Vallas (eds.) (1990) The Nature of Work, New Haven, Yale University Press

Pahl, R (ed.) 1988 On Work: Historical, comparative and theoretical approaches Oxford, Blackwell Sennett, R (1999) The Corrosion of Character: the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism, New York, W.W. Norton i This is a collaborative project funded by the ESRC under its Teaching and Learning Research Programme. Our partners are Gert Biesta, Paul Lambe, Flora McLeod and Mike Tedder (Exeter), Ivor Goodson and Norma Adair (Brighton) and Phil Hodkinson and Heather Hodkinson (Leeds). Further details of Learning Lives can be found on the project website: http://www.learninglives.org/