Beyond competence, thinking through the changes: Economy, work and neo-liberalism

Abstract

The chapter considers workplace learning, vocational pedagogy, education and knowledge and the transformation of practice. It sets the discussion within the wider socio-economic context characterised by an increasingly turbulent environment in which the old certainties surrounding industrial Fordism of jobs for life have been found wanting. This is particularly the case in societies closely wedded to neo-liberalism such as the US and UK. These societies are marked by significant inequalities of wealth and income, polarised labour markets as well as substantial levels of underemployment, unemployment and overqualification. For some writers, the logic of capitalist development anticipates forms of social production which carry progressive possibilities, whereas for others the prognostication is much bleaker. The chapter explores these debates as they serve to frame the manner in which we make sense and engage with notions of competence and knowledge and mobilises notions of cognitive capitalism. It draws on discussions of vocationalism, vocational pedagogy as well as the constitution of vocational knowledge, debates which are set within particular historic, socio-economic and national contexts. It indicates the limitations of analyses of workplace learning drawing upon conceptualisations of ‘really useful knowledge’ and subject-based disciplinary knowledge. Workplace learning can easily lead to an instrumentalism concerned with enhancing variable labour power. The chapter suggests that disciplinary knowledge when allied to workplace experience can be appropriated by oppressed and marginalised groups, thereby becoming empowering as a source of ‘really useful knowledge’.