Governing Learning Practices: Governmentality and Practices

Abstract

Workplace learning practices, once primarily the domain of specialist trainers, have become embedded and embodied in workers’ everyday practices, constituting workers with new identities as worker-learners and reconstituting their work. In this chapter, we use an analytics of governmentality to explore how we might understand these shifts. Such an approach contributes to practice-based perspectives on professional learning by foregrounding relations of power and governmentalities constituted in regimes of practice. Through a study of professional child protection workers, we illustrate how this shift in learning practices has been assembled through changed regimes of practice linked to neoliberal reform programmes associated with new public management.