ABSTRACT

For most people the workplace is the site of tertiary socialization, after the family and the education system. It is here that workers learn to modify their performance and to understand their roles, including their gender roles, in the structures and interactions of the organization. In this respect, job roles, position within a hierarchy and inclusion or exclusion from career ladders contribute to people’s expectations of their own and others’ potential to learn. Workplace learning is of central importance and a crucially important site for learning, whatever vision is held of a learning society. At the same time, workplace learning is poorly understood and under-researched, but has moved to centre stage in discourses about the socalled ‘knowledge-based economy’ and in policies based on that concept.