ABSTRACT
Postindustrial, information and knowledge-based economies are constructed by the rapid spread of new technologies, new and dynamic forms of work organisation and divisions of labour. In such contexts, higher education and understandings of what constitutes ‘valid’ learning are also transformed. The transformation includes increasing demands by enterprises for flexible approaches to education and concurrent discourses of ‘lifelong’ and ‘experience-based’ learning which locate education as directly work related. In these discourses, work can constitute the curriculum. The education and training system is, in this case, shaped by market needs; education becomes a function of its economic profitability, which in turn is related to the higher skill requirements of the economy. This then foregrounds a human capital theorisation of flexible work-based learning that is based on the correlation between levels of learning and productivity. Lyotard (1984) refers to this as a ‘mercantilisation of knowledge’, in which any excess of skill supply will result in diminishing returns (wages, unemployment) and subsequently lead to a decrease in the individual demand for education (Tessaring 1998: 56). This chapter argues that it is human capital theory which has become the principal justification for the promotion of flexible workplace-based approaches to learning and contends that work-based learning is embedded in financial thinking – offering organisations a convenient new tool in the management of intellectual capital.
