ABSTRACT
The workplace is an important site of learning, but it needs to be understood in the context of the power relations which characterize the employment relationship. These influences, some of them beyond the immediate workplace, may encourage or discourage employers’ investment in formal learning and the adoption of forms of work organization conducive to the promotion of informal learning. Theories of situated learning tend to stress the consensual and participative nature of learning at work rather than the constraints on individual and collective capacity for action. The authors analyse workplace learning in three small workgroups in the broader organizational and regulatory context in which they are located. Although training can be the subject of consensual decision-making, the authors argue that consensus and participation have to be constructed as a means for facilitating learning in the workplace, rather than taken as given.
