ABSTRACT
Contemporary analyses of gender in work, vocational education, and workplace learning in Canada should be framed within discourses of the socalled New Economy, which have become pervasive in policy and programs addressing labor and learning. While contested and multifaceted, these discourses generally celebrate the gradual shift from Canada’s heavily resource-based economy in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining with some heavy industry, to technology development, knowledge production, and information management. The New Economy discourses (Beck, 1995) embed other beliefs, by now familiar, in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries: human capital approaches to education and development; the so-called inevitability of globalized competition and accelerated change; time-space compression in work activity; flexibility in work structures and employment relationships; and a supposed need for continuous innovation and adaptation. In Canada, the liberal federal government’s celebration of entrepreneurial enterprise as an attractive employment form for turbulent times also became prominent in the 1990s (Industry Canada, 1999). Consequently, continuous (vocational) learning and training are promoted for everyone as critical to survival in the New Economy (HRDC, 2002). Despite some evidence disputing the premises of the continuous learning discourse,1 higher educational levels and participation in training are frequently linked to higher income, job satisfaction and overall satisfaction with work-life balance in Canada (Duxbury & Higgins, 2001).
