ABSTRACT
The post-industrial phase of modernisation has placed learning in the nexus between work-life transitions and individual life courses. The adoption of the biographical approach to adult learning research is lending a voice to the adult learner but is also raises new theoretical issues in the understanding of the learner subject. In this chapter an exemplary case of unskilled female workers learning is followed by a theoretical development of a materialist concept of their learning in the context of labour market and gender relations. It introduces a psycho-societal approach to the analysis of the relation between societal transformation of work and the psychodynamics of life history. This approach is elaborated in a second exemplary case based on research in care workers learning and identities in the development of care work from invisible women’s duty to professional work. Through interpretation of nurses’ work experiences and self-reflections it provides insights in the dialectic between societal modernisation, changing gender relations and the subjective quality of care work, with an outlook to professionalisation of work in general.
