Abstract

This paper is written at the end of an Australian Research Council funded project of which the author is a co-director. It both reflects upon the findings of that project and considers what further work might be done to derive implications of a MacIntyrian perspective on learning at work. The paper fits in nicely with the theme of this conference because for MacIntyre, teaching is not a practice whereas many other forms of work are practices which people learn through actions and judgments. Key MacIntyrian terms such as practice, institution and relational dependence are explained and related to workplace learning. It is argued that much of the literature concerned with workplace learning, including that concerned with communities of practice, misses the moral and relational dimensions of work.

There has been some interest in MacIntyre's work among organizational and workplace learning theorists (Dawson and Bartholomew (2003) special issue of Organization Studies (2006), (Moore and Beadle 2006) Hager and Halliday (2006). In many ways MacIntyre's work seems to fit within the Community of Practice, situated and sociocultural perspectives to learning. Attractive though the idea of learning as increasingly significant participation in communities of practice is, there remains difficult issues in determining when a group becomes a community and the lack of conceptually robust analyses of power and its influence on learning. Contu and Willmott (2003) Blackler and McDonald (2000) Fenwick and Rubenson (2005) MacIntyre provides some direction out of these difficulties

There is nothing new in the idea of learning as developing the ability to act or judge in a contextually sensitive way nor in the idea that contextuality is implicit. Indeed all Aristotelian accounts of learning rely to some extent on these ideas. What is new is the speed with which some workplaces develop and seem no longer to provide a stable home for the practices that were at the core of their formation. Analysis of the concept of practice is needed in the light of such development. Indeed it may be argued that the international system of employment categorization depends upon a presumed stability in workplace practices that may not be realized.

MacIntyre regards liberal capitalist democracy (LCD) as in a state of crisis. He suggests that a main reason for this crisis is that there is no longer a common moral language that people can draw upon to decide collectively what to do. In its place, emotivism is the idea that moral judgments are no more than expressions of personal preference. It is an illusion to believe that the state can act as a neutral adjudicator between preferences as neutralist liberalism requires that it must. For MacIntyre this leads to an culture which is 'manipulative hellip; the ends are taken as given and not available for rational scrutiny' (MacIntyre 1981: 30) and the manipulators are the managers and therapists (Wain 2004: 93). Manipulation may be minimized through the development and sustenance of small scale associations of people however (MacIntyre 1994). Such associations, we argue, may be centred on workplaces and WL may be regarded as this kind of development and sustenance. What might be concluded from the project referred to above is that there is little empirical investigation of a MacIntyrian perspective on WL and good reasons to suppose that such investigation is unlikely ever to be prolific. Nevertheless some tentative conclusions can be set out and discussed.

Methods

conceptual analysis plus case studies

Results

Workplaces may usefully be regarded as an operational combination of what MacIntyre calls practice and institution. On this view WL has at least four aspects. The first is similar to the idea of increasing peripheral participation as a practitioner. The second is an individual transition from being able to reason in terms of immediate wants and desires to longer term understanding of remote goals competing for our attention and demanding our attention to the question of what is good. The third is a growing sense of relational dependence in which there is a recognition of the asymmetry in giving and receiving that come to replace relationships of rational exchange. Finally there is the maturation of others in the workplace to enable it to support the other aspects. While for the purposes of explanation these aspects can be set out separately, the aspects should be seen as connected for a proper understanding.

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ECER 2008 - Paper #434 - "MacIntyre and Practice: implications for workplace learning" - ECER 2008 john halliday, university of strathclyde, United Kingdom