Towards an emergent view of learning work

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Towards an emergent view of learningworkMary C. Johnsson a & David Boud aa University of Technology , Sydney, AustraliaPublished online: 23 Apr 2010.

To cite this article: Mary C. Johnsson & David Boud (2010) Towards an emergent view of learningwork, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 29:3, 359-372, DOI: 10.1080/02601371003700683

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INT. J. OF LIFELONG EDUCATION, VOL. 29, NO. 3 (MAY–JUNE 2010), 359–372

International Journal of Lifelong Education ISSN 0260-1370 print/ISSN 1464-519X online © 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/02601371003700683

Towards an emergent view of learning work

MARY C. JOHNSSON and DAVID BOUDUniversity of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Taylor and FrancisTLED_A_470590.sgm10.1080/02601371003700683International Journal of Lifelong Education0260-1370 (print)/1464-519X (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis293000000May-June [email protected]

The purpose of this paper is to challenge models of workplace learning that seek to isolate ormanipulate a limited set of features to increase the probability of learning. Such models typi-cally attribute learning (or its absence) to individual engagement, manager expectations ororganizational affordances and are therefore at least implicitly causative. In contrast, wediscuss the contributions of complexity theory principles such as emergence and novelty thatsuggest that learning work is more a creative and opportunistic process that emerges fromcontextualized interactional understandings among actors. Using qualitative case study meth-ods, we discuss the experiences of workers in two organizations asked to ‘act up’ in theirmanagers’ role to ensure work continuity. We believe the differences in how workers take upthese opportunities result from a complex combination of situational factors that generateinvitational patterns signalled from and by various understandings and interactions amongactors doing collective work. Rather than a deficit view of learning that needs fixing, an emer-gent model of learning work suggests that learning develops as a collective generative endeav-our from changing patterns of interactional understandings with others. This re-positioningrecognizes that although invitational qualities cannot be deterministically predicted, payingattention to the patterns of cues and signals created from actors interacting together cancondition ways of understandings to expand what is possible when work practices also becomelearning practices.

Introduction

The growing interest in researching learning in and at work presupposes the exist-ence of a relationship between learning and work that is useful for unpacking theconcepts of ‘learning’ and ‘work’ and for understanding how they interrelate.Fenwick and Rubenson (2005: 1) undertook a review of nearly 300 articles writtenby researchers specifically focusing on ‘learning (processes, dimensions, relations)in and through work’ in 10 scholarly journals during 1999–2004. What they foundwas a wide variation in what researchers understood as learning but a growing occur-rence of empirical discussions on work practices, practice-based theories andnotions of communities of practice. In a majority of the articles reviewed, they foundthat learning is assumed to be an individual phenomenon although it has collectiveimpact, since the performance and delivery of work typically requires, and isgenerated from, the collective efforts of several individuals working together. One

Mary C. Johnsson is an early career researcher in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University ofTechnology, Sydney. Correspondence: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology,Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Email: [email protected] Boud is Professor of Adult Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Tech-nology, Sydney. Correspondence: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, POBox 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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360 MARY C. JOHNSSON AND DAVID BOUD

example of this is that the application of individual knowledge to work activity canadd to organizational resources resulting in improved business capabilities (Fenwickand Rubenson 2005: 4). Another is that learning can be conceptualized as ‘informa-tion flow’ and ‘diffusion’ among multiple individuals and as ways of ‘social partici-pation’ and constructed joint action within teams, groups, communities of practiceand the organization (Fenwick and Rubenson 2005: 4–6).

In the area of work and learning, Billett’s earlier studies (2001a, b, c) on co-participation have been particularly influential in suggesting that the quality oflearning outcomes is based on a reciprocal relationship between how organizationsstructure affordances to legitimize or undermine learning opportunities and howindividuals engage in those learning opportunities. Billett’s recent work (2006,2008) has shifted the nature of this relationship from reciprocity to relational inter-dependence while also refining individual engagement in ontogenetic terms.However, his focus continues to examine the tension between entities or dualisticconcepts set out often in opposition, for example, workplaces and individuals, orga-nizational affordances and individual engagement, the social world and individuals.

In this paper, we challenge views of learning such as that of Billett and others,which can be taken to imply that features of the work environment can be isolatedand manipulated to increase the probability of learning. In contrast, we introducethe concepts of emergence and novelty from complexity theory, suggesting thatnew properties and behaviours emerge from individuals working together incircumstances that cannot be predicted in deterministic and causal ways. Further wesuggest, following Mead (1959 [1932]), that the social world of work performanceand work behaviour shapes invitational qualities that provide cues and ‘condition-ing relationships’ that individuals working collectively use to make sense, attributesignificance and decide how to proceed in the practical affairs of organized work.

Understanding learning as a constructed, emergent and invitational phenome-non suggests a character to learning that differs from commonly understoodmeanings that are dominantly cognitive, acquisition-oriented, normative and explic-itly or implicitly causative (Kim 1993, Sfard 1998, Steiner 1998). Rather, learning isdiscovered and generated together with others from a complex web of contextual,interactional and expectational factors. While learning at work involves individualsand their work environment, opportunities for learning are created less from thetension between individual engagement and organizational affordances (Billett2001a), or the dual reciprocal relationship between individuals and the workenvironment (Billett cited by Bryson et al. 2006: 293) than from contingently formedpatterns of understandings and interactions when actors enact the practicaland situated work activities with others, often using material resources in theirenvironment.

We illustrate this view of learning work by comparing and contrasting work prac-tices in two case studies we recently completed: a local government council and autility organization. Through researcher observations and worker self-reportedreflections, we discuss exemplars of workers learning (or not) from the experienceof ‘acting up’ in another person’s job when for example, their manager is absent orgoes on leave. Our discussion of findings identifies how workers navigate thecomplexities of their work environment through various signals and cues theyreceive from the ways they act and talk and draw inferences from their everydaywork. Some patterns of interactions generate more invitational qualities and spacesfor learning than others; they condition relationships towards directions that

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AN EMERGENT VIEW OF LEARNING WORK 361

influence the emergence of learning for some workers but not for others. This isbecause workers constantly (re-)form their current bases for action throughenmeshing past experiences with the specifics of contextual priorities that mustnecessarily be accommodated. We conclude our paper with some observationsabout the relevance of complexity principles for re-viewing work environments ascreative spaces for exploring possibilities through the public forums of work andwork practices.

From causative to emergent models of learning work

The study of complexity in nature, for example the collective animal behaviour ofant colonies and bird-flocking (Maturana and Varela 1987, Anderson and Franks2001, Sumpter 2005) has generated researcher interest in developing analogies forhuman learning in the social sciences (Stacey 2001, Anderson and McMillan 2003,Stacey and Griffin 2005, 2008). A complexity principle from the biological sciencesstates that macro-level or global patterns arise from the behaviour of local interactingagents, but this global behaviour cannot be traced back to the behaviour of any indi-vidual agent; rather this behaviour emerges (the emergence principle) and is novel(the novelty principle) with respect to the individual agents (De Wolf and Holvoet2004). The organizational analogy, if it holds, is that collective behaviour as shapedby shared understandings and made visible by the actions and talk of groups, cannotbe explained with reference to the combinations of individual understandings,motivations and actions.

The emergence principle therefore disputes the claim made by Kim (1993: 37,43, our italics) in his paper that it is possible to ‘build a theory about the processthrough which individual learning advances organizational learning [using the conceptof a group as] a collective individual… [or] extended individuals’. Kim’s paper joinsmany others that imbue learning in organizations with causal drivers that can beattributed to motivation (Deci et al. 1991, Pool 2000), knowledge (Argyris 1993,Lesser 2000) or transfer (Detterman and Sternberg 1993, Eraut 2004) and thathelped to fuel the momentum of ‘the learning organization’ (Senge 1990, Chawlaand Renesch 1995, Lipschitz et al. 1996).

Analogously, Billett (2001a, b, c) introduced the notion of co-participation, suggest-ing that the quality of learning is shaped centrally by a reciprocal relationship betweenhow organizations afford the opportunities for learning and how individuals engagein those opportunities (Billett 2001a: 209). According to Billett: ‘The degree by whichworkplaces provide rich learning outcomes through everyday activities and inten-tional interventions will be determined, at least in part, by its readiness to affordopportunities and support for learning’ (Billett 2001a: 210). Billett goes onto assertthat because workplaces are contested environments, these learning affordances arenot provided evenly to all workers; as well, workers elect to engage in these oppor-tunities differently, resulting in the variable take-up of opportunities and qualitiesof learning experiences (Billett 2001a: 210). An implication of Billett’s co-participation concept is that workplaces can be altered to become more invitationaland encouraging and that activities such as the development of workplace curriculaor learning guides can result in improved workplace learning (Billett 2001a: 213).

Billett supports his model of co-participation by discussing findings from priorempirical studies (Billett et al. 1998, Billett 2000). Others have used similar tensions

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between access and opportunity, personal disposition and situational factors, facili-tating and constraining factors, or restrictive and expansive learning environmentsto test empirically the nature of relations between various factors that signal learn-ing at work (Ellström 2001, Frese and Fay 2001, Fuller and Unwin 2004, Brysonet al. 2006). Rather than co-participation, Billett’s most recent work now theorizesrelations of ‘interdependence between the immediate social experience andindividuals’ appropriation of that experience… constitut[ing] a dualistic andrelational base for individuals’ learning and remaking of their work activi-ties…[that can be] relational in unequal, inconsistent and disjointed ways’ (Billett2008: 238–239). Such views start to recognize the complexity of the relationshipbetween work and learning, but we believe they are still reductionist in simplifyingthe phenomenon of learning work to tensions between polarities. They arepremised on the notion that a limited set of factors can be manipulated to improvethe probability of learning. These approaches contribute to at least implicitlycausative models of learning.

A more non-deterministic notion of the relationship between learning and workrecognizes that this phenomenon cannot be attributed to its constituent elements(the group/individual dichotomy as previously mentioned) nor to any one or set ofelements that can be universally differentiated—for example, organizationalcultural values, past events such as mergers or crises, prior experience of particulartypes of work or whether the work environment is encouraging of learning. Apply-ing the emergence principle and the novelty principle together to learning worksuggests that a social poetic (from the Greek poiesis, to make new or create) phenom-enon is created (Shotter 2008), one that creates what Bhabha (Bhabha and Ruther-ford 1990: 211) calls a ‘hybrid third space…[where we are not] able to trace twooriginal moments from which the third emerges’.

The notion that something new is created that is more than the sum of its partsis further enhanced by two other related concepts from complexity theory: the self-organization principle (De Wolf and Holvoet 2004) and the snowball effect (Arthur ascited by Mason 2008: 41). Self-organization suggests that behaviour continues to beperpetuated by local interacting agents rather than any concept of a central or exec-utive control mechanism. In workplaces embracing a post-bureaucratic paradigm,self-organization resonates with analogous concepts of employee empowerment and‘bottom-up’ accountability (Wilkinson 1998, Wall et al. 2002). It indicates a shift inthe role of managers from controllers or enablers of workplace affordances to prac-tical authors and interaction partners in the dialogical activities of everyday work(Cunliffe 2003, Koopmans et al. 2006). Further, the snowball effect recognizes thatmomentum can come from a series of small, possibly random, events but that insome combinations of contextual arrangements and interactive effects, an autocat-alytic result occurs that disrupts the stability of the phenomenon (autopoiesis ascoined by Maturana and Varela 1980) or what is called a tipping point in business(Gladwell 2000).

These complexity concepts that govern an ecological view of nature are comple-mented by Mead’s philosophical work on the nature of time (1959 [1932]). Meadchallenges common understandings that time can be segregated into discrete inter-vals of past, present and future, further disputing the predictive power that pastexperiences have for future behaviour (Schwandt and Marquardt 1999, Race 2000,Edmondson 2004). For Mead, the present always remains the locus of reality, withthe past only representing the past in its relation to the present, i.e. actors make

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sense of something that has occurred retrospectively but only from their position inthe present. As Murphy interprets Mead:

The distinctive character of the past in its relation to the present is manifestlythat of irrevocability. As conditioning the present, as making its occurrencepossible, the past must have been of determinate character. It expresses thesettled condition to which the present must conform and without which it couldnot have been what it is.… [T]he past is that out of which the present has arisenand irreversibility…has its critical value in terms of such conditioning.

The doctrine of emergence asks us to believe that the present is always in somesense novel, abrupt and something that is not completely determined by thepast out of which it arose. A present, if it really is new at all, will have in it anelement of temporal and causal discontinuity. (Murphy 1959: xvii)

So as actors, while we can never return to our past, we continually reconstruct ourrecall of these past experiences from our current positions. As Josselson (1996: 35)observes transposing Kierkegaard: ‘We live life forwards but understand it back-wards.’ Our present is partially conditioned by our past but we require what Mead(1959 [1932]: 37–38) calls ‘contact experience’ created from interactional under-standings of living (and working) in the present with others. These experiencesinclude cues such as gesture and response and Mead’s theory of communicativeaction (Blumer 1969, Blumer and Morrione 2004) to continue to interpret mean-ingfully what remains significant and relevant in our contextual environments.

Human actors are natural contextualizing agents—we use talk, actions andjudgements consciously and unconsciously to signal our rational, conative andaffective intentions. But we are also subjective interpreters—what one person inter-prets from the work context as relevant and significant may differ considerablyfrom another person who is situated in the same work context. Therefore, interac-tive understandings need to be negotiated and reconciled because work is a publicrather than private affair that is located and played out in the public sphere(Kemmis 2004).

Conceptualizing learning work as a non-deterministic and interactional phenom-enon from which novel shared understandings emerge structures the nature oflearning as a generative endeavour rather than being conceptualized as a deficitmodel for which root cause analysis is regarded as beneficial and instrumental. Weinterrogate this alternative view of learning by next discussing our research workwith two organizations.

How and when does learning emerge? Learning work in two organizations

We are part of a larger research team that is researching the interrelationshipbetween work and learning and investigating in what ways learning that is integratedwith work can emerge from work. We are using multiple qualitative data methods inthe tradition of case study methodology and narrative inquiry to understand howresearch participants experience the phenomenon of learning through work. Weare unpacking the ways in which these work and learning practices are deployed

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through how participants act and talk with others and in how they use materialresources to perpetuate their ongoing understandings of work and learning. Here,we discuss the experiences of participants working in two organizations:

(1) a local government council responsible for community services in a suburbanarea of a major metropolitan city (we call this organization Council),

(2) a utility responsible for provision of energy infrastructure and services for aregion of the same city (we call this organization Utility).

Interpreting the opportunity to ‘act up’

Most organizations, including Council and Utility, depend upon work progressingforward even when responsible individuals take leave, resign or become unavailable.A commonly used option is to ask a worker to temporarily assume his or hermanager’s job, termed ‘acting up’. At both Council and Utility, participants told usabout how they interpret their opportunities to act up (Table 1). For Kirsty, Peterand Sam, acting up is more a care-taking process of ‘keeping the seat warm’. Itenables the business to continue the performance of required activities through theefforts of others who ideally should not disrupt current practice too much so that itrequires ‘fixing’ upon the incumbent’s return, or when a new incumbent is selectedto make ‘real’ changes in practice.

Table 1. Participant views on ‘acting up’

Council Utility

For the last 10 weeks now I have been acting manager of the strategy and policy unit [and it’s] very different to the work that I do on a day-to-day basis, which I still have had to continue with. So that’s been quite interesting, it’s been a bit of a challenge…when I finish acting [the other policy analyst] will act for awhile. There is no chance that either of us will get the position, we are just keeping the seat warm until they get a suitable candidate…on one hand you do the best job you can, on the other hand, who gives a damn because it’s not going to make a difference.

Kirsty

I’ve acted up as a tradesman to a leading hand, from a leading hand to an office manager and…in two operations managers’ jobs…but I prefer not to, not because I can’t do it, but [because] I end up doing both and I do half of each rather than a complete one. So I try not to act up in this position.I went overseas for six weeks and I was off for two months last year and I had to train someone for three weeks to do my job. [Researcher: But someone acted up in your job?]Yes, then I came back and fixed it all up.

Peter

I strongly encourage and support acting up but not on a ‘it’s your turn basis’—some of [my people] felt it was better…to give everybody a turn to keep harmony—[but] the difficulty is that not everyone is comfortable with that environment. I mean they might do it because we’re a little family but it’s not differentiating because a team leader’s got a responsibility just like I have in the development processes.

Greg

That’s only a caretaker…role so you try and do as good a job as you can but it’s also you’ve got to hand that back in a week or two or three weeks time, so you tend not to get that involved in it because it’s not your baby.

Sam

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In contrast, other participant views illustrated in Table 1 indicate that acting upcan provide developmental benefits to learn various aspects of work: for example,understanding the responsibilities of the manager’s job (Greg) especially the conse-quences of managerial decisions (Tess), the opportunity to change managerial prac-tice (Harry), the benefits of changed working relationships with other workers(Rob) or the organization glimpsing the potential of the worker to perform at amore advanced level (Stella). It would be difficult to generalize from only this cross-section of employee comments, that one organizational environment is necessarilymore encouraging of learning than another. A co-participation argument mightsuggest that learning perceptions are shaped by the level of individual engagementin each of these contextual circumstances; that Kirsty, Peter and Sam are notparticularly motivated to learn from the opportunity to act up because of theirperceptions of too much work (if they had to perform their existing job in parallel),not really their responsibility or that this temporary work is not going to have anyinstrumental benefits (e.g. it is not a test case for whether Kirsty could be promotedinto the job permanently).

However, more unpacking of local contextual and interactional factors suggeststhat participants often use cues and signals from others to determine how to

Table 1. (Continued)

Council Utility

I was acting for six months so it was a lot of hard work—it was petrifying [thinking] that you’ll do something wrong and the consequences of those decisions that you’ll make…it was scary, it was exciting, it was challenging…but when people start treating you differently because you’re in a different position that’s not necessarily a nice thing and it took me a while to get over that, that people started treating me differently just because I’m in a different position. I haven’t changed as a person.

Tess

I find while I’m doing their job, instead of just watching someone doing it or helping, when you’re actually sitting in the seat doing the job, you go…there’s got to be a better way.

Harry

I’ll be acting strategy and policy manager [for about six months because] the existing staff member resigned and, while they’re considering options for a restructure or the way they want this and other units in this group to be, they’ve nominated a few staff to act on a rotational basis, the idea being that it gives us experience in a role should we desire to apply as well as giving us just experience in general even if we don’t want to do it. It’s good to have the experience to be the boss.…They’re giving you opportunities to be able to go for a higher grade pay even if you never get the job just by proving that you can be here if you’re needed.

Stella

The first time I [acted in my boss’ role] for about five weeks…the guys actually had to get more familiar with me, rather than me just sitting off to one side and helping them out every now and then. I was actually involved in their work…so I think that changed things. Once I acted in [his] role a few times, that actually probably helped, get more involved in their work, and understand[ing] more about what they were doing and also, they then became used to coming to me for help for certain things [later on when I returned to my regular job].

Rob

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proceed rather than holding universal or unvarying individual expectationalfactors. We expand on Sam and Stella’s experiences of acting up.

Sam’s emergent learning from its effects on others

Shortly after Sam’s comment about how acting up is normally only a care-takingrole, he goes on to say:

I suppose you often whinge about some other role. If you’re feeding intoanother role and you sometimes [hear] back from them about this or that andyou think why, what’s the big deal? I guess until you do the job and you see thegarbage they’ve got to go through…with reporting and everything, if you cando your job correctly, sometimes they seem to do their bit more easily or what-ever.

I guess you become more careful in what you do whereas you might have justnot been so. A classic example is when you package up a job package, whenyou’ve designed it or done everything you need to do, there’s certain thingsyou need to do in the way of data, things you’ve got to put in the database andalso work order numbers and stuff like that that you’ve got to raise. You’ve gotto do all that correctly, with the right cost codes and all that. If you happen toget one of those—you’re only talking about one digit somewhere wrong ifyou’re a little bit careless—it can have this huge flow-on effect at the end wherethe chief accountant has this dummy spit and you get these emails going: whydid you do this, look what you’ve done!

Here, despite the acting role ‘not being his baby’, Sam is signalling that he actu-ally did learn and change his practice through having experienced what hismanager’s role entails, and better understanding the consequences of actions heperforms that have ‘flow-on’ effects on others in the organization. Sam may makeglobal inferences about the principle of acting up as not disrupting the incum-bent’s practice significantly, but he also realizes that local circumstances andpersonal experiences shaped by the reactions of others modify this perspective asrequired.

Stella’s emergent learning to be constructed with others

Similarly, Stella talks about how she interprets what her supervisor wants from heracting manager role and how she may adjust her behaviour depending upon howthe actions play out:

Well, you really start looking at the value of the middle person, now after sixmonths without our middle person, we know we need a manager; we do, we’revery independent workers and we’re able to get on with the job and do it, butthe day-to-day stuff of being a manager…you really need a person, you reallydo, and we’ve found that, but I don’t know that we would have said it before-hand—a good learning curve.

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[My supervisor’s expectations of my acting manager role are] possibly just tohold the fort and take some of the pressure off him so that his door doesn’thave to be open to seven different people…to deal with some issues and be hisliaison certainly. I don’t know whether he’s expecting the higher performancethat he would of the manager, he certainly hasn’t stated.

Researcher: What do you expect of you?

Well, I personally want to put into place some things that I’d like to see happenand I want to see the reaction when I do that.

Researcher: Can you give us an example?

This is a minor example but we currently do a monthly report [where] every-one has to report…every month…what they’ve done and everyone has theirown little structure for it, different format of reports, different things in it.Some people will be minute-by-minute saying what they’ve done in a monthand other people like myself will just put things in great big chunks and saythis is what I spent most of my time doing, very much the 80/20 principle.But it’s different for everyone and it’s all in different little documents andthat’s silly. What would be good is if there was one place where all six peoplejust dumped their information and I see the value of that as at the end of theyear when we’re all doing performance reviews and we’re all having to tellpeople outside of this section what we did this year. We’ve got this onedocument that says look at all the stuff we did. You wouldn’t have to pull 12different documents from seven different people and look at them; it wouldall be progressively done every month. It’s very, very small but there will beresistance to that.

Stella’s earlier comments in Table 1 could be interpreted as an instrumentalmotivation to take on the acting role to demonstrate her ability to perform and getpaid at a higher grade. She also implicitly interprets her supervisor’s rationale to lether act up as an instrumental way to use her to enable his busy life to be moremanageable. Yet Stella’s later comments reveal a risk-taking approach in wanting toput in place a new report consolidation process in her group that she believes willprovide new benefits for other work practices but that is likely to face internal resis-tance.

Stella’s learning about the success or otherwise of this new approach if sheproceeds will be enmeshed in and emerge only from the actions and reactions ofthe group (as seen by compliance or non-compliance actions, supportive talk orresistant talk, or ideas and talk that could modify and even build upon Stella’sapproach in unanticipated ways). Stella cannot predict the group’s reactions: herperceived sense of resistance may be an accurate read, or the group may surpriseher by realizing how her different perspective on a current practice can generatebenefits for their other collective (or indeed individual) work practices. ‘As theorganization happens’ (Schatzki 2006) and the action unfolds, the group withStella in the acting manager role must reconcile and negotiate any differingperspectives using the specifics in their contextual circumstances as the basis toproceed.

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Discussion: invitational patterns and spaces for learning

Our empirical discussion of two workplaces in the previous section has illustratedthat invitational qualities for learning work cannot be simplistically summarized toa co-participation metaphor between workplace affordances and individualengagement, or indeed other models that suggest learning work is deterministicallycausative. Our view is that there are more complex relations of a non-deterministiccharacter that are operating here to structure the ways in which actors determinehow to proceed, how to learn work and how to learn together through ways ofworking that have public and interactional consequences.

Workplaces and organizations look to survive, adapt and change. They evolvethrough, encompass and are shaped by the events and the individuals that comprisethem but are not fully explainable by them. Concepts of time as espoused by Mead(1959 [1932]) move views of organizational change away from episodic anomalousevents towards making sense of everyday ‘organizational becoming’ (Tsoukas andChia 2002: 570). This unfolding nature of work is a dynamic, emergent and poten-tially transformative phenomenon. It is transformative in the sense that the ‘whole[is] much more than a sum of its parts’; that, as in the complexity sciences, whensystems get to a sufficient ‘critical mass of complexity’, they go through a ‘phase tran-sition’ that perpetuates its momentum in a certain direction but that this transitionis ‘contingent on specific contextual factors’ (Mason 2008: 37).

We believe these complexity notions have conceptual power for better under-standing the way learning works as an unfolding, interactional and contextualphenomenon. In educational workplaces, Davis and Sumara (2006: 137–141) arguethat conditions of emergence can be shaped by educators promoting aspects intheir educational environments that encourage, for example, internal diversity (awide range of possible responses) and internal redundancy (overlap among actorsin terms of shared language and activity). As well, their notion of neighbour inter-actions (Davis and Sumara 2006: 142–147) extends beyond face-to-face physicalinteractions to encompass varied opportunities for representing ideas, knowledgeand practical educational approaches in ways that can create further opportunitiesfor triggering novel responses or reconciling new interpretations. Researching howand whether complexity principles can be applied to different work domains is ofincreasing researcher interest, for example, in education (Davis and Sumara 2006,Forsyth 2008, Mason 2008), healthcare (Kerrick 2004, Darren 2005, Dennard et al.2008) and many aspects of business management theory and practice includingstrategy, leadership, performance, conflict management and corporate socialresponsibility (Ashmos et al. 2000, Griffin 2002, Kurtz and Snowden 2003, Stacey andGriffin 2005, 2008, Fenwick 2007).

The challenge for researchers and practitioners is that if learning is so emer-gent, spontaneous and unpredictable, to what extent can invitational qualitiesand conditions of emergence be fostered or directed within organizations? Citingthe conditions of emergence work from Davis and Sumara’s (2006) research,Fenwick (2007: 641–642) believes that in business environments, leaders can playan influential role in prompting more diversity, feedback and interaction throughmore open-ended approaches rather than enacting control. In his research, Grif-fin (2002) goes further by restating the notion of the twenty-first century leaderas one not of position, but a role of accountability and inclusion that encom-passes broader worker communities—what he and his colleagues at the University

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of Hertfordshire call ‘participative self-organization’ (Stacey and Griffin 2005,2008).

Our view is that Davis and Sumara’s (2006) concepts are analytically useful, butrather than using these or other complexity-based approaches as universalpanaceas for designing work environments or learning curricula, researchers andpractitioners should regularly interrogate their own contextual environments forpotential invitational opportunities that deserve to have attention raised aboutthem. Ocasio (1997) identifies that the work performed in organizations is oftenbased on what decision-makers focus attention on, the context in which it occursand the ways attention is processed in structured distributed ways to surface what isrelevant and significant to the organization. What we believe Davis and Sumara’s(2006) research adds to this attention-based view, through their concept of condi-tions of emergence, are ways to create the spaces for learning that have embeddedinvitational qualities. Thus, by creating common experiential activities (internalredundancy), this also opens up the opportunity to share multiple interpretationsof the current problem/issue as each participant naturally contextualizes from hisor her perspective (internal diversity), which then must be reconciled throughinteractionally generated group talk and actions to take the collective next step(neighbour interactions).

Practical decision-making in this sense is a matter of engagement, but not only inan individual agency sense (Billett 2001a, b, 2006). Decision-making becomes notonly the privilege of those in positional power, but becomes understood as anaccountability and commitment for all workers, since ‘in our daily life, we are largelyoccupied with the next step’ (Dewey as cited by Schütz 1970: 102). This accountabil-ity to take action at work, once initiated, has unfolding public consequences in theperformance of work and its effects on others (Kemmis 2004) that change what isnext deserving of attention in that context.

This complex of contextual, attentional and interactive effects is difficult toreduce to a matter of workplace curricula that can be universally applicable or repre-sent a limited set of identifiable features. At Council, we are not inferring thatmanagement could or should implement a workplace curriculum that explicitlyencourages those in acting positions to look for opportunities to improve existingpractice as Stella was considering. In the busy flow of daily organizational life,managers and workers can often miss the invitational patterns created by collectivework to do something more than achieve the instrumental objectives of work perfor-mance and to address the interests of the organization. By considering local andparticular opportunities as also having developmental possibilities, managers andworkers can shift work momentum towards different directions and destabilize inproductive ways that remake practices.

Alerting attention to the opportunities to act differently in guided and reflectiveways is a valuable activity and forms the basis of many approaches (e.g. Boud et al.2006, Reason and Bradbury 2006). In some ways, the character of emergent learningthat we have discussed in this paper reflects what Bagnall (2009: 280) recentlycommented on as the distinction between lifelong education and lifelong learning.As Bagnall (2009: 280) sees it, proponents of lifelong education have tended toconstrain and explain learning in terms of institutional (who provides), epistemo-logical (what bodies of knowledge are privileged) and developmental (from child-hood to adult) boundaries. We would add that such a view also shapes a preferencefor deterministic and simplified approaches to learning. Alternatively, the concept

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of lifelong learning ‘in its fullest sense exposes its cross-sectoral nature… [requir-ing] co-ordination and integration of these multifarious loci’ (Bagnall 2009: 280).The opportunity to experience this diversity and contextual richness emerges fromthe unfolding social interactions that characterize working, learning (and living)together in a complex world.

Conclusion

Our paper has argued that the relationship between learning and work is a complexkind of relational interdependency that is not adequately expressed by limited co-participation metaphors between group and individual, individual and environmentor individual engagement and workplace affordances as suggested by causativemodels of learning. Instead, we conceptualize learning work as a generative collec-tive endeavour created from changing patterns of interactional understandings withothers. Actors use complex contextual and relational resources to jointly determinethe practical matters of work. Often in guided and spontaneous ways, these resourcescan shape the conditions of emergence and invitational opportunities that expandwhat it is possible to learn when work practices also become learning practices.

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Documents

Towards an emergent view of learning work