Workplace participatory practices: Conceptualising
workplaces as learning environments
Author
Billett, S
Published
2004
Journal Title
Journal of Workplace Learning
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1108/13665620410550295
Copyright Statement
© 2004 Emerald: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please
refer to the publisher version for access to the definitive, published version.
Downloaded from
http://hdl.handle.net/10072/5128
Link to published version
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1366-5626.htm
Griffith Research Online
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au
Workplace participatory practices:
Conceptualising workplaces as learning environments
Stephen Billett
Griffith University
Australia
Billett, S. (2004) Workplace participatory practices: Conceptualising workplaces as learning environments.
Journal of Workplace Learning 16 (6) 312-324.
1. Workplaces as learning spaces
This paper discusses workplaces as learning environments emphasising workplace participatory
practices as conceptual foundations. These practices comprise the kinds of activities and interactions
workplaces afford learners, on one hand, and how individuals elect to participate in workplace
activities and interactions, on the other. Underpinning both workplace affordances and individuals’
participation are the associated concepts of intentionality and continuity. Workplaces intentionally
regulate individuals’ participation; it is not ad hoc, unstructured or informal. This regulation is a
product of cultural practices, social norms, workplace affiliations, cliques and demarcations (Billett
2002a). Those who control the processes and division of labour, including interests and affiliations
within the workplace regulate participation to maintain the continuity of the workplace through
regulatory practices (Grey 1994). Similarly, individuals will engage in ways that best serve their
purposes, such as how it will assist their career trajectory, securing opportunities, or even locating
easy work options. There is no separation between engagement in thinking of acting at work and
learning (Lave 1990, 1993; Rogoff 1990, 1995). Therefore, the kinds of opportunities the workplace
affords individuals in terms of the activities they engage in and interactions with others, and how
individuals elect to engage are salient to their learning through participation in the workplace.
Commencing by arguing for fresh appraisals of workplaces as learning environments, the
paper challenges some current assumptions. Then through a consideration of workplaces as
historically, culturally, and situationally shaped environments in which individuals elect to engage in
particular ways, workplace participatory practices are advanced as premises for understanding and
organising learning through work. Central here are the relationality interdependent processes shaping
individuals’ learning in workplaces. These comprise the negotiations occurring between individuals’
desire for continuity through engagement and how opportunities are afforded on the basis of the
continuities of affiliations, interests and particular workplace goals.
2. Critiquing some existing conceptions of workplaces as learning environments
To conceptualise workplaces as legitimate environments, it is necessary to transform the current
discourse on learning through work. Describing workplaces as being informal, non-formal or
unstructured learning environments is negative, imprecise and ill-focused (Billett 2002). These
descriptions do little to assist elaborate understanding or standing of workplaces as learning spaces.
Describing something by what it is not: (e.g. informal - not formalized or unstructured - not
structured) does little to illuminate its qualities or characteristics, in this case, workplaces as learning
environments. Moreover, concepts and assumptions associated with educational institutions are often
used uncritically as premises for what constitutes the formalisms and structure of legitimate learning
experiences. As teaching and learning are commonly, albeit erroneously, held to be synonymous, the
absence of qualified teachers and classroom-like interactions in workplaces leads to assumptions that
learning, if it occurs at all, will be inferior to that arising in educational institutions (e.g. Collins,
Brown & Newman 1989, Prawat 1993, Ericsson & Lehmann 1996). The absence of written
curriculum documents used to plan teachers’ actions and learners’ experiences, qualified teachers and
didactic teaching practices, all raise the concern that learning through work will be at best ad hoc,
weak, concrete and incidental (Marsick & Watkins 1990, Resnick 1987). So, from perspectives
privileging the practices of educational institutions, learning experiences in the workplace might well
be viewed as being ad hoc and weak because they are inconsistent with these practices. Yet, it is
imprecise and misleading to describe individuals engagement in work activities as being unplanned or
unstructured, as they are highly structured and intentional. Moreover, there are pedagogical qualities to
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participation in work. Indeed, rather than being incidental, these experiences are often central to the work
practice’s continuity. The degree by which workplace experiences are generative of concrete outcomes
(i.e. those that are only applicable in the circumstances of the acquisition) is often important for this
continuity. Of course, concerns about the development of transferable knowledge through experience
outside of educational institutions are legitimate (Evans 1993, Prawat 1993) and easy to raise.
However, learning arising from experiences within education institutions is also far from immune
from these outcomes (e.g. Scribner 1984, Raizen 1994). There is evidence of both adaptable learning
occurring outside of educational institutions (Rogoff & Lave 1984) and concrete learning arising from
experiences inside educational institutions (Raizen 1994). Such evidence challenges easy assumptions
about workplace learning experiences being inherently weak. Instead, it suggests that the qualities of
experiences (i.e. activities and interactions) afforded by either educational institutions or workplaces,
shape the potential richness of the learning outcomes. Importantly, it is mistaken to assume that
learning environments outside education institutions lack these qualities, whilst somehow being in
privileged in those institutions.
Secondly, rather than being without structure and intent, workplace activities and interactions
are highly structured and regulated, and have inherent pedagogic al properties. Just as educational
institutions’ goals, norms and practices frame the activities students participate in, who is allowed to
participate in those activities, and on what basis and how they will be judged. Bernstein (1996)
referred to these as regulative practices. Similarly, workplace goals and practices determine the tasks
and activities in which workers engage in, what support they were received and how their efforts will
be appraised (Billett 2001a; Lave 1990; Scribner 1988/1997). Rather than being unstructured and ad
hoc, participants’ engagement in different kinds of social practices are often central to the continuity
of that practice. Whether participating in weaving (Childs & Greenfield 1980), coal mining (Billett
2001a), midwifery (Jordan 1989), hairdressing (Billett 2001a) and tailoring (Lave 1990), this activity is
intentionally organized to structure workers’ access to the knowledge needed to sustain those
practices. This structuring has been referred to by Lave (1990) as the ‘learning curriculum’ -- a
pathway of experiences that leads to full participation in the social practice. Of course, as in education
institutions, there will be unintended participation and unintentional learning in workplaces, a hidden
curriculum if you like. The key point is that participation and learning are central to the on-going
existence of these practices and is regulated by the workplace.
Thirdly, to describe learning environments as being either ‘informal’ or ‘formal’ assumes a
deterministic relationship between the circumstances in which the learning occurs and changes in
individuals. This constitutes situational (social) determinism and ignores the role of human agency in
the construal of what is experienced and what learning arises from that experience. Even the most
structured learning experiences can only shape individuals’ learning. It seems that, individuals have to
ignore most of social suggestion in order to maintain their own sense of purpose and direction
(Valsiner 1998). Wertsch (1998) notes how unwelcome social press may lead to a superficial kind of
learning, referred to as mastery. He distinguishes this kind of learning from appropriation (Luria
1976) where individuals embrace as their own the knowledge that they are engaging with. Knowledge
constructed through mastery is less likely to be exercised voluntarily and effortfully, than what is
appropriated (Wertsch 1998). All this emphasises the important role of human agency in the
negotiation process of individuals’ knowledge construction. So, much of the learning that arises may
different from what is intended by the exercise of the workplace’s norms and practices, for instance.
These three propositions suggest the need to avoid terms such as ‘informal’ or ‘formal’ when
describing workplaces as learning environments. In the following section, the concepts of
participation and participatory practices are advanced as more effective and precise terms to elucidate
the process of learning through work.
3. Participation and participatory practices at work
The concept of learning can be understood as permanent or semi-permanent changes in how
individuals think and act. When individuals engage in everyday thinking and acting, more than
merely executing a process or task, their knowledge is changed in some way, however, minutely by
that process. Learning is not reserved for particular settings or interludes, although some experiences
may provide richer learning outcomes than others. So, when individuals engage in workplace
activities they are doing more than merely deploying their capacities in engaging in those tasks. A
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cognitive legacy in the form of change arises from engagement in even the most routine of activities.
The most likely change arising through everyday thinking and acting in workplaces will be to
reinforce or hone what is already known. Drawing on cognitive perspectives, engaging in routine or
familiar work tasks reinforces and refines what is already known (Anderson 1982). This kind of
learning is nevertheless important for refining procedures and rendering tasks to be undertaken with
minimum resort to conscious thought. This then frees up working memory to focus on other tasks.
This permits the individual to use their cognitive resources more selectively and strategically. For
instance, focusing on parts of a task that are difficult to perform or are highly complex, requiring the
simultaneous consideration of a variety of factors. So when cognitive processes are engaged, even the
most apparently familiar experience is always new in some way (Valsiner 2000), which is generative
of new learning. However, when engaging in activities that are new to the individual there is a
potential to extend what the individual knows, through the creation of new cognitive structures. So
when engaging in new work tasks new learning might arise. Cognitive learning theories hold that in
overcoming problems, new learning arises (Anderson 1982). Piaget’s (1976) notion of overcoming
disequilibrium, the unknown in what is encountered, through the processes of assimilation (i.e.
reconciling what is experienced with what individuals already know) and accommodation (i.e.
inciting new categories of knowledge from experiences) similarly positions thinking and learning as
one process. Also, Meade (1934) proposed learning as an on-going stream of conscious thought that
constitutes and contributes to individuals’ cognitive processes over a lifespan. This view is shared by
accounts from anthropology proposing associations between practice and learning (Lave 1993,
Pelissier 1991). Lave and Wenger (1991) and Rogoff (1995) refer directly to participation in social
practice as being analogous to learning. Rogoff (1990, 1995) refers to the moment-by-moment accrual
of knowledge through encounters with the social world; micro-genetic development.
Collectively, these perspectives on learning, albeit with different emphases, hold that more
than an end in itself, participation in activities, such as those in workplaces, incites change in
individuals’ understandings and capacities (i.e. learning). While some cognitive theorists only
associate encountering novel problems with learning, this fails to account for the person-dependent
nature of what constitutes a novel task and the different ways of engagement with the same ‘new’
task. In keeping with ideas of the ongoing processes of knowledge construction advocated above, it is
proposed that learning and participation in work are inseparable. However, these processes are not
individual acts of cognition. The work activities individuals engage in have historical, cultural and
situational geneses. Most of the knowledge humans learn is not wholly new, although it may be novel
to the individuals encountering it. Vocational practices have historical, cultural and situational origins
(Billett 1998). The same goes for domestic tasks in the home (Goodnow & Warton 1991) or parenting
(Rogoff 1990) and those practices privileged in educational institutions. They are all practices that
have evolved over time to meet the requirements of particular cultural needs (Scribner 1985) and are
constituted in particular ways in each setting, such as workplaces (Billett 2001b). So engaging in
workplace activities interdependently links individuals thinking and acting and their learning to social
sources. Workplaces provide interactions with human partners and nonhuman artefacts that contribute
to individuals’ capacity to perform and the learning that arises from their performance. These
contributions to learning are conceptualised as being inter-psychological -- between individual social
world -- before becoming intra-psychological attributes -- a cognitive attribute (Vygotsky 1978).
These inter-psychological processes are interdependent. Learning inter-psychologically is not
a process of socialisation or enculturation. Instead, individuals engage actively in the process of
determining the worth of what they experience and how they might engage with it and learn from it
(Goodnow 1990). Valsiner (1994, 2000) refers to the co-construction of knowledge: the
interdependent process of individuals constructing of knowledge through relational interaction with a
social source. That is, individuals will elect how they engage and what they construct from that
engagement, while social practices are able to provide different levels of pressure for individuals to
engage with particular knowledge. Similarly, Rogoff (1995) suggests in the reciprocal process of
learning both the object and the subject are transformed through interaction. The concept of co-
participation at work (Billett 2001a, 2002b) has been used to account for the reciprocal processes of
learning shaped by interactions between what is afforded by the workplace and how individuals elect
to engage with what is afforded. In this view, workplace affordances are shaped by local negotiations
(Suchman 1997) and orderings (Engestrom & Middleton 1996). These localised needs constitute the
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particular requirements for work performance. These cannot be appraised other than in the situation
were tasks are undertaken and the conditions for and judgments about those performances are
exercised. However, situational factors alone are insufficient to understand workplaces as learning
environments. What is required is understanding of the way individuals’ agentic action and
intentionalities (Somerville 2002) shape how they participate in and learn through work. This agency
has social as well as cognitive geneses. The kinds of social experiences individuals have throughout
their life history contribute to what constitutes their subjectivity and identity in shapes their exercise
of their agentic actions.
In considering learning as participation in work, it is important to stress that engagement in
and what is learnt from socially-determined practices is not determined by the social practice. Instead,
individuals decide how they participate in and what they construe and learn from their experience.
4. Workplace participatory practices
Considering learning in workplaces as participation is important for key reasons. Firstly, if learning is
seen as a consequence of participation in social practices, (such as those involved in the production of
goods or services), rather than as something privileged by participation in educational institutions, this
may broaden the bases to understand and legitimate learning generally and learning through work, in
particular. Learning occurs in circumstances other than educational institutions. Neither Piaget’s
(1968) processes of overcoming disequilibrium, nor the sociocultural concept of micro-genesis, are
reserved for particular kinds of social or physical settings. They constitute responses to everyday
encounters and experiences, such as those occurring in workplaces. Therefore, considerations of the
consequences of individuals’ engagement in workplace activities and access to its affordances may
inform a broadened view of learning experiences and their enhancement. Certainly, the widening
acceptance of learning as an inter-psychological process (i.e. between individuals and social sources
of knowledge) prompts a consideration of learning as engagement with the social world generally,
and not only through close personal interactions as Vygotsky (1978), but also through engagement in
the physical and social environment that constitutes the workplace.
There are also worthwhile procedural reasons for making participation and participatory
practices a central foundation of a workplace pedagogy. For most workers, the workplace represents
the only or most viable location to learn and/or develop their vocational practice (Billett 2001a). This
goal has become urgent given that in current lifelong learning policies and practices (OECD 1998). In
these policies, the responsibility for maintaining the currency of vocational practice is being
increasingly transferred to workers. Consequently, understanding how the opportunities to engage in
work, the kinds of tasks individuals are regulated and the guidance provided becomes key to
evaluating how and what individuals are able to learn through work and their working lives. As work
sites are the prime source of the knowledge required for work, how opportunities to participate are
distributed across workers or cohorts of workers in often-contested workplaces becomes an important
factor in learning throughout working life. Moreover, workplace affordances or their invitational
qualities are also likely shape how individuals elect to engage in goal-directed activities and to secure
direct guidance through close or proximal interpersonal interactions between experts and novices or
more indirect (distal) kinds of guidance, for example, through opportunities to observe and listen
(Billett & Boud 2001). Both these kinds of guidance have consequences for the knowledge
individuals’ construct. Close guidance is important for learning knowledge that would be difficult to
learn without the assistance of a more knowledgeable partner (Rogoff 1995). Learning the concepts
underpinning vocational practice (e.g. service requirements, force factors, hygiene) or processes and
concepts that are hidden (e.g. electronic processes, past practices that shape current approaches) likely
require close interactions with more experienced co-workers who can make these concepts and
practices accessible. Indirect guidance contributes to how tasks are undertaken and completed.
However, as with participation in activities, the contribution of guidance is dependent on learners’
engagement (Billett 2003). What directs individuals to engage in the demanding tasks of learning new
knowledge and refining what they already know is premised on their interest and agency.
Participation and learning need to be seen and the interdependent processes in which individuals
exercise their agency, hence the term participatory practices.
But, what of the quality of learning through participation? A key basis by which learning
environments are judged is the degree by which they are able to support the development of robust
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