DIVERGENT WORKING AND LEARNING TRAJECTORIES IN SOCIAL SERVICES: INSIGHTS FROM A USE-VALUE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that a critical understanding of the notion of a knowledgebased economy (KBE) in advanced capitalism requires attention to the ways that the details of everyday occupational life and learning represent an important arena of political economic struggle. As elsewhere in this volume, the discussion below relates to questions defining the nature of a KBE. For example, I respond to the very real impacts of the increasing speed of innovation and change in work processes which often, as is the case in the research below, is mediated by new forms of production technology and work design. Likewise, as conventional notions of a KBE might predict, we will see that intensified learning and knowledge production efforts are required (see Introduction). And yet, many other assumptions of KBE thinking can also be seriously questioned. ‘Knowledge’ continues to be central to production and control, as has traditionally been the case. This has not changed. What else has not changed? Part of the answer to this question involves human ‘use-values’ – the direct satisfaction of individual and collective need. In myriad ways, at multiple levels of social and economic life, usevalue production and mediation continue to clash with the forces of commodification, surplus value, capital accumulation and exchange-value. Below I address how practical needs stemming from use-value generation and mediation continue to drive knowledge production in a variety of ways. This need for usevalue in one’s working life, along with the objects that motivate the learning and practices that spring from it, are not new. In the course of the intensification of learning and change however, the contradictions that emerge may provide an important point of departure for analysis of occupational change. In this context, the general claim is that the making and re-making of occupations must ultimately be accomplished through the agentive learning of workers. Yet this learning is mediated by many things. It is mediated by the organizational premises and the work/technological designs that are dropped into workers’ lives. It is also mediated by the elements of occupational culture and knowledge, real and imagined, inherited from the past. To pursue these types of general claims, I outline a synthesizing approach to the labour/learning process, its implications, and then provide empirical illustrations of its application.

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