The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work Critical Perspectives Edited by D.W. Livingstone OISE/University of Toronto, Canada Kiran Mirchandani OISE/University of Toronto, Canada and Peter H. Sawchuk OISE/University of Toronto, Canada SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / TAIPEI PETER H. SAWCHUK LIFELONG LEARNING AND WORK AS ‘VALUE’ PRODUCTION: COMBINING WORK AND LEARNING ANALYSIS FROM A CULTURAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE INTRODUCTION Studies in lifelong learning and work harbour a fragmented theoretical relationship. Although today we see instances of interwoven conceptual dialogue, the fact is that the intellectual histories of analysis of work and analysis of learning have been developed upon the bedrocks of isolated trajectories. Far more often there is little conceptual dialogue: detailed conceptualizations of work process and economy merely presume notions of learning – ‘proxies’ rather than ‘practices’ as Warhurst and Thompson (2006) put it – even as knowledge production and application has taken centre-stage in its concerns, while analysis of learning, enjoying an expanding niche in concerns of economic life, simply transpose and apply concepts with little attention to what it is that is unique about the institutions of paid work. A premise of this chapter is that, under such conditions, robust understandings of the potential for change, development and transformation inherent in all work activity are among the sacrifices. Thus, a core goal here is to understand how issues of human development and work can be embedded in one another: that is, the labour process and the learning process as mutually constitutive. To address this challenge I begin from analyses of work (sociology of work including labour process theory, industrial sociology and organizational analysis), and then turn my attention to a reformulation of the object of inquiry of work/learning process in terms of distinct interwoven ‘value production’ systems. Specifically, I look at the contradictory forms of value production that necessarily and inherently make up the equally contradictory experience and developmental dimensions of work. I argue this type of integrative re-casting of the labour/learning process contests the imputed stability represented in normative-technical traditions within the study of work and offers an alternative that forefronts change and learning where work is always a complex, active, human productive activity. Central to this alternative is the conceptualization of paid work activity as fundamentally shaped by the contradictions between what Marxists refer to as ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’ in specific instances of organizational life which play themselves out in particularly intense and observable ways. D.W. Livingstone et al. (eds.), The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work, 73–83. © 2008. Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. PETER H. SAWCHUK STARTING WITH THE ANALYSIS TRADITIONS OF WORK Understanding the traditions of adult learning analysis as they do and do not explain patterns of change and human development in working-life is already available (e.g. Sawchuk, 2003). There I outlined core traditions and an inter-locking set of biases (i.e. universalist, individualist, ahistoricist and pedagogical), which shape them. Thus, in this chapter I begin with a sketch of the traditions of work analysis where we can distinguish between what I will call ‘normative-technical’ traditions and ‘radical’ traditions. By way of introduction, a lens of relative historical closure distinguishes the former. I say relative because this does not mean that new ideas – from post-Fordism and flexible production through to high performance work systems and the knowledge economy – do not continue to burble forth, capture attention (though just as regularly seem to fizzle out). I claim that despite outward appearances of ‘discontinuity’ and change there is remarkable continuity to be seen in this tradition: taken for granted are that the basic dynamics of work and economy are suitably identified, recognizably established in practice, easily referenced, and, most importantly, sustainable. What I have referred to as the radical tradition, on the other hand, is distinguished by a strong commitment to a historical perspective that expects and anticipates significant change based on internal contradictions; contradictions that explain both moments of conflict and consensus in the labour process (Sawchuk, 2006). Change – in fact fundamental change – is to be traced in the minutiae as well as the aggregated dynamics of the point of production and political economy. However, change, if it is to occur, has to be made, in practice, individually and collectively, consciously and un-self-consciously by human actors themselves. Thus any model in the radical tradition as defined here must therefore necessarily contend with the need to concurrently conceptualize how this comes about, in what contexts, through what processes and why. The radical tradition, in other words, is inherently tied to an analysis of human learning as change rather than accommodation in a way, as we shall see, that differs significantly from the normative-technical tradition. For the remainder of this section I expand briefly on the nature of each of these traditions.1 The normative-technical tradition is not wrong as much as it is partial. It is most articulately expressed in the apex of affirmative thinking that was born of the unprecedented and remarkably unpredicted (Hobsbawm, 2006) economic growth that followed the second world war (WW2) taking the form of the industrialism/postindustrialism theses (e.g. Dahrendorf, 1959; Touraine, 1971) that continue to live on today. Although, as Simpson (1989) (see also Ritzer, 1989; Form, 2002; Nolan, 2003; Paradeise, 2003) point out, in the inter-war period ethnographic research on work and social practice emerging out of anthropology as well as from what is known as symbolic-interactionist sociology were available, it was not until the post-WW2 period in which sociology of work, industrial sociology and organizational analyses took off as sub-disciplines. This was the period of ascendancy for industrial/post-industrial studies of work.2 Collectively, research in this tradition foretold of the emergence of a type of society in which social progress was realized through diminishing workplace conflict, heightened co-operation and, in particu74 LIFELONG LEARNING AND WORK AS ‘VALUE’ PRODUCTION lar, expansive economic growth. This was shortly followed by post-industrialism scholars who added analysis of new, technologically advanced (‘labour-saving’) paid work and better, wider, and presumably more skilled, participation (e.g. Bell, 1973; Reich, 1991; Frenkel, Korczynski, Shire & Tam, 1999). While the post-WW2 era is crucial, contextualizing it further is a wide-reaching historical summary by Barley and Kunda (1992) that begins in 19th rather than the mid-20th century. They lay out a well-supported case regarding the links amongst the (short and long-wave) business cycle, union organizing and dominant forms of work organization/managerial thinking that can be shown to have swung, in roughly 25-year cycles, between ‘rational’ versus ‘normative’ orientations. The authors show the historically specific blossoming of alternate forms of managerial thought from the moralistic ideologies of ‘industrial betterment’ through ‘scientific management’ and eventually the post-WW2 industrialism/post-industrialism theses. Barley and Kunda (1992) is important here not because of the differences they amply demonstrate but because of the remarkable continuity within this tradition despite rational and normative swings. Indeed, analyses of paid work in this tradition have grown ever more supple and empirically informed (Sawchuk, 2006) though this does not take away from the fact that the presumptions remain remarkably intact. It is on this point that Thompson (2003) comments, [w]hat is striking, nevertheless, is the extent to which each vision of the new is dependent on an assumption of reciprocity, if not between all the actors, then at least between the component parts of the ‘paradigm’. For example, flexible specialization and post-Fordist perspectives saw a unity or sequential flow across the different links in the ‘design chain’, beginning in markets and moving through firm structures, to work and employment. Equally, though in a different manner, knowledge economy theories rest on the assumption of a virtuous circle between companies, employees, consumers and society: ‘a cleverer society that will, in turn, demand cleverer service, creating cleverer jobs, to create a sort of virtuous circle of increasing enlightenment’ (Lewis, 2001, p. 10). Thus the emphasis on cohesiveness and positive connections between elements in ‘the system’ continues unabated. (p. 360) The ‘end of the history’ of paid work, in this tradition, is largely a function of working out the (normative and technical) kinks to strengthen and further realize the already constitutive ‘virtuous circle’ principles of system reciprocity and consensus. In the broader terms of the Western (European) social theory cannon from Karl Marx through to Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, we can see that each devoted significant attention to the organization of work and society. However, while Durkheim’s approach in The Division of Labour in Society (1893/1933) offered characterizations of a self-regulating social ‘organism’ premised on the (re)production of stasis, and Weber’s approach in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1966) looked toward a trajectory of organizational development resulting in the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic disenchantment, Marx’s approach produced something distinct from both. Unlike Durkheim, Marx provided 75 PETER H. SAWCHUK a framework for understanding human development through conflict and contradiction, which explains, for example, why it is that the many ‘virtuous circle’ theories partially inspired by Durkheimian thinking failed to take hold. And unlike Weber, Marx’s approach offered a means to address the emergent capacities for change inherent in production itself (see Wright, 1997) as workers develop not only new forms of knowledge but also greater ability to communicate (see Adler, 2006), coordinate and create the potential for social change. At the same time, however, Marx’s own analysis only grappled with the labour process in illustrative ways. Thus, in response to this gap as well as the inadequacies of the industrialism/post-industrialism theses, in the early 1970s the work of Harry Braverman marked a keystone in the radical tradition as understood in this chapter. To be sure, in countries such as France (cf. Paradeise, 2003) the dialogue between Marxism and sociology of work had older, established roots. In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Braverman (1974) sought to recover a Marxist analysis of work to develop what became known as Labour Process Theory. He re-analyzed the effects of the separation of conception and execution, and argued these to be an expression of management’s war with (craft and office) workers for control and through it heightened exploitation and profitability. The radical tradition, however, is not without its own inadequacies. For example, though this point was quickly remedied (e.g. Burawoy, 1979, to name only one instance), Braverman did not deny as relevant but, all the same, largely set aside subjective dimensions of work and workers to focus on the so-called objective processes and outcomes of the Taylorist divisions of labour; a core work design feature that informed Fordism and which clearly remains dominant globally today. Moreover, Braverman failed to provide a meaningful theory of the emergence of counter-vailing capacities for resistance. Nevertheless, more so than anyone since Marx, Braverman set the stage for detailed analysis of work within the context of an inherent contradictory, dialectical process, which marks what I have termed the radical tradition. Such an approach opens the ground for new conceptualizations of how it is that the inherent clash of social/economic standpoints exemplify a structural contradiction between what workers and those who control organizations require under capitalism; a matter endemic to different but interwoven chains of either use- or exchange-value production; a matter that also encapsulates the different developmental (i.e. lifelong learning) trajectories that go so far in defining the change potential inherent in production.3 The key is the need for new objects of inquiry or units of analysis. As the quagmire that is the de-skilling versus up-skilling debate, for example, shows (Payne, 1999; Warhurst, Grugulis, & Keep, 2004; Sawchuk, 2006), without alternative perspectives, researchers are all too prepared to simply accumulate data and blast away at one another’s argument in increasingly polemical ways. Thus, the point of this chapter is to offer one possibility for an object of inquiry equally integrative and inherently aware of both learning and work: the analysis of the contradictory nature of use- and exchange-value production. The goal, in this sense, is to take seriously how the most basic structural element of capitalism – the dialectic constitution of the commodity form through which the contradictory elements rooted 76 LIFELONG LEARNING AND WORK AS ‘VALUE’ PRODUCTION in an articulation of the interwoven production of use-values and exchange-values – actively constitutes the historical and material reality of both the work and the human learning/change process. VALUE PRODUCTION AS AN INTEGRATING OF ANALYSIS An orientation to interwoven forms of value production as means of developing an integrated analysis of work and lifelong learning recognizes the dialectic nature of skill/knowledge and work design rooted in an analysis of the basic building block of capitalist society: the commodity form. We start, first, from the idea that central to understanding the functioning of (past, present or future) society is that people are both subjects and objects of history; that societies, let alone commodities, are actively produced by human action and indeed are forms of socially produced mediation even when they appear, superficially, to be isolated.4 This building (or labour) process leads to the satisfaction of individual and collective (cultural, psychological and material) needs. In a capitalist society specifically these needs are met in two basic ways: directly (the production of use-values) and indirectly (the production of exchange-values). Use-values are produced all around us, across all spheres of our daily lives, even though only a select portion of this production has legitimized ‘economic’ value (i.e. exchange-value). Use-value, of course, also provides the basis for commodity production in that consumers buy things that they want to (in some broad sense) use. One of the defining features of capitalist society, as Marx observed, is that as the system develops and expands, more and more of our use-value production is organized by the principle of exchange-value production; that is, life activities are increasingly commodified. This expresses the basic contradiction between the forces (socio-technical configurations which include learning, skill and knowledge) and relations (premised on inter-capitalist competition, the appropriation of surplus value and hence antagonistic class forms as well as the relations that reproduce and transform skill/knowledge through a learning process) of production. Indeed, in the approach I advocate here it is no coincidence that issues of knowledge appear as elements of both the forces and relations of production. Activity, skill and knowledge embedded in use-value production account for the pragmatic, shared, and generally co-operative orientation by both workers and management toward the intrinsic, practical usefulness of the service or product. In fact, forms of use-value production activity also partially explain the shared interest in maintaining a reasonable environment of human interrelation (i.e. use-value in terms of friendship, recognition, respect, commitment, identity formation, etc.). However none of this precludes the conflict that necessarily emerges as use-value production necessarily comes into an inherent relationship with the over-arching need to produce ever increasing levels of exchange-value, eventually valorized as profit, in the classic analyses of antagonistic relations of production, alienation or anomie, subversion, resistance, sabotage, normless-ness, sublimation and so on. My general point in this chapter is that the focus on these distinctive value production systems allows us to assess the contradictory, parallel universes that prevail 77 PETER H. SAWCHUK in all capitalist workplaces. This central contradiction anticipates varying degrees of both co-operation and conflict, both engagement and alienation within the same work environment, all the while providing an important means of explaining the character of economic activity. What is particularly important here, however, is that this shift toward ‘value production’ as a unit of analysis allows us to integrate work process and socio-cultural theoretical traditions of learning such as Marxist Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) that have the capacity to offer detailed, expansive, empirical analyses of the actual human developmental, and hence change processes firmly rooted in the radical tradition of work analysis previously discussed. Specifically, the shift provides us with the capacity to identify and track interwoven ‘trajectories of activity’ (i.e. learning and human development; see Sawchuk, 2003) as analytically distinctive value production systems that always co-exist but which account for radically different expansive and/or restrictive learning environments and outcomes. Value production brings the dominant tradition of normative-technical analysis, focused on exchange-value generation into its appropriate, implicit relation to the simultaneous production of use-value, which has, across historical epochs and political economic arrangements prior to and beyond capitalism, formed the foundational human activity as well as the basis for seeing human life as a lifelong learning process. While certainly the founders of the CHAT tradition, following Marx, understood the importance of the issue of dialectical contradictions, in terms of detailed analysis of the labour process we can begin with Engeström’s (1987, 2006) discussion of contradiction, use-value and exchange-value production where he outlines how all relations and activity are saturated with the dual nature of the commodity. In an activity-theoretical view, values at work are embedded in the object of the activity. Objects are contradictory unities of use-value and exchange-value, generated materially, mentally, and textually. In this view, values are also inseparable from motives . . . .5 Being embedded in multiple activity systems simultaneously and successively, objects have lives of their own and resist goal-rational attempts at control and prediction. Negotiations of objects are always also negotiations of values and motives – not just of ‘what’ but also of ‘why’, ‘for whom’, and ‘where to’ . . . Such negotiations are highly value-laden, whether their value aspect is openly articulated or not. The articulation, questioning, and expansive transformation of values can eventually only succeed at the level of collective activity systems (Engeström, 2006, p. 194). Engeström goes on to say that “[p]roblem solving and reflection-in-action at individual or dyadic levels will not suffice” (p. 194). He establishes the important point that the unit of analysis must necessarily be expanded beyond individual learning to the level of activity where individuals, social relations and context are unified. While Engeström’s (2006) concern is to trace the multiplicity of contradictory value production processes by tagging the objects of work (and following their alternating valuations), our focus here is somewhat different. I am proposing to maintain an activity level of analysis, but one in which the dialectic of use- and exchange-value ‘production systems’ is highlighted as two, analytically distinguishable trajectories of practice. 78 LIFELONG LEARNING AND WORK AS ‘VALUE’ PRODUCTION Engeström (2006) is centred on a constructive critique and expansion based on a book by Thompson (1979) entitled Rubbish Theory. Thompson’s biography of transient objects, turning, as they do, from valued commodity to rubbish and back to valued ‘durables’ again, according to Engeström, is interesting but limited. The point that Engeström (2006) argues is that the production process is altogether absent, The life of the object is also the life of value. In the production sphere, the object takes its shape and acquires its value by virtue of being transformed by human labor. The amount and kind of labor invested in the production of the object represents the foundational ‘hard core’ of value. The action of commoditization . . . is the anticipatory definition of the exchange value of the object. (p. 202) Drawing on the case of the medical system in Finland, Engeström’s research goes on to outline no less than 16 different instances of production, which an object (e.g. a medical condition or disease) undergoes. This approach, like my own, offers the advantage of intrinsically generating a work and learning analysis via CHAT. However, the point of this chapter is to argue that further clarity can be brought to the analysis with more focused attention to use- and exchange-value as mutually dependent production systems. To stick with the topic of medical care, this type of greater focus would mean carefully charting not simply the (16 different) value production processes but to chart their instances of contradiction as use-value and exchange-value forms. This would mean, for example, explicitly charting the parallel production processes of ‘health’ (a use-value) and the exchange-value production process which, in Engeström’s research would include the established mean cost-limit of care set by the state by calculation of mean length of stay in a hospital.6 We can ask ourselves, what might this type of charting begin to look like? Drawing on ethnographic research on hospital nursing, Engeström notes how the illness/injury classification process (one of the central administrative labour processes of health care work) is, in fact, inherently infused with a concern for the bottom-line, but one which is culturally as well as economically held in place through the everyday practices of distinguishing not only ‘interesting’ versus ‘uninteresting’ cases, but also ‘clean’, ‘cooperative’, ‘articulate’ – in other words ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ – cases. This classification labour process is not only an example of inter-related activity systems, but also specifically an example of the interaction of value production systems; production systems that, moreover, exhibit regular instances of alignment (e.g. where use-value production is effectively governed by exchange-value production imperatives) as well as occasional moments of conflict (e.g. where there is a struggle over what to do with so-called ‘charity’ cases or those constructed as ‘abusers’ of the system who ‘waste taxpayer money’). Economic efficiency, a concern to treat cases that allow the achievement of ‘mean length of stay’ requirements, for example, mutually constitutes the production of health as a use-value. What comes into view is the confluence of broader political economic structures, immediate goal-directed practice as well as the conditions of its achievement, all animated by inherent contradictions between 79 PETER H. SAWCHUK production systems which, taken together, explain the impulse for and specific forms of reproduction, resistance, change and, of course, learning. Building on this it is important to be as explicit as possible in the inherent linkages between the immediate and meta-content of work processes and learning. The tradition of CHAT is quite clear in this regard. All individual and collective developmental processes are, in the first instance, to be understood as (materially or symbolically) mediated action (Vygotsky, 1978). In the first place, this realization inherently constructs the learning process as historical: that is, all mediating artefacts are historically produced and are given to affording certain forms of practice over others. However, emerging from this is a more far-reaching realization: Activity is the minimal meaningful context for understanding individual actions . . . In all its varied forms, the activity of the human individual is a system set within a system of social relations . . . The activity of individual people thus depends on their social position, the conditions that fall to their lot, and an accumulation of idiosyncratic, individual factors. Human activity is not a relation between a person and a society that confronts him . . . [I]n a society a person does not simply find external conditions to which he must adapt his activity, but, rather, these very social conditions bear within themselves the motives and goals of his activity, its means and modes. (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 10) Activity, understood as contradictory, mutually constituting value production systems, points directly toward the motives, objectives-goals, means and modes that Leont’ev highlights. Indeed, contradictions are what power the individual and collective learning process. And, together, activity systems understood as an interaction of value production systems define not simply the why but also the how of learning, in our case work-based learning. While, without question, learning necessarily involves all the basic building blocks of individual cognition, schema development, socio-emotional or libidinal influences (Illeris, 2002), and possibly even such distinct processes as ‘conscientization’, ‘reflection’ and/or ‘perspective transformation’, the point is that these processes are simply not adequate, on their own, to meaningfully understand the developmental trajectories from the standpoint of either individuals or collectivities. What Engeström’s research draws our attention to is precisely the multiple systems of value production that constitute the interlocking activities of workplaces, and indeed all forms of social practice. However, it is the sites of work – what Marx referred to as the ‘point of production’ – where the clashes and negotiations within these systems of value production are among the most intense of adult learning life. CONCLUSIONS In a world that too often allows itself to think of work simply as patterns of people engaged (or disengaged) in their assigned tasks, this chapter might seem to simply have the purpose of complicating things. However, the practices that define work are complicated even amidst what seems like mundane, un- or semi-skilled labour. These practices constantly entail an interwoven mix of clashing and negotiated 80 LIFELONG LEARNING AND WORK AS ‘VALUE’ PRODUCTION interests. Sometimes further entrenching practice, sometimes resisting or transforming practice, work not only makes use of learning but cannot help producing it as well. I began, however, with the observation that our conceptual tools for combining sound analyses of work with sound analyses of learning are limited. In fact, the point of exploring the differences between what I termed the normative-technical and the radical traditions from the outset was to establish that the barriers to achieving a genuine combination of work and learning analysis have historical-intellectual roots; roots also embedded in actual historical changes in work, economy and regulation, as the research of Barley and Kunda pointed out. We saw that in the normative-technical tradition presumptions of reciprocity and ‘virtuous circles’ were common though not sustainable. We saw, in fact, that this tradition in many ways encapsulated a view of advanced capitalism, as the ‘end of history’ where the core problems of work are largely matters of ironing out the kinks brought on by the turbulence of churning labour markets and creative destruction across the economy. Most importantly for the purposes of this volume, we saw that this normative-technical tradition, in principle and by necessity, has tended to ignore perhaps the most central feature of the learning process – the notion that systemic contradictions produce both human development and systemic change. For this reason we turned to the radical tradition that had consistently sought to discover and understand the uneven forces of change in economic life in and through the labour process itself. Building on this tradition, I argued that CHAT theories of learning were particularly appropriate for generating a ‘unit of analysis’ that could bring an understanding of systemic contradictions and the individual and collective human developmental process together for new insights into the labour/learning process. What we saw in our discussion of the work of Engeström was that by tracing the life of objects, but more specifically the clash and negotiation of parallel useand exchange-value, production systems had the potential to draw our attention to fundamentally new and exciting explanations about why and how people learn at and through work under capitalism. What comes into view is the unity of usevalue and exchange-value production as work-based learning. While some may be content to contain their interests to the spheres of work or learning, the argument here is that, where there are admissions that change is inherent to the human labour process, analyses of learning including the one proposed here, are essential to our understanding. NOTES 1 For an extended discussion of this literature see Sawchuk (2006). 2 Ritzer (1989) concisely points out distinctions amongst sociology of work, industrial sociology and organization studies, but the point remains regarding the established dominance of industrial/postindustrial approaches. Both he and others go on to argue the major dividing lines of the history of social research on work is the micro/macro distinction, and the attempts at integration which characterize the latter two decades. While not irrelevant to my point, my focus seeks to distinguish the capacity to understand change processes within and beyond what I have termed the ‘normative-technical’ traditions. 81 PETER H. SAWCHUK 3 As I note in Sawchuk (2006), this basic division is far from the end of the story where, since the 1970s the two traditions of work analysis have continued to fight it out to the point of stalemate. 4 That is, even in the case of the proverbial Robinson Crusoe (a favoured character of classical political economy) apparently communing strictly with nature, a host of socially produced mediations from language to tools are nevertheless evident, making his practice both social and historical long before he employs the slave labour of Friday. 5 Noting that ‘activity systems’ in this tradition are comprised of three levels of mediation: motive (social structure), objects/goals (self-conscious purposes), and operations (tacit responses to conditions of practice. 6 Noting here that under the neo-liberal state the analogue of profit-making in the private sector is cost reduction in the public sector (excluding policing, border security and military spending. REFERENCES Adler, P. 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