Reading :: The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training

 The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training

Edited by David Guile and Lorna Unwin

I picked up this thick (584pp.) volume to learn more about the intellectual world of David Guile, who has collaborated with me on a few articles. David is Professor of Education and Work at the UCL Institute of Education (University College London) and has published on the learning economy as well as activity theory. In this volume, he and his creditor Lorna Unwin have compiled 27 contributions that consider vocational education and training (VET) from different perspectives and angles, as well as how they are practiced in various countries.

As the editors explain in the first chapter,

We have structured the book around five broad themes:

• VET as evolving concept
• The political economy of VET
• Arrangements for VET
• Developing practices in VET
• Challenges for VET (p.6)

I found the introductory chapter really useful. In it, the editors consider VET from various perspectives, searching for “a new conceptualization of the relationship between work, expertise, and VET, which we term prospective VET expertise”, which is “based on the development of expertise across a process-based continuum” (p.21). In outlining their potential framework, they draw on Guile’s concept of recontextualization, which “supplements the argument that learning occurs through participating in practice with the idea that when people are working across practices (intercommunity), learning can also involve the commingling of practice, both of which are mutually informing processes” (p.34). Recontextualization as a concept, they argue, “can provide a holistic framework for analyzing the way in which learners understand the relationship between theory and practice in their own occupational field, as well as to prepare them to also engage with that relationship in other professional fields” (p.35). 

Chapter 4, Paul Hager’s “VET, HRD, and workplace learning: Where to from here?” provides an overview of VET developments in the second half of the 20th century, which has been characterized by deskilling and reskilling (p.64). Two perennial themes are: moving from on-the-job learning to academies and shifting purpose “from developing individual learners toward meeting economic priorities” (p.65). Drawing on Guile’s concept of recontextualization (p.76), Hager considers VET activities as having a purpose, occurring in a normative context, and requiring inference. 

Other chapters consider VET from different angles. Do we still need the concept of occupation now, in post-Fordist work characterized by precarity (Ch.5)? How does the knowledge economy impact collective bargaining, and what does this shift in industrial relations mean for VET (Ch.9)? How is VET being implemented in the USA (Ch.12), Canada (Ch.13), Denmark (Ch.14, 21), Germany (Ch.15, 16), England (Ch.22, 27), India (Ch.24), China (Ch.25), Argentina (Ch.26), and across Europe (Ch.17)? What does boundary-crossing mean for VET (Ch.18)? With 27 chapters, the volume is far more comprehensive than I can address here. But I expect that I’ll return to some of these chapters as I continue to think about VET.

Should you pick up this volume? If you’re interested in workplace learning and its shifts over time, probably, at least the introductory chapter, Ch.4, and Ch.18 (boundary crossing). If you’re interested in VET and political economy, Part II has a lot of relevant chapters. And of course if you want to learn more about VET and affiliated concepts, such as competency-based learning, you’ll find a lot to consider here. 

Reading :: Sensemaking in Organizations

 Sensemaking in Organizations 

By Karl E. Weick

I’ve been planning to read this well-known book for years, but have been repeatedly thwarted. It’s perpetually checked out at the library, and booksellers have priced it exorbitantly — I think it’s out of print, but in high demand. But earlier this year, I was prodded to use some of my research money that had been sitting in an account, so I blew some of it on this book.

I can see why it’s a classic. Weick writes with a clear understanding of the literature on which he draws (although his style is, weirdly, both confident and tentative). The text is densely constructed, but still navigable and readable, advancing the concept of “sensemaking.” 

In Chapter 1, he argues that sensemaking “involves identity, retrospect, enactment, social contact, ongoing events, cues, and plausibility” (p.3). He argues that sensemaking is not interpretation because “sensemaking is clearly about an activity or a process, whereas interpretation can be a process but is just as likely to describe a product” (p.13). Sensemaking “seems to address incipient puzzles at an earlier, more tentative stage than interpretation” (p.14).  

In Chapter 2, he argues that 

Sensemaking is understood as a process that is

1. Grounded in identity construction
2. Retrospective
3. Enactive of sensible environments
4. Social
5. Ongoing
6. Focused on and by extracted cues
7. Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (p.17)

He develops these characteristics throughout the rest of the chapter. 

In Chapter 3, he turns to sensemaking in organizations. Organizations, he says, are “adaptive social forms. As intersubjective forms, they create, preserve, and implement the innovations that arise from intimate contact. As forms of generic subjectivity, they focus and control the energies of that intimacy. … Thus organizational forms are the bridging operations that link the intersubjective with the generically intersubjective” (pp.72-73). 

In Chapter 4, he considers occasions for sensemaking. “When people confront noncontingent reinforcement of their responses, they try to discover a structure that is not there” (p.84). In organizations, two types of sensemaking occasions are common: ambiguity, in which people “are confused by too many interpretations,” and uncertainty, in which “they are ignorant of any interpretations” (p.91). 

In Chapter 6, when discussing belief-driven processes of sensemaking, Weick considers sensemaking as arguing (p.135). He notes that Tompkins (1987) glosses the entire field of organizational studies as rhetorical (p.136) and says that “arguing is one of at least two forms of belief-driven sensemaking processes” (p.136), involving five characteristics: an inferential leap from existing beliefs to a new one; a rationale to justify the leap; a choice among completing claims; the regulation of uncertainty; and willingness to confront peers (p.138, quoting Brockriede). 

In Chapter 7, Weick considers belief-driven processes. Here, he argues that “organizations can be characterized by the degree to which the contexts they create allow action to be visible, volitional, and irrevocable” (p.159). 

In Chapter 8, considering the future of sensemaking, Weick considers the nature of problems: “Problems are simply moments of interruption in a process. When the interruption is repaired, under the guise of problem-solving, the process continues to unfold and the vulnerability to interruption crops up again. Problems keep showing up over and over because solutions seldom alter the dynamics of the process” (pp.187-188). 

Overall, I found the book to be indeed rewarding, but — surprisingly — of limited direct value to me. Weick’s concept of sensemaking has been thoroughly and densely developed here, but that thoroughness and denseness means that I found it hard to connect this work well to other concepts of organizations and work. I think — and, granted, I have not spent a lot of time considering this — that the framework is exclusionary in the sense that one must take it as a whole, using it as the primary lens to understand organizations. That’s an obvious good if one’s focus is how people make sense of their organizations. But it creates problems if one wants to foreground other aspects of the organization, such as its material tools and rhetorical infrastructure, then consider how sensemaking functions as a part of the system. 

Nevertheless, I’m really glad that I finally read this classic, which I recommend highly if you’re interested at all in organizations.