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. 

Reading :: People are STRANGE

 People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness

By Lambros Malafouris

The link above goes to MIT Press, where you can download this book for free as a PDF. I suggest doing so if you’re interested in Material Engagement Theory (MET) or the link between artifacts and consciousness more broadly. 

I previously reviewed Malafouris’ How Things Shape the Mind, in which he considers how archaeologists treat the mind and suggests MET as an alternate approach grounded in Hutchins, Clark, and Latour. I also reviewed his PhD student Antonis Iliopoulis’ book Early Body Ornaments and the Origins of our Semiotic Mind, which applies MET along with Peircean semiotics. This current book (published 2026) builds on that previous work. 

In Chapter 1, “Selfbound and STRANGE,” Malafouris explains that humans realize self-becoming through the process of Situated TRANsactional GEnesis, at the intersection of mind and matter. He argues that humans enact a self-bounded life world (umwelt) (p.3) He approaches consciousness as a continual process that is codependent on a material world: a system that “emerges in the form of a heterogeneous hylonoetic field (from the Greek hyle for ‘matter’ and noesis for ‘intelligence’” (p.5). He gets here by emphasizing the process of becoming over being: “what we see or experience as an object is actually a process (i.e., self-becoming)” (p.8); “the human condition is in a permanent state of incompleteness,” i.e., “anthropoeisis” (p.10). Thus a “process archaeology of mind” has two characteristics: It “emphasizes the active role of things in human cognitive life” and “sees thought processes as hylonoetic fields — that is, mindscapes extending into the extra-organismic environment” (p.11). He uses the term “thinging” to describe how things around us become part of our minds; thinking is considered a multisensory mode of material engagement (p.12) rather than a passive act of representation (p.13). This brings us to STRANGE:

• “Situated” “denotes codependency of the ‘situated’ on its ‘situation’ and of the ‘situation’ on what is ‘situated’”
• ”TRANsactional” “denotes relations in which the relata only become what they are after their interaction”
• ”GEnesis” “denotes the generative ecology of continuous creation, i.e., becoming” (p.16)

Regarding the second point, he says, “Thinking is a joint transactional accomplishment of the fusion of people and things” (p.21; cf. Hutchins). Meanwhile, culture is understood as “a compound of material forces and energies that mingle and assemble, allowing us to become what we are” (p.25). 

In STRANGE, “humans display a selfbound mode of becoming” (p.29), extending beyond the brain or the organism to the environment around it. 

With this background, he moves to Chapter 2, “Outline of a Theory of Material Engagement.” Using the example of doodling, he says, “Our most habitual actions (psychical or physical) are experienced and become constituted where brain, body, and culture conflate” (p.47). And “Humans think by constructing material signs and memory traces … primarily by using their bodies” in ways that are enacted, not just externalized (p.49). Thus he argues for “a radical continuity between cognition and material culture” (p.50). His unit of analysis for studying human thought is a metaplastic recursive relationship (p.54). To illustrate, he analyzes how a potter makes pottery from clay (p.58 et passim). 

In Chapter 3, “Anthropos: Beyond Nature and Culture,” he asks: “What makes us human?” (p.65). Or: “What mode of becoming are we?” (p.68). His overarching working thesis is that although other organisms show signs of intelligence, such as octopuses, only humans are selfbound (p.74). 

This brings us to Chapter 4, “How Humans Become.” If humans are selfbound, not products of nature or culture, what is human becoming? His position is that — contra Vygotsky — we don’t need to posit a break between evolution and history or between biological and cultural evolution (p.89). Humans become through creative engagement with the material world; for us, creativity and meaning-making are existential conditions (p.90), for “we construct and transform the conditions of our own becoming” (p.91). 

In Chapter 5, “Metaplasticity and Human Incompleteness,” he argues that plasticity and an openness to creative evolution are distinct features of our species (p.95). By metaplasticity, he means the relationship between neural and cultural plasticity (p.98). Contra Geertz, he says, culture is not made of symbols; it is a cognitive ecology grounded in action and material engagement, i.e., “thinging” the world rather than interpreting it (p.103). The mind’s primary function, he says, is not to represent but to form rhizomes with the world (p.104). 

Chapter 6, “What is This ‘I’ that I Know?”, considers the self and postulates three types of self-knowledge: the ecological self, the interpersonal self, and the extended self (pp.112-113). This brings us to agency: The sense of agency is uniquely human, he says, but agency itself is shared across humans and nonhumans as a property of material enactment (p.117). He continues this thread into Chapter 7, “Beyond This ‘I’ That I Know,” considering individuals and dividuals (p.146) and concluding that we cannot separate biological and social aspects of self (p.151).

Chapter 8, “Self-Bounding,” gets to the question of human situatedness. Is a situated body more (i.e., extended through prosthetics) or less (incomplete) (p.158)? He argues with Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia that objects are “hypotheses of action,” with enactive potential. “Things and material environments constitute the ecology that sets our bodies in motion” (p.164). The self only makes sense as a bounding process inside a hylonoetic field of active exploration and sensorimotor engagement; “selfbounding is a tool of relatedness between brains, bodies, and things” (p.169). The self is a self-bounded assemblage (p.170) that is constantly re-self-bounding (p.172). 

Chapter 9, “The Situated Person Perspective,” considers situatedness, which is considered relatedness “captured from the perspective of a process ontology that prioritizes becoming over being” (pp.176-177). He returns to the example of the potter, who has a situated body that engages in a process of dynamic enskillment (p.182). 

In Chapter 10, “Tools for the Self and Body: The Prehistory of ‘Me’,” he examines stone toolmaking (knapping) and body decorations, both of which “constitute an ecology of selfhood” (p.196). Based on these, he argues for two levels of self-binding: causal and intentional/temporal (p.211). 

Chapter 11, “Digital Selves,” uses the term “digital self to refer to those aspects of human consciousness constructed or performed as we engage in or immerse inside this new virtual lifeworld” (p.229). It represents an extension of the process of self-bounding. 

Chapter 12, “Epilogue,” wraps up the book, leaving us with the claim that humans become by creating (p.252).

Quite a read. I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am generally on board with the distributed/extended cognition perspective described here, and I like how the author has surveyed so much literature and illustrated it with so much material. He has spent a lot of time working out MET and its implications for cognition, agency, and selfhood. I also appreciate the focus on processes rather than objects, something that he has in common with dialectical approaches. On the other hand, I felt worn down by the many neologisms, which sometimes felt as if they were standing in for concepts that had already been established under different names. More than anything, I was overwhelmed by the amount of territory covered. So even though I have written the review, I think I will need to reread it along with the book to feel as if I have really gotten it down.

Should you read this book? If you have been interested in the things that interest me — questions of how the cognitive, social, and cultural interact materially in the human experience — definitely. If you have been intrigued by Latour, Hutchins, Clark, Deleuze & Guattari, Bateson, Geertz, or Vygotsky, sure. If you’re interested in how to understand reading and writing as material practices, probably.