Contested Learning in Welfare Work
A Study of Mind, Political Economy, and the Labour Process
1st Edition
Published on 5. August 2013
978-1-107-35306-0 (ISBN)
Description
Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganisation and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
3 Tables, unspecified; 9 Line drawings, unspecified
File size
2,92 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-107-35306-0 (9781107353060)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Peter H. Sawchuk
Contested Learning in Welfare Work
A Study of Mind, Political Economy, and the Labour Process
Book
06/2013
Cambridge University Press
€129.90
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Peter Sawchuk is a Professor of Adult Education and Industrial Relations at the University of Toronto. He studies, writes and teaches in the areas of adult learning theory, the sociology and psychology of education and work, and Marxist political economy. Professor Sawchuk specialises in social perspectives on learning and the economy, emphasising the relationships between learning, labour processes, labour markets and political economy.
Content
1. Introduction; 2. The skills impasse and an activity approach; 3. Taylorism - re-engaging with an enduring influence; 4. Historical meditations in the making of Taylorism in contemporary state social services work; 5. Experiencing the de-skilling premises of welfare work; 6. De-skilling - learning welfare work and the meditations of space, time, and distance; 7. Re-skilling, consenting, and the engrossments of administrative knowledge; 8. Up-skilling, resisting, and re-keying for craft knowledge; 9. Divisions of knowledge production, group formation, and occupational acculturation; 10. Understanding prevalence, roots, and factors of trajectories of knowledge production; 11. Mind in political economy and the labour process - a use-value thesis; Appendix.
