Many of our ideas about workplaces have been inherited from 20th-century corporations, in which the elements of the workplace have been packaged in a highly typified configuration: work is done by people belonging to an organization, for some clear reason, at a specific place and time, using specific processes. This configuration is increasingly…

This paper examines the complex interweaving of the 'personal' and 'professional' in the affective labour of teachers. In line with theorisations of affective labour, contemporary school-teaching involves practices of self-work and self-making, as much as practices of curriculum and pedagogy. One emergent form of self-work, reflective of…

Purpose: This paper aims to introduce the concept of adaptive agency and illustrate its emergence in the field of English teaching in a number of countries using England over the past 30 years as a case study. It examines how the exceptional flexibility of English as school subject has brought many external impositions whilst its teachers have…

Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students' dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement. Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing…

The majority of articles on mentoring in the library and information science field address career development by emphasizing the orientation process for new librarians and building the requisite skills for a specific job. Few articles deal with the psychological and social challenges that many early-career and minority librarians face, which can…

Physical assault against school personnel is a serious problem, although not highly publicized. This workplace violence can result in debilitating injury to school employees along with major monetary costs. This article looks at legal issues that address physical assault against school personnel as well as the roles professional associations have…

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), an independent agency of the U.S. Federal government, has been instructing employees in the tenants of followership since 2009. As part of a multi-pronged approach to create a more empowered workforce and enhance trust in leadership, instruction in followership has helped to raise the FDIC from the…

This article is an analysis of "Performance Improvement Quarterly" (PIQ) for the years 2001-2010. The intent was to examine the article types used, the authors who contributed the most to the journal, the topics the journal most commonly focused on, and the citation frequency of the journal's articles. The analysis revealed that…

It is assumed in the current policy environment that higher education should lead to graduate employability, although understandings of employability are generally limited. In this paper, we discuss issues relating to graduate employability with reference to a case study of an information technology (IT) student progressing to a graduate role in…

The close connection between the quality of provision for young children and professionalisation of the field has long been supported by international research. That the two are inseparable aspects of one picture is beginning to become accepted at European policy level, as evident in recent high level EU policy documents. This article explores the…

This is a case describing how technology enhanced learning environments can be used to improve employees' competence development. For this purpose, specific problematic situations in a Korean insurance company are portrayed. These situations demonstrate that everyday life in a workplace provides opportunities for learning and performance…

The purpose of this paper is to challenge models of workplace learning that seek to isolate or manipulate a limited set of features to increase the probability of learning. Such models typically attribute learning (or its absence) to individual engagement, manager expectations or organizational affordances and are therefore at least implicitly…

A problematic trend in the nature of work in educational settings has been the declining emphasis on a professional orientation to work and a growing emphasis on more technocratic approaches. This international trend has led to increased attention on skills and competencies and lessened attention to values, beliefs, motivations, energy, and…

This article focuses on pedagogical aspects of initial vocational training in the context of the Swiss VET system. Even though apprentices are usually the responsibility of one main supervisor within companies, a number of other colleagues, experts and fellow apprentices interact with them as they engage in productive tasks. In that context, the…

This article presents a case study of a student involved in language learning at a work placement, as part of the basic Swedish language programme for adult immigrants, Svenska for invandrare (Sfi), in Gothenburg, Sweden. In accordance with the predominant economic agenda, this system is assumed to accelerate labour market entrance as well as…