Aileen Watson

Participation, reflection and integration for business and lifelong learning: Pedagogical challenges of the integrative studies programme at the University of Strathclyde Business School

This paper gives a succinct account of current debates in the literature on graduate attributes as they are related to employment and lifelong learning, and argues the limitations of a “key skills” agenda as a guide to curriculum practice. Development of a curricular innovation that addresses key skills, “integrative studies” at the Strathclyde University Business School, is described and located in a wider framework of work‐related facets that extend thinking beyond key skills. Those facets include the idea of a learning organisation and the concept of student identity formation. A research‐based approach to further development of the curriculum is outlined, which takes the experiences of students and the perceptions and practices of specific employers to be key influences.

Back to the Future? Change and Continuity at Work

The original title for this book was ‘Should life all labour be?’ Tennyson’s evocative summation of the duality that work has always represented in our lives: recognized for its sustaining necessity but at the same time resented for its dominance. It could be argued that, historically, the prevailing work ethic in society has striven to enhance the former meaning and diminish the latter and, in the introduction to this book we noted that, in recent government economic and social policy, we can discern the constituents of a new work ethic for our time. The repeated theme that full citizenship and personal fulfilment are only attainable through participation in paid work has elevated the concept of work centrality, the philosophical importance in people’s lives of the work they do, beyond the somewhat confined circles of academic discourse and into the area of policy.

Women and Men

A little-discussed component of the knowledge society model has been the predicted eradication of the gendered inequalities that have been a feature of industrial capitalism. Castells (1996), for example, claimed that information and communication technologies would reverse the relegation of women to deskilled or menial jobs as historical stereotypes were replaced by the demand for an autonomous, skilled labour force. As relatively new employment sectors, we might expect call centre and software work to demonstrate this convergence between men and women. Yet, they already represent horizontally segregated occupations with female-dominated (call centres) and male-dominated (software) workforces, and are often presented as examples of distinctively women’s and men’s work. Our data is also suggestive of vertical segregation: women were underrepresented at management levels in call centres despite their numerical dominance within the occupation, and in software, our findings showed a tendency for women to be located in less technical, lower-level roles.

Class and Status

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.

Organizational Life: The Management of Commitment

One of the research goals was to evaluate whether, after twenty years of the HRM agenda as the new orthodoxy, work had been elevated to a more central position in employees’ lives, as measured by stated levels of organizational commitment. Despite the stated aim of integrating employment practice to company business strategy (Storey, 1992; Guest, 1989), HRM theory is often strangely de-contextualized, apart from token references to globalization and an enhanced competitive environment. For the purposes of HRM, the company is often treated as semi-autonomous capsule, isolated from the rest of society, and this narrow focus on the workplace is, ironically, mirrored in many critical studies of control in the work organization, whether undertaken from a labour process or Foucaultian perspective. Yet movements and changes in the operation of the capitalist economy, such as market turbulence and relations between units of capital (financial and industrial), often have a direct influence on all members of work organizations and on the employment relationship at the level of the firm (Hyman, 1987; Thompson, 2003). Thus we would argue that a major reason for the oft-observed disjunction between the HRM rhetoric and the experienced reality (Legge, 1995; Thompson, 2003) lies in the particular political-economic context within which organizations are located at any point in time and to which they must respond.

Organizational Life: The Nature of Work

In this, and the following chapter, we are concerned with the overarching and broadly-defined concept of organizational life, and focus on two core themes. In the present chapter we examine work organization, labour process and management control, and employee experiences and perceptions in relation to these, and explore the contrasts that exist between the sectors. On the basis of previous knowledge, although with important qualifications, we expected call centres to more approximate regimes of ‘direct control’, while software development would exhibit strong tendencies towards ‘responsible autonomy’. In Chapter 4, we explore management strategy and, in particular, subject to critical scrutiny the extent to which the much-heralded agendas of human resource management deliver the promised, but elusive, outcomes of commitment and job satisfaction. This chapter includes discussion of pay and pay systems. A third related theme pertaining to organizational life, which considers worker attitudes, and principally investigates the claim that individualism has replaced collectivism as a new orthodoxy of employee relations, will be discussed in Chapter 8. We begin by outlining the work settings of our individual case studies.

Work Attachment, Work Centrality and the Meaning of Work in Life

In recent times, a new orthodoxy has become established, claiming simultaneously to describe, explain and indeed shape contemporary economy and society. Concepts associated with the knowledge economy now permeate academic, populist, policy maker and practitioner thinking, to such an extent that they have become axiomatic nostrums informing government agendas (e.g. DTI, 1998; 2004a, b). Accordingly, it is widely accepted that we are living through a new and distinctive epoch, in which the dominant principles organizing human society have changed fundamentally and dramatically. Yet, the ‘big picture franchise’ (Thompson, 2003) of the knowledge economy is but the latest in a succession of paradigm break theories proclaiming the end of industrialism and Fordism, meta-characterizations themselves fraught with definitional and conceptual difficulties (Williams et al., 1987). Since the 1980s, post-Fordism, post-modernism and the surveillance society have been advanced as models, each successively claiming to provide the indispensable framework for understanding socio-economic phenomena of all kinds.

Into the New Century: The Changing Terrain for Work and Employment

Discussions, assertions and policy statements concerning the nature of work at the end of the twentieth century can only be fully understood if we review them against wider socio-economic contexts. These comprise both substantive and observable trends in employment and society in the UK and, given the location of this study, in Scotland, and also of a conceptual element: the prevailing theories, models and predictions about what such trends mean. This latter, conceptual context — broadly that a paradigm shift has taken place in society, economy and the world of work — is associated with the knowledge economy model. This may be seen to constitute a key element of an interpretative hegemony that so pervades policy statements and popular discourse as to have become received common sense.

Household and Community Life

As previous chapters demonstrate, much contemporary management rhetoric is geared toward engaging the commitment of employees, exhorting them to co-operate with management demands to extend and flex working hours, to require availability to customers through call-outs, evening and weekend working and to take work home to meet required schedules.