Work Knowing on the Fly: Co-emergent Epistemologies in Post-Corporate Enterprise Cultures

Dr. Tara J. Fenwick
University of Alberta
Ed North 7-104, Faculty of Education
Edmonton, Alberta  T6G 2G5
Phone: (780) 492-4879    Fax: (780) 492-2024
E-Mail: tara.fenwick@ualberta.ca

A paper presented to the Working Knowledge conference, University of Technology at Sydney, December 10, 2000.

Overview: Drawing on findings of a qualitative study ^[1] exploring the learning processes of individuals working in environments characterized as ‘post-corporate’ enterprise cultures, this paper proposes a conceptualization of work knowing as co-emergence, at the intersection of invention, identity, and environment.

Introduction

Current formulations of working knowledge tend to focus on experiential or ‘informal’ learning, with careful attention to the role of workplace structures, cultures and communities of practice as these influence an individual’s knowledge construction. Extensive critique of these environments have lamented the management of workers’ learning and its subversion to organizational goals of material profit and productivity, eventually producing a worker subjectivity as a ‘bundle of learning needs’. In this paper, I argue for a conceptualization of work knowing which identifies itself with these formulations to a certain extent, but breaks with ‘knowledge as substance’ and ‘individual as knowledge-constructor’ orientations.

This argument relies on literature establishing the formation in economic late modernity of worker subjectivity as ‘enterprising self’, focusing on flexibility inherent in post-Fordist work environments. Edwards (1998) and Garrick and Usher (1999) show the impacts on ‘hidden curriculum’ and individual subjectivities produced in workplaces where flexible workers (responsive, adaptive, transferable), flexible structures (insecure, fluid, adaptive to consumer demand and changing markets), flexible pay (increasingly contractual) and consequently flexible learning are assumed to ensure organizational competitiveness. Both Edwards and Garrick and Usher suggest that one result is the creation of ‘enterprising selves’: workers expected to be active, self-responsible, self-reflexive constructors of their own work capacities, biographies and success. Another, of course, is the naturalization of ‘flexibility’ in various workplace enactments, and a widespread legitimation of (mainly individual) workplace ‘learning’ as foundation for organizational health, supposedly initiating a wide array of benefits for workers: personal development and productivity, purpose and fulfillment, meaningful relationships, creativity, even spiritual growth and happiness.

These conceptions help illuminate the nature of the shift from essential stability in ‘employment’ offered in clear exchange for skills and labor, to the current regimes of work fluctuation and casualization, with blurred boundaries between employees’ private spaces of self and soul and the turmoil of an organization’s hungry growth. The limitation, I believe, is that the focus of these conceptions remains the (large) organization, representing working knowledge as something developed at the intersection of (employee) worker learning and pre-existing workplace structures.

However, I believe there may be a different way to understand both workers and working knowledge. There has been a surge, in Canada at least, of workers (especially women) leaving organizational employment to start their own businesses (Industry Canada, 1999). This phenomenon may be linked to both the prevailing ethos of flexibility and enterprise in late modernity, and individuals enacting Giddens’ notion of the ‘self becoming a reflexive project’. These individuals narrate patterns of work and learning that appear to resist prevailing conceptions of organization-based ‘working knowledge’ and learning as individualist constructivism described in the section below. In later sections I outline a proposal for understanding their work knowing as co-emergence, a socio-cultural framework calling itself “enactivism” (Davis and Sumara, 1997). I connect this frame with dimensions of invention  and identity , arguing that the resulting conceptualization of an enacted, vanishing ‘knowing on the fly’ may be a harbinger of epistemology in post-corporate enterprise cultures.

Problems with Current Conceptualizations of Working Knowledge

Alongside corporate North America’s enchantment with ‘knowledge management’, ‘learning organization’, ‘employee development’, the cult of leadership, and other markers of attempts to control and manage individuals’ learning and change, theory wonders about the location and process of producing working ‘knowledge’, often broadly characterized as ‘practical’ (as opposed to discipline-centered), or situation-specific (compared to universalized transferable propositions). Any conceptualization of working knowledge is bound to be problematic by the very fixity and distorting effects of academic theoretical convention applied to elusive and interminably complex, contradictory living environments of knowing and doing. However, I believe our collective approaches to working knowledge are especially limited by three tendencies in particular: focusing on individual worker-learners as employees subjugated by a corporate (body of individuals) organization; treating individual worker-learners as constructors of knowledge affected by but not fundamentally a part of their environments; and taking up acquisitive metaphors of knowledge as substance.

First, much recent theorizing of working knowledge focuses on the generic ‘organization’ as the instrument and site of post-Fordist working practices flowing from dual governing orientations of flexibility and performativity. Individuals are typically cast as oppressed learning creatures: knowledge-producers and regulated subjects of their ‘workplace’ and its discursive practices, such as its learning technologies. Foucault’s notions of governmentality through self-regulation appear regularly in critiques of workplace subjugation of individuals’ knowledge:

In terms of the actual conditions of employment (power-laden work processes and cultural, textual environments which help shape experience and therefore certain knowledge), individuals are rarely represented as active agents. This Foucauldian approach to understanding social systems has been criticized as mechanistic, overdeterministic and inflexible. Of course, the stress on workplace governmentality shaping worker subjectivity is important for illuminating oppressive discourses and their influences on worker’s view of themselves and their desires in work and learning. However, it may not sufficiently recognize the dynamics of human agency and its consequences in the social networks in which power and discourse circulate. In a later section I show evidence that in fact many individuals now navigate the postmodern marketplace to establish their own livelihood, reasonably free of organizational governmentality in various forms attempting to excavate their dreams and desires for others’ profit.

Turning to the second issue, many conceptions of working knowledge continue to focus on the individual as primary actor in a reflective process of knowledge ‘construction’, an orientation that is problematized later in this section. The individual discerns objects of knowing or judgment from the environment in an ongoing process of meaning-making, which becomes more acute, resilient, self-reflexive and generalizable as knowledge ‘grows’. This orientation sidesteps individuals’ formulation of experience within particular discourses, and downplays the extent to which experience is an embodied and elusive phenomenon.

Third, working knowledge is still often objectified as an identifiable and acquirable ‘thing’ excavated from experience, that can be represented as forms, types and purposes. Despite widespread critique of industry’s orientation to commodify and manage experiential knowledge as ‘intellectual capital’ (Butler, 2000; Garrick and Usher, 1999; Usher and Solomon, 1999) there is still a scholarly tendency to reify knowledge as substance, albeit illuminating new perspectives on working knowledge. For example Hager (1999) argues that “know-how” (‘knowing what to do in practice, evident from people’s various intentional actions’) flows seamlessly from and into workplace practical judgements. In his care to demystify and make visible the creation of know-how, and to reclaim ‘practical judgement’ as an epistemologically legitimate site for and test of learning growth, Hager appears to stabilize and reify “know-how” as a ‘residue’ of learning. Context influences (and is acted upon by) individuals and their learning, but remains essentially separate from them.

Beckett (1998) proposes working knowledge as “organic learning” which “brings to awareness what a learned in the doing of the work, while the work is being undertaken” (p. 86). Though careful to recognize how workplace learning arises from ‘holistic’ human experience situated in particular cultural contexts, Beckett essentially treats ‘organic learning’ as substantive, the ‘gluing together’ of thoughts, feelings, and actions, something that can be ‘made’ and ‘clarified’. Billett (1998) produces a sophisticated model of working knowledge that incorporates processes of routine and non-routine problem-solving of everyday work, and the community of practice wherein goal-directed activity takes place. However Billett portrays knowledge as something ‘constructed’ through interaction between an individual’s mental ‘structures’ and personal history, and the environment. For all three, the individual’s mind (albeit in situ) is the chief site of the learning process, and representable knowledge (albeit experience-based and somewhat fluid) accumulates as its product. This view is essentially constructivist, retaining an ‘acquisition’ metaphor of knowledge.

Elsewhere I have discussed critiques of constructivist views of learning and knowledge (Fenwick, 2000a) from psychoanalytic, feminist, post-structural and situational perspectives. Five premises can be drawn from these arguments: (1) that experiential (work) knowing must be theorized as fully embodied (not a reflective process where lofty rational mind excavates messy bodily experience to create ‘knowledge’) (Michelson, 1996); (2) that individuals and what they construe to be their ‘experiences’ are completely immersed in and shared among communities of texts and relationships (not moving in but separate from their work contexts); (3) that knowledge resides in participative networks of action (not necessarily in individuals’ heads) (Sfard, 1998); (4) that the conscious reflective mind is more limited than much learning theory suspects --individuals actively resist important knowings and desires, even their own (Britzman, 1998); and (5) that environment and identity co-emerge in enactments of cognition (Varela, Thompson And Rosch, 1991). Beyond these five premises, a useful conception of work knowing needs to address important issues of contextuality listed by Hager (1999): pervasive change and crisis; difference and diversity; the particular and local; and political and social dimensions of knowledge (p. 648).

Enactivism: Work Knowing as Co-Emergence

A wide array of authors are now conceptualizing work learning as a process of “changing participation in the culturally designed settings of everyday life” (Lave, 1993, 5-6), variously termed socio-cultural or “situated cognition” (Greeno, 1997), “neo-Vygotskian” perspectives (Sawchuk, 1999), and “CoP” or communities of practice. As Gold and Watson (1999) explain, learning cannot be separated from its practice and the social relations that make it legitimate. The ongoing social process of sense-making results in “the adoption and structuring of practices which will serve to further relationships within a social-cultural context. It is practice that makes a ‘curriculum’ for new members to learn as ‘apprentices’ (p. 199). But many of these situated perspectives still treat the environment as supplemental to the individual consciousness, describing an individual subject who develops  through participative interactions in a community of practice. The concept of autonomous individual mind-- learning to  participate --remains privileged and fundamentally unchallenged.

Somewhat different from these situated perspectives emanating from a psychological tradition is a conceptualization of knowing called enactivism. Grounded in evolutionary biology and complexity theory, enactivism explains the co-emergence  of knower and setting (Maturana and Varela, 1987; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). The first premise is that the systems represented by person and context are inseparable, and the second that change or ‘knowing’ occurs from emerging systems affected by the intentional tinkering of one with the other. When two systems coincide, the “perturbations” of one system excites responses in the structural dynamics of the other. The resultant “coupling” creates a new transcendent unity of action and identities that could not have been achieved independently by either participant. This is “mutual specification” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991), the fundamental dynamic of systems constantly engaging in joint action and interaction. Davis and Sumara (1997) explain that knowing “exists in the interstices  of a complex ecology or organismic relationality” (p. 110).

Thus environment and knower emerge together in the cognitive process, although this is a false dichotomy: there is no context separate from any particular system such as an individual actor. Understandings are embedded in conduct. What others call tacit knowledge is viewed by enactivism as existing not within individuals in ways that drive actions, but unfolding in circumstances that evoke these particular actions. Much of this joint action exceeds and leaks out of individual attempts to attend to and control unconscious action through critical reflection. The problem lies not in underdeveloped critical abilities that should be educated, but in a false conceptualization of the learning figure as separate from the contextual ground. Enactivism draws attention to the ‘background’, and examines myriad fluctuations, subtle interactions, imaginings and intuitions, the invisible implied by the visible, and the series of consequences emerging from any single action. The focus is not on the ‘learning event’ and its components (which other perspectives might describe in fragmented terms: person, experience, tools, community, and activity) but on the relationships  binding them together in complex systems. Knowing cannot be understood except in terms of co-emergence: each participant’s understandings are entwined with the other’s, and individual knowing co-emerges with collective knowing.

A Culture of ‘Post-Corporate’ Enterprise

Garrick and Usher (1999) argue that workplaces are restructured to create ‘enterprising selves’ among employees, with a focus on learning to elicit employee performance in flexible, new and innovative ways:

They go on to suggest that work-based learning is a technology through which selves become enterprising, seeking betterment and fulfillment in the work context. They make a project of themselves and at the same time add value to the organization in culturally sanctioned ways. Edwards (1998), drawing from Beck’s (1992) influential notion of the ‘risk society’, shows how in current regimes of ‘reflexive modernization’ and flexible specialization, people must construct their own biographies, choosing between different lifestyles, subcultures, social ties, and identities.

One result has been increasing cultural preoccupation with self-created enterprise or “me, inc.” as a way of life. Perhaps this is a logical consequence of work messages increasingly emphasizing self-managed careers, individual’s responsibility for creating own work and developing own knowledge and skills, coupled with exploding opportunities (especially in internet enterprise) making business start-up accessible to individuals in wide variety of age, culture, class, bodily, geographic, and other categories of potential inequity and disadvantage. Certainly in Canada, interest in self-employment and entrepreneurism ^[2] appears in many cultural vectors: home-based business, dot-com ventures, youth moguls, special assistance for women entrepreneurs, media glory-stories, even entrepreneurial education proliferating in school curricula. Smyth (1999) deplores this turn to ‘enterprise’ culture as triumphal individualist economic rationalism threatening democratic, civic-minded community.

Certainly self-employed individuals are surrounded by discourses of competitive individualism emphasizing unlimited material growth and profit (Fenwick, 2000c). These formulations of entrepreneurism seem committed to initiating new corporations, capital-creating bodies ingesting workers, competitors and territory in relentless and largely unregulated fight for survival. However, entrepreneurism is not unitary: a closer look reveals that within these discourses there is considerable resistance. Certain entrepreneurs talk not about making money but about creating a nourishing work community. They emphasize ‘passion’ and ‘fun’ in work, echoing Michelson’s (1999) notion of transgressive possibilities of latter-day-Bakhtinian carnival. Their stories of ‘doing business’ demonstrate an actual commitment to personal fulfillment and quality of life for themselves, their families and the people working with them before material growth and consumption; to sustainability before expansion; to mutually supportive relationships before competition; and to ethical integrity before profit (Fenwick and Hutton, 2000). Others such as Hawken (1993) have offered evidence of this transgressive shift away from traditional models of corporate entrepreneurism. The ‘post-corporate’ enterprise culture that appears to be emerging may be small, but challenges the subjugation of humanity to material markers of success and size.

It appears that women are a fast-growing part of this culture in Canada. Women’s business start-ups have risen dramatically in the past decade, doubling the rate of men’s and often outlasting men’s businesses (Business Development Bank, 1999; Industry Canada, 1999). Qualitative studies of these women entrepreneurs indicate that many are creating new models of business, work and learning as more relational and ethically-oriented than profit-driven (Gay, 1997; Robertson, 1997; Thrasher, 1998). The women entrepreneurs across Canada that we interviewed had left jobs in (corporate) organizations. About two-thirds had left unhappily, citing reasons of gendered relations and glass ceiling issues, serious ethical conflicts, lack of recognition and creative opportunity. Past jobs were described as “stifling”, “on a plateau”, “being in a box”, “having a noose around my neck”, where ideas were ‘shut down’ or projects terminated mid-stream. All had decided to start their own business partly as an opportunity to “do it my way”: live out a creative dream, create their own work environments, contribute meaningfully to their communities, and gain more personal flexibility and control over their work and lives.

Now they are the new owners, catapulted from their former status as workers struggling for identity within organizational environments actively preventing their self-determination along lines of gender, age, valued knowledge and valued performance outcomes to take up positions as independent enterprising participants in global capitalism. Part of their struggle against “sub-plots of the master discourse: namely economic competition and employee performance and productivity within a neo-liberal framework” (Forrester, 1999, p. 194-95) is to recognize the contradictory discourses swirling within and around them, discerning and resisting those that reproduce the corporate enterprise cultures they fled (Fenwick, 2000c).

A clue to an emerging post-corporate enterprise culture are these women’s meanings of success, which presumably derive from and shape their actions within the discursive practices of their environments. Many described their enterprise “success” in personal terms: (“Success for me is to be happy in what I’m doing”; “Having three happy healthy children – that’s the biggest”). Many talked about success as their ability to choose daily activity, their daily satisfaction and fulfillment, the quality of relationships comprising their work networks, the contributions they perceive themselves making to their communities, the reputations they build in those communities, and their overall perceived quality of life. Above all most of these enterprising individuals claimed they deliberately resisted dominant cultural measures of success as profit and growth.

Knowing on the Fly

Entrepreneurs’ stories embody what Edwards (1998) envisions as “active, creative, reflexive, risk-taking workers with certain degrees of autonomy in how they define and achieve their work goals” (p. 387). Most work in environments unbounded by institutionalized roles, norms, and disciplinary knowledge. They choose  the relational networks in which they will participate, the physical settings and the overall activities comprising their everyday tasks. Like other workers in an age of flexibility and enterprise, they must mobilize resources, see opportunities and act quickly. They engage in continual innovative problem-solving – in fact, invention is a way of being. Especially in the case of small post-corporate businesses, owners must cross many boundaries of knowing, from management and financing to product design and marketing, from daily operations to long term visioning. These people define what counts as ‘knowing’ in their choices of work activity.

Many entrepreneurs in our study reported that the enormity of what had to be learned hit soon after they made the commitment to a business start-up. (Fewer than 10% of the women we interviewed had any formal business education.) They described their work knowing process as “knowing on the fly”, “navigating the mess”, “do or die learning”, and “discovering our way”. Learning was all-at-once, becoming “a jill of all trades” while flying through judgments about which trade and where in the heat of daily pressure to act. A significant first step appeared to be learning how to focus: separating big messy visions into tasks, then discerning and choosing what needed to be learned. Here is the exercise of subjectivity: an entrepreneur may decide  to take up any of a number of culturally available options of products/services to provide and structures to produce them. Or, the entrepreneur may create new options and incorporate these within the networks in which they choose to participate to remain viable: “We invent it and then figure out what it is.” For each choice requiring skill or information, an entrepreneur can either figure it out or hire it out. In their stories of choosing and figuring out, these entrepreneurs seemed to rely on three things: exquisitely careful ‘reading’ of the systems around them and the consequences of their own actions within these systems; listening to their personal intuition and values (before advice or instruction from others); and circulating new information/ideas into practice, integrating in an on-going process of inventive experimentation.

Invention seems critical. Most entrepreneurs described ‘doing business’ as a continual process of focused trial and error. Each new step of the business development confronting the owner must be figured out or hired out. The figuring out process was described variously as “learning by stumbling and stumbling”, “flying by the seat of your pants”, and “tinkering”. Thus knowing appeared fluid and located in activity. Continuous invention included learning to discern what was emerging, then naming it and representing it to others. Emotions of exhilaration and some fear often accompanied this sense of inventing one’s way into business. Learning to act amidst uncertainty and complexity without a sense of mastery, while trying to frame and construct meaning of a completely unfamiliar situation, became for many a way of working. Most women seemed aware of their resistant positionality: “We do things our way” even if this contravened conventional business practice. Many stories demonstrated struggle between an entrepreneur’s commitment to creativity, openness, collaboration and particular ethics --and a highly competitive global market that is in many ways inimical to small business viability.

These entrepreneurs often had difficulty articulating “lessons learned”, i.e. ‘knowledge’ accumulated from a series of problem-solving ‘learning’ work activities. They claimed difficulty generalizing knowledge from one specific situation to the next. Rapid shifts continually altered their relationships with suppliers, other providers, economic conditions and policies. Changing customer demands required continual innovative experiments. Unanticipated opportunities – and inspiration -- continually presented themselves. Many women eschewed traditional ‘business planning’ for constricting this fluid knowing ‘on the fly’. Some developed a personal need to keep trying new things, exploring new creative challenges. Constant invention staves off boredom.

However, when pushed to talk about the ‘knowledge’ they had developed, many described self-knowing as the most important ‘residue’, if any, of their enterprising work experience. Becoming confident in one’s choices and ability was probably the most frequently mentioned personal change: Women said things like “I am a different person today than I was in that job – completely different”; “The biggest thing is learning how to problem solve for yourself, taking responsibility for your own mistakes and your own decisions”; “Now I don’t beat myself up – just admit it and fix it”; “I’ve learned not to take things so personally”; “I am respected in this community, I have built a reputation – that’s what I have learned”; “I’ve shown I can do it – I love it –I would never work for someone else, ever again”. The ‘knowing’ they appeared to recognize and value most was an identity of efficacious self-in-action, self-determined, creative, inspiring, and woven into networks of belonging and action – where one knows one has influence and agency. These values were, of course, indebted to received meanings evolving within social structures and cultural discourses in which these women functioned.

Thus knowing appeared to co-evolve in a complex relation with daily choices that created the enterprise, which interacted with the evolving systems within and around these people in spontaneous and adaptable ways. Sumara and Davis (1997) describe this enaction “a continuous enlargement of the space of the possible” (p. 303). In other words, people participate together in what becomes an increasingly complex system. New unpredictable possibilities for thought and action appear continually in the process of inventing the activity, and old choices gradually become unviable in the unfolding system dynamics.

Conclusion/ Implications for Understanding Work Knowing

These women’s work lives appear to challenge our concerns that, as Usher and Solomon (1999) put it, workers’ experience is treated as “manageable and in need of management” – involving struggles over how the meaning and significance of experience is interpreted and by whom. As participants in a post-corporate culture, these women seem to resist certain so-called marketplace imperatives, crafting new models of work, entrepreneurship, and success, and creating spaces for learning that are not limited by conventional notions of worthwhile work knowledge and processes for its production. Their enterprises seem to enact vivid, empowering environments and subjectivities through networks of knowing and relationship. In an age of lumbering corporate obsession to capture and codify ‘knowledge capital’, these ‘small’ environments of enterprising action can move swiftly and freely. For the new enterprising worker subject acting within highly unpredictable, fluid and ambiguous contexts, all notions of reified knowledge or ‘learning’ as outcome – whether practice-based or disciplinary -- are considered rigid and irrelevant. In fast-paced flexible work arrangements, knowing co-emerges ‘on the fly’ with a project, community, and attendant identities.

These are small sites of work/learning/creating, not big organized resistance/challenges. There is no place for hero-rescuers here. In fact, there may be little place for educators per se, with our penchant for planning programs, liberating imprisoned consciousnesses, ‘facilitating’ useful change for other people, and reifying a phenomenon of ‘working knowledge’ upon whose existence ours depends. Instead, focus must be directed to subtle particularities of ‘context’ created through the knowing of complex systems, embedded in their constantly shifting interactional dynamics, and the relations among these particularities. Theorists of working knowledge need to become alert to a “complexified awareness . . . of how one [individual] exists simultaneously in and across these levels, and of how part and whole co-emerge and co-specify one another” (Davis and Sumara, 1997), p. 120).

At any rate, I believe that these women’s stories offer hope amidst our pessimistic discourses of ‘inevitable’ globalized capitalism fuelled by the lifelong learning of managed subjectivities. They may herald an emerging post-corporate enterprise culture reflecting Wright’s (cited by Butler, 2000) demand: “The ethos of enterprise must … be actively constituted, the truth of enterprise culture attached to the attributes of personhood and citizenship.” If so, this fledgling culture and its enterprising knowers on the fly deserve further examination.

References

Beckett, D. (1998). Past the guru and up the garden path: The new organic management learning. In D. Boud and J. Garrick, (Eds.) Understanding Learning at Work (pp. 83-97). London and New York: Routledge.

Beckett, D. & Hager, P. (2000). Making judgments as the basis for workplace learning: Towards an Epistemology of practice. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 19, (4), 300-311.

Billett, S. (1998). Ontogeny and participation in communities of practice: A socio-cognitive view of adult development. Studies in the Education of Adults, 30 (1), 21-34.

Business Development Bank of Canada. (1999). Women entrepreneurs in Canada: Geared towards success. Business Development Bank of Canada [On-line government report]. Available: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/mi04735e.html#TOP.

Butler, E. (2000) Knowing ‘now’, learning futures: The politics and knowledge practices of vocational education and training.  International Journal of Lifelong Education, 19, (4), 322-341.

Davis, B. & Sumara, D.J. (1997). Cognition, complexity and teacher education. Harvard Educational Review, 67 (1), 105-125.

Edwards, R. (1998). Flexibility, reflexivity and reflection in the contemporary workplace. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 17 ( 6), 377-388.

Fenwick, T. (2000a). Expanding conceptions of experiential learning: A review of five contemporary perspectives. Adult Education Quarterly, 50 (4), 243-272.

Fenwick, T. (2000b).Women l/earning themselves: Exploring relations between desire and knowledge production of women entrepreneurs. Proceedings of “Engendering Education”, the Canadian Association for the Study of Women and Education International Institute (pp. 78-84). Edmonton: University of Alberta.

Fenwick, T. (2000c). Lady, Inc.: Entrepreneurial discourses, women, and subjectivity. Paper presented to the Canadian Association for the Study of Women in Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, May 24-27, 2000.

Fenwick, T. & Hutton, S. (2000). Women crafting new work: The learning and development of women entrepreneurs. Proceedings of the 41^st Annual Adult Education Research Conference (pp. 112-117). Vancouver: University of British Columbia.

Forrester, K. (1999). Work-related learning and the struggles for subjectivity. Proceedings of “Researching Work and Learning”, A First International Conference”, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K, 188-197.

Garrick, J. (1998). ‘The dominant discourses of learning at work. In D. Boud and J. Garrick (Eds) Understanding Learning at Work  (pp.216-231). New York and London: Routledge.

Garrick, J. & Usher, R. (1999). Flexible learning, contemporary work and enterprising selves. Proceedings of “Researching Work and Learning”, A First International Conference”, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K, 61-69.

Gay, K. (1997). In the company of women. Toronto: HarperCollins.

Gold and Watson (1999). Exploring the dark sides of learning: A communities of practice perspective. Proceedings of “Researching Work and Learning”, A First International Conference”, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K, 198-206.

Greeno, J. (1997). On claims that answer the wrong question. Educational Researcher, 27  (1), 5-17.

Industry Canada (1999). Shattering the glass box: Women entrepreneurs and the knowledge-based economy. Micro-Economic Policy Analysis Branch [On-line government report]. Available: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_ecnmy/mera/egdoc/o4.htm.

Hager, P. (1999). Know-how and workplace practical judgement. Proceedings of “Researching Work and Learning”, A First International Conference”, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K, 645-653.

Michelson, E. (1996). Usual suspects: experience, reflection, and the (en)gendering of knowledge. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 15  (6), 438-454.

Michelson, E. (1999). Carnival, paranoia, and experiential learning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 31 (2), 140-153.

Robertson, H. (1997). Taking care of business: Stories of Canadian women entrepreneurs. Bolton, ON: Fenn.

Sawchuk, P. (1999). Workplace learning in the everyday: Structured participation from an emancipatory perspective Proceedings of “Researching Work and Learning”, A First International Conference”, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K, 131-141.

Smyth, J. (1999). Schooling and enterprise culture: Pause for a critical policy analysis. Journal of Education Policy, 14 (4), 435-444.

Sumara, D., and Davis, B. (1997). Enlarging the space of the possible: Complexity, complicity, and action research practices. In Sumara, D., and Carson, T. (Eds.), Action research as a living practice (pp. 299-312). New York: Peter Lang.

Thrasher, B. L. & Smid, M. (1998). Smart women: Canadian entrepreneurs. Toronto: Macmillan.

Usher, R. and Solomon, N. (1999). Experiential learning and the shaping of subjectivity in the workplace. Studies in the Education of Adults, 31 (2), 155-163.

Varela, F. J, Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

---