An employee’s possibility to learn and develop while working has gradually gained ground as one of the central themes in the field of work and organizational science.
Where Taylorism was mostly interested in providing a decent livelihood and nonharmful working conditions to employees, and where the human relations movement emphasized social satisfaction at work, the most recent work and organizational theories have focused on creating learning and development-conducive work. For instance, the sociotechnical systems movement in Northern Europe and the humanistic psychology movement in the USA both hold an adult’s possibility for continuous learning and development as a central criterion for ‘good work’. The literature on workplace learning has, furthermore, highlighted the importance of learning during daily work processes; in the continuously changing working life, individual and collective learning situated in work is seen as the competitive advantage.
This article investigates the learning opportunities that contemporary industrial
work processes and workplaces offer employees individually and collectively. The
research questions addressed are, first, whether or not daily industrial work contributes
to individual and collective learning and development and, second, how such
workplace learning could further be promoted. The research thus explores how
employees can become trained as professionals and persons through their work and
how individual development may expand to collective development. The research has
a case-study approach; it aims at describing workplace learning and development in several case organizations in a comprehensive and context-sensitive manner by using multiple sources of evidence. One Swedish and three Finnish package-s ...