Researching post-compulsory education:
beyond phenomenology? (Draft 17/02/2016)
Sue Webb and Simon Webb
The Institute for Lifelong Learning
Sheffield University
Do not use without author’s permission
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Abstract
This paper explores the question how can we capture adequately the
formation of learner identities in a world where social structures and social
relations are undergoing continuous change? The paper considers this
question by discussing how researchers have used life history and narrative
research in analyses of learners in transition, and it offers suggestions for the
development of this methodology. We examine a strand of work that has
engaged with Bourdieu’s conceptual framework and the traditions of symbolic
interactionism in order to provide a social-structural account of learner
experiences. These accounts have developed the concepts of ‘learning
career’ and ‘learning culture’ to depict learners’ agency as complex and
heterogeneous rather than deficient, and as involving negotiation of meaning
with institutional, learning and vocational cultures. However, we argue that
analysis of social structure and the dramatic structural changes experienced
by learners and educators over the past 25 years are largely absent from
these accounts. While accounts of learners’ experiences do some important
counter-hegemonic work, this has to be strengthened with an account of
structural change that is entwined with that of agency. The paper concludes
with a rationale for a narrative based approach that seeks to understand
changing identities through snowball sampling allowing us to generate
narratives from different levels of analysis within the same context of change.
Introduction
There has been a recent move within post-compulsory education research
towards an engagement with the conceptual framework of Bourdieu because
of perceived limitations in the research and analysis of learner identities. In
particular, Bourdieu is drawn upon as a conceptual resource in order to
adequately account for the influence of social structure as well as agency.
Consideration of both structure and agency have been features of
sociologically informed educational research for some time as a part of a
critique of inequality and domination. We contextualise this interest in
structure and agency in the framing of these terms in hegemonic policy
discourses. Therefore the first part of the paper considers how the field of
hegemonic policy discourse is constituted. In particular we identify the
discourse of ‘the responsible learner’ as a form of moral regulation in which
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certain individuals and groups are required to make themselves amenable to
the global economy. The second part provides a brief review of research as a
counter discourse. We argue this research offers narratives of learner
experiences that provide an alternative account of the positions individuals
and groups find themselves in, the opportunities open to them, and the
meaning these have for them. The review notes the increasing turn to the
writings of Bourdieu to reveal the relationship between structure and agency
in these narratives. More specifically we examine the development of the
concepts of ‘learning career’ and ‘learning culture’. The accounts offer new
ways of considering structure and agency through utilising a symbolic
interactionist approach and Bourdieu’s conceptual framework. We discuss
whether the aspirations of this conceptual work are being realised currently.
The paper concludes with a reflection on the development of some research
questions that may contribute to furthering counter-hegemonic research. We
explore the development of these questions in relation to an account of
learning, learning institutions and learners in an area experiencing globalising
processes of change.
Constituting the field
In order to understand researching post-compulsory education we need to
examine the policy discourses that are framing the post-compulsory world.
Our argument is that these are understood by the present UK Labour
Government as being constructed within particular economic models drawing
on human capital theory.
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Policy Discourses and the learning society
The current Labour Government presents a policy narrative that is
constructed around a number of related assertions that characterise the policy
problem. It is argued across a range of policy texts that global processes of
economic restructuring have reconfigured the relationship between national
economies and global markets, refashioning the kinds of skills and knowledge
perceived as necessary for economic growth and competitiveness Related to
this, technological developments, as part of the globalisation process, are
viewed as transforming the labour process, with consequent impacts upon
traditional notions of career and working lives. The forward to the recent
Skills White Paper states quite clearly that one of its key objectives is
‘Replacing the redundant notion of a ‘job for life’ with our new ambition of
‘employability for life’, thus helping people and communities meet the
challenge of the global economy’ (Department for Education and Skills 2005:
1). In particular, globalisation is seen as introducing new risks and
uncertainties, disrupting traditional patterns of transition into and through
employment. New Labour’s strategic response to globalisation can be
characterised in terms of a turn towards Human Capital Theory. Dispersed
production sites, globalised markets, geographical mobility of capital and
labour, and flexible labour markets are viewed as placing a premium on
intellectual property, flexible working practices and innovation.
This radical disjuncture appears to call forth a number of related shifts in
organising concepts: from education to learning, from the state taking
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responsibility for education provision to learning opportunities being dispersed
across the domains of education, leisure, consumption, family and work,
blurring the boundaries between these divisions and domains (Halliday 2003;
Martin 2003; Strain and Field 1997). The unpredictability and uncertainty of
our globalised late modern society would appear then to demand responsive
organisations and systems, indeed, responsive individuals, quite different
from that of welfare bureaucracies (Du Gay 2000).
Discourse of the ‘responsible learner’
Policy discourses can be viewed as narratives that seek to persuade
populations of the truthfulness of the perceived policy problem and the
necessity of the proscribed policy response (Edwards and Nicoll 2001; Fisher
2003). Discourses of lifelong learning work in particular ways ‘emphasising
the mobilising of civil society and the support for active citizenship’ (Edwards
2004: 434). This can also be conceptualised as a shift in the balance of risk,
of contemporary society characterised in terms of attempts to shift the
balance of risk from the state to the individual, from a social responsibility of
risk to an individual one (Lister 1990; 1997).
Adult education researchers such as Jim Crowther and Ian Martin have
responded by forcefully arguing that hegemonic policy discourses of lifelong
learning constitute new forms of domination and governmentality in capitalist
society (Crowther 2004; Martin 2003). Adult education, rather than being a
space for critical reflection on the condition of society, is increasingly a space
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for the moral regulation of individuals; where they are called upon to work
upon themselves in order to make themselves more amenable to the
demands of mobile capital. There is then in the discourses of lifelong
learning an economically rational agent, able to work upon themselves in
order to maximise their self-interest; and agent that is enterprising. This is a
highly normative depiction, and one that, as Crowther and Martin have
argued, lends itself to moral regulation. But, this is not to suggest that
hegemonic policy discourses privilege agency over structure. Our argument
is that within the policy discourse agency, whether that is articulated as being
employable, up-skilling, or active citizenship, is determined by global
structural transformations.
Educational research as counter-discourse
Frank Coffield has noted the potential for the research community to be
captured by hegemonic policy discourses and of working on itself to
reproduce the core assumptions of the discourse (Coffield 1998, 1999).
Therefore, we now turn to consider in what ways educational research has
provided an alternative account of learners’ agency in dealing with global
structural transformations. This next section begins to look at research that
focuses on phenomenologies of the learner and will outline the increasing
struggles with the concepts of structure and agency.
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Phenomenologies of the learner
In contrast to hegemonic policy discourse, and its privileging of globalisation
as the determinant of agency, much educational research in post-compulsory
education in the last two decades sought to foreground the voice and the
agency of the learner. Research increasingly focused on qualitative accounts
of the student experience in order to understand the processes that lay behind
the inequitable patterns of participation revealed in the analyses by Blackburn
and Jarman (1993), Egerton and Halsey (1993) and Modood (1993). The
qualitative turn towards experience sought to examine identity formation in
order to understand how categories such as age, gender, ethnicity, disability
and social class related to educational life chances and positioning and how
the acceptance or resistance of these are constructed through people’s daily
lives1. For example, Archer and Leathwood state that they
‘have attempted to highlight how working-class participants and nonparticipants engage emotionally with negotiations around HE participation,
which are grounded within gendered, racialized, classed and sexual identities’
(2003: 191).
A number of studies in the 1990s focused on the experience of groups of
students regarded as under-represented, marginalized or disadvantaged in
1
This work parallels the interest in feminist research, for example, following the work of Judith
Butler Butler, J. 1993 Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London:
Routledge.whereby gender is something which is achieved through performance, albeit in
circumstances constrained by the discourse available, rather than just being a category to
which people assign themselves and others. For Butler, performativity and personal identity
are not acts of voluntarism, rather they result from the ‘reiterative power of discourse to
produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (1993:2). Butler, develops this
argument in relation to sexual identification and the ‘discursive means by which the
heterosexual imperative enables certain sexual identifications and forecloses and/or disavows
other identifications’ (1993:3)
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higher education: for example, Metcalf (1993) and Williams (1997) studied
those labelled non traditional or non-standard; Edwards (1993)and Pascall
and Cox (1993) focused on women; Rosen (1993) on black students; Bourner
et al. (1991) and Tight (1991) on part-timers and Blaxter et al. (1996) on
mature students. Heterogeneous experiences within these groupings were a
common theme leading Britton and Baxter (Britton and Baxter 1994; Britton
and Baxter 1999) and Green and Webb (1997) to highlight the complexities of
difference within these groupings. Nevertheless, James (1995) argued that in
the 1990s the policy and practice of widening participation to higher education
for these groups of people did not acknowledge such complexities. Instead,
the mature student was regarded as a separate ‘species’ with a
phenomeology distinct from that of the full-time young HE entrant.
These studies identified the complexity of structural and individual factors
affecting students’ identities and decision-making to participate in postcompulsory education, and the institutional factors facilitating or inhibiting their
access and retention. A key conceptual framework examined in these studies
was identifying the ‘barriers’ to access and participation. The focus on
institutional, structural and dispositional factors sought to counter the
hegemonic discourse that imposed a calculating rationality upon learners,
often constructing them (or their families and communities) in deficit terms
(see James 1995 for a discussion of how research and policy led to the
construction of a separate species of mature deficit learner). To counter such
a discourse the research of this period privileged the narratives of excluded
groups, be they women, minority ethnic communities, the disabled or the
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working class (Anderson and Williams 2001). This focus is encapsulated in
Fuller’s (2002) account of research she first reported in 1999, which draws on
the reflexive modernisation thesis to justify her exploration of the perspectives
and motivations of mature students for understanding the increase in adults in
higher education. She argues that
‘In my view, the dynamic of reflexivity is particularly salient as it enables us to
conceptualise the relationship between institutional and individual change as
mutually transformative and enables us to take a more active view of
individual agency and identity formation’ (Fuller, 2002:133).
Struggles with structure and agency - learning career and learning
culture
Another tendency emerging at this time was that in some of these accounts
researchers were struggling with how to represent the relationship between
structure and agency. For example, Reay et al (2001) recognised that
identity, not only impacted on the likelihood of participation in higher
education, but this itself was shaped by class differentiated processes
compounded by race. The result was that working class and middle class
students experienced very different opportunities. Similarly, Webb’s (2003)
study of the micro-politics of mature student learner identities, as they
progress into and through higher education and into employment, found
gender differences in choices about study and employment, which were
pragmatic and responsive to classed identifications. Hegemonic policy
discourses, as outlined above, constituted the field of education as
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epiphenomenal to that of the economy. In response to this the field of postcompulsory educational research privileged the voice and agency of learners.
While privileging the agency of learners, this research also noted the way this
agency was constrained, the way decision-making processes were always
more than individual acts. The patterns of access and participation were not
the consequence of the cultural deficit of learners, they were the
consequences of patterns (Archer and Leathwood 2003; Reay, et al. 2001;
Webb 2001, 2003) that could not be transformed simply by voluntaristic
action, by ‘an intellectual act of cognition’ (Bourdieu 2003: 80).
In an attempt to capture a dynamic relationship between structure and agency
in the context of post-compulsory education, Martin Bloomer and Phil
Hodkinson developed the concept of ‘learning career’ (Bloomer and
Hodkinson 2000a; Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000b; Hodkinson and Bloomer
200; Hodkinson and Bloomer 2001; Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997). ‘Learning
career’, then is offered as a counter to hegemonic policy discourses of
education. Situating their work within a broadly socio-cultural approach to
learning, they are interested in the relationship between learning and identity,
and learning as a situated social practice. They are interested in
understanding what the complex of personal and structural relations are that
influence learners’ dispositions to learning, defining career as,
‘…the ongoing unfolding of a person’s dispositions to, and their
engagement with, knowledge and learning opportunities’ (Bloomer and
Hodkinson 1997: 7).
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They were concerned to go beyond the individual and to see the learner
situated within a complex network of inter-personal and structural relations,
‘The development or evolution of a learning career is to be understood
principally in terms of changes in the relationships between a learner’s
personal identity, his or her material and cultural surroundings and
dispositions to learning’ (Hodkinson and Bloomer 2002: 38)
Bloomer and Hodkinson appear to be attempting a synthesis between
symbolic interactionism and Bourdieu's [(post-)structuralist] approach. They
are aware of the tensions involved in this project. The concept of 'learning
career' is the mechanism for attempting this. They note its emergence from
the symbolic interactionism of Irving Goffman, the Chicago school of
sociology, and from Anselm Strauss (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000b). They
draw on Strauss' symbolic interactionism to critique deterministic theories and
to introduce the idea of serendipity, of the unforeseen consequences of
actions and the possibilities of transformation. This leads them to adopt
Strauss’ concept of 'turning points' or critical moments that provoke a reevaluation of our positions and trajectories. The concept of careership is built
upon this notion:
'Careership can be seen as an uneven pattern of routine experience
interspersed with such turning-points' (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997:
33).
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Bloomer and Hodkinson (Hodkinson and Bloomer 2000) are aware of the
limitations of symbolic interactionism, of focusing on inter-subjective relations
at the possible expense of a consideration of social structure. Therefore they
seek to tie a non-deterministic symbolic interactionism to Bourdieu's notion of
the necessary relation between position (within a social space of action structure) and disposition (habitus) (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000b).
Hodkinson and Sparkes, in their elaboration of a theory of ‘careership’,
articulate this relationship between position and disposition as one where,
'Career decisions can only be understood in terms of the life histories
of those who make them, wherein identity has evolved through
interaction with significant others and with the culture in which the
subject has lived and is living' (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997: 33).
The development of ‘learning career’ is related to wider moves within the
sociology of education to elucidate methodologies and representations that
take adequate account of agency and structure together, as relational
concepts. Stephen Ball and colleagues, in their study of post-16 choices state
that,
‘We want to recognise both the individual construction of social
identities and the different structural possibilities and conditions for
such construction’ (Ball, et al. 2000: 24).
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Using a different language, Karen Evans and colleagues conclude in their
work that career patterns emerge as a combination of structure and agency,
produced by the interplay of trajectory and career behaviour, and state that,
‘Career outcomes depend not only on the transition behaviour of young
people but also on the institutional and labour market settings and
social support available’ (Evans, et al. 2000: 127).
Learning Cultures, Habitus, and cognitive agency
The concept of ‘learning career’ has been further developed by Bloomer and
Hodkinson in the context of the Transforming Learning Cultures (TLC)
research group with their notion of ‘learning cultures’ (Bloomer and James
2001; Hodkinson, et al. 2004; James 2002). This signals a further
engagement with Bourdieu, in particular with the concept of habitus.
TLC define habitus as ‘…social structures operating within and through
individuals, rather than being something outside of us' (Hodkinson, et al.
2004: 6). As with Bourdieu, habitus is the conceptual tool by which ‘…to
transcend dualisms of agency-structure, objective-subjective and the micromacro’ (Reay 2004: 432), the way social structure is immanent in the personal
and educational practices of individuals. Habitus is the mechanism through
which practice (agency) is linked with field and capital (structure). The same
habitus can give rise to a range of practices in any given field, depending on
the formation of that field – the particular combination of capitals that
constitute the possibilities for action. All practice is situated, that is
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educational practices have to be understood as context dependent, as
endogenous to particular social structural contexts. There is an iterative
relationship between agency and structure. It is this iterative relationship that
situates habitus as a central concept in Bourdieu’s framework. Habitus
provides the possibility for agency, the dispositions to action, but in ways that
regularly reproduce the conditions of its reproduction. However, there is
indeterminacy to this, or a sense of improvisation. In this way Bourdieu
appears to capture both the regularity of the social world, but also its
unpredictability and improvisational nature. Habitus may be conceived as
improvisations in living, but where only a particular range of improvisations
are usually imaginable; the boundaries of that imagination being produced by
the possibilities and constraints of social structure. Within this framework
spaces for transformation are necessarily constrained. This contrasts sharply
with dominant policy articulations of choice as coterminous with equality of
opportunity. This contrast is eloquently captured by recent work on the
operations of market choice in the field of higher education where it ‘…is
argued that choices are infused with class and ethnic meanings and that
choice-making plays a crucial role in the reproduction of divisions and
hierarchies in HE, but also the very idea of choice assumes a kind of formal
equality that obscures ‘the effects of real inequality’. HE choices are
embedded in different kinds of biographies and institutional habituses, and
different opportunity structures’ (Ball, et al. 2002: 51)
Has this use of Bourdieu been useful? Has it enabled researchers to
understand the making and taking of an identity as individuals negotiate their
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‘learner careers’ in circumstances not of their own making? To examine this
we need to examine whether the concept can take us beyond the
phenomenologies of learners; to understand agency as something which is
not simply a voluntary act.
Beyond phenomenology?
The endogenous character of habitus, of practice, gives rise to the need to
define the social spaces within which practice is generated and performed.
Deborah Reed-Danahay (Reed-Danahay 2005) notes that Bourdieu adopted
the term ‘field’ (champ) from its connotation in Physics of a field of forces,
thereby focusing on the social, cultural, economic and symbolic forces at play
within an arena of social practice (133). Field is therefore a relational
concept. The particular configuration of capitals in a field determines the
positions and range of strategies available to social agents. However, it is the
particular deployment of strategies that allow social agents to take places
within the field that reproduce or transform the social order. To understand
how learners engage with transformations in their learner careers, not only
some understanding of the resources available to them within the field is
needed, but also which resources are differently available, and who can get
access to and make use of the most powerful resources.
Individuals standing still or in motion?
In spite of this use of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework to aid analysis of
transformations for learners, some critiques of Bourdieu, and use of
Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, have tended to stress the way the action of
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habitus tends towards the reproduction of the social order (Kenway and
McLeod 2004; Lovell 2000; McRobbie 2002; Reay 2004). These writers have
criticized Bourdieu for a too deterministic analysis, leaving little room for
agency and transformation. This leads Lisa Adkins (Adkins 2004), in a
supportive critique, to argue that Bourdieu’s analysis tends towards a kind of
political pessimism. In response to this kind of criticism Martin Bloomer and
Phil Hodkinson (1997) emphasizes that habitus is not fixed, but is subject to
change over time. While habitus gives meaning to students’ experience of
learning, it can change, so that a disposition to learning is not fixed
permanently, but can alter as a result of the life history of an individual, which
itself is influenced by external structures and individual agency. Thus the
habitus is not ossified or static, but dynamic. Yet, there is a sense in which
Bourdieu’s framework, while enabling an analysis of situated rather than
abstract practice, can sometimes make it difficult to see ‘individuals "in
motion." ' (Reed-Danahay 2005: 58). If the contemporary moment is one of
rapid and radical transformations, as the policy account of globalization set
out at the beginning of this paper suggests, a more mobile sense of habitus
and field is required to analyse learners’ phenomenologies. Bourdieu’s
theorisation would suggest that a period of rapid structural change would
bring about a disjuncture between habitus and field, provoke a sense of
reflexivity, opening up the possibility of personal and social transformations
(Bourdieu 2003). Diane Reay and Jane Kenway argue that reflexivity is
already a feature of agency, allowing individuals to construct social
trajectories that are not wholly determined by social structure (Kenway and
McLeod 2004; Reay 2004). This is not to imply the freedom from social
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structure postulated by theories of late modernity, particularly those
associated with Ulrich Beck, Elizabeth Beck-Gersheim and Anthony Giddens
(Beck-Gersheim 1996; Beck-Gersheim 2002; Beck 1992; Giddens 1992). As
Lisa Adkins powerfully argues in relation to the apparent feminisation of
society, while gender is not fixed, aspects of gender identity may not be easily
amenable to reflexive intervention (Adkins 2004). The possibility for change
in individual trajectories is likely to be uneven across different fields of
practice, and rather than suggesting freedom from structure implies new
negotiations with changed structural positions. In the next section we explore
current attempts to overcome the structure-agency dualism through an
engagement between symbolic interactionism and Bourdieu’s conceptual
framework.
Do the concepts of learning ‘career’ and ‘culture’ work?
Analysis undertaken using the concepts of ‘learning career’ and ‘learning
culture’ have clearly countered the hegemonic discourse which constructs
learners and learner choices in terms of a reductionist rational choice
economic model. This research highlights the way learners in postcompulsory settings engaged in ways of ‘becoming’, taking on and working
with institutional and vocational cultures, as much as learning discrete areas
of skill and knowledge. There is a sense in which learners work upon
themselves. For instance, Helen Colley and colleagues (Colley, et al. 2003),
provide rich descriptions of the way learners ‘become’ childcare workers,
health professionals and engineers. ‘Learning culture’ works well to reveal
the processes of negotiation of the practices of vocational cultures. Martin
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Bloomer and Phil Hodkinson (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000a; Bloomer and
Hodkinson 2000b; Hodkinson and Bloomer 200; Hodkinson and Bloomer
2001) depict the complex negotiations between family, peers, leisure and
work that learners engage in. In particular, as with Stephen Ball and
colleagues (Ball, et al. 2000), they show how ‘learner’ identities may not be
the most important aspect of individuals’ life-worlds. Another feature of the
use of learning ‘career’ and ‘culture’ is the depiction of personal
transformations that can describe adaptations to cultural contexts, for instance
to the learning cultures of a Sixth Form College (Hodkinson and Bloomer
2000), or personal transformations due to ‘turning points’ in individuals’ lives
(Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000a; Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997).
We are interested in exploring whether the potential and promise of the
concepts of learning ‘career’ and ‘culture’ have been realised yet. For
instance, habitus appears to be deployed within these accounts as a signal for
the constraints on individual agency, much in the same way that the concept
of ‘horizons for action’ does (Hodkinson and Sparkes 1997). Consequently,
they provide rich descriptions that demonstrate the context-dependent nature
of decision-making about courses and employment; and the way decisionmaking and participation; and the way the constitution of learner identities are
formed in part by personal biographies and institutional cultures. However,
despite the deployment of the language of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, the learning,
institutional or vocational cultures that learners are seen as engaging with
appear as relatively static. For example, although Colley et al (2003) deploy
the concepts of structure, agency and vocational habitus in order to
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‘render the process of acculturation far more complex than a passive
absorption into a community of practice. Agency plays its part, since
vocational habitus – and the wider vocational culture – is relational and
dynamic, co-constructed partly by the dispositions of the students themselves
as they construct their own identities’ (2003:488),
there is little sense that the policy shift in responsibilities away from state
welfare to privatised and individual responsibility is reflected in the accounts of
the vocational habitus of child care or health care. Indeed, the research
evidence is used to confirm a continuity of vocational habitus with that
outlined by Bates (1991; 1994) in the early 1990s. The question arises is this
because the conditions of work have largely not changed and that for some
the post- fordist workplace is mythical, or that the methodological approach
has sidelined the impact of structural changes.2
Crossan et al (2003) argue that in part the focus on young people in the work
on learning identities and learning career has resulted in an overly unilinear
and progressive view. They provide for a rather more dynamic sense of these
cultures in accounts that identify identities as fragile, contingent and
vulnerable to external changes, and including hostility to education and denial
even from enthusiastic learners, in contrast to the accounts of Bloomer and
Hodkinson, where there is little sense of the immanence of social structure in
the intimate details of learners’ practices. In the latter we are left unclear as to
2
In a personal communication (11.2.06) Helen Colley has suggested that this difficulty needs
to resolved empirically and in so doing it needs to deal with a particular problem, namely that
consciousness and culture lag behind reality.
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what the world views are of the learners in their studies, and how this world
view provides them with possibilities and constraints for agency.
Furthermore, because this work acts as a counter-narrative to hegemonic
policy discourses, the authors are often keen to demonstrate that learners do
indeed act responsibly and rationally, albeit not in ways recognised by policy.
They provide accounts that demonstrate that learners make rational decisions
that have meaning within their own life-worlds. For example, Bloomer and
Hodkinson provide an account of how one young woman’s changing
dispositions to learning and the changing dispositions of several other
learners were ‘inextricably bound up in both their wider social contexts and in
more immediate social conditions of learning’ (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000a:
73).
However, where hegemonic policy discourses privilege the power of structure,
these accounts privilege the agency of learners. In this sense whilst the
accounts show the ways that dispositional changes are not simply acts of
cognitive agency unconstrained by ‘a complex combination of social and
economic factors, individual preferences and beliefs, and contingency’
(Hodkinson and Bloomer 2001: 117), we are concerned that they may depict
a similarly cognitive agency to that articulated by hegemonic policy discourse
without explicating the ways in which learners negotiate these transformations
that are often pre-reflexive.
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Learner Identities as Articulated Moments – some research
questions
The above analysis leads us to ask a range of related questions that suggest
the need for research into post-compulsory education to deploy a more
detailed articulation of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ if we are not to be either ‘captured
by the discourse’ of hegemonic policy formations or rely on depictions of
learners’ voluntaristic transformations; that seek methodologies that make
‘connections between the private lives of individuals and their public lives as
citizens’ (Crowther 2004: 134).
Sheffield – a case study in social-structural change
We want to use a sketch of Sheffield in northern England, as a means of
suggesting how the social fields learners may inhabit have been altered, and
therefore provide something of an empirical rational for the research
questions that follow. This sketch is necessarily brief. In almost every sense
Sheffield has been caught up in processes of change. Sheffield was for
centuries a centre for metal technologies (see Hey 2005). Sheffield and the
wider South Yorkshire region were examples of the territorialisation of
capitalism characteristic of the industrial revolution (Hardt and Negri 2000), or
of ‘innovation clusters’ (Castells 1996: 37-38), the emergence of centres of
production due to the proximity of raw materials, production processes, and
labour. Sheffield possessed a highly integrated local economy with many
enterprises, particular those associated with metal production, linked together
through chains of suppliers, services, and markets. Steel production was
linked into a local industrial network of cutlery, hand and other engineering
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tools to production, forging, metal pressing, precision engineering, etc
(Dabinett and Graham 1994). Sheffield remained a centre for high quality
steels and cutlery until the economic crisis of the 1970s. Steel production in
Sheffield was largely characterised by a ‘fordist’ mode of mass production,
and as noted by Antonio Gramsci, ‘fordism’ not only created the possibility for
the formation of mass industrial trade unions, but penetrated every facet of
human existence (Gramsci 1971). This structural description gives an
indication of the economic field that might have produced the kinds of
engineering vocational cultures in Helen Colley’s article discussed above.
The particular dominant industrial sectors, the social class, gender and ethnic
relations within those sectors would have given specific characteristics to any
related vocational cultures within local education and training systems.
While the nature of globalisation is disputed (Harvey 1989; Hirst and
Thompson 1996; Jameson 1991; Soja 1989; Wallerstein 1979, 1980), we
suggest that changes in Sheffield’s socio-scape make it possible to
understand the current condition in terms of both historically significant
quantitative and qualitative transformations without accepting the logic of
hegemonic policy discourses, retaining a critical space for research. The UK
economy more generally, and Sheffield’s in particular, can be conceived in
terms of a ‘service economy model’ (Hardt and Negri 2000), involving clear
evidence of quantitative shifts from manufacturing to services; and dominance
of financial services within the service sector. We can see in Sheffield
transformations from an economy dominated by manufacturing, specifically
steel production, to one where the service sector predominates (Sheffield City
22
Council 2004; Sheffield First Partnership 2002). Krishan Kumar, amongst
others, has drawn attention to the inherent dangers of ‘post-fordist’, ‘postindustrial’ or ‘information age’ theories in constructing ideal types and
typologies that make it difficult to locate real case studies (Kumar 1995).
Nevertheless Sheffield stands as an example of the transformative changes
brought about by globalisation. Whereas in 1971 something like 50% of
Sheffield’s economic activity was related to steel production, by the late 70s
and mid 1980s the city’s ‘economy had effectively collapsed’ (Sheffield First
Partnership 2002: 11). Currently, the Learning Skills Council’s forecast for
2002-2010 is that the key growth sectors in Sheffield will be in health, banking
and insurance, communications, personal services, business services, and
education (Learning and Skills Council South Yorkshire 2004). This might
suggest that Sheffield is experiencing a shift from ‘material’ to ‘immaterial’
labour, the emergence of forms of labour that produce immaterial goods, such
as services, cultural products, knowledge or communication; engendering a
transformation in the relationships between knowledge, learning and identity
(Hardt and Negri 2000). Any focus on adult learners would necessarily have
to consider how such a shift affects economic, social and learning identities.
In what sense are the vocational cultures depicted by Helen Colley and
colleagues (Colley, et al. 2003) the same or different to those formed within
those occupational sectors ten or twenty years ago? Or, are those vocational
and learning cultures transformed by the radical transformations in the social
formations they are situated within? In other words, what impact does the
political economy of education and training have on the space for agency
within different learning sites; how has the relation between knowledge,
23
identity and learning been re-worked by the rise of mobile capital (Lash and
Urry 1996; Urry 2000) and ‘immaterial labour’ (Hardt and Negri 2000)?
Conclusion - Some research questions
In conclusion we want to outline a series of possible research questions that
would frame research with adult learners. These questions arise from our
analysis, above, of the concepts of ‘learner career’ and ‘learning culture’. We
contend that these questions and the framing of these questions can build on
the groundwork that has been established by this conceptual work. The
questions are aimed at understanding the interplay between social structure
and agency without suggesting a hierarchical relationship. Importantly, they
are aimed at foregrounding the contemporary moment, which we argue is one
of subjective and objective experiences of change.
In order to explore the construction of identity in relation to the changing
nature of the relationship between education and work, and the nature of
change in those fields, we would need to ask: how are local labour, education
and training markets structured; and what relationship do particular learning
sites and courses have to those markets – how are they differently positioned
within the field? What are the social, economic and political forces that
constitute local learning, institutional and vocational cultures; and what
particular formations of labour markets and local education and training
markets give rise to those particular cultures? We would want to explore the
kinds of identity work that adults have to engage in, in the context of such
transformations of the social fields they inhabit. What resources – social,
24
cultural and economic can and do people draw upon in this identity-work, and
how successful are they; indeed, what would be the criteria for success? We
would need to explore to what extent historically imagined communities,
whether they be locational, classed, gendered or raced, still influence the
emerging learner identities of adults entering post-compulsory education. We
would want to explore whether participation in education, of whatever kind, is
part of a reflexive project, of consciously transforming their identities. These
questions are quite different from those posed by policy.
Identity, whether of place (including institutions) and people, can be seen to
be produced at the nexus of movements within the domains of economy,
culture, and politics - as ‘articulated moments’ (Massey 1994). This builds on
the idea of social formations (and transformations) being constituted through
the articulation of heterogeneous elements. These articulations produce
temporary social settlements, which, due to their necessary instability, require
constant efforts at establishing hegemonic positions (Gramsci 1971; Lacleau
and Mouffe 2001). It is this sense of instability that holds out the possibility of
personal and social change, in that there is always the possibility for a
disjuncture between habitus and field. It is this disjuncture that Bourdieu saw
as providing the possibility for the transformation of the field and therefore of
identity (Adkins 2004; McNay 2004). This understanding maintains the sense
of durability and the immanence of social structure provided by Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus, and extends the improvisational nature of habitus, which is
often muted in Bourdieu’s own work, and use of his concepts by others. It
focuses on the material conditions for the constitution of identities,
25
emphasising the heterogeneous elements that are brought together at that
point. It also stresses the contingent and historical location of identity
formation, that identity does not fully escape the historical processes that
have made that particular formation possible, but also holds out the possibility
of there being other potential formations.
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