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This paper examines the nature and significance of learning by experience during work, both paid and unpaid. Data about the relationship between costs, especially labour costs, and output have come to be interpreted as evidence of learning by experience, but these grouped data are unable to explain the nature and process of individual experience or learning. Direct and detailed evidence from recent case studies, analysed using theories of the open employment contract and continuous cognitive reformulation, illustrates an active, reiterative relationship between work and learning that generates productivity. The analysis of individual behaviour modifies concepts and theories of human capital and mobility, and also has wider implications for economic and social theories, and for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the topic of spiritual injury and the possible influences and relationships it might share with education-to-work transitions of young adults. Students of both dominant and minority cultural backgrounds were interviewed to gain a detailed understanding of how perceptions of transitions came about. Further, I sought to understand what role spirituality and experiences of spirit injury have in the decision-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of informal learning and work has quickly become a staple in contemporary work and adult learning research internationally. The narrow conceptualization of work is briefly challenged before the article turns to a review of the historical origins as well as contemporary theories and methods involved in researching informal learning and work. I review leading theoretical models by Livingstone, Eraut and Illeris, and summarize established methods in terms of case study, ethnographic and interview approaches, survey approaches and situated micro-analytic approaches. I argue that no single theoretical model or methodological approach has yet established dominance, and that these models and methods largely speak to distinctive, not wholly incompatible, features of the phenomena in question. I argue this suggests the potential for cross-fertilization of ideas is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work "together." The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as "systems of fragmented knowledge:" that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter's alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: Framing and postscripting, as practices that generate a "space" of signification for the subsequent action; footing, as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and delegation to the nonhuman, as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first aim of this article is to present a characterization of the techno-mathematical literacies needed for effective practice in modern, technology-rich workplaces that are both highly automated and increasingly focused on flexible response to customer needs. The second aim is to introduce an epistemological dimension to activity theory, specifically to the notions of boundary object and boundary crossing. We draw on ethnographic research in a pensions company and focus on data derived from detailed analysis of the diverse perspectives that exist with respect to one symbolic artifact, the annual pension statement. This statement is designed to facilitate boundary crossing between company and customers. Our study shows that the statement routinely failed in this communicative role, largely due to the invisible factors of the mathematical-financial models underlying the statement that are not made visible to customers or to the customer Enquiry Team whose task is to communicate with customers. By focusing on this artifact in boundary-crossing situations, we identify and elaborate the nature of the techno-mathematical knowledge required for effective communication between different communities in the pensions company, and suggest the implications of our findings for workplaces more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the facilitation of the school-to-work transition in Romania. School-to-work transition is defined generally as a process consisting of three separate but interrelated stages: preparation through education and training, actual transition, and outcomes in the labor market. This article focuses on the first stage within the Romanian arts and trades school (ATS), a vocational route that prepares students for the labor market and/or further education. The ATS was implemented in the Romanian educational system as an extension of compulsory schooling beginning with the 2003-2004 school year.