Abstract:
In recent years there has been significant growth in research that has considered the
relationship between worker identity and learning at work. A key part of this relates to
discussions of the 'newness' of various types of work manifested in discourses such as postcapitalism,
post-bureaucracy and the new work order. On this basis, it is argued that a 'new
worker' for 'new times' is emerging. In this paper we address how such discourses of new
work and new workers relate to what is played out in sites of practice. In so doing we
problematize 'newness' by considering contemporary work practice and worker identity not as
radical breaks with the past but rather as temporalized continuities that, whilst changing, have
embedded in them the traces of the 'old'. To exemplify our argument, we focus particularly
on reconfiguration of training practices in organizations. We explore how such practices are
embedded in different, ambivalent, and at times competing, organizational learning discourses
each proposing how people should 'be'. To do so we examine the particularities of practice
observed in a qualitative study in a large Australian manufacturing firm. The paper concludes
with a discussion of how, rather than ushering in the wholesale adoption of new forms of
identity, contemporary work practices can be understood as situations of conflict and plurality
in which identity is held in the balance.
