Writing the Realities of
the Working Life in a Changing World
"Its all about SOCIAL RESEARCH!"
A Survey and a Case Study Approach
to Assessing Learning
Today,
workers have to be dynamic and open to evolution in the
workplace, and change in the workplace means learning.
Unfortunately, a major element of workplace evolution goes
unseen: the worker's creative and personal contribution to
making change possible. The worker cooperates to ensure a
smooth integration of new methods to maintain workplace
stability and productivity, but demands on the worker
fluctuate along the way. Changes in the workplace have
impacts beyond the workplace, and the challenges of workers
are an indicator of pressures that affect all of us. Our
expectations and treatment of workers (the people who "do
everything" for us and are never acknowledged for it*) says
a lot about how balanced our social and cultural vision is
as a nation.
In the spirit of
documenting the learning of workers, the WALL National Survey team began
an examination from a survey angle. Through
The Institute for Social Research at York University, our
investigators were able to complete over 9,000 interviews with Canadians,
from east to west coast (maybe you were one of the respondents). While the
1/2 hour
questionnaire (otherwise known as the "National Survey of Learning and
Work") may be the survey-statistical team's creation, it was informed by
the WALL Case Study investigators, as a result of the
2003 WALL annual meeting. Statistical data from this survey are being
evaluated now, and results will be available in the months ahead.
There are 12 case study
groups taking on the task of a deepened examination of working life in
Canada. These involve interviews with workers in 12 specific work
environments. The challenge of these case study researchers is to describe
personal experiences more fully, to ensure that individual views of work
environment dynamics do not get lost in the more general evaluation of the
statistical analysis, which cannot provide this kind of detail.
Thus, two research
inroads: one "speaking through numbers", the other "speaking through
testimonial", both uncovering our experiences as working Canadians and
putting them to print. In these two ways, the social research of WALL
provides a voice for the telling of the stories of working people,
asserting the potential of this new voice to inform public policy.
You may wonder "are there
yet other ways than these two to voice sociological realities?" Of course
there are! Other organizations promoting social awareness and action have
websites that you can access from our
links page.
SURVEY DATA:
gathered by the
National Survey Team
CASE STUDY DATA: gathered by the 12 Case Study Teams
National Survey
The principal
investigators of the general national survey on learning and work are
David Livingstone, John Myles (University of Toronto), and Pierre Doray
(University of Quebec at Montreal), in partnership with Larry Hubich
(Saskatchewan Federation of Labour) and Monica Collins (Scotiabank). To
see a copy of the survey, available in both English and French,
click here.
Conducted in winter
2003-2004, the survey documents paid and unpaid work conditions over the
past five years and is generating the first systematic empirical
assessments of changing work conditions in relation to the full array of
adult learning practices, schooling, further education courses, informal
training, non-taught informal learning). It is also providing profiles of
workers' perceptions of changes in key dimensions of paid and unpaid work.
In addition to
contributing to the general survey, Pierre Doray (Université de Québec à
Montréal), is conducting secondary analyses using data from other relevant
national surveys being conducted by Statistics Canada. Using limited but
valuable measures of learning and work contained in such surveys, these
secondary analyses will provide reliability tests for some of the measures
contained in the WALL general national survey.
Evidence generated by our
survey work is providing specific insights into the extent and rate of
emergence of a "new economy," as well as the impact of such changes on
adult learning activities. Our survey will also serve to validate the 1998
NALL survey, permit the first national trend inferences about changes
in patterns of informal learning, supplement the narrower conventional
surveys of education and employment with much greater attention to
informal learning and unpaid work, and provide fuller understanding of the
general dynamics of change in learning and work relations.
Latest Survey Version
Case Studies
The 12 case study groups
are examining learning and work relations in varying work contexts in
greater depth, within the following work environments:
biotechnology;
steel/light manufacturing/nursing homes;
public sector work;
the teaching profession;
disabled bank workers;
women information technology workers;
immigrant workers;
housework;
volunteer community workers;
school-work youth transition;
critical transitions through the life course; and
labour education programs.
In each case study, a
linked survey will provide comparative profiles to the national survey and
will be supplemented by focus groups and other in-depth research methods.
Through both survey and case study methods, we are comparing changing
learning and work relations across regions and sectors, as well as among
"at-risk" and more secure populations.
Case
study briefs:
(For more detailed summaries in PDF, click on
project title)
1.
Organizational Change and Worker Learning in Biotechnology and
Pharmaceuticals
Paul Bélanger (Université de Québec à Montréal), with Pharmabio
Developpement
Building on a current exploratory study of adult learning in firms in this
new sector characterized by continual technological innovation,
comparative case-studies is being conducted at two large biotech and
pharmaceutical enterprises in Montreal area. This study is documenting the
ways high tech employees produce, acquire, transfer and use new knowledge
and skills. The changing organizational policies of these firms on
lifelong learning are being studied (Doray, 1999; OECD 2000), as well as
the micro-mediation processes taking place between external production
related learning demand and the subjective learning experience and
aspirations of employees (Bélanger, 2000; Chatigny 2001). The research
design includes direct observation, semi-structured preliminary interviews
(N=100), focus groups, and selected follow-up interviews. Special
attention is being given to aging and immigrants workers, as well as to
the participation of women.
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2.
Skill Acquisition and Labour Market Experience of At-Risk Workers in
Steel, Light Manufacturing and Nursing Homes
Anil Verma (University of Toronto), with Jorge Garcia-Orgales (United
Steel Workers of America Canada)
Building on Verma’s (1992; 1998) extensive case study and survey research
in both the steel industry and comparative sectoral terms, this study is
focusing on little-studied workers with limited formal education in manual
and low-skill occupations who are most vulnerable in terms of wages and
employment. Primary interest is in their skill upgrading experiences and
consequent labour market outcomes. There are three target groups:
steelworkers from the USWA Local 1005 in Hamilton; workers from mid-size
light manufacturing plants in the Toronto; and Nursing Home/Retirement
Home workers. Research methods include interviews with employers and union
leaders to obtain basic organizational information on the changing nature
of work, technology and markets in their industries, focus groups with
workers, and a large-scale survey (N=2000) administered in each of these
sites. Special attention is being paid to women, recent immigrants, ethnic
minorities, first nation peoples, and disabled people.
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3.
Technological Change and Worker Learning in the Public Sector
Peter H. Sawchuk (OISE/UT), with the Canadian Union of Public Employees
The study addresses the lack of careful attention to everyday
communication and interaction within work/learning/information technology
design processes, particularly in public sector organizations. Building on
prior broader studies of workplace learning (Sawchuk, 2003; Livingstone
and Sawchuk, 2000, 2003). the main focus here is on a massive current
technological change - the introduction of Service Delivery Model
Technology (SDMT), a web-based management/delivery software system for
social assistance (i.e. welfare). The study explores activities at three
inter-related organizational levels of the design and implementation
process: 1) three front-line service delivery sites); 2) one technical and
training support services site); 3) one IT design activity site).
Semi-structured interviews (N=75) and direct observation of key
organizational activities in each research site are being conducted. A
survey of a representative sample of Ontario front-line service delivery
workers will be administered (N=500). Special attention is being given to
organizational size, urban-rural region, gender, educational level, union
activism and disability.
Click here for publications related to this group.
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4.
The Effects of Changing Working Conditions and Government Policy on
Canadian Teachers' Formal and Informal Learning Practices
Harry Smaller (York University), Rosemary Clark (Ontario Secondary School
Teachers Federation), and David Livingstone (OISE/UT), with the Nova
Scotia Teachers Union, the Alberta Teachers Association, and the Canadian
Teachers Federation
This project builds on the first national study of the formal and informal
learning activities of Canadian school teachers undertaken by NALL in 1999
(Smaller et al. 2000). It is providing further and more in-depth
documentation of the ways teachers engage in their own informal and formal
learning, and the ways in which recent government policies and changes in
working conditions have influenced these learning patterns and their views
of professional knowledge. The first stage will again involve a national
survey (N=2000) of randomly sampled teachers drawn from the lists of the
Canadian Teachers' Federation, in the spring of 2004. The second, case
study part of this study will involve semi-structured interviews and focus
groups with teachers from three provinces in which governments have
mandated distinctly contrasting professional learning regimes for publicly
employed teachers since 1999. Ontario’s government-imposed mandatory
recertification regime; Alberta’s employer-managed annual professional
growth plans, and Nova Scotia’s teacher union-administered model with a
minimum criterion of formal and informal learning time. Special attention
is being devoted to gender, age, race, ethnicity, family status, dis/ability,
and region.
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5.
Doing Disability at the Bank: Discovering the Work and Informal
Learning/Teaching Done by Disabled Bank Employees
Kathryn Church, Melanie Panitch, and Catherine Frazee (Ryerson
University), with the Royal Bank of Canada
The study is exploring the work-learning relations that shape and are
shaped by “disabled” employees within a major Canadian bank, one of the
most rapidly changing organizational and training environments
(Livingstone and Mitchell, 1999). We know virtually nothing about
work-learning relations as lived out by disabled people in the unmediated
world of regular jobs, and particularly within a bank. There may be
particular challenges for disabled employees to become competent in this
sector in terms of informal acculturation into social networks (Church,
2001; Church et al, forthcoming). On the bases of feminist standpoint
theory (Smith, 1987) and a social model of disability (Barnes et al,
1999), this project will investigate the work of informal learning that
people with disabilities do in order to get and keep a job. We are making
use of individual semi-structured interviews (N=100), focus groups and
participant observation in the context of bank environments in three
regions, speaking to both disabled and non-disabled employees. In
addition, we are drawing on the general analysis of self-reported disabled
workers in the general national survey (N=about 1000) to compare the
learning and work relations of disabled bank employees.
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6.
Women’s Alternative and Informal Learning Pathways to Jobs in Information
Technology
Jen Liptrot (Advocates for Community-Based Training and Education for
Women, or ACTEW), and Shauna Butterwick (University of British Columbia)
We know that women are relatively absent in the information technology
(IT) sector, in distinct minorities in formal educational access routes
(engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, and that many women have
misconceptions regarding the industry (AAUW 2000; Moran, 2002).We have
little understanding of how women in the IT sector learn skills and
knowledge about and subsequently access careers through alternative
educational pathways and informal or nonformal learning, including
on-the-job learning, self-directed learning, and formal education in other
fields such as graphic arts. This study is conducting a critical analysis
of key state IT policy documents, secondary analyses of Statistics Canada
data bases, semi-structured interviews in B.C. and Ontario with key
informants in the IT sector and informal IT networks, focus groups in both
provinces, and an online survey (N=200), as well as online discussion
groups. Our participatory action research approach is grounded in
attention to the operation of gender, race, class and “disability”
differences within learning and work regimes.
Click here for publications related to this group.
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7.
Immigrant Workers Learning to Labour in Canada: Rights and Organizing
Strategies
Eric Shragge (Concordia University), with the Immigrant Workers Centre
(Montreal)
This project is examining the work and learning experience of recent
immigrants to Canada. Four representative groups will be examined: a
textile factory with workers from many different countries; a support
group of women laid-off from a factory; live-in care givers; and highly
accredited, underemployed Fillipino nurses. The approach used, growing out
of a similar NALL project (Church, Shragge and Bascia, forthcoming),
understands learning as growing out of the very specific social
experiences of immigrant workers. Special attention is given to exploring
how immigrant workers learn to organize themselves and respond to the
pressures of the economy to negotiate means of self-protection in the
current economy. Research methods include in-depth interviews with key
informants and those active in each specific sector (N=30 in each of the 4
groups). A team of community researchers and activists will be formed
through the Immigrant Workers’ Centre to assist in conducting the
interviews , analyzing the results and comparing the situations of
different immigrant workers.Since these groups include a very high
proportion of women workers, the study will especially focus on questions
of gender in relation to immigrants’ work-related learning processes.
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8.
Housework and Care Work: Sites for Lifelong Learning
Margrit Eichler (OISE/UT), with Mothers Are Women (MAW)
There are no well-grounded prior studies of the relations between
housework and learning. This study is focusing on household work and the
learning that occurs through performing it. We are exploringwhat counts as
work and why (Esterik 2002; Knaak 2002), and how the nature of paid and
unpaid household work and the learning associated with each shifts over
time. Informed by Eichler’s (1997) prior policy research, a new, expanded
definition of household work is being developed by a grounded empirical
analysis with members of different organizations concerned with household
work. The major objective is to examine the learning associated with the
performance of household work by women, men and teenaged children in
different circumstances. We are exploring how household work has changed
(a) over the past five years, and (b) over the life course of individuals,
and how these changes have affected learning practices. We are examining
the household work and the learning attached to it of several vulnerable
groups, including single mothers and recently separated people. We are
using focus groups to develop the expanded definition of housework. We are
analyzing the data from the national survey on learning in relation to
types of households and incidence of housework. A sub-sample of people
(N=100) in different types of households will be drawn from the Toronto
respondents to the national survey and an additional semi-structured
interview will be administered. Further focus groups and analysis of
related discussion on the MAW website may also be used.
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9.
The Informal Learning of Volunteer Workers
Daniel Schugurensky (OISE/UT), with Advocates for Community-Based Training
and Education for Women (ACTEW), the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition
(OHCC), and the Ontario Region of the Cooperative Housing Federation of
Canada (OCHFC)
This study is looking at the connections between informal learning and
volunteer work among those who volunteer to improve access to the labour
market, and those who volunteer for other reasons, with a focus on
immigrants and women. We are exploring in more depth the original general
finding in the 1998 NALL survey of a much stronger association between
informal learning and community volunteer work time than between informal
learning and paid employment time (Livingstone 1999). Although there are
many studies on voluntary work in Canada (e.g. Hall, McKeown and Roberts
2001), little is known yet about the extent, modes and effectiveness of
volunteers’ acquisition of new skills, knowledge, attitudes and values,
and the relationship between formal, nonformal and informal learning in
this process. The case of recent immigrants is particularly relevant for
this study, given analyses suggesting that lack of recognition of their
credentials and prior learning now costs Canadian society about $15
billion annually (Reitz 2001). This study is suggesting policies and
programs to improve the connection between volunteering and relevant job
acquisition. The methodology includes a survey questionnaire similar to
the national survey (N=200), semi-structured interviews with 30 volunteers
in each of the three organizations, and six focus groups (6-8 participants
per group).
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10.
The School-to-Work Youth Transition Process
Alison Taylor (University of Alberta), Sandra Clifford (Ontario Federation
of Labour), and David Livingstone (OISE/UT), with the Ontario Secondary
School Teachers Federation, the Alberta Teachers Association, and the
Alberta Federation of Labour
Our objective is to learn more about how school-work transition (SWT)
programs work through comparative examination of relevant policies and
practices within the K-12 education systems in Ontario and Alberta. Using
our expanded conception of work and learning should deepen debate in this
area. For example, a focus on work experience courses should raise
questions about the extent to which schools and employers recognize and
value informal learning and unpaid work experience. Similarly, more
attention should be paid to the actual learning processes in work
experience to help students relate formal and informal learning, promote
the valuing of such knowledge, and promote the radical educative
possibilities of work experience (Guile and Griffiths, 2001; Kincheloe,
1999). We specifically address the lack of information in research
literature about the transition experiences of historically disadvantaged
students (cf. Levin, 1999) and the perspectives of organized labour and
community groups (Taylor, 2002). We first examine why and how SWT policies
developed, how they are conceptualized, and how they are evaluated through
an analysis of policy documents and interviews with government
representatives. Then we will explore different interpretations of labour
market “realities” through focus groups with representatives from employer
organizations, organized labour, and business-education foundations. The
most intensive part of the research involves an in-depth analysis of work
experience programs (cooperative education, work study, apprenticeship)
through observations, and interviews (N=80) with students, parents,
educators, employers, labour representatives, and other relevant
participants within 4 different communities.
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11.
Critical Transitions Between Work and Learning Projects throughout the
Life Course
Pierre Doray and Paul Bélanger (Université de Québec à Montréal)
This biographical study examines how the relation between perceptions of
working situations and learning practices changes throughout the
occupational life course of employees. Changes in economic structures and
techniques of production, linked to the new economy, are posited to
generate critical transition points in both the occupational life-course
and in the learning biography of individuals. These transition moments are
heuristic periods (Alheit, 1994) to grasp meanings that people give to
different learning practices, and to understand how people, according to
their cultural backgrounds and conditions of living tend to resort to
learning in order to cope with these changes. The central issue is to see
how individuals in different social conditions and in a segmented labour
market, cope with the “incertitude” (Beck and al., 1994) of these
transition periods and what meanings (Street, 1995) they give to these
learning experiences in their life projects. To document relationships
between changing work conditions and learning activities (formal and
informal) in life course perspective, we will select 96 male and female
respondents from the general survey according to the following criteria:
reported significant transition in the last five years of their working
life and residence in two areas, Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal.
General learning and work profiles will be generated from the national
survey data followed by more detailed biographical analysis (Lahire,2002).
A short event-centred questionnaire will be used to establish a
biographical sequence of work and learning practices and events.
Semi-structured interviews then will be used to probe the meanings given
by the subject to the way s/he has coped with the last transition in
relation to his or her work and learning history, previous critical
transitions and general accessibility to learning resources.
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12.
Labour Education: Action Research from an Equality Perspective
Nancy Jackson (OISE/UT), and Winnie Ng (Canadian Labour Congress)
Changing employment conditions and growing social diversity of the labour
force are having a profound impact on unions, with vast implications for
both formal and informal elements of union-based education. This case
study explores how diversity and equality issues are being addressed by
labour education in the Canadian Labour Congress, the national labour body
with the leading role for labour education across English Canada. While
equality goals have had a growing place in CLC labour education policy and
practice (CLC 2002), major gaps remain in overcoming the marginalisation
of many groups on the basis of colour, ethnicity, language, region of
origin, sexual orientation, ability issues, age, etc. (see Ng, 2002;
Martin, 1995; Briskin and McDermott, 1993). This program-oriented project
is drawing on data from the national survey and other case studies to
identify current best practices to address equality issues in Ontario and
nationally, explore their adaptation for wider use, and develop labour
education for equality and inclusiveness more fully. This study uses a
participatory action research methodology. Methods of data collection
include direct observation, key informant interviews, focus groups, and
administration of portions of the national survey instrument (N=200). Five
key groups will be central to this process: union leadership, labour
educators, members of equality-seeking groups, adult education researchers
specialized in labour education and participants in CLC courses generally.
Year 1 will focus on gathering and evaluating data on current practices
relating to equality in both formal and informal aspects of CLC labour
education. Year 2 will focus on development, administration and evaluation
of two pilot initiatives in the Ontario Region. Year 3 will focus on a
second round of pilots (implementation and evaluation) in another region
of Canada. Year 4 will focus on hosting a seminar to present outcomes of
this research as well as producing written products for dissemination in
labour and academic publications and for use in ongoing labour education.
Footnote:
* Tam Gallagher (President of Communications,
Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada Local 200-0) in a speech at "Hidden
Knowledge" book launch at OISE/UT,
December, 2003.
All research funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
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Contact
WALL RESEARCH
NETWORK
252 Bloor Street
West, Office 12-254,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6
Tel.
416.978.0015 Fax. 416.926.4751
E-mail:
wallnetwork@oise.utoronto.ca
