Against Learning

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DOI: 10.1177/00187267030568002 2003; 56; 931 Human Relations

Alessia Contu, Christopher Grey and Anders örtenblad Against Learning

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Against learningAlessia Contu, Christopher Grey and Anders Örtenblad

A B S T R AC T This article is a critique of the broad ensemble which we identify as

‘learning discourse’ and its pervasive ideological content which deter-

mines learning as a ‘good thing for all’. We consider how the signi-

fier ‘learning’ works as a nodal point which constitutes (legitimizes

and sustains), yet glosses over, antagonistic and contradictory

organizational and social practices. With our critique we endeavour

to go beyond a simple rebuke or rebuttal. We, rather, point out the

problematic nature of the truths engendered in ‘making the social’

and constituting the promise of a learning society whose ambit

encompasses learning in general, the learning organization and the

political economy of the ‘knowledge economy’. By doing so we

expose the political character of the learning discourse which, we

argue, works as the surface of intelligibility pro-posing the reality of

work, self-hood, citizenship and society. We antagonize its ‘no

alternative’ trope by questioning the equivalence it creates between

social inclusion, competitiveness, employability, empowerment and

personal development. Our critique makes explicit how it is possible,

and why it is important, to be ‘against learning’.

K E Y W O R D S critique � discourse � knowledge � learning � organizationallearning � politics

In this article we seek to advance two propositions. The first is thatorganizational learning is inseparable from, but is a key term within, awider ‘learning discourse’. The second is that this learning discourse is itselfan element within the articulation of a problematic ‘politics of truth’. There

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can be little doubt that learning has become a vogue term. In the field ofwork organizations, concepts of ‘organizational learning’ (Argyris &Schön, 1978; Schön, 1983) and the ‘learning organization’ (Senge, 1990)have become increasingly prevalent (Easterby-Smith, 1997) and, arguably,influential. Of course, the managerial and organizational literature is wellknown for its faddism (Abrahamson, 1996; Kieser, 1997), and one mightchoose to regard learning as just one more example. In particular, the‘learning organization’ has been seen as a fashion, fad, buzzword or hype(e.g. Born & Nollen, 1993; Eccles & Nohria, 1992; Garavan, 1997;Hawkins, 1994; Jackson, 2000; Mastenbroek, 1996; Scarbrough & Swan,2001). Faddishness, of course, implies an ephemeral popularity or, perhaps,that the content of the idea is not new. However, something more signifi-cant seems to be occurring. For learning is not just a hot topic in manage-ment. It has also come to the fore in a range of contexts, with politiciansin many countries speaking breathlessly of the goal of a ‘learning society’and the achievement of ‘lifelong learning’ (see, e.g. Hughes & Tight, 1995).Wales has for many years been aspiring to become a ‘learning country’(Francis, 2000; Poole, 1997). There is at least one worldwide network ofcities striving to become ‘learning cities’ (Learning Towns and Cities,2001).

So, rather than treat it as a management fad, it seems more adequateto regard organizational learning as a term within an ensemble that we mightcall ‘learning discourse’. We do not, of course, mean to imply that fads arenon-discursive or that discourses are not sometime faddish. Rather, we meanthat organizational learning has a wider purchase and a more enduringpresence than is normally implied by the term ‘management fad’ (Abraham-son, 1996). Within learning discourse, organizational learning is not just‘another’ term, however. Rather, it operates as a relay connecting, ratherobviously, learning in some way to organization and the significance of thisis in the linkage it makes between work and the wider social arena withinwhich learning occurs. As a discourse, which is to say a structured andmeaningful totality (Laclau, 1990),1 learning articulates a series of differen-tial relations, which pose and shape a certain understanding of ‘social reality’and by extension, as we shall see, offer learning as a response to the foreseenfuture of this reality. It is this discursive ensemble that we explore in thisarticle.

Although we see organizational learning as more important than a fad,this does not imply an endorsement of those proselytizers for organizationallearning who treat it uncritically as, in and of itself, a break with the past.This evangelism proposes that:

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It is a shift which will be permanent, for in no sense does it reflect afad of (sic) fashion.

(Swieringa & Wierdsma, 1992: 148; see also Garratt, 1995)

Here, other concepts are relegated to the merely ‘fashionable’, whilst organiz-ational learning instead represents a new and enduring verity. By contrast,our stance is not to define organizational learning as significant because ofits inherent importance but because of its enmeshment within a wider set ofconcerns. For we will not get very far in analysing organizational learningas if it were readily delineated from other instances of the invocation oflearning. Viewed as part of a discourse, organizational learning emerges asa condition and consequence of the structuring of work, schooling and thepolitical agenda relating to the knowledge society and global competition.

Of course, one might think that the fact that learning discourse isfashionable constitutes, in and of itself, an excellent reason to criticize it. Todo so would be not merely confirming and contributing to its modishnessbut also reproducing a familiar pattern in the life cycle of any fashionableartefact (Kieser, 1997). That might be worthwhile since, with relatively fewexceptions (Brown, 1996; Coopey, 1995; Coopey & Burgoyne, 2000;Fenwick, 1998; Fielding, 2001; Garrick & Rhodes, 1998; Leymann, 1989;Oswick et al., 2000; Pant, 2001) there has been very limited criticaldiscussion of organizational learning to date (see Örtenblad, 2002, for areview). However, although we want to contribute to this discussion, we alsowant to do so in a way that makes connections between organizationallearning and wider considerations of learning discourse. The aim is to high-light the discursive formation in which the signifier ‘learning’ is mobilized ina way that legitimizes and reinforces a neo-liberal ethos, as an inescapableanswer to the changing times of the supposedly knowledge driven, global-ized economy. For what is most striking is how learning discourse seems tohave become constituted as truth: it is unproblematically assumed thatlearning, like vitamins and stopping smoking, is a good thing (cf. Hawkins,1994). Every label containing the term ‘learning’ is conceived as a positivelabel, and the term appears in an almost limitless array of couplings, whetherin organizational learning and the learning organization or in learningclimate, learning communities, learning systems, learning cities, learningtowns, learning regions, learning nations, learning economy, learning atwork, on-the-job learning, continuous learning, lifelong learning or, at itsmost generic, learning society.

Because ‘learning’ as a discursive term is present in so wide a range ofpolitical and social arenas this means that its power effects are of somesignificance. It seems as if ‘learning’ has the capacity to short-circuit

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contention and debate in favour of a formulaic commonsense. Learningcarries connotations with humanistic concerns of self-actualization, self-development, perhaps even emancipation. Such connotations make the titleof this article rather strange. Is it possible to be against learning? Isn’t itrather odd, perhaps even offensive, that people who are in some sensesprofessional educators should argue against learning? But, as we shall see,that depends on what, precisely, we mean by learning. We are, therefore,simply highlighting the contestable – if rarely contested – series of relationsin which learning is made meaningful. This is the critical space in which itcan make sense to be ‘against learning’.

Organizational learning and organizations and learning

Let us say, first of all, that we do not seek to engage in the debate betweenthe terms organizational learning and learning organizations (see, e.g.Edmondson & Moingeon, 1998; Örtenblad, 2001; Tsang, 1997), whichwould take us away from the main concern of this article. Both ‘OL’ and‘LO’ are part of the common discursive ensemble which mobilizes learning.Yet the connection of the organization and learning is not one which isinitially apparent from the organizational learning literature. In what mightbe called the ‘strong organizational learning claim’, many proponents andanalysts configure it in opposition to conventional understandings oforganizations. Thus:

Organization and learning are essentially antithetical . . . to learn is todisorganize and increase variety. To organize is to forget and to reducevariety.

(Weick & Westley, 1996: 440)

Yet, plainly, this very much depends upon how learning and organization areconceptualized. On the latter issue, it might be argued that the reduction ofvariety associated with rationalization is not a way of forgetting but ofremembering certain ways of working and codifying them into organiz-ational routines (Cyert & March, 1963; Hedberg, 1981). More importantly,for present purposes, is the notion of learning as being somehow beyond oragainst organization. On the contrary, many forms of learning are preciselyabout organization and the reduction of variety. For instance, in the case oforganizational learning and the learning organization, a shared understand-ing is required to direct the attention of the individuals so that they learnthings that are useful to the organization (see e.g. Argyris & Schön, 1978;Huber, 1991). Accordingly:


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Although organizational learning is influenced by the activities ofactive agents, it is at the same time a top-down process. Organizationalhistory, assimilated in organizational memory, structures the activitiesof these learning agents.

(Huysman, 1999: 65)

Furthermore, a learning organization is supposed to be structured to increaseflexibility, with less formalization and more decentralization than in thetraditional bureaucratic organization (see e.g. Senge, 1990; Swieringa &Wierdsma, 1992; Watkins & Marsick, 1993; West, 1994). This is not,however, the absence of structure. It may be another kind of structure, butit is still structure, but we will return in greater detail to this point.

Perhaps the most influential formulation of organizational learning isthat which distinguishes between single- and double-loop learning (Argyris,1992). Single-loop learning is conceptualized as the situation where indi-viduals perform ‘actions’ which have ‘consequences’. There is a ‘match’ or‘mismatch’ between the two and on that basis actions are continued oraltered. Double-loop learning occurs when the individual’s alteration ofactions occurs on the basis of an examination of ‘governing variables’ whichare:

. . . the preferred states that individuals strive to ‘satisfice’ when theyare acting . . . they are the variables that can be inferred by observingthe actions of individuals acting as agents for the organization, to driveand guide their actions.

(Argyris, 1992: 9)

Needless to say, all of the key terms here are rather suspect, and it must bequestionable, to say the least, whether this formulation, with its implicitrationalism, matches the way that any kind of learning really occurs. But thegeneral idea is that double-loop learning is the more creative, critical, inno-vative kind, whereas single-loop learning is the plodding, repetitious kind.Thus:

Single-loop learning is appropriate for the routine, repetitive issue – ithelps get the everyday job done. Double-loop learning is more relevantfor the complex, non-programmable issues – it assures that there willbe another day in the future of the organization.

(Argyris, 1992: 9)

Despite some noises to the contrary, it is plain that single- and double-looplearning are hierarchically paired, with the former deferring to the latter. Fiol


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and Lyles (1985), for example, refer to single-loop as ‘lower-level learning’,and to remain at such a level is, apparently, to court disaster:

Unless people acting as agents for organizations and societies are ableto learn how to detect and correct double-loop errors, the survival ofthe society may be in doubt.

(Argyris & Schön, 1978: 5)

No doubt, like any such pairing, that of single- and double-loop learningcould be deconstructed and inverted. But what matters for present purposesis that it is a pairing which enables the argument that the kind of learningwhich is antithetical to organization is, specifically, the double-loop kind: itis this which disorganizes and increases variety.

But does it? What is crystal clear from Argyris’ formulation is that evendouble-loop learning is to be understood in terms of the ‘individual as anagent for the organization’, and to ‘assure the future of the organization’. Solearning – even the double-looped kind – turns out to be relentlessly per-formative. That is to say it is directed towards the achievement of particularoutcomes, and not just any outcomes, but those imputed to the organizationand concerned with the survival and prospering of the organization (Fenwick,1998; Garrick & Rhodes, 1998). This must therefore imply that some of the‘governing variables’, such as those which guide the individual to serve ratherthan subvert the organization, remain unexamined. For ‘how does onequestion a premise whilst seeing the world through its lenses?’ (Dery, 1982:219). In relation to organizational learning, as Fenwick suggests:

employees are supposed to reflect critically on the operationalprocedures of the corporation, but only its surface . . . learning thatthreatens the existence of the organization, such as liberated workersfinding ecological and communicatively nurturing ways to achieve theirpurposes that begin with dismantling the organization, are not possiblefrom the organization’s perspective.

(Fenwick, 1998: 149)

Thus double-loop learning does not disorganize and increase variety exceptwithin strictly defined parameters. These parameters are defined by ‘theorganization’ and therefore, even in this sense, learning and organization, arenot antithetical.

We shall return to this argument, because it has significant implicationsfor claims about the emancipatory nature of organizational learning. Butsuppose that such antithesis is conceded. What might then emerge would be


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the claim that learning and organization are not antithetical per se, but ratherthat learning (that is, the double-loop kind) is antithetical to particular,traditional kinds of organization. In short, organizational learning is to beconceived of as a version of anti-bureaucratic organization. Single-looplearning is bureaucratic learning, having to do with repetition and mundan-ity, occurring ‘within a given organizational structure, a given set of rules’(Fiol & Lyles, 1985: 807). Double-loop learning is ‘post-bureaucratic’ beingless structured, less hierarchy-driven, more pro-active, more innovative:

These examples [of learning organizations] have in common systemsthinking, decentralization, continuous learning, and empowerment –keys to a learning organization. The examples are all organization-wide cultural change programs that measurably change the skill andinnovation base in the organization, that alter bureaucratic and hier-archical relationships, and that create collegial, problem solving teamsaligned around a globally understood mission.

(Watkins & Marsick, 1993: 192)

This, of course, is a much weaker claim to make, and if this is taken to bethe organizational learning position then some important consequences flowfrom it. First, it means that it is appropriate to make use of many of thefamiliar devices and concepts of organizational analysis to discuss organiz-ational learning. This would not of course be possible if organizationallearning were established as subverting organization per se. Second, it meansthat organizational learning should be considered alongside, or as related to,a whole array of ‘post-bureaucratic’ (Heckscher, 1994) approaches and tech-niques – excellence, teamworking, reengineering and so on. Similarly,organizational learning should be read as part of the sustained assault onbureaucracy which typifies recent managerial and political discourse (du Gay,2000), a point we will amplify later.

This is certainly explicit in much, if not most, of the organizationallearning literature. Perhaps most famously, Peter Senge positions learningorganizations in distinction to ‘bureaucratic organizations where the wonderand joy of living have no place’ (Kofman & Senge, 1993: 22). It is a mootpoint, of course, whether bureaucracies are quite as heartless as this andmore critical analysis (e.g. Ritzer, 1993) would suggest (see du Gay, 2000).Actually, bureaucracies do have some capacity to provide meaning andcommunity, if not wonder and joy. Equally, it is not clear that learningorganizations do or will have a place for wonder and joy. Indeed, the ideaof the learning organization has been criticized for not valuing the uniquedifferences between the individuals (Fenwick, 1998), for interfering with the


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employees’ time with families and friends (Coopey, 1995; Fielding, 2001),and for assuming that people are necessarily more comfortable with flexible,post-bureaucratic structures (Victor & Stephens, 1994).

Senge’s work is certainly, as Fielding (2001) notes, animated by a deeplyhumanistic commitment in the sense that the learning organization is deemedto be one that is structured towards the realization of the human potentialand in particular those ‘higher order’ attributes such as caring and creativity.Senge is absolutely explicit in arguing for an essentialist conception ofhumanity: attributes and needs are assumed to be asocially and ahistoricallygiven (see also Johnson, 1993). In this, Senge, and other organizationallearning proponents, stand in a long line of organizational theorists, certainlyfrom human relations theory onwards, who argue that creating the circum-stances under which human needs are realized is both morally worthwhileand will also enhance organizational performance. A more critical line, whichhas been widely explored in sociology and organization theory (Friedman,1977; Roberts, 1984; Rose, 1990), understands such humanistically informedmanagement as being implicated in subtle and disingenuous forms of controlwhich are entangled in making and enforcing capitalist and other hegemonicforms of the organization of work, economy and subjectivity.

The capacity of organizational learning to yield, in principle, newforms of organizational control is a point developed in some detail by JohnCoopey (1995) in one of the earliest and most incisive of the existing criticaltreatments of organizational learning. He argues that employees withinlearning organizations are likely to be socialized into self-responsibilizedsubject positions. In this, organizational learning may be seen to have muchin common with other new or post-bureaucratic managerial techniqueswhich have been extensively analysed, largely from a Foucauldian perspec-tive, in terms of their capacity to instigate regimes of self-surveillance andself-control (e.g. Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992 on JIT/TQM).

The key issue here is that of empowerment. Organizational learning,like other forms of the post-bureaucracy thesis, posits the new organizationalforms it prescribes as empowering, not in passing but as a central part oftheir definition: ‘empowerment is a cornerstone of the learning organization’(Watkins & Marsick, 1993: 215). This coupling of empowerment andlearning runs throughout the literature, beginning with the ‘high priest’ oforganizational learning, Peter Senge:

. . . learning organizations will, increasingly, be ‘localized’ organiz-ations, extending the maximum degree of authority and power as farfrom the ‘top’ or corporate center as possible.

(Senge, 1990: 287)


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Near identical formulations abound (e.g. Marquardt & Reynolds, 1994;Pedler et al., 1991) and it would be repetitious to quote them, but what isimportant is to recognize that empowerment is configured as mandatory fororganizational learning to occur:

It is, I believe, possible to begin to implement organizational learningwithout a concomitant move toward shared authority, but it is notpossible to move far in that direction.

(Dixon, 1994: 129)

Taken together, the proponents of organizational learning conjure up aUtopia of democracy and freedom, always contrasted positively with thestifling hierarchy of bureaucracy. However, their optimism seems less justifiedthan the darker vision of control which Coopey (1995) articulates. That thisis so is strikingly illustrated by the formulation of one of the champions oforganizational learning, striking because it so closely mirrors the languageof Foucauldian critics of empowerment:

Right now the word ‘empowerment’ is a very powerful buzzword. It’salso very dangerous. Just granting power, without some method ofreplacing the discipline and order that come out of a command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to dispersepower so self-discipline can largely replace imposed discipline.

(O’Brien in Senge et al., 1994: 14)

Empowerment is here revealed to have resolutely proscribed limits, andlearning can occur only within parameters defined by powerful others(Fenwick, 1998). Moreover, learning may not just operate within thoseconstraints but actually increase them so that ‘existing asymmetries of powerare likely to be buttressed by the learning process, giving senior managersaccess to newly generated corporate knowledge and language . . .’ (Coopey,1995: 209, emphasis added).

Pursuing this point undermines the plausibility of the ‘weak organiz-ational learning claim’. Here the influential work of Ikujiro Nonaka isparticularly illustrative (Nonaka, 1991; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1994).Nonaka posits an interaction between explicit and tacit knowledge as thebasis for innovation. Much of what makes an organization work is tacitknowledge accumulated through experience. Somewhat paradoxically, onthe one hand, Nonaka argues that this tacit knowledge cannot be formalizedwhilst, on the other hand, claiming that the successful knowledge creatingcompany builds bridges between the tacit and the explicit such that the


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former becomes the latter, thereby enhancing innovation and adding to theknowledge-capital of the organization.

Whether or not Nonaka is right about this, there is nothing very newabout it and certainly nothing post-bureaucratic. Even Argyris notes (usingthe loop-learning language) that:

One might say that one of the features of organizations as a social tech-nology is to decompose double-loop issues into single-loop issuesbecause they are then more easily programmable and manageable.

(Argyris, 1992: 9)

To put it differently, a desire to render explicit, and at least somewhat tocodify, the tacit knowledge of employees seems to be the guiding thread ofmanagement theory from Taylor onwards (Braverman, 1974; Shenhav,1999). It was Taylor’s desire, as embodied in the first principle of scientificmanagement, to supplant the control which informal knowledge gave toworkers that partly animated his project, just as later human relationsapproaches sought access to the informal norms of work groups in anattempt to align them with formal organizational purposes. So learningconfigured in this sense scarcely represents the antithesis of even traditionalorganization rather, if it may be allowed, it is its essence. Moreover, learningorganizations, thus configured, by no means create knowledge so much asaccess it and seek to control it as exemplified by the continuous improve-ment associated with teamworking practices (see Adler, 1993).

We are not arguing that there is no difference between organizationallearning and Taylorism. It certainly matters that different languages andunderstandings of organization are invoked because these do have thecapacity to construct new social realities. But we do want to challenge thenotion of a fundamental discontinuity between traditional and learning (or,generally, post-bureaucratic) organization. Why? Because it is that claim todiscontinuity which goes with the praising and reinforcing of new organiz-ational forms and new regimes of work that can be seen as the justificatorytrope of social and political actions in which learning works as a crucial relay.

To tackle this same issue from a different direction, suppose it were tobe conceded for the sake of argument that learning represents some newalternative to traditional organization. What understanding of learning goesbeyond the ‘walls of academia’ through the artefacts and engagements of itsmembers, for example, in the form of conferences, books, training activityand research processes informing policies? Contu and Willmott (2003) have,in this respect, shown how a conceptualization such as that of situatedlearning theory and community of practice, embraced by companies such as


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Xerox and IBM, has many radical elements. Yet in the ‘translation’ (Feyer-abend, 1975) into the field of management, its meaning has been naturalizedinto a functionalist or systemic ontology for organization. This has facili-tated the re-appropriation of some of its most radical concepts, such as legiti-mate peripheral participation, from a valuable and radical analytical toolinto ‘a technocratic tool of organisational engineering’ (Contu & Willmott,2003: 289).

Examples such as this show the plasticity of learning discourse and itscapacity to shape and be shaped by social realities. In the following sectionwe elaborate on how learning has been mobilized, translated and prescribedin the field of policy making as well as in the commentaries on the currentsocial conjuncture, typically known as knowledge era, showing what thisdiscourse implies and excludes in the process.

Learning, politics and the politics of truth

The connection of the terms ‘learning’ and ‘organization’ is significant as partof a wider understanding of the social role of education as being linked toperformance, in the sense of corporate and economic ‘needs’. Of course, itis well known that since the 1980s a utilitarian conception of education hasbecome increasingly dominant, so that education is increasingly conceived ofin terms of vocationalism. Education, whether primary, tertiary or higher, isseen more and more as training for economic functioning, and an instru-mental and credentialist understanding of education was encouraged (see,e.g. Gewirtz, 2002). Yet this narrowing of education, for all that it some-times seemed overwhelming, never really exerted the hegemonic influencewhich New Right ideologues might have wished for. As their repeated attackson the ‘education establishment’ and ‘trendy teachers’ make clear, there hasremained a strong attachment within the education system to notions of indi-vidual emancipation, social progressivism and ‘disinterested’ study (see Wolf,2002).

The promulgation of learning discourse in the 1990s can be read as aresponse to these resistances through the invocation of a seemingly morebenign language which superficially resonates with progressivism whilstmaintaining an underlying commitment to functional or utilitarian concep-tions of education. Who, indeed, can be against learning? Educators of allsorts find it easy to commit to a term which was a part of their traditionallexicon. Learning, after all, seems to leave indeterminate the content of whatis learned (Fenwick, 1998). Learning might encompass anything fromreading Derrida to making petrol bombs.


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However, learning discourse codes a much more restrictive set of prac-tices than might be assumed. The political rationale for learning appears tobe a recognition of belief that it is in the vanguard of post-industrialism.Public policy, in the UK, EU and elsewhere, is predicated on claims that‘capital is mobile, technology can migrate quickly and goods can be made inlow cost countries and shipped to developed markets’ (UK CompetitivenessWhite Paper, 1998: 10). Given this ‘reality’, competitive advantage must befound, not in traditional means of production but rather in knowledge, skillsand creativity (UK Competitiveness White Paper, 1998: 10). ‘Lifelonglearning’ becomes a means through which economies and organizations canre-tread workforces and labour pools to adapt to these changes. Therefore,on this account, as advanced industrial economies become more ‘knowledge-based’ or ‘knowledge-intensive’, learning becomes a key to competition. Inthe UK, the 1998 Green Paper, revealingly titled The Learning Age: A renais-sance for a new Britain, makes this explicit. For, as the foreword by the (then)Secretary of State for Education explains:

the fostering of an enquiring mind and the love of learning are essen-tial for our future success. To achieve stable and sustainable growth,we will need a well-educated, well equipped and adaptable labourforce.

Such thinking is by no means confined to the UK. The EU has a 10-yearmission plan:

to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge basedeconomy . . . capable of sustained economic growth . . . LifelongLearning is a core element of this strategy, central not only to compet-itiveness and employability but also social inclusion, active citizenshipand personal development.

(Lifelong Learning, 2002. See also Towards the Learning Society,1995)

These formulations entail several sleights of hand. The promotion of anenquiring mind and love for learning, social inclusion and personal develop-ment does not necessarily have much to do with an adaptable labour forceand economic competitiveness. Indeed, enquiring minds might be lead toquestion the assumptions about economic growth, competition and theeconomic primacy of the West which permeate these policy promotions.They might also question the chain of equivalence between social inclusion,personal development, and competitiveness and employability, which tends


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to equate democratic and humanist values with those of utilitarianism, profit-ability and exploitation. But, of course, we are being disingenuous: thosekinds of enquiry are not at all what learning policy has as its aim. In exactlythe same way as organizational learning restricts and challenges the kind oflearning which can acceptably be undertaken, so too does the wider invoca-tion of learning in society proscribe the roles that are taken by and ascribedto its citizens/workers. It is for this reason that it is possible and perhaps evencommendable to be ‘against learning’.

It should be plain from this comparison why we have stressed thatorganizational learning cannot be abstracted from learning discourse. It isnot just that the same term is used, it is that the same understandings andpractices are associated with those terms. And, even more importantly, thevarious invocations of learning – as would be expected from a discursiveformation – are mutually re-enforcing. For there is plainly a commonrationale between the case for new, post-bureaucratic, learning organizationsand conceptions of a new, globalized knowledge-based economy. In order tocompete, both organizations and economies must change in related ways.Moreover, to the extent that capital is held to be globalized, nation stateswhich fail to encourage learning amongst their citizens will not be favouredsites for inward investment. So a common imaginaire unites different kindsof agencies in the construction of learning discourse. This commonality,which can be read as one of the most powerful ideological2 stances struc-turing the current conjuncture, is, as we have seen, evident in the UK sincethe advent of New Labour to government in 1997 and their programme ofmodernization of the social fabric of the UK, as has been very widelydiscussed (Callinicos, 2001; du Gay, 2000; Heffernan, 2001; Newman,2001). New Labour politicians articulate very much the same language ofchange, competitiveness, knowledge, leadership, etc. found in contemporarymanagerialism (Clarke & Newman, 1997). And a similar stress is put uponlearning, with one erstwhile education ministry being re-designated as thatfor lifelong learning. Thus, what is in process is a kind of interchange inwhich government embraces business values, whilst ‘business claims to be nolonger solely about profit, but also about social visions of empoweredlifelong learners’ (Gee et al., 1996: 22–3).

But the political implications of learning discourse are more extensivethan this rapprochement of nation-state governments, supra-governmentalbodies and corporate organizations would imply. For it is deeply significantthat the rewriting of desirable forms of organizational structure implicitly –and often explicitly – goes hand in hand with claims that the nature of thepolity has fundamentally shifted. No one suggested that the introduction of,say, matrix structures into organizations bespoke of such a shift and yet the


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emergence of ‘post-bureaucratic’ organizational forms has been heralded aspresaging, variously, the end of organized capitalism (Lash & Urry, 1987),the start of post-capitalist society (Drucker, 1993) or the rise of the networksociety (Castells, 1996). In this way, learning discourse becomes emblematicof a series of much wider actual or alleged shifts.

Hence, as we said earlier, organizational learning cannot be consideredjust in relation to management/fads but as a term, linked to other terms, thatrequires evaluation and problematization as such. At that point in thediscussion our argument was that we should not under-value the significanceof what appear, at first, to be ‘merely’ organizational or managerial changes.But the converse also applies: we should not over-value them. This may beillustrated by reference to Castell’s influential work on the network society,mentioned above. For a central plank of his argument for the rise of networksociety is transformations in the nature of organizations, work and employ-ment (Castells, 1996). Here, Castells not only explicitly invokes the litera-ture on organizational learning (e.g. Castells, 1996), but places this withinwhat he takes to be a fundamental shift from Fordism to Toyotism, whichis another version of the bureaucracy/post-bureaucracy shift.

We know, of course, how often, in various guises, this shift has beenidentified. But Castells takes claims about it to be entirely unproblematic(that is, he takes it as an accomplished fact that this shift has occurred) eventhough there is plenty of work suggesting otherwise (e.g. Warhurst &Thompson, 1998; Thompson & Smith, 2001). To take a recent example,Delbridge’s (1998) comparative ethnography of a traditional and a Japanizedfactory shows how the differences between them at the level of labourprocess practices are fairly superficial. Plainly, this is related to the point wemade earlier that organizational learning is not so different to the traditionalconcerns of scientific management.

However, we do not wish simply, or even primarily, to argue that‘nothing has changed’. We are trying to suggest a need to steer between, oraway from, two kinds of realist position. One says that organiz-ational/learning is just so much froth, rhetoric or management-speak andthat really the fundamentals of control and exploitation remain intact (cf.those who claim that the learning organization is ‘only’ a buzzword/fashion).The other says that really what has occurred is a fundamental transform-ation of economy and society. Almost every writer on organizational learningexplains the need for it by reference to changes in the environment (Argyris& Schön, 1978; Pedler et al., 1991; Senge et al., 1999). And, as we haveseen, the policies of countries moving towards neo-liberalism are alsojustified in the light of unrelentless changes in the forces and organization ofproduction. This is also true for neo-Marxists authors such as Hardt and


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Negri (2001) who proclaim the postmodernization of work and assume asa matter of fact the immaterialization of labour and the emergence of aToyotaist knowledge society. This, they argue, is the new Empire to be foughtagainst, but they take on trust or as given the very reality claims made by,as we might call them, ‘the new Emperors’.

We want to argue instead that, first, it is through our collectiveconstructions (including critiques of the Hardt & Negri type) that we rendersuch claims as reality, and second, the political character of such construc-tions. To say that they are constructions is by no means to say that they areonly ‘words’ rather than effective and effectual practices. Our discussion hereis concerned with their actual effects, for example in the de-limitation of theway we can think and speak of organizational/learning, which is central tothe way that organizational as well as social life is made intelligible by meansof political exclusions. Therefore, we recast this discussion in the light ofhegemonic politics (Butler et al., 2000) which opens up the possibility ofthinking of change, and which requires that we make sense of learningdiscourse. For this is one of the articulations through which the ‘knowledgeera’ is produced and maintained as the actual and only reality. This is apowerful ideological formation in that it mobilizes a ‘politics of truth’(Foucault, 1980: 133) about the ways in which businesses, societies and indi-viduals are and ought to be organized. It is the imperative nature of thisproposition which is so significant: there is no alternative. This is, to be sure,very real in the effects, implications and practices of what is done in the nameof learning. It tends to maintain patterns of relation of power and subordi-nation (rich/poor; north/south, etc.) which justify exploitative practices bothin the labour process ‘at home’ or in the export of low skill production toplaces ‘out of sight’ and therefore ‘out of mind’.

Certainly there are many points of entry into these political debates,and learning is just one of these. At a minimum, this means that learningcannot sensibly be discussed in isolation from its political context. However,it is our contention that learning is more important than this preciselybecause of its seemingly benign and apolitical character. It is within suchunnoticed and mundane invocations that the politics of truth is at its mosteffective. Within this, learning discourse offers points of identifications forsubjects of/at work to understand themselves as ‘learners’, as responsibleagents of their own employability. The fulcrum of learning discourse is thetransformation of subjects. In this sense, the accent of learning discourse isrelentlessly individualistic and individualizing. Possessor of a ‘learning style’(Reynolds, 1997) and perhaps of an ‘individual learning account’, it is theindividual who must now navigate a path to full membership, whether oflearning organizations or the learning society.


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Concluding remarks

Organizational learning, we have argued, should not be understood as amanagement fashion, isolated from a wider discourse of learning but as bothdrawing upon and contributing to that discourse. We also suggested thatlearning discourse is deeply problematic, and have tried to make out a case‘against learning’, beginning with a critical appraisal of organizationallearning. We could just as easily have begun with some other term withinlearning discourse but, apart from the fact that organizational learning is theaspect with which we are most familiar, we also suggested that it is signifi-cant for making connections between the workplace and invocations oflearning in the wider social.

Our discussion of organizational learning tried to pin down the claimsof its proponents by first considering what we called the ‘strong organiz-ational learning claim’ – that learning constitutes a radical dismembermentof, and antithesis to, organization. It is important to dispose of that claimbecause, in doing so, we could show that organizational learning, in its weakclaim, was enmeshed within a variety of arguments about, loosely, ‘post-bureaucratic’ organization. This, in turn, meant that we could legitimatelyinvoke existing critiques within organization theory which would not, ofcourse, be possible if learning was indeed antithetical to organization. Sothen we embarked upon a series of discussions about empowerment, controland the expropriation of tacit knowledge.

We then moved away from organizational learning, to talk aboutlearning discourse as it manifests itself within the more overtly politicaldomain: in education policy but, more extensively, in apprehensions oflearning, competitiveness and the knowledge economy. These both resonatewith, and are informed by, the way learning is configured in the organiz-ational arena. Our overall contention is that learning is to be understood interms of a politics of truth. That is, it is part of the construction of certaintruths about the emergence of internationally competitive knowledgeeconomies and their organizational counterparts. Learning has a benevolentand beneficent ring to it. But we have suggested that learning encodes restric-tions on what can be learned, both organizationally and socially, which areboth controlled and controlling, and they are part of an individualizationwhich is manifest throughout contemporary societies.

We have intentionally run together a number of apparently differentscenarios – from the connection between organization and learning, to thepolitical framework regulating and inspiring business and educational prac-tices, to the learning ‘subject’. That running together is precisely the point:when learning is invoked in one context it stands in relation to the whole


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network that is learning discourse. It is this ensemble, which makes learninga significant ideological tool and a real, practical force. It expresses a kindof mood, or summons up a nebulous but seductive and futuristic vision, inwhich ‘old’ conflicts, whether organizational or social – e.g. access toresources, the distribution of wealth, the operations of power – are renderedinvisible. And this is achieved not through some totalitarian control overinformation but through the very ‘power of freedom’ (Rose, 1999) bestowedby learning.

In this respect, our critique has endeavoured to go beyond a simplerebuke or rebuttal. Our case has been not only, or not primarily, that ofarguing for the ‘falseness’ of learning discourse. Rather we have tried to high-light and make explicit the very truth which is engendered through thisdiscourse. It is by actually exploring the ‘truth effects’ of this discourse thatit is possible to open a space for a challenge that is subversive because it ques-tions how those effects are obtained and what they leave out. This is whatwe have identified as the ‘no alternative’ trope which is woven into thelearning discourse that, making it difficult if not impossible to be ‘againstlearning’. We have therefore considered how the signifier ‘learning’ works asa nodal point which constitutes (legitimizing and sustaining) yet glosses overantagonistic and contradictory organizational and social practices. Inconnecting learning and knowledge to empowerment and new, ‘necessary’organizational structures, learning discourse promotes new locales in whichindividual learners can prove and improve their own potential as workersand as citizens. Thus attention has been dedicated to making explicit theextent to which policy making mobilizes the learning signifier and therebypro-poses a notion of society, self-hood and citizenship.

The universal and uncritical acceptance of learning shows just how farthe ideological move of appropriating and suturing a notion of society,organization and self around learning has gone. This makes it difficult – butnot, as we hope we have demonstrated, impossible – and at the same timeimportant to argue ‘against learning’.3

Notes

1 Throughout this article, we leave our theoretical commitments somewhat in paren-theses. We want the article to be read as a theoretically informed argument aboutlearning rather than as an application of a theoretical position to learning. But themain sources, fairly obviously, are Laclau, Foucault, Žižek and, somewhere in thebackground, Marx and Gramsci.

2 The concept of ideology we are drawing upon here is that developed by Laclau (1996)and Žižek (1994). Without entering here the maze of the intellectual discussion on thedeath or life of ideology, as Laclau puts it ‘the ideological operation par excellence


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consists of attributing that impossible role of closure to a particular content that isradically incommensurable with it. In other words the operation of closure is imposs-ible but at the same time necessary, impossible because of the constitutive dislocationwhich lies at the heart of any structural arrangement, necessary because without thatfictitious fixing of meaning there would not be meaning at all’ (1996: 205). The possi-bility of constituting the community as a coherent whole around the notion of learningprojecting the social in the imaginary of a ‘learning society’ represents a powerful andcomplete attempt at the ideological closure Laclau discusses.

3 Important as it may be, it is of course always possible, and sensible, to question theextent to which an academic article can ‘make a difference’, in this case by shiftingapprehensions of learning. This is a complex issue which faces critical work of allkinds, and can hardly be dealt with satisfactorily in this article. It is obviously thecase that any individual article has only a limited impact upon a relatively closedcommunity. However, as a contribution to wider projects, such as those within thecritical management studies community, it is possible for the cumulative effects tobe greater than is immediately obvious, especially when these projects begin toinform teaching. In relation to learning, so muted have been the voices of critiquethat anything which opens up a space of dissent seems to us to be worthwhile. Forfuller discussions of this issue, see Fournier and Grey (2000) and Parker (2002).

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Alessia Contu is a Lecturer in the Department of Management Learningat Lancaster University. She is interested in the notion of politics ashegemonic articulation and its significance for critical managementstudies. Her writing has focused on the concept of community of practiceand its relation with power. She is currently exploring the politics oflearning and organizational change in the context of the digital industry. [E-mail: [email protected]]

Chris Grey, BA Econ, PhD (Manchester), is currently Senior Lecturerat the University of Cambridge having previously worked at Leeds andUMIST. His main research interests are in organizational theory andcritical management studies and he has published widely in these areasin journals including Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies andOrganization Studies. He is Editor-in-Chief of Management Learning, amember of the Executive Committee of the Management Education and

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Development Division of the American Academy of Management, amember of the DfES’s National Educational Research Forum and Chairof the Management Research Advisory Forum to the National Collegefor School Leadership.

Anders Örtenblad is a teacher and researcher at Halmstad University,in Sweden. His main research interests are the spread of (popular)management ideas in general, and ideas connected to knowledge andlearning in particular. He has published articles on these subjects inManagement Learning, International Journal of Management Reviews and TheLearning Organization.[E-mail: [email protected]]

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Against Learning

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