EXPANDING CONCEPTION OF WORK AND LEARNING: RECENT RESEARCH AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

A few generations ago, research and policy thinking about learning and work in the advanced capitalist world focussed on education and employment issues. It still does, but not quite so exclusively. The significance of other forms of learning and work are entering social consciousness. The main reason for the change in thinking about ‘‘work’ ’ is that with the expansion of commodity production and wage labour into more and more service areas of life, it becomes harder to ignore or deny that those still performing similar domestic and community services without pay are doing important work. The increasing participation of married women in paid employment puts pressure on them to do less domestic labour, on their partners to do more and on both of them to recognized and renegotiate divisions of this labour. Declining time for and interest in volunteer work beyond the household has also accentuated the centrality of this sort of labour for sustaining community life. So discussions about work now at least sometimes take domestic labour and community volunteer work as well as paid employment into explicit account