Expansive learning, expansive labour : conceptualizing the social production of labour-power within multi-agency working

Activity theory is customarily defined as offering object-orientated analyses of individual and collective activity. In this chapter, which draws upon the Learning in and for Interagency Working Project’s (LIW) research into professional learning in ‘multiagency’ children’s services settings, object-orientation is considered in relation to the problematic intimacy between ‘learning’ and ‘labour’ in activity theory. Daniels and Warmington (2007) have argued that, regardless of the specified, momentary object of any particular activity (that is, the development of specified projects, practices, services or goods), the object of any activity system also comprises the social production of labour-power, or rather labour-power potential. In using the term labour-power we refer, unfashionably, to Marx, for whom labour-power is the constellation of skills, knowledge and dispositions that constitutes the capacity of individuals and collectives for productive labouring action. Labour-power remains merely a potential resource until it is submitted to the labour process, wherein it becomes actual, value-creating labour (in other words, labouring action). In liquid, post-bureaucratic, service orientated economies, as Rikowski (2002a) and Dinerstein and Neary (2002) have argued, education, training, management and organisational strategies are increasingly orientated to the social production of labour-power (that is with the production of labour-power through means other than just increased recruitment). This is apparent, not least, in the concern across policy, curriculum, managerial and academic fields with qualities such as ‘responsiveness’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘hybridity’ or with ‘interprofessionalism’, ‘generic skills’ and ‘upskilling’