Contested Learning in Welfare Work

Drawing on the field of cultural historical psychology and the sociologies of skill and labour process, Contested Learning in Welfare Work offers a detailed account of the learning lives of state welfare workers in Canada as they cope, accommodate, resist, and flounder in times of heightened austerity. Documented through in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis, Peter Sawchuk shows how the labour process changes workers, and how workers change the labour process, under the pressures of intensified economic conditions, new technologies, changing relations of space and time, and a high-tech version of Taylorism. Sawchuk traces these experiences over a seven-year period that includes major work reorganization and the recent economic downturn. His analysis examines the dynamics between notions of de-skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling, as workers negotiate occupational learning and changing identities.

Peter Sawchuk is a Professor of Adult Education and Industrial Relations at the University of Toronto. He studies, writes and teaches in the areas of adult learning theory, the sociology and psychology of education and work, and Marxist political economy. Professor Sawchuk specialises in social perspectives on learning and the economy, emphasising the relationships between learning, labour processes, labour markets and political economy.