Knowing Work: The Social Relations of Working and Knowing

This book discusses new contradictions in the processes of vocational education. It poses questions on how today’s knowledge is to be taught and what should be learned within vocational education.
The meanings of work, the characteristics of knowledge and knowing, and the processes of vocational learning and educating are complex in contemporary societies. The vocabularies, discourses, and policies are changing globally. Coexisting and contradictory processes, practices, ideas, and ideals shift, waver, and then take hold. It is difficult to understand how they relate to their societies and to the lives of human beings. The neo-liberal policies governing the relations between capital and labour – the state and the labour market – severely affect both the changing and unchanging features of working and learning.
The book approaches vocational education from three perspectives: moral and symbolic orders that are embedded in cultural and social relations, working and knowing at school and at the work place, and the dynamic combination of knowing and working as these are experienced within the ideas and practices of vocational education.

The Editors: Markus Weil, Ph.D., works as an associate at the University Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on university teaching and learning, workplace learning, and vocational and adult education. He is especially interested in the concepts of co-operation and networking within education and economics.
Leena Koski is a professor of sociology at the University of Joensuu (Finland) specialising in the sociology of education. Her field of expertise is in studying the moral orders of education both institutionally (elementary, university, and vocational education) and in relation to late modern culture and policies (individualisation, normalisation, neo-liberal governance, gender). One of her research fields is the historical formation of gender and class differences in educational ideals.
Liv Mjelde is a professor of vocational pedagogy at Akershus University College (Norway). She is a sociologist by training and a specialist in the sociology of education. She is an expert in studying the changing relations between vocational and general education from psychological (forms of knowledge), didactic (workshop and classroom learning), and sociological (division of manual and mental labour) perspectives. One of her research fields is the gender divisions in vocational education and in the manual labour market.