Learning in and for production as a historically changing phenomenon

It was only yesterday that we began to pitch our camp in this country of labo-ratories and power stations that we took possession of this new, this still un-fi nished, house we live in. Everything round us is new and different – our con-cerns, our working habits, our relations with one another. Our very psychology has been shaken to its foundations, to its most secret recesses. Our notions of separation, absence, distance, return, are refl ections of a new set of realities, though the words themselves remain unchanged. To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language. (Saint Exupery, 1941, p. 70)

Antoiné de Saint Exupery is describing the fast and pervasive nature of the change that was brought about through technological invention and the mechanization of production about sixty years ago. That change seems to have features similar to the information-technological revolution of today. Although people are similarly confused about the change, its nature is different.

One reason behind the pervasive change described in the quotation was the closer interaction between science and production that started in the early 20th century. New science-based production branches emerged, but science was also applied in the traditional areas. The fi rst industrial research laboratories were es-tablished. New applied research fi elds appeared between basic research and practi-cal engineering (Berner, 1981, 105–114) and new forms of mediating activities de-veloped between production and scientifi c research (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001; Freeman & Louca, 2001).

Another reason behind the change was standardization. Industrial plants that were in the vanguard of progress began to standardize their products, their modes of action, and their tools. In the new era of mass production progressive standard-ization and rationalstandard-ization became the most important means of survival for com-panies in the competition. Organizations – usually large plants with thousands of workers – learned through successive cycles of rationalization and standardization the most effective ways to produce standard products.

Today, in the emerging information society, companies that use and produce information and communications technology (ICT) are in the vanguard of eco-nomic progress. Centralized plants that were the typical units of mass produc-tion have been replaced by dispersed global networks of producproduc-tion organizaproduc-tions (Castells, 2000). ”Knowledge workers”¹ have taken the place of industrial workers.

Surviving in the current competitive climate depends more and more on compa-nies’ abilities to produce new knowledge and innovative products and services.

The competition is all about continuously designing and producing new genera-tions of products (Peters, 1992, p. 315).

The rise of information and communication technologies is currently changing production structures in all branches of the economy. Companies manufacturing software products, chips, computers, and the like have, in a short time, become the dominating sector, crucial to the economic development of society. ICT is being applied increasingly in all societal organizations but the ICT revolution has prob-ably not yet reached its peak. The structures of the emerging forms of production and economic activity are still embryonic.

Mastering global production networks and the challenges of increasing col-laboration and knowledge creation call for new methods of developing work, as well as new forms of learning. The ongoing transformation of production has raised discussion about the nature of learning in organizations, as well as about the methods of development and consultancy needed to master the new forms of production (Adler & Cole, 1994; Kyrö & Enquist, 1997; Tienari, 1999). Research-ers have tried to fi nd new, more adequate ways of conceptualizing, explaining, and promoting collaborative learning. (Agyris & Schön, 1996; Dierkes, Berthoin et al., 2001; Nonaka-Takeuchi, 1995; Easterby-Smith, 1997; Lave & Wenger, 1991;

Powell, 1996; Toiviainen, 2003)

The importance attached to organizational learning in management discourse is a good indicator of the increasing challenges of collective learning created by

1 Drucker (1994) points out that, at the end of the 1900s, knowledge workers made up a third of the workforce of the United States – a greater proportion than industrial workers ever com-prised in the country.

the new competition in the information society. Peter Senge’s ideas of the fi ve disciplines of the ”Learning Organization”, for instance, were very popular among business managers in the early 1990s. According to this doctrine, managers should analyze the processes and problems of their organizations using systems thinking.

They should learn to think of the causal textures in their organizations as circular rather than linear cause-and-effect relationships.

The idea of the learning organization became so popular in business-manage-ment circles that it was hard to fi nd any well-known company that did not aspire to be a ”learning organization” in the late 90s (Gherhardi, Nicolini & Odella 1999, p. 103). The wealth of publications on organizational learning (Crossan & Guatto, 1996) also refl ects the growing need for theoretical understanding and practical mastering of the processes of collective learning. Theories of organizational learn-ing have nevertheless been criticized for not meetlearn-ing the challenges of enhanclearn-ing the mastery of learning in organizations. Huber (1991) criticizes the research for its inability to create guidelines for increasing its effectiveness and other researchers (Jones, 1995; Tsang, 1997) have since expressed concerns about the lack of practical value in the results of the increasing amount of research that is being carried out.

It seems that production, learning and developmental work are at present con-verging in a new way: ”While you perform knowledge work, you learn. And you must learn minute by minute to perform knowledge work effectively.” (Tapscott, 1996, p. 198). As early as in 1988, Shoshana Zuboff pointed out that learning had become a dominant feature of daily work:

Learning is the new form of labor. It is no longer a separate activity that occurs either before one enters the workplace or in remote classroom settings (…) Learning is the heart of productive activity. (Zuboff, 1988, p. 395)

The rapid increase in the use of consultants could also be seen as a sign of the qualitative change in the learning challenges fi rms encounter, although some of the increase in the number of independent consultants is probably due to the outsourcing of developmental activities. In fact, helping organizations to learn and change has become big business (Toivonen, 2004). The use of management consultants has increased dramatically since 1980, notably in North America.² A similar growth trend, although not so strong, is also to be seen in Europe. The es-timated world market for these services was 25,000 million dollars in 1992 (Kyrö

& Enquist, 1997, p. 11).

2 In 1994, there were 137, 000 management consultants in the United States alone. (Kyrö &

Enquist, 1997, p. 11)

From its very beginning, the main task of management consulting has been to apply scientifi c knowledge in business (Kyrö & Enquist, 1997, p. 12). Consultants were applying technical and economic knowledge until the end of the 1970 when the value of knowledge in other disciplines especially in social sciences began to be appreciated. Consultants are increasingly being invited to help in carrying out major transformations of fi rms’ activities rather than to give advice on opera-tive matters. Tienari (1999, p. 174) notes that consulting fi rms are now emphasiz-ing integrated change programs rather than fashionable management doctrines or ”fads”. Consulting is turning away from the recommendation of incremental improvements towards the implementation of programs of rapid strategic change that combine expertise from many doctrines. Although management consultants typically discuss the transformations they are helping to carry out in terms strate-gic change rather than of learning, it is obvious that collective learning is a neces-sary prerequisite for the success of such transformations.

Experiences of change programs are not encouraging, however. Porras and Rob-ertson (1983) carried out a meta-analysis of a large number of studies on change.

They discovered that fewer than 40% of them produced positive changes in the de-pendent variable of interest. Beer, Eisenstat, and Spector (1990, p. 159) found that, in one third of the cases they studied in-depth, a major resource-intensive change effort actually made the situation worse. They argued that most top-down change programs, which were still the dominant form of change efforts in the 1980s, did not work because they were guided by faulty conceptions of change and learning.

Two developments seem to dominate the recent discussion on organizational learning and change management. First, the traditional forms of individual train-ing and learntrain-ing do not meet the new challenges because production, develop-mental work, and learning are converging. Second, the challenges of learning and development are connected to the ongoing ICT revolution.

In order to secure continuous mastery of their activities and their learning, actors in fi rms have to carry out various actions of learning such as analyzing and solving problems of production, as well as designing and implementing improve-ments. These actions are often taken in relatively well-established ways according to a stable division of labor and using established methods. Their patterns could be characterized as institutionalized forms of learning in and for production.³

Insti-3 I use the term ”learning in and for production” for the distributed and collaborative ways of learning that enable collective mastery and development of a productive activity. ”Work-based learning” is for my purposes too limited as it focuses attention to individual’s learning. ”Organi-zational learning” refers to collective learning, but takes an institution rather than a productive activity as the unit of analysis.

tutionalization is understood here as the formation of relatively enduring social structures composed of regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that are closely intertwined (Scott, 2001, p. 48). Institutions are transferred to new generations by various types of carriers, such as symbolic systems, relational sys-tems, routines, and artifacts. As Latour has (1991) pointed out, the development of technological artifacts is essential in the stabilization of forms of action.

My thesis is that institutionalized forms of learning in and for production are closely related to the prevailing form of production. In this study, I maintain that the revolution in information and communications technology not only affects the amount, content and type of learning necessary for mastering production, but also makes the old institutional forms of learning obsolete as production models change.

Consequently, new types of learning actions and new institutional forms of learn-ing in and for production are needed, and are also currently emerglearn-ing.

In order to understand institutional forms of learning in and for production, we have to study them as historically changing phenomena. The purpose of this study is to create conceptual tools for understanding the nature of the ongoing historical transformation of learning in and for production. More specifi cally, the study purports to answer the following three research questions.

1. How can the ongoing qualitative transformation of the content and the insti-tutional forms of learning in and for production be conceptualized and lo-cated historically?

2. What were the principles and general structures of the dominant forms of learning in and for production preceding the ICT revolution?

3. What is the major limitation of these principles of learning in and for produc-tion that are typical of mass producproduc-tion in current situaproduc-tion and how can this limitation be overcome?