While most researchers explicitly used the term ‘learning’ to represent these objects, almost none defined explicitly what they meant by learning. Many invented different models or maps to
articulate these objects. We grouped these maps into eight categories. The groupings
were emergent, and were intended to capture what seemed to be ontological distinctions
in the relations among knowledge, individual minds, experienced events, groups of
people in action, and whatever was construed to be the ‘organization’. In most of the
publications, the focus was on relations of the social and personal, with a concern to
distinguishing the ‘individual’ and various configurations of the ‘collective’ or group. In
a very few publications, authors eschewed such distinctions and worked with more
emergent or blurred categories, and even included non-human objects as important
actors. These were so few (in this period of workplace learning literature) that we
grouped them into one category even though there are significantly different
orientations collected there. Of course, the delineation of any categories such as these
eight is an imperfect map-making exercise. Some categories overlap. Some may protest
this particular map’s inclusions, exclusions, and forms of representation. So let us treat
these categories as nothing more than provisional and indicative, a way of introducing
the discussion that follows in section two. Each theme here is described only briefly to
indicate the key distinctions reported in the earlier publications.