If a field called ‘workplace learning’ can be argued to exist, it would need to embrace
research and interventions now proliferating within a wide range of fields. Adult
education is only one of these regions, itself a highly multi-disciplinary, conflictual and
elusive group of activities and actors. Adult education finds itself tackling issues of
workplace learning alongside fields which often operate with fundamentally different
starting points and purposes, yet share equally strong interest and investment in
workplace learning. These fields include, at the minimum, human resource development
with its focus on developing organizations and individual careers; organization and
management studies with primary interests in understanding and improving
organizational performance and culture; professional and vocational education
concerned with training individuals; and labour studies oriented to workers’ well-being
and collective empowerment. While the same terms - ‘learning’, ‘development’,
‘pedagogy’ and ‘education’ – are visible in the discourses of all of these fields, they
bear radically different meanings, framed by different logics and questions.