Contested Learning in Welfare Work

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.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The skills impasse and an activity approach; 3. Taylorism – re-engaging with an enduring influence; 4. Historical meditations in the making of Taylorism in contemporary state social services work; 5. Experiencing the de-skilling premises of welfare work; 6. De-skilling – learning welfare work and the meditations of space, time, and distance; 7. Re-skilling, consenting, and the engrossments of administrative knowledge; 8. Up-skilling, resisting, and re-keying for craft knowledge; 9. Divisions of knowledge production, group formation, and occupational acculturation; 10. Understanding prevalence, roots, and factors of trajectories of knowledge production; 11. Mind in political economy and the labour process – a use-value thesis; Appendix.