Concepts and Transformation - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2000

Drastic changes in professional education have led to a need to emphasize that education must be a matter of life-long learning. About this there can be no doubt: the question is how should we conceive life-long learning. I argue on the basis of recent research in Sweden that professional knowledge is in its most crucial dimension what Michael Polanyi called ‘tacit knowledge’ and as a result that the humanities are indispensable to any concept of continuing education worth taking seriously.

The OECD, the EU, and a growing number of national governments have enthusiastically agreed with ideas about innovation systems. At the center of this set of ideas is the notion that learning is the most important process in the economy of the information age. This paper is an epistemological and methodological inquiry into the concept of learning within what economists call ‘the systems of innovation approaches’. Two conclusions are drawn: (1) notions concerning the concept of learning within this new framework of economic thinking are, in general, ambiguous; (2) furthermore, and in particular, ideas of expansive and collective learning in complex systems, ideas that more or less define the concept of innovation, are virtually non-existent within the framework.

An attempt is made to clarify the nature and relevance of the psychodynamic perspective for the work of action researchers and organization consultants. Since this perspective is grounded in psychoanalytic theory and clinical psychology, some important distinctions need to be made between the various work-domains of the consultant/action researcher and the classic individual psychoanalytic session. The author argues that without explicit reference to observable data, interventions may in fact pervert rather than facilitate learning and development. This argument is illustrated by vignettes grouped together under: (a) questionable interventions in group-relations conferences, (b) self-reflections and interpretations as a cult, and (c) the individual in interaction with the group.

Traditionally, compared with Wittgenstein, philosophers have begun their investigation too late in the day. They have thought of people as being already self-conscious, self-contained individuals, acting in a willful and intellectual manner. Indeed, they have interpreted Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy, and his claim that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, in this way: as if he were concerned with language only as a tool, or as move in a language-game, with words said willfully and intellectually. In this view, words have meaning only if they are systematically connected with states of affairs and/or states of mind. There is, however, another side to Wittgenstein: a concern with the beginnings of language-games in spontaneous bodily reactions, and with such reactions as being the prototypes for new ways of thinking rather than as the results of ones already in existence. Here, meaning is understood in terms of one’s direct and immediate responsiveness to one’s surroundings. This paper explores this side of Wittgenstein’s thought, and relates it to practical methods for beginning new practices, by noticing the presence within our old practices of such, usually unnoticed spontaneous bodily reactions.

While most social strategies and policies reflect the notion that paid labor is the fundamental form of particpation in society, the wage labor system is in a state of crisis. The reasons for taking a more differentiated view of the current system are expounded, together with proposals for its reform. The problems are clearly illustrated by reference to two areas: Dutch labor market policies, and the forms of a-typical labor that have developed within the current situation.