Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekäle, T. (2011), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 23 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2011.08623daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 23, Issue 4

In this era, everything seems to affect everybody – the loan crisis in the USA caused unemployment in Europe, the debt crisis in Greece caused problems in Brussels, and we are as aware about the floods in Australia as we are about the politics in Tunis. Today we are able to live the lives of our friends through social media and suffer with strangers all over the world through the news on television. Whilst flying would take hours, happiness and shock are possible at the speed of light.

In 1988 Professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote in one of our all-time favourite studies about how the connection between workers’ hands and the actual process they were performing was broken by the computerised control in banks and pulp mills. The computer moved the worker to a control room, away from the valves or money he/she was actually working with. The biggest problem with the new computer systems was helping the workers to identify with the overall effects of what they were actually doing and the processes that were now happening remotely.

This was a big issue in the 1980s and it continues to be so today. Our own studies have also focused on product-planning teams identifying themselves with their fellow team members working online on the other side of the world, as well as the problems of teachers and students interacting over electronic systems. The more the internet develops, the more the idea of what our “selves” really mean for us and our ways of working. Thus we start off this issue by negotiating time, meaning and identity in boundaryless work with Annette Kamp, Helge Hvid, and Henrik Lund.

The rest of the articles are maybe even more timeless in their topicality. The second paper in this issue is “Restrictive practice: the work-based learning experience of trainee teachers in English further education colleges”, by Kevin Orr and Robin Simmons. Next, we have an article about “Team learning and team composition in nursing” by Olaf Timmermans, Roland Van Linge, Peter Van Petegem, Monique Elseviers and Joke Denekens. Both of these articles are good additions to the mainstream body of knowledge in learning at workplace.

Finally, we promote, with the help of Anil Pathak and Neena Verma, a new method to make people’s face-to-face meetings move quicker from shyness and caution to active cooperation and effective team development, by using appreciative intelligence. Now we must figure out for ourselves how to use these principles to enable the developers of worldwide-distributed products to have effective video conferences.

We once again wish you good reading.

Sara Cervai, Tauno KekäleEditors