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The paper aims to explore “Portfolio work”, an emerging form of flexible self‐employment, which has been identified as significant but under‐researched. This paper also seeks to explore the challenges and benefits of portfolio work from the perspective of individuals' experiences.

The argument draws from a qualitative study involving 31 individuals practising portfolio work in two different occupational groups: nurses and adult educators. Participants were interviewed in semi‐structured in‐depth conversational interviews to explore their everyday experience and work history in portfolio work.

Two dimensions of portfolio work, work design and client‐relations, are found to generate experiences of both deep satisfaction and deep anxiety and stress. The paper argues that portfolio careers simultaneously embed both liberating and exploitative at dimensions for workers, which are at least partly related to their own conflicting desires for both contingency and stability. Further, portfolio work embeds labour that often remains unrecognized, even by the self‐employed individuals assuming responsibility for it.

Portfolio workers need to recognise and document their unpaid but necessary labour in work design and client relations that sustains their careers; portfolio workers may need to educate clients about the nature of portfolio work; and employers who contract to portfolio workers must take more responsibility for negotiating fair contracts that are sensitive to overwork and unfair time pressures, and that anticipate and compensate contractors.

These findings challenge existing conceptions of portfolio work as either exploitative or liberating, and expose contradictions embedded in both the conditions of the work and individuals' expectations and attitudes towards it.

Action learning (AL) methods are popular technologies in programs of organizational learning (OL). However, from the perspective of critical studies, they are instrumentalist, managerialist, exclusive in design, decontextualized and apolitical. A critical analysis of the oppressive potential of AL is presented along these dimensions. To realize better AL's emancipatory potential, four enhancements are suggested: focus AL purpose more on workers’ interests; confront organizational practices that unjustly marginalize or privilege different people; acknowledge the complexity, context and contested nature of learning; and facilitate AL using democratic “power with”, not “power over”, approaches to working with people towards emancipatory change.

The purpose of this paper is to map the different moral positions articulated by small business owners in relation to social responsibility (SR) commitment and practice.

This qualitative study utilized collaborative action research with 25 small business owners in two Canadian provinces and used combined methods of group dialogue, personal semi‐structured interviews, and thematic analysis through researcher triangulation.

We found that the morality underpinning business owners' social responsibility tended to be embedded in a sense of relationship with and commitment to the well‐being of the local geographic community. However, this was threaded with felt ambiguities, revealing their understanding of a spectrum of SR practices.

Through an ethical analysis, we argue that this moral commitment to community is connected to a relational worldview as part of a distinctive ethical vision while, at the same time, the small business owner‐managers were continuing to pursue business within an environment of orthodox economic ethics and practices. This substantially impacted the shape of their commitment as social change agents and their engagement in collective activities with like‐minded peers.

Further research is needed to reveal how much the lack of engagement in collective social change activities and collective promotion of social responsibility is related to the practical issues of time famine, maintenance of a business niche, or an individualist ethos.

This study contributes several original findings by identifying a range of SR practices and the ethics behind each, from the perspective of small business owners, how they position themselves, as well as the paradoxical constraints they experience.

Much research to date on professional transitions has focused on predicting them and then preparing individual practitioners to navigate transitions as sites of struggle. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine, within the context of professional practice and learning, diverse theoretical approaches that are currently prominent in researching transitions and to propose future directions for research.

The paper begins by describing work contexts integral with professional transitions: regulation, governance and accountability; new work structures; and knowledge development. The discussion then examines transitions research in developmental psychology, lifecourse sociology, and career studies. These perspectives are compared critically in terms of questions and approaches, contributions to understanding professional transitions, and limitations.

The implications for educators are a series of critical questions about research and education directed to support transitions in professional learning and work. Future directions and questions for research in professional transitions are suggested in the final section, along with implications for supporting professional learning in these transitions.

The paper is not intended to be comprehensive, but to identify issues for the reader's consideration in thinking about various forms of transition being experienced by professions and professionals. The discussion is theory‐based, exploratory, and indicative, rather than definitive.

This article aims to discuss issues and strategies of developing practices of ecological sustainability in organizations. Three questions guide the discussion: how are practices of social responsibility and ecological sustainability developed and maintained in organizations? What learning in particular is involved in developing practices of ecological sustainability in organizations? How might this learning be fostered by organizational leaders?

The article draws from literatures in ecology, ecological learning and corporate social responsibility to describe the nature of ecological sustainability, intents and approaches of organizations developing it, and their challenges. Case examples drawn from studies of small business are examined to explore successful strategies of developing practices of ecological sustainability. These examples are analysed from a learning perspective.

Challenges that hinder adoption of ecological sustainability practice include low stakeholder understanding and support, low management focus and strategy, and insufficient cost‐benefit analysis. Organizations confronted these challenges by emphasizing education and enabling conditions that fostered learning in everyday action (decentralization, diversity, connections, shared focus, constraints, and feedback).

The discussion shifts the emphasis from corporate social responsibility (CSR) – which has become a broad, contested area of multiple meanings – to ecological sustainability, and shifts the focus from measurement and reporting (prominent in CSR literature) to learning.

Strategies are suggested for organizational leaders to enable conditions for learning that support practices of ecological sustainability.

With the learning perspective, and particularly with the focus on ecological learning models based in complexity science, the article demonstrates a unique link between learning approaches and practices of ecological sustainability.

Innovation is argued here to be a significant and complex dimension of learning in work, involving a mix of rational, intuitive, emotional and social processes embedded in activities of a particular community of practice. Dimensions of innovative learning are suggested to include level (individual, group, organization), rhythm (episodic or continuous), and magnitude of creative change (adaptive or generative) involved in the learning process. Drawing from a study of women who leave organizational employment to develop an enterprise of self‐employment, this article explores these dimensions of innovative learning. Two questions guide the analysis: what conditions foster innovative learning; and what are the forms and processes of the innovative learning process? Findings suggest that innovative processes involve multiple strategies and demand conditions of freedom, patience, support, and recognition.

This paper aims to shed light on the complex multiplicity of domestic violence interagency work. It proposes a new conceptualisation that reflects the entangled nature of professional practice and learning.

The research on which this paper draws is an ethnographic study of practice in an integrated local domestic violence initiative. Data include focussed workplace observations, semi-structured interviews and key documents. The study draws on practice-based sociomaterial approaches and the conceptual framework, and methodology is informed by actor-network theory, in particular, the work of Annemarie Mol.

Findings suggest that interagency work that starts from the victim and traces threads of connection outwards is able to “hang together” as “practice multiple” in integrated service provision. I argue that the learning that happens in these circumstances is a relational effect and depends on who and what is assembled in the actor-network.

The research has significant implications for framing understandings of domestic violence interagency work, as it firmly anchors “working together” to victims. Findings are expected to be of interest not only to practitioners, educators and researchers but also to policymakers.

The paper addresses a current gap in the literature, applies a novel research approach and proposes a new conceptualisation of domestic violence interagency work.

The purpose of this paper is to address issues of practicing social responsibility (SR) in small business, where SR implementation challenges are unique. The discussion examines the difficulties encountered by small business owners adopting SR practices, and the various strategies they learned in the process.

A total of 23 small business owner‐managers located in Western Canada were interviewed in‐depth, individually, and in groups. Group interviews were useful for validating and extending the themes and contradictions that arose in individual interviews, particularly in identifying the most common SR challenges and frustrations, and to compare individuals' learning patterns and diverse strategies of response.

The paper findings show that owners learned SR by working through three main areas of challenge within everyday sociomaterial practices: positioning SR commitments and affiliations; balancing diverse stakeholders with SR ideals and costs; and negotiating value conflicts within SR practice, as part of “becoming” a particular enterprise of SR engagement.

The paper suggests that SR may be most fruitfully studied by examining the traces of the networks, linkages, and boundaries formulated through everyday interactions, focusing not just on the social networks and information exchange among humans, but more deeply on the sociomaterial networks within which new practices such as SR emerge. Second, the paper underscores the importance of conceptualizing SR “learning” more in terms of practices that emerge through challenge and conflict than in acquisition and application of new knowledge and attitudes.

This article aims to explore the concept of amateurism as a form of critique and addition to the concepts of professionalism, professional work and education.

This is a theoretically driven article based upon a review of the historical and sociological literature on amateur–professional relations in various work contexts.

While amateurism is usually conceived pejoratively, the notion of doing something “for the love of it”, even if one is not formally qualified, opens up the possibilities for conceiving new forms of work, worker and sets of working relationships based upon different conceptions of expertise. Drawing upon historical and contemporary studies of the contribution of amateurism to professional work, and exploring the role of digital technologies in enabling amateurs to contribute to forms of professional practice, the article explores some of the challenges posed for work and learning, and suggests some lines of research to be explored.

There has been little to no consideration of amateurism as a positive contribution to considerations of professional work, nor exploration of the expertise and learning of amateurs.

The purpose of this paper is to compare theoretical conceptions that reclaim and re‐think material practice – “the thing” in the social and personal mix – specifically in terms of work activity and what is construed to be learning in that activity.

The paper is theory‐based. Three perspectives have been selected for discussion: cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT), actor‐network theory (ANT), and complexity theory. A comparative approach is used to examine these three conceptual framings in the context of their uptake in learning research to explore their diverse contributions and limitations on questions of agency, power, difference, and the presence of the “thing”.

The three perspectives bear some similarities in their conceptualization of knowledge and capabilities as emerging – simultaneously with identities, policies, practices and environment – in webs of interconnections between heterogeneous things, human and nonhuman. Yet each illuminates very different facets of the sociomaterial in work‐learning that can afford important understandings: about how subjectivities are produced in work, how knowledge circulates and sediments into formations of power, and how practices are configured and re‐configured. Each also signals, in different ways, what generative possibilities may exist for counter‐configurations and alternative identities in spaces and places of work.

While some dialogue has occurred among ANT and CHAT, this has not been developed to compare more broadly the metaphysics and approaches of these perspectives, along with complexity theory which is receiving growing attention in organizational research contexts. The paper purports to introduce the nature of these debates to work‐learning researchers and point to their implications for opening useful questions and methods for inquiry in workplace learning.