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In order to explore how informal pedagogical moments are being renegotiated by the technology woven into people's lives, this paper aims to focus on online communities as sites of learning; more specifically, the informal work‐related learning practices of self‐employed workers in these cyberspaces.

This paper draws on the notion of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) from situated learning theory in order to examine the development of work‐learning practices online. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff) about their engagement in online communities for work learning.

Findings indicate that these self‐employed workers were learning work practices, the viability of doing particular work, how to participate in online communities for work learning, and how to participate in fluid knowledges. The significance of developing a work‐learning practice is emphasized, as is the impact of multiple and peripheral positionings across on‐ and offline spaces.

Web technologies and shifting configurations of online collectives shake up notions of expertise, beliefs about who is able to produce, and consume information, and where one locates themselves, in order to build work‐learning practices. Multiple positioning across several online communities, and ways of participating that are peripheral, partial and part‐time warrant further examination.

The value of this paper is its exploration of how self‐employed workers develop an online work‐learning practice and the tensions that these practices bring. The paper also attempts to discuss the utility of LPP for contemporary learning practices.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that foundational terms in work‐learning research, specifically “learning”, “work”, and “workplace”, are inherently complex and contested as the same as their scope has expanded in different fields to elide various conceptual categories and theoretical positions. Yet researchers often use these terms without explanation, or as generic abstractions. The article suggests rigorous questioning and more precise delineation to reveal conceptual tangles in work‐learning research and build links across disciplinary languages and research traditions.

The argument is theory‐driven, and draws upon a meta‐review of work‐learning studies published in ten journals in the period 1999‐2004.

Often without clarification, the term “learning” in work is used to refer to learning as “product” (knowledge acquisition, transfer, control), as “process” (as cultural change, individual development, network dynamics, practice, collective sense‐making, identity negotiations, or problem‐solving), and as all conscious human experience. Work is used to refer to almost any activity, paid and unpaid. Issues of power relations in work become side‐stepped with these conflations, and the conceptual categories dissolve when they cannot distinguish what is not learning. These issues blur the contribution of work‐learning research (e.g. what is gained through learning studies focused on one context defined by labor relations).

More precise definitions of terms, conceptualizations and purposes in work‐learning research may help reveal conflicting positions, absences, similarities and links, towards more dialogue and rigorous theory‐building across fields.

The article intends to help researchers pause and reflect on the fundamental concepts and processes they seek to explore.

The focus on innovation as a foundational element of enhanced organisational performance has led to the promoting and valuing of greater levels of employee participation in innovation processes. An emergent concept of employee-driven innovation could be argued to have hindered understandings of the creative and transformative nature of work and the kinds of work and learning practices that all workers engage in as part of their routine occupational practices. The purpose of this paper is to propose that a stronger focus on work-learning as workers’ personal enactment of the collective activities that comprise their occupational practice and its circumstances can clarify the nature of innovation.

The paper is based on an extended ethnographic study (18 months) of 12 employees from four different workplaces and who were engaged in a variety of different occupational practices.

The argument is advanced through discussion of four kinds of innovation that were identified through examining the work-learning practices of restaurant, gymnasium, computing and fire service workers. They are personal heuristics, test benching, efficiencies and shared needs.

These innovation forms illuminate personal work-learning practices and offer means of explaining innovation as a foundational factor of work, suggesting that work that supports these work-learning practices can enhance organisational innovation.

The association of work and learning has been well established for many years. However, some of the terms used to describe the various pedagogies related to work and learning have been used interchangeably, with many lacking definitional clarity and scope. These include work-related learning (WRL), work-based learning, workplace learning (WPL) and work-integrated learning (WIL). This agglomerating approach to usage has resulted in pedagogical confusion and what some theorists call a “problematization” for the field, resulting in undermining shared understanding and potential benefit. The purpose of this conceptual paper is an attempt to unpack the meaning and application of some of the key pedagogical terms used in the applied field of work + learning theory and practice.

Conceptual modelling and qualitative descriptions of each pedagogy.

Many of the work + learning pedagogies do overlap and cohere but attempts to create umbrella terms, which apply to all theories and approaches, are misguided; definitional clarity with the different modes of practice is required for sustainable educational outcomes.

A proto-theoretical model, along with a breakdown of distinguishing features of each term as well as their source in the published literature, has been developed to improve clarity and aid the future praxis of educators.

This paper seeks to explore how workers engage in informal online communities for work‐learning. Although online communities may facilitate learning and knowledge creation, much of the literature is situated in formal online courses, suggesting a need to better understand the nuances of more informal learning spaces online.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 11 own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff).

Participants engaged in ways that fit with expectations, leveraged fluidity, played with boundaries, and meshed with work. These workers attempted to (re)configure online spaces to create the degree of connection and learning needed, although not always successfully. This study explores how participants participated in much less pedagogically inscribed spaces and foregrounds several issues related to online engagement: managing exposure, force‐feeding community, and navigating multi‐purpose spaces.

There are indications that these workers are moving toward more networked architectures of online participation. How the notion of online community continues to evolve warrants further research.

Although turning to an online community is sometimes the only viable learning option, online presence brings challenges to be addressed by practitioners and policy makers, including attending to the nature of relationships in and between different cyberspaces, information and media literacies required, and the implications of such extensive connectivity between people and their web‐technologies.

By exploring how adults reach out to others in “informal” online communities for learning purposes, this paper encourages researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and citizens to consider tensions and questions associated with cyberspace collectives.

The purpose of this paper is to contextualise historically transnational labour experiences within guest worker programs in Canada and to provide a conceptual foundation for analysing work, learning and living relations with special attention to agricultural workers.

The research is based on a critical review of the literature as well as secondary analysis of existing research on agricultural guest workers in Ontario, Canada.

The authors argue that the structural conditions for these particular forms of work, learning and living relations have a long historical trajectory that dates back in North America to the nineteenth century. They outline a long trajectory of convergence of American and Canadian policies in this regard. In terms of work, learning and living experiences we show how shaped by race, class and citizenship relations, as well as by the learning that infuses their reproduction, intensification and contestation.

The article sheds light on a system of transnational labour that is emerging in a wide range of economies around the world, but which has not, to date, been widely analysed in work and learning literature.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the link between informal learning and employees’ in-role performance and whether the mechanism through informal learning mediates the relationships between self-efficacy, job characteristics, trust and in-role performance.

Based on data (n = 294) obtained from the firms with the Work–Learning Dual System in South Korea, a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was conducted.

The findings indicated that trust and job characteristics affected informal learning and informal learning mediates the relationships of trust and job characteristics with job performance.

The significant contributions of this study to the extant literature on informal learning are as follows: first, the present study investigates a mechanism and a mediating role of informal learning using SEM, while most previous studies in literature have employed qualitative research in informal learning. Second, this study explores the mediating role of informal learning between personal/job-related determinants of informal learning and in-role performance, which has not yet been examined in existing literature. Finally, this study provides practical implications regarding how organizations can facilitate more informal learning among employees to enhance their performance.

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.

This paper aims to understand how the residents have utilized domestic spaces and furniture during three months' lockdown time for the Covid-19 virus spread measures and to explore how domestic living practices were adjusted which had been the daily urban activities previously.

The research method is a qualitative interpretivist philosophical approach with a quantitative data collection. Short questionnaires were conducted via e-mails with attached links via SurveyMonkey. The sample was the group of people who had been in active urban life before the pandemic and had been actively working at the office spaces.

Separate learning/working spaces were urged at home, at least for the set intervals in the daytime. Production in the kitchen also acted as an interactive production and entertainment. Balconies and terraces were re-discovered and acted as “urban-substitute open spaces”. The living room became the new venue for domestic interaction especially during working-learning breaks, for watching movies, personal care or reading sessions. Computers, tablets and smartphones became the urban activity base due to online meeting applications for social reasons, online shopping, working and learning. The separation of domains at home became essential.

The study only focuses domestic uses of white-collar workers; during the lock-down period, Covid-19 pandemic. Sampling constraints are the employees who were active urban life before the pandemic and working at the office space. Sharing the house at least with one other roommate, sibling or spouse with or without children. Individuals who had not been working outside the home before the pandemic, people aged over 65, retired, permanent home workers, housewives, freelancers and other such demographic structures are excluded from the study.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first wave lockdown began between early March–June 2020, and millions of people were confined to the dwellings. “Staying home” stood for working-learning-shopping-interacting online, more production in the kitchen, using the living room as a domestic multi-functional venue, spending time on the terraces and balconies as domestic open spaces. The active living in the urban context dramatically shifted to “at-home living”.

The study only focuses on the three months' interval in which strict rules for staying home were enforced in Istanbul, Turkey. Schemas, charts and tables are generated concerning the input. The study challenges the making meaning via praxis of “to dwell” and urban living. Nevertheless, the main questions of housing such as production, social aspects, shared spaces, interaction are re-configured and the substitute urban space is created at home.

This paper aims to report and discuss findings from the first exploratory phase of a research project that examined how and in what ways the practice of vocational student work-placement contributes to innovation in host organisations. The focus of the paper is on identifying and clarifying how innovation is understood in this context and outlines six different meanings of innovation variably used by those involved in the work-placement provision – vocational education students, training providers and host organisation staff. The paper suggests that these six meanings evidence the disparity of work-based understandings of innovation and the need to be more explicit and accurate about what the term means in specific work contexts if innovation is to be realised.

The qualitative first phase of the project interviewed 41 students, trainers and organisational staff about the nature of their work and learning practices and the kinds of changes and improvements to those practices that they experienced through the placement program. Through these interview conversations participants were asked to describe and explain their understandings and experiences of innovation in their work. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed.

Interview analysis gave rise to a set of six distinguishable meanings that operate as definitions of innovation. These six meanings highlight the range of meanings the term innovation carries within small business work-learning contexts and the need of those who promote and encourage innovation to be mindful of these various usages.

The findings reported emerge from a small sample and are only one aspect of the overall project. Further larger scale research is needed.

The term innovation should not be considered commonly understood and accepted by those who promote it and within workplaces and organisational practice. Clear, accurate and specific work context consideration of the term is needed.

The project reports the voices and understandings of those whose work and learning are foundational to the emergence and enactment of innovation in work. These voices are all too often seldom heard and heeded. The six meanings they articulate for innovation contrast markedly with typical innovation research literature.