Contemporary changes in what constitutes work are producing different kinds of people in organizations and thus workers can be understood as engaging in ongoing identity work (Scheeres 2003; Solomon 2005). In this chapter we examine how this is played out in two workplaces focussing on one worker in each organisation. The first workplace is a further education institution that is increasingly commercialising its services. The second workplace is a large manufacturing company that is moving from being an autocratic hierarchical organisation to one where all workers are deployed in teams as part of the new participative management structures. Drawing on our ethnographic research and discourse analysis we foreground some of the complexities involved in worker-learner identity work, and in doing so problematise the idea that this identity work is transparent and that new identities are homogenous and easily produced. Further, work as a source of ‘learning self’, and as meaningful and as essential to self fulfilment (du Gay 1996; Usher and Solomon 1999) is seen as leading to a maximisation of people’s capacities in the workplace. This can be understood as a kind of identity work that incorporates desires as well as disciplines. For Foucault (1988), this entails the complexities of technologies of the self and we use this theoretical idea to discuss how the two workers govern or take care of themselves.
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Scheeres, H., Solomon, N. (2007). The Moving Subject: Shifting Work(ers) Across and Beyond Organisational Boundaries. In: Billett, S., Fenwick, T., Somerville, M. (eds) Work, Subjectivity and Learning. Technical and Vocational Education and Training: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5360-6_6
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