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Article Excerpt
This paper explores relations of workers' power, in terms of unionization and delegated workplace authority, with incidence of participation in adult education and job-related informal learning activities Empirical analysis is based primarily on the first Canadian survey to document both aspects of workers' power and both formal and informal learning. Prior inconsistent research on unionization and adult education is critically reviewed. The current study focuses on non-managerial employees between 25 and 64. The findings of this 2004 survey, as well as secondary analysis of other relevant surveys, confirm that union membership is consistently positively related to both participation in adult education and some informal learning topics. Delegated workplace authority also has positive effects on both adult education and some informal learning topics. While delegated workplace authority is not related to unionization, their positive effects on workers' intentional learning are additive. Implications of these findings for further research and optimizing workplace learning are discussed.
Este documento explora las relaciones de poder de los trabajadores, en terminos de sindicalizacion y autoridad de los delegados de base, con la incidencia de participacion en la educacion de adultos y las actividades informales de aprendizaje relacionadas al trabajo. El analisis empirico se basa principalmente en la primera encuesta canadiense que documenta los aspectos de poder laboral y aprendizaje formal e informal. El presente estudio focaliza los empleados de 25 a 64 anos sin puesto directivo. Los resultados de esta encuesta efectuada en 2004, asi como los analisis secundarios de otras encuestas pertinentes, confirman que la membrecia sindical esta consistentemente relacionada a la participacion a la educacion de adultos y a algunos topicos de aprendizaje informal. La autoridad de los delegados de base tiene tambien efectos positivos sobre la educacion de adultos y sobre algunos topicos del aprendizaje informal. Aunque la autoridad de los delegados de base no esta relacionada a la sindicalizacion, su efecto positivo en el aprendizaje voluntario de los trabajadores es aditivo. Se discuten las implicaciones de estos resultados para investigaciones ulteriores y para la optimizacion del aprendizaje en medio laboral.
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Research interest in workplace learning has burgeoned over the past decade, in large part because rapidly increasing use of information technologies is presumed to require continual upgrading of workers' skills and knowledge to ensure their productive use (see Boud and Garrick, 1999). The much heralded "knowledge-based economy" is seen to require growing numbers of workers exercising increasing discretion in mediating the information processing that is at the core of this economy (Cortada, 1998). More generally, discretionary power and relevant knowledge are widely assumed to be intimately related, with the most powerful having greatest access to relevant knowledge and the most knowledgeable thereby gaining influence over the less knowledgeable. Empirical studies of learning and work have found that the general relationship between voluntary work and informal learning is much stronger than that between paid work and informal learning, suggesting a very positive association between discretionary power and learning activities (Livingstone, 2001). However, scant prior attention has been given to assessing actual relations between hired workers' workplace power and their participation in learning activities. Determining whether and to what extent workers' capacities to exercise power in their workplaces is associated with continuing learning activities should be of strategic interest in terms of organizing knowledge-based workplaces.
Our focus in this paper will be on non-managerial hired workers, as distinct from enterprise owners who exercise proprietorial power over the workplace and hired managers who exercise managerial prerogative as their primary responsibility. We will consider two dimensions of workers' power: the negotiated authority they derive from the strength of unions and other collective bargaining associations, and the delegated authority in the workplace they are assigned by their employers to participate in organizational decision-making about significant issues beyond their own assigned technical tasks. These dimensions are estimated by trade union membership and reported organizational decision-making roles.
Learning involves the gaining of knowledge and skill or achieving understanding anytime and anywhere through individual and group processes. The primary focus of the current analysis will be on intentional learning activities. Such intentional learning occurs in sites of widely varied formality. Basic types of intentional learning include: formal schooling; formal adult education; informal education or training; and non-taught individual or collective informal learning (see Livingstone, 2006a, as well as Colley, Hodkinson and Malcom, 2003 for further definition and critical discussion of these distinctions). Few empirical studies to date have paid comparable attention to both formal and informal learning activities, most often concentrating on more easily recorded formal education. We will limit attention to adults over 25 years of age who have generally completed their initial period as full-time students in formal schooling programs. Our focus will be on formal adult education courses/workshops and on job-related informal learning.
The main hypothesis of this paper is that workers who have more power in the workplace are more likely to engage in most aspects of workplace-related learning, including adult education courses as well as informal learning activities. More specifically, we posit that workers who are union members, as well as non-union members in workplaces that recognize unions, will generally be enabled to engage more fully in learning activities than non-union members in workplaces that do not recognize unions. Secondly, we posit that workers who are able to exercise greater authority in terms of involvement in organizational decision-making are more able to participate in job-related learning activities. The premise in both respects is that, since the potential for continual endogenous learning is pervasive in the labour process (Pankhurst and Livingstone, 2006), those workers who have greater discretionary control over their working conditions are empowered to take more of these opportunities to engage in related learning activities. If this hypothesis is confirmed, it would suggest that giving increasing discretionary power to non-managerial workers is an optimal strategy for organizing knowledge-based workplaces.
PRIOR RESEARCH
Working people have become much more highly educated in terms of formal schooling in recent generations, particularly in Canada where over half of the 25 to 64 population now has some form of post-secondary education completion, the highest rate in the world (CMEC and Statistics Canada, 2006). But research on workers' continuing learning beyond initial formal schooling and on the association of such learning with workers' power has been very limited and inconsistent.
Most of the prior empirical studies have focused on the relationship between individuals' union membership status and participation in adult education courses. We will first review this literature and then the smaller array of studies dealing with organizational authority and adult education.
There are inconsistent findings among the existing studies on union membership and adult education. A number of Canadian and international studies have found lower levels of participation in adult education amongst unionized employees (e.g., Green and Lemieux, 2001). Others have found mixed, small or inconsistent, union effects for different types of workers (e.g., Boheim and Booth, 2004). A number of international studies (e.g., Green, Machin, and Wilkinson, 1999) as well as some Canadian studies (e.g., Betcherman, Leckie and McMullen, 1997) have found significant positive effects of union membership on participation in adult education. In addition, some recent studies which review the economic effects of workplace unionization (Aidt and Tzannatos, 2002), personnel training (Ericson, 2005) and union impact on management (Verma, 2005), suggest similarly positive union influences on some aspects of adult education. A more complete review of research on union impact on education is available in Livingstone and Raykov (2005).
A recent review by the Trades Union Congress (2005) finds that union members generally participate more in training than non-union members, that the union effect is increasing over rime and that this effect is significantly greater in the public sector than in the private sector. Our own prior Canadian study (Livingstone and Raykov, 2005) found that union membership had a significant positive influence on employees' participation in adult education.
While the available evidence is increasingly in favour of a positive union effect, it is likely that some of the previous negative or mixed results are caused mainly by sampling and definitional differences. Some studies have included many young people under 25 who are increasingly oriented to completing schooling and have had little chance to have become union members. Some studies have included managerial personnel who may be proscribed from union membership, be designated by employers to negotiate with other unionized workers, and are also among the most favoured participants in adult education. In terms of participation in adult learning per se, diverse indicators have been relied on, including participation rates in various types of adult education courses or in job-related training programs, sources of funding support, and the amount of rime devoted to participation in job-related education and/or training.
Empirical studies directly addressing relations between organizational authority and learning are rare. Kohn and Schooler's (1973) research which discovered reciprocal effects between holding less supervised jobs with greater discretionary control and engaging in more intellectually demanding leisure-time activities such as hobbies and general interest reading is suggestive but focuses on personal task discretion rather than power relations and has had little follow up. Karasek (1979) developed a more complex model relating personal job control and job demands to mental strain. Karasek and Theorell (1990) expanded this model in relation to a wide variety of behavioural outcomes including active learning. But the active learning component of the model remains under-examined in this...
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