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1177/0741713603254026 Mojab, Gorman / WOMEN AND CONSCIOUSNESS ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY / August 2003

ARTICLE

WOMEN AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION: EMANCIPATION OR EXPLOITATION?

SHAHRZAD MOJAB
RACHEL GORMAN
University of Toronto

This studys goal is to uncover the contradictions inherent in the philosophy and practice of the learning organization. Through a Marxist-feminist analysis of recent shifts in adult education and workplace structure, this study attempts to uncover the function of the learning organization in the capitalist political economy, the location of workers in relation to the learning organization, and the role of learning rhetoric in maintaining the status quo. This study argues that the learning organization model can be seen both as a mechanism for the extraction of surplus value from workers and as a method of social control. The learning organization model is often associated with progressive, even emancipatory, claims of inclusion and collaboration in the workplace. However, this study argues that the educational legacies of feminism, trade unionism, antiracism, and revolutionary struggle are better places to seek the learning interests of the workers that make up the learning organization. Keywords: learning organization; workplace learning; women and learning; Marxism; feminism

QUESTIONING THE EMANCIPATORY PROMISE OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

The learning organization is an organizational model based on certain emancipatory promises such as the empowerment of employees, a transformation in the role of managers from controlling to facilitating, and the creation of a broader and collaborative vision for the organization that transcends short-term goals of
SHAHRZAD MOJAB is an associate professor in the Department of Adult Education, Community Development, and Counseling Psychology, Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, University of Toronto (e-mail: smojab@oise.utoronto.ca). RACHEL GORMAN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Adult Education, Community Development, and Counseling Psychology, Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, University of Toronto (e-mail: ragorman@oise.utoronto.ca).
ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Vol. 53 No. 4, August 2003 228-241 DOI: 10.1177/0741713603254026 2003 American Association for Adult and Continuing Education

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profit maximization. This model gained much momentum during the 1990s with the work of Senge (Senge, 1990; Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, & Smith, 1994) and Argyris (1990), among others. The learning organization model attracted much attention because of its claims of inclusive and transforming features, including more collaborative decision-making processes, interdisciplinary work teams, global vision, a flattened organizational structure, and more opportunities to learn. Although the motives for developing the learning organization are contested, the concept has gained hegemonic currency in tandem with the expansion of global capital. Our goal in this paper is to develop a theoretical approach that will disclose the contradictions in the philosophy and practice of organizational learning. The proliferation of literature on organizational learning and the learning organization is arguably an outcome of the global political-economic shift in the 1980s, the era that is widely known for globalization and that is marked by the rise of the neoliberal economic and social agenda.1 Neoliberalism demands nonstateinterventionist market policies in which the forces of the market reign. In social policy terms, this has meant the rise of privatization, the decrease of public subsidy, deregulation of commerce, and eradication of policies protecting the environment, unions, and public participation. These policy shifts have been intended to create conditions for fierce competition and profit maximization. The capitalist market economy is indeed built on competition and efficiency, but never before have these conditions been so fiercely promoted. These ideals are forced on labor, subsequently producing the need for labor flexibility, reskilling, and upgrading. This era has also been marked by massive expansion of technology, particularly communication technology, which has in turn exacerbated the push for organizational competition and efficiency. The organizational learning literature encompasses a broad range of disciplines: economics, management studies, psychology, and adult education (Dodgson, 1993). Tight (2000) identified three interrelated schools of thought in organizational learning. The first line of thinking is associated with Argyris and Schn (Argyris, 1982, 1990; Argyris & Schn, 1976, 1978; Schn, 1983, 1988) and is grounded within systems thinking. Argyris and Schn linked their work to theoretical and empirical studies in a range of disciplines and subdisciplines in the social sciences: social psychology, management theory, sociology, cybernetics, anthropology, and politics (Tight, 2000, p. 41). The second line of thinking, reflected in the work of Lessem (1991, 1993), Peters (1987), and Senge (1990), is a response to the rise of competitiveness and technological innovation in organizations (Tight, 2000). The third school of thinking

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Critical Management Studies conference at the University of Manchester, July 11 to 13, 2001. We would like to thank the editors of Adult Education Quarterly and the three anonymous reviewers who offered insightful comments, with special thanks to Stephan Dobson for his editing assistance.

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may be traced through changing industrial relations. . . . These initiatives appear to be most widely developed in the car manufacturing industry. . . . They typically offer an annual sum for each employee to spend on some kind of learning activity, in addition to enhanced in-company training and development opportunities. (Tight, 2000, p. 42)

Our review of the vast body of knowledge on organizational learning reveals that there are external and internal limitations on organizational learning. Fenwick (1998) noted that learning organization literature is often prescriptive, performing a normalizing and regulatory function while claiming to emancipate workers (p. 151). The empowerment and learning of workers themselves occurs (if it occurs) only as a by-product to organizational growth: Workers learning is to be innovative and critically reflective so long as the outcomes ensure the survival, indeed the prosperity, productivity and competitive advantage, of the employing organization (Fenwick, 1998, p. 149). Salaman (2001) also noted discrepancies in the literature in the stated goals of the learning organization. He argued that the learning organization is limited by its own structures and hierarchies as well as dominant external discourses of government and organization (Salaman, 2001, p. 343). It is clear that the pastiche of motivational and worker-focused features that composes the learning organization model is operating within enterprises that have been redesigned to compete in the global market. In this article, we hope to show some of these limitations through first, contextualizing the learning organization and second, linking the learning within organizations to larger national and global policy imperatives. It is our goal to extend the critique of the learning organization to include an understanding of the function of the learning organization within capitalist social relations. Central to our critique of the learning organization is the question of who benefits from the reorganization and to what ends. We argue that a full critique of the concept of learning organization requires us to go beyond asking who is empowered or what is being learned. We propose a Marxist-feminist theoretical framework that will allow us to reframe questions about the impact of the learning organization on womens and workers rights.

MARXIST-FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

In this section, we first outline the principles of a Marxist-feminist analysis and then apply this framework to analyze the following: the function of a learning organization in the capitalist political economy; the location of workers in relation to the learning organization; and the role of learning rhetoric in maintaining the status quo. By Marxist-feminist framework, we mean a framework that is historical, materialist, dialectical, and gender critical.2 An historical-materialist framework implies

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that it is not possible to understand the significance of the learning organization by tracing the idea of it. Rather, we will understand the phenomenon by tracing how it has unfolded in relation to the political economy. By dialectical, we mean that we view social phenomena as being relational and as containing contradictions. We concur with Allman (1999) that
dialectical conceptualization involves apprehending a real phenomenon as either part of or the result of a relation, a unity of two opposites that could not have historically developed nor exist as they presently do outside the way in which they are related. (p. 63)

This means that if we grasp the phenomenon of the learning organization in its political-economic context, we must acknowledge that it is not coincidental that some workers find themselves in learning organizations and some do not. Further, organizational relations can be fully understood only in the context of the laborcapital relation. When we say critical, we are referring to the process of uncovering social relations that are hidden beneath what we take as common sense, or surface reality. By Marxist feminist, we mean that we recognize spheres of work outside wage labor, including home and community. It also means that we pay attention to how the processes of gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality oppression change and intensify as capitalism progresses. A framework that is historical materialist, dialectical, and critical leads us to ask these four central questions: (a) Why does the concept of learning organization arise at this particular moment? (b) How does the learning organization relate to the capitalist mode of production? (c) What are the contradictions within the concept of the learning organization? and (d) How can we uncover the social relations of the learning organization that are not visible on the surface?

THE FUNCTION OF THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION

In practice, the learning organization concept applies to only a fraction of the workforce, specifically, management teams of corporations and financial institutions. Smaller firms, organizations which are intermediaries in the growing trends of outsourcing and contracting out, or organizations that have been reengineered to have a temporary, casual, or part-time workforce, are often removed from the process of creating an organization which can learn (Senge et al., 1994, p. 4). In these organizations, benefit packages, including access to educational or skill-training programs, apply to very few workers.3 The idea learning organization is only one of a set of strategies that organizations employ to attract and keep elite information workers who are a tiny minority of the workforce. Another way is through offering a flattened organizational structure. This apparent reduction in hierarchy is possible partly because much of

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the work required for the organization to function is no longer performed inside the organization. This is not a new phenomenon, as Ross (2001) showed:
Labor history is full of vicious little time warps, where archaic or long foresworn practices and conceptions of work are reinvented in a fresh context. . . . The sweating system of farming out work to competing contractors in the nineteenth-century garment industry was once considered an outdated exception to the rule of the integrated factory system. Disdained as a pre-industrial relic by the apostles of scientific management, this form of subcontracting is now a basic principle of almost every sector of the post-industrial economy and has emerged as the number one weapon in capitals arsenal of labor cost-cutting and union-busting. (p. 83)

In reality, the vertical power difference between the organizations telemarketers, or cleaning staff, and its upper managers is no longer visible because these tasks have been contracted out to subsidiary organizations. As Keep and Rainbird (2000) noted, What research shows is that the broader end of the spectrum tends to be on offer only to those in the upper reaches of the occupational ladder with those at the bottom receiving little except job-specific training (p. 6). The remaining managerial workers enjoy a loosening of overt authority. This illusion of worker autonomy appeals to elite, upwardly mobile professionals. Workers (including underemployed workers) who are not part of these upper strata are spending an increasing amount of their own time and resources trying to acquire marketable skills. A 1998 survey shows that Canadians spend an average of 15 hours a week engaged in informal learning, that is, learning which is not organized, not provided in a work training program or through an educational institution (Livingstone, 1999). This activity occurs in tandem with a reduction in paid-work time through contract and part-time work. Learning-on-the-job time that used to be factored into a paid workday is now pursued as unpaid work hours, thus effectively lengthening the workday without increasing the wage. Only certain segments of the workforce benefit from learning opportunities, as is indicated by Keep and Rainbird (2000), who cited data from the United Kingdom:
The spring 1998 Labor Force Survey (LFS) recorded that 72 per cent of UK employees had received no training in the 13 weeks prior to the interview. Of these, just under half (48 percent) claimed that they had never been offered any type of training by their current employer. (p. 6)

They further identified four groups who generally are excluded from any type of training: those who are in a lower status occupation; those on atypical contracts such as flexible workers, particularly part-timers [who] have consistently lower chances of being offered training of any sort by their employer; older workers; and those who are less well qualified (Keep & Rainbird, 2000, p. 6), adding that

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indeed, many employers perceive clear disadvantages in training those of their workers in lower occupational groups, particularly training above and beyond the immediate task. These included increased staff turnover, increasing dissatisfaction with boring and menial jobs, and the raising of unrealistic expectations. (Keep & Rainbird, 2000, p. 7)

The failure of many organizations to offer to more than a small fraction of their workforce broader opportunities for upskilling and reskilling renders the rhetoric about the learning organization concept empty of meaning and purpose:
A Tavistock Institute report on workplace training found few organizations that accorded with the ideal and there was a significant gap between the language or discourse of companies who viewed themselves as learning organizations and regarded peoples as their most important asset, and the actual practices of these companies. (Keep, 2000, p. 5)

Under the imperative of market forces, the workforce has been divided into a twotier system of high-performance and low-performance workers, the former contributing to the knowledge economy and the latter to the service economy. The rhetoric about a skills shortage speaks to working conditions more than to the skills required to do a job. The most at-risk workers are the ones who receive the lowest investment in employer-provided skill training and learning.4 In the next section we will explore how the larger sphere of adult education provision is structured and how changes to these structures parallel the rise of the learning organization.

LEARNING IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Within the field of adult education, in-service training and recurrent education has gained much more currency in the past decade (Ramdas, 1999; Wain, 1993). Educational policy trends in the 1990s were characterized by greater stress on the market and individual choice, with greater opportunity for some and greater risk for others (Hake, 1999). Robert Tobias (1999) argued that it is necessary to analyze recent educational policy changes within the economic and political context of the 1980s and 1990s. Tobias cited Gorzs 1989 predictions about the international labor force: 25% will be core workers (who must accept short- and long-term retraining and position mobility); 25% will be peripheral workers (full-time/high-turnover and temporary/part-time administrative workers); and 50% will be external (highly skilled professionals and workers with no particular skill working on contract or subcontract). The demands on this newly segmented working class are that the firms stable core of employees must be functionally flexible; the peripheral workforce, for its part, must be numerically flexible (Gorz, cited in Tobias, 1999,

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p. 111). Noting that it is not a lack of skills or credentials that produce underemployment, but rather the capitalist system itself, Tobias predicted that the vast majority are likely to become disillusioned with a search for qualifications within a shrinking global labor-market (p. 111). In a review of adult education journals in the 1990s, Ramdas (1999) noted a sharp increase in advancing a rationale for what she called enterprise education (p. 10). Worldwide, adult educational structures are shifting to accommodate the market (or, rather, the demands made by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and trade agreements on behalf of finance capital). In this reorganization, the learner is conceptualized as a consumer, with consumer choices (Edwards, 1993; Field, 1996). As free agents, these learners compete for educational units that seem to have the highest exchange value (Tett, 1996). Finally, education becomes a business itself; no longer a state-funded enterprise that responds to market needs, it is sold as a commodity for a profit (Hart, 1996). The rhetoric of learning has become essential for maintaining the appearance of opportunity. The idea that opportunity flows from skill acquisition masks the fact that there is not a skills gap, but a jobs gap. On the question of skill upgrading, Keep (2000) wrote,
Very often, what are reported as skill shortages turn out to be recruitment difficulties caused by low pay and poor working conditions. Aside from concerns about basic skills (particularly literacy and numeracy), most of the problems identified appeared to relate to workersattitudes towards their job rather than their skills. Despite the endless rhetoric about the need for dramatic upskilling across the entire workforce in order to cope with competitive pressures, data from WERS [Workplace Employee Relations Survey, 1998] indicate that managers in many organisations believe that large sections of their workforce require limited skills. (pp. 9-10)

Some segments of the underclassed/reserve army of labor will never be tapped into, and a large number of jobs that are available to workers do not draw on the human capacity to think (Hart, 1996). The need to be flexible and retrainable depends on ones location in the political economy; these qualities apply to the oversupply of middle- and lower-pay-range labor, not to the limited number of highly paid workers (Edwards, 1993). Rather than achieving prosperity for individual workers, the reorganization of adult education is concurrent with the emergence of a newly segmented working class. Hart (1996) suggested that when we talk of learning for a unified workforce, we are actually talking about a highly stratified group. By differentiating skills along lines of race and gender, workers with a wealth of skills, knowledge, and experience are devalued and the commodity value of White male labor continues to rise (Hart, 1996). An ever cheaper, ever more adaptable workforce is the only way to ensure continued growth of profit in a global capitalist system.

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THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION: APPROPRIATION AND ALIENATION

Fenwick (1998) identified the organizations appropriation of critical reflection as one of six problematic aspects of the learning organization (p. 143). The learning organization model takes for granted that the organization should own and control the results of the workers learning. The learning organization is underpinned by the logic of human capital theory, which assumes that the more you have learned (or the more capacity you have for learning), the more of an asset you will be for your organization. In a human capital formulation, workers are compensated for the use of their critical thinking through higher wages and a higher position. Critics of human capital theory point out that if the life experiences and learning of marginalized workers were recognized, they could attain equality with the higher paid managerial employees (Livingstone, 1997). However, this critique leaves the organizations ownership of workers learning unchallenged (see Baptiste, 2001; Coffield, 1999; Field & Spencer, 2000). In a Marxist-feminist understanding of relations of work, the worker cannot be confused with capital. To understand the relationship between the worker and capital, we must recognize that labor power is a commodity in the capitalist mode of production. The workers labor power produces capital. The worker is not herself human capital or commodity, rather, her labor power is a commodity. As a commodity, labor power is subject to the law of supply and demand, and workers are in direct competition with one another to sell their labor. In this configuration, knowledge and skill acquisition can become part of the competition. The more the concept of learning becomes synonymous with market values, the more it becomes commodified and thus alienated from the learner. The learning organization model expands the meaning of labor power by demanding access to the workers thoughts, experiences, and emotions. The other important point about the relationship between the worker and capital is that profit comes from the surplus value of labor; that is, the labor that is appropriated in excess of the amount required to cover the workers wage. To think about how the learning organization model can lead to more profitability, we must consider the ways that surplus labor can be extracted from the worker. Two concepts that are useful for understanding this process are absolute and relative surplus value. Marx theorized that absolute surplus value is extracted by extending the length of the working time by some duration that was in surplus of the time required to recoup the workerswages, while relative surplus value is obtained by increasing the ratio between paid and unpaid labor in favour of the latter (Allman, 1999, p. 74). These two mechanisms are each at work to some degree in the learning organization and are each associated with a range of methods of extracting surplus. The learning organizations incorporation of workers capacity for critical reflection and market demands on workers to spend more of their time on work-related

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learning can be understood as ways for organizations to extract relative surplus labor from their workers. Unemployed, contract, and contingent workers who spend unpaid time on job-skills learning will bring this learning with them when they find paid employment. This unpaid learning time is realized as absolute surplus value by the new employer. A second area of appropriation evident in the learning organization model has to do with group interaction, specifically team building and collaboration. Brown and Duguid (1991) described how previously unnoticed areas of friendships at work could be used as part of the learning team model. They argued that instead of imposing work units, managers should observe how the workers socialize and collaborate with each other to use these relationships to maximize learning and innovation (Brown & Duguid, 1991). This idea is seductive, because most of us like the idea of working with friends; however, situated within, an organization workers friendships become a vehicle for the organization to increase its profits. This appropriation of community ties is underpinned by the notion of social capital. According to its proponents, social capital refers to the way a community creates economic prosperity . . . [through] inter-personal trust, civic engagement and organisational capability in a community (Wilson, 1997, p. 745). In similar fashion to the way the workers labor is appropriated by the organization, the workers relationships are commodified and appropriated by the organization. This overwhelming concern with employees thoughts and interactions hints at an aspect of the learning organization that goes beyond the extraction of surplus valuethese methods of appropriating social capital can also be seen as methods of social control. The subsuming of individual and collective values under corporate values (Fenwick, 1998) separates workers from each other and from themselves. Marx theorized alienation as a process of being separated from the material world, other human beings, and ultimately, the self. This process of alienation originates in a mode of production in which workers have no control over the work they engage in and more important, no control over what becomes of what they produce. Workers are separated from their fellow human beings by competition and the impossibility of most forms of cooperation (Ollman, 1971).

THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

A review of the literature on the learning organization immediately exposes a blurring of the lines between things that feminist concepts of consciousness-raising as a teaching/learning and mobilizing tool, Marxist concepts of class consciousness, and concepts of organizational learning and change keep apart. Lilian Hill (2000) claimed that
human resource development, the educational and training arms of the business world, is a potential leader in the dispersion of global consciousness . . . [which is

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characterized by] a more inclusive world view . . . an ability to cope comfortably with ambiguity . . . and a valuing of complexity and diversity. (p. 171)

Fenwick (1998) argued that this corporate-driven notion of consciousness and education coincides with the notion of an organization as a continuously adaptive and proactive agent (p. 142). In a bizarre kind of personification, the learning organization itself is constructed as a unitary, definable, intelligent entity that is supposed to be learning (Fenwick, 1998, p. 142). This type of theoretical move, exemplified here by proponents of the learning organization model, is known to Marxists as reification, whereby a relation between people becomes transposed withconfused witha relation between things; this relation between things is thought to be autonomous, when in fact it is people in relation with others who are the agents (see especially Lukcs, 1971). Consciousness-raising is the educational legacy of feminism, of trade unionism, of antiracism, and of revolutionary struggle. Feminist consciousness is rooted in collective debate, community problem solving, and solidarity:
The distinctive and deep significance of consciousness-raising at an earlier period of the womens movement was precisely this process of opening up what was personal, idiosyncratic, and inchoate and discovering with others how this was shared, was objectively part of womens oppression, finding ways of speaking of it and ways of speaking it politically. It is this essential return to the experience we ourselves have directly in our everyday worlds that has been the distinctive mode of working in the womens movement . . . the repudiation of the professional, the expert, the already authoritative tones of the discipline; the science, the formal tradition, and the return to the seriously engaged and very difficult enterprise of discovering how to begin from ourselves. (Smith, 1987, p. 58)

Consciousness-raising is a collective, grounded, group-defined process that is bound up in working toward a better existence for the groupas a group, not as the sum of its competing parts. Group consciousness, whether it crystallizes around ideas of class, gender, race, nationality, ability, or sexuality, is always a dynamic, dialectic phenomenon. Group consciousness is not a static or passive set of ideas, but a process or movement (Ollman, 1993, pp. 147-179). Consciousness, then, has a direction, and can be progressive or regressive, and is ever moving toward or away from goals of democracy, justice, and equality. By co-opting collective learning and replacing ideas of equality and democracy with notions of complexity, diversity, and ambiguity, the learning organization becomes a regressive force in collective consciousness.

CONCLUSIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR WOMEN

Our intent in this article is to be critical of the learning organization model as one adaptable for democratic, grassroots, and gender-conscious organizations. The advent of the learning organization coincides with mass job displacement, work

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intensification, changes in adult education policy to further accommodate market forces, the creation of a new underclass of workers, and a plummeting standard of living for working-class women. As the third sector of nonprofit organizations is being encouraged to incorporate values of social capital into their structures (Wilson, 1997, p. 745), we must examine ways that the unending corporate quest for capital co-opts feminist and class consciousness, as we simultaneously question how the definitions of learning and consciousness are changing within feminist theory and practice. As the lines between state, not-for-profit, and market organizations blur, there is increasing pressure for feminist-oriented not-for-profit organizations to take on aspects of the organizational structure of the corporation, and the accompanying concept of the learning organization (Fenwick, 1998), and thereby inadvertently adopt an operational mode that appropriates workers learning. The corporatization of feminist organizations marks the erosion of the consciousnessraising and critical reflection that characterizes feminist thinking. Liberal feminist ideology is implicated in the replacement of collective consciousness about race/gender/ability stratification with individualized strategies for getting ahead. Issues that were once lightning rods for collective feminist organizing and consciousness-raising (for example, about child and elder care, about a gendered and racialized hierarchy in the workplace) are now taken up as rationales for entrepreneurship or as human resource concerns for attracting managerial/ entrepreneurial women as employees (Fenwick & Hutton, 2000; Hochschild, 1997). With the decline in collective organizing around workplace issues, women are finding individual solutions to collective problems. The ranks of garment workers forced into homeworking arrangements are now joined by professional workers juggling family and paid work. The members of this new group of home workers frame their situation as personal choice, as a way of having the best of both worlds, or a way of managing personal responsibility, rather than as a manifestation of gender oppression (Mirchandani, 1998, 2000). As an elite group of women secure positions within learning organizations, they earn less than the men they replace, their work pace keeps intensifying, and more of their mind space is alienated from them. Taken in the context of the advance of global capitalism, the learning organization serves neither the interests of the women who gain a short-term competitive edge nor the larger feminist agenda of equality for all women.

NOTES
1. The two concepts, organizational learning and learning organization, have been used interchangeably (see, for example, Tight, 2000). In the literature, although it is not clearly stated or identified, it seems that the learning organization is the outcome of organizational learning, whereas organizational learning is the sum of individual learning within an organization, with emphasis on individuals responsibility in learning and the collective outcome. Consider, for example, this definition: Firms that purposefully construct structures and strategies so as to enhance and maximize organizational learning have

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been designated learning organizations (Dodgson, 1993, p. 377). Or consider this one: A learning organization (LO) is good at organizational learning (OL) (Tsang, quoted in Snell, 2001). 2. See Nancy Hartsock (1998). This collection of previously published articles maps out more than two decades of Hartsocks articulation of Marxist-feminist thoughts. 3. Collecting data on statistical trends about outsourcing is notoriously difficult (see on this problem International Labor Organization, 1998); however, Moody (1997) gives an indication of the breakup, the vertical disintegration, of production processes previously performed within the same firm and often within a single complex (p. 93) with data drawn from the automotive and service industries showing an increase in contracting out and outsourcing over time (pp. 93-101). 4. For more on the debate on skilling, reskilling, and de-skilling, see Mojab (2000) and Keep, Mayhew, and Corney (2002).

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