Researching Adult and Lifelong Learning in a Global Perspective
Peter Jarvis
Researching adult and lifelong learning in a global perspective: the learning organisation
Peter Jarvis
University of Surrey, UK
Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
This paper explores the effects of the process of globalisation on our understanding of lifelong learning and seeks to demonstrate how the concept of learning is being changed and depersonalised, changes that run the risk of over-simplifying research in the field. The paper starts with an analysis of the globalisation process and this is followed by three parts examining learning, lifelong learning and the learning organisation.
Part 1 The globalisation process
The process of globalisation lies at the heart of our understanding of society; it is a much used word with a variety of meanings but it is used here in a specific politic-socio-economic manner. Beck (2000,p.11) suggests it is 'the processes through which sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientations, identities and networks' (italics in original). He distinguishes globalisation from the idea of the global. Friedman (1999, p.7) makes the point that
Globalization is not a phenomenon. It is not just some passing trend. Today it is the overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country.
Friedman claims that it has replaced the ‘Cold War system’ as the world order but what it is precisely is a more complex matter. There are a number of theories about globalisation (Sklair, 1991) but it is inappropriate to explore these here (see Jarvis, forthcoming) although this analysis combines the neo-Marxist one with others.
The modern form of globalisation began in the late 1950s and 1960s. Change is rarely, if ever, triggered by a single factor and there were a number of contributory factors occurred at that time, such as:
· the nature of capitalism itself and the need to make profit;
· Modernity itself was being questioned;
· the oil crisis in the 1970s dented the confidence of the West;
· the demise of the Bretton Woods Agreement led to the GATT Agreement, enabling both free trade and the flow of financial capital to develop;
· the development of sophisticated information technology (Castells 1996);
· the economic competition from Japan;
· using scientific knowledge in the production of commodities;
· the fall of the Berlin wall (Bauman, 1992);
As lifelong learning is the focus of this study, these will not be explored here, but it is significant that at the heart of this process are the driving forces of the capitalism which view the world as a single market and so the powerful forces of production and distribution are at the heart of the process. These sub-structural forces exert a standardising effect on the world and yet each country seeks to retain something of its own political and cultural independence.
Globalisation might best be understood as a socio-economic phenomenon having profound political and cultural implications. From an over-simplistic perspective, it can be understood by thinking of the world as having a single substructure but each country having its own superstructure, whereas the simple Marxist model of society was one in which each society had its own substructure and a superstructure. For Marx, the substructure was the economic institution and the superstructure everything else including the state, culture, and so on. Now, however, the global sub-structure has also incorporated the technological institution, especially information technology. Those who control this sub-structure exercise power in the global knowledge economy and this rests to a great extent with transnational corporations whose directors are un-elected (Korten, 1995) through their control of the global market. But these forces are supported by the one super-power - America. Consequently, it is possible to see the USA as part of the global sub-structure, or as the most powerful country in the world. At this moment in history, it might be regarded as part of the global sub-structure, although that could easily change. Consequently, the global sub-structure might be seen as having three strands – economic and technological being protected by the political and military dominance of America.
This sub-structure is the same in all 203 countries of the world (the number recorded by UNESCO 2006) and in each there are a number of superstructural layers – international, national, regional, local and organisational with power spreading out from the international and national to the periphery, with each layer being able to exercise its own pressures. But the relations between nations means that global power is also exercised between countries through politics, trade, aid and other inter-national mechanisms. Even this, however is uneven since there are blocks of countries at different levels of the global power structure, with the G8 countries being the most powerful.
Both the global sub-structure and the inter-state political relationships tend to exercise converging pressures throughout the world. But each country also seeks to retain its own degree of independence and culture so that national policies are not only designed to accommodate the global forces of the knowledge economy but also to deal with the social and cultural issues within it. Governments, therefore, exercise considerable power within their own countries as they seek to balance the apparently opposing forces of standardisation and difference. Since the global knowledge economy makes demands on all countries, it is hardly surprising that there has been a common movement to introduce lifelong learning in order to provide an educated work force to take its place in the global knowledge economy.
The significant thing about this analysis is that the forces of change are stimulated by both the global market (which includes small and medium sized enterprises seeking to find a place within the market) and by international and government initiatives that to some extent are also a response to the global forces. Change is, therefore, built into the global system since the only way that the market will survive is for new commodities to be produced, or old ones produced more efficiently, in order for any corporation or organisation to be profitable which, in its turn, demands that individuals have to learn and adapt to a rapidly changing world.
Part 2 Human learning
In my own work on human learning (Jarvis, 1987, 2006 inter alia) I have consistently argued that when individuals can no longer take their world for granted – a state that I have called disjuncture – there is a need to learn. Disjuncture may be defined as the gap between individuals’ biography and perception of their present experience. In this rapidly changing global society everybody is constantly confronted by disjunctural situations and forced to adapt to them. It is not surprising therefore, that learning has assumed a pre-eminent place in the educational vocabulary in one form or another. Neither is it surprising that since society is concerned with behavioural adaptation that one of the approaches to learning that has continued to be prevalent is the behaviourist one which defines learning as ‘any more or less permanent change in behaviour which is the result of experience’ (Borger and Seaborne, 1966,p.14). However, the other approach to learning that has come to the fore, a reflection of post-modernism, is the experiential one, ‘the creation of knowledge through the transformation of experience’ (Kolb, 1984, p.41). Both of these approaches to human learning are popular, reflecting different aspects of learning, but neither offers a comprehensive understanding of human learning.
Consider the following scenario, one that could have only arisen in a globalised world. On a visit to South East Asia I am taken into a restaurant and I leave it to my host to select the meal. As I am eating something which I do not recognise, I say – ‘I like this taste – what is it?’ He tells me its name. I have learned at least three things in this encounter: a taste, that I like it, and the name of a food. But do these definitions of learning allow us to understand what has happened?
The only ways that the behaviourist can tell that I have learned anything from the encounter are if I use the word correctly and if I order the food on subsequent occasions – but even then the fact that I have learned a taste and that I like it can only be inferred never proven. While Kolb’s approach may overcome some of these difficulties, it cannot explain for the fact that the taste never becomes knowledge, only my memory of it is knowledge, but how I learned to like it is not explained. In neither theory the nature of the person, as learner, is discussed. It would be possible to demonstrate the weakness of other theories of learning in the same way (see Jarvis, 2006).
One of the most significant aspects of this encounter is its threefold nature – sensation, affection and cognition and what we frequently omit when we examine learning is the nature of experience itself. In this situation, for instance, the whole person – body (sensation) and mind (affect and cognition) – is involved and the two are in harmony but at the time of my eating the food, I am unfamiliar with the taste, do not know that I will like it and have no social definition for the food and so I am in a disjunctural relationship with my environment at a number of levels. They are resolved through my learning. Three academic disciplines are involved in seeking to understand this process – I, the learner, am involved in both conscious living in which a mind-body interaction occurs, and so that I need to understand the person, mind/brain function – philosophy; I am transforming the experience - partly psychology; I am interacting with the external world (life-world) - sociology. And I must emphasise ‘sociology’ and not just socialisation (as Illeris, 2002 uses it). Any approach to learning that does not incorporate at least these three disciplines must necessarily focus only on certain aspects of the learning process – but elsewhere we have tried to show that there are actually more disciplines involved (Jarvis and Parker, 2005).
Nevertheless, the behaviourist and experiential theories have a lot of credibility in today’s world because the former theory suggests learning can be observed and measured while the latter places emphasis upon the individual’s own experience which allows learning to be viewed beyond the confines of education. Nevertheless, a if these definitions are accepted, it will mean that the learning process cannot be fully understood in research since it will focus only upon those aspects included in the definition. Once significance of the person is recognised, learning must be viewed as an existential process, which may be defined as
the combination of processes whereby the whole person – body (genetic, physical and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses) – experiences a social situation, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the person’s individual biography resulting in a changed (or more experienced) person (Jarvis, 2006, p.13).
However, it is not just the direct outcomes of globalisation that force the individual to learn, it has become the policy of the State to ensure that people keep abreast with the changes so that we now have policies of lifelong learning.
Part 3 Lifelong learning
In the same way that the globalisation process is putting pressure on individuals to adapt, so the State (and the European Union) is putting pressure on individuals to learn and both have introduced lifelong learning policies. But while it is impossible to have a policy about the existential phenomenon of learning it is possible to have policies about individuals undertaking specific learning activities, so that we can see that learning is now being used in a different manner. But institutionalised learning is actually education. Lifelong learning has become the extension of learning opportunities beyond initial education and training which may be taken up at any time during a person’s work life – even after retirement although this is not so prevalent in policy terms. This means lifelong learning is actually more than human learning.
Field and Leicester (2000, pp. xvi-xix) raise this issue nicely when they ask whether we are dealing with the question of lifelong learning or with permanent schooling, since a great deal of lifelong learning is involved with returning to education. This opening question lays the foundation for their book and in the opening chapter Edwards (2000) rightly points to recurrent education as the other factor in lifelong learning. Indeed, it was in 1973 that OECD published a policy paper Recurrent Education: a Strategy for Lifelong Learning that combined the two. But because the boundaries between education and learning beyond school are no longer recognised and formal education is being forced to accredit learning that occurs beyond the educational system, lifelong learning may now be regarded as a combination of human learning and recurrent education. This now allows a definition of lifelong learning, such as such as the one given by the European Commission (EC, 2001, p.9):
all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and competences within a personal, civic, social and/or employment-related perspective.