| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Peter Sawchuk, Adult Learning and Technology in Working-Class Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003)

IN A BOOK that will surely invite the critical attention of labour educators, as well as researchers from a variety of disciplines, Peter Sawchuk offers an engaging theoretical synthesis and empirical study of working-class computer learning. The author combines his shop floor experience with his background as a sociologist specializing in labour and adult education, to probe uncharted areas of collectively directed and tacit learning found in solidaristic networks of manufacturing workers in Ontario. From this standpoint, he fashions a lively and provocative analysis that reassesses adult learning theory and underscores the hidden but vital realm of informal learning across the multiple spheres of workplace, home, and community. Sawchuk anchors his critique of educational theory in a materialist perspective and provides theoretical refinement to situated learning and activity theory as an alternative form of analysis. The voyage is clearly marked by outlining his conceptual foundation, proceeding through a series of related discussions on the themes which arise from them, and culminating in some practical advice. In many respects, it is a worthy addition to Cambridge University Press' Learning in Doing series.

In the first two chapters Sawchuk situates himself in the Western Marxist tradition with an understanding of class analysis shaped by E.P. Thompson, Georg Lukács, and the young Marx of The German Ideology. Drawing out essential aspects of Marx's mature political economy to punctuate crucial points in his account, he also actively incorporates Marxist-feminist standpoint theory and introduces the idea of a "working class technological common sense" that builds on the work of Antonio Gramsci.

Yet, it is his critical appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus which serves as a focal point in the conceptual basis of Sawchuk's study. His idea of a "working-class learning habitus" acts as a unifying construct in organizing patterned forms of behaviour and dispositions rooted in a working-class standpoint. This informs class practices in the approach to learning. Sawchuk sees the habitus as a "strategy generating mechanism" that structures human agency, but is itself subject to change through the exercise of that agency. Or as he would put it, the habitus "undergoes change or elaboration in a sociocultural process that can be described as learning." (100) Similar to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's conclusion that learning and the production of identity are part of the same social process, Sawchuk would view the construction and development of a working-class learning habitus as the formation of "learning identities." (169)

In a subsequent review of the adequacy of theoretical perspectives for investigating working-class learning in its broadest manifestations, Sawchuk detects a "hegemonic bloc of basic class-deficit themes." (23) Features of this dominant view include an over-preoccupation with individualism, abstract rationalism, ahistorical analysis, and the formalized relations of learning between novices and experts. With varying degrees of sympathy, he examines the work of Knowles, Tough, Mezirow, Giroux, and the critical-radical pedagogy school with a coda to Freire, but concludes that different themes found in the dominant view tend to blind "conventional adult learning theory to meaningfully recognize the learning of working-class groups." (25)

Instead, Sawchuk is drawn to sociocultural theories like situated learning and activity theory. The latter becomes a cornerstone of Sawchuk's analysis and he traces its origins from its inception to the third generation of the theory exemplified in the work of Yrj` Engestr`m. To Engestr`m, an activity system is comprised of an "individual participant, coparticipants, the material and conceptual tools of the activity system, and the negotiated objects, goals, and motives of the ongoing learning process." (42) Moreover, activity systems are knit together in a multi-dimensional network where they interact with one another.

The point is a crucial one. As the author notes, it is "this arrangement of overlapping activity systems, which shapes and structures working class learning throughout its full range of variation ... that gives rise to particular responses and, over time, elaborates a set of dispositions that define a working-class learning habitus." (109) This is a fascinating synthesis, and taken in concert with the other concepts he has introduced, Sawchuk provides a penetrating presentation of his evidence.

After situating computer technology historically in the third chapter, Sawchuk describes the "contradictory and compelling" working-class attraction to learning aspects of it. In his view, it provided "the means for many workers to discuss some of their deepest fears, hopes, and desires for themselves and their families (60)," particularly on issues surrounding employment. Here Sawchuk develops his Gramscian notion of a working-class common sense and relates it to the motive level in activity theory. In chapters that follow, he brings this together with a compelling sketch of the learning networks that emerge in the "interstitial spaces" of the workplace, household, and community life. The material structures that were forged include a painfully gendered division of labour in the home and acts of workplace resistance that create gaps where learning takes place. It is within these spaces that oral artifacts are produced, the habitus enriched, and the formation of "identities-in-practice" is realized.

Here, his narrative is at its best, describing the "basements of these working-class homes ... [where] we discovered several more or less obsolete computers in various states of disassembly ... a comfortable well worn couch, and children busily searching the internet or blasting space invaders, with the strong odor of hockey equipment mixed with the fresh moisture that hanging laundry adds to the air." (186) It has a familiar ring to it. Nevertheless, Sawchuk allows his interviewees to speak for themselves, and they do so at times with contagious enthusiasm, evident heartbreak, and urgency.

The fourth and the sixth chapters expand on the process of learning and the development of class standpoints with the author performing some novel microanalysis in the former. In two case studies, Sawchuk demonstrates how learning can be collectively produced outside of expert-novice relations, and how perforations in the electronic labour process nevertheless create conditions where workers learn by improvising solutions to production problems. The first study is an ingenious application of concepts drawn from ethnomethodology and conversational analysis, but the latter perhaps does more to establish the continuing relevance of Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent. Certainly, there is some question as to whether the author's idea of a "key field" corresponds to the way it is commonly understood in relational database management systems. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Sawchuk may have benefited from insights provided by writers like Phil Agre and Sherry Turkle.

The ninth chapter negotiates the difficult terrain of the commodity-form in everyday learning. These controversial observations are followed by the final chapter that contains recommendations Sawchuk makes based on the implications of his research. Broadly speaking, he ultimately sees the production of exchange-values that characterize the activity system of these workers in their quest for computer literacy. Legitimized in terms of its fit with the dominant discourse on human capital production, this everyday activity becomes a fetishized commodity, alienated and separate from the people who produce it. He concludes the final chapter by outlining two possible outcomes that research in informal learning could produce: a knowledge-intensive capitalism or the development of a "proletarian public sphere" sustained by labour and other social movements.

Peter Sawchuk has provided us with a moment in the development of working-class computer learning. The networks he describes have no doubt been supplanted or widened by the emergence of online communities of practice that straddle the virtual and real worlds. This brings with it a new set of analytical challenges. But, as he has shown us, a lot of the lessons may well be the same.


Zenon Gawron Lockport, Manitoba

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