Personal Quarterly 3/2021

6 SCHWERPUNKT _INTERVIEW PERSONALquarterly 03 / 21 PERSONALquarterly: Professor Billett, you have been researching adult learning in the workplace for almost 30 years and you published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and mo- nographs on this topic. However, I did not find publications of yours which use the term ‚knowledge management‘, although, in the related context of Human Resource Management, it is a commonly used term. Why is that? Stephen Billett: This is a good question. My answer is also a little bit awkward given the journal and forum in which it is being presented. As you note, I have published in many kinds of outlets normally with disciplinary associated with education, learning, vocational education and training, higher education and also human resource development. A key reason why I have not published and I tend not to use the term human re- source management is that it implies managing humans as resources, and I am not comfortable with that concept based on my experiences of factory work. However, my particular concern is how individuals learn and utilise their capacities (i.e. resources) in and across their working lives. Hence, the difference is more of focus: adults as workers and learners. This extends to the kinds of support and guidance that they are afforded through workplace experiences and also those in educational institutions, as well as when these two sets of experiences are combined and integrated in some way. Cen- tral here also is how working-age adults engage in work and learning. So, I prefer a different starting point. Whilst recogni- sing the importance of collective action and interdependence in achieving organisational goals (i.e. profitability, provisions of effective services), my research and theoretical orientation suggests that achieving institutional goals necessarily requires a consideration of how individuals come to engage, learn, and transform the occupational practice and within the work set- tings in which they engage, which is also shared by many HRM practitioners and researchers. Of course, like them, I want a police force that is efficient as an organisation protecting law and order, a healthcare system that is effective in terms of the skills that doctors, nurses, allied health workers et cetera have. I want airlines to have pilots and cabin crews that adhere strict- ly to the mandated requirements of their work. Yet, the starting point here has to be what workers know, can do, and value: their readiness to engage in work and learning. My preference How to foster workplace learning Das Interview mit Prof. Stephen Billett führte Prof. Dr. Andreas Rausch for a field of social practice is not so much the workplace, but the domain of occupational capacities that individuals need to learn, adapt and also apply in the particular circumstances in which they find employment. However, it would be wrong to assume that I am unsympathetic to organisations seeking to achieve those outcomes. So, those whose job it is to organise these outcomes (e.g. meisters, trainers, teachers) are another group of individuals whose role it is to engage in work tasks that require them to organise and secure outcomes from wor- kers. However, my starting point is that these processes need to be understood again from the perspectives of those who are see- king to achieve goals and those who are to be subject to them. Let me provide an example of what I mean. I spent many years working in the clothing industry and, in particular, for companies that manufacture large quantities of garments. I was a head designer, a role that is largely technical in terms of cutting patterns for organising the production of and managing the quality of finished garments. A process used in that indus- try was to provide machinists with a specific time to complete a section of a garment. If the machinist was able to complete sections under that time they would earn a bonus, and if they fail to meet the quota, they could be seen as being a liability. Consequently, a key task was to time the operation – rate- setting – calculate the time it would take to perform a particular operation or short set of operations. This process was enacted by a ‘time and motion’ person who would time a machinist to set the rate. However, this process was always a contested one. The machinist would perform the operation slightly slower than optimum to benefit from a longer time allowance. How­ ever, the rate setter knew that the machinist might perform the operation more slowly than was optimal. However, the ma- chinist knew that the rate setter knew that she (they were all women) might be performing sub optimally, so the machinist would ‘fox’. That is, give all the appearances of working as fast as possible (e.g. full concentration, tongue between teeth, making breathing noises) to try and convince the rate setter that she was working as fast as possible. However, the rate setter knew that the machinist would be foxing and would try to compensate for it. The simple point here is that something which should be highly objective – how long does it take to sew a particular component – is one subject to a range of human