Stephen Billett 
Work, Change and Workers 

This book aims to provide a fresh account of the changing nature of work and how workers are changing as result of the requirements of contemporary working life. It also identifies implications for preparing individuals for work and then maintaining their skills throughout working life. It does this by examining the relations between the changing requirements for working life and how individuals engage in work through an analysis that engages a range of disciplinary perspectives. These include the psychological, sociological, philosophical and anthropological literatures as they relate to work and empirical research that represents both the perspectives of work and work practice as social institutions and as a vocation that individuals exercise with intentionality and agency. This body of work is also used to identify implications for vocational education, professional development and on-going learning throughout working life. This book is the product of a now long-term project to understand contemporary working life and its implications for learning throughout working life. Along the way it has benefited from a range of contributions. It commenced with research from the early to the late 1990s that sought to understand how people learn through their work. The Australian Research Council, state government funding, private enterprise sponsorships and the National Research and Evaluation Committee of the Australian National Training Authority supported these investigations, as did the many workplaces and workers who contributed time, insights and sometimes patience.

Table of Content

Section 1 -Introduction.- Work, change and workers.- Section 2 – Social and individual bases for understanding work life.- Cultural, situational and individual geneses of work life.- A relational basis for understanding work life.- The worth of work.- Section 3 – Changing concepts and requirements of work.- Changes in available work.- Changing participation in work.- Changing composition of paid workforces.- Changing requirements for work performance.- Section 4 – Describing and elaborating work.- A framework for describing work.- Changing work practice and work requirements: Case studies.- Work, learning and identity.