Conference Agenda

It seems that the design of vocational training for ‚disadvantaged‘ groups requires a special approach (Beck, 2018; Carvajal Muñoz, 2022; De Greef et al, 2012). This study investigates how workplace learning is shaped, experienced, and organizationally enabled within an Austrian Social-Economic Enterprise (SEE) operating in the secondary labor market, focusing on employees with histories of long-term unemployment and predominantly low formal qualifications. It examines three project areas characterized by distinct gendered and task configurations—wood construction (male-coded), local supply (diverse), and facility cleaning (female-coded)—and integrates the learning-biographical perspectives of employees with an organizational ethnography of artifacts and interaction practices. In doing so, the study tries to combine individual learning trajectories with organizational enabling (or constraining) conditions and accompanying modes of subjectification.

The research is guided by two interrelated questions: first, how employees in the SEE constitute their learning paths and coping practices in the context of reintegration and qualification processes meaning how are agency, recognition and belonging produced in and through (performative) routines, affective bonds and material arrangements; second, which organizational conditions—including instructional practices, feedback routines, team culture, work organization orartifacts—facilitate or workplace learning.

The theoretical framework draws on workplace learning theories (Usher and Edwards, 2007) as well as the Judtih Butler’s concept of Vulnerability (1997, 2004). Vulnerability is understood not as a deficit, but as relational exposure to normative orders, material infrastructures, and affective economies—as an ambivalent condition of fragility and responsiveness that opens up learning opportunities while also limiting them. The study thus links individual learning trajectories with organisational conditions of possibility—enabling as well as limiting—in work-centred transition and qualification settings, understood as fluid arrangements of practices, things, spaces and norms.

A narrative interview approach (Schütze, 2016) provides the basis for reconstructing life and career trajectories, including learning and coping experiences, transitions, and key events. Organizationally, the study mobilizes ethnographic perspectives following Ybema et al (2009), with attention to artifacts (e.g., work instructions, checklists, logbooks), team practices, and modalities of instruction and feedback in situ. Methodologically, analysis is grounded in reconstructive approaches; this is complemented by thematic coding to identify organization-relevant patterns and mechanisms.

The objectives are to develop an understanding that links biographical learning logics with organizational enabling structures; and to derive design recommendations for work organization, instructional and training practices, and artifact design (e.g., checklists, logbooks). Taken together, the study advances a multidimensional perspective on workplace learning in an SEE while considering employees’ biographical starting points and the organization’s real resources, routines, and constraints.

Previous research highlights how some aspects of vocational knowing are difficult for students to develop during workplace-based learning (WPL) (e.g., Kristmansson, 2016; Paul, 2017). This is tied to how the learning environment and the tasks vocational students/apprentices get access to contribute to expansive or restrictive learning (e.g. Fuller & Unwin, 2003).

Developing vocational literacies is one such aspect of vocational knowing that often gets little attention in VET, which can result in the lack of explicit guidance in the function and use of vocational texts (Hellne-Halvoren, 2014; Paul, 2017). Texts in the workplaces function as mediating tools (Vygotsky, 1978) and are often “invisible” (Karlsson, 2006). For instance, in interviews when asked about what is read or written in the workplaces a vast range of vocational texts are not mentioned. Thus, the myth of vocational education as an educational pathway suitable for students struggling with or not wanting to read or write remains strong (Paul & Lindberg, manuscript).

Nevertheless, anthropological, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research traditions have shown the ways in which texts are used across a wide range of contexts and for different purposes (e.g. Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Furthermore, vocational texts are often multimodal (Buch, 2020; Hellne-Halvorsen et al., 2021) and how they are used differs from more dominant/privileged forms of literacy (Barton & Hamilton, 2000).

But the discrepancy between the idea of VET as a pathway with less need for developing literacy competences and the highly specific vocational texts used in workplaces is driving force behind this paper presentation. Moreover, vocational literacies remain an under-researched area within VET-research.

The presentation examines the types of vocational texts encountered by floristry students and florists (who also work as supervisors during WPL) during workplace-based learning and how they interact with these texts; by asking:

What functions do the vocational texts used by florists serve in the daily work in floristry? What types of vocational texts do floristry students encounter during WPL and how do they interact with these texts? Compared with the florists, what aspects of vocational literacies seem difficult for the floristry students to access during WPL?

By focusing on both students’ and supervisors’ use of vocational texts, the study highlights the role of literacy practices in both vocational learning and work within floristry.

Theoretically the study draws on concepts developed within the field of New Literacy Studies, which conceptualises literacies as socially situated practices rather than autonomous skills (Street, 1984). Texts and the ways they are used in different contexts serve specific functions (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). In floristry education, texts fulfil certain functions, while in flower retail and vocational practice they fulfil other, context-specific functions. Literacy events refer to activities involving texts that are at least partly possible to observe and constitute more concrete manifestations of literacy practices (Heath, 1983; Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Literacy practices are understood as broader, more abstract patterns of using texts, encompassing social norms, values, and beliefs related to literacies within a particular community; as well as power relations that shape and are shaped by how texts are used (Street, 1984; Barton & Hamilton, 2000).

In this study I examine young vocational cook students’ negotiations during work-based learning. Learning in workplaces became an established part of Finnish vocational education and training (VET) at the turn of the millennium, (Virtanen & Tynjälä, 2008) and its role was further strengthened in the major VET reform in 2018. (Act on Vocational Education and Training, 2017). As a result, vocational cook students now spend a substantial share of their studies in restaurant and catering companies.

Work-based learning has been seen as desirable practice enabling students to acquire skills and competencies that are relevant in continuously changing world of work. However, from the students’ point of view, it is not always self-evident that the work-based learning supports their learning in a meaningful way (Rönnlund & Rosvall, 2021). For example, the quality of workplace communities and the pedagogical arrangements have found to be at the centre of successful professional learning outcomes (Fuller & Unwin, 2003; Virtanen et al., 2014). Furthermore, work-based learning is widely presented as a mechanism to support young people’s integration into vocational fields and labour market. In this paper I argue that it can paradoxically function as a mechanism alienating students form their vocational field. In such cases, the intended bridge between education and employment becomes a disrupted and unreliable passage into working life.

Drawing from interview data with young cook students I examine what kind of negotiations students engage during work-based learning. When entering workplaces, young people step into environments where expectations, hierarchies, and routines are already well established. For this reason, negotiation becomes a central mechanism through which they attempt to gain access to meaningful tasks, clarify expectations, secure support, protect their wellbeing, and construct a legitimate professional identity. These negotiations rarely take the form of explicit bargaining; instead, they unfold subtly in everyday interactions. Furthermore, I examine how do these negotiations shape students’ relationship to their vocational field. Rather than viewing work-based learning as a straightforward transfer of skills, this perspective captures it as a dynamic and sometimes fraught social process that can foster both belonging to and alienation from the field.

Following May (2011, 2013), students’ experiences of belonging and alienation can be understood not as static states, but as ongoing relational processes shaped through their interactions with people, material environments, and the social norms that structure everyday practices. Belonging, in this perspective, involves a felt sense of ease, comfort, and alignment with one’s social, cultural, relational, and material surroundings. Alienation, by contrast, can be understood as the absence or disruption of this ease. It is feeling unease, discomfort, or dissonance in relation to one’s environment or social position within it. Alienation reflects a situation in which the individual struggles to find a place within existing relational, social, or material arrangements. This may involve experiences of not being recognized as a legitimate participant, feeling out of rhythm with workplace norms or expectations, or a feeling that one’s values doesn’t align with work environment.

Restaurant and catering industry offer an interesting context to study the dynamics of alienation and belonging. In the industry, the precarization of post-industrial societies is evident (Kalleberg & Vallas, 2018). The work is often carried out in shifting, part‑time, and fixed‑term contracts. It is physically and mentally demanding and the pay is low. The working hours include evenings and weekends, and workdays can stretch into long shifts. Such conditions can generate a sense of alienation for young people entering the field, as the instability, exhaustion, and limited recognition associated with precarious work may undermine their sense of belonging and make it difficult to envision a sustainable future within the industry.

Recent studies have examined how technological developments are transforming both work and learning processes, for instance, the emergence of virtual workplaces (Willermark & Islind, 2023), the influence of technology design on vocational practice (Sadroge et al., 2024), and the digitalisation of work processes (Pargmann et al., 2023). These studies share a concern with how technologies function within workplaces and reconfigure learning opportunities (Cairns, 2022). Alongside this ‘functional-technical’ lens, a growing body of research adopts a more practice-oriented view, highlighting how technological artefacts are embedded in learning as part of the sociomaterial texture of work (Gherardi, 2020, p. 103/104). From this perspective, technologies are actors contributing to the relational and epistemic conditions of workplace learning. In our paper, we highlight the potential of a sociomaterial approach to educational research on technology in the workplace (Fenwick et al 2012; Orlikowski 2007). Addressing the question, How do technologies function as boundary objects to mediate workplace learning?, this paper contributes to that emerging field by examining how technologies can mediate learning across boundaries in workplaces. It does so through the sociomaterial lens of boundary objects: artefacts that inhabit multiple social worlds and enable coordination without full consensus (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 2010). While the boundary object concept has gained traction in education research, there remains a need to explore how such artefacts function empirically in vocational and workplace settings (Shan, 2020, 2023; Viktorelius & Larsson, 2025).
We address the general inquiry into “who is acting” through two studies. The first focuses on a VR training system used in a Swiss apprenticeship programme for electricians (Kraus et al., 2025). The VR headset operates as a pedagogical artefact that both trainers and apprentices engage with, albeit with different aims. For trainers, it is a structured instructional tool; for apprentices, it offers immersive, exploratory practice. This interpretive flexibility, the ability of different groups to use and assign meaning to the same artefact, is a core property of boundary objects. The VR headset also enables what Star (2010) calls “coordination without consensus.” Trainers and apprentices need not share a unified interpretation to collaborate effectively. The technology further mediates responsibility and control, with trainers acting as gatekeepers who grant or withhold access based on their assessment of the apprentice’s readiness, thereby negotiating pedagogical authority through the artefact itself.
The second case examines a Danish retail setting where a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) structures task coordination and oversight. While managers use the PDA to standardise workflows, some early-career employees engage with it as a means of expanding roles and learning. The early-career employees, feeling stuck in repetitive tasks, negotiated access to new responsibilities involving the PDA, including inventory and peer mentoring. The device thus functioned as a boundary object spanning distinct social worlds (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star & Strauss, 1999), enabling coordination without shared interpretation. Though embedded in hierarchical routines, the PDA afforded moments of negotiated autonomy and learning.
Across both cases, we explore how technologies mediate learning and collaboration across educational and workplace boundaries in vocational training. By bringing these empirical insights into dialogue with the sociomaterial approach and boundary object theory, the paper contributes to debates on the changing conditions of workplace learning in technologically mediated environments. We argue that understanding learning at the intersection of education, work, and technology requires taking objects seriously, not just as instructional tools, but as co-constitutive elements of workplace learning. This aligns with the broader call to move away from an anthropocentric worldview, which is also discussed as one dimension of the “poly crises” addressed in the call for papers. It theorises learning as situated, negotiated, and materially mediated.