Discourse for Normalizing What? The Learning Organization and the Workplace Trade Union Response

Abstract

Recent critics of organizational learning and its normative offshoot the 'learning organization'have posited that conceptualizations of organizations based on knowledge and learning constitute a rhetorical device enabling elites to assert different forms of control through a new 'normalizing discourse'. The article, while welcoming such critique, nevertheless asks whether it is adequate to dismiss the learning organization without proposing an alternative. Moreover, a case is made for serious evaluation of the extent to which learning might contribute to progressive development of the workplace. A comparison of two cases at manufacturing plants in northern Sweden suggests that while the learning organization may indeed be criticized as a 'normalizing discourse', in practice it does appear to be of some practical benefit to unions in the design of discursive arenas for humanization of the labour process and promoting payments systems that reward competence development.