John Garrick

The philosophical assumptions that underpin interpretive research are seldom critically scrutinized in education literature. Yet interpretive research is a powerful shaper of knowledge about the world of lived experience, or as Van Manen puts it, "the lifeworld, which is both the source ...

Abstract: This paper draws on Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) seminal study The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge to reflect on two macro-level catastrophes: the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2009 (and its continuing effects throughout the Eurozone and elsewhere) and Fukushima. These two case studies probe aspects of these grand failures to reveal serious deficiencies in integrity at work, the changing nature of contemporary working relationships, knowledge management and fashionable new approaches to
organisational learning. The paper draws upon Lyotard’s ‘performativity theory’ to examine how people in commercial enterprises may often define ‘knowledge’, how this is transferred and how, in turn, managing this knowledge affects
working relationships, learning and change.

ABSTRACT This paper examines organisational knowledge in terms of how people in workplaces understand and define it. Organisational knowledge has developed to a point where the nature of research and knowledge can no longer be tied to the confines of scientific knowledge. Instead, knowledge is increasingly classified in terms of its contribution to organisational effectiveness. Where alternative (non-scientific) means can better achieve organisational effectiveness, hard science may not be necessary. Knowledge, in this sense, has worth in its use value such as 'billable hours', 'measurable return' and its ability to achieve something outside of itself. In questioning the authority through which knowledge is legitimated in such firms, we revisit Lyotard's (1984, p.9) pertinent question: 'Who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?' We draw onhis theory of performativity to examine the ways new organisational knowledge can be constructed.

In post‐industrial workplaces, training can be theorised as a ‘technology’ that controls the systematic organisation of knowledge. Training is more than a symbol of the shift in the location of labour in relation to commodity production. Training does not ‘simply’ upskill workers. It can and does enable new forms of control and surveillance over them. Training for post‐industrial work thus