Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the relational work carried out in mentoring programmes and the implications for learning capabilities in future practices. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on field research of a mentoring programme bringing together senior and newly graduated workers in a…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore what learning-oriented leadership could mean in practice and to identify possible sources of variability in this leadership between first-line managers (FLMs). The empirical basis of the study comprised FLMs in nursing homes for elderly care. Design/methodology/approach: The study was carried out…

The aim of this article is to investigate how the formal competence development activities provided by the Production Leap, a workplace development programme (WPDP), were interwoven with everyday work activities and to identify the conditions that enabled learning and employee-driven innovation that contributed to production improvement, in small…

The aim is to explore challenges related to the integration between product development and production in product introduction and, given these challenges, to analyse the learning potential of boundary crossing in the context of product introduction. The paper draws on evidence from a Swedish manufacturing company. The theoretical framework is…

Objective: Ideas from evolutionary theories are increasingly taken up in health promotion. This article seeks to demonstrate how such a trend has the potential to embed essentialist and limiting stereotypes of women and men in health promotion practice. Design: We draw on material gathered for a larger ethnographic study that examined how…

This report explores the links between trade unions and workplace training, and the potential benefits of social partnership in the skills system. The UK is relatively unusual in having no formal role for trade unions in the training system. In most advanced economies, trade unions and employers work alongside government in shaping the skills…

Purpose: Work-place learning takes place in many settings and in different ways, resulting in knowledge and skills of different kinds. The recognition process in the work place is however often implicit and seldom discussed in terms of recognition of prior learning (RPL). The aim of this paper is to give examples of how the knowledge/skills of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate individuals' learning and propensity for changing their job situation during downsizing in a company. Design/methodology/approach: A case study was carried out in an industrial company that had undergone major downsizing to adapt to changes in production. Approximately 100 employees retrained at…