Magister Educationis (Adult Learning and Global Change) - MEd(AL) / This study set out to determine how trainers construct their professional identities in a changing work environment in a training academy of the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the context of a police-university partnership. The study differentiates between three professional identities (academic, police and trainer) and builds on the notion that the construction of professional identity is a conscious and dynamic process, which is formed in social contexts and settings where individuals participate in communities of practice or act on affordances to participate in organisational activities. Following a constructivist methodological approach, the study involved face-to-face interviews with trainers of the SAPS Academy and an analysis of police documents in the Academy. The study portrays trainers’ professional identity construction as relational and ongoing. Trainers perceive their changing roles in the SAPS Academy as a form of progression in their professional identity where one aspires to become an academic as a form of achievement. While the SAPS Academy attempts toregulate the construction of professional identity through enforcement of policies, it strengthens police trainer identities rather than enabling the construction of the needed new academic identities. Trainers therefore have to navigate the tensions between the institutional culture and construction of professional identity. Trainers negotiate their professional identities when they become part of the trainer pool, where they join smaller communities of practice, and when they make use of affordances for learning and development. The practice of multi-skilling of trainers, an authoritarian institutional culture and challenges to academic freedom and autonomy hamper their attempts to construct academic identities at both institutional and disciplinary level. The study suggests that organisations need to understand how policies contribute to employees’ construction of professional identities, particularly when new and unfamiliar professional identities are to be constructed. Development of higher academic qualifications is not enough. Workplaces need to apply organisational policies consistently and without ambiguity. A holistic approach should be followed when organisations embark on the construction of professional academic identities as employees construct professional identities through their lived experiences. Finally, the study showed that workplaces should provide a suitable environment that would stimulate professional and academic identity construction.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur lagerarbetare i ett svenskt grossistföretag uppfattar arbetsplatsidentitet och hur betydelsen av det påverkar upplevelsen av arbetet och välbefinnandet på arbetsplatsen. Vidare är syftet i studien att undersöka hur arbetsplatsidentitet påverkas av hur arbete och arbetsuppgifter är organiserade. Uppsatsens övergripande frågeställning är Hur påverkas arbetsplatsidentitet av hur arbete och arbetsuppgifter är organiserade? Social identity theory och Need to belong theory har använts i studien för att få en djupare förståelse om begreppet arbetsplatsidentitet. I studien tillämpas kvalitativ forskning genom sju semistrukturerade intervjuer för att samla in empiriskt material. Respondenterna i studien är lagerarbetare som har arbetat i minst ett år på grossistföretaget och har hunnit skapa en uppfattning om arbetsplatsen. Resultatet i studien visar att arbetsplatsidentitet är förknippad med känsla av tillhörighet till andra individer och till arbetsuppgifter. Ytterligare visar resultatet att arbetsplatsidentitet är betydelsefull för lagerarbetarnas välmående och inställning till arbetet. Vidare visar resultatet att arbetsplatsidentitet är kontextberoende och har större betydelse i arbeten som utförs i grupp. / The purpose of this study is to explore how workplace identity is perceived by warehouse workers in a Swedish wholesale company and how it affects their experience of work and wellbeing in the workplace. Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to explore how organizing work and work tasks affects workplace identity. This study's general issue is How is workplace identity affected by how work and tasks are organized? To gain a deeper understanding of the concept of workplace identity we have applied Social Identity Theory and Need to belong theory. To collect empirical material a qualitative research was applied in the study by doing seven semi-structured interviews. The respondents in our study consists of people working as warehouse workers, who had at least one year of experience in the company and developed an opinion about the workplace. The study results show that workplace identity is associated with a sense of belonging with other individuals and a sense of belonging to work tasks. Furthermore, the results show that workplace identity is of importance to warehouse employees wellbeing and work attitudes. Finally, the result shows that workplace identity is specific to the context and of greater importance in work that is performed in groups.

This dissertation conducts in-depth inquiries into the practices, nature and theory of post-industrial cultural work and the humanities- and arts-based civic dialogues which cultural work promotes. Given the broad neglect of utopian thinking in the mainstream of critical social science and in an attempt to sketch out a vision of an alternative future, the aim of this thesis is to outline an “epistemology” for post-industrial cultural work as well as to reflect upon the outlook for educational cultural work practices and their function as a catalyst for civic dialogue and cultural change. The main concerns are the signification, interests and aims embodied in cultural production touching on issues of cultural and scientific learning, alternative modes of democratic governance of science and technology (Felt, Wynne et al. 2007), industrial society’s logic of accumulation and market rationality, the primacy of contemporary instrumental and capitalist values, neoliberalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. With a view to addressing elementary questions regarding the future of cultural work, which are explored and theorised alongside future perspectives of a new form of knowledge work for the humanities and the arts, the actual challenges of cultural work are considered from within the wider context of the risk society (Beck 1986) and the threats which affect everybody today. In relying on Beck’s (2009) conceptualization of the world risk society as a “non-knowledge society” characterised by the global existence of incalculable risks/threats and non-knowing, the thesis addresses the problem of non-knowledge and unrecognised contingencies as a challenge for cultural work to design processes of (un)learning in civic dialogues. In exploring the social, cultural and political relevance of three empirical case studies, the thesis ventures into the prospects of a new socio-epistemological perspective for cultural work and workspaces for knowledge. The studies investigate three different (techno-)socio-cultural spaces of knowledge: a public exhibition about the new Gotthard Base Tunnel currently under construction in the Swiss Alps, Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (2006) about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and China’s industrial revolution, and the living intervention Fairytale at Documenta 12, 2007, which brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is employed as a tool for the analysis of the material-semiotic properties of differing knowledges, the heterogeneous relations of socio-economic networks, and the global and uncertain conditions of the post-industrial world in which cultural work is embedded. What is colloquially referred to as post-industrial cultural knowledge work in this thesis is elaborated in the context of a propositional socio-epistemological second-order framework (Von Foerster 1984; Pakman 2003) for cultural work and its entanglements with ethics, aesthetics, pragmatics, politics—and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2009). In order to build “third spaces” of knowledge (Turnbull 2000) and to nurture uncertainty-oriented approaches and contingencies, the findings propose the development of more open, (self-)reflexive and anticipating forms of thinking and acting in cultural production fields with the aim to catalyse societal developments, to foster intrinsic values and to create cultural workplace identities with a moral-ecological-political awareness (cf. Banks 2006; 2007) invoking new interactions between viewers, audiences and the environment.