Interest in workplace learning has attracted considerable interest from policy-makers across the world for a number of years. It is now widely regarded as one of the key means of enhancing economic performance and raising living standards. However, the current economic recession has shown that workplace learning offers no ‘magic bullet’ since its extent and form is contingent on the economic climate faced by organizations. While this is the most obvious constraint and facilitator of workplace learning, there are others too. This paper outlines a conceptual framework designed to give these features greater visibility and specificity than hitherto. The existing literature discusses many of these as the ‘context’ of workplace learning, but rarely is a conceptual framework outlined. In this paper, we present the ‘Working as Learning Framework’ as a way of filling this conceptual gap, thereby illuminating the links between the macro-level forces that shape employment, the nature of work organization at the point of production and the ‘expansive’ or ‘restrictive’ character of learning environments. The paper, then, demonstrates value of the framework by examining how it aids our understanding of workplace learning as experienced by workers (such as aerobics instructors) and how the pattern of workplace learning may change as a result of changes elsewhere in the productive system (such as call centre workers in a local authority). In each case, the journey takes us beyond the particularities of the work task itself and into the world of work organization and the wider pressures organisations face for survival, growth and development, or what has previously been referred to as the ‘context of learning’.
