Redefining learning in a changing society

According to Deleuze (1990), contemporary social change can be seen as a historical passage from ‘disciplinary societies’ to ‘control societies’. Institutions forming the disciplinary society – school, family, factory, hospital and prison – experience a decline in their ability to retain control. Although disciplinary logics continue to persist, they spread apart, fluidly, across the social tissue. It is within this process of change that the striated space that characterises disciplinary societies gives way to the plain space of the control society (Deleuze, 1980). While disciplinary society makes fixed shapes for institutions, control society is based on flexible and modulating networks.

The change from a disciplinary society to a control society was made possible by breaking down the obstacles that constrained the autonomy of institutions. The continuous removing of obstacles increasingly makes the distinction between institutions’ inside and outside less clear. Concomitant to this process is a redefinition of power and its field of action. What will be discussed here in relation to these changes – because it has not yet received enough critical attention – is the socialisation that takes place in between institutions; that is, informal socialisation interrelated with informal learning (Pais, 2001).

As one consequence of this change, the world of labour increasingly demands of its participants the competence to organise and structure their own working lives and to develop the personal and social competencies needed for this. At the same time, education and training are less and less capable of producing these essential capacities on their own. They are highly dependent upon the world outside to generate resources like meaning, subjectivity and motivation (see Chapter Eleven of this volume). Informal and non-formal modes of learning, therefore, have gained popularity not only among educationalists but also among policy makers in Europe in the course of the past few decades (Bjørnåvold, 2001; Dohmen, 2001). These forms of learning are associated with great hopes of extending the boundaries of the formally organised and well-ordered guises of learning, and curing some of the negative effects that seem to be inherent in the latter. First, informal learning, it is hoped, should help in bridging the skills gap between the quickly changing demands of the economy for a qualified workforce and the relatively immobile output of education and training systems by providing flexibly acquired skills that are not available through formal training.