Producing core values in the workplace: learning new identities

This paper discusses how a large manufacturing organisation in Australia is attempting to reconstruct itself as a cultural site. It is a workplace of 900 employees where core values discourses sit alongside product discourses, and both construct work practices that are rational and linear. Findings from ethnographic studies and discourse analysis of data from the workplace are used to discuss aspects of this workplace as a teaching and learning organisation, in particular, aspects connected with embodying its core values. Firstly, the paper focuses on the language of the core values themselves, exploring tensions involved in producing a common reading regarding what the values mean. Secondly, the paper turns to procedures and practices designed to ensure employees learn the core values. It tells a critical story of a training day where production-line workers are required to engage with complex literacy and numeracy activities. It further argues that opportunities for productive learning are lost or treated as disruptive in a learning context that becomes a contested site where participants struggle to (re)position themselves and have their voices heard.