Keating, Maree (2010) Learning from retrenchment: local textile workers redefine themselves after global restructuring. PhD thesis, RMIT.

Abstract

This thesis analyses the ways in which recent changes in the global field of work have resonated in the lives of one group of retrenched workers. In order to conceptualise the relationships between changing conditions and changes in individual lives, the author has drawn from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Of particular importance to the study are his notions of the ‘habitus’, the ‘field’ and the ’disposition’. The research focuses on workers leaving the textile industry, in which a diversity of individual ‘dispositions’ once flourished as part of another system or work ‘habitus’. This allows examination of how changing conditions of work have generated specific transformative possibilities for workers at the lower end of the economy. The author asks what transformations were undergone in the lives of seventeen retrenched textile workers and how adequately their learning process was supported by vocational education and training.

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