Education, Lifelong Learning and the Problem of the Firm 

Professor Catherine Casey, University of Leicester

Wednesday 15 February 2012, 3.00-4.30 pm, Committee Room 2

Abstract

Policy-favoured macroeconomic models of knowledge-based, learning economies propose that a general improvement in education and skill levels generates increased productivity and disperses knowledge-intensive production across all industry sectors and labour markets in society. The knowledge-based economy is assumed as generating constant innovation, continually requiring higher levels of education and skills development across the population. Labour markets, it is projected, will comprise predominantly high productivity sectors requiring high levels of skills which successfully displace low productivity sectors and low levels of skills. Any gaps on this path to a generalised knowledge economy are assumed to be due to structural inertia and other behavioural hindrances to optimal labour market equilibrium.

However, close examination of the application of these models at the organizational level of the labour market reveals critical discrepancies and contradictions. The firm, in pursuit of its interest maximization and corresponding forms of organization, plays a powerful role. The firm’s organizational behaviour rationally utilizes employees’ education and skills in pursuit of its corporate interests. Its actions impede or contradict the optimal dispersion and development of higher order knowledge and skills assumed in knowledge-based economy and learning society models.

 The firm’s role in generating discrepant educational outcomes, as well as its interests in influencing educational activity and lifelong learning policy in society, is notably under-addressed in both labour market studies and education, including lifelong learning, studies. This paper principally addresses the role and behaviour of the firm in regard to the demand for and utilisation of higher levels of education and skills. It raises critical dilemmas for lifelong learning, and for institutions of work.

 Catherine Casey is Professor of Organization and Society at the University of Leicester. Her research addresses critical questions in economy and society, with a main focus on work, organizations and institutions, labour markets and employment relations, and education and lifelong learning. Her current book, Economy, Work and Education: Critical Connections, (Routledge, 2011) is a sociological exploration of critical concerns arising from policies of knowledge-based economies in neo-liberal conditions.

 Formerly working at the School of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, she has held visiting fellowships at a number of institutes, including Trinity College, Dublin, and the European University Institute, Florence. She has served in advisory capacities to the New Zealand Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Research and Science, the European Commission, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council. She is Senior Editor of Organization Studies.

Attendance at the seminar is free; please register in advance via llakesevents@ioe.ac.uk.