The Politics of competence: Views from around the Globe

Abstract

There has been little attempt to situate notions of competence historically or culturally and the definition of competence has not changed much once applied to different national workforce development policies. An international group of scholars examines this topic as one of the products of HRD research and practice and notes the need to recontextualize the construct of competence within social, political and cultural practices.     

“It’s a great benefit to have gray hair!”: The intersection of gender,aging, and visibility in midlife professional women’s narratives

Midlife professional women’s aging experiences, especially the experiences of changing physical appearance, are examined in this study. A discursive-narrative approach is used to analyze interviews of women working in senior professional and managerial jobs in Finland. The decline narrative is not enough to capture the experiences of these women; noticeable signs of aging can indeed have a positive connotation. After looking older and less attractive (in a stereotypical sense), women are no longer being subjected to a sexualized gaze and are taken more seriously. Aging opens up possibilities for “doing” gender differently and transcending rigid gender dichotomies and relationships.     

Developmental leisure: why work-related learning takes place outside of working hours

This study is interested in why many professionals engage in work-related learning after formal working hours. It has been argued that in knowledge-intensive work the work/leisure boundaries are blurring. Similarly, the line between work-related and non-work-related learning is harder to draw. In this study, an innovative concept of ‘developmental leisure’ will be introduced and explored. The concept refers to a human resource development (HRD) discourse that makes possible the evaluation of leisure in terms of its benefit to work-related learning. The study investigates how leisure intertwines with HRD and how it is positioned discursively in relation to work-related learning. The analysis is based on life stories from information technology professionals working in a large international organization. The findings of the analysis show that when leisure is discussed within the HRD discourse, it is positioned as a resource for work-related learning. Much of the learning outside of work intertwines with the objectives of HRD and learning at leisure becomes synonymous to learning for work.