This chapter examines the approaches to cross-cultural training in the workplace, outlining the strengths, weaknesses and educational outcomes, and the view of language and culture underpinning each approach. From the mid-1980s cross-cultural training has diversified, and approaches have arisen that recognise this reality, with some programs focusing on migration movements and the consequent issues of social justice and equity that arise. The central concern of EEO and antidiscrimination training programs is that of access and equity in culturally and linguistically diverse workplaces and communities. The linguistic approach to cross-cultural communication training focuses explicitly on language. The psychological and interpersonal approach to cross-cultural training began in the USA in the 1980s. The productive diversity approach adopts a broad definition of culture, encompassing many of the features of the other approaches but focusing on the culture of the workplace. The content of the program focuses on case studies and people's own work and life experiences, allowing for reflection and comparison.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how workers experience planned and unplanned change(s), how the effects of change endure in organizations and the entanglement (Gherardi, 2015) of materiality, affect and learning. Design/methodology/approach Research design is ethnographic in nature and draws from 30 semi-structured interviews of workers in an Australian organization. Interviews were designed to elicit narrative accounts (stories) of challenges and change faced by the workers. Desktop research of organizational documents and material artefacts complemented interview data. Analysis is informed by socio-material understandings and, in particular, the ideas of materiality, affect and learning. Findings Change, in the form of a fire, triggered spontaneous and surprisingly positive affectual and organizational outcomes that exceeded earlier attempts at restructuring work. In the wake of the material tragedy of the fire in one organization, what emerged was a shift in the workers and the practices of the organization. Their accounts emphasized challenges, excitement and renewal, which prompt reconsideration of learning at work, in particular the entanglement of affect, materiality and learning in times of change. Originality/value Much workplace learning research identifies change as conducive to learning. This paper builds on this research by providing new understandings of, and insights into, the enduring effects of change.

This empirically driven paper is about workplace learning with specific focus on the ‘work’ of consuming practices. By consuming we refer to the eating, and the drinking, and (at times) to the smoking that workers, in most organisations, do on a daily basis. Indeed, it is the quotidian nature of consuming, coupled with its absence from workplace learning research that make them noteworthy practices to explore. In using the term practice we draw on the recent tranche of practice based theorisations: notably Schatzki (1996, Organization Studies, 26(3), 465-484, 2005, Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863-1873, 2006) and Gherardi (Human Relations, 54(1), 131-139, 2001, 2006, Learning Organization, 16(5), 352-359, 2009). The paper frames consuming practices as ‘dispersed’ (general) practices and, illustrated through empirical data from multiple projects, we progressively outline how these contribute to the learning of ‘integrative’ (specialized work) practices. Our overall aim is to (re)position consuming practices from prosaic, to having much relevance for research on workplace learning.

There is an increasing recognition internationally of the critical impact of communication within healthcare. The link between ineffective communication, patient dissatisfaction and critical incidents is well established. Family Planning New South Wales (FPNSW) has sought to address patient-centred care and communication in its policy platform. This article reports on research conducted within FPNSW, which analysed the discourse features that constituted effective doctor–patient1 communication in sexual and reproductive health consultations. The principal aim of the research was to understand how effectively messages were conveyed and received and to what degree patients were active participants in their own sexual healthcare. Analysed consultations were characterised by extremely high levels of communicative competence on the part of the doctors who integrated medical expertise with the development of interpersonal relationships with patients, thus positioning patients as active contributors to the consultations and to decisions about their ongoing treatment. The detailed linguistic analysis identified characteristic features of patient-centred communication that are essential to patient-centred care. These interactions demonstrate that communicating care is just as important as delivering care and involves a drawing together of the medical and the interpersonal in consultations. The article details strategies for interweaving medical knowledge and establishing rapport that can inform practitioner communication practices across different healthcare contexts.

This article presents a meta-disciplinary and institutional framework of practices used by nurses and doctors to manage the indeterminacy of knowing in emergency departments (EDs) in Australia. We draw on Schatzkian perspectives of how practices prevail and reflect particular site ontologies. We posit that nurses and doctors draw on a repertoire of practices to finesse their knowing at patients' bedsides: they practise knowing. Drawing on existing practice knowledges (old learnings) they tailor them in the ED (new workplace learnings). This suggests that learning (practices) in the ED is teleological and emergent. This alerts us to new ways of thinking about attachments to practice knowledges, or 'the teleological-affective structuring' of practices (Schatzki, 2006, Organization Studies, 27, 1864), and its implications for organizational learning.

In the new work order, more and more work is talk, and much of the new kinds of textual or discourse work that employees, including production line workers, are undertaking, is enacted during team meetings. Learning to be a team member involves learning to talk. This paper presents ethnographic and discourse data from a large, Australian manufacturing workplace to argue that central to the participatory practices of working in teams is the development of discursive networks of participation, constructed to elicit “bottom up” engagement with work‐related problems and issues, and produce offers of worker involvement, rather than relying on more traditional, “top down” management commands and control of workplace knowledge. In the case presented here, the team members are production line workers from different areas of the workplace and thus they hold, and (can) contribute, different kinds of knowledge to the team meetings. The developing discourses of offers and suggestions for improvements can be seen as producing self‐regulating (organisational) workers.

Purpose - To examine Hardt and Negri's discussions of immaterial labor in relation to personal identity and sociality at work in a context of the postmodernization of the global economy. Design/methodology/approach - Hardt and Negri's discussions of immaterial labor are reviewed in relation to their implications for social interaction and identity at work. Heidegger's idea of "presencing" is then used to examine the dynamic emergence of identity as an effect of the "affectualization" of work. Findings - Global trends towards an informationalized economy have profound implications for identity at work in that the dynamics of identity are foregrounded and managerial and organizational power structures that seek to define an essential worker identity are destabilized. Research limitations/implications - Suggests that research into identity at work should include a focus on the immaterial dimensions of work and should consider the implications of this for the dynamic emergence of identity and for future forms of organization and management. Practical implications - Suggests that the emergence of immaterial labor might provide increasing, albeit complex and contested, opportunities for worker participation, this is on what management relies, and what at the same time has the potential of undermining the legitimacy of management. Originality/value - Provides an innovative way of examining the dynamics of identity in contemporary organizations.

The current thesis is a case study of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in a Hong Kong school context. Its contributions are two-fold. Firstly, it is an empirical investigation of the actual implementation of TBLT, thereby contributing to the literature in this area. To date, the literature has focused on TBLT either as an effective syllabus or as a set of detailed methodology principles and activities (Bygate, Skehan & Swain, 2001; Candlin, 2001; Ellis, 2003; Johnson, 2003; Nunan, 2004, Willis & Willis, 2007). The significance of this thesis is, therefore, its empirical focus. Secondly, the original contribution of this thesis is its focus on the Hong Kong context, in particular, describing and critiquing the relationship between the Hong Kong curriculum framework and the perception and practice ofTBLT in a local secondary school. The subjects came from a government secondary school in Hong Kong. They included ten English teachers and 158 students. The data were collected through a triangulated approach comprising surveys, lesson observations and personal interviews. The findings indicate that both the teacher and student subjects generally had favourable attitudes towards TBLT. The findings also reflect significant discrepancies between the teachers' perceptions ofTBLT and their actual practices. Suggestions have been made to explain such discrepancies, for example, misconceptions of TBLT by teachers and poor learning motivation of students. This study also reveals that the school selected for the study lacked favourable conditions for the implementation ofTBLT. Not only does this study confirm the value of TBLT in a Hong Kong context, but it also enriches the literature by presenting an insider's perspective ofTBLT. Although the findings could conclude that TBLT is well received by both teachers and students, it was also found that teacher training for TBLT was insufficient and students were not well informed of their active role in the English language teaching and learning process. In

Focusing on the experiences of one 95-year-old patient, Jane Edna, this chapter uses a practice theory approach to investigate in situ ‘knowing-in-practice’ (Gherardi, Situated knowledge and situated action: what do practice-based studies promise? In Barry D, Hansen H (eds) The Sage handbook of new approaches in management and organization. Sage, Los Angeles, pp 516–525, 370, 2009b) in emergency health care. In particular, we discuss relationships between work, knowledge/knowing and learning through an examination of professional and interprofessional ‘doings and sayings’ (Schatzki, Organ Stud 27(12):1863–1873, 2006) by clinicians around the bedside of Jane Edna, who spends over 11 h in a busy Australian hospital emergency department (ED). We present and explore some of the ethnographic and spoken interactional data recorded between Jane Edna and her team of clinicians.We are primarily concerned with the practices and the potential for learning practices that the ED affords the junior doctor who directs Jane Edna’s care. The junior doctor’s ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘beings’ concentrate on applying biomedical scientific knowledge – practising medicine learned in vacuo – privileged within the institutional order (Sarangi and Roberts (eds), Talk, work and institutional order: discourse in medical, mediation and management settings. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, 1999) of the ED. We consider the interplay and consequences of differentially valued epistemologies (Cook and Brown, Organ Sci 10(4):381–400, 1999), in particular, the dominance of ‘organisational knowledge’ (knowledge possessed by individuals – here, high-status doctors). We discuss how ‘organisational knowing’ (the collective working/knowing of all the participants who care for Jane Edna including Jane Edna herself) and ‘knowing-in-practice’ (Gherardi, Learn Organ 16(5):352–359, 2009a) could be more explicitly foregrounded to help create the team-based models of care that are enshrined in twenty-first-century hospital policies.The chapter concludes with some implications for understanding practice and learning practice in organisations as doing knowledge together where knowledge is emergent and co-constructed in situ through language, actions, relationships and material arrangements.