Flexible learning, contemporary work and enterprising selves

Abstract

Flexibility has become a key metaphor. The contemporary learning situation is manifesting not only as a flexibility in learning but also as a flexibility of learning. A flexibility in terms of what is learnt and how it is learnt within a reconfiguration of traditional educational principles of disciplines-based curricula, texts, courses with fixed beginnings and ends, and face-to-face teaching. This is different to flexible learning where there is a sense of learning flexibility that points to the hidden curriculum of flexible learning. The authors argue that this hidden curriculum is concerned with the management of subjectivity in the workplace that is now seen as a site of learning. A site that offers new forms of organising production and work management as well as sites for shaping the subjectivity of the employees through the learning of key technologies.