Description: This book explores the hidden world of everyday learning in the lives of manufacturing workers from a social perspective. It challenges the myth that everyday learning, despite its apparent openness and freedom, can be understood as class-neutral. Based on life-history interviews, selected ethnographic observations in homes and factories, and large-scale survey materials as well as the microanalysis of human-computer interaction, the analysis follows learning across the spheres of "working-class life" and draws on the author's personal experiences as a factory worker and academic.
Review Quotes: "Sawchuk is able to detect subtle strategies used by workers to increase their own store of cultural capital at the employers' expense. His analysis also succeeds at relating the concerns of Marxists with relations of production to those of postmodernists focused on identity formation and cultural appropriation. The result is a new set of perspectives on the relationships suggested in the title, and a new appreciation of the complexity of those relationships." American Journal of Sociology