Homogenization through Social Integration

This chapter produces a socio-cultural critique of the ‘social integration’ workplace e-learning scenario to homogenize the workforce through organizational communications; workplace design and organizational development; recruitment, rewards, and retention; and, learning and knowledge management. Workplace e-learning for workplace adult education and training, as a result of the normalization of skills and competencies and the commodification of knowledges, becomes progressively more homogenized. This leads to an increasingly socially integrated workplace. The socio-cultural impacts are understood through the homogenization of the modes and media of workplace e-learning. An exploratory case study considers some of the socially integrationist repercussions of this homogenizing trend in workplace e-learning for workplace adult education and training. The modes of learning are becoming more homogenized through policies, value chains, and business processes. The media of learning are becoming more homogenized through workplace e-learning artefactual foci. Socio-cultural insensitivity from workplace e-learning, in this scenario, comes from the basic, unquestioned assumption that workers are essentially socially flawed and culturally inferior; accountable for overcoming their socio-cultural flaws and inferiorities; and, need to be homogenized by workplace e-learning, through communications, design, recruitment, and learning, to meet the expectations of the infallible and commodified workplace. Social integration by workplace e-learning happens through the application of homogenizing modes and media towards organizational communications; workplace design and organizational development; recruitment and retention; and, learning and knowledge-building, to socially integrate the workforce for a knowledge-based workplace. Social integration, as an analytical metaphor for workplace e-learning, also reveals and exposes some of the unseen, conformist, and persuasive, outcomes that inexorably lead towards pedagogies of workforce alienation and contingency.