Abstract
Ph.D. (Higher Education Studies)
Employee learning has of late become a strategic imperative for both individual organisations and countries. The reasons for this include the role of learning in employee professional growth; job and customer satisfaction as well as the need to enable employees to cope with technological advancements. This has given rise to the question as to how best employee learning can be practised. Attendant to this is the question as to the culture that should characterise such learning which, as pointed out by Garvin, Edmondson and Gino, (2008) is an area in which there is a dearth of studies as publications in most refereed journals, for example, take a generalist approach to either human resource management or adult learning. In addition, as Harrison (2009) points out, this is an area characterised by fluidity of perspectives and thus continuous search for new knowledge.
Approaches to employee learning since the 1960’s have largely been premised on Human Capital Theory (HCT) whose main thesis is that investing in human beings guarantees an improvement in production as well as the economic benefits that accrue to them, the organisations which they work for and, ultimately, their countries. The suggestions in HCT and its related theories have several implications for the culture of employee learning. One of these is that its attendant culture is linear as it is solely dependent on government and or employer’s employee learning initiatives, on one hand, and the employees’ responses to such initiatives, on the other.
In spite of their appeal, some of the proposals in HCT began to be questioned as early as the 1970’s especially because of evidence that brought to question the link between education, on one hand, and higher earnings for individuals and economic prosperity for nations, on the other (Bowles and Gintis, 1975; Tyack, 1974; Vally and Motala, 2014)...