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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Provides an innovative way of examining the dynamics of identity in contemporary organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of “learning” through what we have termed “integrated development practices”. These are common organisational practices that both enhance organisational effectiveness and contribute to organisational and employee learning.

The paper analyses the ways in which learning and being a learner were talked about and enacted with regard to one of the integrated development practices identified in a study of four different organisations – safety practices, and how learning and being a learner regarding safety were legitimate in one of the organisations. Data are drawn from semi‐structured interviews with members of a variety of workgroups in one major division of the organisation.

Interviewees' responses reflected that learning was fully embedded as an accepted part of a necessary function of the organisation. This use of a learning discourse is discussed in the light of findings from an earlier study on informal learning at work that suggested that learning and the identity of being a learner were sometimes resisted in the everyday culture of work.

Using the theorisations of practice of Schatzki and the lifelong education framework of Delors the paper discusses the implications of these findings to examine when it is acceptable to articulate learning as part of work and be identified as a learner at work.

The purpose of this paper is to critically scrutinize the use of training interventions as a means of implementing corporate culture change and to assess the implications of such programs for employee identity.

The paper uses empirical materials, observations and reflections from a two‐year ethnographic study in a manufacturing firm to discuss the organization's “core values” with specific attention directed to a particular organizational event – the running of a training program designed to educate the firms employees in the company's newly designed culture.

The contested interaction between formally articulated corporate culture and the workplace experience of the employees is shown to demonstrate how cultural change programs can work to suppress employee's dissent and dialogue whilst being articulated in a language of inclusiveness and involvement.

The paper provides a review of the complex and paradoxical implications of cultural change programs that would be of use to managers, management consultants and human resource development professionals involved in implementing cultural change.

The paper examines organizational culture through detailed ethnographic study with a particular focus on the problematics of how training is used as a technology for cultural change.