SOCIO-POLITICAL AND SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

From a socio-political perspective we have to attest that all post-industrial societies have seen a dramatic shift towards more symbolically mediated and information driven work processes. We can observe a general increase of "constructive" or "design"-practices that focus on the production of artefacts in the ongoing work process. Architects produce technical drawings and sketches, psychologists create diagnostic reports or treatment plans, programmers develop new prototypes, and so forth. What all these activities have in common is an evolutionary design- and development process that inevitably produces challenges and demands for change and "learning" on a regular basis. The progression of such design- and development processes is generally hard to predict, since goals and strategies often have to be changed and expectations have to be adjusted. Authentic challenges and tasks often require collaboration, communication, acting under (at least partial) uncertainty, and an overall working style that has been described as bricolage (J. S. Brown, 1999). Bricolage refers to the localisation, selection and combination of artefacts and objects (things, tools, documents, programme-code, etc) in a novel context. Beyond accessible artefacts, the systematic integration of other people and what they know and are able to do (see e.g. the work on distributed cognition by Hutchins, 1991, Hutchins,1995), becomes a core component for successful problem solutions in information-intensive work settings.

Thus, in numerous work and life settings new important "areas of challenge" emerge. Many people, for example, find themselves increasingly operating in distributed and technologically mediated environments. They need to build up viable dispositions for collaborating, self-directing (intentional change projects), and social-networking successfully within these environments, while making use of new potentials for mediated action on one hand, and compensating the limitations and constraints of such a mediated form of (interaction on the other. Some scholars, particularly in the area of vocational education, have acknowledged this trend. Their conceptualisation of competence, for example, explicitly emphasises the role of dispositions such as orientations, values, and volitional aspects for (self-organising) action that can be successful in situations that carry a high level of uncertainty and complexity (Erpenbeck & Heyse, 1999; Heyse et al., 2002). Thus, these scholars try to shift our focus away from dispositions such as factual knowledge and procedural skills that made up the core of the old concept of "qualification". Of course, factual knowledge and procedural skills are necessary dispositions in all contexts, but they are not sufficient to act successfully in many authentic problem situations. They might offer a starting point and some guidance but certainly not a straight solution in many areas of life and work.