Refers to work domains that might be termed professional or semi-professional: engineers, social workers, nurses, pedagogues, police, and researches the subjective engagement of the people in the development of their profession. Considers how to theorize the subjective side of work within a life history perspective and focuses on a critical discussion of the notion of professional identity. This theorizing is seen as a complementary contribution to a critical sociology of knowledge and other concepts of profession identity and learning.

Taking its point of departure from some critical remarks about some of the most important recent theorising of learning, this article presents an alternative framework for theorising learning as a subjective process in a social and societal context, based on life history research. The key concepts of subjectivity and experience, derived from European critical theory, are briefly introduced with respect to their intellectual background. Based on the author's research into the professional learning of general practitioners, the article outlines the implications of these concepts in relation to an understanding of emotional aspects of learning in everyday life and to an understanding of knowledge. The pivotal role of language use and language socialisation is explained in brief, and a psychodynamic complement to a language game concept of language use is developed.

RELA is a refereed academic journal produced by the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA). It aims to create a forum for dialogue across European adult education as a field of research. World wide contributions are welcomed which are deemed by the editors to further debate and discussions.

RELA is a refereed academic journal produced by the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA). It aims to create a forum for dialogue across European adult education as a field of research. World wide contributions are welcomed which are deemed by the editors to further debate and discussions.

Competence is a concept imported into the adult and continuing education arena from the psychological terminology of human resource development in work organizations. It has been elevated to a societal and political level as part of a new discursive regime. This article points out the significance of the particular circumstances in which the competence discourse has emerged, and argues for its critical investigation within a Marxist framework. A new discourse of learning and competence reflects a new material dependency of capital(ism) on the concrete quality of work and workers, requiring a total program of learning for work. This opens a new arena of political struggle over the direction of learning processes and the participation of workers in work and society. The socio-economic realities and new understanding of the interrelationship between knowledge, skills, learning and practice central to the competence concept, raises a potential issue about the role of work and the living worker in a capitalist economy. This requires a re-development of the notion of economy based in the value and interest of working people, and enabled by the full development of the competences of the workers themselves. A notion of the "political economy of working people" is proposed as a framework for investigating the potentials of competence development for enhanced democracy.

RELA is a refereed academic journal produced by the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA). It aims to create a forum for dialogue across European adult education as a field of research. World wide contributions are welcomed which are deemed by the editors to further debate and discussions.