This paper offers an account of a methodological approach to understanding and developing learning that has been successfully used in a research project on mathematical skills in workplaces. The approach is based on the concept of articulation work, which is concerned with the processes of coordination and integration by which different social worlds intersect and negotiations take place between them, and the role of symbolic boundary objects as mediators for negotiation

Kent, Phillip

English

Institute of Education EPrints

In the Workplace: Learning as Articulation Work, and  
Doing Articulation Work to Understand Learning 
Phillip Kent 
London Knowledge Lab and WLE Centre, Institute of Education, University of London 
p.kent@ioe.ac.uk 
 
Abstract  
This paper offers an account of a methodological approach to understanding and developing learning 
that has been successfully used in a research project on mathematical skills in workplaces. The 
approach is based on the concept of articulation work, which is concerned with the processes of 
coordination and integration by which different social worlds intersect and negotiations take place 
between them, and the role of symbolic boundary objects as mediators for negotiation. 
 
1. Introduction 
This paper is a work-in-progress which involves using the concept of articulation work in the 
development of a methodological framework that builds on the results of a project which investigated 
mathematical skills in workplaces, and developed novel forms of learning interventions to support 
employees in developing new skills. 
The concept of articulation work was developed by the sociologist, Anselm Strauss (1993), to 
account for the under-valued and often “invisible” forms of work (particularly, for him, the work of 
women at home and at work) which are nevertheless critical to the completion of tasks in everyday 
life, or in workplaces. In Strauss’ terms (cf. Hampson & Junor, 2005; Suchman, 1996), articulation 
work is the coordination and integration that must go on such that organisational arrangements 
between the “social worlds” inhabited by people are established, maintained and revised. Strauss 
(1993, p. 212) defines a social world in terms of there being a primary activity (or more than one); 
sites where the activity occurs; technology that is involved; and organisations that evolve to further 
one or more aspects of the world’s activity. Here “organisations” refers to both formal organisational 
structures of, say, a workplace, but also the informal structures that evolve amongst employees to 
maintain the practice
1
. “Interactional” processes are central to articulation work, including 
negotiating, compromising and educating. Social worlds intersect along “fluid boundaries” which are 
continually negotiated, and I am particularly interested in the technological and mathematical 
artefacts through which these boundary negotiations take place. 
                                                          
1
 There are similarities here to the “cultural-historical activity theory” approach, which we have used in previous 
writings (Kent et al, 2007; Bakker et al, 2006). In order to keep my thread of argument simple, I will not discuss these 
similarities in this short paper. (Cf. also Fjuk, Nurminen, and Smordal, 1997.) 
In research on mathematical skills in workplaces, my colleagues and I
2
 were interested in the role of 
mathematical skills in a range of workplace types, one of which was customer service call centres for 
financial services companies, which were providers of pension, investment and mortgage products 
direct to customers (Kent, Noss, Guile, Hoyles, & Bakker, 2007). Articulation work is central to this 
work, since it is all about the employee’s ability to articulate between the informational needs of the 
customer and the IT-based information systems which hold the customer and product information. 
We found that the articulation work of customer services was very often compromised by a lack of 
mathematical understanding on the part of employees; indeed, their roles had generally been setup not 
to require such understanding. This is perhaps not surprising, given the shortage of mathematical 
skills in the labour market, and the wage premium employers must pay to obtain them. Thus, among 
the social worlds within a company which interact around the IT system, there has been an intentional 
system design on the part of managers and financial-mathematical experts such that the mathematical 
models and relationships used for the calculations within the IT system have been made to be 
invisible, except to those expert employees. 
Why should this matter for companies? The informational needs and expectations of customers are 
changing; customers want to know more, and this puts a pressure on customer service employees to 
explain more, which challenges the mathematical understanding of both employee and customer. An 
example of lack of understanding that we observed involved pension customers seeking information 
about the annual pension statement which had been sent to them, which contained a projected value 
of their pension at the point of retirement (see Figure 1). The projection was based on a mathematical 
calculation (compound interest) that was unknown to the employees; thus they could only provide 
scripted responses to customer questions (likely not to satisfy the customer), or pass the customer 
query on to technical departments (an expensive exercise for the company). 
Our research involved trying to find means of developing employee understanding of some of the 
mathematical calculations that featured in the IT systems they worked with. They reported dis-
satisfaction in that they perceived calculations as “just magic”, and we wanted to replace such 
perceptions with a solid (although necessarily limited) understanding of what was happening. A need 
for informal learning presented itself: informal in the sense of being unlike (formal) school maths 
(any attempt to introduce this would alienate most employees, and fail to take account of the 
complexities of the workplace context), and drawing on employees’ personal experiences and 
understandings. Informal, also, in that our time with the employees could only be very short, thus we 
wanted to offer tools and ideas to the employees which would allow them informally to work on 
changing their own practice. 
The key to this approach to mathematical learning is to make use of the “symbolic boundary objects” 
that form part of practice, that is, the graphs and numerical tables that are the inputs and outputs of 
the IT systems. Figure 1 shows an example of a pension statement that proves problematic for 
communication between employee and customer. 
                                                          
2
 Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace project, 2003 – 2007. See www.lkl.ac.uk/technomaths. 
 Figure 1: A simple example of a pension statement “symbolic boundary object”. 
We generally sought to adapt and modify boundary objects for the specific purposes of learning, 
incorporating them within software-based mathematical learning tools and simulations which we 
designed. In this case, an appropriate mathematical software tool was a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel) 
which is ideal for the construction of tabular data, and it allows users to do algebraic constructions 
through the use of “point and click” formulae, so that explicit algebraic language may be avoided (but 
it is there if users wish to look for it), and moreover the spreadsheet will do the work of carrying 
through the algebraic manipulations and calculations for particular numbers. Thus in dealing with 
pension statements, we asked employees to re-construct a pension statement such as Figure 1 in a 
spreadsheet, starting with the most simple case and then building in additional details (e.g., 
management charges of various forms). An additional advantage of the spreadsheet is that it is 
software which most employees have access to on their own computers, and already use in the most 
basic fashion for consulting information. Thus we could hope that employees might take on board the 
ideas we showed them for re-thinking their understanding of mathematics in their routine practices. 
2. Learning as articulation work 
If work is interpreted as articulation work, then attempting to extend the capabilities of employees 
through learning interventions can be seen as an exercise in articulation work in which employees 
attempt to integrate the results of learning into their existing practices. We thus came to use 
articulation work in three connected ways: 
 as an analytical description of how mathematical knowledge and skills become integrated 
within working practices; 
 as a principle for the design of software-based mathematical tools to support learning in 
workplaces; and 
 as a methodological principle for conducting workplace research which may probe into the 
nature of mathematical learning “in context”. 
Symbolic boundary objects and their mediation of articulation work play a central coordinating role 
among all three ways. The third way implies that we as researchers are also doing articulation work, 
as we bring our social world into intersection with the social worlds of the workplace. In some sense, 
it is obvious that researchers must do this, but I would like to stress how necessary we found it to 
think of ourselves in this way, adopting the position of co-developers and co-teachers with company 
trainers and technical experts, rather than as outside educational experts who (“objectively”) observe 
the situation and deliver a learning “solution”.  
A telling example of this occurred when we opened our learning sessions with the following short 
exercise:  
Geoff and Susan book themselves a “last minute” long weekend break in New York City. Going into 
shops, they find it a bit confusing that all prices are given without “sales tax” added, and then a sales tax 
of 8% is added when they pay at the till. 
In one electronics shop, they find a special offer of all digital cameras with 15% discount. They decide to 
buy a camera which has an original (pre-discount) price of $250. At the till, the shop assistant takes 15% 
discount from the original price and then adds the sales tax.  
Geoff is not happy with this and complains to the manager: he thinks the assistant should add the sales tax 
first, and then take off 15%, because that way he will get a bigger discount. 
Who is right - Geoff or the manager - and why?  
A common employee response to this question was to insist that only one way could be legally 
correct, an interpretation that simply did not occur to us in designing the exercise: “The 8% tax has to 
be on the price paid, so the customer is not right.” In our reading of the exercise, we looked through 
the hypothetical context to what mattered to us, the mathematical relationships involved, and 
understanding Geoff’s situation in mathematical terms. This shows that the “why” of the context is as 
crucial as the “what”, and that “mathematical experts” should not expect to understand what matters 
mathematically in the context, without doing the detailed articulation work of negotiation with the 
social worlds of the context. And I think it is appropriate to call this articulation work, because 
researching in workplaces really did involve for us a continual negotiation and a very gradual, 
emergent coming-to-understand of the context. 
3. Conclusions 
In summary, the research described here typically involved looking for workplace situations where 
there are “intended” boundary objects, through which sharing and communicating about knowledge 
are intended to happen, but fail to happen because of a lack of knowledge in one or more of the 
communities involved, or an effective means of mediating the knowledge for all. In such cases, we 
worked on learning interventions which aimed to introduce new boundary objects which: (1) helped 
us initially to learn about the nature of the (mathematical) knowledge in the situation, and (2) were 
intended to “repair” the flaws in the situation by introducing new software-based forms of mediation 
for the (mathematical) knowledge. 
I will conclude with a few points about how the methodology described in this paper may have wider 
relevance for research on informal learning. The articulation work and boundary object approach has 
strengths in the following ways: 
 to make visible what is ordinarily invisible – both to employees/learners and to researchers of 
learning, which is particularly important for domains of technical knowledge which the 
development of IT systems tends to render invisible; by introducing a designed symbolic 
boundary object, you create a need for the employee to externalise their knowledge and 
understanding; 
 looking for changes in practice over medium-term timescales as evidence of learning – as the 
learner seeks to integrate boundary objects with their existing practice; 
 to seek long-term sustainability of learning interventions, by engaging companies and 
organisations in a way that encourages them to take control of what begins as a researcher-led 
intervention. 
What I particularly like about this approach is that there is a continuous, coherent flow from initial 
observation of workplace practice around symbolic boundary objects, to the design of boundary 
objects which “capture” the mathematical concepts at issue in the practice, testing these through 
learning interventions, towards the sustainable introduction of the tools and ideas into workplace 
training and practice. 
Acknowledgements 
The research work reported here was part of the “Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace” 
project, 2003–2007, funded by the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme 
[www.tlrp.org], Award Number L139-25-0119. The contributions of my project colleagues, Arthur 
Bakker, Celia Hoyles, and Richard Noss, to the development of the ideas presented in this paper are 
gratefully acknowledged. 
References 
Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P., & Noss, R. (2006). Improving work processes by making the 
invisible visible. Journal of Education and Work, 19(4), 343–361. 
Fjuk, A., Nurminen, M. I., and Smordal, O. (1997). Taking articulation work seriously – an activity 
theoretical approach. Technical report, Turku Centre for Computer Science, Finland.  
Download: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~ftp/publications/others/OSmordal-5.pdf  
Hampson, I. & Junor, A. (2005). Invisible work, invisible skills: Interactive customer service as 
articulation work. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20(2), 166 – 181. 
Kent, P., Noss, R., Guile, D., Hoyles, C., & Bakker, A (2007). Characterising the use of mathematical 
knowledge in boundary crossing situations at work. Mind, Culture, and Activity 14(1&2), 64–
82. 
Strauss, A.L. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine De Guyter. 
Suchman, L. (1996). Supporting articulation work. In R. Kling (Ed.), Computerization and 
controversy (2nd edition): Value conflicts and social choices. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. 
Pages 407-423. 
 
 
 


Continual Permutations of Action.

Improving work processes by making the invisible visible.

Supporting articulation work. In

Taking articulation work seriously – an activity theoretical approach.

In the workplace: learning as articulation work, and doing articulation work to understand learning

UCL Discovery

In the Workplace: Learning as Articulation Work, and  Doing Articulation Work to Understand Learning Phillip Kent London Knowledge Lab and WLE Centre, Institute of Education, University of London p.kent@ioe.ac.uk  Abstract  This paper offers an account of a methodological approach to understanding and developing learning that has been successfully used in a research project on mathematical skills in workplaces. The approach is based on the concept of articulation work, which is concerned with the processes of coordination and integration by which different social worlds intersect and negotiations take place between them, and the role of symbolic boundary objects as mediators for negotiation.  1. Introduction This paper is a work-in-progress which involves using the concept of articulation work in the development of a methodological framework that builds on the results of a project which investigated mathematical skills in workplaces, and developed novel forms of learning interventions to support employees in developing new skills. The concept of articulation work was developed by the sociologist, Anselm Strauss (1993), to account for the under-valued and often “invisible” forms of work (particularly, for him, the work of women at home and at work) which are nevertheless critical to the completion of tasks in everyday life, or in workplaces. In Strauss’ terms (cf. Hampson & Junor, 2005; Suchman, 1996), articulation work is the coordination and integration that must go on such that organisational arrangements between the “social worlds” inhabited by people are established, maintained and revised. Strauss (1993, p. 212) defines a social world in terms of there being a primary activity (or more than one); sites where the activity occurs; technology that is involved; and organisations that evolve to further one or more aspects of the world’s activity. Here “organisations” refers to both formal organisational structures of, say, a workplace, but also the informal structures that evolve amongst employees to maintain the practice1. “Interactional” processes are central to articulation work, including negotiating, compromising and educating. Social worlds intersect along “fluid boundaries” which are continually negotiated, and I am particularly interested in the technological and mathematical artefacts through which these boundary negotiations take place.                                                           1 There are similarities here to the “cultural-historical activity theory” approach, which we have used in previous writings (Kent et al, 2007; Bakker et al, 2006). In order to keep my thread of argument simple, I will not discuss these similarities in this short paper. (Cf. also Fjuk, Nurminen, and Smordal, 1997.) In research on mathematical skills in workplaces, my colleagues and I2 were interested in the role of mathematical skills in a range of workplace types, one of which was customer service call centres for financial services companies, which were providers of pension, investment and mortgage products direct to customers (Kent, Noss, Guile, Hoyles, & Bakker, 2007). Articulation work is central to this work, since it is all about the employee’s ability to articulate between the informational needs of the customer and the IT-based information systems which hold the customer and product information. We found that the articulation work of customer services was very often compromised by a lack of mathematical understanding on the part of employees; indeed, their roles had generally been setup not to require such understanding. This is perhaps not surprising, given the shortage of mathematical skills in the labour market, and the wage premium employers must pay to obtain them. Thus, among the social worlds within a company which interact around the IT system, there has been an intentional system design on the part of managers and financial-mathematical experts such that the mathematical models and relationships used for the calculations within the IT system have been made to be invisible, except to those expert employees. Why should this matter for companies? The informational needs and expectations of customers are changing; customers want to know more, and this puts a pressure on customer service employees to explain more, which challenges the mathematical understanding of both employee and customer. An example of lack of understanding that we observed involved pension customers seeking information about the annual pension statement which had been sent to them, which contained a projected value of their pension at the point of retirement (see Figure 1). The projection was based on a mathematical calculation (compound interest) that was unknown to the employees; thus they could only provide scripted responses to customer questions (likely not to satisfy the customer), or pass the customer query on to technical departments (an expensive exercise for the company). Our research involved trying to find means of developing employee understanding of some of the mathematical calculations that featured in the IT systems they worked with. They reported dis-satisfaction in that they perceived calculations as “just magic”, and we wanted to replace such perceptions with a solid (although necessarily limited) understanding of what was happening. A need for informal learning presented itself: informal in the sense of being unlike (formal) school maths (any attempt to introduce this would alienate most employees, and fail to take account of the complexities of the workplace context), and drawing on employees’ personal experiences and understandings. Informal, also, in that our time with the employees could only be very short, thus we wanted to offer tools and ideas to the employees which would allow them informally to work on changing their own practice. The key to this approach to mathematical learning is to make use of the “symbolic boundary objects” that form part of practice, that is, the graphs and numerical tables that are the inputs and outputs of the IT systems. Figure 1 shows an example of a pension statement that proves problematic for communication between employee and customer.                                                           2 Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace project, 2003 – 2007. See www.lkl.ac.uk/technomaths.  Figure 1: A simple example of a pension statement “symbolic boundary object”. We generally sought to adapt and modify boundary objects for the specific purposes of learning, incorporating them within software-based mathematical learning tools and simulations which we designed. In this case, an appropriate mathematical software tool was a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel) which is ideal for the construction of tabular data, and it allows users to do algebraic constructions through the use of “point and click” formulae, so that explicit algebraic language may be avoided (but it is there if users wish to look for it), and moreover the spreadsheet will do the work of carrying through the algebraic manipulations and calculations for particular numbers. Thus in dealing with pension statements, we asked employees to re-construct a pension statement such as Figure 1 in a spreadsheet, starting with the most simple case and then building in additional details (e.g., management charges of various forms). An additional advantage of the spreadsheet is that it is software which most employees have access to on their own computers, and already use in the most basic fashion for consulting information. Thus we could hope that employees might take on board the ideas we showed them for re-thinking their understanding of mathematics in their routine practices. 2. Learning as articulation work If work is interpreted as articulation work, then attempting to extend the capabilities of employees through learning interventions can be seen as an exercise in articulation work in which employees attempt to integrate the results of learning into their existing practices. We thus came to use articulation work in three connected ways:  as an analytical description of how mathematical knowledge and skills become integrated within working practices;  as a principle for the design of software-based mathematical tools to support learning in workplaces; and  as a methodological principle for conducting workplace research which may probe into the nature of mathematical learning “in context”. Symbolic boundary objects and their mediation of articulation work play a central coordinating role among all three ways. The third way implies that we as researchers are also doing articulation work, as we bring our social world into intersection with the social worlds of the workplace. In some sense, it is obvious that researchers must do this, but I would like to stress how necessary we found it to think of ourselves in this way, adopting the position of co-developers and co-teachers with company trainers and technical experts, rather than as outside educational experts who (“objectively”) observe the situation and deliver a learning “solution”.  A telling example of this occurred when we opened our learning sessions with the following short exercise:  Geoff and Susan book themselves a “last minute” long weekend break in New York City. Going into shops, they find it a bit confusing that all prices are given without “sales tax” added, and then a sales tax of 8% is added when they pay at the till. In one electronics shop, they find a special offer of all digital cameras with 15% discount. They decide to buy a camera which has an original (pre-discount) price of $250. At the till, the shop assistant takes 15% discount from the original price and then adds the sales tax.  Geoff is not happy with this and complains to the manager: he thinks the assistant should add the sales tax first, and then take off 15%, because that way he will get a bigger discount. Who is right - Geoff or the manager - and why?  A common employee response to this question was to insist that only one way could be legally correct, an interpretation that simply did not occur to us in designing the exercise: “The 8% tax has to be on the price paid, so the customer is not right.” In our reading of the exercise, we looked through the hypothetical context to what mattered to us, the mathematical relationships involved, and understanding Geoff’s situation in mathematical terms. This shows that the “why” of the context is as crucial as the “what”, and that “mathematical experts” should not expect to understand what matters mathematically in the context, without doing the detailed articulation work of negotiation with the social worlds of the context. And I think it is appropriate to call this articulation work, because researching in workplaces really did involve for us a continual negotiation and a very gradual, emergent coming-to-understand of the context. 3. Conclusions In summary, the research described here typically involved looking for workplace situations where there are “intended” boundary objects, through which sharing and communicating about knowledge are intended to happen, but fail to happen because of a lack of knowledge in one or more of the communities involved, or an effective means of mediating the knowledge for all. In such cases, we worked on learning interventions which aimed to introduce new boundary objects which: (1) helped us initially to learn about the nature of the (mathematical) knowledge in the situation, and (2) were intended to “repair” the flaws in the situation by introducing new software-based forms of mediation for the (mathematical) knowledge. I will conclude with a few points about how the methodology described in this paper may have wider relevance for research on informal learning. The articulation work and boundary object approach has strengths in the following ways:  to make visible what is ordinarily invisible – both to employees/learners and to researchers of learning, which is particularly important for domains of technical knowledge which the development of IT systems tends to render invisible; by introducing a designed symbolic boundary object, you create a need for the employee to externalise their knowledge and understanding;  looking for changes in practice over medium-term timescales as evidence of learning – as the learner seeks to integrate boundary objects with their existing practice;  to seek long-term sustainability of learning interventions, by engaging companies and organisations in a way that encourages them to take control of what begins as a researcher-led intervention. What I particularly like about this approach is that there is a continuous, coherent flow from initial observation of workplace practice around symbolic boundary objects, to the design of boundary objects which “capture” the mathematical concepts at issue in the practice, testing these through learning interventions, towards the sustainable introduction of the tools and ideas into workplace training and practice. Acknowledgements The research work reported here was part of the “Techno-mathematical Literacies in the Workplace” project, 2003–2007, funded by the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme [www.tlrp.org], Award Number L139-25-0119. The contributions of my project colleagues, Arthur Bakker, Celia Hoyles, and Richard Noss, to the development of the ideas presented in this paper are gratefully acknowledged. References Bakker, A., Hoyles, C., Kent, P., & Noss, R. (2006). Improving work processes by making the invisible visible. Journal of Education and Work, 19(4), 343–361. Fjuk, A., Nurminen, M. I., and Smordal, O. (1997). Taking articulation work seriously – an activity theoretical approach. Technical report, Turku Centre for Computer Science, Finland.  Download: http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~ftp/publications/others/OSmordal-5.pdf  Hampson, I. & Junor, A. (2005). Invisible work, invisible skills: Interactive customer service as articulation work. New Technology, Work and Employment, 20(2), 166 – 181. Kent, P., Noss, R., Guile, D., Hoyles, C., & Bakker, A (2007). Characterising the use of mathematical knowledge in boundary crossing situations at work. Mind, Culture, and Activity 14(1&2), 64–82. Strauss, A.L. (1993). Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine De Guyter. Suchman, L. (1996). Supporting articulation work. In R. Kling (Ed.), Computerization and controversy (2nd edition): Value conflicts and social choices. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Pages 407-423.    

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In the workplace: learning as articulation work, and doing articulation work to understand learning

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