247 S. Billett, T. Fenwick and M. Somerville (eds.), Work, Subjectivity and Learning, 247–265. © 2006 Springer. 15 Work, Subjectivity and Learning: Prospects and Issues Tara Fenwick and Margaret Somerville Work communities are powerful sites of identity, practices and knowledge systems in which individual workers’ desires for recognition, competence, participation and meaning are imbricated. In the new times of increased flexibility and rapid transmission of information, people and capital through globalised networks, worker subjectivity arguably has become a primary target of work learning to ensure organisational survival. The re- searchers contributing to this volume have explored how particular subjec- tivities are constituted among these varied coordinates, and how learning processes are implicated in individuals’ subjections, negotiations, asser- tions and shifts of subjectivity. Butler (1992:13) maintains that the ‘subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process’. In this possibility, in this ongoing constitution, lies the agency of the subject. Subjects are intertwined with the social practice of work in which they participate and from which they learn, reflecting a complex interaction between subjects’ sense of knowledge, agency and de- sire with their immersion in cultural images, invocations and social activi- ties that bring forth practices of subjectivity. These shape how people en- gage with and make sense of what they experience and perform socially. But clearly, subjects participate in their own constitution in psychic, social and material ways, raising questions about the precise nature of agency and the possibilities of freedom. Thus there are diverse perspectives of this subjectivation process and its centrality to the processes of learning throughout working life. Some authors in this book view subjectivity as formation of an autono- mous identity or sense of self, and propose a direct role for individual agency and intentionality in work and learning. Others view the subject as derived from and articulated in participation and learning through practices, shaped by particular spatial-temporal arrangements of work- places. Some view agency as a product or effect of discourses intersecting