ANZCA09 Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship. Brisbane, July 2009 Are New Zealand managers getting less literate and, if so, should we care? Frank Sligo Massey University F.Sligo@massey.ac.nz Frank Sligo is the Head of the Department of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University, Wellington and Manawatu, and programme leader of Massey’s Adult Learning and Literacy Research Group. The Group has produced a longitudinal and interconnected series of studies into literacies in organisational and community settings, including health literacies and functional literacies at work. This research has been funded by the NZ Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Health Research Council, the Ministry of Health, the Tertiary Education Commission, and the Department of Labour. Abstract According to the ALL (Adult Literacy and Life Skills) survey, New Zealand managers’ literacy competencies fell substantially in the ten years 1996 to 2006. This may undermine national aspirations that New Zealand managers should be able to succeed in what is usually described as the competitive, knowledge-based international economy of the future, where sophisticated, creative capabilities in the workplace are increasingly deemed necessary. Persisting skill shortages may have brought into managerial ranks people with less than desirable education for management work, while high demands on managers’ time often make it difficult or impractical for them to upgrade their functional literacy. However, a strong challenge to surveys like ALL comes from situated learning literacy researchers, who reject the cognitively-based theories of learning on which such surveys are based, insisting that literacies can be understood only within grounded contexts. This paper attempts to assess the implications of the particular nature of managerial work for literacy learning.. Insights from situated learning research will remain critical in revealing barriers and conduits to improved managerial literacy, but, in our view, surveys like ALL also provide some valid and complementary ways of exploring the state of managerial literacy. For research into literacy to progress, this paper argues that the impasse between situated learning and cognitive/ policy theory must be resolved, permitting learners’ and their teachers’ aspirations for strengthened functional literacy to be supported by inspirational and consensual literacy theory. Keywords literacy, literacies, managerial literacy, Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey ANZCA09 Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca09.org 173