Developing vocational practice in the jewelry sector through the incubation of a new ‘project-object’

sought to develop an intermediate position between the ‘gradualistic’ and ‘radical’
perspectives on workplace learning. The cornerstone of our approach is the way in which
we have used the notion of the project-object as a unit of analysis to identify the individual
and organizational contribution to workplace learning.

This has allowed us to first, reveal the epistemic basis of vocational practices. The
conventional conception of epistemic is the production of foundational knowledge within a
disciplinary field in science or in the humanities, thus, restricting epistemic practice to
those fields (Toulmin, 1972). The idea that the formulation and instantiation of a new
artifact is a knowledge-based process introduces a rather different sense of epistemic
compared with the traditional conception. One way of understanding this new conception is
to turn to Knorr Cetina’s (1999; 2001) argument about the spread of ‘epistemic cultures’ in
advanced industrial societies. Knorr Cetina maintains that scientists’ knowledge generating
practices, for example, the accumulation, verification and distribution of knowledge to
remediate practice are becoming a constitutive feature of other professions. Thus, from her
perspective, in those occupations and organizations which have a significant knowledge
base:

one would expect practitioners to have to keep learning, and the specialists who develop the knowledge base
to continually reinvent their own practices of acquiring knowledge, Practice, in this case, would seem to take
on a wholly different set of meanings and raise a different set off questions from the ones raised by habitual
activities (Knorr Cetina, 2001, p. 175).

Thus in this new context, the concept looses its strong teleological and foundational
connotations, yet retains many of the features of knowledge-generation that have
traditionally been associated with science, for example, a concern for the development of
practice based on the spread of research-based methods of inquiry and research-based
partnerships. In a nutshell, her argument is that those vocational practices which have an
explicit knowledge base and are a part of a well defined field have a stronger epistemic root
compared with those practices which are not characterized by such features and, moreover,
that this root constitutes a key resource for their continuing development³.

This conception of epistemic has allowed us to reveal the way in which the practices that
Kate introduced Shona provided her with a resource that enabled her to not only formulate
ideas and designs more effectively for a new range of jewelry for M&M, but also to
appreciate the changing position of the jewelry industry within the creative and cultural
sector. In the case of the former, Shona used the moodboards to reposition her in relation to
the project-object. Instead of trying to self-generate designs by relying on her imagination,
Shona injected a more explicit research-based dimension into her working methods so as to
identify emerging fashion trends and to consider their implications for jewelry designs. The

³ I would like to thank Reijo Miettinen, my discussant at a symposium on ‘epistemic practice’ at the
Vth Nordic Socio-Cultural Activity Theory Conference, Oslo, 2007, for pointing out the problems of
not fully clarifying the way in which the term epistemic practice was being deployed in a paper that
I gave at the conference.

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