This paper is about Sally, an enterprise-based teacher employed by a TAFE college. She is contracted to work in an organisation I will call AFM (Australian Fabric Manufacturers) under two Commonwealth Government funded programs, one concerned with English literacy provision and one concerned with the facilitation of team-based workplace organisation and team based learning. Although AFM pays some of her salary, she and her co-worker Mary are funded largely through these government programs.

Sally works on three sites at AFM. Most of the time she works at a large provincial city I will call Harbourside, but at other times she works at each of the two inner suburban factories. The major focus of her work is to get a cross functional action learning team running across the three sites, and to help that team establish a series of Eight Step problem solving teams. She also teaches computer skills to a couple of interested staff at Harbourside and, with her colleague Margaret, edits and produces, and largely writes, AFM's company newsletter.

In this paper I am interested in Sally's work as an enterprise-based teacher facilitating an Action Learning Team program. I focus on the way in which she, over an eight month period, and with the workers in the team, calls on a variety of narratives and counter narratives to question and reconstruct her own narrative about teaching and teachers' knowledge, and her own speaking part. I argue that there are competing narratives at work in the complex and fluid context in which she teaches 'team work', and that they shape what Sally knows, and what she does, and, indeed, what it is possible to know and to do. But, before I pursue that argument, I need to say something about AFM, something about texts, and something about the narratives that Sally uses as resources to construct her work practices, her working knowledges and her working identities.

Australian Fabric Manufacturers (AFM) produces automotive and industrial textiles and high performance fibres for local and global markets . The company was established over 60 years ago . It consisted originally of a single factory located in an industrial part of inner suburban Melbourne but, in the past ten years, it has taken over two smaller companies, one located in a neighbouring suburb and one in Harbourside, about an hour's drive from Melbourne. As the company has expanded it has restructured, centralising management and financial control at the original site, and shedding staff.

AFM and its associated group of companies now employs about 700 people and produces 7 million kilos of fabric and dyed yarn a year. Although it is still, in Australian terms, a relatively large textile company, AFM is, like the Australian textile industry generally, precariously placed in the global economy due to increased global competition and to the tariff reduction policies of successive governments. In an effort to increase its competitiveness in this market AFM has established a group of Australian companies operating in complementary areas of textile production, including domestic textiles, clothing and yarn dying. The group shares some facilities, like computerised salary and wages systems, and jointly buys and tenders in some instances. AFM has also established legal agreements with a Japanese firm and with a Swedish firm to develop its technical, design and styling capabilities, ensuring that it keeps abreast of global trends and technical developments, and so is competitive in global markets. All the same, without the custom of several large global automotive companies AFM would not survive for long. These contracts are, however, increasingly vulnerable to competition from low wage economies on the Asia Pacific rim.

So, what has all this got to do with Sally, who is, after all, just a literacy teacher? The computerisation of work processes and the development of formal global links with geographically remote global client companies have placed new literacy demands on workers at every level of AFM. The progressive computerisation of the looms and the warping and knitting machines and management systems has meant that most administrative, design and textile manufacturing processes at AFM are now textually mediated (Farrell 1998, see also Zuboff 1988). The additional responsibility of maintaining the 'chronic and routine connections' of the global web that AFM has spun also falls to most workers at AFM, regardless of their level. The global web of relationships of legal and commercial accountability is sustained by the new literacy practices of workers at all levels of the organisation. These practices include engaging in formal, documented problem solving activities like the Eight Step teams I refer to later, the expansion of written standard operating procedures and the presentation of data about production in standard formats like Pareto charts and statistical tables.

The impact of these changes is far reaching. The embodied working knowledge of the warpers and weavers and creelers and menders is rarely viewed as authoritative anywhere but on the shop floor. Textualised knowledge is the knowledge that is coming to count. This shift to the textual mediation of work practice has prompted the management of AFM to apply for funding from several government agencies to provide workplace literacy teachers who will not simply teach 'the basics' but who will work with employees to promote the new literacy practices, and the new values and dispositions, of the global workplace. As far as they are concerned, this is what Sally is employed to do.

I have said that I want to think about Sally ,and AFM, in terms of narrative theory and I want briefly now to consider how a narrative framework might help to illuminate how Sally constructs her working knowledges and working identities.

Bakhtin argued that 'the word in language is always half someone else's' (1981:293). He was talking about novels when he said this, making the point that even the most formal and original narrative must be understood as a product of the dynamic interaction of social and historical contexts of heteroglossia. He uses the singularly appropriate image of textile making to explain what he means. He says:

Unlike Bakhtin, when I use the term 'narrative' I am not referring to novels, or to any other formal story telling. Rather, I am using 'narrative' to mean the stories we (individually and collectively) tell ourselves, stories which provide the frameworks through which we act:

Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia, then, is powerful for me because it captures the way in which these story lines, or narratives, are neither independent nor inert; they are always in dynamic and hierarchical relationship with each other. Heteroglossia implies discord, and struggle. It:

I like this framework for seeing the way in which narratives operate in workplace contexts because it captures the historical resonances in contemporary narratives, resonances which are often obscured, but never erased, in the cacophony of more immediately identifiable tensions and struggles. Old words may be overlaid with new meanings, but Bakhtin reminds me that all our words are second hand.

When I try to understand the written, spoken and graphic texts of AFM I look for the stories that form the weft and the warp, I look for those 'dialogic threads'. I know that in each text a multitude of narratives are in play, each of them offering unique orchestrations of plots and speaking parts. It is with these narratives that Sally, Margaret and the workers and management at AFM (and beyond) construct working knowledges and working identities (or 'speaking parts).

I will focus on two cultural storylines although it should be clear from what I have said so far that I believe there are many more than two narratives operating in a contemporary workplace at any one moment. Each of these story lines have settings, plots and speaking parts. They make available some constructions of 'knowledge', and some 'speaking parts' and deny others. I should make it clear that these narratives have material effects when they are taken up; they have consequences for individuals and for categories of people. This is why they are promoted, they make some of these consequences seem to be inevitable. As Fairclough reminds us, it is not only possible but common to 'talk a discourse into being'.

Quality Management is a compelling narrative which finds expression in management textbooks (on four hour loan in the prestigious university library where I prepared this paper) , political speeches, education and training policy documents and popular commentary. I think of it as a modern version of the medieval 'morality play' in which 'Everyworker' undertakes a journey from darkness to enlightenment. There are resonances, too, of 19th century religious tracts about work ethics and Friereian discourses of liberation. One popular management text bears the startling title of Liberation Management a title that manages to harness both theological and critical/progressive education discourses, providing a piquant illustration of what Bakhtin means when he talks about words that are 'half someone else's'.

Quality Management is a tale about the way in which a 'new work order' creates a 'new moral order'. It is a tale in which the deepest held values of good people are, finally, manifest in economic structures. It is also a tale about how a business achieves success in an increasingly competitive global economy, operating on rationale market principles (Wiseman 1996, Butler 1998), in which companies are driven by endlessly accelerating competition and the only possibility of survival lies in a highly devolved, and highly responsive, innovative (and self surveilling) cross functional teams.

The label Quality Management is recognised as an umbrella term which covers a range of business management systems popular over the past ten years or so. For my purposes here it covers a raft of movements including Just In Time, Kaizen, Quality Circles, World's Best Practice, Reengineering and many movements that are more transitory and more local, than these Despite their differences these movements share a number of features:

Quality management systems mandate certain work practices (understood to be 'best practice') on the basis that, when they are comprehensively adopted, they guarantee the production of standardised, high quality products, no matter how remote from head office is the location in which they are produced. One prominent feature of quality systems is the high level of documentation required for an enterprise to achieve and maintain a high quality rating.

The Quality Management story is set firmly in a global world dominated by global corporate power in the form of transnational corporations. Transnational corporations are prototypal corporate structures marked by flat hierarchies, highly dispersed systems of responsibility and authority, the financial autonomy of individual units, the disinterested sharing of knowledge throughout the global web of organisations and the construction of an entirely new kind of autonomous worker (Edwards et al 1996) In this version of the global market the power of the nation state is constrained, limited to providing conditions, like an educated, flexible and compliant workforce, which might attract transnational corporations.

The Quality narrative is fundamentally about providing a new 'speaking part' for workers. Hammer, an important story teller in this narrative, explains that, in the 'reengineered' workplace,

In Hammer's 'enchanted workplace' all workers work 'with their heads, not just their hands'. He distinguishes between the old kind of industrial worker, whom he characterises as

from the new kind of worker who is:

The part of the 'professional worker' is one in which the individual is freed to achieve their full, mature, identity.

The construction of knowledge is central to this narrative. In the new workplace knowledge is the new capital, driving productivity in much the same way that the steam engine drove industrial revolution (Castells 1996). The role of education (as opposed to the standard 'training') is to transform the worker. A worker is trained, Hammer argues, but a professional learns.

Workers who embrace these new work practices and new working identities will be removed to a new spiritual level in which they are fused with their work:

Managers in this new, enchanted workplace will voluntarily relinquish authority. They will coach and design rather than organise and control.

This new workplace will, finally, realise the Utopian Dream of a fair and just society:

A feature of this narrative is the way it slips from time to time into the present tense, as it does here, suggesting that all this has already happened, we have found Utopia if we did but know it.

In this narrative the role of the literacy educator is enhanced, she becomes almost a spiritual guide, taking Everyman on his journey to enlightenment. Her function is both to realise the dream and to open the eyes of the workers to the enchanted workplace they already inhabit.

From a slightly more technical perspective, the workplace literacy educator is expected to develop, with professional workers, the new literacy abilities that Lankshear labels the 'new basics (Lankshear 1997). They include some, but not all, of the 'lingering basics', like capacities with everyday texts that enable a citizen to join the economic and civic mainstream, but focus on capacities with abstract language and sophisticated symbolic logic capabilities like solving problems, applying knowledge and writing and communicating effectively. Some workers are also expected to have command of 'elite literacies', literacies of a 'higher order', grounded in academic learning. Within this narrative, these literacies permit high level critique, innovation, diversification etc - and the application of theory and research. As Gee (nd) points out, social orientations to literacy education are 'very attractive to actors in the new capitalism'. Quality Management can be read as a story about redemption through critical literacy.

While the Quality Management narrative dominates workplace reform, there is a counter narrative. It finds expression in political economy textbooks (on monthly loan), some industrial union policy, and in discussion in contemporary workplaces. If the Quality Management narrative can be caricatured as a contemporary moral tale then the counter narrative caricature is of a post modern pastiche involving Waiting for Godot and The Emperor Has No Clothes.

In this narrative the global world is no new phenomenon, all colonising societies have been global in intent, if not in reach, since at least the days of the Roman Empire. The global economy, far from operating on rational market principles, relies on persistent social and economic structures and practices to accomplish transactions and these practices privilege some groups of nations and categories of people in systematic ways, while they disadvantage others (Cox (1996) , Probert (1998), Butler (forthcoming), Poynton 1986), Hessing 1997 ).

Transnational corporations, where they exist at all, are not culturally neutral global webs of companies (Reich 1991) but culturally inflected phenomena which offer for the most part, limited and familiar speaking parts for workers and managers.

In this story the prototypal transnational corporation is more or a less a phantom. Any company can engage in the global movement of funds without becoming a 'multicentred, networked, powersharing, transnational (Edwards et al: 42). In fact, few global companies fit the prototype of transnational companies (some commentators say only one ever has, and that only briefly (Hu 1992, Edwards et al 1996)). This is a story of continuity rather than a story of transformation, of persistent and enduring structures of privilege. Most global companies are a complex amalgam of old and new practices, but they have much in common with the companies that went before:

Many companies are successful operating within these old management systems and see no real value in adopting new structures in any comprehensive way:

While work practice is certainly increasingly textually mediated, this is a means by which existing forms of peer and self surveillance are extended and entrenched, it is not, for most workers, or most managers, an opportunity to develop autonomous and professional work practices. In this narrative working knowledge has always been central to work practice and the foregrounding of knowledge work does little to change the distribution of knowledge in any particular workplace. Workers have always worked with the head as well as the hands. Authorised knowledge remains the province of an elite. While a few workers have been elevated to an enchanted workplace, most have been stripped of their dignity, their security and their identities.

Within this narrative the role of the workplace literacy educator is to train workers to fulfil the 'chronic and routine' documentation demands that mandated Quality processes make of enterprises in an effort to exert control from a distance.

While the Quality rhetoric of literacy practices which permit high level critique, diversification, innovation, application of theory and research is quoted, these practices are, at best, confined to the means by which a company should maximise profits. No worker is ever expected, encouraged, or even permitted, to interrogate the ends, or purposes, or outcomes of company (Lankshear 1997).

Within this narrative the workplace literacy educator is serving the needs of the company, the workers individual needs, and the needs of the broader society, are never at issue. While critical literacy discourses are appropriated to workplace narratives they can never be used to challenge the values, purposes or outcomes of the company. Emancipatory narratives are an illusion and the literacy teacher is paid (largely by the government) to serve Mammon in unequivocal, but subtle ways.

So far I've argued that there are competing narratives in the contemporary workplace, narratives that offer conflicting constructions of working knowledges and working identities for all the actors, and that this is especially critical for workplace literacy teachers. Now I want to look at the way that Sally 'takes herself up' in these narratives as she writes, from the narrative resources available to her, her own 'speaking part'. I should let you know right now that Sally does not find a comfortable, tailor made part. Rather, she writes herself into the dominant narrative of AFM laboriously, moment by moment. These transcript sections come from a long interview I had with Sally about half way through the eight month project.

I want to come back to Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossic dialogism to get a sense of the way in which Sally is constructing her own narrative here, a narrative she weaves from the storylines she encounters at AFM. Although the narratives and counter narratives of Quality Management dominate the construction of the speaking part there are echoes of historical narratives about adult literacy and basic education teaching, and about traditional workplace workplace training, that are not entirely silenced.

In Transcript Section One Sally talks about herself explicitly as a teacher and trainer 'doing a bit of language and literacy teaching'. Her critique of training practice at AFM calls on this narrative, talking about reflection and valid, authentic language activities. She seems to view what is going on here as a failed learning activity, and is confident about her own working knowledge as an expert educator brought in to set things right. She views the learning activity and the 'Quality' activities as separate spheres which might conveniently come together to 'kill two birds with one stone'. Even so, she chooses the tasks she works on with half an eye to the Quality narrative, and calling on her knowledge of Quality procedures, noting that she must attend to the SOP in Finishing because 'it wouldn't really be adequate in terms of Quality.

In Transcript Section Two Sally seems to me to be using the Quality Management narrative as a resource to try out a 'speaking part' more centrally located in the major narratives of AFM. She distances herself from the role of 'teacher director' and aligns herself with the identities available to her in Quality Management - 'facilitator and leader. In doing so she is also explicitly aligning herself with the workers she is 'teaching' and with their dilemmas. She speaks of the team meeting as a collaborative learning opportunity.

In Transcript Section Three Sally appears to take up the identity offered by Michael as he tries to find a way to increase AFM's Quality score. Sally uses her knowledge of the formal textual practices of Quality Management to rewrite the Action Learning Team meetings, shifting them from 'learning moments' to points on a Quality score sheet, recognising as she does so the 'bottom line' imperatives of Michael and AFM. Here the counter narrative of Quality Management is valuable resource, it helps Sally to recognise that technical and documented compliance is what is required, the collaborative, cross functional team could be 'a team of one'.

This brief and incomplete analysis of Sally's stories about her work gives some insight into the way we as educators, working in times that are, as Elaine Butler reminds us, at once new and old (in press), write our own stories using the narrative resources we have to hand, moment by moment. As we write our own stories, and insert our 'speaking parts' in collective narratives like Quality Management, we construct our own working knowledges, knowledges that must be respected as transient accommodations of on going struggles and tensions. There isn't much point in being categorical about knowledge given the chaotic, and constantly shifting, environment in which it must struggle to emerge. Sally takes up the cultural storylines of the contemporary workplace moment by moment, ceaselessly resituating her working knowledge, while she tries out alternative ways of performing herself in the narratives that are offered to her.