This makes workers appear as isolated actors and skills appear as strictly individual traits, rather than as threads that take their meaning from a weave of workplace culture and social relationships.

Reading Work is about this journey of discovery of workplace literacies as social practices. The book is in two parts, and speaks with several different voices. Part One presents stories of literacies-in-use in the four research sites, as told through the eyes and the voice of our own experience doing ethnographic fieldwork. In Part Two, we put back on our familiar hats as workplace educators and academics and try to share our reflections on what we have learned, and what we hope others may learn, from these workplaces. An Appendix offers a narrative account of how we did our research and how we handled some common hurdles in ethnographic research methods.

Hull, G. (1995). Controlling literacy: The place of skills in “high performance” work. Critical Forum, 3(2-3), 3-26.

Nancy Jackson is Associate Professor, Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and a member of the In-Sites Research Group.