This article is based on research into the practical problem of masculinity and learning and practising safety in the mining industry. The research began with a post-structural analysis of gendered subjectivity in miners' yarns but argues that a concept of 'culture' is needed to elucidate a middle-level relationship between individual workers and the organisation. Concepts of 'culture', however, are problematic in this context because they have been used uncritically in organisational literature. The author explores the enactment of a concept of 'culture' through an ethnographic study of mine workers. It was found that workplace cultures are characterised by violence and aggression, risk taking, and competitiveness, which impact on learning and practising safety. In emergent understandings of culture in this study the author suggests that 'culture' can be reconceptualised in order to involve workers in their own cultural analysis and to articulate the relationship between the complex, collective, and contested nature of contemporary workplaces and the learning that takes place there. Such a cultural analysis enables the possibility of identifying sites of change and 'culture' as a concept that can be mobilised as a technology for workers to intervene in their own workplace practices.

This paper arises from a research study that I have recently conducted into workplace learning in aged care workplaces in partnership with an organisation that manages a number of aged care facilities in rural and regional Australia. Twenty aged care workers were interviewed using semi-structured, conversational style interviews about how they learned to do their work. This included trainee entry level care workers who were also researched using discussion/focus groups and conversational interviews about the process of their workplace learning, tracking their learning experiences after one week, three months and eight months of full time work. This paper focuses on the findings from these trainee care workers. The study found that these trainee workers learned in the usual ways that have been documented in the workplace learning literature. The most powerful and resilient learning however, was learning the body, a process which could only occur during the process of doing their work in a community of practice. The paper will explore this body learning, its embedded nature, and how new learning is contested within this community of practice.