Abstract
This chapter undertakes a socio-cultural critique of the ‘instrumental instruction’ workplace e-learning scenario. This scenario includes workplace e-leaning interventions that are designed to culturally decompose the workforce through abilities, beliefs, and behaviours. The goal is to use workplace e-learning to make workers more able to cope with periodic and on-going ICT innovation and business process change within organizations. An exploratory case study brings together the elements of process, technology, and culture. This provides a more holistic understanding of the experiences of the workforce and management when it comes to continuous ICT innovation, business process change, and a culture of instrumentalism. All this bears significant socio-cultural impacts on the workforce that come about through the workplace e-learning scenario of instrumental instruction. Socio-cultural insensitivity from workplace e-learning, in this scenario, comes from the basic, unquestioned assumption that workers are essentially socially flawed and culturally inferior; accountable for overcoming their socio-cultural flaws and inferiorities; and, need to be decomposed by workplace e-learning, through abilities, beliefs and behaviours, to meet the expectations of the infallible and commodified workplace. Workplace e-learning is now increasingly relied upon by organizations to provide the instrumental instruction that brings about cultural change in the workforce in terms of cultural decomposition of the workforce. In the wider marketplace, technological innovation in the ICT sector, accompanied by business process change in organizations, continues to culturally influence workplace e-learning industry trends and strategies. Workplace e-learning industry trends and strategies also culturally shape workplace e-learning. Instrumental instruction from workplace e-learning thus signifies the instrumentalization of instruction for workers, by workplace e-learning through their abilities, beliefs and behaviours, to culturally decompose the workforce for a knowledge- based workplace.