TRAINING AND SKILL DEVELOPMENT : A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Human capital economists and political elites claim that training and retraining are necessary for sustained economic growth and development. Training, as a strategy of adaptation to changing modes of production, occupies a central place in industrial relations. This centrality is heightened with recent radical shifts in technological innovations. The social implications of training as a strategic tool of industrial relations have subsequently altered in conjunction with these historical shifts in the structural conditions of the productive process.

This study seeks to examine the role of training in industrial relations today. It focuses on the competitive goals that training is meant to attaint and the implications that this has on the labour process. Training, it is purported, has come to mean different things for the different actors in capitalist production. This study has at its core, the aim of discovering the complex socio-structural relationships that impact on training and its role in today's social organization of work.