This chapter examines negotiation as a multi-dimensional context and set of conditions in and by which learning occurs. The concept comes to be seen as both the circumstances and meta-activity that shapes the kinds of interactions that can take place between participants in social activity. In this sense, negotiation is about the parameters that frame experience of joint activity as relationships between co-participants. The discussion draws on social constructivist perspectives that situate and contextualise work and learning as context dependent and integrated practices. Understanding these practices is about understanding relationships as always interdependent and always occurring within a negotiated space. The chapter focuses on learning as a relationally mediated activity that engages learners in transactions of self, practice, and context. Hence negotiation is both ‘where’ learning emerges and ‘is’ the enactment of that learning. Understandings of the mediating factors that comprise work-learning, the relational interdependences that shape learning and the transactional qualities of action that ground change (as learning) as a fundamental aspect of context are examined and elaborated. Together, these understandings, in conjunction with those of the previous Chap. 2, establish the nature and limitations of the concept of negotiation as it has commonly been employed in work-learning research literature. Those limitations are the base from which the book begins its pursuit of finding other and richer ways to conceptualise negotiation as the description and explanation of work-learning. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.
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