Work‐based learning; discipline, field or discursive space or what?

Work‐based learning (WBL) is predicated on a form of transdisciplinarity (Costley & Portwood, 2000 Costley, C. and Portwood, D., eds. 2000. Work based learning and the university: new perspectives and practices Birmingham SEDA Paper 109 [Google Scholar]; Garrick & Rhodes, 2000 Garrick, J. and Rhodes, C., eds. 2000. Research and knowledge at work, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Boud & Solomon, 2001 Boud, D. and Solomon, N., eds. 2001. Work‐based learning: a new higher education, Buckingham: SRHE and OU Press. [Google Scholar]) within the community of higher education academics over about the last 10 years. The broad area of WBL in higher education draws its academic focus from high‐level practical knowledge and learning, in a work‐based context. To seek if there is an appropriate location for WBL in the current field of higher education we construct a topology of this field, offer a description of the relational aspects of WBL to other forms of higher education and then try to locate it in the geography of that topology. We conclude that there is an inadequate fit between the existing notion of academic disciplines as we depict them and WBL and attribute that to its transdisciplinary nature of work‐based studies.