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Optimism about the increased engagement of women in information technology employment has been informed, in part, by essentialist ideas about the suitability for women of emerging jobs combining technical with interpersonal, artistic or other 'non-technical' skills. Drawing on evidence from Australia, we highlight limitations to this brand of optimism, questioning the potential for women in mixed-skill jobs in computing and multimedia organisations.

Recent developments in workplace learning have focused on relational and social network views of learning that introduce practitioners to the norms, values and assumptions of the workplace as well as the learning processes through which knowledge is acquired. This article reports on a qualitative study of a mentoring programme designed to assist women education managers gain promotion by broadening their networks and stimulating insights into the senior management positions for which they were being prepared. The findings are that members reflexively assess and reassess goals and values to demystify knowledge and resolved cognitive dissonance in these processes. Moreover, this article shows that women participants learn from the networks, and that the networks learn from the participant in a reciprocal and informal way. The article concludes that organizational learning programmes must focus on enabling such networks to flourish.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the claim by the Office of the Employment Advocate (OEA)and the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business (DEWRSB)that Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs)allow employers to integrate both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ dimensions of ‘strategic’ human resource management (HRM)theory, providing greater efficiency and profitability,while also givingemployees more flexibility. Based on a review of the literature and the content of 539 AWAs approved between March 1997 and June 1998, we conclude that the general trend of AWAs is towards the ‘hard’ HRM philosophy of minimisation of costs and maximisation of flexibility of hours. Provisions based around the developmental and personal needs of employees are relatively uncommon and, where they occur, are usually brief. Contrary to Government predictions, there is very little evidence that AWAs are being used to advance the philosophy of ‘soft’ HRM.