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Drawing upon the narrative accounts provided by fifteen college principals in England and Wales this paper looks into the ways in which incorporation has changed the culture of further education colleges. Principals' accounts reveal their views on how the sector has changed and identify a number of concerns including how the adoption of a market driven approach to the provision of further education now shapes their work. Data is presented and discussed on how principals experienced the process of incorporation, its impact on relationships with schools, other colleges and LEAs and on how colleges were to be viewed as businesses. It is suggested that since colleges are now widely perceived as independent businesses there is a need to reassess the understanding of business practice as applied to the college setting. The StudyThere is a lack of data detailing the process of incorporation and its impact on people or organisations. As Elliot and Crossley (1994) argue, incorporation has forced college principals to satisfy external performance indicators and the temptation is to inform and validate policy by the use of quantitative data. They also argue that this concern needs to be counter balanced by a concern with the consequences of policy decisions in practice', and suggest that qualitative methodologies are well suited to this task. This study draws from further education college principals' own accounts to reveal their lived realities and their own perceptions of the culture of their organisations.During the period from May to October 1994 fifteen principals of further education colleges were interviewed by researchers from the School of Education, University of Wales, Cardiff. The selection of principals was to a large extent arbitrary, except that we limited our choice to colleges in Wales and the South West of England. We did not select principals because of any known predisposition on their part towards incorporation and nor was our selection based on any known history of the impact of incorporation on any particular college.

Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) programme. The research project is investigating the experiences of learning and working in further education colleges in Wales and the data used in this paper were collected during the first three months of the project from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 27 teachers. This paper begins from the simple proposition that it is important to locate teachers and learners as active participants in at least some of the processes of learning. More specifically, the character of these processes is shaped by the nature of the social contexts in which interaction occurs and the ways in which teachers and students construct their roles within it. Our analysis of the data suggests that teachers' conceptualisations of their students' learning can be related not only to their own and students' backgrounds and learning biographies, but also to the wider structural context within which learning in FE is currently located. This kind of analysis has implications for how to analyse learning processes both theoretically and methodologically and the ways in which researchers convey their findings to a practitioner audience. IntroductionThe paper draws upon empirical material from the first stage of a research project on Learning and working in further education colleges in Wales. The research is jointly funded by the ESRC and Welsh Assembly Government under the TLRP extension to Wales scheme. The overall aim of the research project is to explore the relationships between the social organisation of further education (FE) in Wales, the interactions between teachers and students and learning outcomes for both groups. Considerable debate amongst scholars has been concerned with how to conceive 'learning' most effectively. Sfard's (1998) distinction between acquisition and participation metaphors has been especially influential here. Reflecting their analytical perspectives, commentators have placed varying emphases on 'learning outcomes' and the processes through which they are produced, individual cognition and the influence of social context and so forth. Building upon the socio-cultural ideas of Lave and Wenger (1991) Hodkinson and Colley's (2005) discussion of formal, non-formal and informal learning offers a useful differentiation and emphasises the view that learning is inherently embodied and social. Along with Lave and Wenger (1991) these authors argue that learning is also relational and that it is a 'mistake to separate out either *Corresponding author. Email: SalisburyJ@cardiff.ac.uk Downloaded by [Temple University Libraries] at 17:41 17 November 2014 422 J. Salisbury et al.learning or the learner from the contexts in which the learning takes place as each is part of the other' (Hodkinson 2005, 6).The FE sector is, of course, complex. FE teachers are expected to deliver a far more diverse range of education and training programmes, to a wider range of clients, in a broader range of contexts, than any other educational sector and they are increasingly expected to balance...