Working the planning table: The political practice of adult education

The purposes of this study were to investigate how adult educators exercise power through negotiation and to characterise the types of negotiation they use to construct adult education. Our theoretical framework is that adult education is constructed through a social process whereby people negotiate interests in contexts of socially structured power relations. The findings indicate that negotiations always occur at two levels: substantive negotiations in which people act in the web of power relations to construct programs and meta-negotiations in which people act on the power relations themselves to either change or maintain them. In the case study presented, we show that both types of negotiations produced significant outcomes and that the meta-negotiations directly affected the outcomes of the substantive negotiations.