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In this paper, I am concerned with learning in post-bureaucratic organisations, that is, organisations that are reconstructing and developing themselves as communities of practice building common values and a culture emphasising social relationships. There has been a shift away from viewing the workplace in technical or systems terms, to understanding organisations as cultures in which people, and in particular, their (often new) interpersonal relationships, play a central role. This emphasis on employees is established as organisations move from a focus on how those in control formulate what is to happen at the level of work, towards requiring workers to verbalise how they see themselves as being able to contribute to the organisation. As more and more work is constituted as talk, employees working across a wide range of sites, including production lines in factories, are expected to learn to be discourse workers as they meet in teams where they take on these new work practices and new worker identities. I am interested in some of the ways organisations are naming and approaching the knowledge, skills and attitudes believed to be essential in constructing a successful workplace in the 21st century. The work practices that I will talk about … are particular participatory practices: the work of teams and team meetings. The workers that I will talk about are, in the main, production-line workers, and the facilitators and trainers who are charged with producing the linguistically and culturally competent workers that organisations desire. What I maintain in this presentation, is that at the heart of the new work order is a struggle to make sense of, and learn, ways of ‘being’ a worker, and that an important site of this struggle and learning is teams. Following on from this, I begin to speculate on what this might mean for research that focuses on learning and work.