The articles collected in this study examine how compelling, or dissonant, worldviews affect the manner in which people learn. The rhetoric of lifelong learning and globalization have created pressures that are unlikely to abate. In every educational sector, teachers and students have to cope with new, complex and often conflicting values and demands. The contributions consider these complex issues in light of national cultures, professional cultures, disciplinary cultures, formal and informal cultures and of cultures, past, present and future. They draw on multiple disciplines and discourses - sociocultural studies and cultural psychology, sociology, organisational development, policy studies, management theory, political and economic theory - so as to develop an approach to the complexity of learning today that will enable us to maximise the quality of educational provision for the 21st century.