This paper seeks to map out some of the conceptual territory that will be explored through an international study into the impact of the "knowledge economy" on contemporary forms of learning and life story telling within communities of labour located in different world cities. The paper begins with a brief critical overview of the main theories of economic and social transition which have been influential in developing educational and training polices aimed at the formation of "new labour" identities. It argues for a theory of mediations between the local and global in which regional urbanisms and embedded actor networks are allowed to play a key, if variable, role in defining and accessing transmissible knowledge in specific sites. From this starting-point and drawing on some interviews from a pilot study in the East End of London (UK), the paper considers the various ways in which workers confront the abstraction of labour form implicit in current regimes of transferable skilling. The paper concludes by sketching a possible theoretical framework for understanding the actor networks through which different strategies of learning to labour have been connected to grammars of life story telling, and considers the consequences of their weakening.