This article about workplace learning examines the relationship between, firstly, individual learners positions and dispositions, and secondly, their working and learning within the workplace community and practices. Drawing on research with secondary school teachers, it presents case study accounts of two teachers from the same school to illustrate the significance of these relationships. In order to understand these relationships from a broadly participatory perspective, the article then presents a theoretical discussion, extending Lave and Wenger's work on communities of practice, through the use of Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field. It concludes that such a combination offers a valuable means of understanding these relationships, in a wider social, economic and political context.