Four essential dimensions of workplace learning

IntroductionWorkplace learning can be understood as centrally relying on and being practised through connectedness in action, or a texture of practices (Gherardi, 2006; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002). I argue that this connectedness or texture has essential temporal, spatial, bodily and material dimensions. These dimensions are essential, but often rendered invisible in dominant accounts of work and learning. In presenting and elaborating this conceptual framework I extend and enrich sociomaterial approaches to understanding work and learning, characterised by metaphors of emergence and questions of how different elements assemble or hang together. The four-part framework provides an analytic toolkit to investigate and the social and material accomplishments and connections that form the basis for work and learning, but have too often been treated as invisible or unimportant.

After outlining the empirical context used to illustrate conceptual points, I locate this framework within recent developments in workplace learning theories, and connect with the concept of knowing in practice. I then show how work practices in the site I studied require ongoing learning, before characterising this learning epistemologically. I outline Gherardi’s concept of the texture of practices, and then present times, spaces, bodies and things as four inter-related and essential dimensions of connectedness in action.

The paper takes up Nicolini’s call for further work ‘documenting in detail how practices hang together’ (2009, p. 1413). Furthermore it complements his framework for theorising work and organising practices in that it similarly offers a vocabulary, series of lenses and sensitising concepts that extend key assumptions about practices and learning. Nicolini (2009, 2012) argues that singular theoretical strategies are inadequate, and that studying practices requires choosing different angles for interpretation without giving prominence to any one. He discusses practice theory (such as that of Schatzki and Reckwitz) rooted in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, ethnomethodology, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an ‘eclectic’ but nonetheless consistent suite of theoretical tools. I offer follow the same principles, but instead draw out four dimensions that are implicit in contemporary understandings of practices, using them to enrich the central notion of texture and how practices relate to one another.

This is a conceptual paper, furnished with examples drawn from an ethnographic study, again following Nicolini’s (2009) example. The site for this was the Residential Unit run by Karitane, a child and family health service in Carramar, Sydney. Families are referred for a five-day stay on the Unit when they experience significant challenges associated with parenting children under four years of age. The Unit offers 24 hour support on issues relating to child sleeping, settling, feeding, behaviour, and interaction. It is free to families across the state of New South Wales, and is a key feature of services designed to ensure that all children have the best possible start in life, seeking to disrupt conditions that might become embedded and complex in the long term. Karitane is not a pseudonym: as an organisation they requested to be named in all publications. All individual names are pseudonyms.

My fieldwork involved 60 visits spread over a nine month period, mainly focused on shadowing staff. All hours from Monday morning to Friday afternoon, including nights, were covered several times. Observations traced the work of 36 members of staff, and the experiences of 58 families. In addition to field notes, 338 photographs were taken and used as the basis for developing tracings that capture bodies and materiality in particular moments. One hundred and nineteen documents were also collected, and a number of clinical handover interactions audio recorded. Teena Clerke also undertook fieldwork as part of a methodological extension study exploring asymmetries in

collaborative ethnography (Clerke and Hopwood, 2014). Further details of my ethnographic approach and the focus and outcomes of the Unit’s work are available elsewhere (Hopwood, 2013a, b, forthcoming b, in press; Hopwood and Clerke, 2012). The conceptual framework I develop in this paper builds on particular assumptions about the nature of work and learning. It is located within sociomaterial or practice-based approaches, which themselves contribute to wider shifts in theorisations in fields of workplace learning, professional practice and education.

Changing approaches to understanding work, practice and learningHager (2011) describes three broad approaches to theorising work and learning, beginning with psychological theories. These focus on behaviours and cognition, drawing on acquisition and transfer metaphors of knowledge. Learning is seen as a product, often associated with reflection, rooted in an individual epistemology of practice. Sociocultural approaches reject individual units of analysis and cognitive or technical rationality associated with behaviourism. Metaphors of participation are foregrounded, highlighting the social or relational nature of work and learning (eg. Lave and Wenger, 1991). One of the key shifts in the sociocultural developments involved specific interest in and expansion of the concept of practice. The overlap and distinction between practice and work as nouns or practise and work as verbs are complex, and would to explore these fully would distract from my key argument and contribution (see Nicolini, 2012). While not all practices are practices of work, it is consistent with the theoretical foundations of my framework to conceive work and learning as accomplished through practices.

In the third strand, practice remains a central feature. Emergence replaces participation as a dominant metaphor, and questions of temporality are expanded, rejecting linear chronological or precedent/antecedent temporal models. The importance of material or non-human world is foregrounded, in some (post-humanist) cases treated symmetrically alongside, and not distinguished from the human world, as in Actor-Network Theory (see Fenwick, 2010). Practice and learning are understood as complex (rather than complicated), implying non-linearity, self-organisation, unpredictable emergence, and multiplicity (Antonacopoulou, 2008; Lancaster, 2012; Fenwick et al., 2011). The body also receives more explicit attention in these approaches as a more-than discursive, material, doing, evolving, social, and multiple (Mol, 2002) entity.

Associated with these developments is what has been termed a ‘practice turn’ (Nicolini, 2009; Schatzki, 2001a; Hager et al., 2012). This does not reflect a single movement or a single resulting orientation. Some have roots in Wittgensteinian and Heideggarian philosophy, referred to as ‘practice theory’ (Schatzi 1996b, 2001a, 2002, 2010; Reckwitz 2002), taken up in a range of educational research contexts (Green 2009). Others, calling themselves ‘practice-based studies’, grew out of different traditions focused on empirical study of organisations (Gherardi, 2009a, b, Nicolini 2009, 2012). Practice-based theorising of learning and knowing aims to dispel entrenched and problematic notions of learning, such as those based on individual possession and transfer models (Gherardi, 2000, Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000). Gherardi (2006, 2009a, b; see also Corradi and Gherardi, 2010) argues that the value of practice-based approaches is in their potential to go beyond binaries of structure/agency, mind/body, and to pay due attention to materiality of social world.

Knowing in practiceIn abandoning metaphors of learning based on acquisition, possession and transfer, practice-based approaches conceive not of knowledge, but of knowing. This is a performative rather than cognitive notion, the germ of which lay in Gergen’s (1991) argument that knowledge is not something that people possess in their heads, but rather something that people do together (Gherardi, 2006). The idea of knowing in practice leads us to study knowing as an embodied social process, human and

material, aesthetic, emotive and ethical, and above all, embedded in practice (Gherardi 2006; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000). Following this rubric, questions of learning become questions of knowing, how knowing evolves, and are always tied to enactments. Learning and knowing are about what people do and say, bodily, and the material worlds in, amid and with which these actions unfold. To investigate knowing in practice, we need to explore how different and dispersed ways of knowing in practice work together, changing our unit of analysis form individuals to practices and their relationships (Nicolini, 2011, 2012). The framework presented in the paper offers a means to do precisely this.

How I understand learning and practiceMy framework of temporal, spatial, embodied and material textures as a vehicle for understanding connectedness in the action (and hence learning) builds on and contributes to sociomaterial and practice-based approaches. I assume that learning and practice are not temporally separable; rather learning is a feature of practice, and without practices there can be no learning (Hager, 2012). The learning needed for successful performance in an occupation cannot be specified in advance (Hager, 2011). Insofar as practice is used as a lens through which to understand the accomplishment of work and learning involved therein (following the second and third strands described above), what is discussed below in terms of ‘practice’ refers simultaneously to the instances of work and its enactment.

Why learning and practice must emerge together on the Residential UnitIn order to illustrate these assumptions, and to show how learning can be understood in terms connectedness in action (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002), I will outline how work on the Residential Unit of Karitane demands learning, how performance and learning emerge together.

Professionals on the Unit are expected to work in partnership with families (Davis and Day, 2010), which means developing negotiated, customised forms of support that respond to the circumstances, priorities, and strengths of each family. This this requires learning (Hopwood and Clerke, 2012). This learning follows a steep curve around the start of each week, and evolves throughout the five days of residence. It includes but is not limited to: demographic and medical history information; protective and risk factors that affect family wellbeing; parents’ anxieties, frustrations, values, and hopes; children’s sleep, eating and behaviour patterns, and their responses to strategies being tried to bring about change in those patterns. Actions (which are always interactions of some kind) of staff and families must become entangled. I theorise these entanglements as a texture (see below).

The professionals working on the Unit come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including nursing, childcare, social work, psychology, psychiatry, and paediatrics. The Unit provides 24-hour support from families’ arrival on Monday morning until their departure on Friday afternoons, and is organised into various patterns of shift-work, job-sharing, and visiting hours for external medical officers. To function, the Unit demands connectedness in action across its workforce, textures between shifts and between professions, which, like those between staff and families, always comprise temporal, spatial, bodily and material dimensions.

What kind of learning is implied?This learning about families and among professional staff is not based on an epistemology of truth. On the contrary, the epistemology of the Unit is contingent, emergent, and entertains multiplicity. Learning produces knowing that is for now, accommodating uncertainty and multiple forms of understanding that do not compete, but which can be held in parallel.

The ontology to which this learning is related can be understood on similar turns. The way knowing evolves and is enacted on the Unit does not imply a single reality that is already out there, waiting to be known more or less truthfully. Rather there are realities, plural (Mol, 2002): knowing is as

much about changing realities as it is about understanding them. Professionals learn about families and connect that learning among each other not to know families better, but to inform actions that in turn help bring about change for families. Each new set of actions leads to new ways of knowing families (which may have themselves changed) and presents new imperatives for learning. Practices proceed through individual and collective ways to live with fragile knowings (Manidis and Scheeres, 2012, 2013). On the Residential Unit, provisionality and multiplicity are not problems, but are rather essential features in bringing knowing in practice and changing realities together.

Textures of practice: connectedness in action

Gherardi (2006) writes that practices are nested (or not) with each other, forming a texture of practices, which varies in its density. The concept of texture is thus presented as a means to understand how practices relate to one another. Nicolini (2009, 2012) argues that practices are mutually connected and constitute a nexus, texture or network, adding that while the vocabulary for articulating this varies, the idea remains a central tenet that is shared across the diverse family of contemporary practice theorisations. Nicolini makes reference to organising (connectedness, hanging together) being the effect of a texture of interconnected practices.

Crucially the concept of texture asserts interconnectedness as a fundamental property of practices, while resisting concepts of practices and their relations as static. The concept grows out of notions of dynamic interactions, endless movement within and between practices. This sense of fluidity and movement is captured in the idea of texture as connectedness in action [my emphasis]: without action, without doing and saying, there is no texture. In other words, textures are enacted, they are living. The implications of this conceptual move are significant, shifting our focus away from fixed entities such as organisations or knowledge, into fluid movements and verbs such as organising and knowing. Knowing in practice is about accomplishing connectedness in action (p 48).

Gherardi is not alone in seeking ways to conceptualise how practices relate to one another, and how social practices are organised. These issues lie at the heart of Schatzki’s practice theory. He uses different language, referring to how practices ‘hang together’ in a kind of thick horizontal web of interweaving practices and interconnected material arrangements (2002). In his site ontology (Schatzki, 2002, 2005), materiality may prefigure practices, and join them across space and time. Practices proceed amid and with objects and artefacts, they may pursue material ends, and ultimately are performed by a material entity that is the body. The site ontology does not join two separate realms of practice and materiality: it co-implicates them in one another. By extension questions of temporality, spatiality, materiality and embodiment are implicated in questions of connections between practices (see Hopwood et al., 2014 for an illustration of how this idea may underpin the concept of a ‘sociomaterial curriculum’).

Taking the concept of textures further: four dimensions I propose conceiving textures of practices as comprising four essential dimensions, such that any texture of practice can be understood as comprising textures that are temporal, spatial, embodied and material in nature. By saying that these are essential dimensions of a texture of practice, I am saying that they are part of what constitutes that practice texture, they are its essence. They are also essential in the sense that they are non-optional. I cannot conceive of any texture of practice without there being textures of times, spaces, bodies and things.

This dual essentialism underpins how I arrived at the four dimensions. Although specific definitions of practice vary, it is fair to say that common to practice-based (Gherardi and others) and practice theoretical (Schatzki and others) approaches, is a conception of practices as performed bodily and materially (quite what the ‘and’ here specifies, how bodily performance and materiality are understood, is a point of debate). Furthermore, practices are consistently held to be spatially and

temporally spread out or dispersed. Spatiality and temporality are also referred to through references to situatedness and emergence: ‘all practices are involved in a variety of relationships and associations that extend in both space and time and form a texture of dependencies and references’ (Nicolini, 2009, p. 1407). These four ideas – times, spaces, bodies, things – became increasingly apparent to me not as aspects that have a bearing on practices or relate to them, but as dimensions of them. If they are dimensions of practices, they must also be dimensions of how actions connect with one another.

Rather than ‘zooming in and out’ as Nicolini (2009, 2012) suggests, I offer a ‘thick horizontal’ framework in which none of the four dimensions has priority, and none is more or less local than the other. Each, and as a collective, they nonetheless do the necessary work of enabling us to make connections beyond particular local instances: the textures to which they sensitise us are not conceptually bounded in this way. Nicolini describes his approach as eclectic and programmatic, responding to the multifaceted nature of practice which requires an heteroglossic ‘toolkit’ logic. My framework of four dimensions is not eclectic in the sense that it highlights and extends dimensions that are already implied in the broader foundational conceptualisations of practices that it builds on. However individually and together they are suggestive of the need to and value of conceptual ‘collage’.

Caveat: on the awkwardness of four dimensionsIn presenting textures of times, spaces, bodies and things I set up awkward separations. However, these tensions are more than compensated for by the insights that are offered. With care, they can be negotiated without arriving at a theoretically inconsistent position. Schatzki is far from alone, or novel, in treating space and time together rather than separately. The historical habit of treating one as defined in the absence of the other has been widely discredited, and diverse approaches to understanding them in non-dualistic ways have emerged (eg. Czarniawska, 2004; Lefebvre, 2004; Massey, 2005; Nespor, 1994; Fenwick et al., 2011).

Bodies and things are similarly problematic in their distinction. Haraway’s (1991) cyborgs are just one articulation of the fuzzy boundaries of the human body, the incorporation of objects into the body (see also Grosz, 1994; Hancock and Tyler, 2000). Cyborgs are becoming increasingly present in literature on work and learning (Allix, 2011; Czarniawska, 2012). Schatzki (2002) acknowledges this and adds that practices and materiality bundle not least because practices involve bodily doings and sayings and the bodies performing these actions are material bodies. Actor-network theory (ANT) continually questions the distinction between the human and nonhuman, and retains a powerfully material (rather than, say, discursive) presence of the body (see Fenwick, 2010). Other boundaries are porous and hard to define. Bodies have temporal rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004), and spatiality and the experience of place can be understood as proceeding from the body (Schatzki, 2001b; Thrift, 2004). Lefebvre (2004) writes that there are no things outside of rhythm, that objects inscribe themselves with the use of time with their own demands.

If times, spaces, bodies and things are such problematic categories, why use them as the basis for four dimensions of textures? My use of these terms is not categorical. The four dimensions require no mutual exclusivity nor delimitation in terms of boundaries at all. They are not conceptual separations, but form an overlapping multiplicity. Each adds to rather than replaces understandings furnished through the others. All textures of practices must comprise (at least) textures of times, spaces, bodies and things. In doing so I am not suggesting they can be pulled apart – there is the texture of times, there the texture of spaces. Rather that a fuller understanding may be reached by exploring the different avenues that each offers. In doing so, one ends up looking at the same feature from a different angle, seeing it, or its connections to other features, differently.

In this difference, or multiplicity, there lies value that cannot be reached if we don’t entertain times,

spaces, bodies and things as different analytical points of departure. The following sections demonstrate this, exploring respectively how times, spaces, bodies and things are connected in action, while allowing for explicit leakage between textures.

Textures of timesTo understand textures of times as a dimension of the connectedness in action, we must let go of some common but highly limiting notions of time. Time in the texture of time is not confined to what Schatzki (2006a, b) refers to as objective time, or the time of the universe. This is the everyday sense of time: time that is separate from human activity, invisible, beyond our control; time that gets used up; time that unfolds in inevitable linear sequence of past then present then future in which the first and last of these are always beyond our grasp. Instead we must adopt a view of time as constructed or produced through practice, time as made, time as material, and time as times, plural (Gherardi and Strati, 1988; Lefebvre, 2004; Schatzki, 2006a, b, 2009; Shove et al., 2009). In this view practices do not just take time, they make times. Times are social and material enactments.

One feature of activity time as Schatzki (2006a, b, 2009, 2010) understands it is that past, present and future may occur together. In any moment, people act from particular circumstances or states of affairs (motivatedly), and towards others (intentionally). As professionals on the Unit learn about families, they become entangled in these temporalities: understanding but also shaping them. This not a neutral or passive process. In referring to temporal entanglements I draw on Barad (2007) who suggests that future moments do not follow present ones like beads on a string, rather causality and associated temporalities are entangled affairs.

Let us consider an admission interview, conducted shortly after a family arrives on a Monday morning. Kalisa, mother of Aimee, is seated on a bed, while her daughter sleeps in a cot in the adjacent nursery. Penny, a nurse, is seated on a chair diagonally across from Kalisa. She asks Kalisa about her family, aspects of personal history, present condition, the challenges she has been experiencing, her reasons for coming to Karitane. Penny’s attention to Kalisa’s sayings and bodily performance (posture, gesture, facial expression and so on) help her become entangled with the mother’s activity time: she understands where Kalisa is acting from and what she is acting towards. As Penny writes, this past and future is being materialised, enabling larger entanglements to follow as other colleagues read and respond to her notes. Connectedness in action between Penny, Kalisa and her family, and subsequently between other professionals who support Kalisa, is established through temporal entanglements of past, present and future.

Temporal connectedness in action can also be understood in terms of rhythms, many of which have bodies as their metronomes (Lefebvre 2004). I have shown how many of the challenges that bring families to the Unit are rhythmic in nature, relating to frequencies, durations, tempos, repetitions and differences in patterns of children’s sleep and waking, feeding, play, tantrums, and so on (Hopwood, 2013b). Nurses, playroom coordinators and other professionals learn about these rhythms through practices of peering into nurseries to see if children are asleep, sitting with families at mealtimes, joining them in play, and by talking to parents (see Hopwood and Clerke, 2012). The discernment of such rhythms reflects a highly developed aesthetic dimension (Strati, 2003) of professional expertise. These rhythms become part of evolving professional knowing in practice: what has been learned of the rhythms of family life is shapes future enactments of practice. Staff adjust their doings and sayings, providing support and guidance to families, presenting particular forms of challenge and praise to parents and children. In doing so they also intervene in these rhythms, helping to bring about rhythmic change (Hopwood, 2013b). Learning is as much about changing realities as it is knowing them. Professionals also connect their knowing in practice with

their colleagues, through handover practices, and through materialisation in progress notes, behaviour charts, and so on. Here, connectedness in action – texture – can be understood in terms of how knowing in practice is anchored to and acts upon rhythms.

Temporalities of past, present and future, and notions of rhythm do not exhaust the ways in which connectedness in action can be understood in terms of textures of times. However I have illustrated how starting from questions of times can lead us to notice valuable dimensions of learning and practice in terms of connectedness in action. And we have seen that textures of times are not devoid of spaces, bodies, and things.

Textures of spacesTo explore spatiality as a dimension of connectedness in action we must abandon ideas of space as an invisible container for practices, but think instead of spaces, multiple, shaping and being enacted in practices. The precedent for doing includes the work of Lefebvre (1991), Soja (1996), and Massey (2005). Gherardi and Strati (2012) note that among the many advantages of a practice-based approach is the fact that it articulates the spatiality and the fabrication of knowledge, where spatiality refers to situatedness, and fabrication to materiality (see below). I assume that spaces are socially and materially produced, and draw specifically on Massey’s (2005) idea of space as a coming together of trajectories.

The Residential Unit is laid out in a basic L-shape, with families’ bedroom suites located along two corridors, and the nurses’ station at their nexus. The corridors and nurses’ station are produced as spaces through the coming together of bodies and materialities in particular actions. These connections – spatial texture – are crucial in enabling staff to learn about the families they are supporting. Knowing in practice, emergent and contingent as it is, cannot proceed without the spatial texture of the corridor-nurses’ station arrangement. While seated at the nurses’ station, usually writing notes, nurses are able to hear cries emanating from nurseries down the corridors. Another aesthetic (Strati, 2003) feature of their expertise concerns their ability to locate the cries spatially, and to associate cries with particular infants based on their rhythmic and tonal characteristics. This knowing in practice – attributing cries to bodies and locations – evolves over time, and influences subsequent actions. A cry heard may prompt a nurse to stand and look down a corridor to check if a colleague is already at hand to support a parent. Or the nurse might put down her pen and walk directly to a nursery. The materiality of the corridor is significant in this spatial texture. Nurses asked for the carpet to be removed and replaced with a hard plastic floor, so that they could better hear cries.

Other trajectories come together to produce spatial textures whose primary function is to connect knowing in practice across the staff team. In handovers, the bodies of two or more nurses (and sometimes parents) come together in the handover room or other locations. Also present are material artefacts including clients in residence sheets (lists of family names, child ages etc), behaviour charts (discussed below), written summaries of goals, and so on. These bodies and things come together at particular times, during overlaps in the rhythm of nurses’ shifts. A weekly case conference brings together bodies representing a range of health disciplines and management roles, in a different location, with different material artefacts – client medical records and food (the meeting is at lunchtime). What is said and written in handover and case conferences affects what is said and done afterwards. The spatial textures establish connectedness in action not only for the fleeting duration of each coming together of trajectories, but between the past (reporting on what has happened, reading notes written previously) and the future (shaping what is done subsequently).

Textures of bodies‘Bodies’ is a rough and problematic term given difficulties in fixing the boundaries of a human body and separating it from other features of the material world. However it signals a distinctive

way of exploring connectedness in action. Bodies are material entities. However I have also suggested that times and spaces are not immaterial, so my focus on bodies is not to separate them out from materiality, but to take the human body as a fuzzily defined, porous starting point. Connectedness in action cannot be disembodied: no bodies, no texture. Cognitivist, and to an extent participatory approaches display an unfortunate rendering the invisible; this approach confronts bodies in their fleshy, visible presence head on.

Varied ways of conceptualising bodies and embodiment are at our disposal and provide potentially rich resources for further probing the body in learning and practice (see Green and Hopwood, forthcoming). These include critical feminist approaches (Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 1991; Butler, 1993), which dismantle body/mind dualisms, blur the boundaries of the body (cyborgs), and offer performative and material (rather than discursive or biological) bases for understanding the body (see also Green and Hopwood, forthcoming; Schatzki 1996a).

Many of the practices through which professionals learn about families on the Residential Unit secure connectedness in action through establishing body geometries drawn from a repertoire of arrangements that I observed being reproduced over and over again. By body geometries I refer to relations between human and other bodies in terms of qualities such as proximity/distance, angle, and associated issues of sensory interaction through sight, sound, smell, touch and taste (Hopwood, 2013b; Hopwood, forthcoming b).

Let us consider a child painting with her mother in the playroom, with a playroom coordinator nearby. The bodies of mother and child are in close proximity to each other and the painting stand (another kind of body), such that the mother can put her arm around the child, comment gently on the child’s actions, and physically join in the painting. The playroom coordinator squats 1-2m away from the mother, child and painting. She does not intrude in the close interpersonal and material space of the mother and child painting together, but she is close enough to observe and listen to what is happening, and to talk to the mother, pointing certain things out, making suggestions, asking questions. Through this geometric arrangement, the playroom coordinator’s knowing in practice evolves as she learns about the child, her parent, and how they interact; this knowing also informs her interventions in those interactions (see Hopwood, 2011, forthcoming a). Remarkably similar geometric arrangements were enacted around dining room tables, during infant massage, and so on. A variation on this form involves nurses and parents congregating either side of a nursery door while a child falls asleep inside.

Body geometries are also established in handover practices, connecting knowing in practice across the Unit’s workforce. Many handovers involve two nurses sat around the corner of a desk, with various forms of paperwork. I took dozens of photographs of handovers during my observations, and the regularity of the arrangement of human and other bodies in the standard nurse-nurse handover is astonishing: even when the handover room could not be used, the geometry was reproduced elsewhere. There are elements here of what Nicolini (2009) refers to as body choreography (see also Hopwood and Clerke, 2012).

Much more could be said of textures of bodies, including of how nurses’ and infants’ bodies connect through sensory interaction (holding infants, smelling nappies), how all actions are performed by cyborgs – human bodies wearing clothes, using pens etc. Ideas of how bodies affect each other and are capable of being affected, and associated concepts of contagion (Seyfert, 2012) present highly promising ways to further understand bodily dimensions of connectedness in action.

Textures of thingsGherardi (2009a, b) argues that the value of practice-based approaches lies in their attention to

materiality. Nicolini (2009) writes of how materiality can be understood to participate in and shape what people do and say. This is a corrective to traditions in which the material world has been ignored and rendered invisible. I use ‘things’ as a rough substitute for ‘materiality’ simply because it runs more elegantly alongside times, spaces, and bodies. However using the word ‘things’, is even more problematic than ‘bodies’. Schatzki (2005) distinguishes between human bodies, organisms, artefacts, and things, while post-humanist approaches resist any a priori separation between human and non-human, or material and other. The awkwardness of ‘things’ can be accommodated in the context of the four textures for the reasons I explained above: each entertains blurred boundaries and resists tight definition. By starting from questions of things, we may notice dimensions of connectedness in action that have not yet been foregrounded.

Connectedness in action is a material accomplishment. Textures of materiality emerge, and this has implications for questions of knowing in practice (Bruni et al., 2007). To illustrate this I will briefly discuss three things (material artefacts) their connections with each other, and with knowing in practice. The Residential Unit makes widespread use of behaviour charts, upon which aspects of a child’s sleep, feeding, mood and toilet behaviours are recorded. This information is temporally specified, resulting in an unbroken record running from arrival on Monday until departure on Friday. Nurses create these artefacts by using specific forms of notation, knowing what to write down based on direct observations (of children’s bodies, nappies etc.), interaction with parents, and what they have been told by colleagues. Progress notes are written, by hand, and form a crucial part of the medical records, which are stored long term and have legal significance. These are not a continuous account, but a professional descriptive digest, focusing either on parents or children (there is a record for each); stickers and signatures indicate which member of staff has authored each entry (see Hopwood [under review] for a discussion of signatures as embodied and material enactments of professional responsibility). Clients in residence sheets take multiple forms, one of which is an A4 sized personal version, upon which basic information about each family is printed, and then handwritten notes are added by nurses. These are ephemeral, and may be jettisoned after a shift, or brought back on subsequent shifts and added to.

These three sets of things do not connect themselves – the texture of things is enacted bodily, and is not separate from textures of times and spaces. I wish to highlight the importance of this material texture for knowing in practice: learning about families, and learning from colleagues. The updating of the behaviour chart is simultaneously a result and an enactment of knowing in practice. The updated behaviour chart materialises one person’s knowing in practice such that that knowing can be taken up by others in their subsequent actions. Personal clients in residence sheets are both produced through interactions such as handover, and are referred to by nurses when they are giving handover. Their content is defined by what the hander or handee deem relevant in terms of shaping future practices. Progress notes in the medical record not only provide a stabilised, materialised record for purposes of accountability. Each night shift is marked by a period during which night staff read the progress notes (and consult the behaviour charts), learning what has happened during the day. Their knowing in practice evolves through the night as they work with parents to re-settle waking children, and that is in turn reflected in the notes that connect other staff in the morning handover.

It makes no sense to conceive a texture of practices that does not have a material dimension. In this argument I am in no disagreement with Gherardi or others. I argue simply that the concept of textures benefits from being subjected to scrutiny from this, and (at least) three other angles.

ConclusionGherardi’s concept of the texture of practices is highly valuable to researchers seeking to understand relationships between practice and learning in workplaces: it leads us to investigate

connectedness in action. While the existing literature suggests this connectedness may take multiple forms, these have not been specified or conceptualised in detail. Neither have textures been fully considered in relation to broader theorisations of practices of which the concept is part. I argue that, since practices have temporal, spatial, bodily and material dimensions, so we can better understand textures of practices and make what is otherwise invisible visible by exploring connectedness in action with reference to times, spaces, bodies, and things. These are not exclusive, separate or even clearly defined categories; I am not proposing four different types of texture that may or may not be present in a particular suite of connected actions. I present them as dimensions of all textures of practices: there is no connectedness in action that is not constituted in at least these four ways.

The conceptual framework I have developed here joins a growing body of research that treats learning and practice as emergent (or perhaps co-emergent), which emphasise the importance of materiality, and which reject the erasure of human bodies from social inquiry. Implicit in the four textures are assumptions about learning that build on a performative notion of knowledge (knowing), an epistemology characterised by provisionality, uncertainty, contingency and multiplicity, and ontological assumptions in which knowing and multiple realities are fluid, fragile and in constant flux through mutual connection.

Readers may ask how this framework may be put to use. I suggest it may be productive to mirror Nicolini’s (2009) suggestion that such frameworks be treated as programmatic yet not prescriptive: offering sensitising concepts, leading us to ask new questions, notice different things, and importantly, make different and valuable connections. I share Nicolini’s (2012) eclectic appetite which is less occupied with the establishment of one particular theoretical view, and more oriented towards flexible bringing together and adaptation that ultimately are put to the test against some form of empirical material. This is not a singular or totalising framework, but a multiple and open-ended one. My sense is that it will not always be useful, appropriate or necessary to attend equally to all four dimensions, but I do argue that if we wish to understand how practices hang together and form a texture, and through this how learning in work takes place, then we must be cognisant that these processes are at least temporal, spatial, embodied and material.

There may be other textures. To qualify as an additional dimension another concept must be conceived as essential (in both senses of constitutive essence, and non-optional) to connectedness in action. A strong contender for a fifth dimension may focus on affect (Seyfert, 2012). In expanding Gherardi’s texture of practices into four dimensions, I have already added to complexity. As an advocate for parsimonious explanation I stress the importance of the qualifying criteria I mentioned above. Simply providing a different form a texture may take is not the same as establishing another dimension. I find taking times, spaces, bodies, and things as different, related and overlapping points of departure a fruitful way to further my own analysis. I hope others will find the same.

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