Four essential dimensions of workplace learning
Introduction
Workplace 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 texturehas 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. TeenaClerke 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 learning
Hager (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; Fenwicket 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’ (Schatzi1996b, 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 practice
In 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 practice
My 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 Unit
In 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, howperformance 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 essentialdimensionsof 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 dimensions
In 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.