Reconfiguring Textures of Practice: Expansive-Restrictive Learning Environments at the Thrift Shop

The aim of this paper is to theorise expansive-restrictive dynamics of learning environments at work as a texture of practice (Gherardi, 2019). The development of the expansive-restrictive continuum (Fuller & Unwin, 2004) has rested largely on social and sociocultural learning theories which despite a sensibility to materiality foregrounds human interaction. Here, we position the locus in the sociomaterial ‘connectedness in action’ (Gherardi, 2019), that is the entanglement of humans, things, and spaces in an emerging practice. Inspired by Gherardi’s (2016, p. 686) call to invent/discover/reconfigure a new vocabulary, we seek to ‘circulate existing concepts’ not better per se, but differently and perhaps, more adequately. The empirical outset is ethnographic data from Re-Use, an employment programme in a thrift shop for young adults with interrupted work histories. Accordingly, we ask: What are the expansive-restrictive dynamics of the emerging texture of Re-Use? What comes into view when expansive-restrictive dynamics of learning environment are theorised as texture of practice? Drawing on the notion of texture of practice and Hopwood’s (2014) four vantage points space, bodies, things, and time, we offer a range of conceptual resources useful for empirical sensibility of the sociomaterial, spatial and temporal expansive-restrictive dynamics of learning environments.