Why study expansive learning from a materialist perspective? I have said elsewhere that learning needs an expansive topology, and that it must be reminded of the strange, the questionable, the terrible, and even the divine which drives it (Beighton 2015a, b: 159). I’m concerned with this expansion because its possibility persists in the most banausic repetition, troubling our anthropocentric self-sufficiency, thrusting its strange otherness on us as material beyond ourselves. I think that environments, bodies, and organs are nothing without this stuff and that the steps we take in learning are inseparable from a dynamic relation with it. We can no longer treat data “as if they were either uncomplicatedly ‘there’; or as mere social constructs and therefore not really there at all” (MacLure 2015: 2).

What Maggie MacLure is stressing is that this stuff is not, of course, inert. Indeed, it often acts in unpredictable ways, and its strangeness is present in organizational learning and research. More than this, it’s actually demanded by today’s changing workplace environments:

In fact, one could say that much of organizing relates to what happens while management is busy making other plans (…) the body of an organization and its organs (similar to the sleepwalkers) can and do achieve things that management, captive in its prejudices, has never dreamt of. (Clegg et al. 2005: 158)

So a rediscovery of the vital strangeness of matter is only the first step. In fact, the real challenge for researchers is to bring profound features of organizational learning into relief, studying the culture and practices of a particular area in depth. But materialist research needs to espouse the presupposition that absolutely nothing is known: “everything to it is equally strange and a problem.” Here, Arthur Schopenhauer (1969: 81) was referring explicitly to philosophy, of course, just as Alfred North Whitehead (1985: 337) remarked that the chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. I want to take these ideas seriously, because the things that matter, the material that we deal with—and which deals with us—cannot be narrowed down to a few threadbare concepts, perceptions, or ideas.

In this book, then, I want to suggest that developments in professional learning bring these issues into stark relief while underpinning a suitably sophisticated understanding of what matters. By sophisticated, I mean deploying a rationale for multiple perspectives on practice and, particularly, research, although there is no doubt that this poses problems for practitioners and researchers in organizational settings. Reich et al. (2015: 139) have identified a tension in recent research: while organizational learning needs frameworks and structures which recognize that professional learning is “collective, dynamic and embedded in everyday practices,” at the same time it needs to speak to the concerns of professionals, organizations, and their professional bodies.

What, though, does it mean for learning to be collective? Surely, it means more than just getting people to do things together, an often uninspiring and overrated exercise in human logistics. What is meant by dynamic? We often use the term to mean “speedy,” but I don’t think this can be enough, when learning can take anything from a millisecond upwards to take effect. What, finally, does it mean to embed learning in practice? In what sort of practices, precisely, is learning to be embedded, and how? Does this embedding refer to learning in given contexts, or is the relationship between practice and place properly complex, with all this implies about the properly dynamic relations between the two? These relations certainly matter. If it’s true that small steps shape one’s professional learning environment and build networks beyond the institution (Boyd et al. 2015b: 137), how does this dynamic reciprocal determination work—and what gets in the way?

Trying to answer these questions makes real demands on our conceptual as well as our practical tool kits, and much recent work takes these complex professional spaces and workplace relations seriously. However, as Tara Fenwick and Monika Nerland (2013) have said, there is a feeling of despair about the lack of recognition of this in professional organizational learning itself. While no one would claim to have exhausted the complex phenomenon of professional and workplace learning, they argue that those involved continue to ignore serious criticisms of the decontextualized, individualized, immaterial parameters under which much organizational professional learning continues to operate. Like Fenwick and Nerland, however, I am keen to look closer at specific organizational practices, and where better than policing as a context for such an investigation? Policing evidences both totemic importance as an organization and a certain fragility since its claim to professional status is itself contested (Fyfe 2013). Where better than a section of policing where these issues are affecting daily practice, namely UK Police Firearms¹ training? The case of policing spotlights the fact that budget cuts linked to current economic circumstances are radically changing key aspects of professional operational behavior. Policing may even be “in the midst of a paradigm shift” in how officers tackle their daily tasks in this challenging environment (Terrill et al. 2014: 494).

Pedagogies of expansive learning developed in this context are one way of looking into the development of professional knowledge across a range of professional learning settings, and my first goal is to offer principles and tools for research, practice, and even ethics in organizational contexts. I want to place the processes of learning at the center of my analysis, since without them, wider theoretical and practical systems would not exist and the concept of experience as a set of rich, interconnected processes makes no sense. Referring to and reflecting on a longitudinal research project (Beighton and Poma 2013; Beighton and Poma 2014; Beighton et al. 2015) and its data, I wanted to examine the extent to which insights from the field provide a helpful description of practice in an organizational context with much to teach us about professional learning.

One way of doing this is to re-evaluate simplistic pictures of practice by examining properties which have been hitherto ignored, neglected, or misconceived. A candidate for such a re-evaluation is the material of these environments or the recalcitrant stuff which reminds us that the world is not simply a construct to be redefined or a substance to be reformed in our own image. This is the stuff which does so much more than simply surround practitioners as if it did not exist until we noticed it.

This re-evaluation goes somewhat against the grain of course: we are used to the arguments which demonstrate the naivety of realism and cast materialism as some form of dehumanization. My argument here though is that we cannot conceive of change in workplace environments, still less speak of it, without a very specific form of materialism. This is a materialism which shows how the stuff of experience is what makes learning possible and that what things are becoming is an indispensable feature of our entanglement with them. Immanuel Kant, certainly no materialist, notes early in the first Critique (1791/2007: 38) that while experience does indeed teach us that things are thus, it does not teach us that they cannot be otherwise: simply noticing empirical evidence tells us nothing about underlying complexities. This is especially true when these complexities are defined by this tendency toward new forms of emergent property.

Expansive learning theorists Engeström and Sannino (2012) recognize this when they say that the processual nature of learning needs to be thought through. This is a striking idea if it makes us turn to the worlds around us with a sense of wonder again. The particular wonder in question here is a response to the sheer strangeness and the alterity of things, and it’s necessary because it’s an encounter which rescues us from mechanism, repetition, and what Gilles Deleuze (1994) called la bêtise —the sort of animality of which even animals are incapable. If we think of the barely human as that which simply perpetuates itself through automatic, circular relationships which never take it out of itself, then it helps to consider how the really human actualizes that which as people we most relish: learning to become what we are.

But enough of this.

The five chapters which follow tackle these issues by moving from definitions of the problem at hand to its implications.

Chapter 2 presents and discusses the concept of expansive learning a s a response to the demands for a more complex theory of organizational learning mentioned above. The case for expansive learning is made first, and then different definitions of the term are discussed. I consider why it is useful in organizational contexts, suggesting a synthesis of two influential strands of thinking and recognizing some of the points made by its critics. Focusing on key features of expansion in professional learning, I stress the importance of difference , materiality, and change in understanding these processes.

Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which these ideas impact on research into organizational learning. It examines the political background of such research, as well as the practical implications of the concept. A central concern in this chapter is the tension between “what works” and “what matters,” and the resulting implications of research philosophy and its impact on tools, research practices, and the collaborative arrangements which are currently being promoted by some professional organizations.

Chapter 4 continues this discussion with reference to a specific example in Police Firearms training. It focuses on the problems of professional learning environments and how research might go ...