# Assistant conversation 8FMXDR

- Canonical URL: <https://sheaf.less.rest/8FMXDR>
- Resource IRI: <https://sheaf.less.rest/8FMXDR>
- Type: assistant conversation
- Mode: quick

## Transcript

### 1. User

can you read though ch4 of the new 4V8VH7 draft, also read ch5  cuz that one is more redrafted and edited and polished now, but yeah so in ch4 there's a bunch to do but especially we are wondering about clearly integrating shove 2012 into this chapter so let's go through the throughline of ch4 and imagine how the chapter would read if it were more clearly and lucidly grounded in shove 2012?

### 2. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "4V8VH7"
}
```

### 3. Tool result: get_document

THESIS #4V8VH7
Title: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

Outline:
  - 1 #ZF9EYF Introduction
    - 1.1 #LAR465 Latvian context and research
    - 1.2 #MUKRGA A note on terms
    - 1.3 #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis
  - 2 #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework
    - 2.1 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice
    - 2.2 #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices?
    - 2.3 #HQ4PZX Consumption practices
    - 2.4 #23NMLX Consumption Work
    - 2.5 #ULSUAX Conclusion
  - 3 #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice  Freecycle
    - 3.1 #ZXRYYU The site
    - 3.2 #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode
    - 3.3 #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice
    - 3.4 #VMQSHJ Participant observation
    - 3.5 #GU86TB Interviews
    - 3.6 #BRBBF9 Data analysis
    - 3.7 #TGAMBJ Research ethics
  - 4 #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation
    - 4.1 #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home
    - 4.2 #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow
    - 4.3 #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation
    - 4.4 #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange
    - 4.5 #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price
    - 4.6 #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition
    - 4.7 #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?
    - 4.8 #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations
  - 5 #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode
    - 5.1 #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle
    - 5.2 #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care
    - 5.3 #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route
    - 5.4 #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care
    - 5.5 #75D5UH Conclusion
  - 6 #M9WQLY CONCLUSION
  - 7 #FTE3UX SUMMARY
  - 8 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES
  - 9 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE

### 4. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "9XAKTW",
    "82G2QE"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "limit": 10,
  "query": "Shove 2012 materials competences meanings"
}
```

### 5. Tool result: read

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation

PARAGRAPH #PL9BXR
  This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the competencies that order the exchange. Throughout the chapter I move between analysis of freecycling as practice-entity and as performance, especially attending to moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other.

PARAGRAPH #EKYQ3W
  Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I trace the incoming flow of things into Brīvbode, starting with the decisions of divestment in the households of participants. I look at how Brīvbode is positioned among possible routes of divestment, and turn to the site itself to see how its material elements sustain the practice of circulation, as well as how the competencies and norms at play let the swapshop cope with the constant pressure of overflow.

PARAGRAPH #XYAHKP
  Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between conceptions of charity and exchange. I also examine how the absence of price reshapes participants’ attachment to objects, and the competencies of letting go that the practice both requires and cultivates. Finally I consider the range of participant orientations towards freecycling as a practice of sustainability.

PARAGRAPH #L252MY
  Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist.

SECTION #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home

PARAGRAPH #5XUPCJ
  The material outcome of one practice present in Brīvbode (domestic divestment: things arrive) is a direct resource for another (sequential acquisition: things are taken), sustaining the circularity between different households and the freeshop. Instead of starting at the “shop”, freecycling in Brīvbode can be viewed as starting with the outward flow of things no longer needed or wanted in the household and the question of what to do with them. The practice of managing this flow (what Počinkova et al. (2023) call voluntary disposal) is what brings most givers to Brīvbode. The swapshop offers them an opportunity for circulating materials as well as a way of managing attachment and detachment from things. Brīvbode is one node in the available infrastructure of divestment, and is distinguished from others by what it means to route things through it.

PARAGRAPH #CLU5VP
  Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed through darning socks at home – now a rather rare practice – but has moved, as Gregson (2007) shows, into methods and styles of disposal and divestment. Divesting responsibly has become one of the ways people sustain and recreate identity in relation to their things.

PARAGRAPH #TYTN9E
  The ideal encouraged by the organisers in Brīvbode is for participants to both give and take, yet the two roles do not always recruit the same carriers or sustain participation through the same meanings. Giving in Brīvbode is typically more structured by the motives of givers rather than by the needs of the receivers. Giving contributes to a stock of the swapshop and is shaped by the givers’ assessments of their sense of responsibility toward still-usable objects (too good to throw away), hopes for things finding new trajectories with other carriers, and their capacity to manage the work of getting rid of things well. The practice is donor-driven, and things arriving reflect more the rhythms and pressures of household life, and coordination with receivers’ needs is only indirect.

PARAGRAPH #WEBXCF
  Divestment in Brīvbode is distributed across time unevenly and concentrated around rhythms of domestic material arrangements and particular life events. People typically bring things in batches – no longer wanted items are set aside and accumulate at home until, e.g. a bag is full and is then divested to Brīvbode.

PARAGRAPH #AB93FC
  Moving home, renovation, seasonal clearing, and sorting through a deceased relative’s belongings generate larger pulses of divestment. Participants described sorting through an entire previous owner’s life when buying a flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home.

PARAGRAPH #7Y7J2Z
  The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment as smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out in order to fulfill, for example, the ideal of an uncluttered home – this requires both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route.

PARAGRAPH #CWZ4L2
  The ideal of a decluttered home functions both as cultural script and as embodied relief. Gundega puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety rather than clarity – no one person can remember it all. Viesturs is more pragmatic about decluttering methods: "I sense there are all sorts of methods and things, but it all seems like a luxury problem to me. Although maybe we should promote something like that – users of those methods would definitely supply us with better quality content."

PARAGRAPH #V83RLN
  The act of bringing things to Brīvbode performs moral work that throwing away does not – it can relieve guilt of having acquired unnecessarily, maintain the identity of a responsible consumer, and transfer some of the responsibility for what happens next to the swapshop. Divesting well and finding a route that feels appropriate to the object's remaining value is itself a practice with normative dimensions: there are right and wrong ways to let things go, and Brīvbode offers one of the right ways.

PARAGRAPH #PQV5PN
  Participants who divest in Brīvbode mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system in comparison to the freeshop. Both routes offer removal and a presumed social good, but participants expressed particular satisfaction for witnessing circulation in Brīvbode – moments when they saw someone taking the items they brought. Although giving and taking are decoupled and mediated by the swapshop, participants can sometimes observe the circulation during their visits, a characteristic noted by many with a kind of quiet pleasure. The divestment is completed by seeing or knowing an item was taken, and this visibility closes the divestment cycle affectively. The opportunity for other visitors to access the materials is valued, while the textile collection management system is deemed too distanced to imagine who benefits.

PARAGRAPH #7ZXWJU
  In absence of a specific receiver, while trying to negotiate the appropriate value and quality standards for the items circulated, givers construct a figure of a receiver, a meaning which shapes the practice from the giving side. Aiga describes her hope that a homeless person from the neighbourhoods of Ķengarags or Purvciems, someone in genuine need would use what she brings. This imagery expands what counts as worth passing on: objects that might be marginal by taste standards become appropriate if genuine need is the criterion, and the threshold for what counts as good enough shifts accordingly.

PARAGRAPH #YNY54V
  The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty can become a source of tension. Aiga described how she continues wearing clothing that is slightly pilled and normally uses dry food items past their expiry date – her own standards of what remains usable are linked to the meaning of genuine need but she cannot know in advance whether the items she brings to Brīvbode will be acknowledged as suitable. After receiving comments once about the quality of something she brought to Brīvbode, she prefers to not linger and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated by someone else.

PARAGRAPH #MS53CN
  The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable.

PARAGRAPH #796PVP
  In reality, Brīvbode also functions as a divestment route for items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate: unfinished repair projects and textile fragments can sometimes be found, photographs and used magazines, not entirely complete jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes volunteers would remark that they already look for signs of wear and tear in suspicion about reasons an item has been brought to Brīvbode. They are aware that the swapshop can become a route of last resort for objects that are genuinely difficult to route elsewhere. What counts as acceptable and what counts as waste is decided through social judgment rather than formal criteria. I sometimes brought things in my backpack but ended up not taking them out as on second thought they seemed too worn or not suited.

PARAGRAPH #HN8W7V
  Fieldwork observations reveal different versions and scales of what counts as usable and worthy: I recall a collection of single-use sugar packages; a bundle of expired covid tests (I spent time unpacking the alcohol wipes and watched a woman take them); carefully washed plastic containers that were taken to the recycling bin after all (although the sour cream containers are useful in spring for growing plantings). A regular visitor brought coloured wire offcuts generated by her husband’s wireworking practice – she imagined someone who makes art or does craft work with children could be taking them, as they were never on the shelf anymore the next time she visited. Her husband generates surplus, she routes it to Brīvbode through her domestic management, an unknown hypothetical third person absorbs it into their own. The trajectory is sustained by an imagined right-owner who may not exist, and the volunteers did not have the heart to tell her the bags of small plastic pieces were not used that way.

PARAGRAPH #5GWZER
  Yet unpredictability of supply works both ways – e.g. the same giver who took extra effort to send Brīvbode a parcel with stained old plates that raised volunteer questions about the balance of invested energy for handling it, divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens another time – laid out on the table, those attracted many visitors’ attention with shared beauty. This uncertainty of supply is itself part of what sustains participant engagement with the practice through meanings of “serendipity” and magic moments of unexpected “good catch”.

PARAGRAPH #4G43HR
  The same logic that makes divestment easy also can make Brīvbode available as a pressure valve. Fast fashion sometimes arrives with tags still attached; one participant brought clothing she had purchased online – after it did not fit she arranged a return, and was told by the company to donate it rather than send it back – the retailer in this case is routing their surplus to volunteers to manage.

PARAGRAPH #9CFEH4
  Divestment is normalised and sought after. As Brīvbode manager Rasa observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things."  In this view, Brīvbode appears as evidence of the structural conditions it aspires to address rather than a solution to them. There is tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system and as a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve easily.

SECTION #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow

PARAGRAPH #2PU5ZY
  On Thursdays and Fridays a queue often forms by Brīvbode before noon – sometimes more than ten people wait to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Rasa sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins."

PARAGRAPH #X8RDCG
  After an item is divested to Brīvbode, it does not belong to the donor anymore, it belongs to the swapshop. This transfer of ownership is actively managed: takers are discouraged from taking things from the sorting table before they are processed, as their enthusiasm has caused discomfort to other visitors in the past.

PARAGRAPH #SUZYLN
  However, sorting is done “on the spot” and in the same room, and things move fast. As Larsen (2023) observes, in thrift shops, practices are often characterized by a "reversal" of standard economic logic, where the goal is to move things along as quickly as possible rather than to maximize the profit per individual item. This can also be said about Brīvbode – there’s excitement about things moving quickly.

PARAGRAPH #RQ8CCN
  Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh  (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, observe, “relational-material exchanges play out better as an embodied co-presence with others/things” – objects can be handled, tried on and assessed, and an item of decent quality will eventually find a taker.

PARAGRAPH #LHLZ8Y
  The physicality and permanence of Brīvbode as a site is one of the main attributes setting it apart from other similar initiatives that often struggle with availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note how, because of this reason, organisers of Singapore markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives – thus it is important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice of freecycling, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life.

PARAGRAPH #KMD7AJ
  The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic –  with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance.

PARAGRAPH #CL5CS8
  The regularity of operation that the physical on-site format allows also fosters social contact among participants. Opening hours twice per week is both a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour and a social encounter catalyst – temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to encounter each other. The volunteer in charge of the shift anchors the social experience, and the personal relationships accumulate over repeated visits. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Nadja is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Viesturs is." While Brīvbode is not a primary site for socialisation for most participants, regular visitors, especially those living in single person households, noted the meaningfulness of the social aspect of visiting, the casual contact with known “faces”, Brīvbode being a place to go and the visits giving a structure to the week.

PARAGRAPH #WW8YUW
  Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own.

PARAGRAPH #2TPNCM
  The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space."

PARAGRAPH #3USBHB
  During another shift, Rasa offered me a handmade black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before my departure confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Rasa laughed: “This is how it is here.” As a material site, Brīvbode is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings.

PARAGRAPH #PNCAWA
  The pull of Brīvbode as a divestment destination persists even when the physical site is temporarily absent. For several weeks after the Brīvbode pop-up venue in Āgenskalns closed at the end of summer 2021, people kept bringing boxes and bags of belongings, leaving them in front of the empty shop. The practice had recruited carriers so effectively that the site’s closure did not interrupt the flow.

PARAGRAPH #SFAYYS
  The things are made visible by being put in the shop. It makes the material overflow more visible – there is no “away” to throw your things.

SECTION #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation

PARAGRAPH #TDQ4JL
  The material composition of Brīvbode reflects the gendered organisation of (clothing) consumption more broadly. The majority of items circulating through the freeshop are women’s and children’s clothing – a pattern that mirrors the more feminised character of household consumption management. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they also look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics.

PARAGRAPH #BCDC5C
  The gendered asymmetry extends to the competencies required to manage the space. Viesturs described his initial challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing after he started volunteering: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competence of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation and has to be worked out through practice.

PARAGRAPH #2U6CTU
  The standards applied to men’s clothing also operate differently. There is simply less of it, and the threshold for what is acceptable is lower – men’s clothing is assumed to be used for physical work and is assessed accordingly. One day two young women looking through the clothing boxes for film costumes picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it was, while a man right next to them took it. Rasa later confirmed the shirt was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she noted, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around.

PARAGRAPH #F9CK8T
  While there are explicit written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, those are framed in general relational terms – “bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend” – and there are no formal categories of exclusion. Norms regarding acceptability are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction about where the boundaries lie.

PARAGRAPH #BZ6FJC
  Being in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. The work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions, and the balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. At times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought.

PARAGRAPH #Y7K4KZ
  This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed strictly, e.g. accepting only unopened items and carefully monitoring expiration dates, in Brīvbode the circulation is shaped less by formal regulation and more by trust and familiarity among participants. Open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially.

PARAGRAPH #7CR75E
  A stronger boundary emerges in relation to certain categories of items, such as medicine. In one instance, a regular visitor brought various medications, explaining their uses to the day manager. While the items were initially placed on the table for taking, a while later another worker quietly removed them, remarking to me, “I don’t think I support this.” The removal was not communicated directly to the donor, suggesting a reluctance to enforce the norm explicitly. Instead of a formal refusal, workers might suggest that perhaps the giver has not noticed the defects, but items could be washed and brought back or simply delay decisions until the giver is no longer present.

PARAGRAPH #CUBS5Q
  "Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly.

PARAGRAPH #MQPMT2
  Competencies of Circulation

PARAGRAPH #76T3WR
  The competencies that sustain freecycling in Brīvbode are largely social and evaluative rather than technical, and none of them require formal training — but each is acquired through repeated participation and is unevenly distributed across practitioners. Material literacy — recognising wool from synthetic fibres, identifying well-made construction, spotting a hidden stain — is foundational, and volunteers develop it most acutely through handling what arrives. Rasa, in the recollection of one student researcher who spent time in the shop, has "the most trained eye for the quality of things" [visuztrenētākā acs uz mantu kvalitāti]; her own acquisition criteria turn on fibre type and durability, preferring what is "more nature-friendly, ecological, and long-lasting." Visitors develop a more limited version of the same competency. Laura describes herself as a careful second-hand user who checks everything thoroughly, though she admits she has still occasionally taken home items that turned out to be broken on closer inspection.

PARAGRAPH #EXTCGS
  On the acquisition side, competence also means knowing when to come and how to navigate the space. Agate has mapped the visitor typology and times her arrivals strategically; Marta describes starting in the first room and returning when something new has arrived. Equally important is the negative competency of not taking — knowing what one needs and what one already has. Zane keeps a list on her phone of items she is actively looking for, and her stylist consultations work as an investment in self-knowledge that guards against impulsive acquisition. Agate explicitly asks herself while browsing whether a given item could be combined with what she already owns. This is cognitive work — holding a mental model of one's wardrobe and household — and without it, acquisition becomes impulsive and the divestment work follows. The competencies of acquisition and divestment are therefore inseparable: each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour.

PARAGRAPH #73DSQT
  On the divesting side, the practice expects items to arrive clean and in reasonable condition, requiring washing, stain-checking, and sometimes minor repair, though norms vary: Marija leaves the washing to the recipient, while Anna says she never divests anything that has been repaired. The boundary between "ready to circulate" and "needs more work first" is itself negotiated through the practice.

PARAGRAPH #J4CQAN
  “on material literacy, meaning the skills and knowledge about different materials, how durable they are and with what treatment they last longest. This includes knowledge about appropriate washing, storing (Figures 2 and 3) and other care techniques like using a lint shaver or an iron.”

SECTION #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange

PARAGRAPH #QU37KZ
  Practices have normative meanings – understandings upheld about what correct participation looks like, what the practice is for, and who belongs in it. In Brīvbode, normative work is done by organisers to uphold the meaning of the freecycling as an exchange as opposed to a charity. This framing is a normative aspiration – a claim about who belongs and on what terms, actively maintained against pressure from resellers and heavy-takers. The normative aspiration is held together by a moral vocabulary of equality and reciprocity – the norm that participants bring something or at least contribute in kind or offer their help at the shop is part of what defines active participation in the practice rather than use of a service. This positioning work is felt as particularly needed by organisers also because Brīvbode is located in the neighbourhood of Gaiziņš night shelter.

PARAGRAPH #KBESND
  As Rasa puts it: “Exchange is a very honest way of operating, it requires responsibility from both sides. When both wealthy and poor, old and young can participate, and everyone knows it's on the basis of exchange, that you are equal, nobody gets a discount, nobody is more special. To many people we simply say: “We are not a charity. It's not the case that you come and now demand that you need clean trousers. We are not a charity point, this is an exchange point. Do you actually have something with you for exchange, before you start setting the rules here?” Nadja is very good at negotiating this. “Go to the Red Cross, go to other places that are specifically a charitable institution! We are not a help institution.””

PARAGRAPH #T8P86W
  Widlok’s (2017) analysis of give boxes – small scale unattended exchange infrastructure in a German town – offers a frame for what the non-monetary arrangement achieves socially. Give boxes, he argues, separate the acts of giving and receiving – donors and recipients do not need to interact directly, and the intermediary space absorbs the social awkwardness of charity. Items move quickly, suggesting ongoing demand, while participants tend to frame their involvement in terms of giving even when they primarily take.

PARAGRAPH #UFJ4GC
  Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to take without performing need. At the same time, Widlok notes that give boxes are not straightforwardly sharing practices – they tend to be understood within a moral register of charity or almsgiving rather than open-ended reciprocity, and tensions arise when participants extract items for resale rather than use.

PARAGRAPH #7FPBUS
  The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses."

PARAGRAPH #QKY57B
  This reveals a hierarchy of meanings operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s arrival to a sequential user is weighed as more important than the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of non-monetary exchange can be subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation. Besides, if visitors come with something in return, further trajectory is difficult to control.

PARAGRAPH #ERMRTL
  Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally.

SECTION #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price

PARAGRAPH #GL6QPX
  The intensity of circulation of items in Brīvbode and its non-monetary context raise a question about the relationship between price and attachment. Evans’s (2020) framework suggests that attachment is produced through the acquisition-side moments of consumption – appropriation and appreciation, processes that are normally anchored by monetary investment. Assima et al. (2023) describe "financial myopia" – the difficulty of detaching from items one has spent significant money on, even when they are no longer used. This results in "neglected possessions" accumulating in wardrobes as disposal is deferred to avoid the feeling of wasting a significant investment.

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  The anchor of monetary investment is absent from acquisition in Brīvbode, and some participants articulate the shift in their own relationship to objects directly. Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing – I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out or give it away, not wear it. Now it's simply: if it doesn't suit, bring it back. Try it – it works, or it doesn't. It's much more free." She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too: “No matter where the garment comes from, there is that percentage of things I take or buy or acquire for myself that I always know won't get worn regardless of whether I've paid money for them or not. So the safest thing to do is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets." This is a recalibration of what kinds of commitment acquisition is.

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  Fieldwork observations capture this in the dynamic of circulation. A woman arrives and leaves in different shoes than she came in: “I left mine here instead. Today with these trousers, the high heel doesn't suit. Hopefully no fungus..." Another laughs as she leaves her jacket in Brīvbode on a sunny day because she feels too hot: “I left home with clothes on but will be coming back in socks only. I don't need anything.” A third also swaps her jacket on the spot for one she prefers. The meaning of novelty comes across in these cases.

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  Another aspect to the quality of attachment is the possibility of a return after trial and seeing whether attachment will form. It can be difficult to assess in the moment of acquisition whether an item will settle in person’s life. Bringing something back if it does not further loosens the relationship between taking and keeping, allowing a lower stakes and a more experimental participation. This trial opportunity was appreciated by participants whose physical attributes and body shapes are not always catered to in retail: "Because for a small person it's quite hard to find trousers... But here there's the opportunity to try them for some time and see."

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  However, if acquisition carries less commitment, the same conditions that make divestment easier may make acquisition more frequent and less deliberate. My own divestment to Brīvbode often consists of things bought secondhand online as a preferred route of acquisition, but choosing not to invest effort in reselling when they don’t work out. The non-monetary regime does not automatically produce more careful consumption; its relationship to sufficiency depends on the meanings participants bring to it.

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  Elīna describes feeling a sense of responsibility toward everything she acquires – whether bought secondhand, taken from a swap event, or found in Brīvbode. Once something has come to her, she feels obligated to find it a good next home rather than simply discard it: "If this has come to me, then this material... energy and work and transport went into producing it, and I can't just throw it away. I feel I have a duty to figure out how to pass it on to hands where it will be useful." She adds, however, that this sense of responsibility sometimes feels like too heavy a burden to carry.

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  (Sometimes the relation to the shop is a source for jokes: “We have special mega discounts, 100 % – only today and tomorrow!”)

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  The self-management work

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  Managing the impulse to take because it is free. Marta describes this explicitly – learning to replace "free" with "exchange" in her mental vocabulary, developing the decision rule that if she is not sure she does not need it. This is deliberate self-regulation work, and it is not trivial. The non-monetary arrangement removes one natural brake on acquisition – financial cost – and participants who want to avoid accumulating must supply that brake themselves through conscious effort.

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  (moral economies of access and restraint)

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  "Man bija ļoti daudz dažādu veidu... pēdējos pāris gadus es kaut kā esmu no tā atkāvusies, ka es tā vairs nedaru. Es tiešām ļoti izvērtēju, vai man tā lieta tiešām ir nepieciešama." [I used to have so many different kinds of things… in the last couple of years I've somehow weaned myself off it; I no longer do that. I really do evaluate whether the thing is genuinely necessary for me.] Madara describes a conscious shift away from impulse acquiring in secondhand contexts – she recognizes her own past behavior as a problem and has worked to change it. This is deliberate practice modification. Madara: "Es tiešām cenšos nebūt tā tante ar trīs maisiem, kas staigā katru dienu tur no vienas točkas uz otru. To es cenšos nepieļaut un cenšos arī sadraudzēties maksimāli ar tām lietām, kas man ir." [I really try not to be that auntie with three bags who walks every day from one spot to another. I try to avoid that, and try to make peace as much as I can with the things I already have.] Making peace with what you have – sufficiency as an active practice of relationship with objects rather than deprivation. This is a positive formulation of sufficiency that does not rely on environmental discourse.

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  Elīna R. "S1: Bet kā tu nonāci pie tās sajūtas, pie tās atziņas – man jau pietiek? S2: Man vienkārši skapī vairs nav vietas. (smejas) Nu, arī, teiksim, tagad ir ziema, un ir džemperu laiks, un es saprotu, ka es tāpat neuzvelku visus savus džemperus. Nu, tātad man viņu ir acīmredzami par daudz. Un man arī patīk novalkāt lietas. Tur ir kaut kāds tāds, nu, man vismaz, īpašs tā kā kaifs, ka es ar šo lietu esmu tik daudz lietas darījusi kopā, ka viņa ir tik novalkāta, ka viņu, iespējams, pat vairs nevar salabot." [Interviewer: But how did you arrive at that feeling, that realisation – I already have enough? Elīna: There's simply no more space in my wardrobe. (laughs) Well – say it's winter now, sweater season, and I realise I don't wear all my sweaters anyway. So I obviously have too many of them. And I also like wearing things out. There's a kind of – well, for me at least, a special pleasure when I've gone through so much with a thing that it's worn down to the point where maybe it can't even be repaired anymore.]

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  "Es esmu krājēja. Jā, es esmu krājēja." [I'm a hoarder. Yes, I'm a hoarder.] Aiga recognised hoarding tendencies in herself. She links it to scarcity experience – not having had much as a student, learning to keep things because things were hard to come by. The accumulation habit is understood as a survival response to past material insecurity, but she is actively working to change. The turning point was a month-long solo trip through Europe after her employment ended: "Es aizbraucu, un tad ar to arī sākās, ka tagad, nu, tagad tas ir izdarīts, tagad ir jādomā kaut kas par lietām, kas ir par daudz." [I went away [on the trip], and that's when it started – that now, well, it's been done, and now I have to think something about the things that are too many.] Travel – where you carry only what fits in a bag – reframed her relationship to possessions and worked as a biographical rupture that catalyzed practice change.

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  "Es labāk šobrīd lēnā garā atbrīvojos... man nav vienkārši žēl paņemt somu un aizbraukt." [I'd rather let go of things slowly now… I just don't want it to be hard to pick up a bag and leave.] The war anxiety dimension: she is releasing things partly because she wants to be able to leave quickly if necessary. The geopolitical context of Latvia – proximity to Russia, uncertainty since 2022 – appears explicitly in her divestment motivation.

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  "Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." [The question of attachment is being worked on. It's in process.] "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." [Brīvbode helps, so to speak, this process to develop.] "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." [I'm already at the edge now, that's why I say one has to start saying goodbye even to what one has already found.] Māra is explicitly working on her attachment to things – she names it as a problem and frames it as ongoing work. Brīvbode as a tool for developing the capacity to let go. This is the freeshop as infrastructure for a personal practice of detachment. It is a positive framing of the same phenomenon that Rasa describes as generating excess – from Māra's perspective, having a route makes it easier to release.

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  Brīvbode as material infrastructure enabling the practice of letting go. The freeshop does not just receive things; it creates conditions that make divestment possible for people who otherwise could not do it. This is the role of material arrangement in sustaining practice.

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  the practice of divestment requires competencies that include emotional regulation and the capacity to detach from objects. Māra is developing these competencies deliberately.

SECTION #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition

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  Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and what each reveals about how the practice recruits and retains its carriers – what do people experience as useful and rewarding when they opt to take things in Brīvbode.

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  For Marija, the primary meaning is access and dignity as Brīvbode enables a form of self-presentation beyond her regular means: "I dressed like an absolute princess. You can’t even find things like that in a shop." She takes pleasure in the secret source as other people in her networks cannot tell the difference between her clothing originating from Brīvbode or retail. This also has a competence dimension: knowing where to look, when to come, having access to a source others do not use.

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  Anna frames her participation with a desire for aesthetic autonomy: “I've always really disliked it when I'm wearing something and someone else is wearing exactly the same." Instead of sustainability or thrift, this meaning is based on distinctiveness. Anna also has a sewing competency that works as an extension of the same desire – making her own clothing is the ultimate guarantee of uniqueness: the competency of sewing is sustained by the meaning. Additionally Brīvbode also enables Anna's daily performance of festivity: wearing a glitter dress as everyday wear is possible because Brīvbode provides a low-stakes supply resource.

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  Elīna describes a similar dynamic at a lower threshold of commitment: “You can try out different styles for free. I took a bomber jacket I would never have bought myself." The jacket became one of her most-worn items. Brīvbode enabled a style experiment that she would not have risked financially. Similarly, a practitioner who was exploring cross-dressing also described: "What gives me joy is that I can create different characters from those clothes. For example, yesterday I went to my first cross-dresser date with this beautiful purple wig. I also got these court shoes... And that somehow challenged me to put them to use."

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  Madara’s participation is organised around her craftsperson's gaze – a competency that allows her to notice objects as made of particular components and materials. "When I see an item, I see it not just as a finished garment, but also, for example, as a material – fabric, beads, zippers." This competency distinguishes her participation from others and allows her to find value also in objects that other people might not find useful at all: "I found an old, cut mosquito net, which I use as a base for embroidery." Something that appeared to be waste turned out to be a useful resource to her. This is a heightened version of the right-owner logic – the object finds not just a user but a user who recognizes a value in it that is largely invisible to others. Also Madara’s rugmaking practice originated in having accumulated too many secondhand clothes – material surplus became the origin of a new practice.

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  The craftsperson's gaze has a negative counterpart, however, when it is decoupled from valuing items as a shared resource: some visitors treat the shop as a source of free raw materials, cutting off buttons or zippers from garments, and leaving the damaged items behind – extracting the value themselves while diminishing it for everyone else.

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  While alternative, these meanings simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –

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  Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality and access is the meaning of class related stigma, and its presence significantly affects the practice’s recruitability. Some participants hinted at it subtly in conversation, but denied it when asked about it directly. Marija is the only one who explicitly named the shame associated with freecycling, and this cuts against any simple narrative of freecycling as normalized exchange practice for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and also praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, nevertheless, she also compares taking from Brīvbode to going through someone else’s trash. Especially when a TV crew came to Brīvbode and a journalist approached her for a couple of words, she flatly refused “I will not let them see that I've fallen so low as to come to Brīvbode." Yet in the same conversation she also reclaims the class label: "I'm common, simply common (prasta – common, plain, I.L.). I will go and get what I need." The value is privately experienced, but restricted in representation.

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  For some potential practitioners this association with lower class status is a barrier to entry, while others manage it strategically. Several participants mentioned withholding information about the origin of items, especially when passing things acquired in Brīvbode to other people as gifts. As volunteer Anna noted, grandmothers say: “I don't tell my daughter where I got that jacket, because she wouldn't take it.”

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  A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released.

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  This stigma of second hand acquisition is, however, also generationally uneven and appears to be dissolving, similar to patterns reported elsewhere (Gurova, 2024). Changing meanings are shifting the practice’s recruitability. Madara notes how a broader normalization of secondhand acquisition in recent years has produced a shift within her own family, who previously held strong norms against it. Luīze, a highschooler preparing for graduation, uses the English word "thrift shops" to talk about her consumption practices, frames her participation in explicit environmental terms, and reports that her classmates are actively seeking secondhand options for graduation dresses. She attributes the negative meaning her parents hold towards second hand acquisition to “Soviet mentality”.

SECTION #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?

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  In our conversation, Viesturs also positions Brīvbode against charity but from a different angle than Rasa: "Our goal is not to do good for people, I think. Our goal is to do good for the planet… Charity is always related to the meaning of poverty. I think that we need to emphasize the fun factor, the joy factor – swapping, changing clothes. That it's cool, fun, that it's joyful." He is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded to recruit and retain more practitioners. This orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing.

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  When I ask Viesturs if he sees working in Brīvbode as helping visitors or helping a cause, the question turns out to be beside the point: "To me it's so natural now, I don't evaluate it anymore. Others should evaluate it. It's simply a thing I do, without going into philosophical meanings." Sorting, switching clothing, chatting with visitors and attending to the shop so that it continues operating well – have become sufficiently routinised for him that they no longer require justification or meaning-work. The practice has stabilized to the point where the question of what it means has receded behind the doing.

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  Rasa answers similarly when I enquire about the environmental and sustainability aspects of Brīvbode: “Everything else is so intense… It has remained somehow, in a way, a little secondary." While the sustainability framing remains present – and is foregrounded e.g. when writing project funding applications or designing info materials – it does not need to be actively held by every practitioner in every performance. For both Viesturs and Rasa philosophical meaning-making has receded. This is what Smith and Jehlička (2013) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce sustainable outcomes without requiring their practitioners to hold or articulate sustainability as a motivation.

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  Sustainability as a meaning is present for practitioners, and e.g. Luīze is at the other end of the spectrum for whom it is expressed as primary rather than peripheral. She explicitly framed her participation in terms of ecological responsibility and the wider politics of avoiding fast fashion and microtrends.

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  Līva discussed how the environmental meaning is present for her, but in tension with her actual acquisition practices. She identifies textile consumption as probably one of her most environmentally problematic behaviors, yet was open that knowing it does not resolve it. She estimates she buys an item of clothing every month and frames this as more than she used to in adolescence. The meanings she uses to evaluate her consumption patterns are in tension with the meanings that sustain the acquisition, and neither cancels the other one out. Researching household textile disposal, Sigaard (2026) concludes that even while sustainable consumption is ideally endorsed, disposal is very normalized because it is strongly embedded in identity work, relational considerations and in facilitating other practices.

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  Also, as I argue, most participants come to Brīvbode for practical and social reasons instead of self-professed environmental conviction. This resonates with Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability, developed through their research on Czech urban gardeners: sustainable practices that can be widespread and effective but are not articulated in terms of sustainability by their practitioners. Smith and Jehlička contend that quiet sustainability is defined by practices “that result in beneficial environmental or social outcomes, that do not relate directly or indirectly to market transactions, and that are not represented by the practitioners as relating directly to environmental or sustainability goals. Cultures of sharing, repairing, gifting and bartering characterise quiet sustainability” (2013: 155). Latvia provides a productive context for this concept – several participants trace their orientations towards reuse and frugality to generational experience rather than sustainability aspiration. [..]

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  Some participants do find meanings for their participation in explicit sustainability terms, though, and this difference should not be overlooked. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without collapsing them into a single category, treating the variation between them as empirically interesting. In practice-theoretical terms, however, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice and “doings” hold the centre.

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  (Lifestyles of Enough) “Finally, the meanings attached to sufficiency-oriented consumption practices go way beyond altruistic motives like environmental concern. As a study by Kropfeld et al. (2018) showed, environmentally concerned consumers (with more altruistic motives) have a higher environmental impact than voluntary simplifiers (with more self-related motives). Personal or egocentric motives, therefore, can lead to sufficiency-oriented behavior, as the example for sharing services from this review showed. This is in line with Sandberg’s (2021) findings on sufficiency practices related to miscellaneous consumption, as she connects a reduction of consumption of various products (incl. clothing) to anti-consumption lifestyles such as voluntary simplicity or frugality.

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  Quiet sustainability – sustainable practices without added sustainability meaning.

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  what matters in sustainability? e.g. people gather egg cartons because it is easy, but issues that are more impactful and require more resources are more difficult to enact.

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  Several participants in this study trace their orientations toward thrift and reuse to generational experience of the scarcity of the early post-Soviet period, or to upbringings in which resources were used carefully as a matter of practical necessity rather than environmental commitment.

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  The “activists” are part of the visitors, yet a large part do not frame their participation in Brīvbode primarily in environmental terms: they come because they have things to give away, because they sometimes find things they need. Their practices have sustainable dimensions that they do not necessarily name or claim.

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  This framing does not require flattening the diversity of participant orientations. Some visitors do articulate explicit sustainability motivations – concerns about fast fashion, about waste, about the environmental costs of overconsumption. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without forcing them into a single category, and treats the tension between them as empirically interesting rather than theoretically problematic. One question that remains open is whether explicit articulation makes sustainable practices more effective at retaining practitioners – more resistant to disruption when material or social conditions change. This is beyond the scope of the present study but worth noting as a direction for future research.

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  Māra: "Mammai to lietu nebija daudz, un tās lietas tika visas, nu, ļoti labi uzturētas. Bet tad, kad jau parādījās tie humāno preču veikali, tad savukārt bija otrā drusku galējība." [My mother didn't have many things, and those things were all, well, very well looked after. But then, once the second-hand goods shops (humāno preču veikali, lit. "humanitarian goods shops") appeared, the other extreme came.]

SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations

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  Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow.

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  Sustainability can be an outcome without it being a requirement and a conscious orientation for practitioners. The practice recruits and retains carriers through meanings that also have little to do with environmental concern and yet the circulation it enables has sustainable dimensions that persist regardless of how participants frame their involvement.

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  This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode

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  Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop’s operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics, it nevertheless continues to fly. This chapter examines the work that keeps Brīvbode running. Where the previous chapter examined freecycling as a practice – its venues, materials, meanings, and competencies, and the moral economy through which they cohere – this chapter turns to what that practice costs and to the people who pay it: in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management.

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  The chapter is organized by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands – acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting – and tracks how they are distributed across technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all.

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  Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two: drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike.

SECTION #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle

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  Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers for many of whom participation is only possible because their lives are organized around sufficiency – a practice cluster in its own right, characterised by flexible time, low monetary consumption, and small combined income streams. As Tan and Yeoh (2024) note, while material inputs in freecycling markets are readily available, the human labour required to organise and run them is consistently short in supply. As Viesturs puts it: “I understand that the lifestyle I live is complete luxury these days, at least for this part of the world. To have free time, to decide myself what to do with my time – that is the main resource. The most important thing that a person can donate to Brīvbode is their time.”

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  The sufficiency orientation is visible in how volunteers approach the management of resources in Brīvbode as well. When a new stove was needed, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves using upcycled components: gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, a drain fitting. Rasa framed it matter-of-factly: “What do you do if you don’t want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself.” In the spirit of mutual exchange, in return for her partner’s invested time, she promised him a week of help with the tedious final sanding phase of his own DIY motorboat project.

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  This is repair and upcycling competency, sufficiency orientation and collaborative volunteer labour combined in prioritising making do with what is available as both a practical skill and life orientation. Rasa described a similar approach to her own consumption practices: it is more advantageous for her to work less in formal employment and rather invest time in planning meals, researching purchases and visiting secondhand shops than to earn more and consume more easily to keep her preferred level of wellbeing.

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  The volunteers’ time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives make Brīvbode’s unpaid consumption work possible. They are also what makes possible a form of community-based care that non-profit organisations and local communities can offer to “balance marketised care,” with “clothes-swapping events” listed alongside repair cafés and community fridges as exactly this kind of arrangement (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26). Sufficiency is the structural condition for both consumption work and care work: it is what makes the labour Brīvbode requires possible, and what allows that labour to be undertaken as care.

SECTION #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care

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  Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. Tölg (2025) describes valuation as comprising both evaluation — judging whether something is valuable — and valorising — the process of making it so — and shows that consumers rely on a range of valuation devices such as garment tags, retail staff knowledge, and resale platforms to perform this work. In retail, the price signal is the most legible such device, quietly slowing acquisition and supplying a shorthand for worth. When it is removed, that work does not disappear; it shifts onto participants and volunteers, drawing on moral and relational registers instead. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop the ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is a key competence of circulation work.

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  The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: “I really know it won’t be good even before I’ve opened the bag. I ask them: ‘Is everything really okay in there?’ ‘Yes, yes, only the best!’ And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets.” This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality — assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not — is a form of consumption work that in commercial retail would fall to paid warehouse or quality-control staff; here it is absorbed by volunteers as a constant and largely invisible competency that visitors, who see only the finished presentation, mostly miss.

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  Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people’s needs. Rasa describes it as having “a filter.” She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously — the kind of matching labour that in retail is performed automatically through pricing, display, and inventory systems, but here depends on Rasa’s relational knowledge of specific people, which cannot be systematised or delegated, and which makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point.

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  For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. Madara recalled how disorienting the freeness was on her first visit: “At first it felt a bit like I was stealing.” She resolved this by reframing the transaction: “I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word ‘free’.” For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: “Someone maybe sees ‘free’ and thinks – everything is free, let’s take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.” Her self-imposed restraint is itself valuation work — a moral framework constructed in the absence of the device that would otherwise supply one.

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  Divestment, too, is shaped by valuation. When an item retains monetary value, participants take on the labour of online selling — photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging meetings. As one participant noted: “you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere.” Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination that absorbs some of the divestment labour through volunteers and releases participants from finding a buyer or judging a recipient.

PARAGRAPH #A2APRY
  Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open.

SECTION #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route

PARAGRAPH #SZG4E8
  If §5.2 traced the valuation work the absence of price creates, this section turns to the kind of arrangement in which that work takes place. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension names how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements — paid and unpaid, formal and informal, market and non-market, household and institution — and how the same task takes on a different character depending on which arrangement it is embedded in. The same act of sorting used clothes is paid retail work in a thrift chain, contracted labour at a municipal textile collection point, unpaid domestic labour at home, and something else again at Brīvbode. The question this section asks is what kind of arrangement Brīvbode is, modally speaking, and what difference its form makes for the labour that runs it and the people it recruits.

PARAGRAPH #QQ9MKA
  Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, but the chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else’s home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted.

PARAGRAPH #EW2HC4
  Along this chain, unpaid volunteering, household management, neighbourly help, care work, and informal exchange come together in ways that blur distinctions between market and non-market activity and make the labour difficult to recognise as work at all, even though the system depends on it. This is precisely the kind of community-based care that, as Mesiranta et al. (2025) argue, marketised arrangements cannot perform: sequential reuse depends not on material availability alone but on what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities — the relational labour that keeps things moving between people.

PARAGRAPH #VA7PZF
  Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants.

PARAGRAPH #RCC9LM
  The modal choice is therefore also an ethical one. Brīvbode’s particular configuration of unpaid, informal, household-to-household labour is what allows consumption work to be performed as care, and care to be performed as a recognisable mode of circulation.

SECTION #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care

PARAGRAPH #8JYYXC
  Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. The work that sustains Brīvbode is continuous with domestic consumption work  which is consistently organised through women's labour.

PARAGRAPH #PNGSGT
  Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find the same gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. Anna states it directly: "It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes." Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband "would just throw it in the bin." Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared.

PARAGRAPH #3BY9GH
  The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: "They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'" What looks like consumption work performed on behalf of others is, in Tölg and Fuentes’s (2025) terms, also care for neighbours and for the imagined future users of the things — the logistical labour and the relational orientation are inseparable.

PARAGRAPH #Y344XY
  Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: “Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won’t let me.” This is consumption work in Bankovska’s (2020) sense of care not-work — labour that is unremunerated, hard to see as work from the outside, and yet performed because the alternative is unbearable. It is care as obligation that cannot be put down.

PARAGRAPH #VCEUP7
  Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard — competencies that are simultaneously consumption-work skills and the dispositions of care that Bankovska (2020) shows being transmitted across generations in the everyday work of provisioning.

PARAGRAPH #SZVP2G
  What neither sufficiency nor valuation quite revealed, the processual dimension makes visible: the labour of Brīvbode is gendered not only structurally but ethically — women carry it because they have always carried care, and the consumption-work skills it requires are inseparable from the care dispositions through which they are taken on.

SECTION #75D5UH Conclusion

PARAGRAPH #5YXGE6
  This chapter has examined the labour that sustains freecycling in Brīvbode, finding it distributed across structural, ethical, and gendered dimensions that existing circular economy frameworks tend to overlook. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. The feminist ethics of care and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska’s (2020) care not-work and Graeber’s (2018) account of work as what just needs to be done, name the orientation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller (1998) names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others’ generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation.

PARAGRAPH #HM56MD
  Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports (Hobson et al., 2021). Some of this labour is unreflexive and habituated – Aiga's inner feeling that prevents easy disposal, Marija's building logistics naturalised into her social role. Some is deliberate and effortful – Kristīne's category-by-category method, Madara working on her impulse-acquiring. Both are labour, but they are differently visible, and the unreflexive forms are the hardest to see and the hardest for policy to reach.

PARAGRAPH #RX9JDU
  What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility.

### 6. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland (#86EHHS), Olga Gurova, p. 3
  Context:
    #Q9Y7AV Practice theory approach to Gen Z's sustainable clothing consumption in Finland
      #2SQ58Y Theoretical approach: following sustainable fashion as an integrative practice
  Matching excerpt #XL67W8:
      Practice theory focuses on actions per se . Practice theory is another powerful theoretical framework widely applied, also in consumption studies (Schatzki, 1996; Reckwitz, 2002; Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Shove et al. , 2012; Warde, 2005). Reckwitz (2002, pp. 249) defines practices as a "routinized type of behavior"; as a block or pattern that consists of interdependencies between diverse elements including "forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, "things" and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge" (Shove et al. , 2012, pp. 6–7). Shove et al. (2012) suggest a scheme based on three main elements of practices: materials, meanings and competences. Materials encompass objects, infrastructure, tools, hardware and the body itself (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). For this research, among the most important part of the materials is, for instance, the availability of infrastructure for thrifting and recycling or tools for repairing and upcycling clothing. Meanings is a term that represents the social and symbolic significance of participation in practices (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). For this study, this means justifications that young consumers give for why and how they follow clothing consumption practices. Competences are multiple forms of understanding and practical knowledgeability (Shove et al. , 2012, p. 23). Competencies would mean knowledge and awareness about sustainable fashion. When the elements combine, the practice is born or, in terms of practice theory, the practice recruits a practitioner. Then, the practices are reproduced in everyday life. A practice can fall apart if a needed element or a link between the elements are missing.

2. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 36
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption
        #Q2QTGB Consumption and theories of practice
          #HP5NWV Defining practices
  Matching excerpt #L87E64:
      Shove et al. (2012) offer an alternative framework for describing a practice. They argue that practices are constituted by three different elements, that is, materials, competences and meanings. Materials refer to the different "things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made", competences include "skill, know-how and technique" and lastly, meanings include "include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations" (Shove et al., 2012: 14). These different elements then need to be linked together by the practice carrier to perform the practice.

3. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 23
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #E4Z6F8 The interdisciplinary research field of circular consumption
        #PZ5SEK Sociological circular consumption research2
  Matching excerpt #BJDPW8:
      Firstly, sociological studies on circular consumption often draw on a practice theoretical approach to consumption (Shove et al., 2012; Warde, 2005) to study how different circular practices are enacted in everyday lives. As opposed to the behavioural approaches, they show that circular consumption does not simply rely on attitudes, motives or personality traits. Some of these practice theory-informed studies on circular consumption specifically map out what competences, materials and meanings (Shove et al., 2012) are necessary for the performance of the circular practices they investigate. For instance, Camacho-Otero et al. (2020) show how clothes-swapping practices are enabled by the interlinking of different materialities (e.g., the clothes, the venue, tokens), competences (e.g., event organising and establishing rules, selecting and preparing clothes to bring), as well as meanings (e.g., environmental benefits, community-building, but also meanings associated with used clothes). Furthermore, connected to the single-use plastic packaging challenge of the CE, Rabiu and Jaeger-Erben (2024) illustrate the difficulties involved with giving up plastic due to its centrality in mundane everyday doings. According to the authors, to give up plastic packaging, for instance, through package-free shopping, consumers need materials, such as reusable containers and unpackaged products, competencies in weighing and handling the produce, and lastly meanings such as eco-friendly values.

4. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 39
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption
        #2Z8T4S Performing sustainable consumption in everyday lives
  Matching excerpt #68LTKB:
      One approach to conceptualise practice change has been provided by Shove et al. (2012) in The dynamics of social practice . In this book, besides putting forward the earlier discussed argument of practices being constituted by the linkage of materials, competences and meanings, they also outline how these elements become linked, how links are broken and what this means for changing practices. Shove et al. (2012) argue that practices change if there are new elements involved or if elements are combined in novel ways.

5. Source: After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice (#9D34UM), Alan Warde, p. 8
  Context:
    #R4R77Y After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice
      #ARWQQK Theories of practice and the sociology of consumption
  Matching excerpt #Q6DSL7:
      Bringing the material and functional properties of things back into the account was signalled theoretically clearly by Reckwitz (2002a) and has been exploited extensively. Thus, Shove et al.'s (2012) three key concepts for practice theory – meanings, competences and materials – give as much weight to the things as to meanings because of their affordances for many everyday practices which surreptitiously use up natural resources. The intellectual tools for exploring the material component of practices derive partly from STS, wherein the human use of machines and objects is fundamental. The resulting research deals with activities like the washing of bodies and clothes (Shove, 2003), gardening (Hitchings, 2007), heating and cooling (Shove et al., 2013), using electronic devices (Christensen and Ropke, 2010) and waste disposal (Evans, 2011). These are practices which are dependent upon inconspicuous use of energy, water and scarce raw materials and where changing of patterns of consumption might mitigate environmental effects.

6. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 10
  Context:
    #MZZYT2 5. FINDINGS
  Matching excerpt #8Q3AAD:
      Even if the focus of the research is the consumer, called a practitioner of the practice theories (Shove & Pantzar, 2005), the analysis of the practice has to submit to the context, involving the practices, the providers, and practitioners, and how the practices are carried out (Jarzabkowski et al., 2015). Through the context, it is possible to identify the three elements that make up the practice located (Shove et al., 2012): materials (objects, tools and infrastructure), competences (embedded knowledge and skills) and meanings (cultural conventions, expectations, and socially shared meanings) (Shove et al., 2012; Spurling et al., 2013).

7. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6
  Context:
    #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES
  Matching excerpt #XC3KN6:
      Practices as entities are thus founded or made up of three elements: materials, competences, and meanings; such elements are dynamically interconnected by qualified practitioners, through regular and repetitive performance, thus constituting the practice (Shove & Pantzar, 2005; Hargreaves, 2011; Shove et al., 2012; Spurling et al., 2013). Inspired by the viewpoints of Schatzki (2002, 2012) and Reckwitz (2002), Shove et al. (2012) proposed a sociotechnical approach for understanding the essential elements of practice and how they relate to each other. In this perspective, both human agents, that is, individuals, made up of bodies and minds (Schatzki, 2001), as non-humans (objects/artifacts), are indispensable requirements for the practice (Reckwitz, 2002; Spaargaren & Oosterveer, 2010). The human body itself is considered a material element, and the mind a component of meaning (Shove et al., 2012; Süßbauer & Schäfer, 2019). Next, Figure 1 details the three elements that make up the practice.

8. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 10
  Context:
    #CP87EF 4. RESEARCH METHOD
  Matching excerpt #8K8WZJ:
      All the research participants were assured of their anonymity and to identify them, we established the following pseudonyms: (EO) provider interview; (EA) practitioner interview; (GF) focus group; and, (EC) group interviews. The criterion for selecting respondents was that they were in the habit of sharing second-hand items in the collaborative store researched. All respondents were randomly female, aged between 22 and 39 years. According to the entrepreneurial partners, women are approximately 85% of the public that shares garments. To analyze the data, we use qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2003). In view of this, we list categories defined from the elements of practice (materials, meanings, and competences), listed by Shove et al. (2012). The process occurred, initially, by the transcription of the data collected (focus group, individual and group interviews) (Table 2). The data were read and revised so that the categories were presented according to the theory proposed by Shove et al. (2012). Additionally, the information apprehended and recorded in the observations also went through the same process (Table 1). Then, all data were listed in a table where it was possible to check the existence of the elements of each category. This process was conducted with the use of Excel.

9. Source: Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices (#N5VYH8), Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva, p. 3
  Context:
    #PXPU7G Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices
      #F2UNMP 3. Dimensions and perspectives of a network of practice analysis
        #NLZ4YJ 3.1. Zooming in - variations (within) practices
          #NS6W7B Step 2. Defining the elements of practice
  Matching excerpt #5CCVLX:
      three-element model proposed by Shove et al. (2012) comprising materials, competences and meanings. We particularly employed this model not only because Shove's concept is one of the most often used in social literature (easily recognisable and adaptable) but also because it was recommended by Nicolini (2012), who suggested 'zooming in' on social practices by considering the meaning practitioners attach to a specific practice, as well the material and knowledge needed to perform them. However, the step of 'zooming in' can also be carried out on the basis of a different but similar understanding of elements. Shove's model actively incorporates material elements as part of the analysis that refers to things, technologies and infrastructures. It connects what people do to technical and provisional systems as well as to the design of places, buildings and so on (Shove et al., 2012).

10. Source: Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective (#QWH9YU), Maren I Kropfeld, p. 3
  Context:
    #8JHLB5 Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective
      #HZX8S4 Theoretical background
        #V92RQQ Consumption as a social practice
  Matching excerpt #NRF6Z2:
      According to Reckwitz (2002: 249) a practice is a "routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, 'things' and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge." Shove et al. (2012) offer a simplified, and thus easier to operationalize, definition of a social practice focusing on the three central elements (cf. Figure 1): materials including objects, infrastructures, tools, and the human body; competences incorporating know-how, practical knowledge, skills, and a shared understanding of appropriate behavior (e.g., social norms); and meanings in the sense of the symbolic significance of activities.

Approximate matches

1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework
      #ULSUAX Conclusion
  Score: 0.636
  Related paragraph #3JUPW7:
      Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016).

2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES
  Score: 0.543
  Related paragraph #RU2ER4:
      Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage.

3. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 36
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption
        #Q2QTGB Consumption and theories of practice
          #HP5NWV Defining practices
  Score: 0.613
  Related excerpt #L87E64:
      Shove et al. (2012) offer an alternative framework for describing a practice. They argue that practices are constituted by three different elements, that is, materials, competences and meanings. Materials refer to the different "things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made", competences include "skill, know-how and technique" and lastly, meanings include "include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations" (Shove et al., 2012: 14). These different elements then need to be linked together by the practice carrier to perform the practice.

4. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 39
  Context:
    #T6KQ92 Introduction
      #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption
        #2Z8T4S Performing sustainable consumption in everyday lives
  Score: 0.543
  Related excerpt #68LTKB:
      One approach to conceptualise practice change has been provided by Shove et al. (2012) in The dynamics of social practice . In this book, besides putting forward the earlier discussed argument of practices being constituted by the linkage of materials, competences and meanings, they also outline how these elements become linked, how links are broken and what this means for changing practices. Shove et al. (2012) argue that practices change if there are new elements involved or if elements are combined in novel ways.

5. Source: Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices (#ARE7AL), Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen, p. 4
  Context:
    #QLT6TK Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices
      #FAQAPC Materiality in social practices
  Score: 0.545
  Related excerpt #8L5RXQ:
      More specifically, Shove (2016) categorises material things into three different roles that show how co-humanist approach assigns only limited agency to materials in the practices with materials having varying impacts on practices. She claims that 'materials are defined, constituted and positioned with respect to each other through their role within specific practices' (p. 157). Things can possess an infrastructural relation to practice, which means that these things are necessary, but they are not interacted with directly. Rather, they form the background to the practice. In the context of housing, this background can be, for example, the home or kitchen, or, more broadly, the infrastructure that also enables living. Second, things can be mobilised or manipulated , or in other words they play a device-oriented role in relation to the performance of a practice. Third, things

6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework
      #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion
  Score: 0.636
  Related paragraph #MWD2WS:
      Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016).

7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange
  Context:
    #BA7Z5L LIST OF SOURCES
  Score: 0.543
  Related paragraph #HFT3L6:
      Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage.

8. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 5
  Context:
    #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption
      #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE
        #Z89RBX 5.3 TWO PRACTICE-THEORETICAL PROGRAMMES FOR SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION
  Score: 0.557
  Related excerpt #86K433:
      Shove, on the other hand, is centrally concerned with understanding the dynamics of everyday practices, how practices emerge, persist and disappear, and how expectations and conventions become naturalized. This programme seeks to understand the complex causalities that lead to more (or less) resource-intensive practices (e.g. Shove 2003, 2004), and the implications of such for policy (e.g. Shove 2010; Shove and Walker 2010; Shove et al. 2012; Spurling et al. 2013). Shove suggested a fundamental rethinking of the research agenda for the sociology of sustainable consumption, arguing that:

9. Source: Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices (#N5VYH8), Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva, p. 3
  Context:
    #PXPU7G Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices
      #F2UNMP 3. Dimensions and perspectives of a network of practice analysis
        #NLZ4YJ 3.1. Zooming in - variations (within) practices
          #NS6W7B Step 2. Defining the elements of practice
  Score: 0.565
  Related excerpt #5CCVLX:
      three-element model proposed by Shove et al. (2012) comprising materials, competences and meanings. We particularly employed this model not only because Shove's concept is one of the most often used in social literature (easily recognisable and adaptable) but also because it was recommended by Nicolini (2012), who suggested 'zooming in' on social practices by considering the meaning practitioners attach to a specific practice, as well the material and knowledge needed to perform them. However, the step of 'zooming in' can also be carried out on the basis of a different but similar understanding of elements. Shove's model actively incorporates material elements as part of the analysis that refers to things, technologies and infrastructures. It connects what people do to technical and provisional systems as well as to the design of places, buildings and so on (Shove et al., 2012).

10. Source: Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective (#UB9EAT), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 2
  Context:
    #7Q7UZ6 Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective
      #9TPZLU 3 | SOCIAL PRACTICE PERSPECTIVE
        #W7ENK2 3.1 | Social practice as entity
  Score: 0.537
  Related excerpt #XYGNLA:
      Shove and Pantzar (2005, pp. 44–45) built on this definition and suggested that practices as entities "presume the existence of requisite elements, including images, forms of competence and in many cases objects as well". Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012b) defined materials as the physical entities that are used when performing a practice such as clothes in dressing. Competencies and skills , refer to the knowledge required to operate the materials, perform the practice and evaluate the outcome. In the case of dressing, competence could refer to the knowledge about the size that fits oneself, the instructions for taking care of the garment, and the appropriate dress codes in specific social settings. Finally, meanings indicate the images the practice evokes for people, that is, "the social and symbolic significance" people give the practice. In dressing , specific types of garments could be associated with power positions or social occasions. In addition to these elements, Gram-Hanssen (2010) suggested that rules and institutions are also part of social practices.

### 7. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "Q2WXHP",
    "ULSUAX"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

### 8. Tool result: read

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice

PARAGRAPH #H7MB3H
  The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (reference).

PARAGRAPH #A2ACVP
  While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “An organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both practical activity and its representations" (Warde, 2005: 134).

PARAGRAPH #B4MLVB
  Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices.

PARAGRAPH #ZA3SED
  Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions.

PARAGRAPH #G5LFQA
  Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies.

PARAGRAPH #ZALK38
  Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system)

PARAGRAPH #JCD8P5
  Practices as entities can be distinguished from practices as performances: the specific, recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed. Transformation and change comes through  recombination of the elements of practice (Shove et al. 2012) – a complex process that is constantly evolving and difficult to predict.

PARAGRAPH #KSLB7G
  A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as  entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms.

PARAGRAPH #8MU8D5
  The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing.

PARAGRAPH #RG72B3
  This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research.

PARAGRAPH #QPWYY6
  Delineating a practice and setting it apart from adjacent practices can be one of the challenges in practice theory, as there are no fixed procedural rules for determining exactly where one practice ends and another begins. Nicolini (2017: 26-27) notes that, while for analytical purposes, practices can be conceived and examined individually, empirically they are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities. Practices “hang together” in bundles and complexes (Shove et al. 2012), distinguished by the density and “stickiness” of their patterns. Practice bundles refer to the more loose-knit relations between practices, often gathered around the same site or time – practices that are related and shape each other but not strongly. Complexes refer to more integrated combinations that can also constitute new practice entities if the relations become significantly denser. In this thesis, I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed, while recognising the emerging state of freecycling as a practice in Latvia.

THESIS #4V8VH7
Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

SECTION #ULSUAX Conclusion

PARAGRAPH #7RYKMT
  This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged.

PARAGRAPH #2G2WSX
  PIEVIENOT

PARAGRAPH #MHZQUS
  “Pinning down the actual practice and its scale, identifying overlaps with other practices or deciding which actions belong to which practice registers as a tricky task, further complicated by the fact that practices change over time.” (Sedlačko, 2017: 53)

PARAGRAPH #CE4SN6
  consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”?

PARAGRAPH #A3Q9XS
  A central conclusion is that textile disposal has become normalized. – “Sustainability transitions in textiles therefore require systemic reconfiguration of what is considered ‘normal’ in household practices.”

PARAGRAPH #LZ9SHB
  “this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act.

PARAGRAPH #D3N7FX
  Disposal is treated not simply as the act of discarding but as a meaningful practice that enables and intersects with the reproduction of broader everyday activities.

PARAGRAPH #ER4VSA
  In sociology, the study of consumption has evolved through three major phases: an early focus on economistic models prior to the 1980s; the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1980s, which emphasized meaning-making, identity, and symbolic value; and, more recently, a ‘practice turn’ that reorients attention toward the routines, materialities, and shared norms of everyday life (Warde, 2014, 2015).

PARAGRAPH #YK565D
  in clothing consumption research consumption of clothing is viewed as a habitual and socially embedded activity rather than a constant, deliberate process of choice and identity construction (Chamberlin & Callmer, 2021; Miller & Woodward, 2012; van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016).

PARAGRAPH #FT8AED
  “In their classical taxonomy for describing consumer disposition behavior, Jacoby et al. (1977) illustrated that disposal may involve keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or throwing away, and even within each category, multiple practices exist. Disposal is thus not inherently destructive or wasteful and cannot be reduced to simply ‘throwing something away’, but is an active social practice embedded in ethical, cultural, and material contexts (Hetherington, 2004). This perspective recognizes disposal as an active, meaning-making practice. As Gregson et al. (2007b) argue, divestment is not simply a negative or absent moment in consumer life, but a practice that enables other practices. To sustain certain routines and identities, other objects must be removed. In this sense, disposal is not the final step in a linear production-consumption-waste chain but a recursive moment that helps reorder consumption itself (Gregson et al., 2007a; Hetherington, 2004). Following Douglas (2002), disposal can be seen as part of the ‘ordering work’ of everyday life, where waste becomes threatening not by its material properties but by its symbolic disruptions of social and domestic order (Gregson et al., 2007a; Heidenstrøm & Hebrok, 2021).”

PARAGRAPH #5TXWXW
  “What we discard reflects who we are but also helps constitute who we become. In this way, waste is both expressive and constitutive of identity (Lucy, 2023).”

PARAGRAPH #D3J7AD
  Maldini et al. (2019), for instance, found that garments are often retained long after they stop being worn, while new items are added without replacing old ones, highlighting the entanglement with disposal and accumulation. Furthermore, as with disposal in general, textile disposal is not merely a matter of getting rid of unwanted things, nor is it a straightforward or linear process.

PARAGRAPH #M53GUY
  “This theoretical approach shifts the analytical focus away from individual behavior to practices allowing textile waste to be understood not as the outcome of isolated decisions but as a meaningful and situated activity embedded in everyday domestic routines.”

PARAGRAPH #W5NCU9
  “Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).”

PARAGRAPH #8Z9KL4
  “Dressing is viewed as a dynamic, lifelong everyday practice comprised of three interdependent elements: materials (e.g., clothing, wardrobes, washing machines), meanings (e.g., symbolic notions such as cleanliness or fashion), and competencies (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).”

PARAGRAPH #U87FBB
  “Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.”

PARAGRAPH #2MV3XY
  Schatzki’s site ontology

PARAGRAPH #FZHH6H
  “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.”

PARAGRAPH #MR6SKV
  ​​For example, textile disposal emerges from the intersection of multiple practices, such as cleaning, organizing, shopping, and caring, even when disposal appears as the main activity.

PARAGRAPH #3JUPW7
  Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016).

PARAGRAPH #96FRVP
  Practice as entity – how does the threefold model

PARAGRAPH #AHYBAR
  Looking at a practice as entity – materials, meanings, competencies. MESOLEVEL.

PARAGRAPH #MBE4PM
  Individual level of practice – practice as performance – doings, sayings, embodied experiences, movements, everyday parts… PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE.

PARAGRAPH #WQZYJP
  practice as bundle or practice as entity…

PARAGRAPH #Z769KE
  Acknowledge these three levels, focusing on practice as performance and practice as entity.

### 9. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `tag_paragraphs`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "MQPMT2",
    "J4CQAN",
    "RQ88U2",
    "F6TNUS",
    "PYSU33",
    "SY28Z3",
    "JDEYZH",
    "Q9T2SN"
  ],
  "tags": [
    "fragment",
    "needs_revision"
  ]
}
```

### 10. Tool result: tag_paragraphs

PARAGRAPH TAGS ATTACHED
Blocks: #MQPMT2, #J4CQAN, #RQ88U2, #F6TNUS, #PYSU33, #SY28Z3, #JDEYZH, #Q9T2SN
Tags: fragment, needs_revision
Statements: 16

### 11. Assistant

I read Ch4 and Ch5. Ch5 is much more controlled because it keeps one analytic lens in view the whole time: **what work circulation requires, who does it, and how it becomes care/consumption work** (#DM28T4, #EF5DET, #5YXGE6). Ch4 already has the material for an equally strong chapter, but its Shove grounding sometimes appears as local vocabulary — materials, meanings, competencies — rather than as the chapter’s engine.

The good news: the Shove structure is already basically there. The task is not to add theory everywhere like academic parsley. It is to make the throughline explicit: **Brīvbode works when materials, meanings, and competencies are successfully linked; its tensions appear when those links are unstable, contested, or overloaded.**

## Core throughline for Ch4 with Shove 2012 more clearly integrated

Right now Ch4 says:

> Brīvbode is a practice of circulation involving a physical venue, material flows, meanings, and competencies (#PL9BXR).

That is correct, but the chapter could more sharply say:

> Following Shove et al. (2012), I treat freecycling not as a set of individual choices to donate or take, but as a practice entity made through the linking of materials, meanings, and competencies. Brīvbode’s circulation depends on things, shelves, bags, opening hours, sorting tables, household storage limits, and textile containers; on meanings such as responsibility, exchange, thrift, dignity, experimentation, and sustainability; and on competencies of sorting, evaluating, restraining, letting go, reading the room, and recognising value. The chapter follows the movement of things through Brīvbode in order to show how these elements are linked in practice — and where the links fray.

That is the chapter’s real argument.

Shove gives you four very useful moves here:

1. **Practices recruit carriers** — people participate because some combination of materials, meanings, and competencies makes Brīvbode available and worthwhile.
2. **Practices persist through repeated performances** — Thursday/Friday openings, sorting, browsing, giving, taking, returning.
3. **Practices change when elements are recombined** — “free” becomes “exchange”; secondhand stigma becomes thrift/fashion/sustainability; unwanted things become resources.
4. **Practices break or strain when links fail** — overflow, inappropriate donations, resellers, charity expectations, class stigma, too much supply, not enough sorting capacity.

Your theory chapter already states this clearly: practices as entities are constituted by meanings, materials, and competencies, while performances are the recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed (#KSLB7G, #JCD8P5). Ch4 should keep returning to that sentence-level logic.

---

# How Ch4 would read if Shove were the explicit spine

## Chapter opening: make the promise more active

The existing opening is good but slightly list-like (#PL9BXR–#L252MY). I’d revise it to make the reader understand that **the chapter tracks linkages**, not merely themes.

Possible replacement/expansion:

> This chapter analyses Brīvbode as a practice of circulation in the sense proposed by Shove et al. (2012): a practice constituted by the linking of materials, meanings, and competencies. I follow things as they move from households into the swapshop and out again in order to show how this linking happens in practice. Materials include the objects themselves, domestic storage space, bags, shelves, sorting tables, opening hours, and the wider reuse and textile collection infrastructures that absorb overflow. Meanings include responsibility toward usable things, exchange, thrift, dignity, experimentation, charity, stigma, and sustainability. Competencies include sorting, evaluating quality, recognising possible value, restraining acquisition, letting go, and reading the room.  
>
> The chapter’s central argument is that Brīvbode is held together not because participants share one meaning of freecycling, but because the site allows incompatible meanings to coexist long enough for things to keep moving. Its fragility appears when the links between elements are strained: when too many things arrive, when givers and takers imagine different receivers, when “free” is interpreted as charity or extraction, or when the competencies required for circulation are unevenly distributed.

That would set up everything that follows.

---

## 4.1 Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home

This section is already very Shove-compatible. It has:

- **materials**: household surplus, storage space, bags, small homes, inherited things, fast fashion, unfinished projects (#WEBXCF, #AB93FC, #7Y7J2Z, #796PVP)
- **meanings**: responsibility, guilt relief, “too good to throw away,” imagined receivers, visible circulation (#V83RLN, #PQV5PN, #7ZXWJU)
- **competencies**: evaluating what is good enough, batching, sorting, routing, knowing disposal channels (#MS53CN, #796PVP)

The best Shove integration here is to frame divestment as **not just a motive but a practice that links household materials to Brīvbode’s circulation**.

The section’s key claim could be:

> Divestment recruits participants when the material pressure of household surplus meets meanings of responsible letting go and competencies for routing things elsewhere.

That would make #5XUPCJ and #CLU5VP do more work. The Shove/Gregson point about meanings migrating from darning to divestment (#CLU5VP) is excellent, but it should become the section’s hinge:

> In this sense, Brīvbode is not simply a place where people bring things after deciding to get rid of them. It is one of the material arrangements through which “responsible divestment” becomes performable.

Then the examples line up beautifully:

- small homes make divestment materially necessary (#7Y7J2Z)
- decluttering scripts provide meanings and methods (#CWZ4L2)
- Brīvbode offers a morally acceptable route (#V83RLN)
- seeing someone take the item completes the divestment affectively (#PQV5PN)

The tension at the end of 4.1 should be stated as a Shove problem:

> The same linkage that recruits givers — low-threshold access, moral relief, and trust in circulation — also risks turning Brīvbode into an overflow channel for the very consumption practices it critiques.

That prepares #4G43HR and #9CFEH4 very well.

---

## 4.2 Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow

This section should be the **materials/infrastructure centre** of the chapter.

At the moment, it has great ethnographic images: “It begins” (#2PU5ZY), the sorting table as transfer point (#X8RDCG), the space swallowing its own offerings (#3USBHB), people leaving bags after closure (#PNCAWA). The Shove move is to say: **materials are not background; the site organizes the practice.**

Suggested section-opening sentence:

> If divestment begins in households, it becomes freecycling only through the material arrangement of the site. In Shove et al.’s terms, Brīvbode’s venue, shelves, sorting table, opening hours, storage limits, and links to textile containers are not a backdrop to circulation but constitutive materials of the practice.

This lets you connect:

- physical co-presence: touching, trying, assessing (#RQ8CCN)
- permanent venue: regular rhythm and embeddedness (#LHLZ8Y)
- retail-like/DIY aesthetic: contested meanings materialised through display (#KMD7AJ)
- textile containers and charity storage: infrastructural dependence (#WW8YUW)
- overflow: material strain on the practice (#2TPNCM, #3USBHB)

The strongest Shove sentence in this section is already here:

> “Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance” (#KMD7AJ).

That could become a model for the whole chapter. Ch4 needs more of those sentences.

The end of 4.2 could explicitly say:

> The site therefore stabilises the practice, but only partially. It recruits regular carriers through rhythm, visibility, and accessibility, while also making the material excess of consumption impossible to hide.

That gives #SFAYYS more force.

---

## 4.3 Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation

This should be the **competencies section**, and it is already close. But right now it has a small structural wobble: #MQPMT2 is just “Competencies of Circulation,” and #J4CQAN is a stray quote/note. I tagged those as fragment/needs_revision, along with a few other fragments.

The section could begin with a sharper Shove framing:

> In Shove et al.’s model, competencies are the practical understandings and skills through which a practice is performed. In Brīvbode these competencies are not primarily technical, though they include material literacy. They are social, evaluative, and situational: knowing what counts as good enough, when to refuse, how to sort, how much to take, when to put things out, and how to preserve relationships while keeping things moving.

Then the section’s internal logic becomes:

### 1. Competencies are gendered because materials are gendered

Women’s and children’s clothing dominate the flow (#TDQ4JL). Sorting women’s clothing is not obvious; Viesturs has to learn the branching categories (#BCDC5C). Men’s clothing has different thresholds because of scarcity and assumptions about use (#2U6CTU).

This is not just “gender appears.” It is:

> The material composition of the flow determines which competencies are required and who is presumed to have them.

### 2. Norms are competencies in action

The rules are general — “bring things that would bring joy” — so judgement must happen situationally (#F9CK8T). That means participants and volunteers need to learn how to evaluate quality without formal criteria (#BZ6FJC).

Food and medicine examples are useful because they show norms hardening or softening depending on trust, risk, and familiarity (#Y7K4KZ, #7CR75E).

### 3. Freeness requires self-management

Madara’s “I see it as exchange” is a very strong practice-learning example (#CUBS5Q). She is not just expressing a moral view; she is acquiring the competence needed to participate without feeling like a thief or becoming a grabber.

This should probably be moved/echoed later too, because Ch5 uses the same material in a polished way as valuation work (#4HW9DD). In Ch4, use it specifically as **competence acquisition**.

### 4. Competencies link acquisition and divestment

#EXTCGS is excellent: “each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour.” This is one of the strongest sentences in Ch4. It directly links Ch4 to Ch5.

I would keep this section but clean up the fragments #MQPMT2 and #J4CQAN. If #J4CQAN is from a source, integrate it as evidence; if not, delete or move to notes.

---

## 4.4 Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange

This section is where “meanings” become most explicitly political/normative.

The Shove framing should be:

> Meanings are not only personal motivations; they are shared understandings of what the practice is, who belongs in it, and what counts as correct participation.

You already say almost exactly this in #QU37KZ. This could be made even more central.

Here, the chapter should show that Brīvbode’s practice-entity is held together by **a dominant meaning: exchange, not charity**. But the performances constantly challenge that meaning.

The throughline:

- organisers define Brīvbode as exchange, equality, responsibility (#QU37KZ, #KBESND)
- the physical space mediates giving and taking, making need unnecessary to perform (#T8P86W, #UFJ4GC)
- resellers/heavy-takers threaten the exchange meaning (#7FPBUS)
- but the deeper meaning of “keeping things moving” sometimes overrides the anti-resale rule (#QKY57B)
- volunteers develop tactical competencies to manage these contradictions (#ERMRTL)

This is a really good place to use Shove’s idea that practices are not fixed; they persist through ongoing performances that may reproduce or subtly transform them. In your terms:

> Brīvbode’s exchange meaning is not simply stated in rules; it is reproduced shift by shift through correction, tolerance, avoidance, joking, tactical delay, and selective non-confrontation.

That makes #ERMRTL especially useful: Viesturs “reading the room” is not anecdotal; it is performance maintaining the practice-entity.

---

## 4.5 Letting Go: Attachment Without Price

This section currently contains some brilliant material but is more drafty. It could be reorganised around one Shove-style argument:

> Removing price changes the link between materials, meanings, and competencies. It loosens attachment, enables experimentation, and requires new competencies of restraint and letting go.

This section should not only be about attachment psychologically. It should be about **how the non-monetary material arrangement reconfigures the practice of acquisition/divestment**.

The sequence could be:

### 1. Price normally links acquisition to commitment

Use Evans/Assima as now (#GL6QPX). Price anchors attachment and makes disposal hard.

### 2. Brīvbode removes price and changes the meaning of taking

Rasa’s quote is perfect: if it does not suit, bring it back; acquisition becomes lower-stakes (#Q9UXGA).

### 3. Lower-stakes acquisition produces experimentation

Shoes/jacket swapping and style trials show this (#PYZ6UH, #34Z7TB). This links to plural acquisition meanings in 4.6, so maybe keep this compact.

### 4. But without price, restraint must be supplied by competence

This is where #7397K7, #9XUDV9, #QCXR6D, #LG8X4N should be integrated. The fragment heading #F6TNUS can become an actual subsection paragraph:

> The absence of price removes one ordinary brake on acquisition. Participants who want to avoid accumulation must therefore develop other brakes: lists, self-knowledge, rules of need, bodily awareness of storage limits, or an ethic of making peace with what they already have.

This is very Shove: when one element is removed/changed — price — the practice requires new competencies and meanings to remain sustainable.

### 5. Brīvbode as infrastructure for detachment

#LG8X4N and #WABKA8 are extremely important. Māra explicitly says attachment is “in process” and Brīvbode helps. That is maybe the best evidence that Brīvbode does not only receive divestment; it **cultivates the competence of divestment**.

I’d rewrite the end around:

> Brīvbode therefore works as an infrastructure for practising detachment. It does not automatically produce sufficiency; indeed, it can enable more frequent acquisition. But it creates a setting in which participants can rehearse different relations to things: trying without buying, returning without failure, taking without ownership as destiny, and letting go without throwing away.

That’s a strong Ch4 claim.

---

## 4.6 What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition

This section is already clearly about meanings, but it should be introduced explicitly as **recruitment through heterogeneous meanings**.

Your first paragraph already says this (#5L3QYB). I’d only make it more Shove-y:

> A practice does not need one shared meaning to recruit practitioners. Brīvbode’s strength is that the same material arrangement can be linked to different meanings by different carriers.

Then the meanings can be presented as a sequence:

- access and dignity: Marija, “princess” (#54GE84)
- uniqueness/aesthetic autonomy: Anna (#NMQ6KB)
- experimentation/play: Elīna and cross-dressing participant (#N2JHPC)
- craft/material recognition: Madara (#D4H3PB)
- stigma/shame: Marija and secrecy (#86WW2X, #ZEVQDB)
- spiritual contamination/purgatory: previous-owner energy (#Z4WUR2)
- generational normalisation of secondhand: Madara/Luīze (#MD2XMJ)

The crucial analytical point:

> These meanings do not all point toward sustainability. Some overlap with capitalist consumption meanings — novelty, style, distinction, self-expression — while others oppose market consumption through thrift, reuse, access, and ecological concern.

You have a fragment at #RQ88U2: “While alternative, these meanings simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –”. That should become a full paragraph, maybe after #N2JHPC:

> While Brīvbode is organised outside monetary exchange, the meanings that recruit participants are not outside consumer culture. Novelty, self-expression, experimentation, and distinction remain powerful. What changes is the material and economic arrangement through which these meanings are pursued. Freecycling can therefore redirect consumer desire into reuse without necessarily abolishing it.

That would be a very lucid bridge.

---

## 4.7 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability?

This section has the right material but contains several note-like fragments (#SY28Z3, #JDEYZH, #Q9T2SN). I tagged those. The polished version should do one thing: explain sustainability as **one meaning among others, not the master meaning of the practice**.

The Shove-throughline:

> Sustainability may be an outcome of the practice without being the meaning that recruits most carriers.

You already say this in several places (#M9983A, #P6X2DJ, #FLSHWG, #VFPYU2). The section should probably be shorter and cleaner.

Suggested structure:

1. **Viesturs wants to foreground fun/joy, not charity** (#T6FW9N). This is strategic meaning-work: he is thinking about recruitment.
2. **For core volunteers, sustainability can recede behind routinised doing** (#LUDRGT, #M9983A). This is very practice-theoretical: once stabilised, practices do not require constant reflective justification.
3. **Some participants articulate explicit sustainability** (#CX2SM8, #78HBEQ).
4. **Many enact quiet sustainability without naming it** (#P6X2DJ, #8B2Y8N, #VFPYU2).
5. **Conclusion: articulated and quiet sustainability coexist** (#V445EY).

The best Shove sentence to add:

> In practice-theoretical terms, this variation is not a problem to solve. Sustainability is one possible meaning linked to freecycling, but the practice can also be carried by thrift, convenience, sociality, style, responsibility, or the simple need to move things out of the home.

That would stop the section from feeling like it has to decide whether Brīvbode “is” sustainable. It lets you say: sustainability is one linkage, not the whole practice.

---

## 4.8 Conclusion: strengthen the Shove payoff

The current conclusion is solid but could be more explicitly tied back to materials/meanings/competencies (#M3VCHH–#MHM9Q5).

Possible revised conclusion:

> This chapter has analysed Brīvbode as a practice of circulation constituted through the linking of materials, meanings, and competencies. Its material elements include not only the objects that pass through it, but also household storage pressures, bags, shelves, sorting tables, opening hours, the physical venue, and the textile infrastructures that absorb what Brīvbode cannot. Its meanings are multiple and sometimes incompatible: responsibility, thrift, exchange, dignity, experimentation, charity, stigma, fun, sustainability, and relief from guilt. Its competencies include sorting, assessing quality, recognising hidden value, managing impulse, detaching from things, reading the room, and negotiating the boundary between usable object and waste.  
>
> Brīvbode persists because these elements are linked flexibly enough to recruit different carriers. Givers can experience it as responsible divestment; takers can experience it as access, style, experimentation, or social contact; volunteers can frame it as exchange, ecological work, care, or simply “a thing I do.” The practice is therefore held together less by a single shared definition than by a moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist while keeping things moving.  
>
> At the same time, the chapter has shown the fragility of this arrangement. The same low-threshold route that enables responsible circulation also absorbs the overflow of overconsumption. The same absence of price that makes experimentation and access possible also requires new competencies of restraint. The same moral economy that rejects charity and resale tolerates them when the alternative is material blockage. Brīvbode thus appears both as an alternative value regime and as a pressure valve for the surplus it seeks to counter. This unresolved tension leads into the next chapter, which asks what work is required to hold such a practice together.

That last sentence connects perfectly to Ch5.

---

# What Ch5 teaches Ch4 stylistically

Ch5 is polished because each section has a clear analytic job:

- 5.1: sufficiency/time makes volunteering possible (#5SHEQN, #FT6K3G)
- 5.2: absence of price creates valuation work (#U7QJHT, #A2APRY)
- 5.3: Brīvbode is a modal arrangement of informal/non-market labour (#SZG4E8, #VA7PZF)
- 5.4: this labour is gendered and transmitted as care (#8JYYXC, #SZVP2G)
- conclusion: circular consumption depends on invisible, unevenly distributed work (#5YXGE6, #RX9JDU)

Ch4 can copy that discipline. Each section needs a one-sentence analytic job:

| Section | Analytic job in Shove terms |
|---|---|
| 4.1 Divestment from home | Shows how household surplus becomes linked to meanings of responsible divestment and competencies of routing |
| 4.2 Site as active flow | Shows how the venue, schedule, shelves, sorting table, and overflow infrastructures constitute the material element of freecycling |
| 4.3 Norms and competencies | Shows how circulation depends on learned, unevenly distributed competencies of sorting, assessing, restraining, and reading the room |
| 4.4 Moral economy | Shows how meanings of exchange, equality, charity, and circulation are negotiated and hierarchised |
| 4.5 Letting go | Shows how absence of price reconfigures attachment and requires new competencies of restraint/detachment |
| 4.6 Plural acquisition meanings | Shows how the practice recruits carriers through multiple, not always sustainable, meanings |
| 4.7 Sustainability | Shows sustainability as one possible meaning and/or outcome, not the necessary motivation of the practice |
| 4.8 Conclusion | Shows Brīvbode as a flexible but fragile linkage of materials, meanings, and competencies |

---

# The clearest possible Ch4 argument

If you want one sentence for the chapter, I’d make it this:

> Brīvbode sustains freecycling by linking a low-threshold material infrastructure for moving things with plural meanings of responsibility, exchange, access, experimentation, and sustainability, and with practical competencies of sorting, evaluating, restraining, and letting go; its tensions arise where these elements are unevenly distributed or linked in incompatible ways.

That is the Shove-grounded throughline.

I also tagged the most obvious Ch4 fragments/notes needing revision: #MQPMT2, #J4CQAN, #RQ88U2, #F6TNUS, #PYSU33, #SY28Z3, #JDEYZH, #Q9T2SN.