Vehicles of In|formality – The Role of the Car as a Mobile Space of Policy and Relational Work

Abstract

The materiality of policy worlds – buildings, mobile phones and carparks – has been an under-examined aspect of policy relations. Everyday materialities are routinised in such a way they are enacted as trivial, contributing to an indifference towards the roles they play. In particular, the role of the car and quite what happens aside from driving is largely overlooked. How relations are re-assembled through the small threshold spaces of car interiors, where actors are suspended between two states – neither here nor there – affects everyday work. Latterly, the car has become a complex communicative assemblage for multi-tasking, a coordination centre for telephone, global positioning system (GPS), internet, etc., a place of work, but cars are also places of refuge, comfort zones for affective regulation via the sound system. This chapter explores from a multi-sited, inter-organisational ethnography in rural Scotland how cars are vital in mobilising relations for the implementation of legislation requiring certain National Health Services (NHSs) to integrate with local government social care services. Given rurality, actors’ cars were used to travel around the area. I suggest a focus on taken-for-granted materials, like cars, can unsettle policy understandings, engendering thinking beyond ‘formal’ policy practices, to illuminate acts of implementing ‘through things’ (de La Bellacasa, 2011). Materialities provide a novel way of interrogating policy practices unfolding in assorted in|formal settings, in this case, conveyed via vehicles. The car is a site whereby often unnoticed doings are produced through relations between bodies, objects and places. These relations are spatially and temporally enfolded and constitute policy work, particularly in rural areas.

Citation

Mulherin, T. (2024), "Vehicles of In|formality – The Role of the Car as a Mobile Space of Policy and Relational Work", Garner-Knapp, L., Mason, J., Mulherin, T. and Visser, E.L. (Ed.) Informality in Policymaking: Weaving the Threads of Everyday Policy Work, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 127-144. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-280-720241009