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

The materiality of policy and organisational worlds – buildings, laptops, furniture, 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 can play. In particular, the role of the car and quite what happens while travelling, aside from the driving of the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. How relations with colleagues are re-assembled and re-organised in, and through, the small threshold spaces that are car interiors, where actors are suspended between two states – neither here, nor there – effect everyday work. Importantly, in recent years, the car has become a complex communicative assemblage for multi-tasking, a coordination centre for telephone, GPS, internet etc., a place of work; but cars are also places of refuge, a comfort zone for affective regulation via the sound system.
This chapter empirically explores, from a multi-sited, inter