Abstract
In this article, we make a conceptual and typological contribution to studies of work and mobility and mobile work. We do so by describing the physical, pedestrian mobilities of a team of care workers as they look out for homeless clients in the UK city of Cardiff. Conceptually, and in conclusion, we engage with Goffman’s essay, published in Asylums, on the ‘vicissitudes of the tinkering trades’ and consider the ways in which mobility further and differently complicates already difficult care work. By way of this one empirical case – drawn from a sustained ethnographic engagement with the team – we develop a fourfold typology. We intend this typology as something to be tried out, put to use and shared across different work settings. We offer it as a means of illustrating the ways in which mobility and work and the work of movement might relate to one another. And also how work, and care work in particular, and movement are differently figured in relation to the environment. We also intend the typology as a means of developing a conceptual distinction between (work) practices that take place on the move and mobile (work) practices proper.
Highlights
In this article, we make a conceptual and typological contribution to studies of work and mobility and of mobile work
We do so by describing the physical, embodied, pedestrian mobilities of a team of care workers as they try to look out for homeless clients in the UK city of Cardiff. By way of this one empirical case – developed from a sustained ethnographic engagement with the team1 – we develop a fourfold typology, which we see as offering some conceptual purchase on the ways in which mobility and work and the work of movement might relate to one another
Our particular context is that of the work of care, repair and attention, but we offer the typology as something to be tried out, put to use and shared across different work settings
Summary
We make a conceptual and typological contribution to studies of work and mobility and of mobile work. We do so by describing the physical, embodied, pedestrian mobilities of a team of care workers as they try to look out for homeless clients in the UK city of Cardiff By way of this one empirical case – developed from a sustained ethnographic engagement with the team1 – we develop a fourfold typology, which we see as offering some conceptual purchase on the ways in which mobility and work and the work of movement might relate to one another. The second conceptual distinction is bound up in whether or not the object can be, physically or morally, taken from wherever it is that it has broken to a specialised place of work In the latter case, material and structural arrangements emerge in relation to the particular kind of repair work that was to be done; the workshop complex, as Goffman had it ([1961] 1991, 290). We consider this critique below, but given our interest, here, in mobility and work, we move toward our typology by sketching out some of the stages of the repair cycle and server–client relations in terms of the to-ing and fro-ing of care work
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