Precarious work and local governance through the lens of informality and caring for place

Abstract

Against the backdrop of fiscal austerity and bordering discourses in the UK, precarious work has become increasingly important to understand local governance and provision of community services. This paper contends that precarity can be overcome through caring practices found in the social reproduction that communities develop in their everyday experience of place-making, but care is made invisible by the state's own contribution to informal governance arrangements. The paper aims to contribute to the study of precarity in England, by bringing into dialogue debates on work precarity, informality and popular economies. Through this framework the relationality between state and non-state actors can be studied through decentring the role of the state in the provision of community services. This framework recognises the hidden and ambiguous interfaces that co-exist, or are nested within each other, when local communities encounter marginality in social, organisational, political and economic ways. Through qualitative research carried out in Barnsley Metropolitan Borough in South Yorkshire, the paper unpacks how the visibility of material and social precarity are compounded with the invisibility of voluntary work in the initiatives organised by the local council and different community organisations when caring for others and place. Through the relations among individuals and community groups that stem from practices which render work invisible, networks of solidarity are formed, but they are not enough to develop more inclusive conditions for change.