Motility and viscosity: a new understanding of mobility for better policy making

Talking about mobility as ‘supply and demand’ reduces a complex social practice to the thin economic rationalism of ‘homo economicus’ to focus only on what is empirically observable. While such thinking has its uses, it overlooks less visible prerequisites that need to be in place before mobility becomes thinkable and doable. It also fails to explain the absence of mobility. What I like about the concept of motility is that it opens up these topics of prerequisites and the messy stuff of human aptitudes, dispositions and emotions as important contributing factors. Similarly, explaining mobility through the structural dimensions of economic and social inequalities is important but risks being overly determinist, overlooking the potential of individual agency which is where social change can emerge. Any social analysis needs to keep both structure and agency in play. In this way the concept of motility is really helpful.

In my research, I interviewed hyper-mobile military families for whom household moves were frequent. They told of cumulative effects on how members of the family coped with frequent moves. For some, the story was one of growing motility, gaining skills, strategies and dispositions that made moving easier. For others, the story was one of losing motility, as educational problems or spouse employment issues eroded any willingness to move again. So for me, the relationship is also about time, not just the context of place. I also interviewed professional families, on whose mobility rural and remote communities rely. These relatively privileged families could move on their own terms, so the nature of the local education market and lifestyle affordances played a large role in family’s mobility choices, typically drawing them to larger urban centres. These choices in turn created the social problem of poorly serviced communities elsewhere. Thus there is a significant relationship between family mobility and the contexts they avoid, as well as the ones they choose to live in. For my analyses, I found it useful to distinguish between the effect of the agent’s motility, and the way the institutions they dealt with could help or hinder mobility in their routines, practices or expectations. For example, a highly motile family will still find moving difficult if schools uses waiting lists that presume immobility. To better conceptualise the structural effect, I developed the concept of institutional viscosity, being the degree to which the institutional context conditions agents’ accomplishment of mobility. Similarly, I argued that the concept of motility should be confined to what the agent brings to any realization of mobility. This would allow for a clearer distinction between the motility of the agent, and the viscosity of the context they seek to move through. The concepts of motility and viscosity similarly work in tandem in physics or biology.

By separating the agent’s potential of motility from the structural quality of viscosity, policy makers can make sharper analyses of mobility patterns then craft more nuanced interventions to create their desired changes. Mobility is the result of how motility and viscosity interact. Effortless mobility realized through a combination of high motility and low viscosity is not necessarily a good thing in itself. Rather, the appropriate degree of viscosity and the desirable degree of motility will depend on the social context, goals and circumstances. By having both concepts to think with, policy makers have more levers at their disposal, and more possible responses: adjusting institutional practices that contribute to viscosity issues, and/or addressing the motility prerequisites for individuals. An obvious example is the ticketing practices in public transport services. Over time, ticketing has been streamlined (lowering viscosity) with the introduction of innovations such as tap on/tap off cards. This change to institutional practice proactively encourages the flow of commuters to keep moving (low viscosity, high motility). In airports however, security, passport and customs checks are designed to slow the flow of people down (higher viscosity, high motility) so the necessary checks and precautions can be taken. Less obviously, schools have historically served resident populations (high viscosity, low motility), so the high viscosity of their routines and expectations can be difficult and inconvenient for the comings and goings of mobile families. However, schools that dignify the demands of mobile populations may develop proactive practices (lower viscosity, high motility) such as: holding a number of places open for families who can’t satisfy waiting list requirements; buddy systems to welcome new students into friendship groups; and routine communications with previous and subsequent schools to facilitate continuity in programs for mobile students.