Paper short abstract:

This paper centres on the people who are mediating electronic governance processes in Subang Jaya, Malaysia’s e-governance 'laboratory'. Drawing on the field theories of Bourdieu (field practices) and V Turner (field processes) it analyses the new mediators’ motivations, trajectories and skills.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes a close look at the people who are mediating electronic governance processes in Subang Jaya-USJ, a Kuala Lumpur suburb regarded in Malaysia as that country's e-governance 'laboratory'. Drawing on the field theory of both Pierre Bourdieu and Victor Turner, the paper investigates the new mediators' backgrounds, motivations, trajectories and positionings within the emergent field of electronic governance in the suburb over a period of six years (1999-2005). The paper focuses on the new mediators' 'unusual combination of technical, political and cultural skills' (Coleman), a combination that can only be understood in relation to the specialist field in which they operate. This 'field of organised striving' (Martin) is a political commons in which activists, politicians and civil servants cooperate and compete over the hearts and minds of 'the community', in the process shaping local forms of residential sociality in unforeseeable ways. In turn, the field must be analytically placed within the specificities of the Malaysian polity at a time of swift socio-technological change coupled with political-administrative continuity.