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Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car
Abstract
Car cultures have social, material and, above all, affective dimensions that are overlooked in current strategies to influence car-driving decisions. Car consumption is never simply about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobility, this article locates car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a broader physical/material relational setting that includes both human bodies and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move (or fail to move). Drawing on both the phenomenology of car use and new approaches in the sociology of emotions, it is argued that everyday car cultures are implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling in which emotions and the senses play a key part – the emotional geographies of car use. Feelings for, of and within cars (‘automotive emotions’) come to be socially and culturally generated across three scales involved in the circulations and displacements performed by cars, roads and drivers: embodied sensibilities and kinaesthetic performances; familial and sociable practices of ‘caring’ through car use; and regional and national car cultures that form around particular systems of automobility. By showing how people feel about and in cars, and how the feel of different car cultures generates habitual forms of automobilized life and different dispositions towards driving, it is argued that we will be in a better position to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of car consumption and the moral economies of car use.
... Exploring the affective and embodied experiences is helpful for gaining insights into why and how people travel (van Duppen & Spierings, 2013). Sheller (2004) described how the act of driving a car, speeding around corners, sensing the breeze, hearing the engine sound, and cruising in various neighbourhoods may generate a host of emotions such as happiness, excitement, or anticipation. This chain of emotions usually produces sensations and attachment to the car, offering one explanation of how the culture of automobility is further reinforced in social life. ...
... This chain of emotions usually produces sensations and attachment to the car, offering one explanation of how the culture of automobility is further reinforced in social life. Moving beyond individual bodies, affect is a concept that helps explore the relationships among people, technologies, and spaces of mobility, in which emotions play a key part (Sheller, 2004). However, it is worth acknowledging that affect tends to be defined differently across different disciplines. ...
... Car culture can influence the adoption and ownership of AVs (Nitschke, 2020;Sheller, 2004), and can be explained through the lens of habitus (Bourdieu, 1984). Some participants commented on their habitus of drifting even though it could be associated with road crashes and risking the lives of various road users. ...
Social perception and acceptance are crucial for the large-scale adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Using the theoretical lens of the mobilities paradigm, this study explored the social meanings, cultural practices, and structure of feelings that could influence adoption and use of AVs in New Zealand (NZ) cities. The data were collected from public NZ Facebook pages during the period 2015–2020 when the AV debate gained momentum. Qualitative content analysis was conducted for a dataset drawn from 57 Facebook posts with over 4200 comments. The findings show that AVs are associated with meanings of safety, (un)employment, freedom, and control. The findings show how a society's car culture influences the adoption and ownership of AVs. They also show how AVs may increase productivity by introducing new practices while on the move such as eating, applying makeup, reading, or working, suggesting that travel time in AVs is not ‘dead’ time. The findings also uncover new aspects of how and why the public could develop trust in AVs. Overall, NZ society tends to be inclined towards accepting AVs with lower automation levels to maintain the pleasure of driving and allow the exploration of unplanned destinations. This study contributes to the mobilities paradigm by enriching our understanding of the diversified meanings and competencies associated with the adoption of AVs and draws attention to ways in which social meanings could be incorporated in AV policy interventions to better inform urban planning and infrastructure decisions that would shape the smart cities of the future.
... The daily task of combining various time structures in a certain activity space is characteristic of our contemporary lives (K. Davies 2001;Sheller 2004). Mobility and the need to be mobile can be considered crucial to our daily lives, and this affects our practices, thoughts, and being in our daily environments (e.g., Sheller and Urry 2000;Featherstone 2004;Urry 2007). ...
... On the individual level, traveling and transportation intertwine with daily chores and motivations, and with feelings and emotions (K. Davies 2001;Sheller and Urry 2000;Sheller 2004). ...
... This lack of services underlines the significance of private mobility for rural residents. Private cars enable drivers to reach remote wilderness territories (Urry 2004;Sheller 2004), but from the viewpoint of a rural resident, a car is a means of getting out of the countryside-or indeed of doing anything outside the immediate home environment (also Tedre and Pulkkinen 2011, 307-8). I learned at firsthand about the necessity of having a car and being able to drive during my fieldwork trips. ...
Ordinary tasks, like working, taking part in social events, leisure time activities, and consumerism create a need to move. The location of residence determines the means and ways of performing these activities. When studying life in remote rural areas, researchers inevitably confront the question of daily traveling. In Finland, remote rural areas are truly distant from municipal centers and far from cities, workplaces, and public activities. Distances are long, and it takes time and money to move from home villages with no public transport available. How can we analyze the meaning that these distances have for the people living their everyday lives in remote rural areas? In this article, I analyze the most common feature of mobility in rural Finland: private motoring and its multifaceted meaning to residents of rural places. My research, conducted via fieldwork, shows how the body of a car becomes a confluence for daily activities and emotions, a private space where duties, leisure, caring of family members and neighbors, and pleasure gained from the living environment join. By focusing on private motoring, I am also able to open up the wider picture about rural (im) mobility, the nature of rural life, and significance of rural environment as a source of well-being.
... Intimate stories of love and loss were shared, like the time a passenger explained how she had just left her partner after years of abuse as we drove her to a women's shelter. The car was a space that affected both passengers and drivers (Sheller 2004;Kent 2015;Jensen, Sheller, and Wind 2015). ...
... Recognizing the emotional dimensions of driving, the new mobilities literature calls for a consideration of the experiences and feelings of being in a car (Sheller 2004). Mimi Sheller (2004) describes these feelings as 'auto-emotions', or 'the embodied dispositions of car-users and the visceral and other feelings associated with car-use' (223). ...
... Recognizing the emotional dimensions of driving, the new mobilities literature calls for a consideration of the experiences and feelings of being in a car (Sheller 2004). Mimi Sheller (2004) describes these feelings as 'auto-emotions', or 'the embodied dispositions of car-users and the visceral and other feelings associated with car-use' (223). Following this work, I understand emotions to be culturally and socially specific, embodied and also made in and through social relations (Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004;Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). ...
Ikwe is a grassroots ride-sharing group founded in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in January 2016 to serve a growing number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women—many of them poor and vulnerable—who felt unsafe taking taxis. It uses a Facebook group to connect its network of volunteer drivers with passengers. This article argues that Ikwe’s technical infrastructure—Facebook and cars—is supplemented by an emotional infrastructure through which drivers share and manage the feelings elicited by their work. This gendered emotional infrastructure is based on a network of social circulations that includes sharing information over the Drivers’ Log (a Facebook Messenger group that includes all Ikwe drivers) and telling funny and sad stories at the parking lot that the drivers call ‘Headquarters’. In this way, drivers seek to foster a system of mutual support and protection. It also challenges the standard notion of a rational, efficiency-maximizing commercial exchange between drivers and passengers, as drivers and passengers intimately engage with each other during rides, at Headquarters or over Facebook.
... But providing 'more or less integrated systems of activity', pre-existing customs and arrangements take 'priority' (Dewey 1922, 60) and transmit and make common 'experiences, ideas, emotions [and] values' (Dewey 1920, 207). Preceding choice, they explain why private car use often seems so natural, inevitable and uncontroversial (Paterson 2007;Sheller 2004). ...
... People can hold rather ambiguous or indifferent sentiments about cars (Paterson 2007) whilst also developing powerful affective and embodied attachments for and within cars (Sheller 2004). Participants' orientations and attachments revealed both the way a habit is reinforced and strengthened by other habits and can continue to function in subdued form even when apparently dormant or inactive. ...
... Future research could further explore the applicability of these interrelated characteristics, disruptions, and events, elsewhere and for other types of shared arrangements. While similarities with car sharing may be found for those arrangements, our work reinforces that the enclosed space and affordances of cars (Sheller 2004;Wells and Xenias 2015) and the supporting habits and infrastructures they require, ensure car sharing remains a distinct form of sharing. ...
Car sharing could support a transition away from private vehicle ownership and use. Attempts to understand participation in car sharing have primarily focused on minor and major disruptions which catalyse change in practices. This paper examines how processes of entering, continuing or exiting car sharing systems unfold in Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. Car sharing is conceptualised as an arrangement of elements assembled, adjusted and supported by events, practices and habits. Drawing on biographically-oriented household interviews, we build on and extend existing understandings of change and stability in car sharing in four ways. First, by focusing on households rather than individual users, the paper complements recent attempts to understand the decoupling of family and private-car-based mobility. Second, under-examined processes of exiting, alongside entry and continuation are considered. Third, it highlights the importance of recognising more imperceptible, gradual and continuous changes which might not necessarily coincide with a disruptive event. Fourth, habits of shared car arrangements are demonstrated to be fragile and not as deeply ingrained as those associated with ownership. Existing household practices and habits thus raise further questions about the potential for shared mobility services to disrupt the primacy of the car.
... Muito embora essa campanha possua um caráter predominantemente institucional e menos comercial sob o ponto de vista de persuasão do consumidor, ainda assim é possível notar que o produto carro está no centro dos depoimentos. Conforme expõe Sheller (2004), mais do que qualquer outra máquina, o carro mexe com as pessoas e é capaz de provocar as mais diversificadas e intensas emoções. Diante dessa argumentação, verifica-se que a relação estabelecida entre a menina afrodescendente Gabriela (Figura 1c) com o produto carro é caracterizada por um aspecto de ordem sensorial (verbalizada através do desejo), ao passo que o jovem João (Figura 1b) estabeleceu uma relação mais racional. ...
O objetivo do estudo consistiu em examinar de que forma os anúncios publicitários têm retratado os indivíduos afrodescendentes em termos de estereótipos e estigmas. Ele consistiu de análise qualitativa interpretativa em duas propagandas de automóveis tendo como arcabouço teórico a Teoria dos Estigmas e como referenciais metodológicos pesquisas anteriores semelhantes. Os resultados da análise revelaram que os anúncios publicitários contribuem para o reforço da ideia de invisibilidade social dos indivíduos afrodescendentes e também que ainda há predominância de caracterizações impregnadas de estigmatizações.
... Consumer preferences, tightening regulation, and technological breakthroughs are adding up to a fundamental shift in mobility behavior, becoming an interesting research topic (Hewer and Brownlie, 2007). Through a close examination of the aesthetic and especially kinaesthetic dimensions of automobile mobility, Sheller (2004) identified car cultures (and their associated feelings) within a wider physical/material relational setting that includes both human and car bodies, and the relations between them and the spaces through which they move; that work showed how people feel their cars in order to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of automobile consumption and the moral economies of car use. carried out a model for sustainable car consumption, highlighting that consumers are increasingly less emotional attached to their old automobiles in favor of new ones. ...
Despite the global crisis, the automotive sector seems to be in recovery, with an average growth of 3% in most industrialized countries and a yearly number of registrations close to 100 million. In this regard, the work follows a Big Data-oriented approach. In particular, social media analytics is applied on Twitter by taking into consideration people's opinions expressed about the eight largest car companies by production in 2016. Overall, over one million tweets were selected and analyzed. Subsequently the collected data were subjected to a sentiment analysis, a word cloud analysis and a cluster analysis. The results emerged from the survey show the existence of numerous aspects able to affect the automobile consumers’ preferences. In fact, in addition to traditional factors such as price, value for money,
reliability, performance, and so on, it is surprising that many consumers buy automobiles based on additional elements, such as environmental sustainability, driving technology and connectivity.
Keywords: Car consumer preferences; Big Data-oriented approach; Social media analytics; Sentiment analysis; Cluster analysis; Twitter.
... Also, following what stated by Ortar & Vincent-Geslin (2017), there is a slight difference within the Millennial generation itself: "early" Millennials (1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991) have been raised and socialised in a dominating car culture (Sheller, 2004), educated in a world where the place of the car was still dominant and unquestioned, and where obtaining the driving licence were (and sometimes still is) a prerequisite for becoming an adult (Masclet, 2002; Tilleczek, 2011), naturalizing mobility attitudes (Rajan, 2006). While their younger counterpart (let's say the "late" Millennials, 1992Millennials, -2000, the new generations who are now too of an age to take financial responsibility for their spending, have a more pragmatic relationship with transport, viewing it as a tool serving more global ways of living (Hjorthol, 2016). ...
The purpose of this research is to understand if and how the Millennial generation is contributing to a transition towards more sustainable travel behaviours in Europe. The study uses a comparative approach on a cohort and territorial basis. On one hand it analyses the differences between the Millennials, which are experiencing a general decrease in car use/ownership if compared with previous cohorts, and the Baby Boomers, which are seen to be highly car-dependent – even after retirement. On the other hand, it considers the territorial differences among EU clusters of countries and degrees of urbanisation. The methods include secondary analysis of EU-wide datasets with descriptive and geographic analysis and logistic regression on socio-demographic characteristics and modal choice, plus a series of focus group sessions across the Italian territory. ***************************************************************************** According with the results, it is confirmed that Millennials have less polluting habits than their predecessors: less car use/ownership, less probability of being car users independently from context/status, higher degree of urbanisation. Nonetheless, in recent years this trend is experiencing a change of direction, with a general rise in car use/ownership and declining urbanisation, with different paces and schemes amongst clusters of countries and territorial contexts. The main results suggest that i) with the improvement of their individual status and general European economic recovery, Millennials’ car use tends to rise; ii) the pace and extent of this rise is highly dependent on the regional and territorial context, with a substantial incidence of Eastern and PIIGS countries and of the ones living in suburban contexts, resulting in an overall rise in car use in Europe. ***************************************************************************** Indeed, the regression analysis, together with the qualitative study, showed that what really makes the difference in choosing or not the car as the main mode is not much the fact of belonging to a cohort, but the residential location (both urban/rural and regional cultural/economic context), and the “status” (income level; being a student). Millennials are now more urban and still in education, but in many of them persists the idea of a future in less urban areas, and/or an inevitable automobility once they are out of the student-period. ***************************************************************************** Though, the study highlights the importance of the relationship between the two cohorts, drawing attention on the peculiarities of Millennials (more formative experiences of car-less life abroad/in different cities; more pragmatic yet conflictual relationship with the car), but also on them as heirs to the Baby Boomers’ choices and systems of values and habits (suburban way of life as a legacy). The study demonstrates the power of the cohort effect (set of values, education, growing up context) in shaping car (in)dependent people; showing as well that car dependency cannot be overcome without working on places. It finally offers a scheme of car (in)dependency to guide policy actions to make both people and places less car dependent in the long term.
... With these technologies, spatial convergence (both fixed, and customizable) leads to an operational convergence, in which both the media display (with app content), and the driving display (with driving data) are presented on the same ontological plane. In this, both are made customizable, not only to the driver's interests, tastes, feelings and passions (Sheller 2004), but also to their driving situations (i.e. going on a family holiday, or driving home from work). ...
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.
... Edensor, 2004;Giucci, 2012;Monroe, 2014;Butler & Hannam, 2014;Broz & Habeck, 2015;Small, 2018). Since the mobilities turn, detailed accounts have been given of aspects of automobility such as driving (Thrift, 2004), 'passengering' (Laurier et al., 2008), accidents (Short & Pinet-Peralta, 2010) and 'automotive emotions' (Sheller, 2004). The attention given to cars stands in sharp contrast to the neglect of motorbikes and motorcycles in the mobilities literature. ...
The rapid developments in Vietnam since economic reforms have led to a transformation of urban mobility. In less than 20 years, motorbike ownership increased more than tenfold, and there are now about 58 million motorbikes in the country. While the two-wheelers dominate traffic, car ownership has increased rapidly in the past decade. Based on ‘motorbike ethnography’ in the streetscapes of Hanoi, this chapter considers the changing practices and meanings of motorised mobility in Vietnam’s capitalist transformations. It focuses on two main aspects: the everyday geography of the ‘system of moto-mobility’, and the emergence of a new automobility regime. The chapter finds that although motorbikes still dominate in Hanoi, automobility is becoming progressively normalized.KeywordsAutomobilityMoto-mobilityVietnamMiddle classConsumptionDistinctionMotorbike ethnography
... Actually the movement drove much more numerous claims, many of them in opposition to several government measures affecting mobility in 2018 (rise of the taxes on energies including gasoline, speed limitation to 80 km/h on secondary roads, hardening of roadworthiness tests, development of speed cameras) or more broadly speaking, against the Governement's alleged responsability in increasing gasoline prices (+ 50% for diesel an + 25% for gasoline since 2016). In a way, the YV movement can be conceived as an archetypal representation of the "politics of automobility" (Sheller 2004;Urry 2004;Cresswell 2010), which intricates spatialities, socio-economic and symbolic issues (Miller and Ponto 2016). It is also a label that unified actions, people and claims that are potentially very disparate, heterogeneous, or even divergent, from place to place and from period to period . ...
Yellow vests gatherings spread across France in late November 2018, and arose mostly in peripheral France, where social movements are not used to appear. This movement have been already studied through its spatial dimension, but without sources and methods being always unequivocal and deconstructed. In this context, our proposal aims to getting things straight among all the available sources and data which document the spatial dimension of the YV movement during the first months of the contestation. Through a monograph in Normandy, maps and a geostatistical study of YV gatherings at a national scale, we first highlight the disseminated, simultaneous but temporary YV appropriations of different strategic spaces in the margins of small towns, before massive and repeated central gatherings, which underlines the politicization of the movement. Then we explore the “Jaune vif” database, which is very relevant since it is the only source that documents both the gathering and the daily life spaces of protestors, essentially peri-urban or rural dwellers and inhabitants of small towns in the beginning, whose lifestyles and daily life spaces, often marginalized or depreciated, have been there brought to the forefront of politics. Even if some of them carried on mobilizing far from their home, the centralization of the movement appears to be coupled with a centralization of the protestors, who were gradually more metropolitan and used to social movements, structuring the movement at a broader scale.
... Building on another theme in Sheller's (2004) work, emotional connections to 'automobility' and other forms of transport have been discussed extensively by scholars, such as Jennifer Kent (2015) and Waitt, Harada, and Duffy (2017). This growing body of work recognizes that vehicular mobilities are not only about rational or economic choice, but also about other things, such as sensory and emotional responses, aesthetics, and social relationships. ...
The aim of this special issue is to bring together ethnographic scholarship on last-mile logistics work, sometimes called ‘platform labour’, into a more direct conversation with the mobilities framework. The introduction argues that although platform mobilities often employ a rhetoric of unrestricted flow across time and space, the movements of people and technologies associated with them are in fact entangled in the social, political, economic, and ethical relationships that characterise the places in which they operate, and in unexpected ways. The contributions, based in a wide range of settings globally, provide empirical insights into how platform mobilities are embedded in a range of both new and long-standing societal dynamics that cannot be described through relations of economic extraction alone.
... Consequently, it is likely that such an embodiment of the machine is an important characteristic for the human's experience in a human-machine symbiosis. For example, tool-use changed the estimated forearm length of the participants (Sposito et al., 2012), some embodiment has been observed for robotic hands (Alimardani et al., 2013), or, in a more anecdotal way, car drivers often report to even sense pain in case they witness a car crash (Sheller, 2004). Symbiosis in physically coupled human-machine systems is expected to change the embodiment by incorporating at least parts of the machine into the own body scheme. ...
The notion of symbiosis has been increasingly mentioned in research on physically coupled human-machine systems. Yet, a uniform specification on which aspects constitute human-machine symbiosis is missing. By combining the expertise of different disciplines, we elaborate on a multivariate perspective of symbiosis as the highest form of interaction in physically coupled human-machine systems, characterized by a oneness of the human and the machine. Four dimensions are considered: Task, interaction, performance, and experience. First, human and machine accomplish a common objective by completing tasks conceptualized on a decomposition, a decision and an action level (task dimension). Second, each partner possesses an internal representation of the oneness they form, including the partner’s inner states (e. g. experiences) and their joint influence on the environment. This representation constitutes the “symbiotic understanding” between both partners, being the basis of a joint and highly coordinated action (interaction dimension). Third, the symbiotic interaction leads to synergetic effects regarding the complementary strengths of the partners, resulting in a higher overall performance (performance dimension). Fourth, symbiotic systems specifically change the user’s experiences, like flow, acceptance, sense of agency, and embodiment (experience dimension). Our multivariate perspective allows a clear description of symbiotic human-machine systems and helps to bridge barriers between different disciplines.
... These quotes illustrate how driving is often associated with narratives of freedom (Freudendal-Pedersen 2009), and how some have strong emotional attachments to cars and driving (Sheller 2004). The emotional and embodied knowledges, which also may be of importance in the formation of people's mobility practices, seems to be overlooked and are to our knowledge not informing the planning practices. ...
The development of low-carbon cities calls for a restructuring of their suburban hinterlands, and regional land-use and transport planning has become an instrument to achieve this. However, this restructuring has several social implications and is lived by people, who are expected to develop more sustainable practices. There are disconnections between planning practices and people’s everyday practices, of which the literature has provided little to explore and solve. This paper deals with this by studying how regional low-carbon transport strategies are implemented, translated, and lived in a suburban context, and discusses how disconnections between scales of mobility transitions might be bridged.
... Emerging in the 1930 s, early SUV models such as the Chevrolet Suburban in the USA were marketed to portray affluence (Lauer 2005). These wealth-related symbolic functions of private cars have persisted for more than a century, and have been discussed extensively (Sheller 2004;Steg 2005): 'car pride' continues to have great relevance for transport behavior even today (Moody and Zhao 2020). ...
There is a general consensus that private car ownership is a significant barrier to transport system change, specifically in regard to injuries, space, air pollutants, or greenhouse gas emissions. Observed changes in automobile characteristics also suggest that the system is becoming less sustainable, given trends towards larger cars with greater mass and horsepower. It is thus relevant to understand how the automobile system progresses. National statistics provide data on the technical side of car ownership, such as changes in vehicle specifics or national fleet size. This paper complements this view with a socio-psychological perspective on aspirational car ownership, i.e. the type of car people preferred to drive if given a free choice. Data is derived from an online panel (n = 1,211) representative of the German population, and also contains information on current car ownership, use, driving style, traffic behavior, attitudes towards traffic risks and safety measures, as well as political orientation. This allows for a discussion of driver segments in relation to the characteristics of cars, and hence to better understand the socio-psychological drivers of the development of the automobile system.
... People who heat more rooms in their house after a thermal retrofit often do so because society has changed: for example, their children have to do their individual homework on their own computers in the privacy and quiet of their own space. Women tend to buy high fuel-consumption Sports Utility Vehicles because these vehicles merge the traditional role of women as shoppers and transporters of children, with the feminist image of a powerful woman enhanced by symbols of prestige and competence (Jain 2002;Sheller 2004). ...
Rebound effects have been historically studied through narrow framings which may overlook the complexity of sustainability challenges, sometimes leading to badly informed conclusions and policy recommendations. Here we present a critical literature review of rebound effects in the context of sustainability science in order to (1) map existing rebound research which goes beyond mainstream approaches, (2) unveil and classify current knowledge gaps in relation to sustainability science, (3) outline a research agenda, and (4) provide a knowledge base to support the design of effective policies toward sustainable development. We analyzed the literature in accordance with seven criteria for sustainable assessment: boundary orientedness, comprehensiveness, integratedness, stakeholder involvement, scalability, strategicness, and transparency. Our review identified three main issues: (1) the failure to address the multidimensionality of rebound effects, whereby both negative and positive outcomes may arise simultaneously, (2) the shift toward absolute rebound metrics which enables the contextualization of its effect with respect to science and policy goals, and (3) a general lack of attention to behavioral effects. We conclude that addressing these issues will help rebound research gain explanatory power and relevance for key decision‐makers. We envision that with better alignment with sustainability science, future rebound research could help elucidate trade‐offs in policies, including why certain strategies such as those based on the circular economy might fall short of expectations, and why achieving key goals and targets such as the sustainable development goals is so challenging. This knowledge is crucial for promoting a prioritization of actions and a concrete transition toward sustainability.
... The concept of need for achievement entails a person's aspiration for important accomplishment and a tendency to choose and persist at activities that hold a moderate chance of success or those providing a maximum opportunity of personal achievement satisfaction (McClelland, 1961;McClelland, 1987;Miron & McClelland, 1979). It is important to note that delight and excitement are affective responses to cars (Sheller, 2004). These emotions are vital to the personal aspirations individuals have while purchasing cars. ...
Environmental issues have gauged the attention of marketers and researchers all around the world. Automobile industry has a major environmental impact due to fuel consumption and emissions. A threadbare understanding of the automobile buyer is necessary to better connect with consumers with changing lifestyles, attitudes, and personalities, basically to cater to their sensibilities and psyche, gradually accommodating contemporary environmental viewpoints. Marketers have religiously focused upon studying the car buying behavior and its links with lifestyles. The present study aims to offer a preview of the relationship between lifestyles and ecological behavior among urban car consumers in an emerging economy like India. The findings of the study suggest factors like need for achievement, need for uniqueness, price consciousness, and need for status affect the ecological behavior of the Indian car buyers.
... Other factors that may drive car ownership include levels of education, as highly educated professionals, who generally have a high perceived value of time, tend to prefer driving [25]. More so, sociological characteristics may influence car ownership [26,27]. Younger generations in the developed countries are staying in school longer, joining the workforce later, being in predominantly short-term contract work and settling in relationships late and this reduces prospects of car ownership [28]. ...
There are significant deviations in travel mode choice drivers between developed and developing countries. This study investigates the determinants of car ownership and public transit ridership in Iran. Using survey data from 800 respondents, the determinants of travel behaviour of Kerman residents were investigated, based on gender, age, household size, car ownership, frequency of public transport ridership, number of working days per week, number of shopping activities in the neighbourhood per week, number of entertainment activities in the neighbourhood per week, and number of shopping activities in the city. Two multivariate models were estimated using the OLS and WLS methods. Our findings suggested that owning a car tends to increase as age, household size, number of working days and number of shopping days in the city decreases. An increase in the number of entertainment days in the neighbourhood raised the probability of car ownership while shopping in the neighbourhood did not influence car ownership. Public transport use was negatively influenced by gender, increased age and number of working days, but positively influenced by shopping in the city. Our research results have significant implications for transport planning. Firstly, changes in household size may not be a good basis to inform planning as our findings show that in Kerman as household size increases, car ownership decreases, and it does not influence public transport. Secondly, when planning road network connectivity (land use) higher working days are expected to increase both car ownership and public transport use.
... Alongside the convenience and sense of freedom that the automobile offers, the actual act of driving increases people's emotional attachments to their vehicles (Thrift 2002). These emotional attachments can be very strong, but as they are difficult to quantify they are often overlooked in policy documents (Sheller 2003 " New fuel systems such as hybrid or hydrogen cars " New lighter materials to make car bodies, and reduce engine sizes " Improvements in smart card technology " De-privatisation of cars through car clubs "A focus on demand reduction in transport policy (including road pricing) " Developments in communications technology and the internet Increasing concerns over sustainability and the introduction of road pricing could lead to a tipping point, but if and when such a move towards a 'post car system " (Urry 2003a) would occur is highly unpredictable. Urry argues that for such a shift to occur most of the changes outlined above would be needed, and in a certain order, adding to its unpredictability. ...
p>This thesis examines the controversial policy of road pricing, using a qualitative approach based on a series of case studies. Two related issues are explored; first the barriers to implementation, which help account for the lack of road pricing schemes to date, and second how businesses are likely to respond to a road pricing scheme. As the effects of road pricing are not fully understood, policy makers are often reluctant to implement schemes. This amplifies the problem that there are a lack of operational schemes to learn from, and in turn means the impacts of road pricing remain poorly understood. The first part of the analysis explores the institutional, attitudinal, practical and technological factors that influence the success and failure of road pricing policy, through case studies of Singapore and the Netherlands. In particular, the dominance of the automobile in society, and the history of policy controls on its ownership and use are shown to play a key role in affecting both the acceptance, and the ultimate success, of road pricing. A series of potential barriers to implementation are outlined, key . lessons are identified, and recommendations are made for future road pricing proposals, both in Southampton and beyond. The second part of this thesis moves on to consider the potential economic impacts of road pricing, focusing on how businesses in Southampton would respond to a hypothetical road pricing scheme. A wide range of ways that businesses could respond to road pricing are identified, which are categorised as locational, organisational, transport and financial. This thesis shows that a number of businesses in Southampton are locally embedded, both through territorial embeddedness, high sunk costs and ties to Southampton because of its unique characteristics as a deep water port and cruising centre. This embeddedness means many firms are less likely to relocate in response to road pricing than policy makers often fear. Firms' non-locational responses are affected by a number of factors, including their level of behavioural and cognitive `lock in' to their working and transport practices, and their willingness and ability to pass on any extra costs that they may incur if road pricing is introduced. Although Southampton is in many ways unique, this research has focused on understanding and explaining the reasons for particular responses, rather than simply identifying them; and as such the results can be applied to other cities considering implementing road pricing.</p
... N. Uusitalo children during a long drive and taking my kids to school and hobbies, and thus also facilitating their social life. Mimi Sheller (2004) writes that car consumption is not only about rational economic choices, but is as much about aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving, as well as patterns of kinship, sociability, habitation and work. In the West, the automobile has been established as a normal and necessary tool for personal independence and successful management of family life (Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson 2017, 9) (Figure 2). ...
As participants of the global capitalist system, we have rich and lifelong experiences of living with fossil fuels. However, these experiences are often implicit in our everyday lives, and rarely formulated explicitly. Coming off Fossil Fuels is a project that visualises and collects personal experiences of fossil fuel dependencies. Experiences can include memories, current attachments and future dreams connected to fossil fuels. This article is a methodological account of collecting fossil fuel experiences through two modes of visual recollection: (1) an autobiographical video piece visualising the author’s own dependencies on fossil fuels and (2) gallery visitors’ fossil fuel experiences. The article utilises a participatory arts-based approach in which gallery visitors were able to react to the video in recorded responses. The video was presented as part of the 2022 LOOK Climate Lab thinking space in Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, where video responses were collected. The article also discusses possibilities for developing a method of visual recollection by considering temporal and spatial dimensions of fossil fuel dependency.
A key feature of current economic policies in Saudi Arabia is the inclusion of women in the labor market. The lift of the ban on women driving was expected to have a positive impact on this goal. Using longitudinal interviews with Saudi university students (both men and women), we find that the ban on women driving configured individual mobility as family mobility, which affected women’s options and men’s obligations. Secondly, we find that mobility constraints, moderated by socioeconomic status, continue to restrict women´s mobility even after the lift of the ban, reinforced by societal and family opposition. Finally, we show that the mobility constraints that Saudi women face affect their labor market preferences, opportunities, choices, and outcomes. While remaining conservative social attitudes continue to restrict women’s mobility, women’s increased labor force participation erodes those attitudes, creating a reinforcing mechanism in which increased mobility and labor market access strengthen each other.
Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by revisiting core concepts in mobilities studies: movement, representation and embodied experience. Our analysis of machine learning is centred around the transition from human senses to sensors mounted on cars, and what this implies in terms of autonomy. While much of the discussions related to this transition are already foregrounded in mobilities studies, due to this field's emphasis on complexities and the understanding of automobility as a socio-technological system, questions about autonomy still emerge in a slightly new light with the advent of machine learning. We conclude by suggesting that in mobilities studies, autonomy has always been seen as intertwined with technology, yet we argue that machine learning unfolds autonomy as intrinsic to technology, as the space between the car, the driver and the context is collapsing with autonomous cars.
For developing healthy and environmentally friendly cities an innovative redesign of urban infrastructure is necessary. However, changes to the current infrastructure are not always adopted and accepted immediately. Therefore, it is crucial to understand why people accept or refuse the transformation of public space towards active mobility. Taking the example of Berlin, a four-week real-world experiment (RWE) was conducted in summer 2021 when a street was transformed to a car-free square. Parklets, which are wooden platforms on parking spaces, made this alternative use of space visible for residents and enabled them to experience the infrastructural change in their daily lives. However, these temporary experiments and infrastructural changes in general are controversial among residents. After the intervention, we measured residents’ acceptability as attitude and intention to react (protest etc.) within a household survey (N = 155). Using regression analyses, we examined the influence of socio-demographics and psychological variables (perceived fairness, affect and place attachment) on acceptability. The survey shows that almost as many participants favor the redesign as oppose it. Moreover, we found that on the attitudinal level, acceptability is influenced by perceived fairness, affect, place attachment, gender, and age. Whereas for behavioral acceptability, only perceived fairness plays a significant role. This demonstrates that the transport transition is strongly influenced by the idea of fairness. If the benefits are clearly recognizable for different population groups and the distribution of space feels fair, changes to the built environment are more easily accepted.
In the context of recent discussions on co-operation within media studies, this contribution focuses on material co-operations, i.e. on the entanglement of bodies and objects as participants in situated concerted actions within the ongoing accomplishment of social practices. More specifically, I am concerned with the empirical case of air travel, addressing material co-operation with regard to boarding, accommodating to the plane, and finally detaching oneself from the entanglement when leaving the plane. Viewed from this perspective, sociality on board turns out to be a complex social process that depends on different participants like the crew, passengers, their bodies, objects, and material infrastructure. Not only flying, but also boarding and disembarking are clearly shaped by the materiality of the vehicle. While accomplishing an utterly material co-operation of bodies and infrastructure on board, passengers contribute to a culture of “civil inattention”, only occasionally interrupted by polite conversation. Even conflict is more often covertly than overtly acted out. However, the same infrastructure that contributes to the mostly friendly and peaceful atmosphere on board can also turn into a medium of conflict: overhead compartments, seats, arm rests, food, drinks, the bodies of other passengers and their smells or noises, all this can be perceived as part of an exciting experience, as hardly relevant to one’s own situation, or as annoying. Co-operation proves to be a fruitful concept to understand not only how material dimensions of the social are interwoven with the interactions of persons, bodies, objects, and infrastructure; the concept furthermore delineates how thick such material entanglements can be and to what extent all participants have to make a concerted effort to put them into effect.
O presente artigo promove uma análise acerca das emoções frente à percepção cromática do ser humano, tendo como objeto de estudo o automóvel. Para tal fim, além do levantamento bibliográfico, foi feita uma avaliação da percepção emocional do usuário em relação a automóveis por meio da ferramenta Roda das Emoções de Genebra (GEW) coletados dados de 20 pessoas de dois diferentes grupos. Para essa pesquisa, foram utilizadas imagens do automóvel modelo Renegade, da marca Jeep, selecionado a partir de um grupo de foco, editadas e organizadas em diferentes cores. Com base na análise dos resultados, ficou notória a diferença entre as respostas dos estudantes de Design e dos estudantes de outras áreas. Nesse contexto, os discentes do curso de design apresentaram maior variedade na percepção de emoções, em contraposição com os discentes de outros cursos, os quais assinalaram menos opções emocionais dispostas no GEW.
The concentration of immigrants in suburban neighborhoods and cities should motivate research into the mobility experiences of racialized and immigrant youth in the suburbs. While intentionally turning our attention to racialized suburban adolescents, we might also look to consider how activities and travel are embodied, reproduced, and embedded with the environment, the social, and the material. Drawing from an ethnographic study about non-school activities and travel of adolescents ages 13–19 years in the suburban city of Mississauga, Canada, we highlight mobility experiences that are mediated by socio-material structures and embedded within micro and macro power relations. Attention is given to visible and invisible negotiation tactics employed by participants to navigate and access and/or exit four types of data-emergent childhood places: physical, mobile, digital, and representational. Participants indicated awareness of systemic surveillance and a parental preference to construct and preserve the innocent child. In response, participants strategically employ mundane daily practices, technologies, and peer-networks to access, widen and obscure the social, spatial (virtually and otherwise) and temporal scope of everyday life.
The concept of emotion is closely related to affect, which is an encompassing term, consisting of emotions, feelings, moods, and evaluations. Organizations, conferences, and special issues related to emotion and design in human factors and ergonomics have been burgeoning. Core affect is object-free without being directed at anything, that is, no emotional associations, whereas affective quality is related to or belongs to the product and has the ability to cause a change in core affect during the human-product interaction process so that the product is attributed with creating emotional associations. Quality function deployment is a method that first transforms qualitative customer needs into quantitative parameters, then deploys the functions to form product quality, and then translates product quality into design elements, and finally to specific manufacturing processes. Emotional design has been well recognized in the domain of human factors and ergonomics. The chapter reviews related models and methods of emotional design.
This open access book seeks to understand why we consume as we do, how consumption changes, and why we keep consuming more and more, despite the visible damage we are doing to the planet. The chapters cover both the stubbornness of unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent societies and the drivers of rapidly increasing consumption in emerging economies. They focus on consumption patterns with the largest environmental footprints, including energy, housing, and mobility and engage in sophisticated ways with the theoretical frontiers of the field of consumption research, in particular on the ‘practice turn’ that has come to dominate the field in recent decades. This book maps out what we know about consumption, questions what we take for granted, and points us in new directions for better understanding—and changing—unsustainable consumption patterns.
This article explores how Britain’s changing roadscapes are apprehended by the road-user with reference to my own experience of driving the same route between Scotland and Cornwall over the past quarter-century. My pre-millennial analysis of these journeys (published 2000) is compared with more recent driving-events and deploys the same multi-layered autoethnographic methods I first experimented with then. My central argument is concerned with the ways in which drivers and passengers both respond and contribute to such change vis-a-vis those aspects of their own autobiographies which are entwined with the ‘lifecourse of the road’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). The concept I have devised to account for the ways in which the materiality of the road is entangled with the cognitive and affective passage of the traveller is journeying: i.e. the means by which the individual journey is overlaid, and shaped, not only by previous journeys but also the life-journey of the traveller for whom a familiar route has special meaning. The analysis reveals the extent to which increased traffic and congestion has impacted upon the experience of driving long-distance routes as well as the critical role roadside landmarks (and their disappearance) play in orienting and disorienting the traveller.
This chapter analyses the trajectory of the Indian small car, the Tata Nano. When launched by the manufacturer Tata Motors as a new Indian ‘people’s car’ in 2008, the Nano was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India. Yet it barely made an impact on the Indian car market, and production was phased out just a decade after the first Nano had hit the Indian roads. By analysing the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries that attach to the car as a means to mobility and an object of identity and social status, we argue that the Nano failed neither because it was mediocre, nor because it remained economically out of reach for most Indians. Rather, its insertion into the lower ranks of a powerful status hierarchy of identity-defining objects precluded it from adequately tapping into new and hegemonic forms of middle-class consumer aspiration in ‘New India’, thereby leaving the people’s car without ‘a people’.
The goal of consumption—and hence of economics—is wellbeing. Whilst useful for some purposes, orthodox tools such as GNP tell us little meaningful about our wellbeing, or that of the planet. Newer frameworks such as Ecological Economics or Quality of Life indices introduce qualitative criteria, embracing a much broader view of costs and benefits. However, they still leave consumers without tools to actually guide and frame decision making. Looking beyond the material, psychological, cultural and other forces underlying consumption, this chapter offers tools to enable those—consumers or policy makers—who have the intent to move towards sustainable choices.
However, to do so we need to integrate all three facets of ecology, economy and society within a holistic framework. Basic material needs like food or shelter are quantifiable; qualities such as friendships or liberty are not. Consumption decisions involve both objective and subjective factors, quantities and qualities, facts and values. Can these antinomic categories be integrated in one framework for evaluation and decision making? We must also consider the individual, the collective and the global. This is what “value mapping” offers; a framework to evaluate and compare choices; an integral approach to wellbeing and consumption. It addresses both experts and laypeople, and is visually intuitive as well as easy to apply either in simple versions or in detailed forms not described here. What kinds of consumption can give maximum wellbeing with minimum negative impacts? The Value Maps presented here are practical tools to address this question.
Electricity plays a vital role in everyday life. However, electricity-dependent practices are often taken for granted, and the complex underlying infrastructure tends to be invisible—until power supply is disrupted. Drawing on qualitative interviews with rural Norwegian households, this chapter takes practices as the starting point for examining how daily life changes during power outages and how households experience the consequences of such outages. The aim is to use households’ perspectives to understand the consequences of power outages and show how disruption influences relations between infrastructures, practices, customers and providers. Using the three elements of practice—materials, competences, meanings—I demonstrate how power failures temporarily break the linkages between elements in electricity-dependent practices, and how households forge linkages between other items and technologies, embodied knowledge and competences, and new meanings, in order to continue daily life. This re-assembling of elements in practices demonstrates the complexity of power-outage consequences and explains how rural Norwegian households can cope relatively well with lengthy power outages. The chapter also sheds light on the difficulties of trying to reduce consequences to monetary terms. Rather than worrying about the economic costs of power outages, households focus on maintaining their daily routines. The ability to adapt during outages demonstrates a relatively high level of flexibility, but this does not mean that households do not value having secure power supplies.
This chapter assesses the contribution that economics can make to help us understand consumer behaviour and, if necessary, to try and change it. Economic theory of consumer behaviour is sophisticated and rigorous, but very limited. It excludes from consideration many of the factors which are well-recognised by other social sciences as being important. These limitations stem largely from the standard model of homo economicus . Economists are not unaware of this problem, but it is difficult to resolve it: to establish models that are tractable—for example incorporating the idea of interdependent preferences. But even simple economic theory, in which income and price are the main explanatory factors of consumer behaviour, provides the basis for potentially very effective policy instruments. If incomes fall, consumption is indeed reduced; and taxes and subsidies can substantially alter consumer behaviour. The problem is that such instruments are politically very unpopular.
Flying has become an increasingly contested form of consumption, but ‘green’ consumers often continue to fly. This chapter provides novel insights into the stubbornness of air-travel by specifically studying the obstacles that environmentally conscious consumers face when trying to limit or eliminate aeromobility. Through in-depth interviews with Norwegian environmental organisation workers—conceptualised as particularly self-reflexive when it comes to environmentally contested forms of consumption—we analyse how environmentalists negotiate one of the most environmentally destructive aspects of their consumption patterns. To explore how the social embeddedness of flying complicates the reduction of air-travel in these accounts, we draw on a combination of mobilities and social practice approaches. The participants considered flying to be problematic, but also often necessary in specific practices. Various expectations related to convenience, time, and sociality, led to a certain ‘lock-in’ of (aero)mobility. Zooming out to consider broader practice geographies, we argue that aeromobility contributes to the tempo-spatial expansion of many practices, changing their contents, meanings, and the contexts in which they unfold. To achieve sustainable mobility, we suggest that attention must be shifted from the air-travels of individual consumers to the broader practices in which aeromobility is embedded.
Solar water heating, working correctly, can slash fossil fuel use in households. These systems have been popular in some countries for decades. But even in places environmentally well-suited to solar water heating, the technology is not necessarily widely used. Despite favourable weather, its early embrace of rooftop photovoltaics, and a generous decade-long incentive program, solar water heating is uncommon in California households. While there are many possible explanations, there has been little fieldwork on who uses solar water heating, the experiences of those who do, and how they relate to these conventional explanations. This chapter presents a picture of what we learned by talking to California households who use solar water heating systems, and relates these findings to policies and strategies for achieving low-carbon futures. The interviews were an unusual ethnographic element of a larger research project that sought to provide a broad view of the socio-technical landscape of solar water heating in California. We also discuss the role of these interviews in that project and the challenges of producing an integrated socio-technical analysis that can satisfactorily inform technology-centred solutions to problems seen by policy.
In this article I analyze the emotional logic that urban transport drivers in La Paz assign to their vehicles in their life cycle. I pay attention to the emotive dimension of the “technical rationality” of practices of vehicle renewal, reuse, and maintenance—that is to say, the set of emotions, affections, and, especially, feelings that emerge in keeping the vehicle in good condition or in its possible replacement. This emotional dimension does not emerge as an autonomous sphere of technical rationality but rather is inherent to it. My hypothesis also points to its overflowing and kaleidoscopic character, since it transcends the individual experience by allowing us to analyze other phenomena of social life. En este artículo analizo la lógica emocional que los choferes de transporte urbano en La Paz asignan a su vehículo en su ciclo de vida. Para tal fin, presto atención a la dimensión emotiva de la “racionalidad técnica” de las prácticas de renovación, reutlización y mantenimiento vehicular. Es decir, al conjunto de emociones, afectos y, en especial, de sentimientos que afloran en la conservación del vehículo o en su posible reemplazo. Dicha dimensión emotiva no aflora como una esfera autónoma de la racionalidad técnica, sino más bien es inherente a esta. Mi hipótesis apunta además a su carácter desbordante y calidoscópico, puesto que transciende esa experiencia individual al permitir analizar otros fenómenos de la vida social.
This book is intended for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the dynamics and governance of low-carbon transitions. Drawing on the Multi-Level Perspective, it develops a whole system reconfiguration approach that explains how the incorporation of multiple innovations can cumulatively reconfigure existing systems. The book focuses on UK electricity, heat, and mobility systems, and it systematically analyses interactions between radical niche-innovations and existing (sub)systems across techno-economic, policy, and actor dimensions in the past three decades. Comparative analysis explains why the unfolding low-carbon transitions in these three systems vary in speed, scope, and depth. It evaluates to what degree these transitions qualify as Great Reconfigurations and assesses the future potential for, and barriers to, deeper low-carbon system transitions. Generalising across these systems, broader lessons are developed about the roles of incumbent firms, governance and politics, user engagement, wider public, and civil society organisations. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
L’ultima bambina d’Europa (The Last Girl of Europe), written by Francesco Aloe, is a captivating example of Italian cli-fi. Inspired by Pulitzer-prizewinning American novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, L’ultima bambina d’Europa narrates the story of a young Italian family traveling southbound in an exhausting voyage toward Africa; presumably, there the sun is still visible, the wind is softly blowing, and water and food supplies have not run out, at least, not yet. In this article, I will analyze some of the main cli-fi topoi and I will connect them to the narrative and rhetorical construction employed by the author. Specifically, I will focus on the effect of estrangement, which will encourage readers to embrace a less anthropocentric gaze. Through the perspective of the main protagonists - mother, father and their daughter Sofia - readers will become aware of the gluttonous nature of capitalism that functions only for a few. In their voyage, these three characters traverse a barren and devastated landscape void of temporal and spatial references. However, in this unspecified gloomy future scenario, readers will recognize the ruins of our current society and of our petroculture, heavily influenced by the American model of consumerism. Sofia’s parents, who seem to suffer from “petro-melancholia” (LeMenager, Living Oil 102), recollect nostalgically the petrochemical culture in which they grew up. This is in stark contrast with Sofia’s perspective; she has no recollection of a capitalist society. Finally, this analysis will underline Aloe’s prowess in situating death among the living, the place where it rightfully belongs.
There are public debates concerning the meaning highly automated vehicles (HAVs) will possess in society and on road social interactions, with the topic of autonomy being frequently stressed. The de-contextualised and abstract discussion has influenced the development of the on-road Multi-Agent Social Interaction (MASI) concept. By addressing socially sensitive road users’ co-experiences with HAVs, a range of social situations, and how the social dimensions comes to play in different future scenarios may aid scholars and manufacturers gain insights as well as challenge perceived assumptions. For prolific future mobility research and development, we need to consider long-term automation effects to on-road social interactive behaviours – an under-addressed and often overlooked issue. Thus, we revised ideas that infer social interaction patterns, in hopes to try to interrogate and situate these patterns within the context of MASI. These viewpoints are compared and integrated to formulate a structured and explorative framework, describing MASI in the context of space sharing, as this is important to consider in the early stage of HAV development. This paper aims to situate the experiences of road users within an illustrative urban context, as real-world commuting experiences may include multiple people interacting with HAVs at the same time. Further offers significant contributions, which is a description of “MASI”: in short, as on-road social interaction consisting of different road users (humans and automated vehicles), as agents that socially interact with and react to each other, simultaneously. In essence, a classification of co-experiences that users’ may exhibit in in-group social interactions with HAV and interaction dynamics with automation tailored for different road-user types, and further supports several multimodalities. This framework is helpful in envisioning better-equipped systems, models, theories, human factors requirements for interaction designed strategies, and in-group-out-group humans-automation collaborative research.KeywordsAutomated vehiclesHuman factorsTraffic and transport ergonomicsMASILong-term automation effectsUser experiences
Surface textures play an important role in the perception of consumer products. In car interiors, they are a major contributor to the perceived quality of a vehicle. However, limited attention has been paid to the affective responses elicited by touch and observation of a textured surface. Here we report an investigation in which Kansei Engineering was used to explore the perception of texturized plastic surfaces, both in its psychophysical and affective dimensions, as well as the influence of the textures’ physical parameters. In a controlled study, 21 subjects were asked to touch 18 samples of two types of plastics, commonly used in car interiors, Polypropylene (PP) and Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), under tactile (only touch) and visual-tactile (touch and vision) conditions. Participants were asked to rate the samples according to 8 descriptors of psychophysical and affective nature. Results show a relation between perceived roughness and the positive/negative valence of the affective response. Importantly, this relation is moderated by the visual appearance of the textures, when these are visible. Both psychophysical and affective dimensions were modelled through height parameters of the texture elements and a variable describing the type of material. The present findings are relevant for the understanding of visual-tactile perception of textures and have implications in the design of textured components for automotive car interiors.
Focusing on conventional taxis and e-hailing, this paper discusses the technology, job and mobility choices of a conventional occupational group – taxi drivers – faced with an algorithm-enabled mode of mobility. Based on six-month ethnographic fieldwork in Xi’an, China, it shows that taxi drivers generally prefer taxis to e-hailing. Because the e-hailing algorithm treats each driver independently, drivers’ spatio-temporal skills become marginalised and taxi drivers are no longer able to maintain a regular spatio-temporal arrangement that facilitates their community nodes as they do in taxi-driving. Their preference for taxis is a response to the potential threat to their community and social values imposed by algorithm-enabled mobilities. The paper emphasises how workers’ response to algorithmic digital automation are centred around and operationalised by spatio-temporal mobility. It also shows that the impacts of new mobilities are distributed unevenly across groups with different socio-economic backgrounds and life experiences, in this case vis-à-vis the privatisation and urbanisation of Chinese society.
Despite the escalation of crises related to a car-dependent system – global warming, habitat fragmentation, and the continued depletion of nonrenewable resources – the governing assumptions behind automobility remain unchanged. In this paper, we argue the endurance and continued expansion of a transportation regime centered on automobility in the US represents a zombie policy formation, simultaneously reliant on and consolidated by crises. Examining governance of the proposed Osceola Parkway Extension in Central Florida, we unpack the rationalities governing expressway development and the connection between road infrastructure and continued suburban development. Even as environmental crises are articulated in US policy, the focus on alleviating crises of congestion continues to propel automobility forward. However, it is not functioning as it did in an earlier life. Once lauded as a sign of modernity, automobility is now cynically advanced to perpetuate road construction and suburban developments. Expressway authorities invoke environmental crises and employ a discourse of sustainability to justify road infrastructure expansion as necessary. Thus, expressways are posed as the solution to the crises that automobility causes. We argue this contradictory governance paradigm, which ostensibly should be dead but continues to move forward, represents a zombie automobility.
This paper focuses on the history of Turkey’s efforts to establish a national automotive industry, which culminated in a state-driven project to build a Turkish automobile, the Devrim (Revolution), in 1961. The outcome of the project was three prototypes unveiled in Republic Day ceremonies, but quickly left in oblivion afterwards. This paper investigates the possible causes of the termination of the project, arguing that building a Turkish car had great symbolic significance for the identity of a nation in the quest for modernization and Westernization. The project was difficult to sustain considering the vexed political and ideological motivations invested in it.
p>Este artículo examina la cinta Hoy no circula (un día sin auto) codirigida por Rafael Montero y Víctor Ugalde en 1993. Se indaga en las experiencias de movilidad motorizada en la Ciudad de México en lo general y, en particular, en el impacto que tuvo en los conductores la implementación del programa Hoy no circula, medida que, para disminuir la contaminación, limitó la circulación de los automóviles en la capital mexicana. Con ayuda del cine, se propone que el traslado a bordo de un automóvil constituye una práctica de lo cotidiano, que arroja luz sobre los usos y efectos que produce el espacio en el habitante.</p
The safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is considered a high-priority area that has yet to be fully understood and more comprehensively addressed to enable their large-scale adoption. The current literature lacks a cohesive conceptual framework for a holistic understanding of AVs implications. This paper develops a framework that conceptualises the safety impacts of AVs more holistically. Through the theoretical lens of a 'mobilities' paradigm, the conceptual framework encompasses four dimensions-social, political, technological, and economic mobilities- unveiling a range of hidden complexities and challenges in adopting AVs. It suggests that a successful transition towards safer AV systems would initially require greater understanding of how these four dimensions are interrelated, interdependent, and complex. The value of this framework is to enable policymakers, planners, and engineers to navigate the future of autonomous mobilities optimally.
The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Girls on the Verge and Unpregnant) and two films (Grandma and Never Rarely Sometimes Always) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual.
How can it be that rational adults suddenly find themselves making obscene gestures at drivers who just cut them off? Why do people react with tears to events as disparate as winning a sports championship and the death of a parent? How can a child cry continuously in a cunningly strategic manner for five minutes, and then speak with no trace of the tears that were just shed? Jack Katz develops methods for unravelling these mysteries. His book undertakes to answer the fundamental questions at the heart of our emotional life. Katz fills the book with real-life emotions - crying under the pressure of police interrogation, road rage on California freeways, laughter in a funhouse, 8-year-olds shamefacedly striking out at baseball games - where their rise and fall can be observed without the artificial influence of the research process. By using videotapes, interviews, ethnographic description, participant observation and the insights of novelists, Katz studies emotions as physical and embodied - vibrantly, "under the radar" of a person's perceptual reach - rather than as remembered and recounted. Katz illustrates his methods with photographs and video stills that demonstrate the embodiment of emotion. The portrait that emerges is one in which people are much more sensually, intimately and aesthetically bound up in the landscapes of their lives than previous scientific studies would suggest. The text seeks to reveal the poetic and coherent logic of emotional experience and revolutionize the study of this enigmatic and essential aspect of human life.
This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change.
The phenomenon of “driving while black” has ignited a heated debate: Do the police use race to target drivers? Most research on the topic compares the number of police stops and searches for a racial group to that group's distribution in the population. This approach ignores sociological theories of law, the driver's social status, the combined influence of race and sex, and whether the driver carries drugs in the car. In addition, the police are aware of being observed. To address these limitations, we surveyed undergraduates (N = 1,192) at one of the most diverse universities in the nation about their experiences with the police and their personal criminal behavior. Drawing on Black's (1976) theory of law, we examine whether a driver's race, sex, and social status influence police behavior (stop, exit, frisk, search, ticket/arrest). We also examine which drivers are most likely to have drugs in the car. The results suggest that a driver's race, sex, and social status all shape police behavior: African American men and Hispanic men experience more social control than white men; all men experience more social control than women; and low status drivers experience more social control than high status drivers. But despite the police focus on minority males, white males were the most likely to report carrying drugs in the car.
Accounts of the nation and national identity have tended to focus upon the transmission by cultural elites of authoritative culture, invented traditions and folk customs. Following Billig, I suggest that the national is increasingly located in the everyday and in the realm of popular culture; far more so than in ‘high’ and ‘official’ forms of culture. To exemplify this, I discuss national automobilities, specifically exploring the role of iconic models, mundane motorscapes and the everyday, habitual performances of driving. With a particular focus upon British and Indian car cultures, I further suggest that the ‘national’ is not a singular or monolithic entity but is constituted out of a vast matrix of interrelated elements, three of which are the models, geographies and performances identified above. As the national proliferates and expands, becoming globalized, it generates multiple forms of national identity, although consistencies and points of focus remain. Accordingly, as in other cultural fields, I argue that while global manifestations of automobility proliferate, this has not necessarily diminished the salience of the national in the relationship between driving cars and identity. The national thus remains a powerful constituent of identity precisely because of its often unreflexive grounding in everyday spaces and practices.
In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space in sharp contrast to the pressures of modern living. Second, there is considerable variation in the bodily experiences that people gain from woods and forests, influenced by personal and family life-stage, socio-economic circumstance and geographical location. The values people appear to attach to woods and forests arise from the specific `affordances' that the latter could offer for bodily desires. There are, we might say, different `contested' natures of the forest.
Modern disciplines both reflect and perpetuate a basic dualism. The natural sciences deal with a `material world', abstracted from human concerns, while the social sciences have, in their turn, constructed a world of `agents' disconnected from material things. James Gibson's theory of affordances was an attempt to counter this deep schism in modern thought by emphasizing the material conditions of human activity. He came to see that psychology, as traditionally conceived, was itself a creation of dualistic thinking. Yet, Gibson failed to engage in a corresponding exploration of the sociality of the material. This paper examines the reasons why Gibson retained a dualism of the natural and socio-cultural in his theory; points to some of the ways in which the concept of affordances should be socialized; and, finally, raises the question: what would ecological psychology stand to lose if all affordances were social?
The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies.
Trinidad and modernity modernity as a general property Christmas, carnival and temporal consciousness household as cultural idiom mass consumption - origins and articulations modernity as a specific condition.
With an eye toward the architecture, the art, the literature, and the technology of urban life, Richard Sennett gives an account of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experience in Western culture – and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city.
“Why do we avert our eyes when we encounter the unaccustomed?” asks Sennett. In answer, he moves between past and present from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club; from Augustine’s City of God to the Turkish baths of the Lower East Side; from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of East Harlem; from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to subway graffiti. The Conscience of the Eye is an exploration of the politics of vision.
Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical (in the form of mobile people, objects and hybrids of humans-in-machines) and informational (in the form of electronic communication via data, visual images and texts). We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history.
This article analyses the connections between forms of solitary automobile habitation and the use of mobile sound technologies in automobiles: the radio, cassette, sound system and mobile phone. It does this through an empirically informed analysis of automobile use. In doing so it re-evaluates our understanding of the occupation of space and place, arguing that traditional concepts of urban space have underestimated the active role that the users of these communication technologies might have in transforming the meaning of these spaces as they pass through them. The article points to the powerful, and potentially problematic, role that sound technologies play in the daily experience of moving through the city.
This article argues that de Certeau’s understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city can have an equal validity. In other words, de Certeau’s work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of this article is devoted to exploring how that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular on how new knowledge like software and ergonomics has become responsible for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change in what counts as making the city habitable.
This article attempts to understand the reconstitution of the `present' in modern societies. I argue that this reconstitution is the result of work done on `bare life', which I associate with that little space of time between action and performance. The article goes on to consider the ways in which this reconstitution of the present is taking place, using examples from the economic sphere. Throughout the article, I argue that operations on bare life are not only instrumental but also open up new spaces of biopolitical practice based on a greater recognition of the value of slowness in a world commonly figured as fast.
Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregrounds chance encounters and `underworld' associations. The parallels are still stronger if we take a consider the life-world of embodied cosmopolitans as including not only other human beings and human artifacts, but also the many non-human life-forms that make themselves at home in our built environments, in our networks, and inside our own bodies. Contra theorists of risk society, fusion of complexity theory with cosmopolitan aesthetics raises the possibility of conceiving of runaway biological and technological events as both creative and destructive.
As practices of social coordination and connectivity shift in contemporary urban spaces, in part because of the increasing hybridisations of technologies and infrastructures of communication and transportation, public life is being reconfigured and respatialised. In this paper I argue that models of 'publicity' have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which publics are deeply embedded in social and machinic complexes involving the mobilities of people, objects, and information. The first half offers an overview of how the converging technologies of mobility and communication have created new temporalities and spatialities for public participation. In the second half I turn to a theoretical programme for rethinking public connectivity and disconnectivity not in terms of the conventional imagery of networks, but as more fluid and contingent social structures that Harrison White has described in terms of coupling and decoupling. Publics are becoming more 'mobile' in two ways: first, there is an increasing tendency to slip between private and public modes of interaction, as a result of the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communication technologies; and, second, there are opportunities for new kinds of publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of newly emerging places and arenas for communication.
Premising that both mobility and technology are co-constituted by gender, this article analyzes, through two day-long in situ interviews, the activities of two American women, one in Portland and the other in Manhattan. The author examines how mobility as a social and material system undergirds the use of new technologies such as cell phones. Furthermore, the article examines how possibilities for civic life circulate among these aspects of environmental, technological and social infrastructures.
The social sciences have generally ignored the motor car and its awesome consequences for social life, especially in their analysis of the urban. Urban studies in particular has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space 'scapes' of the modern urban/suburban dweller. Focusing on forms of mobility into, across and through the city, we consider how the car reconfigures urban life, involving distinct ways of dwelling, travelling and socializing in, and through, an automobilized time-space. We trace urban sociology's paradoxical resistance to cultures of mobility, and argue that civil society should be reconceptualized as a 'civil society of automobility'. We then explore how automobility makes instantaneous time and the negotiation of extensive space central to how social life is configured. As people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete a series of activities within fragmented moments of time. Urban social life has always entailed various mobilities but the car transforms these in a distinct combination of flexibility and coercion. Automobility is a complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling which have reshaped citizenship and the public sphere via the mobilization of modern civil societies. In the conclusion we trace a vision of an evolved automobility for the cities of tomorrow in which public space might again be made 'public'.
What is it to be big? What is it to be small? And what is it to be global? Common sense, including a good deal of the common sense underlying network metaphors for complex globality, involves the assumption that the global is large, that it includes the (smaller) local, and that to understand it we need to adopt a holistic approach in which we look up to explore emergent complexities, and so obtain a provisional overview of the whole. In this paper I argue, following Chunglin Kwa, that this is a particular and romantic method for imagining complexity. I then follow Kwa by considering a baroque alternative. Instead of looking up, this looks down and discovers limitless internal complexity within, which is materially heterogeneous, specific, and sensuous. In this monadology there are no limits to complexity within, but neither is there any possibility of modeling and knowing that complexity in full. There is no overview and neither is there any assumption of coherence. In this way of thinking the global lies within each site and is small, sensuous, specific, heterogeneous, noncoherent, and cannot be more than patchily modeled.
Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis. With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the editors and contributors to Passionate Politics argue. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable. With its look at the history of emotions in social thought, examination of the internal dynamics of protest groups, and exploration of the emotional dynamics that arise from interactions and conflicts among political factions and individuals, Passionate Politics will lead the way toward an overdue reconsideration of the role of emotions in social movements and politics generally. Contributors: Rebecca Anne Allahyari Edwin Amenta Collin Barker Mabel Berezin Craig Calhoun Randall Collins Frank Dobbin Jeff Goodwin Deborah B. Gould Julian McAllister Groves James M. Jasper Anne Kane Theodore D. Kemper Sharon Erickson Nepstad Steven Pfaff Francesca Polletta Christian Smith Arlene Stein Nancy Whittier Elisabeth Jean Wood Michael P. Young
El autor de esta obra sostiene que para comprender la era global, la sociología debe dejar de lado el estudio de la sociedad como un conjunto de instituciones encadenadas y enfocarse, mejor, al estudio de movimientos físicos, imaginarios y virtuales. Esta sociología de la movilidad trataría, entonces, de los viajes de gente, ideas, imágenes, objetos, mensajes, productos basura y dinero a través de las fronteras internacionales y sus implicaciones políticas y sociales.
Drawing on evidence from a recently conducted study of the everyday lives of young people in Manchester, UK, this article considers the place of cars in contemporary youth culture. The article acknowledges the recent beginnings of sociological and social science discussion of cars but concurs with the view that this topic has been much neglected. More specifically the study of young people and personal mobility has been constrained by approaches that emphasise the problematic nature of this phenomena or locate it within a theory of subculture. Taking its cue from recent studies of consumption, this paper offers an alternative theorisation. Refinement of the work on television consumption by Roger Silverstone leads to a discussion of more affluent young people's relationships to cars under three heads: anticipation, use and meaning. It is suggested that car use must be seen in the framework of sociability and networks and that it also critically and suggestively mediates ordinary consumption with imaginative possibilities.
Persuading People Out of Their Cars', Presented to the ESRC Mobile Network
- S Stradling
Stradling, S. (2002) 'Persuading People Out of Their Cars', Presented to the ESRC Mobile Network, http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/projects/mobilenetwork/mobilenet-work.html (accessed 15 May 2003).