Dispatched Orders and the Cab Driver: A Study of Locating Activities

Psathas, George; Henslin, James M.

doi:10.2307/798855

“…delivering and preparing patients for hospital; collecting, sorting and rejecting rubbish bags; flying and servicing air passengers). There are examples of one-person one-vehicle working arrangements such as taxi-and lorry-driving, though in each of these cases the job is in itself the transportation of persons or goods (Agar, 1986;Davis, 1950;Hollowell, 1968;Psathas and Henslin, 1967;Verrips and Meyer, 2001), whereas the jobs that are now moving into the car are regional management, personnel, sales support, credit control and so on. In an important sense, driving and its contingencies are potentially problematic since they necessarily take priority with the person-as-driver in terms of avoiding crashes and collisions, while for the person-as-office worker these pressing concerns are not straightforwardly available to the awareness of remote co-workers and clients.…”

Section: Mobile Workplacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

Laurier¹

2004

Theory, Culture & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article takes the motorway seriously as a place where the society of traffic can be found and studied. While many kinds of activities are done by drivers and passengers in parallel with driving on the motorway, such as listening to the radio, eating lunch or caring for, or being, children, I focus here on office work. Empirical material from a video-ethnography of one driver doing paperwork and overtaking a slow-moving vehicle ahead is used to examine in detail some of the practices of combining driving and office-duties in the car while in motion. Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, the article examines how this mobile society is naturally organized as an architectural configuration brought to life in the practices of driving in traffic. Overlooked phenomena that are orderly stable features of being mobile are analysed, such as ‘overtaking’, ‘tailgating’ and ‘cruising’. Where other writers have used ‘speed’ to theorize the contemporary period, a brief re-specification is offered in the light of the uses, moral and otherwise, of speed within, and as made apprehensible in relation to, traffic.

show abstract

“…delivering and preparing patients for hospital; collecting, sorting and rejecting rubbish bags; flying and servicing air passengers). There are examples of one-person one-vehicle working arrangements such as taxi-and lorry-driving, though in each of these cases the job is in itself the transportation of persons or goods (Agar, 1986;Davis, 1950;Hollowell, 1968;Psathas and Henslin, 1967;Verrips and Meyer, 2001), whereas the jobs that are now moving into the car are regional management, personnel, sales support, credit control and so on. In an important sense, driving and its contingencies are potentially problematic since they necessarily take priority with the person-as-driver in terms of avoiding crashes and collisions, while for the person-as-office worker these pressing concerns are not straightforwardly available to the awareness of remote co-workers and clients.…”

Section: Mobile Workplacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

Laurier¹

2005

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Eric Laurier is a Research Fellow at the Department of Geography and Geomantics, University of Glasgow. He has carried out research on social interaction, working in cars, technology and urban life, community in suburbia, human-animal relations and wayfinding with maps. His current research project is an ESRC-funded study of cafes and civil life in contemporary cities.Laurier -Doing Office Work on the Motorway 277

show abstract

“…Sociologists have examined the relationship between the taxi drivers and their fare (Toiskallio, 2000; Vidich, 1976), both in terms of establishing trust (Gambetta & Hammil, 2005; Henslin, 1968) as well as the challenge of soliciting gratuities (Davis, 1959). Ethnographers have inquired into the occupational culture of taxi drivers (Henslin, 1967a; Psathas & Henslin, 1966), the difficulty that drivers face in accessing a restroom while working (Norén, 2010), the relationship between immigrant drivers and Black fares (Anderson, 2011), and the development of occupational niches among immigrant communities (Mitra, 2003a, 2003b, 2009). Taxi drivers have been extolled as religious innovators (Smith & Bender, 2004), magicians (Henslin, 1967b), and cowboys (Hoffmann, 2006).…”

Section: The Rise Of Independent Contract Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investing in Independent Contract Work

Occhiuto

¹

2017

Work and Occupations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

New York City ''yellow'' taxi drivers work as independent contractors. Like many independent contract workers, taxi drivers engage in economically precarious work-or work that is economically uncertain, unpredictable, and risky. This article explores how taxi drivers make sense of the economic risks they face each workday. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic data, it finds that taxi drivers made sense of their work by expressing a sense of control over their work schedule, which is significant given the selfconceptions that drivers bring with them to this particular work arrangement. As a result, this sense of schedule control serves as a mechanism for worker investment in the structure of independent contract work.

show abstract

Dispatched Orders and the Cab Driver: A Study of Locating Activities

Cited by 18 publications

References 8 publications

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

Investing in Independent Contract Work

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About