The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order

Abstract

The forms of emblematic gesture and other communicative moves used in hailing taxicabs are shaped by the urban built environment and by the micro politics sparked by what Goffman called the "loose coupling" of the interaction and social orders. Cabdrivers evaluate street hails and choose whether or not to stop for prospective passengers; hailers seek to communicate their desirability as passengers within the limited mode of the street hail. The conditions and con straints that underlie the practice and reception of street hailing are considered. A survey on methods used to hail taxis was sent to a listserv of taxi drivers in San Francisco, California. The drivers evaluated street hails in terms of two axesclarity and propriety -and three levels of context: the immediate interactional context of the street; the anticipated interactional context of the cab ride; and the political context, or the political discourse framing taxicab regulation in the city.

Mediatization of Social Space and the Case of Uber Drivers

“…We use the term "digitallyenabled service workers" to refer to workers who interact with consumers virtually before meeting in the physical space. Like taxi drivers (Anderson, 2014;Davis, 1959) and other traditional service workers (Leidner, 1999), digitally-enabled service workers need to evaluate interactional contexts, and thus manage emotional dis-plays during service encounters. Scholars have studied the power-relations between service workers and consumers (e.g., Leidner, 1999;Lopez, 2010) and the instrumentality and socio-economic forces of performing affective or emotional labor (e.g., Duffy, 2016;Gregg, 2010;Hearn, 2010;Hochschild, 1983).…”

A Context-Aware, Computer-Vision-Based Approach for the Detection of Taxi Street-Hailing Scenes from Video Streams

“…The topic of recognizing taxi street hailing has been studied by sociologists in order to explore how taxi drivers perceive and culturally interact with their environment, including passengers [ 39 ]. An interesting work is the work of Anderson, who studied gestures, in particular, as a communication channel between taxi drivers and passengers during hailing interactions [ 13 ]. Based on a survey that he distributed to a group of taxi drivers in San Francisco, CA, USA, the researcher wanted to explore how taxi drivers evaluate street hails in terms of clarity and propriety.…”

“…The current state of the art reveals that only two works have studied taxi street hailing from an interaction perspective. The first work is the study of Anderson [ 13 ], a sociologist who explored traditional taxi street hailing as a social interaction between drivers and hailers. Based on a survey that he distributed to a sample of taxi drivers, he found that the hailing gestures used by passengers largely vary in relation to the visual proximity of the hailer to the taxi and to the speed at which the taxi is passing [ 13 ].…”

“…The first work is the study of Anderson [ 13 ], a sociologist who explored traditional taxi street hailing as a social interaction between drivers and hailers. Based on a survey that he distributed to a sample of taxi drivers, he found that the hailing gestures used by passengers largely vary in relation to the visual proximity of the hailer to the taxi and to the speed at which the taxi is passing [ 13 ]. The second work, also from a social background, is the conceptual model proposed by [ 14 ] to design their vision of what would be humanized social interactions between future autonomous taxis and passengers during street-hailing tasks.…”

The Space Between Us: On Shifting Sitting Patterns in Tel Aviv Taxi-Cabs, and Their Meanings

“…The bulk of the existing “social-scientific-literature” focusing on the taxi relies mainly on texts from archives, on surveys or on interviews (see, e.g., Vidic 1976; Toiskallio 2000; Gambetta and Hamill 2005; Anderson 2014)—rarely on participant observation; also, most texts focus on various layers of the macro level —on taxi industries and on industrial relations (Biju 2005; Darbéra 2009; Darr 1999). Thus, the exploration of interaction rituals (Goffman 1983) routinely performed in the taxi remains almost untreated.…”