TITLE:
Emotion Work and Scale in Sociocultural Bicycle Advocacy and Transportation Literature
AUTHORS:
Rebecca van Stokkum
KEYWORDS:
Emotion Work, Scale, Bicycle Transportation, Institutions, Formal Rationality, Policy
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.12,
November
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: Previous reviews of sociocultural bicycle transportation studies have focused
on analysis of research results and policy meant to increase bicycle
transportation. However, the literature also reveals relevant but implicit
patterns regarding emotion and scale embedded in the discourse of the authors,
a dimension of the literature that could be explored further. This underlying meaning expressed implicitly by
researchers has been much less studied and
is the focus of the present research. Affect
or emotion related to daily transportation has been shown to
influence what mode people use for transit. Sociology of emotion research
suggests that emotional factors are part of all that is social, creating an
emotional dimension to the allocation of transportation resources, bicycle safety,
and policy. In this study, Arlie Hochschild’s concept of emotion work is
suggested as a mechanism that crosses the divide between individual scales and
state-level policy/institutions. Through a systematic qualitative review of sociocultural
bicycle literature using discourse analysis, this paper suggests ways
individuals are linked to formally rationalized institutions through emotion work
focused on identity, here, largely race, class, and gender. In this review,
rationalized institutions were seen to reduce the impact of emotional responses
to the distribution of transportation resources, while emotion and emotion work
were key to both the production and perpetuation of these institutions along existing dimensions of inequality. In the literature,
underlying or less-than-conscious emotion work enabled policy decisions to
occur at scales removed from the population level while also producing the
illusion of meaningful public deliberation. In contrast, emotion work by groups
that eschew institutional structure such as Critical Mass was meant to disrupt
existing transportation norms and, thus, maintains deliberation about
transportation at the population level. These results suggest links between
individual emotional experience and formally rationalized institutions.