The World is More Mobile than Ever

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Historical and Geographical Overview

Prehistory The mobilities discourse takes ‘mobile’ terms such as ‘fluidity’, ‘speed’ and ‘acceleration’ – which have mostly been used as metaphors for life and social organisation in the social sciences over the past few decades – and reapplies them, with select parts of their metaphorical baggage intact, to literal phenomena (such as tourism, migration and transport). Modernity has long been associated with mobility – ‘progress’ was symbolised by the literal speed and acceleration of the technologies of the steam train, the automobile and the aeroplane – and this history is acknowledged by current mobilities theorists (see Cresswell, 2006a, in particular).1 In the 1920s, Pitirim Sorokin devised his widely influential concept of ‘social mobility’, a metaphor for improving the socio-economic conditions of one’s life.

Urry’s Instigation and Development

Mobilities is not Urry’s first expansion of social research topics; in 1990 he published The Tourist Gaze (now in its third edition), which popularised sociological research into (leisure) tourism, and so he was already studying a type of mobility before he coined the word ‘mobilities’. In 2000 he published Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the TwentyFirst Century, in which he claimed that the nation-state society was sociology’s ‘central concept’ and that it needed to be replaced as such, due to what he saw as its inappropriateness as a framework for investigating the impact of globalisation and the ‘global marketplace’ on people’s lives. He proposed a new 13-point ‘manifesto’ for the entire discipline of sociology, starting with the directive: ‘to develop through appropriate metaphors a sociology which 12 focuses upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis, structure and social order’ (p. 18).

The Advocates’ Demographics

There are very few published mobilities researchers (and perhaps no ‘leading figures’) in the field who come from poor or non-Western countries. Although CeMoRe boasted more than 800 email list members in over 26 countries as of December 2011 (CeMoRe, n.d), nearly all leading figures in the mobilities discourse have thus far been European, mostly from Britain, France, Germany and Scandinavia, and both Phillip Vannini (2010) and Kellerman (2006) have noted that the entire mobilities discourse is concentrated in Europe (the notable exception is Sheller – Director of the Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA – but she also has a continuing appointment as a senior research fellow at CeMoRe at Lancaster, and has co-authored a number of texts with Urry). Due to the heavily European-skewed demographic make-up of the mobilities research community, there is a risk that the sociology of the European Union will be read as the sociology of the entire world within the mobilities discourse.

Terminology: ‘mobilities what?’

As mentioned above, the researchers at CeMoRe, led by Urry, call the mobilities discourse ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ in several publications (for example, Sheller and Urry, 2006; Hannam et al., 2006; Urry, 2007), however others deliberately eschew the phrase. Cresswell (2010, p. 18) directly criticises the word ‘paradigm’ as problematic, given that it ‘suggests the Kuhnian notion of normal science being transformed by sudden revolutions where what went previously is unceremoniously tipped into the junkheap of academic history’. It could be argued that Sociology beyond Borders suggested such a radical change of discipline-wide axioms by dismissing the nation-state as a research container – but this is not the mobilities discourse’s focus, either in theory or practice. Urry himself seems to have finally decided to support nation-state research within the mobilities paradigm; by 2006 he was claiming that the paradigm’s ‘critique of “static” social science also departs from those that concentrate on … the end of states as containers for societies’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 210). With the loss of its boldest idea, the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ lost any claim to its title.

The Inclusion of Information

With the inclusion of ‘information’ and ‘capital’ in the definition, mobilities already involves both literal physical movement and metaphorical communicative ‘movement’, without differentiating between the two. Communications – ‘the imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary – is separate from physical movement in common English-language ontology. Collapsing this distinction, as this core mobilities definition does, has the effect of downplaying or even denying altogether the differences between communications and transport – for instance, the different resources and abilities needed, and the different experiences and potential outcomes. Justifications for the distinction collapse vary: according to Sheller and Urry (2006a, p. 221), not only are transport and communication similar, but there is ‘increasing convergence’ between them, while Urry (2004b, p. 509) more specifically describes this convergence, saying that he foresees a potential future which includes ‘the embedding of information and communication technologies into moving objects so that the divide of transport and communication dissolves’ (emphasis added).

Table of Contents :

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Historical and Geographical Overview
• 3. Definitions
• 4. Mobile Methodologies: Justifications I and II
• 5. Justification III: The World is More Mobile than Ever
• 6. Justification IV: Motility is Now a Significant Factor in Social Stratification
• 7. Immobility
• 8. Automobility and Autonomy
• 9. Conclusion: Mobilities as a Sociology of Technology
• Bibliography

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Stuck Fast: A Critical Analysis of the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’