Demanding hosts and ungrateful guests – the everyday drama of public transportation in three acts and academic prose

Abstract

In their own view, public transportation companies make a very hospitable offer to commuters: if you are ready to travel with us, we will take you for a reasonable price nearly anywhere, every day and almost at any time of the day, under good conditions of comfort and safety. Please, step onboard. But commuters resist being reduced to the thankful guests of their commuting service providers. Commuting is an experience whose rhythm structures daily lives. It is not an innocuous in-between-doors passage, but a social practice intertwined with the routines bound to the home, workplace, and places of leisure which they commute to and from. Commuting routines are a constitutive part of commuters’ lives. Correspondingly, commuters own their commuting space. They do not own it in terms of legal ownership, although they possess a valid ticket; they own it via the degree to which they are at home in their routines and intuitively know through the senses and feelings produced through the normal flow of daily practices, that they are on their own home turf. Home is more than the physical space of the house; it is an embodied perception of a familiar cultural space which is organized in such a way that one has some control and responsibility over. Because commuters grant transportation companies daily access to the intimacy of their homes, they are hosting the companies, not the opposite. Public transportation hospitality is thus a tension-filled drama, co-produced by transportation companies and commuters. In this drama managerial routines meet routines of daily life, legal definitions of ownership meet practice-based ones, and organizational hospitality stands against individual hospitality. Our claim is that the fact that each party considers itself to be the host of the other, the prevailing situation consequently frames the provision and experience of public transportation services as a drama: the drama of hospitality.

Keywords:

• practices
• hospitality management
• public transportation
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

Hervé Corvellec acknowledges the financial support of the Swedish TRANSAM research program ‘Decisions on risk within public transportation’ that has been co-financed by the Swedish Rescue Services Agency, the Swedish Emergency Management Agency, the Swedish Maritime Administration, the Swedish Road Administration, and the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA). Research grant: SRV dnr 621-6092-2005.

Tom O'Dell acknowledges the financial support of the Swedish Research Council and Erik Philip-Sörensen's Foundation for the advancement of genetic and humanistic scientific research (Erik Philip-Sörensen's Stiftelse för främjande av genetisk och humanistisk vetenskaplig forskning). Both acknowledge the kind participation of Nadia Mazzoni.

They are also grateful for the comments that they have received from participants to 2009 SCOS conference in Copenhagen and Malmö (The Bridge) and from friends colleagues at the Department of Service Management, Lund University on a previous versions of this text.