How collective frames of orientation toward automobile practices provide hints for a future with autonomous vehicles

ABSTRACT

Since recent studies on autonomous driving have revealed that perceptions and evaluation toward the technology are bound to how people ascribe meaning to their car use, current user perspectives on and practices toward car use and ownership are thus feasible to approach user perspectives on autonomous driving. The article aims to engage in the current technology debate by examining these perspectives and practices. It argues that there is a need in transport and mobility research to reach beyond individual attitudes and to analyze them in relation to the sociotechnical context they are associated with. The empirical study thus examines mobility as a practice deeply embedded in and mediated with social and societal relations using a qualitative approach.

The results indicate that car use and ownership are not only based on individuals’ decisions reflecting their attitudes, motivations and functional or emotional aspects but also embedded in a specific regime of orientations, attributions, values and norms related to today’s society. While the participants in the group discussions expressed a critical view on car use and autonomous driving at first sight, their underlying frames of orientation exposed a different and more “car-friendly” picture. The study uses these results to draw lessons on the acceptance and adoption processes for autonomous driving in the future. Besides requirements for future research, there is a need of integrating holistic approaches into policy and planning processes when implementing autonomous vehicles into the transport system.

KEYWORDS:

• Car use and ownership
• transport behavior
• qualitative research
• group discussions
• autonomous driving
• system of automobility

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank the Daimler and Benz foundation for funding this research project. I particularly want to thank all of the 18 participants for their time and striking dedication in the discussions – it was a great pleasure to listen to their ideas, thoughts and arguments! I want to thank Malve Jacobsen and Maximilian Hoor for helping to prepare the scenarios, setting up the technology – the recorders and cameras – and spending hours, days and weeks on transcribing the audio material. And lastly, I want to thank all those who spent their time and intellect on reflecting on the interpretations in various settings. Once more, it became clear to me how much the results from qualitative research rely on joint examination processes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Autonomous driving is the label for vehicles that execute navigation, longitudinal and lateral control without human intervention (SAE 2014), thus making them “self-driving” and allowing its passengers to pursue other activities while riding. In the following study, I refer to SAE levels 4 and 5 when speaking of “autonomous driving”.

2. Acceptance is here understood as “a complex individual and collective process of evaluation and negotiation” (Fraedrich and Lenz 2016a, 626) and exceeds individuals’ opinions, motivations and attitudes. It thus relates to an understanding of a technology deeply embedded in a sociotechnical system (meaning its social, economic and use-related context). A more detailed examination of acceptance (processes) in relation to autonomous driving is published in Fraedrich and Lenz (2016a).

3. (Mobility) Practices can be described as actions that include actual behavior and routines. They are habitual and often unconscious parts of everyday life. Reckwitz (2002, 250) defines a practice as “a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood”. In this regard, it is not so much the subjects (actors and individuals) executing the practices that are of research interest but also the (sociotechnical and everyday life) context in which they are executed – in other words, practices link, fabricate and (co-)produce structures and individuals. This theoretical understanding of practices as supra-individual then requires specific methods of investigation.

4. Most representatives of these studies base their assumptions and analyses on (psychological) theory of action approaches (cf. Schlag and Schade 2007; Steg 2005) – here, action is considered as an outcome of several influencing factors and constraints with the individual as (intentional) originator in the center of her/his actions. Sociocultural and sociotechnical factors are seen as external to the individual’s actions, though influencing her or his decisions, motivations, attitudes, behavior, etc.

5. Various scholars within mobility research have been addressing this “social context”, with different labels, though while Urry (2004) termed it “socio-technical system”, D’Andrea et al. (2011) call it “larger material and symbolic regimes” and Manderscheid (2012) referred to it as “mobility dispositif”.

6. “Agency” refers to individuals’ (independent) capacity to act; in contrast, “structure” describes the external factors that determine and influence this agency (social class, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Within the social sciences, the concepts of agency and structure are analytical approaches to deal with the relation of individuals and society and their mutual interdependency.

7. For a critical examination of (mostly) qualitative methods used within mobility studies as well as proposals for an extension of these methods, see, for example, Manderscheid (2016).

8. Passages of metaphoric density are typically characterized by a high degree of interactivity between the participants and detailed (and pictographic) descriptions of the stories told. These passages are the center of the group’s collective experiences and thus often reveal the frames of orientation (Bohnsack, Nentwig-Gesemann, and Nohl 2013).

9. Case comparisons aim at describing what it is “typical” for the respective research cases (Nohl 2013). By comparing (internal) passages and (external) cases with each other, the researcher examines analogies or homologies that subsequently allow for generating types of orientation (it is only against the comparison of passages/cases to other passages/cases that orientations become visible and explicable). This does not necessarily aim at comparing topics of cases (or within one case) but on how specific topics are dealt with by the groups.

10. Detailed results on the introspection of the group discussions as well as on the method are published in Fraedrich and Lenz (2016b).

11. The study did not have a particular spatial scope – or did assume any relation between attitudes toward autonomous driving and perspectives on car use and ownership from a spatial point of view.

12. The participants were addressed through bulletins at university institutes, multi-address emails that were sent to students as well as employees at two universities in Berlin, and Facebook announcements. In contrast to quantitative research, qualitative approaches typically rely on smaller, purposive samples that are not supposed to meet representativeness of a population. Other than that, purposive samples are chosen, for instance, to display a certain diversity of perspectives and attitudes or to display characteristics of a specific group under investigation (e.g. car users in the city of Berlin).

13. We still do not know much about possible use cases and pathways of autonomous driving and thus about future users of the technology. Moreover, the group of nonusers can be considered to be quite heterogenous in their needs, attitudes, etc., as well as in their transport practices – making it difficult to target a sample. Hence, they were not included in the study at hand.

14. The names of the participants are pseudonyms to guarantee their anonymity.

15. The different indentions mark where the contributions overlapped each other – thus also indicating passages of high metaphoric density (see Footnote 8).