Motility: Mobility as capital

By V. Kaufmann, M. Bergman, D. Joye. 2004

1,054 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social and territorial structures form intricate relations that transcend a social stratification or spatial focus. Territorial features and geographic displacements are structuring principles for society, as societal features and social change effect the structure and use of territory. Based on our examination of the conceptual and theoretical links between spatial and social mobility, we propose a concept that represents a new form of inequality. Termed ‘motility’, this construct describes the potential and actual capacity of goods, information or people to be mobile both geographically and socially. Three major features of motility — access, competence and appropriation — are introduced. In this article, we focus on conceptual and theoretical contributions of motility. In addition, we suggest a number of possible empirical investigations. Motility presents us with an innovative perspective on societal changes without prematurely committing researchers to work within structuralist or postmodern perspectives. More generally, we propose to revisit the fluidification debate in the social sciences with a battery of questions that do not begin and end with whether or not society is in flux. Instead, we introduce a field of research that takes advantage of the insights from competing paradigms in order to reveal the social dynamics and consequences of displacements in geographic and social space. Les structures sociales et territoriales forment des relations complexes qui depassent toute stratification sociale ou convergence spatiale. Les caracteristiques territoriales et deplacements geographiques sont, pour la societe, des principes structurants, tout comme les caracteristiques societales et le changement social font naitre la structure et l'usage d'un territoire. A partir d'un examen des liens conceptuels et theoriques entre les mobilites spatiale et sociale, cet article propose un concept traduisant une nouvelle forme d'inegalite: appele‘motilite’, il decrit le potentiel et l'aptitude reelle des marchandises, informations ou individus aetre mobiles sur un plan tant geographique que social. Trois traits essentiels de la motilite— acces, competence et appropriation — sont presentes. Si l'article s'attache aux contributions conceptuelles et theoriques de la motilite, il suggere aussi plusieurs axes possibles d'etudes empiriques. La motilite offre une perspective novatrice sur les changements societaux, sans engager prematurement les travaux de recherches sur des rails structuralistes ou post‐modernes. Plus generalement, il s'agit de revisiter le debat sur la fluidification en sciences sociales a l'aide d'une batterie de questions qui, ni au debut ni a la fin, ne demande si la societe est fluctuante ou non. En revanche, l'article propose un domaine de recherches qui exploite les reflexions tirees de paradigmes concurrents afin de reveler la dynamique sociale et les consequences des deplacements dans l'espace geographique et social.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41989a6dc5e85c375ad786875a85fd73a69567ca

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Citations in the corpus

Corporate Ecologies of Business Travel in Professional Service Firms (2009, positive): “Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye (2004, p.750) make a similar point with the”
Travel and Subjective Well-Being: A Focus on Findings, Methods and Future Research Needs (2013, background): “The potential to move can be referred to as motility, which comprises three elements (Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006; Kaufmann et al., 2004): (i) access, (ii) competence, and (iii) appropriation.”
Business Travel from the Traveller’s Perspective: Stress, Stimulation and Normalization (2014, positive): “This brings up theoretical questions about the relationship between spatial and social mobility, and about the potentially mediating role of certain forms of mobility capital (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004; Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen 2006).”
Do people travel with their preferred travel mode? Analysing the extent of travel mode dissonance and its effect on travel satisfaction (2018, background): “Not (fully) understanding public transport routes and schedules and not knowing where and when to transfer might prevent people to use public transport (Flamm and Kaufmann, 2006; kaufmann et al., 2004).”
Travel satisfaction revisited : on the pivotal role of travel satisfaction in conceptualizing a travel behavior process (2017, background): “Besides actually realised travel, people’s capacity to become mobile (referred to as motility (Kaufmann et al., 2004)), or the value people give to various transport options can affect their eudaimonic well-being (Nordbakke, 2013; Nordbakke and Schwanen, 2014).”