Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ...ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. InThe Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR.
In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.
Contributors: Elke Beyer, Swiss Institute of Technology; Valentina Fava, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and University of Helsinki; Luminita Gatejel, European University Institute, Florence; Mariusz Jastrzab, Kozminski University; Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, University of Bochum; Brigitte Le Normand, Indiana University Southeast; Esther Meier, University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg; Kurt Möser, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; György Péteri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim; Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. ...Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present "car society." Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.
Car Country Wells, Christopher W; Cronon, William
05/2013
eBook
For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country a nation dominated ...by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car.
The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today.
Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ
Road safety research has traditionally involved a focus on individuals in which social norms are considered but rarely discussed in detail. Outlining the existing body of research on young drivers in ...particular, In the Company of Cars shows the contribution that considering road safety from a social and cultural perspective could make to the reduction of death and injury on the roads. It highlights the involvement of driving cultures, as distinct from car cultures, in the social framing of cars and the ways in which they are utilised.
Every workday we wrestle with cumbersome and unintuitive technologies. Our response is usually "That's just the way it is." Even technology designers and workplace managers believe that certain ...technological changes are inevitable and that they will bring specific, unavoidable organizational changes. In this book, Paul Leonardi offers a new conceptual framework for understanding why technologies and organizations change as they do and why people think those changes had to occur as they did. He argues that technologies and the organizations in which they are developed and used are not separate entities; rather, they are made up of the same building blocks: social agency and material agency. Over time, social agency and material agency become imbricated--gradually interlocked--in ways that produce some changes we call "technological" and others we call "organizational." Drawing on a detailed field study of engineers at a U.S. auto company, Leonardi shows that as the engineers developed and used a a new computer-based simulation technology for automotive design, they chose to change how their work was organized, which then brought new changes to the technology.Each imbrication of the social and the material obscured the actors' previous choices, making the resulting technological and organizational structures appear as if they were inevitable. Leonardi suggests that treating organizing as a process of sociomaterial imbrication allows us to recognize and act on the flexibility of information technologies and to create more effective work organizations.
Auto pact Anastakis, Dimitry
Auto pact,
c2005, 20051126, 2005, 2000, 2005-01-01, 20050101
eBook
The 1965 Canada-United States Automotive Trade agreement fundamentally reshaped relations between the automotive business and the state in both countries and represented a significant step toward the ...creation of an integrated North American economy. Breaking from previous conceptions of the agreement as solely a product of intergovernmental negotiation, Dimitry Anastakis'sAuto Pactargues that the 'big three' auto companies played a pivotal role - and benefited immensely - in the creation and implementation of this new automotive regime. With the border effectively erased by the agreement, the pact transformed these giant enterprises into truly global corporations.
Drawing from newly released archival sources, Anastakis demonstrates that, for Canada's automotive policy makers, continentalism was a form of economic nationalism. Although the deal represented the end of any notion of an indigenous Canadian automotive industry, significant economic gains were achieved for Canadians under the agreement. Anastakis provides a fresh and alternative view of the auto pact that places it firmly within contemporary debates about the nature of free trade as well as North American - and, indeed, global - integration. Far from being a mere artefact of history, the deal was a forebearer to what is now known as 'globalization.'
Sound and Safe Mom, Gijs; Cleophas, Eefje; Krebs, Stefan ...
12/2013
eBook
Do you enjoy listening to music while driving your car? Do you find radio traffic information indispensable? Do you appreciate the moments in between work and home in which you can listen to or sing ...along with whatever you like?This book shows how we created auditory privacy in our Western cars, making it feel sound and safe, even though automobiles were highly noisy things at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains how engineers in the automotive industry found pride in making car engines quieter once they realized that noise stood for inefficiently running machines. It follows them in struggling with the sounds audible within the car after the automobile had become a closed vehicle. It tells how noise-induced fatigue became an issue once the car became a mass means for touring across the country. It unravels the initial societal concerns about the dangers of car radio, and how radio traffic information became crucial for avoiding traffic jams. And it explores how car drivers once listened to their cars’ engines to diagnose car problems, and are now supposed to buy a car because of its high quality sound design. This book is about the sounds of car engines, tires, wipers, blinkers, warning signals, in-car audio systems and, ultimately, about how we became used to listen while driving.
Auto mania McCarthy, Tom
2007, 20071024
eBook, Book
The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. InAuto Maniahe ...presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecycle-from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal.
From the provocative public antics of young millionaires who owned the first cars early in the twentieth century to the SUV craze of the 1990s,Auto Maniaexplores developments that touched the environment. Along the way McCarthy examines how Henry Ford's fetish for waste reduction tempered the environmental impacts of Model T mass production; how Elvis Presley's widely shared postwar desire for Cadillacs made matters worse; how the 1970s energy crisis hurt small cars; and why baby boomers ignored worries about global warming.
McCarthy shows that problems were recognized early. The difficulty was addressing them, a matter less of doing scientific research and educating the public than implementing solutions through America's market economy and democratic government. Consumer and producer interests have rarely aligned in helpful ways, and automakers and consumers have made powerful opponents of regulation. The result has been a mixed record of environmental reform with troubling prospects for the future.
El presente artículo analiza las medidas adoptadas por el ordenamiento jurídico español a efectos de prevenir y sancionar el extendido e inapropiado uso del empleo público temporal para la cobertura ...de puestos de trabajo de carácter permanente y el consiguiente fraude a la obligación legal de recurrir, como regla general, al empleo indefinido. Se examina una situación de gran actualidad en la que, a las últimas sentencias del Tribunal Supremo, se añaden inminentes pronunciamientos del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea, que podrían obligar a un cambio jurisprudencial en los fallos nacionales.
