Ontologies on collision course: Collaborative mobility v. managerial transport in the contemporary history of intelligent transport systems

Introduction

In a 2017 JTH editorial, Massimo Moraglio hinted at a theoretical rift between the concept of transport and the notion of mobility that has fuelled debates within the JTH community. ¹ Transport is no longer sufficient to explain the various dimensions of movement and mobility in society. Instead travel, displacement, dislocation or mobility have become a more viable terminology for the social and historical questions that challenge us as researchers in the field of transport. ² Thus, transport history has expanded and diversified, for example, in 2003, Peter Lyth and Gijs Mom acknowledged that a shift from the predominant focus on the production of transport towards an inclusive history of the consumption of mobility was taking place. ³ In 2005, Colin Divall and George Revill proposed a “cultural turn” expanding transport history into the investigation of movement as cultural performances. ⁴ This has resulted in an expansion where we more or less, as Colin Divall points out, can describe the field as synonymous to mobility history or at least transport-cum-mobility history. ⁵ However, this diversification is not merely an expansion but rather, as pointed out by Moraglio, an ontological shift thus calling for a “new” ontology within transport history, or perhaps an invitation to more ontologies within the field.

Much remains to be investigated, as Moraglio points out: “[w]e can comfortably say that transport perception is still under the spell of ‘Darwinist’ thinking, in which the fittest technology wins”. ⁶ But “what is” transport in a “Darwinist” thinking? Transport is not nature, thus not under the rule of biological laws, there is nothing natural in the systems of transport they are man-made and man-controlled through and through. What kind of ontological thinking then, is transport perception still under the spell of? The purpose of this speculative essay is to explore “decentred ontologies of connection” or more specifically, constituent elements enacting two different ontologies within the field of intelligent transport systems (hereafter ITS). ⁷ The aim is to provide an understanding of how ontologies enacted is a part of our understanding of mobility and hence affect transport-cum-mobility history.

In the following the essay will turn to the empirical investigations of (political) ontologies in science and technology studies (hereafter STS), as a methodological approach. We will then study an interruption in which ontological differences become visible. We will particularly focus on the unsuccessful efforts of merging the research field of ITS with the field of mobile information and communication technologies (hereafter mobile-ICT) in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, despite their technological and material similarities in the arena of mobility. Ontologies are like infrastructures, they become visible upon breakdowns and controversies and thus the friction between ITS and mobile-ICT can highlight different characters, attributes and other constituent elements, used to mark difference of something that otherwise easily blurs into transport-cum-mobility notions. ⁸ Divall and Revill's plea for a “cultural turn” was perhaps not so much a division between soft and hard infrastructures, but a recognition of the “objects that might otherwise appear ‘finished’ or ‘ready-made’, to scrutinise those entities that a conventional STS analysis would often consider ‘black-boxed’ and no longer controversial”. ⁹ By looking at the tension between ITS and mobile-ICT we can identify two ontologies that might have existed for long in the history of transport, traffic and mobility.

The dissonance between these two research fields we argue, can be outlined by studying the accomplishment of two ontologies, one managerial and one collaborative. Following examples of dissension between these traditions enable us to articulate the differing “institutions and sensibilities” that make up the managerial and the collaborative ontologies and how they historically have emerged from the traditions in transport and urban planning. ¹⁰ Ontologies that in the context of JTH mark the difference between transport and mobility.

(Methodology) empirical studies of ontologies

The topic of ontology has received an increased interest, not only within philosophy, ethics and religion, but throughout the entire spectrum of disciplines in social science and the humanities. ¹¹ In that regard, transport history is no exception. However, when turning to questions regarding ontology – “what is” – we still need some clarification on what we refer to when studying ontology. As one subset in the overall trending interest of studying ontology, the field of STS have experienced an “ontological turn”, or at least critically considered on such possibility. ¹² For this speculative essay I have turned to the findings and arguments within STS as a theoretical baseline and methodological starting point when considering different ontologies related to “what exists” as transport-cum-mobility. This essay will not cover the world of transport history and provide a detailed map over its cosmology, nor will it provide a comprehensive map of ITS. ¹³ However, by pointing at “accomplished ontology of entities” in the world of ITS, rather than multiple representations of ITS, enables us to highlight forms of difference that cannot be “reduced to a disparity of ‘worldviews’”. ¹⁴  Following the current trend in STS provides us with sufficient theoretical tools to speak of politics of ontological constitution.

According to Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun the ontological turn has many motivations. First, it gathers a “new analytical momentum from combining, under the guise of ontology, a set of widely held institutions and sensibilities” as a consequence of the implications raised by previous “turns” in STS. ¹⁵ Secondly, and particularly important for this essay, the ontological turn draws attention to entities and technologies that are neither novel nor new but despite this still remain (un)settled and (un)finished. ¹⁶ “Probing the ontology of mundane entities not only serves to display the multiplicity of realities hidden under the everyday and seemingly undisputed signifiers – it is also … a method of drawing attention to ‘a penumbra of not quite realised realities’, the failed, unseen or not-yet-real possibilities hinted at by ordering practices”. ¹⁷ This approach to ontology, or more specifically, empirically studying ordering practices that characterise the situation and enact the realities we experience enables us to describe and articulate the ontologies we encounter.

Annemarie Mol's book Body Multiple is for many the seminal book and origin for the ontological turn in STS. ¹⁸ Following a disease, she shows that it is enacted differently yet coordinated through practical work into the upshot of being the same. Seeing sameness as a result of choreography or coordination work leads to the conclusion that “things” might be more than one (but still less than many, as argued in Mol's book) – thereby opening up the multiplicity of ontologies. But it also opens up another possibility. What happens if there are different ontologies but no coordination work – would “things” be enacted as same or different? ¹⁹ Could difference of “things” enacted be the upshot of conflicting ontologies rather than different characteristics? ²⁰ This will be the theoretical argument for this essay, that in the absence of coordination work it will be viable that frictions between ontologies will create a difference within a situation even though the “things” enacted in this situation as easily could – if it was otherwise – been enacted as same.

Hence following the footsteps of Steve Woolgar, John Law, Annemarie Mol and many others, this essay is “an experimentalisation of ontology [that] opens up (rather than answers) the question of how particular objects come to be invested with normative and political capacities”. ²¹ Rather than following the material (which is often the case in STS), we will follow the almost realised, the fleeting impression of a gap, enacted at a workshop in 2008 and encountered at numerous other situations too.

(Method) slow, vulnerable, modest and uncertain

Most significantly within the ontological turn in STS, is to regard ontologies as something that can be studied empirically, that they can be observed in the mundane and ordinary (and not so ordinary) life. ²² This speculative essay is in many ways an autoethnographic reflection in which I try to articulate impressions of personal experiences when encountering the field of ITS from 1999 and onwards. I have been part of the field of ITS, mostly as an outsider and as an ethnographer studying a culture. Throughout this period, ITS have never been the main subject of research, only one of several possible academic setting in which my studies of public transportation communication systems etcetera could be presented. As a sociologist I have been studying humans (and non-humans) in mobility or ICT embarking in the use of vehicles to increase their mobility – or short mobile-ICT in traffic. The main focus has been on the users and not the academic community that, for different reasons, are interested (or not) in the findings. However, when communicating my findings, I had to relate to the field of ITS and subsequently I became engaged in the field. ²³

ITS can, as a wide definition, be described as ICT applied on transport with the aim of increasing its transportation efficiency – its mobility. ²⁴ Hence, it includes sensor technologies to identify the flow and movement of vehicles, computers and communication technologies to transfer information and data, geographical information systems, monitoring systems to control and guide vehicles and other things on the move as well as different modes of mobility. Both the things that move (vehicles) and the structures used to move through (infrastructures) have different computers, sensors and communication devices. My focus was to understand how humans interact in and through this technology-intensive setting. However, during my research the main setting in which I presented my work became the field of human computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work, despite the special case of always studying the road and traffic setting in which humans interacted with computers or cooperated through computers. ²⁵ Learning to understand both the world of mobile-ICT and ITS. But despite the similarities in technologies (and computer centric interest) these two fields did not work easy together and the exchange was slim. This essay is an effort in trying to articulate why.

Breakdown exposing ontologies: The gap between mobility as transport and mobility of humans and non-humans

In the fall 2008 I attended a workshop called Mobility, the City and STS hosted by the Technical university of Denmark. ²⁶ The workshop brought together researchers from several countries looking at a fairly narrow field (Mobility and the City) and adopting a quite restricted theoretical frame (STS). Presenting the city as the technological frame, and mobility as the utility created through these technologies enabled the workshop to study a large variety of things – from bikes to subways, from wheel-chairs to train stations. Hence, there was enough variety to allow interesting exchanges while at the same time a restricted field and frame to focus. At the beginning of the conference the organising committee talked about the possibility of writing an anthology and at the second day the chairs for the workshop, Ulrik Jørgensen and Knut Sørensen, commented on the presentations and presented a proposal for future work.

However, instead of presenting an outline and a division of sections for a book, the two professors were very sceptical of the possibilities of combining what they regarded as an extremely incongruent selection of papers. A collection of papers would therefore not attract readers and would have difficulty in presenting a coherent theme. According to the professors the ways of addressing a phenomenon, mobility and the city, was made through incommensurable approaches. In many ways they argued that the presentations consisted of different perspectives that did not strengthen each other. ²⁷ There were differences between studies of the political monitoring and expert influence in the historical process of creating large technological systems, such as the development of the subway in Athens, and the interactional sense of experiencing a metropolitan station or seeing cars as architectural public components. Thus, through their practice of ordering the presentations and their contributions, differences were established between the participants. A gap – created by differing perspectives – or was it something else? Could it be the exposure of different ontologies?

Were the contributions so disparate? The impression that the chairs articulated was something that many of the presenters felt during the workshop, but what kind of differences were there? What kind of boundary work was going on in-between the different researchers? ²⁸ Within STS it has been more common to speak about bridging divides – especially the one between the technological and the social. ²⁹ There was a theoretical sameness in the presentations, even though the terminology that was used varied between different theoretical schools such as actor network theory or social shaping of technology that often appear in tandem in STS literature. ³⁰ Similarly, the methodology was quite consistent and predominantly qualitative. Furthermore, the people attending were mainly researchers in the social sciences. The division highlighted by the conference chairs was not social versus technological all the presenters were on “the social side”.

A plausible conclusion could be that the workshop attracted both researchers studying mobile ICT as well as those studying transportation systems. This conclusion seemed possible, but the more I thought about it made me think that this was not the case. Yes, mobile-ICT was more common in one camp while cars and classic infrastructures dominated within the other. But inconsistently, many of the innovative cases were presentations where the technology and “approach” had swapped place. There was not a single technological regime that could divide one group from the other. The gap, however tempting it might seem, could not be explained by pointing at a technology that divided our interests.

Hence, for me the outcome of the conference was a recognition of rift. A divide between on one side, STS studies of transport systems and on the other STS studies of mobility that could not be explained by disagreements in theory or method; in the division between social and technological; within the field of social science or the technological regimes studied – it was something else – perhaps even conflicting ontologies. But how should I describe this dissonance?

Managerial ontology: ITS in Sweden

A few years prior to the workshop in Copenhagen, the STS researcher Hans Fogelberg published a survey on the industrial, political and academic networks on ITS in Sweden. ³¹ The survey was conducted on commission by VINNOVA a state-driven funding agency with the purpose of facilitating innovation. ³² The innovation policies in Sweden for ITS were extremely straightforward and simplistic (as politics often are). At that time (in 2004) Sweden still had a large industrial complex focusing on transport technologies (such as VOLVO, SAAB and SCANIA) simultaneously as the businesses in mobile communication (through, e.g. Ericsson mobile) was fairly influential. Hence, by combining the competences of mobile-ICT with transport technologies – a large cluster of ITS could be created – using the benefits of both technological regimes. One plus one would become three.

But in 2004 the politicians and the administrators of innovation systems were still waiting for the success of ITS. As Fogelberg writes: “The rapid expansion that was expected 20 years ago has failed to appear”. ³³ Internationally R&D projects had existed in the field of ITS since the early 70s, especially in Japan often tightly connected to welfare systems in the transport sector. In the US political incentives expanded in the early 90s and within Europe ITS was financially supported with the start of projects such as the EU-funded DRIVE (1987) and the European car manufacturers joint research project Prometheus (1986) managed by the newly founded (1985) European innovation funding network, the Eureka initiative. ³⁴ But from a political perspective, the commercialisation of ITS had not yet been fulfilled. This long expectation time, without any successful expansion resulted, according to Fogelberg, in a frustration among the members in the ITS community in Sweden. This frustration was the incentive for Fogelberg to study the members of the ITS community rather than the ITS field and in many ways his findings provide an account of the ITS composition of the world.

Fogelberg identified three different networks: a political network focused on “infrastructure telematics”; the car manufacturing industry focused on “vehicle telematics”; and academia studying “user telematics”. ³⁵ These networks did not integrate or collaborate, instead Fogelberg identified a divide between the industrial/academic networks and policy networks or “those that treat ITS as a policy-object and a transport policy agenda”. ³⁶ This gap was similar to my experiences in Copenhagen, thus enabling a re-examination of Fogelberg's descriptions as textual enactments of different ontologies. The report enabled me to re-visit the differences, expressed by Fogelberg's informants on ITS, and what the technologies they were talking about potentially could do. The report could also be seen as a text where ontological difference was enacted (rather than a social or a technological one).

Among officials and policy-oriented actors, ITS was regarded as a system within the transport sector that could create or assist the realisation of a complete traffic management centre. The objective was traffic control in various different ways – to monitor and steer traffic and minimise disturbances. ³⁷ The goal with implementing ITS was, for these officials to create a more efficient organisation of transport – hence the term managerial ontology. ³⁸ This perspective echoed the promises of DRIVE and Prometheus promoted in the early 1990s as a “more potent approach of controlling the [transportation] system”. ³⁹ To summarise the objective for the policy-oriented actors (or a managerial ontology), the goal was to utilise the technologies – by combining sensors, communication systems (telematics), computer systems together with transportation systems – thereby establishing a real-time control through real-time data. Central for any of these efforts was the creation of a managerial centre. With the eyes of a managerial ontology ITS could combine traffic management (monitoring weather, road friction, infrastructural conditions, accident status and infrastructural prizing), transport demand management (controlling access, parking, route diversion and road prizing), traffic control, fleet management (monitoring goods, vehicles and passengers), navigation and the possibility of controlling the car and tutoring the driver. ⁴⁰ By the use of ITS the complex systems of road transport could be re-organised into something more manageable such as the systems of railroad traffic or flight traffic (considering the role of air-traffic controls). This managerial ontology was theoretically strengthened by the system theory that focused on the optimisation of feedback. ⁴¹ Thus, the absence of a successful expansion of ITS was in part due to the political disinterestedness in centralising the control of traffic or enforcing a complete automatisation of the use of roads. For transport systems to improve officials needed ITS to monitor and control the use of available infrastructures.

Collaborative ontology: Mobile-ICT

For the industry, both within the vehicle industry and the telecom business, ITS was something else – it was a question of distributed information. It was a question whether the information and communication systems where embedded in the vehicles (vehicle telematics) or carried by the users (user telematics or mobile-ICT). The information services could either be provided in your “pocket” or be integrated with the car with features such as emergency call, car diagnostics and other traffic-monitoring information. ⁴² The industry was more inclined to use ITS as means to improve the product and the ownership of the vehicle. Furthermore, other industrial actors saw information systems, equivalent to ITS moving from the supervision of a transport system to the personal devices (or mobile-ICT). The academic network shared this perspective and as a member of this network during this period I will describe the collaborative ontology from personal experiences.

Since at least the mid-1990s, significant groups within computer science, such as computer supported co-operative work, re-formulated the design rationale of ICT as well as mobile-ICT. ⁴³ My initial encounter with the sociotechnical complex of mobile-ICT and ITS was as a Ph.D. student to the STS researcher Oskar Juhlin, who was trying to introduce the design principles of computer supported co-operative work into the field of ITS. ⁴⁴ In 1999, when I started to work with him, he had presented an alternative to the main trends in ITS, launching what he called Road Talk Informatics (instead of Road Transport Information). ⁴⁵ The main argument advocated by Juhlin was to understand traffic and road-use as something that needed collaboration to be accomplished rather than achieved through management and monitoring. Like the designers in computer supported cooperative work, Juhlin advocated the importance of local knowledge and situated practice by which the challenges of transport and mobility were solved. ⁴⁶ The use of computers and ICT could, as evidenced by computer supported c-operative work also support a collaborative approach. The novelty in Juhlin's approach (adopted by the group of doctoral students that were starting to work with him, me included) was to focus on the collaborative features of traffic. ⁴⁷ This approach to ITS coincided with a trend within the academic computer supported co-operative work community becoming more interested in mobility and mobile-ICT, talking about a co-operative world. ⁴⁸

We started by looking at the distributed ways in which bus drivers coordinated their work in relation to each other instead of in relation to a coordination centre. In this study we carefully followed the bus drivers work in trying to manage their work and found out that in their ordinary practice of bus driving they coordinated their routes either autonomously or collaboratively. The first form of coordination was accomplished through the rigorous adjustment of the situated task of driving to a pre-planned timetable. By following the managerial objectives articulated in work-plans, coordination was maintained. But ethnographical studies of bus-drivers’ work revealed that they, to a considerable extent, also used communication devices (mobitex and mobile phones) to collaboratively accomplish coordination as well. In addition, the space and setting, routes and bus stops were also recourses that the bus-drivers used to coordinate their work collaboratively. ⁴⁹ Hence, in practice traffic could be either managed or achieved collaboratively and the ICT used in public transport could be designed for both forms of coordination. Thus, in hindsight, we identified the mundane ordering practices of both a managerial ontology and a collaborative ontology enacted by the bus drivers. These studies were followed by other occupations in traffic as well as other modes of transport such as cars and bikes while computational devices increasingly became persistent feature of public urban life, not only in work – mobile phones are now almost omnipresent. ⁵⁰

The group also developed computer-based communication devices (what today would be described as different apps) that could enable different workers to collaborate by sharing and communicating with each other but also prototypes that enabled distributed traffic information, shared locally and situated by drivers rather than by traffic managers. The same systems could also be used to share music, personal traffic messages on the road, or to play games with the roadside. But these applications had little resemblance with the main systems in ITS even though the “same” technologies were used. Taken together, the research group showed that a collaborative ontology was possible including the design of mobile-ICT to be used for transport-cum-mobility.

From ITS to transport history – Managerial transport or collaborative mobility?

Back to the question of the workshop in Copenhagen 2008. Neither technology regimes nor conflicting schools in social science could explain the differences that Ulrik Jørgensen and Knut Sørensen identified. By re-tracing my experiences with ITS an alternative explanation have been presented – that the differences are a result of two co-existing ontologies – that in turn influenced the designs of ITS and mobile-ICT correspondingly, one managerial and one collaborative. Perhaps these ontologies are not limited to the fields of ITS and mobile-ICT but rather a common trope in the techno-politics of transport and mobility and subsequently a topic for transport history. These fields share with transport history a focus both on the extensive mobility of humans and non-humans as well as an emphasis on the importance of technology and systems to accomplish said mobility. Acknowledging that we cannot equate ITS and mobile-ICT with transport history we still can draw some possible, yet hypothetical comparisons, regarding the constituent elements, such as characters, attributes and networks that characterise the different ontologies at play in transport history.

Neither managerial nor collaborative ITS were realised realities but through the ordering practices surrounding these transport technologies different ontologies became enacted. Acknowledging multiple ontologies implies that the question “what is?” can have more than one answer. Hence, when we look at these ontologies different answers regarding for example what is transport-cum-mobility appears? For a managerial ontology infrastructure is a property, transport is a commodity, transport information is feedback and supervision whereas mobility is the product and outcome of a system of control. For a collaborative ontology infrastructure is a common good, transport is a right, transport information enhances your room for manoeuvring whereas mobility is an achievement of a communal system of interaction.

But there are many similarities between the managerial and the collaborative as well. The same type of sensors and ICT are utilised. They are also expected to be used to maintain and manage the same infrastructures and create mobility (even though their understanding of mobility differs). Both approaches rely heavily on social norms and structures as well as the cultures they are mired in. Both are through and through political (or politics by other means as the classical phrase goes). Describing one of these ontologies as part of a “cultural turn” thus becomes problematical, none of the ontologies are neither more nor less cultural or political. ⁵¹ But this is, I would argue, exactly why Colin Divall and George Revilĺs contribution to transport history was important as they “advocated an approach which acknowledges that the two [‘technology’ and ‘society’] are, in some sense which requires much further elucidation, mutually constitutive”. Furthermore, they pointed out that our presumptions of “what is” transport (ontology) “include a failure to acknowledge that various social, material, and technological factors present both opportunities for, and constraints on, physical movement, resulting in an analytical approach which is often ahistorical or apolitical”. ⁵²

This speculative essay is therefore and effort in trying to describe some of the constituent elements that characterise and enact our notion of mobility, to paraphrase Massimo Moraglio, we can comfortably say that transport perception is under the spell of “managerial” thinking – resulting in the obsession of time- and budget-savings or caught in a progressive story of control. ⁵³ Both ontologies rely on systems and technologies as well as social institutions but not always from a clear cut micro-macro perspective. A managerial ontology is supported by bureaucracies and meso-institutions while a collaborative ontology is simultaneously dependent on the situated micro accomplishments and the macro institutions of language and common sense. These constituent elements are methodologically important for sociologists as well as for historians, since our sources will unavoidably highlight some ontologies while simultaneously obscuring/hiding other ontologies. ⁵⁴ This brings us back to Philip Steinberg's methodological proposal of finding “an alternate route for developing decentred ontologies of connection” where lived experiences are incorporated together with the mobilities themselves “not just as experienced spaces but as a dynamic field that – through movement, through our encounters with its movement, and through our efforts to interpret its movement – produces difference even as it unifies”. ⁵⁵

Having identified both a managerial and a collaborative ontology in transport does not imply that one always should be preferred, that is a political choice that we must make. As argued by Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun the multiplicity of worldviews creates a “cosmopolitical choice: in which world would you like to live in, and what can you do to bring such world into being?” ⁵⁶ Reflexively understanding that we, in explaining or advocating one form of transport in relation to another such as with smart cities and smart mobilities, also pass on worldviews calls for a carefulness but also a sensibility. ⁵⁷ What kind of smartness do we want to enact – neither ITS nor mobile-ICT was without politics, there are possibilities of adopting the technologies involved, the settings where they are enacted in different ways, conflicting compositions coexist. Herein lies the importance of transport history and the “usable past” – in order to inspire, educate and warn regarding the possibilities and potentials connected to the cosmopolitical choice history can play a vital role.