Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes a sociological study of the public and political acceptability of urban road pricing. It introduces the idea of urban road pricing and describes schemes and experiments that have been tried around the world. The book also introduces qualitative sociology and explains the advantages of basing theory construction on the method of grounded theorising. It concentrates on explaining the different methodological camps in sociology, such as positivism and naturalism, quantitative and qualitative research. The book describes that the method of grounded theorising is particularly appropriate because it provides a way of structuring the data while remaining practical in its orientation. It looks at arguments that address the advantages and disadvantages of using pricing to influence directly the levels of traffic. The book shows the different stages of the research together and makes suggestions for further research.