ABSTRACT
Mobility and Society Introduction Some degree of personal mobility is fundamental to the operation of all societies but, as briefly outlined in Chapter 1, it can be suggested that the role and significance of mobility within society has changed significantly over the twentieth century. Such claims relate to arguments for increased globalisation of and complexity within economy and society, with easier and more frequent movement of people, goods, services and ideas around the world, and increased access to fast and individualistic forms of transport for everyday mobility (Urry, 2003). Indeed, Urry (2000) has argued that increased mobility is a defining characteristic of twenty-first century society, and as such could become an organising principle of Sociology. There appears to be increased global interest in adopting a ‘mobilities’ perspective to social research. This research agenda is defined clearly by the introductory statement on the web site of Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research. The scope of mobilites research is defined as: ‘both the largescale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life’ and the significance of mobility within society is further justified as follows:
Technological, social and cultural developments in public and private transportation, mobile communications, information storage and retrieval, surveillance systems and ‘intelligent environments’, are rapidly changing the nature of travel and of communications conducted at-a-distance. As mobile connectivity begins to occur in new ways across a wide range of cyber-devices and integrated places, so we need better theorisation and research, especially to examine the interdependencies between changes in physical movement and in electronic communications and especially in their increasing convergence. These changes are having many effects. The human body is transformed, as it is enhanced by communication devices and likely to be ‘on the move’. Changes also transform the nature of ‘local’ communities and of the commitments people may feel to the ‘nation’. And the global order is increasingly criss-crossed by tourists, workers, terrorists, students, migrants, asylum-seekers, scientists/scholars, family members, business people and so on. Such multiple and intersecting mobilities seem to produce a more ‘networked’ patterning of economic and social life.
