Tending to mobility: intensities of staying at the petrol station

This paper reports a study of ongoing social activities at a petrol station. Petrol stations constitute a nexus for mobility. Through ethnographic observations the author tests how the continuous flow of vehicles, commodities, money, and people are sustained and made accountable. The fieldwork demonstrates that, despite its transitory character, the petrol station offers a wide spectrum of `duration of stay'. The station was used while being-on-the-way as well as providing a possibility to disembark from automobility, that is, being-off-the-way. However, the most important finding is that the station tends to mobility, from the production and recognition of fluency, the constant negotiation and articulation work of situations, to continuous maintenance and repair of movement. Accomplishing a flow of people, vehicles, money, and commodities is a complex and delicate task requiring subtle negotiation between staff and visitors as well as among visitors themselves. A negotiation supported and hampered by available materialities of the place. DOI:10.1068/a37280 (1)Morris's essay describes a motel. However, there are striking similarities between her description of the motel and my findings regarding a petrol station. In accordance with that, in this paper I aim to describe the role of the petrol station in relation to the everyday accomplishment of automobility. The assemblage of artefacts, spatial arrangements, routines, visitors, staff, etc composing `the station' collectively tends, I will argue, to mobility. Tending, as a term, emphasises the accomplishment, or the process-practice perspective heaved up in several current strands of sociological enquiry (for example, see Garfinkel, 2002; Latour, 1992; Laurier, 2001; 2004; Pickering, 1993). These approaches underline the importance of studying the situation as it unveils (that is, in the making).When here used in relation to the petrol station, tending is also descriptive because it incorporates a wide spectrum of involvement from production and recognition of flow (Ryave and Schenkein, 1974), continuous negotiation and articulation (Gerson and Star, 1986), to the ongoing maintenance and repair of movement (Orr, 1996; Suchman, 1987). However, accomplishing fluency of people, vehicles, money, and commodities is a complex and delicate task. Constant negotiations and reformulations are necessary to balance between diversity on the one hand, and the predictability of a smooth flow on the other. These negotiations are accomplished through mutual cooperation between staff and visitors as well as between visitors, supported or hampered by the petrol station design, and the whole array of technologies from computers, pumps, and vehicles, to counters and signs. Much of the accomplishments of the petrol station rely on the station's quality as a global entity standardised and repeated in similar form along the roadside with a branded totem and the same collection of commodities, making the petrol station familiar even when one is abroad (Augë, 1995). Interestingly, the very standardisation enables variation and heterogeneity of utilising the place. I approached mobility by becoming a member of a petrol station on the west coast of Sweden between April and June 2002, following one of two day shifts that either started at 6:00 or finished at 22:00. I considered working as a staff member to be important in order to be treated as an insider and to experience the life cycle of the petrol station setting (Harper, 2000). During the last two weeks, my role altered to one of an observer, either standing at a cafë table or sitting on the grass outside; changing costume to get a different perspective of the site (Zuiderent, 2002). This strategically situated (single-site) ethnography [a method of studying mobility suggested in, for example, Marcus (1995) and Weilenmann (2003)], provided a continuous flow of floating relationships passing through the forecourt. The fragmentary interactions making up those relationships can be understood as the petrol station life while also reproducing a wider mobile life form. Marcus points out that `̀ strategically situated ethnography attempts to understand something broadly about the system in ethnographic terms as much as it does its local subjects'' (1995, page 111). Hence, bearing in mind one can expect only a partial picture from an ethnographic pursuit (Hine, 2000), the encounters at the petrol station offer insights to automobility. The setting The station is placed right beside a highway junction, in a no-man's-land on the outskirts of a Swedish city, between a large industrial area and suburbia, with a McDonald's restaurant as the closest neighbour. The small building, located in this odd landscape, is far from an architectural splendour; on the contrary, it looks more like a box or shack surrounded by a forecourt of asphalt. A huge totem, several flags, and signs dominate the view of the place. The combination of large signs beside a shack looks like a school example from Venturi et al's (1972) seminal book Learning from Las Vegas. Nearby, there is also a large entertainment complex with sporting facilities and a swimming pool, as well as the second largest trotting track in the country. 242 D Normark