Suchergebnisse

The development of Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) represents the introduction of an alternative technology into a deeply embedded market—as automobiles and gasoline have been linked to one another through multiple and overlapping cultural, political, and technological developments since the early 1900s. The emergence of a market for PEVs takes place within an existing transportation system based on privately owned individual internal combustion engines that is entrenched in myriad symbolic, material, spatial, and habitual ways, and influences nearly all aspects of social life. This dissertation explores the matrix of political, economic, and cultural elements that combine to create a historically contingent context for the PEV market, and analyzes consumption within this context to offer a case study of consumer behavior in an emerging market. This research uses qualitative data, collected from semi-structured in-depth interviews, group workshops, and focus groups during a three year period, to identify the prevailing qualities consumers attribute to PEVs, and explain how they provide symbolic and functional value for consumers.This dissertation advances theories of valuation using the PEV market as a case study to illustrate how consumers negotiate value in an emerging industrial market. The author argues that consumers perceive that a given quality (or qualities) of a PEV produces a particular performance which becomes, if viewed as desirable, a source of value. The value an individual consumer derives from the expected performance of a PEV is translated into an amount which they can then compare to the price of the vehicle when deciding whether to make an exchange. PEV drivers make their purchase expecting their vehicle to provide simultaneous performances in their physical state, their social position, and their imaginative world. The author found that the environmental and technological qualities consumers assign to PEVs offer important sources of physical, positional, and symbolic value beyond the financial benefits often assessed in studies of PEV adoption.The author argues that much of what is valued in the PEV market reflects the broader social values informed by sustainability ideology and the entrenched system of automobility. Moving from explaining sustainability policy narratives to describing dominant trends in analyses of consumers in the PEV market, the researcher found that sustainability discourse, including analyses of pro-environmental behavior, acts as an influential discourse that shapes consumers' processes of valuation and evaluation of PEVs. In their narratives of (e)valuation, consumers attributed qualities (and subsequently value) to PEVs in ways that reproduced the myths of individual responsibility and technological utopianism based on ideological commitments to sustainability, even as they negotiated the boundaries of both. The relationship between sustainability ideology and PEVs reveals how institutions, ideology, and the socio-historical context of a market shape value creation as much as the interpretive activities of consumers.

Given the complex nature of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there are increasing calls for new inclusive and bottom-up governance mechanisms in building a relationship between governments and their citizens, in particular, the youth, to localise the 2030 Agenda. But such successful bottom-up multi-stakeholder engagement tools have yet to emerge in practice. Hence, of specific interest in this study is exploring bottom-up approaches useful for localising the SDGs and harnessing real transformative change to leave no one behind by 2030. Using a case study from the UK, we present a novel integrated mechanism to achieve this. An integrated Social Innovation (SI) and Scenarios Thinking (ST) mechanism remains a valuable bottom-up tool capable of empowering citizens, including the youth and decision-makers in delivering coherent SDGs plans, policies, and programmes. The study reveals that although the SDGs are distinct, they are also interconnected. A scenario development workshop with youth with no prior knowledge of the SDGs showed a common thread of policy measures for different SDG future images. Standard policy measures amongst different SDGs call for an equitable society at all levels; that all energy sources be from clean and renewable sources; investment in low-carbon technologies and research; and financial support for promoting sustainable transportation and consumption measures. This study highlights that we need to change how we think and talk about SDGs and recommends socially innovative steps to embrace cross-sectoral and nexus thinking as the backdrop of the citizen science concept. We conclude that the SDGs should not become a performative exercise or failed social experiment. And any practical localisation from the UN's Member States across the northern and southern hemispheres will require robust measures addressing future-oriented systemic thinking, inclusivity and good governance, together with standards for community resilience and sustainability.

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are now being offered for sale to consumers. Contemporaneously, multi-way social interactions among individuals, groups, businesses, governments, and other actors are increasingly facilitated by communication technologies: we take this to be "social media." Can this confluence facilitate the formation of new interest-based communities among plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) buyers? How might this be important to promoting PEVs? This paper presents the results of 28 in-depth interviews with household PEV drivers in San Diego, California. These PEV drivers show wide variation in their descriptions of who they believe PEV drivers to be, conceptualizations of a PEV, uses of social media to engage other members of the community, and socially mediated and face-to-face interactions with other PEV drivers. Better understanding of the relationship between emerging PEV markets, social media and consumer-based communities will affect the ongoing management of transitions to electric-mobility.