Digitally induced industry paradoxes: disruptive innovations of taxiwork and music streaming beyond organizational boundaries

The exponential growth of digital technologies and their increased importance in both organizational and everyday life poses new challenges to paradox research within management studies. Management scholars taking a paradoxical lens have predominantly focused on social paradoxes within the confines of the organization. Technological change has often been treated as an exogenous force bringing previously latent tensions to the fore. Such newly salient paradoxes are viewed as instigating managerial sensemaking and exploration of strategic responses that will re-establish equilibrium. Our investigation of how digital innovations disrupted London taxiwork and global music distribution shows something different. The paradoxical tensions raised by emerging digital technologies inevitably play out at industry and societal levels. Concomitant changes in boundaries, categories, and potentials for action that shape and channel ongoing industry transformation call for organizational responses and adaptation. Critically, such tensions must be interpreted within the context of industry arrangements absent a centrally controlling actor. Rather than episodes of exogenous change, the nature of the digital, along with interactions across multiple sources of agency, continually surface complex dynamic and systemic tensions within and across industries. Our findings highlight the importance of explicitly accounting for the inter-relatedness and mutual dependence of the social and technical elements of change. As digital innovation expands and starts to impact all aspects of human experience it is critical for management scholars to reflect how the paradoxical perspective can be expanded to better understand these contemporary large-scale changes

The size, origins, and character of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the author merges anecdotal experience from qualitative interviews with hard data from a survey of 770 informals in Ulaanbaatar, from a national household survey, and from official employment statistics. Using varied sources, the author generates rudimentary estimates of the magnitude of, and trends in, informal activity in Mongolia, estimates that are surprisingly consistent with each other. He evaluates four types of reasons for the burst of informal activity in Mongolia since 1990: 1) The crisis of the early and mid-1990s, during which large pools of labor were released from formal employment. 2) Rural to urban migration. 3) The"market's"reallocation of resources toward areas neglected under the old system: services such as distribution and transportation. 4) The institutional environments faced by the formal and informal sectors: hindering growth of the formal sector, facilitating entry for the informal sector. Formal labor markets haven't absorbed the labor made available by the crisis and by migration and haven't fully responded to the demand for new services. The relative ease of entering the informal market explains that market's great expansion. The relative difficulty of entering formal markets is not random but is driven by policy. Improving policies in the formal sector could afford the same ease of entry there as is currently being experienced in the informal sector.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Public Health Promotion,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,National Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

Learning by Driving: Productivity Improvements by New York City Taxi Drivers

We study learning by doing by New York City taxi drivers, who have substantial discretion over their driving strategies and receive compensation closely tied to their success in finding customers. In addition to documenting learning overall by these entrepreneurial agents, we exploit our data's breadth to investigate the factors that contribute to driver improvement across a variety of situations. New drivers lag further behind experienced drivers when in difficult situations. Drivers benefit from accumulating neighborhood-specific experience, which affects how they search for their next customers

Vehicle-to-Vehicle Inductive Charge Transfer Feasibility and Public Health Implications

There has been an increased push away from the traditional combustion-engine powered vehicle due to environmental, health, and political concerns. As a result, alternative methods of transportation such as electric vehicles (EVs) have gaining popularity in the market. However, the EVs are not penetrating the market as quickly as expected, due in part to a combination of range, charge anxiety, and their financial costs. EVs cannot travel far due to limited driving range and require longer charge times than combustion-engine powered vehicles to recharge. Coupled with a lacking infrastructure for charging, the feasibility of an all-electric transportation market is still not possible. We propose a novel system in which we study and characterize the feasibility of increasing the effective driving range of a battery electric vehicle by utilizing inductive charge transfer to create an ad-hoc charging network where vehicles can “share” charge with one another. The application of wireless charge transfer from vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) is the first of its kind and does not require any changes to current metropolitan infrastructures. Through the use of computer networking and communications algorithms, we analyze real-world commuter and taxi data to determine the potential effectiveness of such a system. We propose a participation and incentive mechanism to encourage participation in this network that enables the system to be functional.To illustrate proof of principle for V2V charging at traffic lights, we simulate a simplified model in which vehicles only exchange charge at traffic lights without coordination with other vehicles. Using a greedy heuristic, vehicles only exchange charge if they happen to meet another vehicle that has charge to share. The heuristic is greedy since decisions are made at each iteration with longer optimality not being considered. We are able to demonstrate an increase in effective driving range of EVs using these simplistic assumptions. In this thesis, we develop and quantify a complete simulation framework, which allows EVs to operate using charge sharing. We analyze data from the United States Department of Transportation, New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and Regional New York City data sources to understand the cumulative driving distance distributions for passenger/commuter vehicles and taxicabs in large metropolitan areas such as New York City. We show that the driving distributions can best be represented as heavy-tail distribution functions with most commuter vehicles not requiring additional charge during a typical day’s usage of their vehicle as compared to taxicabs, which regularly travel more than 100 miles during a 12-hour shift. We develop and parameterize several variables for input into our simulation framework including driving distance, charge exchange heuristics, models for determining pricing of charge units, traffic density, and geographic location. The inclusion of these parameters helps to build a framework that can be utilized for any metropolitan area to determine the feasibility of EVs. We have performed extensive evaluation of our model using real data. Our current simulations indicate that we can increase the effective distance that an electric vehicle travels by a factor of at least 2.5. This increased driving range makes EVs a more feasible mode of transportation for fleet vehicles such as taxicabs that rely heavily on commuting long cumulative distances. We have identified areas for future improvement to add further parameters to make the model even more sensitive. Finally, we focus on the application of our charge sharing framework in a real-world application for utilizing this methodology for the New York City bus system. In partnership with the New York City MTA, we launched a feasibility study of converting the currently majority hybrid bus fleet into a complete electric bus fleet with charging available at bus stops during scheduled bus stops. Unlike the earlier charge sharing framework, this simulation focuses on discrete distances that are traveled by the bus before having an opportunity to charge at the next bus stop. In this scenario, a large source of variability is the amount of time that the bus is able to stop at a bus stop for charging since this is determined by the amount of time needed to successfully embark and disembark the passengers at the given bus stop. This particular variability impacts how much charge the bus is able to gain during any given stop. We conclude with a list of opportunities for future work in expanding the model with additional parameters and conclusions of our work. Further, we identify areas of further research that outline the potential positive and negative outcomes from a charge sharing system that can be extended to various other applications including micro-mobility applications such as electric scooters and bicycles

Government transport land-use planning and development by implicit contract for franchised buses and ferries in Hong Kong, 1933-1972

As a contribution to policy research on monopolies in planning for public utilities and the role of the state in ordering the coordination of land use and transport in a market economy, this paper evaluates a couple of hypotheses informed by the Coasian economic concept of an implicit contract. There have been public subsidies to franchised bus and ferry companies in Colonial Hong Kong in the form of concessions in kind with spatial land-use transport implications. The hypotheses were evaluated by a comprehensive archive survey and documentary analysis of the clauses in relevant franchise documents, Crown Leases, government memoranda, and expert writings on buses and ferries. The findings revealed that there was no real land price subsidy provided for within or outside the franchise or lease documents, but there were substantial indirect subsidies during the study period. These were provided not only in terms of the free provision of bus terminals and piers, but also their planned combination on government land, as well as the strategic positioning of bus terminals in newly-developed government housing estates and new towns. The land-use public transport planning strategy shaped the urban structure of Hong Kong prior to the takeover of the companies by developers. The critical role of the government vis-á-vis developers as a super landlord is discussed. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.postprin

Uberising the Urban. Labour, Infrastructure and Big Data in the Actually Existing Smart City of Toronto

This thesis explores how Uber reformats the urban and vice versa. Rather than taking for granted Uber’s success in remoulding the emerging ‘smart city’ in its own image, Uberising the Urban pays close attention to the contradictory, variegated and far from frictionless encounters between Uberisation and urbanisation. The thesis is particularly interested in those neuralgic points of contact where the abstract logics of Uber’s business model – its vectors of data extraction, labour exploitation and platform expansion – hit the urban ground of existing social and physical geographies. The Uberisation of the urban – such is this thesis’s main argument – does not take place in a material and social void; it unfolds in, with and against the dense social and material thickness of existing urban space. This argument is deepened in three case studies. Zooming in from different angles, these case studies show how the vectors of Uberisation have come up against the multiscalar and variously uneven urban grounds of the actually existing smart city of Toronto. While the first case study provides a detailed discussion of the conflictive processes leading up to the legalisation of Uber in Toronto and the parallel ‘regulated deregulation’ of the city’s taxi-cum-ridehail market, the second case study tackles the next subsequent ‘stage’ of Uberisation in Toronto: the proliferation of various public-private ridehail partnerships (PPRPs) between Uber and Lyft on the one hand and local and regional transit agencies in the GTA on the other. The third case study is concerned with Uber’s self-driving car programme and, in particular, the invasive practices of data extraction that Uber has implemented in Toronto – turning the city into a real-life urban data reservoir for the development of its self-driving software. A conclusion, shedding light on a potential reconfiguration of Uber towards more socially emancipatory ends, rounds out the dissertation

The Political Economy of St. Catharines' Illicit Taxi Trade

The global restructuring of production has led to increasingly precarious working conditions around the world. Post-industrial work is characterized by poor working conditions, low wages, a lack of social protection and political representation and little job security. Unregulated forms of work that are defined as “irregular” or “illegal”, or in some cases “criminal,” are connected to sweeping transformations within the broader regulated (formal) economy. The connection between the formal and informal sectors can more accurately be described as co-optation and, as a subordinate integration of the informal to the formal. The city of St. Catharines within Niagara, along with much of Ontario’s industrial heartland, has been hard hit by deindustrialization. The rise of this illegal service is thus viewed against the backdrop of heavy economic restructuring, as opportunities for work in the manufacturing sector have become sparse. In addition, this research also explores the paradoxical co-optation of the growing illicit taxi economy and consequences for racialized and foreign credentialed labour in the taxi industry. The overall objective of this research is to explore the illicit cab industry as not only inseparable from the formal economy, but dialectically, how it is as an integrated and productive element of the public and private transportation industry. Furthermore the research examines what this co-optation means in the context of a labour market that is split by race

Urban transportation planning in low-income areas : a case study of appropriate transportation technology

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1980.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Bibliography: leaves 250-265.by Byungho Oh.Ph.D

Networking Transportation

Networking Transportation looks at how the digital revolution is changing Greater Philadelphia's transportation system. It recognizes several key digital transportation technologies: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, connected and automated vehicles, digital mapping, Intelligent Transportation Systems, the Internet of Things, smart cities, real-time information, transportation network companies (TNCs), unmanned aerial systems, and virtual communications. It focuses particularly on key issues surrounding TNCs. It identifies TNCs currently operating in Greater Philadelphia and reviews some of the more innovative services around the world. It presents four alternative future scenarios for their growth: Filling a Niche, A Tale of Two Regions, TNCs Take Off, and Moore Growth. It then creates a future vision for an integrated, multimodal transportation network and identifies infrastructure needs, institutional reforms, and regulatory recommendations intended to help bring about this vision