Hermes on Two Wheels: The Sociology of Bicycle Messengers

by Kevin Wehr

Overview

Hermes on Two Wheels shows the dynamic world of the bicycle messenger through a sociological lens, based on a five-year participant observation study. Beginning with the experiences of messengers themselves and moving to describe the structural settings of those experiences, the research shows how messengers work within a political-economic system that devalues semi-skilled labor and strips people of emotional fulfillment. The voluntary risk-taking of messengers becomes a means of achieving such emotional fulfillment as well as making a living, while their stylistic expressions pay dividends in cultural scrip rather than money. Through their work, messengers help to reproduce and maintain the structures of society while also constructing a vibrant, rebellious, politicized subculture that has come to represent the new urban hipster, an image continually under threat of co-optation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761847939
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	09/28/2009
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kevin Wehr is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the California State University, Sacramento, where he specializes in environmental sociology, political sociology, social theory, culture, and criminology. He received his Ph.D. in sociology in 2002 and his M.S. in 1998 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He completed his B.A. in 1994 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 1. Introduction: Hermes on Two Wheels
Chapter 3 2. Why Does Hermes Fly?
Chapter 4 3. Risk, Edgework, and the Community of Danger
Chapter 5 4. Visability and Invisibility: Liminality, Anarchy, and Bike-Punk Culture
Chapter 6 5. Bicycle Culture, Messenger Solidarity, and Community Matters
Chapter 7 6. Conclusion: The Last Non Co-opted Punk Rock Subculture
Chapter 8 Methodological Appendix
Chapter 9 References
Chapter 10 Index

Editorial Reviews

Wehr's Hermes on Two Wheels examines an interesting social phenomenon closely in order to derive insights about the contradictions and challenges of our accelerated era of laptop capitalism. He shows that the Internet-driven post-Fordist era cannot dispense with actual people, who dodge traffic in order to deliver important pulp documents on time. In this, he brilliantly opposes technological optimism, which assumes that utopia is a chatroom. Bicycle messengers, an edgy crew, live on the edges of our fast society and help us see it more clearly. This book is very much in the tradition of Walter Benjamin's study of the Paris Arcades project. Like Benjamin, Wehr examines fragments—tea leaves, as it were—as the resources of a critical social and cultural theory.

Dr. Ben Agger

Wehr's Hermes on Two Wheels examines an interesting social phenomenon closely in order to derive insights about the contradictions and challenges of our accelerated era of laptop capitalism. He shows that the Internet-driven post-Fordist era cannot dispense with actual people, who dodge traffic in order to deliver important pulp documents on time. In this, he brilliantly opposes technological optimism, which assumes that utopia is a chatroom. Bicycle messengers, an edgy crew, live on the edges of our fast society and help us see it more clearly. This book is very much in the tradition of Walter Benjamin's study of the Paris Arcades project. Like Benjamin, Wehr examines fragments--tea leaves, as it were--as the resources of a critical social and cultural theory.--Dr. Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington.

From the Publisher