The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order

Abstract

The forms of emblematic gesture and other communicative moves used in hailing taxicabs are shaped by the urban built environment and by the micropolitics sparked by what Goffman called the “loose coupling” of the interaction and social orders. Cabdrivers evaluate street hails and choose whether or not to stop for prospective passengers; hailers seek to communicate their desirability as passengers within the limited mode of the street hail. The conditions and constraints that underlie the practice and reception of street hailing are considered. A survey on methods used to hail taxis was sent to a listserv of taxi drivers in San Francisco, California. The drivers evaluated street hails in terms of two axes – clarity and propriety – and three levels of context: the immediate interactional context of the street; the anticipated interactional context of the cab ride; and the political context, or the political discourse framing taxicab regulation in the city.