Organizations as Change Agents Towards New Modes of (Sustainable) Mobility: Insights from Practice Oriented Projects

Abstract

Nowadays, for many reasons, the transformation of individual mobility behavior seems crucial. There is a consensus among scientists that in time we will run out of fossil fuel. Secondly, in order to at least slow down climate change, pollution of the environment has to be minimized. In addition to these ecological aspects, city centers and urban areas are running out of space in the face of increasing individualized traffic. On the other hand, individual mobility is a crucial factor to enable social participation and integration. Not being mobile often means living on the fringe of society. From an economic point of view, the mobility sector needs to be competitive on a global level but with lower energy use. From the point of view of the customer finally, mobility must be affordable. This contribution focusses on electric cars, on car sharing, and on intermodal services as possible ways of reducing emissions, decreasing the number of cars and overcoming the problem of insufficient space without at the same time increasing social inequality and threatening economic competitiveness. In an ongoing research project, the role of organizations as change agents towards sustainable mobility is being explored. By offering electric vehicles to their employees or tenants, organizations, as employers or landlords, seem to be important actors regarding a successful implementation and diffusion of new modes of mobility. Using a mixture of empirical methods, the project has traced implementation processes of e-fleets in different kinds of organizations and identified different types of promoters from within the organizations as well as structural and institutional barriers to these drivers of change. The preliminary findings allow deeper understanding of how organizations understand their roles in a transformation process towards new modes of (sustainable) mobility, but they also indicate some of the problems that still exist.