Rhetorical orientations for promoting sustainable travel behavior: A perspective

Varsolo Sunio, Robert Z. Cortes and James Lactao

Research in Transportation Economics, 2022, vol. 91, issue C

Abstract: We introduce eleven orientations underpinning the rhetoric for promoting (or impeding) sustainable travel behavior. These orientations are: convenience, status, health, privacy, safety-security, economic, environmental, impact, justice-equity, geographical, and problem-solution. Using a novel and systematic method, we perform the study in three stages. First, using online media as data source, we apply concordance and Gioia methods to identify the rhetorical orientations underpinning these texts. Second, we cluster the orientations according to the direction (pro- or anti-sustainability) being generally pushed by each orientation. Convenience, status, health, privacy, safety-security orientations, in general, push towards anti-sustainability direction. On the other hand, economic, environmental, impact, justice-equity, and geographical orientations generally push towards pro-sustainability direction. Meanwhile, problem-solution orientation appears equally in both clusters. Finally, we extract the semantics of each rhetorical orientation using collocation analysis to differentiate their vocabularies. Our findings show the discursive struggle and contestation in relation to mobility, which manifest not only in the differences in rhetorical orientations appropriated but also the vocabularies deployed. One important implication is that any attempt to render the messages promoting sustainable travel behavior more persuasive necessitates the de-legitimation of contrary rhetorical orientations (convenience, status and health, privacy and safety-security) by addressing the issues associated with them.

Keywords: Rhetoric; Orientation; Persuasion; Environmental communication; Global south (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R40 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2020.101026

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