The "Chauffeur Problem" in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology

On a summer Sunday in 1906 a New York Times headline told a man-bites-dog story: “Chauffeurs Lord It Over Their Employers.” ¹ Chauffeurs became a serious problem for wealthy motorists during the first decade of the twentieth century. They extorted commissions and kickbacks from garage owners, took their employers’ cars out for joyrides at all hours, and exhibited a brazen disregard for social decorum. They did not behave as servants. Between 1903 and 1912 howls of protest arose over chauffeurs’ arrogance and insubordination and the pages of the automotive trade press overflowed with letters, articles, and editorials describing, complaining about, and offering solutions to the “chauffeur problem.” This study uses Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to uncover how chauffeurs used new automotive technology to enhance their social power, how they eventually lost that power, and how the consequences of the intervening struggle persist to this day. It provides both a case study and a theoretical orientation that should prove useful to historians interested in the complex connections between social and technological change viewed from the user’s perspective.

In the grand scheme of technological history the chauffeur problem is limited in scope and duration; it affected relatively few people for little more than a decade, which helps explain why many a historian has thumbed past the pages of public outcry it generated. ² Yet such an outcry should flag researchers interested in the relationship between social and technological change. Most of the time individuals and groups go about their daily activities without much need to formulate or express the rules of social interaction that structure their routines. Those rules are tacitly understood and routinely reproduced. Their transgression forces interested parties to formulate explicit or “discursive” versions of the rules in order to sanction or control the offending behavior. Studying such periods of discursive rule-making can help us understand what those usually tacit rules are, who they affect, and how they are negotiated and formed. The commotion over the chauffeur problem is a case of public discourse over the rules surrounding the use of a new technology.

Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory can shed some light on the role that new technology played in disrupting the relative equilibrium that preceded the chauffeur problem, as well as on the responses of the situated actors and the ultimate outcome of the ensuing struggle. Structuration, in Giddens’s use of the term, is a process: the ongoing, dynamic use, reproduction, and mutation of the tacit rules of routine social interaction. As another commentator has it, structuration theory “attempts to transcend the traditional division in sociology between action and structure by focusing on ‘social practices,’ which, the theory argues, are not something external to social actors but are the rules and resources produced and reproduced by actors in their practices.” ³

The concepts of structure, agency, and the duality of structure are central to structuration theory. Giddens defines structure as “rules and resources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems.” ⁴ In other words, structure means the habits and principles that guide human social interaction. Agency, for Giddens, refers to the capacity of individuals “to understand what they do while they do it.” That is to say, Giddens does not see individuals as pawns reacting to social constraints. They have knowledge, both practical and discursive, about their social world and the structures within which they operate. The duality of structure is the glue that holds the seemingly antithetical concepts of structure and agency together. “According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize.” ⁵ That is, the rules and resources that make up the social structures that guide human social interaction are themselves the product of knowledgeable human agency. ⁶ Therefore, “human agents always have the ability . . . to act at odds with such structures . . . and thus to undercut or even to initiate change in the structures. ⁷ The ability to act at odds with or change a given structure depends...