The Cabdriver and His Fare: Facets of a Fleeting Relationship

Abstract

The relationship between the big-city cabdriver and his fare is random, fleeting, unrenewable, and devoid of socially integrative features conducive to constraint. A regulative imbalance can be said to exist which, among its other consequences, is expressed in the preoccupation with the vagaries of tipping. So extreme a relationship suggests the extent to which practitioner-client controls in other fields of service depend for their effectiveness on the maintenance of a safe modicum of continuity, stability, and homogeneity of clientele.