Christian Bröer

Below you find a short summary of his PhD thesis on aircraft noise annoyance, which he defended December 2006. He is still working on the subject. Next to this, he is starting to research protests against mobile phone masts (UMTS) and the effect protests have on people’s perception. He recently received a grant for this from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). You can download a summary of the research at the bottom of this text.

Summary of his thesis:
Policy annoyance how policy discourses shape the experience of aircraft sound (Beleid vormt overlast, hoe beleidsdiscoursen de beleving van geluid bepalen), Amsterdam: Aksant, 2006, 265 pp., ISBN: 97952602356

If policy treats a situation as problematic, people will experience the situation as problematic.

Air mobility spans most of the globe, but its side effects are concentrated in small localities. Noise annoyance is a major part of conflicts that surround airports. This thesis presents a new explanation for aircraft noise annoyance. It shows that our everyday understanding of aircraft sound is profoundly shaped by noise annoyance policy.

Noise annoyance research consistently shows that sound pressure does not sufficiently explain noise annoyance. Moreover, differences in annoyance hardly correlate with income, education, age or sex. Instead, distrust, anxiety and the idea that one cannot control noise, increase annoyance. Citizens who distrust political authorities experience sound to be more annoying, which in turn strengthens distrust. This study further extends these insights. It investigates the everyday experience of aircraft sound and asks if policy discourses are implicated in it. To this end I combine macro- and micro-sociological approaches to discourse analysis. I propose a new model, called resonance theory, to grasp the influence of dominant policy discourses. Resonance means echo or repercussion. The basic idea of this model is, that a policy discourse is of prime importance among all social relations in which aircraft sound is furnished with meaning.

To test the effect of the policy discourse, I investigated two cases with different noise annoyance policies: Amsterdam Schiphol and Zurich Kloten. From policy documents, interviews, participant observation and secondary literature I derived the dominant policy discourses. In interviews with people, their letters, complaints and public inquiry statements, were searched for possible traces of the policy discourses. I found the policy is highly relevant in four respects: first, people constantly refer to policy when they describe sound. Second, people use the language and logic of the policy when they make sense of sound. Third, people struggle with the dominant policy discourse. Fourth, the way people relate to the policy discourse affects the amount of annoyance. Altogether, people in Amsterdam experience aircraft sound differently from people in Zurich because the noise policy is different.

This research can be used to question existing noise policies in Europe, which often emphasizes acoustic exposure. It shows, that acoustic approaches have already incorporated basic political decisions. The research further stresses the importance of local effects of global air mobility. It opens up new ways of understanding typically modern social conflicts. Full text

 

Protests againt mobile phone masts; research proposal