In this article, I approach motorcycling as a learning process. The main concept used is that of the social career, as advanced by Erving Goffman and David Matza. I highlight the specific bodily practices and risks that occur in the successive stages of a motorcyclist's social career. Throughout their career as motorcyclists, riders learn how to manage successive risks. The riding body may be approached as a case of voluntary risk-taking, a structural factor identified in many contemporary societies. Motorcycling is thus similar to hang gliding, skydiving, scuba diving or rock climbing. The study is based on data gathered from the main online motorcycling forum in Romania, participant observation carried out among motorcyclists in Romania in 2008 and 2009, and conversations and interviews with motorcyclists. I suggest that the risk implied by using motorcycles depends on the stage that a person is at in his or her social career.

In a departure from car-centered analyses of the automobility systems, this article highlights the importance of motorcycles and motorcycling in the mobility practices of socialist countries. For at least half of the existence of socialist mobility systems, and especially during the 1950s and 1960s, there were more motorcycles on the roads than cars. Motorcycling was important in commuting, for the mobility of lower-ranking administrative personnel in the countryside, and for mass tourism and leisure. Although in that era maintenance and repair practices were equally central to motorcycling and car-driving, the distinction between user-owner and mechanic was much more fluid in the case of motorcyclists. As a result, the centrality of maintenance and repair to socialist-era motorcycling offers an ideal opportunity to enrich current interdisciplinary conversations about breakdown, maintenance, and repair. Building on the car-centered research into maintenance and repair activities, I add additional material on the nature, types, and complexity of such practices for motorcycling. I outline nine forms of material engagement with motorcycles that reference, but transcend, the current dichotomies between necessity and pleasure, the formal and the informal, the technical and the aesthetic, and the repair of existing objects and the creation of new ones.

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Most social science studies on automobility have focused on the production, usage, identity construction and aesthetic improvements of personal means of transportation. What happens if we shift the focus to the labour, knowledge and social relations that go into the unavoidable moments of maintenance and repair? Taking motorcycling in Romania as an ethnographic entry point, this book documents how bikers handle the inevitable moments of malfunction and breakdown. Using both mobile and sedentary research methods, the book describes the joys and troubles experienced by amateur mechanics, professional mechanics and untechnical men and women when fixing bikes.