Abstract
Next time I drag my family and friends to one of my occasional chorus performances, I will no longer feel that I might be imposing too much upon them. Thanks to Marek Korczynski’s elegantly written and insightful book, titled Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance, I now can tell them that they will be “musicking” during the entire show. Listening to music, including my own less than perfect singing, is an active endeavor or, at least, that’s what Korczynski posits in this book. He builds on Christopher Small’s (1998) notion of “musicking”—namely, the view of music as an ongoing social process rather than a static outcome—to argue that the workers he studied actively engaged with music while on the job. This finding is not too surprising, but the book’s real novelty is to show that they engage with specific musical forms (rather than music in general) on the factory floor. The crux of the study is to uncover the cultural meanings of this process of musical engagement at work.
Korczynski’s main argument centers on what he carefully labels the “dotted” lines between workplace alienation and song preferences. He suggests that the practice of musicking that he observed both went “with and against” the social orders on the shop floor (p. 11). The songs that workers preferred to engage with involved “multitonous musicking” or a process that invoked “a dialectical cultural play with the monotonous” (p. 197). (The neologism “multitonous” refers to the idea that any given song can include multiple layers of meaning.) Pop songs that illustrate this notion include, for example, Abba’s “Staying Alive” or U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Their refrains are repetitive, yet their lyrics contradict this repetition. The process of multitonous musicking made the workday go faster while at the same time subverting the workplace’s social order by evoking, for instance, images of escape, survival, and melancholia.
To develop his argument, Korczynski worked in a window-blind manufacturing factory located in the Midlands region of England, which employed 170 manual workers. The many radios playing rampantly throughout the workshops greatly facilitated his observations of musicking. Whether piping through a central radio broadcasting system or coming from small radios at the hands of groups of workers, music was a fixture at this workplace. Management encouraged the listening to music. Korczynski could therefore track what was playing at the same time as he documented which workers’ practices involved music. In that sense, he was able to collect rare data on musicking at work. Korczynski managed to negotiate access to this factory “through personal contacts” (p. 212) and ultimately spent three months on site as an unpaid participant-observer. During that period, he held four shopfloor jobs in two different workrooms. He describes his presence as appearing to have been treated as a “normal part of everyday shop floor life” (p. 214), perhaps because he was joining a constant inflow of new employees. Indeed, given the relatively high labor turnover rate in this firm (35–40 percent per year), new blood was constantly being pumped into the factory.
As Korczynski describes it, the multitonous musicking occurring in the factory was a way to deal in part with the alienating and unrewarding work environment. First, manual workloads were hard to predict since there seemed to be constant swings in production demands. Second, hourly pay was low and bonuses were non-existent. Moreover, the workforce was not unionized, leaving few options for workers but to go the unlikely, direct route to supervisors in cases of conflict. Unsurprisingly, the main topic of discussion among manual workers seems to have been what people wanted to do next in life rather than what the current job entailed. The possible interpretations of some songs, by contrast, provided alternatives to this fairly alienating context.
Such an alternative was most obvious in the responses to an inquiry Korczynski conducted on “top songs” in the factory. He asked 70 individuals to name “a song or a piece of music that spoke to them in any way—musically, rhythmically, or lyrically, for instance—about their experience of working in the factory” (p. 113). As he explains, the most evocative songs spoke, for instance, of defiance (e.g., Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” and the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays”), community and survival (e.g., Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”), or of being someplace else (e.g., John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane”). For those who remember dancing to these hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you will recall that the disco era relied heavily on a steady beat and was embraced early on by minorities (such as Latino, black, and gay communities) who viewed it as a way to counter the dominant trend (i.e., rock music). Put otherwise, the disco vibe and its combination of repetitiveness and resistance both echoed and contrasted with the factory workplace’s mood. The argument that musicking can enhance, as well as complement, workers’ mood is novel and appealing. (I did want to know, however, the study’s data collection year and what the top charts were at that time to better understand whether this form of musicking resonated specifically with a factory floor culture or, more broadly, with English culture.)
Reading this fascinating study also made me wonder how other workers without access to music might similarly attempt to echo and break a given workplace mood. Korczynski partly answers this question by focusing on other ways that factory workers resist (for example, through output restriction and absenteeism). Discussing the ways members of other social groups might react could prove fruitful as well. As an illustration, bankers are often said to favor the use of recreational drugs as a mood-enhancing technique to deal with a work culture that likes to see itself as striving on highs and lows (as in the unpredictable stock market), rather than on monotony. So what might be an equivalent to “multitonous musicking” in that setting? Might other forms of musicking prove a better fit there? More broadly, if we push Korczynski’s argument further, could we predict ideal forms of musicking by professions and occupations? These are only some of the intriguing questions triggered by reading this book. I trust that other readers will find many others.
My only reservation about Songs of the Factory concerns what Korczynski might have missed while conducting his fieldwork. The factory’s workforce was 80 percent female, putting Korczynski in the minority. While he acknowledges this point in his appendix, I could not help but think of Annette Weiner’s (1988) re-reading of Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) study of the Trobriand Islands through a female gaze and of her documenting parallel trades in banana-leaf bundles alongside the shell trades noted by Malinowski. In the same manner, I wondered whether some of the forms of musicking that Korczynski noticed in the factory could evoke family, rather than workplace, dynamics. Indeed, as Sally Westwood (1985) showed in her ethnography of women working in the British hosiery industry, work and family seem very much intertwined for these workers. This made me curious as to what Korczynski’s female co-workers might not have shared with him. One need not be a woman to study women, but the gendered nature of field interactions cannot be fully disregarded. Being seen as a fairly “normal part” of shopfloor life might still not be enough. The relatively short time spent in each workgroup (most likely, several weeks at most) might have also limited a fuller involvement with participants. It often takes time and a certain level of shared experiences to open up to an unknown ethnographer.
Overall, and despite this one reservation, I recommend this book to many readers. Songs of the Factory will be of interest to scholars of work, music, organizations, and managerial control, as well as to those wanting to gain a better understanding of contemporary English society. The book also proves exemplary at showcasing how bridging two streams of seemingly distinct literature (here, industrial sociology and musicology) can yield very promising insights for our field. And finally, I encourage you to check out Korczynski’s musical performance online. He has plenty of freely accessible videos where he performs labor songs, but not, I should warn you, “Staying Alive” or “We Are Family.” Those musical lacunas, however, probably reflect more my current mood than any gaps in his repertoire.