
Songs of the Factory
Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance
Marek Korczynski(Author)
ILR Press
Published on 6. November 2014
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-8014-5154-6 (ISBN)
Description
In Songs of the Factory, Marek Korczynski examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. Reporting on his ethnographic fieldwork in a British factory that manufactures window blinds, Korczynski shows how workers make often-grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, Songs of the Factory draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life.
Music, Korczynski argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The author highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, Korczynski also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.
Music, Korczynski argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The author highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, Korczynski also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.
Reviews / Votes
Marek Korczynski makes an enriching contribution to the study of workers' informal organization in the workplace.... Songs of the Factory is a real contribution to the development of a sociology of music as well as to the sociology of work. We learn from it how to make use of musicking as a conceptual approach to thinking about music's social functions, and we get some fresh insight into what Korczynski likes to call the 'with and against' of wage labor.- Richard Flacks (American Journal of Sociology) Music is complex, and people use it in differently complex ways. Rather than reducing both expressive culture and its participants to flat caricatures, we ought to investigate real settings and explore the variety of ways music functions in peoples' lives. This is what Korczynski has done, and we are better for it.
- John Pippen (Notes)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Cornell University Press
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
1 line drawing, 2 tables - 1 Line drawings, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8014-5154-6 (9780801451546)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
02/2015
ILR Press
€23.49
Available for download
Person
Marek Korczynski is Chair in Sociology of Work at the Nottingham University Business School. He is coauthor of On the Front Line, also from Cornell, and Rhythms of Labour and author of Human Resource Management in Service Work.
Content
1. Reach Out I'll Be There: Pop Music, Work, and Society2. Stayin' Alive at McTells3. I Got All My Sisters with Me: Music and Community4. Music, Machines, and Clocks: Songs and the Senses of Alienation5. You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk: Music as Aid to Work and Critique of Taylorism6. Pop Songs and the Hidden Injuries (and Joys) of Class7. Collective Resistance on the Shop Floor8. Dotted Lines on the Shop Floor: Cultural Connections with Collective Resistance9. Conclusion: Pop Music, Culture, and ResistanceAppendix: An Ethnography of Working and of MusickingReferences
Index
Index