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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.
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.
"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."
Richard Flacks:
"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."
Paul Edwards, Birmingham Business School:
"What can a study of mundane work in a very ordinary factory in the English Midlands tell us? Marek Korczynski's beautifully written and often moving account demonstrates that we learn a huge amount, not only about the neglected place of pop music in the creation and maintenance of a workplace culture and its subtle linkages with resistance but also about the structure of the pop song and the history of popular music. And it connects all this to class and alienation at work. Songs of the Factory is worthy to stand alongside the very best classics of workplace ethnography."
Timothy J. Dowd, Emory University, Editor-in-Chief of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts:
"In this groundbreaking book, Marek Korczynski not only builds on recent trends in sociology but also takes the discipline into important new directions. He interrogates how popular music can enliven and provide meaning in a monotonous workplace and, in the process, reveals crucial lessons about agency, worker control and resistance, and community. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Songs of the Factory strikes all the right notes."
Joel Dinerstein, Associate Professor of English and James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization, Tulane University, author of Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars:
"Songs of the Factory is an important and singular work due to its combination of ethnography, musicology, labor studies, and popular culture. This book truly engages the lived social process of the modern workplace."
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