Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance

Having made the case for an ethnographic study of how workers hear and use music, I now turn to connect the topic to bigger questions within industrial sociology, musicology, and cultural studies—questions regarding the nature of popular music in contemporary society, and questions regarding the links between workplace cultures and workplace resistance. In examining these questions, I use Small’s (1998) term “musicking” to denote social practices that involve music. For Small, whenever we are playing music, singing, listening to it, dancing to it, or writing it, we are musicking. Despite the broadness of this concept, so far most writers who have used the concept have tended to follow Small’s lead in focusing on performance as the “primary process” of musicking (113). But there is also a rich potential in seeing musicking in how music is received. Musicking is a term that opens a door into better seeing “music as social life,” to use the phrase of Turino (2008). Musicking as a conceptual lens leads us to focus on the situated meanings of the people who are musicking. As Small puts it (1998, 13), “the act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies.” It is a term that emphasizes the active role of the person who is musicking. It sits well with John Cage’s argument that “most people mistakenly think that when they hear a piece of music that they’re not doing anything but that something’s being done to them. Now this is not true and we must arrange our music, our art, everything ... so that people realize that they themselves are doing it and not that something is being done to them” (quoted in DeNora 2003, 157)

Aesthetic labour, emotional labour and masculinity

This special issue of the journal focuses on the topic of service work and gender. The theme for this special issue arose out of a stream on service work and gender at the 2005 Gender Work and Organization conference. In many respects this special edition can be considered as complementary to an earlier special edition on gender and service work that came out in 2005. In the editorial for the 2005 special edition Kerfoot and Korczynski raised a number of issues, questions and points for debate. It is worth briefly reprising some of these here as in many respects they provide a point of departure for a number of the concerns of this particular special edition

Energy input is primary controller of methane bubbling in subarctic lakes

Emission of methane (CH4) from surface waters is often dominated by ebullition (bubbling), a transport mode with high‐spatiotemporal variability. Based on new and extensive CH4 ebullition data, we demonstrate striking correlations (r2 between 0.92 and 0.997) when comparing seasonal bubble CH4 flux from three shallow subarctic lakes to four readily measurable proxies of incoming energy flux and daily flux magnitudes to surface sediment temperature (r2 between 0.86 and 0.94). Our results after continuous multiyear sampling suggest that CH4 ebullition is a predictable process, and that heat flux into the lakes is the dominant driver of gas production and release. Future changes in the energy received by lakes and ponds due to shorter ice‐covered seasons will predictably alter the ebullitive CH4 flux from freshwater systems across northern landscapes. This finding is critical for our understanding of the dynamics of radiatively important trace gas sources and associated climate feedback

BVOC ecosystem flux measurements at a high latitude wetland site

In this study, we present summertime concentrations and fluxes of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) measured at a sub-arctic wetland in northern Sweden using a disjunct eddy-covariance (DEC) technique based on a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS). The vegetation at the site was dominated by <i>Sphagnum</i>, <i>Carex</i> and extit{Eriophorum} spp. The measurements reported here cover a period of 50 days (1 August to 19 September 2006), approximately one half of the growing season at the site, and allowed to investigate the effect of day-to-day variation in weather as well as of vegetation senescence on daily BVOC fluxes, and on their temperature and light responses. The sensitivity drift of the DEC system was assessed by comparing H<sub>3</sub>O<sup>+</sup>-ion cluster formed with water molecules (H<sub>3</sub>O<sup>+</sup>(H<sub>2</sub>O) at m37) with water vapour concentration measurements made using an adjacent humidity sensor, and the applicability of the DEC method was analysed by a comparison of sensible heat fluxes for high frequency and DEC data obtained from the sonic anemometer. These analyses showed no significant PTR-MS sensor drift over a period of several weeks and only a small flux-loss due to high-frequency spectrum omissions. This loss was within the range expected from other studies and the theoretical considerations. <br><br> Standardised (20 °C and 1000 μmol m<sup>−2</sup> s<sup>−1</sup> PAR) summer isoprene emission rates found in this study of 329 μg C m<sup>−2</sup> (ground area) h<sup>−1</sup> were comparable with findings from more southern boreal forests, and fen-like ecosystems. On a diel scale, measured fluxes indicated a stronger temperature dependence than emissions from temperate or (sub)tropical ecosystems. For the first time, to our knowledge, we report ecosystem methanol fluxes from a sub-arctic ecosystem. Maximum daytime emission fluxes were around 270 μg m<sup>−2</sup> h<sup>−1</sup> (ca. 100 μg C m<sup>−2</sup> h<sup>−1</sup>), and during most nights small negative fluxes directed from the atmosphere to the surface were observed

"flipping through pages keeping a record of time" : Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Jimmy Robert

“flipping through pages keeping a record of time” proposes an intergenerational dialogue between Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert. Sharing a prolific engagement with performance, Super 8 film, and text, this assembly of their work in all three mediums takes the limit of the page as both material and a contested site of meaning

Retrieval and interpretation of textual geolocalized information based on semantic geolocalized relations

This paper describes a method for geolocalized information retrieval from natural language text and its interpretation by assigning them geographic coordinates. A proof-of-concept implementation is discussed, along with geolocalized dictionary stored in PostGIS/PostgreSQL spatial relational database. Discussed research focuses on strongly inflectional Polish language, hence additional complexity had to be taken into account. Presented method has been evaluated with the use of diverse metrics

Intersexuality In The Arctic Isopod Mesidotea (=Saduria) Sibirica

An intersex individual of the isopod Mesidotea sibirica was found among 50 specimens taken from collections obtained in Pauline Cove, Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, in the summer of 1975. This is the first such intersex form reported for M. sibirica. Intersexuality has not been reported previously among isopods of the genus Mesidotea ...

Modelling CH_4 emissions from arctic wetlands: effects of hydrological parameterization

This study compares the CH4 fluxes from two arctic wetland sites of different annual temperatures during 2004 to 2006. The PEATLAND-VU model was used to simulate the emissions. The CH4 module of PEATLAND-VU is based on the Walter-Heimann model. The first site is located in northeast Siberia, Indigirka lowlands, Kytalyk reserve (70 degrees N, 147 degrees E) in a continuous permafrost region with mean annual temperatures of -14.3 degrees C. The other site is Stordalen mire in the eastern part of Lake Tornetrask (68 degrees N, 19 degrees E) ten kilometres east of Abisko, northern Sweden. It is located in a discontinuous permafrost region. Stordalen has a sub arctic climate with a mean annual temperature of -0.7 degrees C. Model input consisted of observed temperature, precipitation and snow cover data. In all cases, modelled CH4 emissions show a direct correlation between variations in water table and soil temperature variations. The differences in CH4 emissions between the two sites are caused by different climate, hydrology, soil physical properties, vegetation type and NPP. For Kytalyk the simulated CH4 fluxes show similar trends during the growing season, having average values for 2004 to 2006 between 1.29-2.09 mg CH4 m(-2) hr(-1). At Stordalen the simulated fluxes show a slightly lower average value for the same years (3.52 mg CH4 m(-2) hr(-1)) than the observed 4.7 mg CH4 m(-2) hr(-1). The effect of the longer growing season at Stordalen is simulated correctly. Our study shows that modelling of arctic CH4 fluxes is improved by adding a relatively simple hydrological model that simulates the water table position from generic weather data. Our results support the generalization in literature that CH4 fluxes in northern wetland are regulated more tightly by water table than temperature. Furthermore, parameter uncertainty at site level in wetland CH4 process models is an important factor in large scale modelling of CH4 fluxes.</p

What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works

This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept's reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger's 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid's article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger's 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal relations and understandings that develop in mutual engagement on an appropriated joint enterprise, but his focus is the impact on individual identity. The applicability of the concept to the heavily individualized and tightly managed work of the twenty-first century is questionable. The most recent work by Wenger – this time with McDermott and Snyder as coauthors – marks a distinct shift towards a managerialist stance. The proposition that managers should foster informal horizontal groups across organizational boundaries is in fact a fundamental redefinition of the concept. However it does identify a plausible, if limited, knowledge management (KM) tool. This paper discusses different interpretations of the idea of 'co-ordinating' communities of practice as a management ideology of empowerment