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)

Capital, labour and economic performance in the engineering construction industry: 1960-1990

This study engages with the debates on industrial relations and economic performance at the micro-level. Primarily; this issue has been addressed through the production function approach which seeks to correlate a variable for unionisation with an economic performance measure. Criticisms are put forward which stress the technical limitations of existing studies, the limitations of statistical studies in examining social processes, and theoretical problems with the production function approach. The literature recognises the need for a detailed, processual case study. The thesis is such a case study, examining the Engineering Construction Industry, i. e. the building of large power stations and process plants, from 1960 to 1990. The principal research methods were archive work and interviewing. The industry was chosen because it constituted a 'crucial' case for the argument that labour militancy underlay the UK's poor economic performance in the 1960s and 1970s. The industry was characterised by widespread militancy and large project overruns, the assumption (tested within the thesis) being that the former caused the latter. The key finding is that the chronic project delays were at root due to the opportunistic practices of contractors who deliberately and covertly delayed construction in order to force the client into offering extra payments. A key profit focus of contractors lay in exploiting opportunities to generate additional payments. The widespread militancy of the 1960s and 1970s exacerbated overruns, but the key significance of militancy was that it was used as a tool by contractors in reproducing beneficial commercial relations with clients. The improvement in performance in the 1980s was at root due to the rise of managing contractors who curbed opportunism. Unconstrained by high levels of labour militancy, managing contractors adopted a low trust route to improve project performance, implying that the basis for longer term development has not been laid. A 'crucial' case study of the British worker argument has rejected the thesis that militancy underlay poor performance. The relationship between opportunism, militancy and poor performance uncovered within the study potentially has relevance for other important sectors of the UK economy

The caring self within a context of increasing rationalisation: The enduring importance of clients for home care aides

The current political economy imposes cost-saving rationalisation within home care work. In this context, a key question is whether home care aides act with indifference to clients or whether home care aides continue to espouse and act out of the caring self, which centres on the desire to give meaningful care to clients. This article assesses the thesis of the caring self within a context of rationalisation in relation to home care aides in three organisations. The article brings qualitative and quantitative research to bear on this question. It finds that despite the processes of rationalisation occurring in home care work, home care aides’ overall satisfaction with client relations, and their ability to satisfy clients continue to have significant links to their job satisfaction, and discretionary effort. This offers support for the thesis of the caring self within the context of rationalisation

After-Progress: Commoning in Degrowth

What does it mean to live with the threat of extinction? We make a case that living with the threat of extinction logically can only mean that we have to abandon the modernist ideology of progress. We review ideas of societal progress and note the decline in arguments relating to progress in the writings of political and social commentators. However, alive and well, and hidden in plain sight, is the current dominant ideology of progress-the central policy goal of governments to achieve growth in Gross Domestic Product. We must abandon this twisted ideology of progress. We point to two interrelated elements of a political economy of after-progress-degrowth and commoning. Currently, there are rich and vital literatures on degrowth and on commoning, but rarely do writers in these fields come into explicit dialogue with each other to see and develop a shared logic. We outline a political economy of degrowth as one centred on sustaining the commons, and contrast this with current arguments for green capitalism, centred on the idea of a Green New Deal. Competitive individualism is the central social relationship of capitalism, and is a social relationship that leads to the destruction of the commons. By contrast, commoning should be seen as the central social relationship of a degrowth economy. It is simultaneously a social relationship and an ecological relationship. It is a social ecological relationship to sustain the commons within a degrowth economy

Classic and Agent-Based Evolutionary Heuristics for Shape Optimization of Rotating Discs

The article presents a metaheuristic solution for the problem of shape optimization of a rotating annular disc. Such discs are important structural components of e.g. jet engines, steam turbines or disc brakes. The design goal is to find the disc shape that would ensure its maximal carrying capacity (corresponding to the speed of rotation), which is a variational problem with the objective functional defined by L-infinity norm. Such a definition makes the problem impossible to solve using analytical methods so utilization of metaheuristics is necessary. We present different algorithms to solve the problem starting with a classic evolutionary one, followed by agent-based and hybrid agent-based memetic algorithms, which are the main focus of this paper. The reason for this is that agent-based computing systems proved to be versatile as an optimization technique being especially efficient for the problems with complex fitness functions. The obtained experimental results encourage further application of such an approach to similar engineering problems

EXPRESS: The Improvised Language of Solidarity: Linguistic Practices in the Participatory Labour-Organizing Processes of Multi-Ethnic Migrant Workers

There are considerable language barriers facing the potential collective labour organization of multi-ethnic migrant workers. From the research literature, we know little about linguistic practices that might overcome these barriers. Based on an ethnographic study of the participatory organizing of S.I. Cobas multi-ethnic migrant workers in the Italian logistics sector, we point to three linguistic practices that help overcome language barriers-translation, lingua franca and humour. We theorize these three linguistic practices as constituting an 'improvised language of solidarity'. We argue that an improvised language of solidarity develops from, and can significantly support, participatory organizing

The consumption of work: Representations and interpretations of the meaning of work at a UK university

This paper focuses on representations of the nexus of work, meaning and consumption as experienced by university students. We develop an empirically based argument that the meaning of work is being constructed as an object of consumption on a British university campus. We suggest that this indicates two key changes in representations of the meaning of work. First, there is a significant shift in the social construction of orientations to work towards what we term ‘consumption of work’. Second, we argue that this new social construction is made up of three dimensions: consumption of an idealised image of work, consumption through specific work processes and consumption of self-development opportunities at work. We conclude by suggesting ways in which this argument could be researched further

Hearing music in service interactions: a theoretical and empirical analysis

There is an extensive literature concerned with the impact of music on customers. However, no study has examined its effects on service workers and their interactions with customers. Drawing together literatures on service work and music in everyday life, the article develops a theoretical framework for exploring the role of music in service exchanges. Two central factors are identified – how workers hear, and respond, to the music soundscape, and their relations with customers, given these have the potential to be both alienating and positive to the point of meaningful social interaction. From these, a 2×2 matrix is constructed, comprising four potential scenarios. The authors argue for the likely importance of music’s role as a bridge for sociality between worker and customer. The article considers this theorising by drawing upon interviews with 60 retail and café workers in UK chains and independents, and free text comments collected through a survey of workers in a large service retailer. The findings show broad support for music acting as a bridge for sociality. Service workers appropriate music for their own purposes and many use this to provide texture and substance to social interactions with customers

How Institutional Logics Inform Emotional Labour: An Ethnography of Junior Doctors

Sociological analysis of emotional labour can be aided by considering how institutional logics inform the performance of emotional labour. We consider the link between institutional logics and emotional labour by conducting an in-depth case study of junior doctors in a large UK hospital. We point to three key institutional logics-bureaucratic, consumerist, and professional logics-and show how they inform the emotional labour of junior doctors. We also consider how doctors respond to these logics through enactment processes of choice, resistance, and negotiation. In this way, we make an important theoretical contribution by identifying the way that institutional logics relate to the performance of emotional labour. We also make an important empirical contribution by contributing to a growing body of ethnographies on the emotional labour of doctors

Adapting a Constituency Parser to User-Generated Content in Polish Opinion Mining

The paper focuses on the adjustment of NLP tools for Polish; e.g., morphological analyzers and parsers, to user-generated content (UGC). The authors discuss two rule-based techniques applied to improve their efficiency: pre-processing (text normalization) and parser adaptation (modified segmentation and parsing rules). A new solution to handle OOVs based on inflectional translation is also offered