Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance 9780801454813

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Songs of the Factory

Songs of the Factory

Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance

Marek Korczynski

ILR Press an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2014 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2014 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2014 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Korczynski, Marek, author. Songs of the factory : pop music, culture, and resistance / Marek Korczynski. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5154-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7997-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Music in the workplace—England—Midlands. 2. Popular music—Social aspects—England—Midlands. 3. Working class— England—Midlands—Social conditions. 4. Industrial sociology— England—Midlands. I. Title. ML3922.K67 2014 781.5'9309424—dc23 2014020725 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

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With love to Ursula

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1. Reach Out I’ll Be There: Pop Music, Work, and Society

1

2. Stayin’ Alive at McTells

23

3. I Got All My Sisters with Me: Music and Community

41

4. Music, Machines, and Clocks: Songs and the Senses of Alienation

67

5. You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk: Music as Aid to Work and Critique of Taylorism

93

6. Pop Songs and the Hidden Injuries (and Joys) of Class

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7. Collective Resistance on the Shop Floor

140

8. Dotted Lines on the Shop Floor: Cultural Connections with Collective Resistance

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Contents

9. Conclusion: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance

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Appendix: An Ethnography of Working and of Musicking

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

In the writing of this book, I have been inspired by wonderful books written by Betty Messenger (Picking Up the Linen Threads), Craig Werner (A Change Is Gonna Come), Joel Dinerstein (Swinging the Machine), Thomas Turino (Music as Social Life), and James Scott (Domination and the Arts of Resistance). This book leans on, and develops from, journal articles I published based on my ethnographic study at McTells. I am indebted to the insight, efficiency, and enthusiasm of the editorial director Frances Benson of ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press. It has been a pleasure to work with her, and it is a true honor for this to become my second book with ILR. Thanks to the following colleagues for offering comments on drafts of either papers or chapters: Michael Pickering, Emma Robertson, Donald Hislop, Maurizio Atzeni, Randy Hodson, Timothy Dowd, Joel Dinerstein, Vic Gammon, Carol Wolkowitz, Paul Edwards, Davide Pero, Robert Cluley, Seamus Allison, and James Mansell. Also thanks to Craig Werner for generously sharing

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his manuscript (written with Doug Bradley), “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” A huge thanks, of course, to the workers at McTells who entertained my company with good grace. Finally, above all, thanks to Ursula, for her love and for her wisdom (and for going with me to see Bergman’s Cries and Whispers—see chapter 4).

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Reach Out I’ll Be There Pop Music, Work, and Society

It’s 8.30 in the morning. The shift is just starting. Lana walks up the stairs, says hello to Anna and Evelyn as she walks past them toward her worktable. She puts her creasing rod, scissors, and marker pen down on the table and reaches out for the roll of fabric to begin her work of creasing hem-shapes at the bottom of this fabric. She leans forward to the fabric but then pauses and pulls herself back. She turns around and walks toward the radio, which is placed on a shelf against the wall, and turns it on. She is greeted by The Four Tops Reach Out I’ll Be There. She smiles, turns the volume up, and walks with a little dance step back to her work station, smiles at Shirley, and pulls the fabric toward her.

This book is written to dignify this small moment at the start of the working day in a blinds factory. It is written as an analytical celebration of the beauty, strengths, and limitations of the musically informed “Stayin’ Alive” culture that workers in this factory created. It asks, as Small (1998) enjoins us to ask when considering the playing out of music: What is going

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on here? What does it mean that this person, in this work role, in this factory, in this epoch of the structuring of work organization, turns around and turns on this particular form of broadcasting technology, to play this particular style of popular music, common to the chosen channel? What looked like the most straightforward of questions ends up being a potentially demanding and profound question. And by addressing this specific question, I hope to generate understandings that allow us wider insights about the relationship between popular music and society, and between working cultures and resistance. It is a book about music and work in a specific blinds factory, but it is also a book about the nature of popular music and the nature of working cultures, more generally. It is a book motivated by the belief that we learn most when we allow ourselves the opportunity to look for the meanings in the everyday, to look for depth when it is more common to see the superficial. And it has been common, at least among sociologists of work, to regard music playing in workplaces as the domain of the trivial. We can certainly see a casual disdain for this topic in the following quote in Pollert’s (1981, 132) otherwise exemplary ethnography of working in a cigarette factory: “Twice a day there was a reprieve from the grey sameness of a working day: Muzac . . . it was . . . keenly looked forward to: Val: It’s the best part of the day when the records come on. Stella: 12 o’clock! Jimmy Young! They missed him twice last week!” If there is condescension here from the sociologist toward music at work, there is something rather different from the workers, Val and Stella, whose words we hear. From them, we sense a deep attachment to music at work. This is music that means something to them. It becomes harder to keep to the assumption that music at work is a trivial issue when we hear the voices of industrial workers, from different time periods and in different workplaces in different countries, expressing the same depth of attachment to music. I begin this brief tour of workers’ voices regarding music by giving some of the lyrical words of William Thom (1847, 14–15), also known as the weaver poet. He outlines the souldestroying nature of work between 1814 and 1831 in a Scottish weaving factory and describes how workers there found solace in their expression of humanity though music (in this case, singing): “Let me again proclaim the debt we owe those Song Spirits, as they walked in melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted. . . . Song was the dew drops that gathered during the long dark night of despondency, and were sure to

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glitter in the very first blink of the sun. . . . We had nothing to give but a kind look and a song . . . the better features of humanity could not be utterly defaced where song and melody were permitted to exist.” Hamper (1992, xvii) wrote Rivethead, an account of working in a Detroit car factory in the 1980s, and he starts with a description of music at work, from which the reader may intuit a desperate attachment of the workers to the music: “Dead Rock Stars are singin’ for me and the boys on the Rivet Line tonight. Hendrix, Morrison. Zeppelin. The Dead Rock Stars’ catalogue churnin’ outta Hogjaw’s homemade boom box. . . . Tonight and every night they bawl. . . . We’ve come back once again to tussle with our parts and to hear the Dead Rock Stars harmonize above the industrial din.” The words of Tricia, who worked at the blinds factory studied in this book, end this short tour: “That bloody thing [the radio] keeps me alive; that’s why it’s glued up there. Nobody’s going to take it away from me.” The words used by workers given here have become less florid and more condensed, but the overall message has remained remarkably consistent. For these workers, music at work has real, and often deeply intense, meaning. We can sense some of the value of music at work, even when music is absent. This observation comes from an ethnography of an assembly-line plant in which there is no music playing: “The monotony of the line was almost unbearable. . . . It was not unusual to look up or down the line and see workers at various stations singing to themselves, tapping their feet to imaginary music” (Thompson 1983, 225). Here is a reflection on the absence of music at work by an African American mechanic whose radio has been taken away by his boss: “They allowed us to have radios. We’d put us on some music, and we’d step through any project that we had on the job. They took the music away and it was just like putting us out on the field again, you know” (Crafts, Cavicchi, and Keil 1993, 175). Lemert and Willis have argued, appositely, that the subtle everyday activities of people are often freighted with great meaning and wisdom. Lemert (2005, 3) has written that people should be regarded as “everyday sociologists” for the way they exhibit “this quality of human resilience, this competence that sustains and enriches human life, even against the odds.” Willis (2000, 3) regards people as “everyday artists” who enact “art as a living, not textual thing and as inherently social and democratic. Art as an elegant and compressed practice of meaning-making is a defining and irreducible quality at the heart of everyday human practices and interactions.”

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If we agree with Lemert and Willis, if we see the value in exploring how people enact “working philosophies” in their everyday lives and how they bring “spontaneous wisdom . . . to bear upon the concrete problem of living” (Cohen and Taylor 1992, 31), then we cannot keep ignoring the attachment of industrial workers to music. Even if a song appears to us as banal, it is not necessarily the song itself that is important but the way it is heard and used by workers as everyday artists. Leonard Cohen expresses this with typical poetic clarity: There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes. People are getting through the day, with songs we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song. (quoted in Zollo 2003, 331)

Until now there has been no ethnographic study of music in the workplace. There have been some notable historical studies of workers’ use of music. Most famously, there are the studies of the role of music in the labor of African American slaves and convicts (Epstein 1977; Abrahams 1992; Jackson 1999). There are some important insights into the musical cultures at work in preindustrial occupations (Hugill 1961; Campbell and Collinson 1969; Porter 1992), but studies become rare when the setting is the industrialized workplace (Morgan 1975; Messenger 1980; Jones 2005). There are quite a range of industrial psychological studies of the impact on music in factories on output variables such as production and tiredness (see Oldham et al. 1995), but this scholarship does not so much dignify the attachment of workers to music as instrumentalize this attachment. These studies certainly do not seek to open up the “black box” of the meanings of music to workers, and of the social practices around music that they have adopted. With colleagues (Korczynski, Pickering, and Robertson 2013), I have written an overview of the social history of music in British workplaces, covering the journey from preindustrial occupations to the introduction of broadcast music into factories in the middle of the twentieth century. That overview followed the thread of music in the workplace

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against the dimensions of fancy (i.e., scope for the imagination and play) and function, voice, and community. It showed that while singing at work for many preindustrial occupations involved a strong intermingling of the playful with the functional (e.g., coordinating labor), industrial workers turned to broadcast more for survival than for play. For many preindustrial workers, singing was a crucial mode of raising their voice in terms of airing interests and grievances. By contrast, industrial workers tended to have extremely limited scope for using broadcast pop music as a mode for the raising of their voice. The strongest continuity between preindustrial work and contemporary industrial work is in the way music has been crucial for workers in both periods to express and create community at work. These insights are chiseled from oral histories and scattered written accounts. What has remained missing is an ethnography that can access the subterranean and embodied meanings and practices that are likely to be crucial for understanding the deep fabric of music at work but that are elusive to other modes of research. Ethnography is a well-suited method for examining how people see, hear, know, and experience their social world, particularly when people’s knowledge of their social world is tacit rather than explicit in nature. Explicit knowledge, or discursive knowledge (Lemert 2005), is knowledge that people know they have and that they are able to articulate verbally. Tacit knowledge, or practical or embodied knowledge, is knowledge that people have within them and that they may express through their actions but that they are not able to explicitly articulate. Much research privileges explicit discursive knowledge. But as Bendix (2000, 1) argues, this privileging of the explicit word can be impoverishing: “The nineteenth century’s unreflected preference for writing and print as media of learning and communicating knowledge almost automatically impoverished our understanding of the sensory and sensual totality of experience.” Cultures are often seen as holding tacit knowledge. Willis (1977, 125) puts the case for examining the embodied knowledge of cultures in this way: “The cultural forms may not say what they know, nor know what they say, but they mean what they do.” Many research methods are able to examine people’s explicit knowledge, but ethnography is particularly suited to unearthing people’s tacit knowledge. Musical knowledge is often tacit knowledge: music may be able to speak to us and for us in ways

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that other forms of communication cannot. Given that musical cultures are likely to be rich in tacit knowledge, this means that ethnography becomes the best way to find out “what is going on here.” 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).

Popular Music and Contemporary Society Understanding the meaning of popular music in the factory can help develop our knowledge about the nature of the use and role of popular music in contemporary advanced capitalism. At present, there are two rather well-established schools that offer differing interpretations of the role of popular music in society—one that emphasizes the role of popular music in upholding the social order and one that emphasizes the resistive and

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emancipatory in popular music. The writings of Adorno, a key member of the Frankfurt school of critical social theory, are the focal point for the literature indicting popular music’s essence as conservative. Adorno (1976, 270) argued that popular music primarily operates as a tool for social control, creating “one-dimensional,” passive, uncritical listeners: “Music for entertainment . . . seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.” Adorno and Attali (1977, 111) argued that popular music takes the place of real sociality between people, leaving behind a sham of false fraternization. Adorno’s work has been widely criticized as overly pessimistic, with the pessimism seen as emanating from his emphasis on abstract structuring forces of capitalism and his neglect of the agency of those who receive popular music (e.g., Middleton 1990). DeNora (2003) argues that it is perhaps too easy to dismiss Adorno on this basis. She argues for a more nuanced approach in which Adorno’s abstractions can be assessed by grounding them in more concrete empirical settings, given that “music acts . . . only in concert with the material, cultural and social environments in which it is located” (156). It may be that in the factory the scope for critique offered by popular music to workers is so small that the worker-listener becomes as “unfree” as Adorno assumes the listener to be (Middleton 1990, 57). The factory may be the setting in which some of Adorno’s claims about music as a medium of social control can be redeemed. For instance, Adorno (1941, 1976) argued that popular music is essentially standardized in form—in the same way that industrial production is standardized. Adorno’s ideas about congruence between repetitive labor and repetitive music suggest that in the factory popular music may help lubricate the functioning of the labor process. Indeed, scholars within this tradition can point to industrial psychological research that has shown that in repetitive low-skilled work, the productivity of workers tends to increase slightly if music is played in the workplace (Oldham et al. 1995). An alternative tradition highlights the potential for music to be used as a resistive cultural resource. Particularly important here is the tradition of British cultural studies. Within this tradition, there have been a number of studies that have shown how relatively powerless groups have appropriated forms of popular music to reinforce and articulate a sense of resistance. For instance, Hall and Jefferson (1975) argued that many forms

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of music consumption by young people represent a class-conscious form of rebelliousness or “resistance through rituals.” Research in this tradition has also developed in North America. Rupp and Taylor (2003, 217–18), for instance, show how drag queens “appropriate mainstream popular music that has one set of meanings, drawing upon hegemonic and counterhegemonic gender and sexual symbols to inflect these songs with new meaning.” Space for such appropriation of forms of popular music is suggested by active-audience theory (Negus 1996), in which the value of music lies in what it sets in motion for listeners rather than what it is as an artifact (Buchanan 1997). The rich polysemic nature of music opens space for listeners to frame new, and potentially resistive, meanings around popular songs, almost regardless of any socially conservative origins it may have. Whereas the Adorno approach posits popular music as creating false sociality, there is a strong tradition in sociomusicology that highlights the role of music in creating community. Notably, Eyerman and Jamison (1998) have shown how a range of social movements of protest have drawn on music to build and sustain collective identities. Roscigno and Danaher‘s (2004) study of the role of music during the wave of labor activism in the Southern textile industry in the 1920s and 1930s offers similar conclusions. More generally, McNeil (1995) and Turino (2008) have argued that music has played a key role in different historical periods in creating and sustaining a sense of the collective. Turino, in particular, gives an in-depth sense of the social bonding that occurs through the process of participatory dance practices. These are all important studies, but it can be countered that the community that music has helped to create has articulated with musical forms outside of the mainstream popular song. Ehrenreich’s (2006) fine overview of the history of collective joy is important, therefore, for it highlights the strong, empowering, collective sense that young women created together in their sustained euphoria over the Beatles—notably, during their early “pop” period. Ehrenreich is clear that such a collective sense was resistive to the strong prevailing norms constraining the female body. This rich literature shows the potential for popular music to be heard and used in emancipatory and resistive ways. But potential does not mean inevitable, or even usual. As Grossberg (1992, 2) notes: “To argue that people are often ‘empowered’ by their relations to popular culture, that . . . such empowerment sometimes enables people to resist their subordination is not the same as arguing that all of our relations to popular culture

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constitute acts of resistance, or that such relations are, by themselves, sufficient bases for an oppositional politics.” This suggests the importance of seeing how music is heard and used in specific contexts. One important critique of the debate between those who emphasize popular music as implicated in modes of social control and those who see it as a resistive resource is that it has been undertaken in too absolutist a manner. We can see the turn toward studying music “in everyday life” as in large part driven by the desire to move beyond the increasingly hollow absolutes of the debate. One of the key things to take from DeNora’s (2000) groundbreaking study of the minutiae of music use in Music in Everyday Life is the idea that people’s sense and use of music is intimately tied to their understandings of specific social contexts. At the same time, it is necessary to move beyond the agenda of music in everyday life. While the ethnomusicological impulse behind this approach is to be welcomed, there remains a lack of analytical edge in the key category of “everyday life.” As sociologists have labored for many decades to highlight, our everyday lives are made up of a number of social arenas that each have their own distinct pattern of social relations. Work is one of the most important of these. As an important step in moving the theorizing of music forward, we can seek to conceptualize how people use music in the specific structures of their working lives. As noted, we know too little about what is going on in that small moment when Lana paused to turn on the radio. This is not a trivial gap in our knowledge, for as I and my colleagues (2013) have shown, the relaying of popular music to workers in industrial contexts has been extremely common in advanced Western economies since the middle of the twentieth century. Contextualizing the study of how popular music is heard is one way of moving forward our understandings of popular music. We also need to move the debate beyond the dichotomous view of popular as either simply “with” or “against” the social order. We need a way of hearing both the with and the against in popular music. We require an understanding of the dialectics of the use of popular music. A dialectical approach sensitizes us to see within one social practice both a thesis and an antithesis, both a proposition and its negation. An approach to analyzing the dialectics of the uses of popular music foregrounds the way in which people hear and use popular music in ways that are simultaneously both with the social order and against the social order. Indeed, if we appreciate that music has different layers of text, there is greater space for understanding how there may be both a “with” and

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an “against” in musicking with popular music. Turino (2008, 108) notes that songs have much greater semiotic density than the spoken word, because beyond words there are melody, rhythm, instrumentation, harmonic settings, vocal style, and sometimes even choreography, and that different layers of text can be linked with different meaning frames. This argument can be connected with Turino’s (2008) thesis that music is structured within an interplay between “the possible” and “the actual.” The “actual” refers to everyday life in which “we have our routine and act out of habit.” The “possible” refers to “those things we might be able to do, hope, think, know and experience” (16–17). Turino argues that one of the special qualities of the arts, and particularly of music, is that they allow us to feel the dynamic interplay between the possible and the actual. If we see the existing social order as the actual, and the resistance to the social order as implying the possible, then it is clear that there is a great deal of compatibility between the dialectical understanding of music developed in this book and Turino’s understanding of music as located within the dynamic interplay between the actual and the possible. There are two other writers whose insightful work on popular music forms can be drawn on to help develop the idea of the dialectics of popular music being put forward here—Dinerstein and Grossberg. They are particularly useful, because they take us toward the specific context of this study—popular music practices within the rationalized alienating structures of Taylorism, or Fordism, in which jobs are structured as highly repetitive and low skilled. Dinerstein (2003) argues that 1930s swing music existed as a vamp simultaneously with and against the rationalized rhythms and structures of Fordist modernity. Swing music and its associated dances created a humanization and aestheticization of the pace and rhythms of Fordism—they incorporated the pace and strict timing of machines but also swung against them. Dinerstein argues that “big band swing made sense of factory noise, and the lindy-hop [dance] gave the opportunity to get with the noise” (6) and that “swing musicians and dancers created a genuine pop art that mediated the need for both accommodation and resistance to the technological society” (18). Such an aesthetic should be seen as distinct from the aesthetic that simply celebrated Fordist modernity (Van Delinder 2005). We can see Dinerstein’s analysis of swing as a specific example of Turino’s more abstracts ideas, in which the rational structures of Fordism are the (dominating) actual, and the humanized

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aesthetics of swing music expression are the possible. Although his analysis may come too close to suggesting a straightforward homology between music and societal form, Dinerstein’s analysis emphasizes how an interplay of the possible and the actual within musicking can be one that involves simultaneous accommodation and resistance (to a rationalized social order). Grossberg’s (1992) analysis of rock music offers another way of examining the possibilities of simultaneous with and against within contemporary musicking. On the one hand, Grossberg argues that one of the key qualities of rock music is its ability to generate “affective empowerment” that can be a key resource for generation of cultures resistive to the social order. On the other hand, he locates rock music as accommodative in that its (framing) origins are connected to the status quo of the liberal consensus. He argues that it is no accident that rock music is rarely directly linked to forms of resistive social mobilization. He argues that rock music is primarily constituted “outside of everyday life” (150). Rock music’s accent on the transcendent is such that it is barely able to articulate with everyday life, and it is everyday life that is the stuff around which resistive collective mobilizations occur. Grossberg is here moving us toward a nuanced understanding of social practices of rock music as involving a with and an against in which the gesture of the “against” tends to lack substantive meaning. Having a readiness to see the simultaneous with and against is but the starting point. The question for analysts is to see how this with and against is played out in practice in specific contexts, with an understanding of how important limits to the “against” may be embedded within the social structure of the context and the social framing of the music. It is in relation to the social practices of hearing and using contemporary popular music in monotonous social structures that I develop in this book the concept of multitonous musicking. Here, I will give a brief overview of the concept. Multitonous musicking involves a way of using music to be both with and against a monotonous social structure. It is a dialectical form of musical practice that is rooted in the context of the monotonous social structure. It is a form of musicking that allows the enactment of the social order within the monotonous while also allowing the expression of a spirit of resistance to that social order. In multitonous musicking people tend not to have a deep immersion of their senses in music. Rather, music is used as a way of preventing the senses from being dominated by the monotonous.

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Multitonous musicking accents nonrepetitive cultural practices as a critical response to structural repetition within the monotonous. It also opens up space for the adoption of more “agentic” rather than structured movements within the monotonous setting. Agentic movements are those that involve excess or surplus movement of the body, often enacted in a nonrepetitive way. Structured movements involve no such excess movement and tend to be robotically, repetitively enacted. A swagger is a typical example of an agentic movement. Further, multitonous musicking involves people reappropriating lyrics in pop songs (often in choruses) to express critical understandings of the monotonous social setting. Although this book spends some time examining the collective form of multitonous musicking that was played out on the floor of the factory that I studied, I do not see the collective element as a necessary part of multitonous musicking. Multitonous musicking is likely to be most intense when the setting is not only monotonous but also alienating. Further, it will grow in intensity the longer that people spend time in that setting. Given that Taylorized workplaces are not only monotonous but also alienating, and given that working hours are long, multitonous musicking is likely to be at its most intense within Taylorized workplaces. Although, multitonous musicking will be at its most intense in Taylorized factories, the concept of the multitonous can have resonance in any social order that is perceived as monotonous. Advanced capitalist societies have many rationalized structures that can generate perceptions of monotony. The Taylorized workplace is the most important and easy to identify, but there are others in which the multitonous is played out—as I will argue in the concluding chapter.

Shop Floor Cultures and Resistance The study of pop music in a factory is also relevant to important questions within the field of industrial sociology. Specifically, an understanding of how pop music is heard and used in a factory as part of a deep-textured understanding of shop floor culture can also help us better understand the nature and dynamics of workplace resistance. There have been enough ethnographies of workplaces to allow scholars to draw up maps of the main patterns of workplace conflict and to point to key factors underpinning the main patterns identified. Particularly notable here is the writing

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of Edwards, Belanager, and Wright (Edwards. Belanger, and Wright 2006; Belanger and Edwards 2007) as well as Hodson and Roscigno (Hodson 2001; Roscigno and Hodson 2004). Both of these approaches to the analysis of the material factors that structure forms of workplace cooperation and conflict represent important steps forward—and I look at this scholarship in more detail in chapter 8. At the same time, the focus on the “structuring” factors leaves large unanswered questions regarding the role of agency of the actors within these structures. Hodson (2001, 266) acknowledges that the agency of workers remains insufficiently explored: “Workers’ contributions are realized through both their individual and collective activities. The analysis of workers’ practical autonomy, its varieties, and its antecedents and consequences is a vast, little explored, and yet centrally important concern for a fully developed sociology of work.” There is a clear analogy here with the development of the literature on social movements (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tilly 2003). The first wave of social movement writing focused on the structures of political opportunities that opened space for social movements to emerge. This analysis was acknowledged as an important contribution, but critics subsequently argued that this approach tended to marginalize the agency of the actors involved. As Jasper (2010) put it bluntly, “there was no theory of action” (966) with its focus on macrostructuring factors. On the back of this critique, within the study of social movements “the intellectual pendulum has swung away from the great structural and historical paradigms and back toward creativity and agency, culture and meaning, emotion and morality” (970). Within this there is an understanding of the importance of seeing political agency develop out of everyday lived cultures of actors. The analysis of patterns of workplace cooperation and resistance can also be strengthened by taking a similar turn toward extending the analysis of material structuring factors to also examine the everyday lived culture of actors and the link of this to agency. Such a turn is particularly important within the current moment of political economy in which strong union representation at the workplace level is increasingly rare in many major economies. When the union has not been taken to be the mode of agency for resistance, the alternative main focus, within industrial sociology, has been the work group. Indeed, perhaps one of the strongest contributions of industrial sociology (ethnographies) has been the way that acts of resistance, such as output restrictions,

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have been described and understood as outcomes of work group norms and behaviors (e.g., Lupton 1963). Notably, this literature has served to correct the assumption that work group activity in limiting production was irrational, for it showed how this behavior often had an underlying rational economic logic (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999). Overall, however, these studies have done surprisingly little to address the issue of agency, for with their understanding of the economic factors underpinning action, they effectively position themselves as focusing on the material structuring factors of resistance (albeit, at a lower level of abstraction, the work group level). Unfortunately, with their strong focus on showing the patterns of workplace resistance enacted by work groups, these studies have tended not to analyze the microcultural activities of workers and work groups. Even where attention has been paid to both elements—microcultural practices and acts of resistance—it has been rare for scholars to look for links between them. Donald Roy’s famous studies are a case in point. Based on ethnographic research within a factory, Roy wrote two notable studies— “Efficiency and ‘the Fix’ ” (1954) focused on the work group’s economically rational limiting of output and “Banana Time” (1958) focused on the minutiae of cultural practices of a small work group. Both studies are important, but what Roy did not attempt was to try to understand the potential linkages between microcultural practices and the playing out of output restrictions. Roy’s became the established way of studying the workplace, with a separation between those studying contours of control and resistance (e.g., Lupton 1963; Edwards and Scullion 1982) and those studying forms of cultural practices, most notably humor (e.g., Linstead 1985). There have been only a small number of studies which have sought to look for connections between microcultural practices and resistance. Both Pollert (1981) and Purcell (1982) argued that forms of gendered cultural practices of women workers tended to limit their ability to enact certain forms of resistance. Purcell, for instance, suggested that, in the workplace she studied, women’s cultural practices, such as astrology, fortune-telling, and superstitions, tended to have a flavor of fatalism, which meant that they tended to accept rather than challenge workplace structures of domination. Collinson (1992) also looked at gendered cultural practices in terms of a masculine culture of joking and argued that this culture had an important resistive edge in terms of undermining management authority and

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creating an overall “resistance through distance.” (53) At the same time, however, these workers used humor to control other workers who were seen as not working hard enough under the collective-bonus scheme. Further support for investigating the links between cultural practices and resistance comes from a parallel literature that has investigated the cultural activities linked to the trade union and labor movement (Reuss and Reuss 2000; Hall 2001; Roscigno and Danaher 2004). These cultural activities, such as music and art, are implicitly seen as sustaining the overall resistive project of the labor movement. Indeed, Roscigno and Danaher (2004) examine how the type of music textile workers listened to in the southern United States in the 1920s and 1930s influenced the likelihood of the workers taking part in strike action. If cultural activity is seen as important at this level, should not we also be focused on examining the microcultural practices enacted within the workplace and their link to forms of resistance? Willis certainly thinks so, for he wrote that on the shop floor, workers “thread through the dead experience of work a living culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat” (1977, 52). His classic book, Learning to Labour, from which this quote is taken, is primarily a study of cultural practices around school, but he does offer a parenthesis in this book in which he follows this culture onto the factory floor (52–56). Intriguingly, he sketches some elements of a vibrant, living culture that is heavily based on joking and then immediately discusses forms of resistance, such as output restrictions and “fiddling,” which are also enacted on the shop floor. Implicitly, Willis seeks to connect the cultural activity of the factory workers and their acts of resistance. But because the factory floor was not the main site of his ethnographic research, this remains an implicit idea within a sketch—a sketch that requires sustained ethnographic research on the shop floor for it to be developed into a picture. A final, but important, connection between culture and social action (including resistance) is suggested in DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life (2000). A key argument that DeNora puts forward is that individuals use music as a facilitator of agency, such that music should be seen as affecting not just individual behavior but also social ordering at the collective level. For DeNora, the aesthetics of music should be seen, and studied, as a potential springboard for social action. If the social action being examined is collective resistance, the implications of DeNora’s argument is that we should not assume music to be a peripheral presence,

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but we should consider that it may play a key role in the processes of agency leading to the resistance. In examining the links between cultural activity within the workplace and acts of resistance, I need to make three points of clarification and development. First, in analyzing the nature of cultural activity, I will examine it in terms of whether it expresses or embodies a spirit of resistance. Whereas acts of resistance involve workers acting in ways that are counter to the dominant actor’s or dominant logic’s aims, the spirit of resistance refers to workers holding or expressing values or meanings that are counter to those of the dominant actor or dominant logic. Note that the difference between acts of resistance and the spirit of resistance is not around actions per se. For it may be that one of the ways that a spirit of resistance is expressed is through actions holding embodied meaning. Rather, the difference is the effect of the actions. Acts of resistance adversely affect the aims of the dominant actor (usually management) or the dominant logic, whereas workers holding a spirit of resistance do not adversely affect these aims. Thus, actions that have an embodied resistive meaning but that do not counter the aims of management should be understood not as acts of resistance but as actions expressing a spirit of resistance. The importance of considering the spirit of resistance is present in a number of important strands of literature. Scott, for instance, when he writes of the importance of social scientists properly considering symbolic resistance within the hidden transcripts of the weak is focusing on the same idea. In his seminal Domination and Arts of Resistance (1990) he emphasizes that scholars must move away from a simple focus on acts of resistance to also consider the ways the weak communicate with one another, creating value systems and meanings counter to the dominant, and that this “infrapolitics of subordinate groups . . . provides much of the cultural and structural underpinning of the more visible political action on which our attention has generally been focused” (184). Thus, acts of resistance, he argues, often need a spirit of resistance to underpin them. Similarly, cultural studies writers, when they have analyzed what they have understood as resistive cultures of subordinate groups, often focus not so much on the actions of these groups as harming the aims of the dominant but rather on the cultures as expressing values and meanings that run counter to those of the dominant. Musical culture is a good example. When Abrahams (1992) argues that the musical culture of African American slaves was resistive

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in nature, this is a claim about the spirit of resistance expressed within this musical culture, rather the participants using music in actions that directly disrupted the aims of the dominant. Among studies of workplace resistance, the prime focus has been on acts of resistance, and the space for examining resistive meanings and values rather than actions continues to be littered with some unnecessary and unfortunate baggage. Such baggage involves belittling hidden transcripts that express resistive meanings as “decaf” resistance that is not comparable to “real” acts of resistance (Contu 2008, 369). Of course, the spirit of resistance and acts of resistance are different from each other and need to be distinguished, but belittling activities that contain resistive values wholly misses Scott’s point that such resistive meanings and values may act as the underpinning for acts of resistance. Another form of baggage is that the workplace studies that do take resistive meanings seriously tend to focus on people’s identities. The primary problem with this approach is that it involves methodological individualism. By focusing on the individual’s identity, the resonance and meaning of socially created, potentially resistive lived cultures are marginalized, if not completely lost. If we are interested in examining agency that informs acts of resistance, then socially created and expressed meanings are crucial—as Hodson (2001, 267) puts it: “Definition of appropriate directions and levels of effort are . . . essentially collective in nature. An adequate model of worker agency will have to rely more on emergent collective meanings and behaviors than on free-floating individual attitudes.” The second important way that the traditional literature on workplace resistance needs to be extended is through a consideration of the multiple levels at which resistance (whether spirit or actions) may be directed. The default approach of industrial sociologists has been to see worker resistance as actions that disrupt the aims of management or the employer. The focus is on actions that disrupt the aims of the immediate structuring dominant actor. Edwards (1986) put forward a more nuanced approach in terms of considering resistance vis-à-vis different levels at which management control operated. But a more radical approach than this is required. Such an approach is implicitly suggested in the literature on “institutional logics” (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). A core idea of the institutional logics approach is that actors are often located in social locations involving multiple institutional logics, for example, the family, religion,

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state, market, profession, and corporation. A given social situation is often a nesting of multiple social orders. Thus, a workplace may be thought of as nested within multiple institutional logics—not only a logic of capital accumulation but also a logic of patriarchy and a logic of rationalization, for instance. The implication of this understanding of the texture of workplace resistance is to see that resistance may be directed at the immediate management/employer and/or it may be directed at a key institutional logic that is commonly manifest within workplaces. This broadens and enriches our understanding of workplace resistance. It allows us to see the nature of worker actions with considerably greater clarity. This approach allows us to see, for instance, that a piece of action may disrupt an institutional logic but that this may not necessarily disrupt the immediate aims of the employer. Here, we can say that resistance is played at the specific institutional logic level but not at the level of the particular employer. Indeed, such a scenario may often inform the important set of relations that have been known as an “indulgency” pattern of relations. The term was originally coined by Gouldner (1954) in a classic book about a gypsum mine in the United States. It has come to be used to refer to ways in which management allows informal patterns of behavior to exist that, although not strictly aligned to the systems of rules, are not seen as harming performance. In Gouldner’s original study, the indulgency pattern primarily involved worker actions that were resistive, not at the level of the immediate employer but at the level of the institutional logic, or social order, of rationalization. This nuanced understanding allows us to see that if the market or the financial context changes in a way so as to push the immediate management to embrace rationalization more tightly, then the same set of actions by the workforce will operate as resistance to both the immediate employer and to the social order of rationalization. Another important example of worker resistance to the logic of rationalization that did not constitute resistance to the immediate employer occurred within the “gang system” of production that operated in some engineering plants in Britain in decades after the Second World War (Friedman 1977). Here, management ceded organization of production to the workforce, organized as “gangs,” and these gangs tended to organize work in ways that differed significantly from the logic of rationalization. These two points—the widening of the focus to include a consideration of the spirit of resistance as well as the acts of resistance and the

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development of a consideration of the different levels at which resistance operates—are likely to be particularly important for consideration of the role of culture in workplace resistance. It will allow us to analyze cultures not in the narrow sense of whether they directly constitute acts of resistance, which they are unlikely to do except in relatively narrow cases such as workplace rituals and carnivalesque playing out of humor that can be seen as also reducing work effort. It will allow us to see cultures that may be at least partly resistive even if they do not constitute acts of resistance— for cultures may hold and express a spirit of resistance (that may operate at a number of levels). This extension of the focus to examine the spirit of resistance and the different levels at which resistance might operate does not mean that I want to throw out consideration of acts of resistance that are directed at the immediate employer. Rather, the extensions allow a more nuanced consideration of how cultures may connect to acts of resistance. The third and final extension to the analysis of workplace resistance, then, is a call for an enquiry into the dotted lines between culture and acts of resistance. The lines connecting culture and acts of resistance are unlikely to be straight and clearly defined, for, as Grossberg (1992, 20) has persuasively argued, “understanding the articulation of culture and politics is a project that is always just beyond our reach.” Cultural activities very rarely directly and unambiguously inform political activity. For Stuart Hall (1992, 280), this is a “necessary displacement of culture,” for “there is something about culture . . . which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it directly and immediately with other structures.” It is little surprise, therefore, that Street, Hague, and Savigny’s (2008, 275) review concludes that existing studies “have established only a weak connection between music and public action.” If we are to think of lines running between cultural practices and acts of resistance, then we should see these lines as dotted ones. We should understand that there are spaces between the dots, and our attempts to conceptualize the links between cultural practices and acts of resistance should pay as much attention to these spaces as to the dots of the line. Many traditional industrial sociologists may consider the study of musical cultural practices within a workplace as trivial compared with a proper focus of enquiry on acts of resistance. However, it may be that a microfocus on cultural practices may lead to a richer and more nuanced understanding of workplace resistance and,

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particularly in the absence of strong workplace unions, the processes of agency underpinning it.

Overview The main body of the book has three sections. The first section, chapter 2, sets the scene and deepens the questions developed in this opening chapter. It gives salient features of McTells, the firm in which this ethnography is situated, and the company’s product-market strategy before detailing McTells management’s overall approach to labor and music. The chapter also sketches the characteristics and background of the workers and outlines their overall feelings of alienation toward the work and antagonism toward the firm. The chapter features the first of four “side steps” in the book. Side steps are where I move away from the flow of the narrative to render a deeper exploration of a key element that has been touched on in the narrative. The chapter’s side step on the film Saturday Night Fever draws a picture of how pop music is structured as primarily antithetical to work. This picture allows me to further contextualize, and in the process to deepen, the questions driving this book. The second section, comprising chapters 3 through 6, details the textures and the processes of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, with a primary focus on the significant musicking elements of this culture. Chapter 3 draws out how workers’ use of pop music was entwined with the creation of community on the shop floor. Workers needed to connect with one another to stop their senses being dominated by alienation, and they often used music to connect with one another. Chapter 4 turns to examine how workers heard and used music in relation to their sensing of alienation. Music was important for workers because it helped them fight against the sounds of alienation and to fight against the experience of the passing of slow, alienated time. The chapter also examines the fragility of music as a resource in this battle. Chapter 5’s primary focus is on how music was important for workers in terms of how they moved their bodies as they enacted the labor process. It afforded them the opportunity to enact the movements of work less in the structured alienated way of Chaplin in Modern Times and more in the swaggering agentic way of John Travolta’s walk in the opening

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scene of Saturday Night Fever. Workers at McTells used the song and also the joke, both central to the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, to enact production even as they expressed a critique of the way it was structured. Chapter 6 examines the form of musical knowledge of the workplace held within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. It accesses this knowledge by analyzing the responses, given with energy, enthusiasm, and feeling, by workers to a simple question that I asked: “Is there a piece of music that speaks to you in any way about your working life at McTells?” The chapter gives a Top 10 rundown of the types of songs nominated by the workers at McTells. It shows that workers were able to appropriate Top 40 songs of heartbreak and hear them as articulating some of the hidden injuries (and joys) of class. The third section of the book, given in chapters 7 and 8, examines the informal collective resistance at McTells, and the material and cultural underpinnings of these acts of resistance. Chapter 7 is concerned with outlining the extent and forms of the informal collective resistance. Although workers were not unionized, primarily due to management hostility to unions, workers enacted an extensive range of forms of collective resistance. If chapters 3 to 6 are primarily of interest to musicologists, and if chapter 7 is primarily of interest to industrial sociologists, chapter 8 is where, I hope, both sets of academics can meet in seeing the importance and relevance of both types of work. Chapter 8 first examines the material structuring of the informal collective resistance against the established industrial sociology literature before turning to see how we can understand worker agency better by understanding the connections between lived culture and resistance. The chapter outlines how crucial elements within the musicking “Stayin’ Alive” culture at McTells served, in a “dotted line” kind of way, to support the agency of workers in enacting the resistance. The concluding chapter returns to the main themes identified in this introductory chapter and reflects on what has been learned with regard to them from this ethnography of working and musicking. It shows key patterns of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture that can be drawn out into the concept of multitonous musicking, and it points to the resonance of this concept for understanding musicking in other settings experienced as monotonous. It also suggests that some of the important dotted lines between shop floor culture and acts of resistance found at McTells are likely to have

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significance for other workplaces. In the story of shop floor culture, pop music, and resistance in a blinds factory in the middle of England, there are also important stories about the meaning and role of pop music in contemporary society and about cultural practices and resistance in contemporary workplaces.

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Stayin’ Alive at McTells

In the introductory chapter, I argued that we needed a grounded sense of context to be able to properly understand musical cultures. The aim of this chapter is to give exactly this sense of context. It is a scene-setting chapter in which I outline, first, the nature of McTells, the blinds firm. Next, I turn to give an overview of the people who worked at McTells, of the way in which they regarded their jobs, and of the nature of the “Stayin’ Alive” shop floor culture they created and in which their musical culture was nested. There are also two side steps in this chapter. The first focuses on the social history of the radio in the workplace, and the second examines the film Saturday Night Fever in which I see an important way of theorizing the relationship between pop music and work. This second side step develops the theoretical discussion begun in chapter 1.

McTells, the Social Order of Taylorism, and Music Policies McTells is a pseudonym for a blinds manufacturing and fitting firm, located in the Midlands region of England. As a condition of being granted

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research access, I agreed to keep the firm anonymous. I initially chose to call it McTells simply because in the process of thinking of a name, my mind connected the keywords “blinds” and “music” and came to rest on the wonderful Bob Dylan song “Blind Willie McTell.” I held to this name because the key refrain in this aching song (Gray 2002)—“Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell”—kept reverberating within my mind, asking me to keep probing deeper into the shop floor culture to where I supposed (and the song seemed to suggest) the deepest blues lay. Although my search for these deepest blues proved to be a misguided one (as will become clear), at least the desire to keep probing deeper was, I hope, an honorable one. It is the process of questioning that I want to obliquely reference through the use of the name McTells. McTells employed 170 people in manual production, working in four product-specific workrooms—vertical blinds, roller blinds, soft furnishing, and pleated blinds. My research was undertaken in the two largest workrooms—those manufacturing “verticals” and “rollers.” McTells manufactured customized made-to-measure window blinds. It aimed to give a quick four-day turnaround from when a specific customer order was relayed to the firm. The size of customer orders could vary considerably between products, so management sought flexibility to allow a quick shifting of staff between workrooms as required. Its competitive strategy was centered on delivering quick low-cost blinds. It was exposed to a high degree of product-market variability in two senses. First, because production involved working on specific customer orders, there could be no buffer between demand and production. Second, a key generator of demand was the activity of agents in the field who sought individual customers and measured and installed the blinds. McTells did not directly employ these agents. Rather, they were self-employed. This meant that the activities of these agents, and hence the flow of demand, could not be easily controlled by McTells. McTells’s overall competitive strategy informed the way in which work was organized. As mentioned in chapter 1, Frederick Taylor developed a system of organizing work in which conception and execution were separated. Conception was to be held by management, and workers were simply to execute. Further, workers’ jobs were designed with the central motif of repetition: jobs should have a narrow task range, be low in complexity, and be easy to measure and monitor. These are the central principles of a

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Taylorist system of work organization. In many advanced economies, from the 1920s onward, Taylorism became a key logic underpinning the design of jobs for many working-class people (Hodson and Sullivan 2001; Watson 2003). At McTells, the presence of a Taylorist logic was clear. The manufacturing of the blinds was broken down into a number of narrow discrete tasks, and people’s jobs involved the repetition of one particular task (albeit with variations in parts of the substance of the task according to different customer orders—e.g., cutting different sizes of fabric). So, for instance, there were eleven job types in the manufacturing of roller blinds—rod cutting, fabric fetching, fabric cutting, hem folding, hem stitching, hem shaping, braiding, sticking, finishing, testing, and packing. Unlike many Taylorized jobs, these jobs were not closely driven by automated technology as in an assembly-line form of production. Rather, they primarily involved a hand-driven form of bench assembly, in which batches of the partly finished blinds were passed on to workers in the next stage of the production process. Each worker had a narrow range of low-skilled tasks to repeat, and their accomplishment was easily measured and monitored with target quotas of production set per hour for each job type. Supervisors monitored the amount of production by checking on each worker’s output against the targets. Workers were reprimanded and disciplined if their productivity fell below target levels. Taylorism is a form of social order in which there is a hierarchical imposition of a logic of rationalization. This idea of Taylorism as a form of social order relates back to the discussion in the opening chapter, in which I argued that forms of resistance need to be considered as relating to various layers of social reality. We can think of social reality at different levels of abstraction: at the most macro, we can talk of a capitalist logic, and at the most micro, we can talk of matters at the interactive level, where, for instance, intergenerational issues may become relevant. This idea of Taylorism as a form of social order is positioned at a high-level of abstraction, a level below where we can talk about a capitalist logic. Indeed, it is useful to think of Taylorism as one of the key forms of social order within developed capitalist societies. The logic of the Taylorist social order was a central element in the social reality of the factory floor at McTells. A Taylorist social order has implications, but not determinate ones, for the forms of wage and employment-relations policies pursued by specific employers. In the case of McTells, this link was followed through.

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Management had a strategy of paying low wages. They aimed to pay a small fraction above the legal national minimum wage. This was sustainable, at least in the medium term, because of the extended availability of low-skilled workers in the local labor market. The employer kept benefits low. Payment was by an hourly rate, with no opportunity for bonus earning. Some staff had worked their way up into supervisor positions, but this was the only, very limited, route of job progression within the factory. Management pursued a clear strategy of keeping unions out of the workplace. Only a handful of workers were members of a union, and the union had no representational status vis-à-vis McTells as an employer. Management had recently developed some structures linked to ideas of human resource management (Legge 2005) that allowed for a limited and controlled workforce voice to be expressed. They had set up a works council that discussed, but did not decide on, aspects of company policy, particularly with regard to employment-relations matters. Workers voted for workforce representatives who sat as their representatives on the works council. This structure pertained to the whole firm. At the lower level of productionprocess organization management had also recently initiated structures, analogous to the Japanese system of quality circles, in which workers were taken away from production to take part in meetings to discuss ways in which the system of production could be improved, from which suggestions could be taken forward to management. I refer to these meetings as work group participation meetings. Despite the fact Taylorism emphasizes structure and order, the actual organization of production at McTells was chaotic. Workers frequently experienced this primarily through unexplained and unanticipated peaks and troughs in the production demanded of them—discussed in more detail in chapter 8. The sudden swings in levels of production demand meant that the role of supervisors in the system of control involved not just checking workers’ productivity against targets but also enforcing patterns of disciplined working when production pressures were high. I take up the importance of the disorganized nature of production for some elements of workplace relations in chapter 8. Senior management at McTells actively supported the playing of music in the factory workrooms. In the vertical blinds workroom (the verticals room), a central broadcasting system was installed. An administration office, just off the factory floor, contained the radio controls, and the radio

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audio was broadcast to the factory floor via a series of loudspeakers dispersed throughout the room. The staff in the administration office stated that it was up to the workers to choose the radio station to be played. In the roller blinds workroom (the rollers room), workers were allowed to bring in their own radios and music players. Radios were dispersed evenly throughout this workroom, so that each grouping of workers had a radio. There was no limit to the amount of time that radios could be on, and there was no policy regarding which radio station should be played. There was a formal policy proscribing the wearing of headphones. This was justified on the grounds that workers needed to be able to hear for health and safety reasons. Managers did not espouse the aim that music should make the workers more productive; nor did they try to measure any “productivity effect” of the music. Instead, management was prepared to support and accept music in the workplace, primarily because it was viewed as making the workers “happy” at small or negligible cost. We can see management’s support for music playing in the context of employment-relations policies as a form of minimal “indulgency pattern” played out in the aural sphere. As noted in chapter 1, the term “indulgency pattern” refers to ways in which management allows informal patterns of behavior to exist that, although not strictly aligned to the systems of rules, are not seen as harming performance and are seen as generating possibilities of a flexible sense of reciprocal give-and-take from the workforce. An indulgency pattern is also a useful concept because it points to the importance of agency among the workforce—it is the workers who are the active parties in creating the patterns of behavior that management tends to disregard. The playing of music at McTells also involved agency from the workforce. This agency can be seen at two levels—the historic agency of British working-class manual workers to wrest control of the loudspeaker in the factory, and the specific agency of McTells workers. Side step 2.1 examines the first, historic level. The agency of the specific McTells workers is clear in the way that they brought in their own radios in the workrooms where there was no central broadcasting system. It is clear in the report that a manager gave me when he had visited another factory site of the firm in the north of England. That site had a system to broadcast radio to the whole factory, but the system had stopped working for a few days. The manager reported that there was “uproar” among workers, and that it had become the first item to be discussed at the works council meeting.

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This agency is also evident in some shop floor interactions of workers with supervisors in which supervisors tried to limit the time spent listening to or volume of the radio, and workers acted to resist this. The agency is there also in the scene that started the book, in that moment when, at 8:30 in the morning, Lana paused, turned, and switched on the radio, at the time of her choosing, to the channel of her and her co-workers’ choosing.

Side Step 2.1. A History of Radio in the Workplace To understand the social history of the radio in the workplace in Britain, we need to understand the wider social history of music in the workplace. With colleagues, Mike Pickering and Emma Robertson, I have written a book (2013) on this topic. Prior to the industrial revolution, singing at work was common in very many important manual occupations. Then came the silencing. With only a few isolated exceptions, industrialization brought an end to singing at work, even while it was still common for people to sing and make their own music outside of the workplace. There were two main factors behind this. One was employer opposition to singing. Employers wanted to kill off preindustrial work habits that they regarded as injurious to the rationalized discipline necessary for the new industrial order. They regarded singing at work as one of these habits and thus imposed bans on singing and enforced systems of fines for singing or even whistling. In addition, the roar of industrial noise worked against singing—although this should not be overstated, because some of the isolated exceptions of singing cultures within factories involved workers collectively singing even in overbearing industrial soundscapes. This separation of music from the workplace continued with the moves to advanced industrialization with Taylorism and Ford’s assembly lines. Notably, one of the favorite maxims of Taylor and Ford was “work when you work and play when you play” (Andrew 1999, 13). The entwining of work and (musical) play was not to be countenanced. It was only during the Second World War that music came back to workplaces—this time in the form of the carefully controlled introduction of broadcast music. A significant catalyst in this was a piece of industrial psychological research conducted in 1937 by Wyatt and Langdon that found that the playing of music in a context of low-skilled repetitive work had the effect of increasing productivity and lessening workers’ boredom. This report also argued that

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to have this desired effect, a certain type of music—instrumental versions of popular dance tunes—should be played in small “doses.” (Two programs of a half-hour each per day was recommended.) Taken up by a number of bodies and broadly supported by subsequent industrial psychology research, this recommendation became the blueprint for the widespread introduction of broadcast music in the workplace on the back of the BBC radio program, Music While You Work. Within a few short years of the inception of this program in 1940, broadcast music in factories became nearly ubiquitous, with employers broadcasting the program via systems of loudspeakers. Wartime provided a supportive context—the government wanted to look for ways to both increase productivity and quickly socialize millions of women workers to the demands of the largely Taylorized jobs in munitions factories. but it is likely that broadcast music in factories would have developed without this context, albeit at a slower pace. From this carefully designed and controlled top-down introduction of broadcast music in the middle of the twentieth century, workers gradually took control of the terms of broadcast music in the workplace—the type of music played and the length of time it was played. It was clear that workers wanted more music than two half-hour doses, and over time they were able to break away from the initial limits and to choose from a range of radio stations. Morgan (1975) was able to observe workers in a British a factory in the 1960s listening to the likes of the Beatles and Dusty Springfield on the main pop music radio channel, Radio 1, continuously all day, via their own portable radios—even though this was against the formal rules that stipulated that music should be limited to two doses of the Music While You Work program. From this change from the top-down control of music, the indulgency pattern, in which workers are active agents and in which management come to see certain patterns of behavior as acceptable, is clear.

McTells Workers and Alienation The people who worked on the McTells factory floor were working-class people, who, in the main, had few or no educational qualifications, little credentialed skills training, and who survived at the low-skilled and unskilled end of the job market. This was true for Derek, who was sixty and who worked on the cutting machine in the verticals room. He used to be a janitor, but his knee had become painful and his mobility was impaired.

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“I can’t afford to get laid off, so I’ve got to put up with it,” he explained, regarding his work in McTells. Around 80 percent of the workforce was female, and 80 percent of staff worked full time. Management had no data on the overall age composition, but I estimated that in the two workrooms in which I worked, the average age was around thirty-five. For Teresa, as for a sizeable proportion of the workforce who were single mothers, working at McTells was the way they could support their children. The following excerpt (and those throughout the book) is from my field notebook. Teresa is a thirty-year-old woman. She’s got kids, and she says the job is not so bad because she’s got kids and they go to school near the factory. She also says, “But I’m leaving this place when they’re teenagers, though. Three more years and I’ll be out of here.”

Around 10 percent of the workforce were members of an ethnic minority group. Ethnic minority group membership was evenly split between Indian/Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean. Not surprisingly in a factory with low-paying Taylorized jobs and with employment-relations policies that implicitly placed them as a cost to be minimized, workers overwhelmingly experienced their jobs as alienating. The routine low-skilled jobs were seen as monotonous and demeaning; the supervisors were often regarded with contempt, some seen as little more than tyrants, and the workers felt they received little respect within the overall organization. These points echo throughout the subsequent chapters, so here I provide only a small number of typical judgments. Fran has been here for two years. “What do you think of it?” I asked. “Well, it’s a job, isn’t it? That’s about the best you can say.” I ask Ginny what she thinks of the job. “Oh, it’s boring. It’s the lack of variety. It’s just standing here doing the same thing every day: testing, testing, testing, and the wages are terrible as well.” Irene says, “Nobody cares about us, do they? It’s always the same. We’re the last people that matter.” (observation of a workgroup participation meeting)

Many workers had a vision of a way out of McTells. For some, the idea of a route by which they could leave was central to how they sustained themselves. Bill told me, “I don’t think I can stay here forever.” He

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had already started to think of ways out. He was a big wrestling fan and wanted to write a book on wrestling and promote wrestling fights. Lana was marking time, in the longer term, to her retirement and in the short term to her holiday break. “Six more years to go, hooray.” And she’s also counting down to the Spain holiday. “I’ve got five weeks and four days ’til I go on holiday to Spain—not that I’m counting. Ooh, I can’t wait.”

Tricia reflected on the role of her imagined route out: “I always think I’ll be leaving soon, but you get stuck in your ways. You’ve got your mates here, and the job’s not so bad I guess.” Given that the production manager reported that “turnover was 35 to 40 percent,” a significant proportion of people were acting on their visions of a way out of McTells. But when I spoke to the people who were on the point of leaving, the narrative I was given was not of straightforward relief but had a bittersweet quality. There was a sense of impending release and hope at leaving the material conditions of a job at McTells, but there was often some real sadness at what was being left behind. This was clear in the words of Ratula and Terri: I talked to Ratula who is leaving. She’s been here for four years and leaving tomorrow because she’s going to a better-paid job: “You’ve got obligations. Sometimes you’ve got to move on and say goodbye. It’s a bit hard, but you’ve got to move on.” I talked with Terri, who’s leaving to go to Toyota: “It’s better. It’s going to be better money.” I asked her how she feels about leaving, and she said, “I’m a bit sad. I’m leaving my friends behind. I’ve got some good mates here, so I’m a bit sad about that. It’s not so bad here, though you do get stressed sometimes.”

On her leaving day, after fifteen years at McTells, Gloria alternated between smiles, from the impending release from monotony and tears at leaving “the people”: “It’s like a family here, but I’m ready to leave. It’s had its purpose.” (Her daughter, whom she has brought up, is about to leave school now.) “I’ve done me time.” Gloria says she’ll be sad to leave the people here and ends

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Songs of the Factory by saying, “Oh my god, it can get really tiring. Oh the work, it’s so monotonous, oh day after day.” Her face wears a sad, careworn smile.

The “Stayin’ Alive” Culture and Its Music It was the overall culture that workers created and the friendships that were formed within that culture that made the leaving of McTells a bittersweet moment rather than a moment of unambiguous relief. Within the structure of an alienating Taylorist social order, in which workers were treated by the firm with little dignity, workers were able to create such a rich way of being with one another such a rich culture that working at McTells was experienced at one level, and often to a significant degree, in a positive way. I characterize this culture, which I label a “Stayin’ Alive” culture, as a musically informed culture of worked happiness that was embedded in an alienating social order and protected workers from being dominated by alienation. An understanding of this overall culture is crucial to a proper understanding of the meaning of pop music to workers at McTells, so here I want to outline what I mean by each of the key terms in the italicized phrase. The essence of the culture was the way in which workers created a bright mood to allow them to go through the working day without the alienating tendencies of their job dragging them too far down. Smiles and laughter were very common on the factory floor. Humor was common. Frequently, I would look up from hem folding to see from where the latest ripple of laughter had come, to see who was involved and what was going on. I was not alone in this; others looked up to see if there was something in this latest round of humor that they could riff on, to take further and spread around. Many workplace ethnographies give details of stand-out moments of carnivalesque humor, but what was striking at McTells was the way in which an active creation of humor and an overall bright mood prevailed as an everyday, normal way of being. Here is a typical example of everyday musical humor on the factory floor: “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners came on the radio. Two or three people sing along to the chorus, changing the words to “Come on Irene” directed at Irene. They’re smiling and laughing. Irene, also smiling, responds by straightening the string of the blind like she’s playing along to the violin that accompanies the chorus. Then, Tricia steps to Irene and taps

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her on the back in time with the banjo and percussion break at the end of the chorus. Irene reprises her violin/blind string playing at the soaring riff that immediately follows. They’re all laughing now.

If workers were often smiling and bright, this was not a sign of simple contentment with their position. This was not a simple happiness, rather it was a “worked” happiness in which an understanding of the alienating context facing them drove workers to work, culturally, to happiness. When I discussed the bright mood on the factory floor with workers, the enjoyment of the shared culture was acknowledged, but it was very frequently located as a necessity given the alienating structures facing them. The key elements in this “Stayin’ Alive” culture were use of humor and use of music. I was reminded again and again of the need to “have a laugh” and to “have the music” in order to rise above the demeaning material conditions of the work: Rose: “It’s factory work, that’s what it is. You’ve got to be able to have the radio on and have a laugh.” Jill: “Sometimes it’s great when you’re having a good laugh in the afternoon because it’s so boring; it drags, oh.” Betty: “You’ve got to have some fun here because it’s the only thing that keeps you going.”

It was a culture that had to be made and remade in every part of every shift, first thing in the morning, after the morning break, and after the lunch break. It was a culture that had to face the grinding material conditions day in, day out and come out smiling and dancing after all that. The central importance of this cultural work on mood in the face of the alienating structure was made plain by Maggie: “It’s okay here.” She’s been here for eight years. She’s going to stick it out now. “Some days it’s oh . . .” and gestures above her head, indicating it’s just too much. “It depends on the mood here; it depends on the mood. It’s good to hear some music.”

This culture of worked happiness was a musically informed one. This culture often operated through, and further to, the music that workers listened to. The way in which this culture was enacted through, and helped by, music is the essence of this book, which will be brought out in great detail in

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subsequent chapters. I do not want to overstate the argument by suggesting that a similar culture would not have been possible without music, but there are clear points that suggest that pop music was an important help in the strength of this culture. Here, it is enough just to underline how frequently workers explicitly acknowledged the importance of music to them: Tony: “I need the radio, bloody right. I couldn’t face this place without it.” Claire: “I need the music. It really helps you get through the day.” Brian: “You’ve got to have it [the radio] to keep alive.”

This last quote from Brian resonated. This culture was about keeping alive in the sense of avoiding just existing with your senses dominated by alienation. Because of this resonance, and because it only seems right to reference music, I have labeled the culture a “Stayin’ Alive” culture. On the shop floor itself, where the cultured was a lived, embodied culture, there was no name for the culture. People do not give names to their own lived cultures. Workers, however, did see the term as appropriate. For instance, I had told people that I was going to write a book about McTells. John asked me what it would be called. “Stayin’ Alive,” I suggested.1 “Yeah, that’s it. Perfect,” he said. This reaction was echoed by other workers on a number of other occasions. For instance, after I had asked Bill if there was a song that spoke to him about his working life at McTells, he posed the same question to me: Bill asks me what my song would be. I’ve been here for two weeks, and I suggested it would be “Stayin’ Alive” because you need the music to keep you going. And he said, “Oh my god, you’re right—imagine what it would be like without the radio. Oh, it would be awful.”

“Stayin’ Alive” also seemed to be a good choice as a label because the song was actually played on the factory floor.

1. I did not know there was a book on culture and class called Stayin’ Alive already being written (Cowie 2010). The McTells workers’ support for my approach to and understanding of their culture resonates with what Guba and Lincoln (1994) call credibility in qualitative research, that is, when participants in a social world corroborate the understanding of the social world held by the researcher.

Stayin’ Alive at McTells

Side Step 2.2. “Stayin’ Alive”: Pop Music and Work There were other reasons it made sense to me to call the shop floor culture at McTells a “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Because the Bee Gees’ song “Stayin’ Alive” features iconically in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, the name invites a side step to consider what that film has to say about the nature of the relationship between pop music, class, and work. The film had that rare quality of earning both huge commercial success and a tremendous critical response. A leading US film critic, Gene Siskel, lists it as one of his favorite movies: “One minute into Saturday Night Fever you know this picture is onto something, that it knows what it’s talking about” (1977). One of the key things that the film talks about is exactly the relationship between popular music and work. At the heart of the appeal of the film is its intense energy. The swirling center of this film is a product of the antithesis it crafts between work as a sphere of grey discipline, rationalization, and alienation and pop music as an arena of color, freedom, and self-expression. It is, in short, a film whose key protagonist, played by John Travolta, is thrown between what Daniel Bell (1976) called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism” and what C. Wright Mills (1957) called “the big split” between leisure and work in capitalist society. For Bell, one of the key cultural contradictions of capitalism was the antagonism between work as a sphere of rationalized discipline and leisure as a sphere of hedonistic freedom and lack of restraint. The film develops this argument by placing pop music squarely in the arena of hedonistic, unrestrained consumption. The film produces this picture of opposition strongly but also subtly. Consider the framing and content of the scenes in which the Travolta character is in the workplace. In these scenes, there is musical silence. For an apparently music-centered film, this is a bold move. The genius, of course, lies in the way that this creates a contrast for the music-filled audio when Travolta dances. In the work scenes, the overwhelming colors are grey and pallid fawn. The merchandise in the hardware store where Travolta works is bleached of color; the long store jacket with its name tag that Travolta has to wear is grey and characterless. This creates the contrast against which the flashing colors of the disco dance floor dazzle, and against which the vibrancy of Travolta’s clothes shine—particularly because we come to find out just how important his clothes are to the him. It is never articulated, but somewhere in the film we feel that when Travolta hides his color, his clothes, his self to don the long grey work jacket he endures the everyday moments of what Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb (1972) call “the hidden injuries of class.” We also sense that it is, in no small part, these hidden injuries that Travolta attempts to dance away on the disco floor. There

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is also a contrast in the content of the social relations that surround Travolta at work and at the disco. At work, his status is that of a subordinate. He tries his best to persuade his boss to give him a raise. He is the supplicant who has to ask favors from the superior. By contrast, on the dance floor Travolta is king—certainly in terms of the informal status accorded to him by the other dancers and his friends, and even formally in terms of the (disputed) result of the dance contest. This powerful theorization of the relationship between pop music and work is no less important because it is articulated within a popular film. Indeed, if we take the idea of people as everyday sociologists seriously, it is exactly in people’s everyday relationship with popular culture that we can look for potentially profound insights. This theorization can be considered against that put forward by Adorno. Adorno did not argue for an antithesis between pop music and work. Rather, he suggested that the same motif of unthinking repetition characterized both spheres. Saturday Night Fever presents an alternate mode of theorizing the relationship between pop music and work. Whereas Adorno tended to see the playing out of a simple synthesis, Saturday Night Fever points to a stark antithesis between pop music and work.2 Indeed, we can draw on some musicological writing to flesh out the film’s position. Simon Frith (1981), for instance, noted that pop songs hardly ever concern themselves directly with the sphere of work. For Frith, work primarily features in pop songs as an absent present. In songs celebrating Saturday night and the weekend, work features only rarely directly but rather more indirectly as the sphere of rationalization and alienation that can be escaped from on the weekend. It is the unspoken “other” that gives meaning to the idea of celebration. In this way, Firth noted that pop music, with “its intimations of fun, irresponsibility and fulfillment,” had come to act as “an implicit critique of work” (265). This also can be seen to be a more grounded, specific, and therefore, more useful, reading of Grossberg’s abstract argument (introduced in chapter 1) that rock music is primarily constituted “outside of everyday life” (1992, 150). If we substitute “work” for Grossberg’s term “everyday life,” we see clear affinities in the arguments of Saturday Night Fever and of Grossberg: “Rock refused to identify with everyday life, which was ordinary and boring—it celebrated instead the extraordinary moments within the youth’s . . . life. . . . It constituted itself as a

2. This argument is simply that one of the key elements to which pop music is structured in opposition is the sphere of rationalized work. It should not be read as suggesting that this is the sole, or even the dominant, factor structuring pop music. It is given theoretical attention here because the study concerns the sphere of work.

Stayin’ Alive at McTells

space of ‘magical transformations.’. . . Rock celebrated its ability to avoid the dominant structures of everyday life” (180). If we want to dig deeper into the moral weight of the analysis put forward by Saturday Night Fever, then we are faced with key questions about whether this antithetical relationship between pop music and work is to be embraced or resisted. As with many other great pieces of art, there is an ambiguity in how the answer to the question is played out. On the one hand, the film operates as an intense celebration of the captivating energy of popular music (defined in opposition to work). Arguably, this is how the film primarily lives in the popular consciousness—in the form of the iconic image of Travolta as king of the dance floor in his white suit (holding that pose, with his right arm out-stretched, touching the background glow of a disco light, easily understood as a star). On the other hand, the story is also played out, sometimes brutally, as a tragedy—a friend dies, male friends rape female friends, dancing as freedom and selfexpression appears as an empty myth, as the Travolta character infers that racism has underpinned the decision of the dance contest judges. As Jones and Kantonen (1999, 136) put it: “Tony finally sees how hollow, hypocritical and pathetic his whole life truly is during the night of the dance contest.” The note of tragedy is also present in the lyrics of the song, “Stayin’ Alive.” These are the repeated words that make up the last minute and a half of the song: “Life goin’ nowhere. Somebody help me. / Somebody help me, yeah. / Life goin’ nowhere. Somebody help me, yeah. / I’m stayin’ alive.” Perhaps, ultimately, the film is trying to say that there is both beauty and energy and empty tragedy coexisting in the way that pop music is structured with work as the implicit other. Indeed, we can see this even in the title of film, Saturday Night Fever, which plays with the dual associations that pertain to the word “fever.” In the phrases “a feverish excitement” and “a feverish energy” fever is used with positive connotations relating to affirmative intensity of experience. But, of course, “fever” is also a condition of illness. The dance is feverish because it closes off space for music as a medium of healing and understanding vis-à-vis work. This is the crucial tragedy in the way in which pop music is primarily structured as antithetical to work that we need to consider. By romantically gesturing that the value of pop music lies in opposition to the valuelessness of work, it serves to rob workers of a vital artistic medium through which to have a nuanced view of their working lives. If it refers to work, it does so in a simplistically oppositional way. But careful ethnographic accounts of people’s working lives very rarely give a sense of workers adopting a simply oppositional sensibility to work. No matter how demeaning and authoritarian are the structures that workers face, they find ways of reclaiming forms of dignity at work and of finding forms of meaning

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within their workplace (e.g., see Hodson 2001). Ian Watson (1983, 117) persuasively argued that workers’ “love-hate relationship to work remains overwhelmingly unreflected and unarticulated” in the genre of industrial folk song. This argument can be played through a Marshall amplifier at volume 10 when applied to pop music. This has been a discussion of patterns in the structuring of pop music. Even if there is some elegance in the logic of the argument of the structuring of pop music as antithetical to work, we should not lose our sense to this logic. We should realize that there may be broad patterns formed by the structuring of pop music but that these are not totalizing patterns. Further, the structuring of pop music does not simply determine how it is heard. Even if there are few songs that explicitly express a love-hate relationship to work, perhaps workers can create such meanings through active listening.

Here is a good point to outline the music that was played on the radios at McTells. The songs I have already referenced —“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Come On Eileen,” and “Stayin’ Alive”—give a pointer to the overall nature of the music. The main radio station that was broadcast, which I will call Diamond, played “classic,” mostly upbeat pop songs from the current and previous decades that had reached high chart positions and resonated in the popular consciousness, and which were generally understood as being positive in mood, either through the lyric or through the music and rhythm. The songs were roughly evenly divided between each decade from the 1960s on. So, for instance, in a given half-hour at McTells, we could hear Coldplay’s “Clocks” (2000s), Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” (1990s), Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (1980s), Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’ ” (2000s), The Jacksons’ “Blame It on the Boogie” (1970s), the Beatles’ “Help!” (1960s), and Wet, Wet, Wet’s “Love Is All Around” (1990s). Not all of these songs are unambiguously upbeat—for instance, Coldplay are best known for the overall melancholic feel to their songs, but most of them have come to be associated with a positive feel—even the Beatles’ opening line of despair, “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down” is trumped by the vibrancy with which it is delivered, and arguably also by the overall nostalgia with which the band is now received. Diamond is a commercial radio station, so in between songs, as well as commentary by the disc jockey, there were ads approximately every ten minutes. There was negligible engagement

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with either the ads or the disc jockeys who framed the music. This was the main radio station that was heard, but not the only one. The next most likely radio station to be heard on the McTells shop floor was River, which tended to play songs from the current pop charts, with a dash of wellknown pop songs from the previous five years or so. The ratio of which radio station was played was within a range of 4:1 and 3:1 in favor of Diamond. The issue of choosing between the radio stations is discussed in detail in the next chapter. Aside from the back-and-forth between the two radio stations, there was a strong consensus among the McTells workers for a radio station playing upbeat, well-known pop songs. Although this overall consensus existed, it was not unambiguously the case that this was the sort of music that the McTells workers would individually choose. The people who worked at McTells had a range of musical tastes. But, most frequently, even where people had a strong taste for a type of music that was never or hardly ever played on Diamond or River, they said that the pop music on Diamond or River was the best sort of music to be played at McTells. For instance, Alex was a big fan of REM, and Robert loved Bruce Springsteen, but both expressed that they were happy to have River playing at work, even though it was quite rare to hear REM or Springsteen played on River. (In chapter 6 I discuss why songs of critique, such as Springsteen’s, did not become part of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture.) “I like to have this stuff,” said Robert, pointing to the radio that was playing ABBA’s “Waterloo” at the time. Similarly, Molly told me about how she loves to “listen to symphony music at home.” She hardly owned any pop music, but I observed her frequently engaging with the pop music in the factory.

Conclusion This chapter has elaborated the picture with which the book started— the scene in which Lana steps back from her worktable at the start of the morning shift to put on the radio to hear the Four Tops. We now know more about the factory in which this scene takes place and the history of how the radio came to be in the factory. We know more about the work that Lana was stepping back from, and we know more about Lana’s colleagues, their everyday culture and their musical tastes, as well as the music

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they liked to listen to while working at McTells. But we still need to dig deeper to answer the question “What is going on here?” Our analytical side step on the theme of “Stayin’ Alive” served to deepen the questions we must ask rather than to answer them. It allowed us to understand the structuring of pop music as primarily antithetical to work, but it could not close off the question of how this pop music is heard on the McTells factory floor. It is the task of the following chapters to address this question.

3

I Got All My Sisters with Me Music and Community

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lester Bangs wrote in the Village Voice that Elvis was the last thing that we were all going to agree on, that his was the last music that we would respond to as one. From then on, music would be increasingly fractured and individualized. Each of us would have our individual heroes and reference points. If he were alive and writing today, Bangs might say that each of us has our own individual playlist that we tailor to our individual musical sensibilities. Bangs’s final sentences to his article were: “I won’t bother saying goodbye to [Elvis’s] corpse. I will say goodbye to you.” And yet on a shop floor in a blinds factory in the middle of England, decades after Elvis’s death, there was still a “you,” a community of musicking that continued to defy Lester Bangs’s prophecy. One of the central reasons so many McTells workers clung to the pop music played on the radio was because it facilitated the creation of community, because it expressed community, and community was the main harbor wall that workers built against the insistent threatening waves of alienation. It was music

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that offered spaces for positive social interactions that workers needed to prevent the experience of Taylorist social order overwhelming them. At McTells, music mattered largely because it was “our music” not “my music.” The McTells shop floor was one of those places where forms of participative musicking continued to be played out “beneath the radar” of our normal perceptions of musical practices (Turino 2008, 36). It is the task of this chapter to show how and why pop music became so entwined with community. The chapter begins with an outline of the fabric of strong feelings of community that existed on the factory floor. It then shows the important ways in which music generated social responses through singing, dancing, commentaries, and discussions of linked memories. The chapter also includes consideration of the intergenerational frictions in the intertwining of music and community, and the way in which music also helped to push supervisors outside of the community. Finally, the chapter examines the dynamic interrelationship of musicking and community.

Community on the Factory Floor On my second day at McTells, Rachel came over to the work table to pick up a batch of roller blinds that required stitching as the next part of the production process. She picked up an armful and turned to carry them back to her stitching table, but in so doing, she caught one of the blinds on a trolley and all the blinds spilled on the floor. Almost before she could say “Oh bugger!” there were four people crouching down, helping her pick them up. “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine,” said Sheila, handing back three of the blinds to Rachel. This was an illuminating moment of how easily and deeply the McTells workers supported each other. Four people did not get down on their knees to pick up blinds because they had a commitment to the firm and wanted to promote production. As noted in the previous chapter, these workers saw McTells as treating them with little respect. Further, Rachel had only had her job for a week, and so it was not a group of established close friends who were stopping their own work tasks to help. Rather, it was a symbol of how supportive relations between workers were on the shop floor. It was particularly revealing because many other factory ethnographies indicate that such an incident is

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often the cue for the one who makes the error to be teased—especially in workplaces with a strong masculine culture (Collinson 1992). But, here, there was no hint of teasing, only support and care. This was not an isolated incident but typical of how workers interacted on the factory floor. Workers tended to address each other with either their first name or as “love” or “mate.” “Thanks, love,” Doris would say, with a small smile in the eye, to Betty as Betty brought over a new batch of material to be cut. “You can go first, mate,” Robert said to me, as we both arrived, with armfuls of blinds, at the place where the blinds were stacked for the next stage of production. That workers often addressed each other by their first names rather than nicknames is also telling because nicknames can often be a way in which teasing relations become normalized. The sense of supportive camaraderie was also noticed by Charmain, who started at McTells at the same time as I did. We often chatted to each other about how we were getting on. By the sixth day, she offered the simple and clear observation: “I’m starting to like it. The people here are so friendly.” At McTells there was a strong caring feminine culture that was supportive of community. The bonds between workers at McTells also often became bonds of friendship that stretched beyond the factory gate. Many of the workers socialized on weekends. There were many discussions in the build-up to Evelyn’s engagement party, and it was clear that Evelyn had invited around thirty friends from McTells. My field note on the presentation of a gift to Evelyn at work shows the contrast between the alienated relations pertaining to hierarchy and the warmth that obtained among the workers: Everybody is called down to the office. . . . It is for a presentation to Evelyn. It is led by Gloria, her friend. She says, “You thought you were here to get a bollocking, well it’s not true. Come down here Evelyn.” Evelyn goes really bright red, as embarrassed as heck. There’s a little chorus of “Congratulations!” from people in the back. Evelyn is clearly touched, and quite a number of people are touched by her response to this. She’s been given a gift voucher for her engagement.

The fabric of community was also evident in more common workplace rituals. Most workers contributed one pound per week to a collective entry into the weekly soccer gambling game known as “the pools.” If it was your

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birthday, it was the norm that you brought in a box of sweets and walked around the workroom and adjoining ones, offering a sweet to each person in turn. The workers understood that they needed one another to be able to survive the debilitating workplace structures. Lauren told me this and positioned the importance of music as clearly below the fundamental importance of “sticking together”: “We all stick together, like. You come to work, and the job’s awful factory work. It’s awful. You’ve got to be able to have the radio on and have a laugh.” “How important is the music?” I ask. “Not as important as the conversation, I don’t think. If you can’t talk, it’s awful.”

Anna also told me that music was important on the shop floor but that it was by no means sufficient in itself: “If you work in a factory, it’s factory work. You need something You need somebody. The music’s there, but you’ve got to have somebody to talk to.” The cooperative culture must be understood, not only as an active creation against experiencing the worst of the alienating drag of low-skilled repetitive work, but also because there was nothing in the social organization of work that kept workers apart. There was no bonus system to create tensions among workers, and there was little opportunity for promotion, and hence there was no structure of competition between individual workers looking to progress up a job hierarchy (a point to which I return in chapter 8).

Pop Music, Participation, and Cultural Instigators The “Stayin’ Alive” culture on the shop floor was constituted, to a significant degree, by small musicking communities. The pop music that was played on radios served to open up spaces for social interaction that could often set an upbeat mood for a while. The interactions would often come in the form of singing along, shared among a small group of people: “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge comes on, and Maggie and Betty sing along together to the chorus and smile to each other. After this, there is a joke about Maggie, Betty, and Evelyn forming the Hilda Ogden trio. That’s one of their running jokes, and they have a series of jokes when they do

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little songs and when they do little sing-alongs to some of the songs. [Hilda Ogden was a character in the British TV soap opera, Coronation Street. She was a cleaning woman, famous for her unflattering headscarf and curlers.] Eddie Grant’s “I Don’t Wanna Dance” comes on, and Betty sings the main refrain to Maggie and does a little dance, just as Maggie comes back from her break, to set the tone of things. Maggie smiles and sings it back to her.

In these examples, the singing along became social either through the simultaneous participation of people or through a back-and-forth call-andresponse between people. These moments of social singing were centered on the hook of the chorus. These hooks were the points where workers were able to take a piece of recorded music and turn it into a participatory field, to use Turino’s phrase relating to “music making as social intercourse and activity among face-to-face participants [with an] emphasis on the doing among all those present” (2008, 90). Most pop songs are written to showcase a specific hook that can offer almost instant appeal to listeners and that can be easily remembered. When pop songs have become hits they are thus part of the social memory of people and can function as points for people to partake in participatory musicking through and with a pop song. As noted in the previous chapter, the main radio station played at McTells was Diamond, which specialized in the playing of hits from previous decades. Most workers deliberately chose music, therefore, that would offer these points where the pop song could become a participatory field and community could be expressed and strengthened. Indeed, there was one song played at McTells that explicitly drew attention to its hook as a point for the creation of participatory musicking. The song was “Hey Baby (Uhh, Ahh)” by DJ Ötzi. It featured the refrain “Hey, hey, baby (uhh, ahh), I wanna know (woh-o-o), if you’ll be my girl.” The song is presented as if sung to a live audience, and we are given the impression that the live audience members join in on the singing of the chorus refrain—thus demonstrating to the listener the appeal of the song as a point for the creation of a participatory field. It’s “Hey Baby,” which is made for singing along with because the actual song itself has a kind of crowd noise of people signing along, and it does get a response with two or three people singing for quite a sustained period toward the end.

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Sometimes, the singing done by one person was social even if it did not generate a musical response. The following field note shows how such singing generated community: I talk about music to Jonathan, who is about twenty five, and Betty, who is sixty, and who work as a pair on the headrails bench. She says, “He starts singing at twelve. It makes me laugh.” She says this with a real smile (he smiles as well); there is warmth and camaraderie between them.

Singing was social because of the way it was intentionally directed for one or more other people to hear, and its receipt was signaled. Almost always this signal of receipt was a smile: Lauren has the radio back near her, and it’s on Diamond, about nine thirtyish. She sings along with “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson. Anna and Nina look up from their work and smile at Lauren.

Overall, the social singing occurred in relatively small, dispersed moments that were systematically present through much of the day. And, as noted in the examples, they often operated as key mood-setting cues. Through these smiling musical social moments, McTells workers reminded each other of the joys of human company and showed each other that together they could smile and sing despite the Taylorist social order in which they were embedded for the working week. Because of this social meaning, these moments of social singing had a resonance beyond just the time it takes to sing along to a few lines in a chorus. This resonance allowed them to operate as mood-setting cues. The processes of singing were seen as signifying a positive mood of the singer both by observers and the singers themselves: Lana sees Betty singing to herself: “Oh, she must be in a good mood now,” in contrast to her black mood earlier in the day. Doris observes, “I sing the most. I’m a happy soul.”

The social use of music therefore helped the communal mood work at McTells. This follows Bruno Nettl’s (2005, 221) observation that “music in Western cultures is broadly regarded as a symbol of happiness.” These common instances of social singing created an overall culture of musicking

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such that a number of people made the observation to me that they sometimes even sang along to songs that they did not like. Social dancing was nearly as frequent as social singing, and often people sang and danced at the same time. As with social singing, social dancing could involve a small group of people joining together in the activity at the same time, or it could involve the activity as a social signal. Dancing also resonated as a social cue for the creation of an upbeat mood, in which communication with a humorous inflection was intensified. Dancing involving multiple people set the strongest social cue: “Blame It on the Boogie” sets the mood for a period of great banter and smiles. Evelyn did a little dance along the way, and Lauren and Anna were doing some dancing and trying to get Eva to go and do some singing and dancing as well, and she kind of smiled and shook her head and said, “They’re mad those lot.” And then Lauren came round and grabbed her from behind, and they did the dance linked to the song where you imitate the sunshine and the moonlight and so on, as the chorus goes “Don’t blame it on the sunshine / Don’t blame it on the moonlight.” And Lauren explained that she does that—“Eva does that all the time when we go out,” and there are loads of smiles and it’s one of those moments that kind of sets the upbeat tone for a while.

On occasion, it was consciously observed how dancing and singing was often picked up on as a social signal in the creation of a brighter mood. For instance, part of my field notes read: Irene says, “Yesterday there was a song on, and I was dancing and singing. And those lot behind here,” she says, pointing to the next table, “were laughing away.” She says this with an approving smile.

Dancing as a social cue could signal support to others who were in need of it, either in the face of the relentlessness of the Taylorized labor or in the face of specific impositions of hierarchical control: Irene’s mood is still down after a visit to the supervisors’ office to be chastised for taking a day off. The key moment in the changing of her mood is seeing Evelyn dance to the first bars of a song and do a little sing-along. So she sees that and Evelyn looks to her and smiles at her and Irene looks too

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Songs of the Factory at her and smiles, and then after another thirty seconds Irene goes down to talk to Evelyn because she’s seen that she is in a good mood and she’s going to have a chat and chats to her for two or three minutes and comes back smiling and looks much better. So music and people’s actions to music spark a scene for interaction. Appropriately, the song was “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys.

More typically, dancing by one person as a social signal had a more muted effect as a social cue: “Too Busy Thinking about My Baby” is on, and Lauren does a kind of musical dance at first, carrying some blinds, and when she comes back, she does absolutely break into a dance, to which Anna smiles.

Although more muted, these instances were still an important fabric of the social mood setting through music. The pop music on the radio was also a cue for, and subject of, conversation. The following shows the mingling of social singing and talking about the music: “Sugar Baby Love” comes on, and there’s a big discussion on who sang it and when it was [the Rubettes in 1974]. There’s a bit of a collective sing along on the really high “ooooh, aaaaahhh Sugar Baby” bit. There was a discussion about if people could remember it—if they could, then the reply was “it shows how old you are.” That continues into the next song as well: “How old were you when this was out?” “I was in the school fifth form disco when this was playing.”

Because the bonds of workplace community often stretched into bonds of friendship beyond the workplace, the music played sometimes brought back collective memories of people’s times together going out to pubs or clubs. The shop floor gave way to the dance floor. The radio is on low in the next room. Anna to Lauren: “Oh turn this one up.” It’s “Stuck in the Middle with You.” Lauren does. Anna: “This one reminds me of dancing wild, great.” Gloria and Sara, “Oh yeah.” And they talk about the club they used to dance at.

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Evelyn goes “Oh yeah” when “Waterloo” by ABBA starts and sings a bit of the first line of the chorus. And this leads to Tricia saying, “It reminds me of Blackpool,” and the story is that both of them sang at the karaoke at Blackpool to this song. And Tricia and Irene have a good laugh and smile about this. Rose also sings part of the chorus.

The importance of singing, dancing, and other social interaction within the texture of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture was such that there was little desire among workers to use headphones to listen to music. Despite the increasing prevalence of listening to music through headphones in society, most workers at McTells realized that in the workplace this would cut out vital social interaction, whether musical or not: Sam and Ben have their own radio on their work table. I asked them whether they’d thought about headphones. “No, you can’t hear what people say,” says Sam. Ben agrees: “That would be stupid—if you’re singing along as well to a song, or having a laugh with headphones, nobody knows what you’re doing.”

I only observed one worker listening with headphones during my time at McTells. One of the managers did tell me that there was a policy against headphone wearing—for safety reasons—but in my discussions with workers, this policy was not widely known. The main reason few people tried to wear headphones was that it worked against “Stayin’ Alive” culture informed by musical communities. Underpinning the social musicking within the workplace were the activities of a number of cultural instigators—individuals who had a high level of social engagement with the music on the shop floor, prompting others into musicking interactions. It was cultural instigators who initiated many of the social interactions through music, opening up opportunities for others to join in. These cultural instigators played a key role in the process of music facilitating and expressing community. All but one of the cultural instigators whom I observed were women. They came from a range of ethnic backgrounds and age groups. Side step 3.1 gives an overview of the key people who were the cultural instigators keeping the “Stayin’ Alive” culture burning as bright as they could.

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Side Step 3.1. The Main Cultural Instigators Here is the cast of the main cultural instigators. These are the people who played the main part in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. These are the people who feature most frequently in this book. Anna. Anna was in her late thirties and worked part time in order to be able to pick up her child from school. (She was a single mother.) Famous for her discordantly wholehearted singing of high-pitched ballads, Anna was the most consciously proactive of the cultural instigators in the rollers room in looking to music, humor, and conversation to keep dark moods of alienation from the shop floor. In chapter 7, we also see her key role in trying to overturn a change in the overtime payment policy at McTells. Evelyn. Evelyn was also in her late thirties. She worked full time. She was very popular in the rollers room, partly because of her infectious smile and humor. This good humor did not prevent her from standing up for herself and colleagues when supervisors sought to impose discipline. She was renowned on the shop floor for her love of ABBA. Angela. Angela was in her late twenties, and like most of the cultural instigators had been at McTells for a few years. She worked full time on the key part of the production process in the rollers room as a fabric cutter. Typically for a cultural instigator, she was self-effacing in her singing and reacted with mock hurt when her singing voice was (jokingly) critiqued. Chapter 7 details her role in organizing a petition to curtail the bullying actions of a supervisor. Lana. Lana was in her sixties and looking forward to retirement. It is with her turning on the radio that this book begins. She had been at McTells for many years, working part time. A bit more muted in her participative musicking than many other cultural instigators, she, nevertheless, had a number of games— which are discussed in chapter 5. She wore a union badge openly and wanted a union to organize the workers at McTells. Molly. Molly was in her sixties and worked full time in the verticals room. I had a difficult and then rich relationship with Molly. As the appendix details, Molly was initially concerned that I was a management spy. After she was persuaded otherwise, and perhaps as a way of compensating for her mistaken suspicion, she would often stop to chat with me. She was very conscious of a prevalent “bad mood” in the verticals workroom and turned to music to try to address it. Sally. Sally was in her fifties and had been at McTells for many years. For her, music was crucial to stayin’ alive, in the sense of not being dominated by

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the alienating structure of the work organization at McTells. She also realized that music on its own was not enough to do this, and therefore she acted in ways to bring participative musicking onto the verticals room shop floor. She also played a key role in forms of informal collective resistance, as discussed in chapters 7 and 8.

The following are typical examples of cultural instigators at work: On the radio, 10cc, “The Things We Do for Love.” Angela looks up for people to join in on the bit that just leads up to “Like walking in the rain and the snow / When there’s nowhere to go,” and she sings along boisterously to it. This leads to four or five joining in: “Oooooh, you made me love you.” A communal music moment to ABBA’s “Voulez-Vous,” started by Evelyn, who does a kind of exaggerated dance with her arms in the air. She knows the song from the intro. She says, “Go, Betty, go!” Evelyn leads the lines with six or seven joining in at various points during the song.

People who had been cultural instigators and who had moved on from McTells were remembered fondly: Gloria and Tina tell me a story about Rachael. She was about twenty years old, a black woman who worked on braiding with them, and she had a great voice: “She sang in a gospel choir, oh, she could really sing. We said, ‘Go on then, Rachael, let us have a song.’ And she really belted it out, really, really loud, a Whitney Houston song. It was great, beautiful, and we were like waiting for Kate [senior supervisor] to come up and any minute bollocks us. Oh, it was great.”

Sometimes the cultural instigators would act unconsciously, reacting spontaneously to music that they liked. At other times, cultural instigators appeared to consciously and deliberately use music to try to create a bright communal feeling on the floor. I witnessed Anna consciously undertake the role of cultural instigator on a number of occasions. Anna was adept at sensing when the mood was downbeat, when senses were being dominated by alienation, and using music as a spark to try to change this. The following occurred after the workers on the cloth-cutting table had

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been subject to a public reprimand for slow working by the supervisor on the shop floor. After this the cutters returned to their tables in a sullen mood: After the disciplining, about twenty minutes later, Anna looks to the music for salvation. “Can I have the radio up, I can hardly hear it?” The supervisor, sitting beside it, says “No.” . . . A few minutes after the attempt to turn it up, Anna said to Angela who’s the other key cultural instigator in the room, “How about some singing?” And Angela sings a couple of bars of the Osmonds and smiles before looking down and getting down to her work.

Anna’s most renowned musical role was belting out “Unchained Melody” as sung by the Righteous Brothers. A number of people had already talked to me about Anna’s version of this song even before I witnessed it. The most elaborate version of the story about her singing was that one time the worker charged with first-aid responsibilities had run up from downstairs and asked where was the injury—she had assumed that Anna’s singing was actually a cry of pain. Here is another example of Anna in similar singing form, with a nice pay-off of musical humor at the end: “[I Can’t Live if Living Is] Without You” (Harry Nilsson) comes on very shortly after, and that also keeps the mood high, sung along with at first by Evelyn and Maggie. Meanwhile Anna does a self-conscious very loud version, and it is truly dreadful and there is good banter about this. “I can’t live with you singing like that. I can tell you that,” says Terri.

Anna’s versions of “Unchained Melody” and “Without You” are also significant because her emphasis on poor singing shows another, subtle way in which cultural instigators set the tone for participatory musicking at McTells. As Turino (2008, 33) notes, a key element within participatory musical fields is that there is a marginalization of technical proficiency and an emphasis on the idea of taking part: “The success of a performance is more importantly judged by the degree and intensity of participation than by some abstracted assessment of the musical sound quality.” Many cultural instigators emphasized their lack of vocal prowess—sometimes making a joke of it—and in this way demonstrated to others who might be wary of exposing their singing that it was fine to sing.

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“Unchained Melody” is on. Anna does her full vocal version; people come from the next room to witness it. There are periodic calls out of “Who let the dog out!” “Ooooohh” and things like this, during her rendition, which is painfully, painfully, painfully out of tune, and there’s a big build up to the high note as well. And there are smiles all round, and there’s claps from a few people when she finishes it. Anna did it like a performance, a complete performance. Doris said to me that sometimes she’s given stick for singing too much and they say it’s caterwauling [squalling].

Indeed, Evelyn, an enthusiastic cultural instigator, seemed to sing more poorly than she was able to when she was engaged in encouraging social musicking. I had heard her singing on the shop floor, particularly to ABBA. Her singing was usually loud, rough, and enthusiastically somewhat off-key. On this basis, I assumed that her singing was relatively poor in quality. This certainly seemed to be the verdict of others: There’s an ABBA song on, and I vaguely hear Evelyn belting through the broken- down wall from the other room, and there are a few jokes. Karl says, “Shut your mouth, I’ve had enough of your bloody caterwauling.” This forces Evelyn to sing a bit louder, and there are a few laughs and jokes about this.

Later, however, when I talked with her alone, I discovered a different side to Evelyn’s vocal abilities. When we were discussing the Osmonds, it turns out that Evelyn has a very nice voice. She sings “Puppy Love,” and she carries a tune very nicely, and she says, “I do have a nice voice, not like the others who say, ‘Oh, not her again.’ ”

By exposing their “poor” singing, cultural instigators demonstrated by example that it was the singing that counted, the joining in, rather than technical proficiency of the singing. Around a third of the social interactions with and through music on the shop floor did not feature cultural instigators, but the cultural instigators’ role was important in sustaining the “Stayin’ Alive” culture: There was generally little engagement with music today, and I realize in retrospect that this was because there were no key music-mood setters. Angela

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Songs of the Factory wasn’t there. Anna wasn’t there. Lyn the supervisor was there all afternoon, so all these things contributed to a relatively low engagement.

The key role of the cultural instigators for inscribing the pop music into community is also evident in the fact that it was very frequently a cultural instigator who turned on the music in the morning. Not surprisingly, cultural instigators disliked the idea of workers wearing headphones: I ask about headphones, whether it was common for people to wear headphones when they were allowed. Lauren and Anna both agree that only a couple of people used to wear them. “There’s too much going on. You miss all the chat.” “It’s a bit ignorant,” says Lauren. “It cuts other people out.”

The whole social musicking that cultural instigators so often put in train would be blocked by headphones. The spatial dispersion of the cultural instigators in the workrooms was such that a large majority of the workers worked close enough to a cultural instigator to allow them to musick with a cultural instigator. This suggests that the cultural instigators were essentially socially created rather than the role being driven by the innate musical sensibilities of the individuals concerned. It appears that there was a social need within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture for the role, and individual workers intuitively stepped forward to fill this role. The fact that no two active cultural instigators worked in very close proximity to each other offers support for this point. Further, it was the case that the level of musical engagement of some cultural instigators outside of the workplace was relatively low. Anna, for instance, was a key cultural instigator, and when I asked her about her musical tastes at home she was unsure about which artist created her favorite album. It seems that cultural instigators were not people who were expressing their deep attachment to music through their role. Rather, it was a socially created role, within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, into which they stepped.

Music, Lines, and Community The danger for an ethnographer embedded in a warm cooperative culture is that it can become too easy to adopt a romanticized view of the community. Conscious of this potential problem, I kept myself awake to the

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exploration of how music could inform divisions within the community, and also of the way in which the creation of an “us” in the musical community necessarily creates a “them” who stand outside of the community. In this section, I examine both of these elements under the rubric of music, lines, and community. Grossberg has argued that an important factor in the framing of rock (and pop) music is its relationship to youth. Given this, it is little surprise that the key tension in the relationship between music and community centered on music preferences that differed primarily across generations. This was played out in disputes over which radio station should be played—River or Diamond. Broadly, there were two sides to this divide. The smaller side, made up largely of the younger workers, preferred radio stations, such as River, that played mainly or exclusively contemporary songs (i.e., songs released within the last few months). The younger workers preferred the contemporary pop music, hearing it as an index of their youth (Frith 1987): I walked down toward the packing area and Justin Timberlake is on Luis’s radio, which is tuned in to River. . . . “This is my type of stuff I like. I love it. It makes me think about dancing with my girlfriend and stuff,” he says. Mark likes Radio 1 much better. “It’s new stuff. Got to keep young, keep thinking young.”

The larger group in this divide over which radio station to play was made up mainly of workers who were older than thirty. This group preferred Diamond, with its approach of playing hit songs from a range of previous decades from the 1960s on. Having the radio tuned to Diamond allowed them to hear the music that was an index of their youth: Sue from soft furnishings says, “Music’s great. It really brings back memories of the Four Tops. . . . Dancing around our handbags at the Palais [a local night club]. I think it’s brilliant, great.”

A number of McTells workers who preferred Diamond also argued that there was much more social engagement with the music on Diamond than with the music on River: Maggie says, “You know, I think that the mood changes when we have Diamond on, we’re all singing along more.” Anna says that “Diamond is much

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Songs of the Factory better. It gets much more interaction from people at work. Somebody has always got something to say about it, and other people moan back, and it’s all good fun and it’s much better. But when River is on hardly anybody does that.” . . . Lauren agrees with all this.

So, as well as the linking of music to youth, it was also the ability of music to inform community that motivated the radio station preferences of a significant portion of the workforce—particularly, the cultural instigators. Indeed, it is notable that Anna was perhaps the cultural instigator who was most conscious of her role. Cultural instigators used music as a key way to generate social interaction to allow the “Stayin’ Alive” culture to keep its spark and to keep the wolf of abandonment to alienation at bay. This debate about which radio station to play constituted a potentially divisive issue. However, in the context of the strong community on the shop floor, the issue was actually played out mainly in a way of joking banter that tended to cement rather than corrode the wider community: We’re discussing the radio station issue and Lauren says, “We actually had planned to change the station back from River to Diamond.” So they say, “I’ll let you know how it goes.” I walked back in to the room about five or ten minutes later and notice that the station has been changed, and I ask Anna, “How did your coup go?” She says, “My deputy Lauren did it and nobody argues with her.” And they send me over to talk with Betty to ask her opinion about the change of the station, so even though I know I’ve been set up I go over and say, “Betty, what do you think of changing the station?” And she says, “Fucking hell, fucking wankers haven’t changed over the station have they, fucking wankers,” and there’s an excellent banter between Betty and Lauren and Anna, who is joking, and most of them laugh and smile a bit. And Betty says, “You don’t want to go up talking to those two at the black widow corner. They’ll eat you up and spit you out,” and they joke about that. Betty makes considerable banter about the station. . . . She winks at me to let me know that it’s all good-natured stuff, but I knew anyway.

There was also playful banter between Luis and Dave, who were working on packing together: I’m talking to Luis, and there’s River playing on his radio. He says, “This is my stand” and points down to his radio. “I love it on to River or off when Dave’s here.” Dave is away at lunch now and he arrives back about a minute

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later with his hand cupped around his ear and a slight smile on his face. Luis laughs and shrugs, “Oh alright, in a minute” [indicating, he will change the station soon], and they’re both clearly enjoying this interaction.

Further, the two sides of this musical division learned to cooperate in three ways. First they equitably swapped round which radio station was to be played on different days. Barbara says, “We brought in the old radio we used to use; we use it for Diamond if Tricia is off. And if Tricia is on we have River. Everybody’s happy now. Tricia is okay with that.” Indeed, a vote had been organized around nine months earlier, with a result that the two main radio stations that were preferred by the main culture and the younger workers were to be alternated on a daily basis. When, as occasionally happened, the norms of cooperation broke down, there was a real sense of grievance—which itself highlighted how important most people found the norms of cooperation: Doris expresses clear outright anger and despair at the radio: “I can’t tell you how much this mindless drivel is driving me to despair. I can’t stand it. I object to being captive audience to this nonsense. It seems to me that only a minority want this radio station on, but they prevail. We could swap it around, but no, it’s this bloody River.”

Second, in the rollers workroom, space was ceded to a particular type of radio station when it suited the overwhelming majority of workers in that area. This meant that a number of different radio stations could be playing in different parts of the workroom. On relatively rare occasions, this would mean that one or two people would be in positions where they could hear two different radio stations simultaneously. This inevitably led to further discussions and searches for local compromises. This approach was not an option, however, for the verticals workroom where there was a central broadcasting system relaying one radio station on multiple loudspeakers. Third, and perhaps most significant, although there was a discourse of division between the two sides in the radio station debate, and there were some points of tension, the overall texture of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture meant that in practice members of both sides would still participate in social interactions through music, irrespective of which station was being broadcast.

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Songs of the Factory Betty says, “I sometimes sing along [to Diamond]. It’s good.” And she says, “I’m just pulling their legs about, winding them up about not liking Diamond. I don’t mind it really, it’s fine. Everybody should have a bit of everything really.” I ask Sally about which radio station is playing: “I think everyone’s in a better mood with this on, you know, there’s more singing, I mean in here. . . . Even the youngsters sing along. Yeah, Friday’s a good day.”

My own observations supported Sally’s. The concept of music informing community brings with it the idea that there are lines defining community. The most defined line on the shop floor was that between workers and supervisors. Although it was the policy of senior management to allow music to be played on the shop floor, supervisors would clash frequently with workers on how the music was used on the shop floor. The clash centered on supervisors observing overt musicking and seeking to curtail it, causing resentment among the workers that their “Stayin’ Alive” culture work was being blocked: Lauren says, “These lot [referring to supervisors] would never sing or dance to the radio. They’re jobs men, boring. They just stand there dumb, doing the same things every day, just getting your figures [i.e., production target]. . . . Some days it would be great. You’re having a laugh when the music’s on and it’s good. It can be great, but more often than not, just when you’re having a laugh, the supervisors come along and tell you to get back to work with a big strop on. Tell us to stop talking. We’re always getting told off.”

At no point did I observe supervisors taking part in any “Stayin’ Alive” musicking with workers on the factory floor. This was not because supervisors were any less musically oriented than the shop floor workers. Indeed, Vinny, a supervisor in the verticals room, told me, “If I was out there on the line, I’d love a bit of ABBA. That would be great.” Rather, what kept supervisors out of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture was the social structuring of their role, specifically their position in the immediate application of hierarchical control. Lines of community were clearly drawn. Supervisors also disliked the radio because it was a symbol of the aural sphere of the factory being largely under the control of the workers. When the supervisors needed to assert themselves in the aural sphere, through

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the issuing of instructions and discipline, they would often turn the radio off (albeit temporarily) to assert their control: Rhona, the supervisor, turns down the radio twice. Lana turns it up once. Rhona comes through muttering about people not hearing her, “They don’t bloody hear me.”

On three occasions I witnessed the senior supervisor call a shop floor meeting of a group of workers to admonish them, either for poor productivity or for poor quality of work. This was known on the shop floor as a “bollocking.” On each of these occasions, the senior supervisor turned off the radio before she began speaking, symbolically asserting her control over the aural sphere.

The Interrelationship between Music and Community The argument developed so far has done little to untangle the direction of the causal relationship between community and music. Is it that the pop music caused workers to build community, or was it the existence of a communal spirit in the first place that led to participative musicking? Two preliminary points need to be made before addressing the question. First, the question is underpinned by assumptions of simple unidirectional causality that do not lie easily with a methodological approach informed by an ethnographic imagination that searches for subtle social processes that often involve multidirectional causality (Willis 2000). The second point relates to the importance of considering the interdependency of music and community within the overall social system, in which the foremost pattern was one of workers seeking to create a culture that could keep away the dark shadows of alienation cast by the Taylorist social order. Embedded within this overall system of relationships relating to the fight against alienation, the pattern was one of symbiotic reinforcement between participative musicking and community, with both growing when one side was strong. This can be seen, for instance, from the interaction around Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You,” noted above. This song had social meaning because it resonated with the already existing friendship between Anna, Lauren, Gloria, and Sara that was played

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out in nightclub dancing. But then the playing of the song, and their participation around it, further strengthened this community. Within this overall pattern, there were also some clear cases that indicated that music could foster community as well as cases that indicated that community could facilitate musical engagement. I will examine each in turn. There were three distinct ways in which musicking worked to facilitate the creation of community. First, joining in social singing was an important way for recently hired workers, especially when they were from minority ethnic groups, to join the community of McTells workers in their “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Natalie was a young black woman who had recently migrated from South Africa. She worked in the rollers room and was quiet. She only occasionally spoke and rarely joined in singing. She smiled quite a lot at humor and the musical engagement of others, but it was often a reserved smile. The first time I spoke to her about music I asked her if she could think of a song that spoke to her about her working life at McTells: I put the question to Natalie, and she can’t think of anything at first. A few minutes later she asks me what the question is again, “Do you want work related or memory?” I say, “I don’t know,” and she says “Christmas carols that were brought in by Eva.” She says, “We all had a lovely sing-along, and I really enjoyed it. It was my best memory of working here, and it was my first Christmas at McTells.” The singing along aspect is confirmed by Anna and by Lauren, who at first said, “Oh my god, those carols were—no actually it was good singing along with them. There was some nice stuff.” This seems quite significant because Natalie does not speak much—nobody has real banter with her, but she smiles at the banter and she speaks very softly. This is the clearest way in which she’s felt part of the community in her singing along, and her key memory is quite a poignant one.

The poignancy lay not just in her words but in the warmth with which she expressed them. Social singing was also a bridge into the community for Charmain. I have noted that Charmain started at McTells at the same time as I did and quoted her saying on her sixth day that she was beginning to like the job because the people were “so friendly.” On the seventh day, I saw the beginnings of her entry into the community of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. While she was working, she was swaying, dancing a little to Garbielle’s “Give Me a Little More Time.” She softly sang the first line of the

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chorus, “Give me a little more time.” She smiled when her singing was responded to by Gloria, across the work table, who sang the next line, “I need to make up my mind.” They continued to exchange the final two lines of the chorus: Gloria: “I just can’t pretend any longer,” Charmain: “Feeling’s getting stronger.” This was the first occasion in which I saw Charmain smile openly and warmly. Next, the importance of musicking for the causation of community was also suggested in the fact that the sense of community, and participation within the overall culture of the McTells shop floor, was much stronger for those who could hear music and was much weaker for those outside of the range of the broadcast music. While the vast majority of workers on the shop floor engaged in the musical “Stayin’ Alive” culture, there was also a small number of people outside of this culture. Nonparticipation was not related to sex, age, or ethnicity. A key element that influenced whether people were inside or outside of the community was simply their ability to engage with the music.1 It was notable that participation in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture was lower in those few jobs where music could not be properly heard. These were the jobs that involved standing over the loud fabric-cutting machines in the verticals workroom. For example, I only once saw Sylvia chat with anyone on the shop floor, and I never saw her engage with music in any way. When I went to talk to her at her fabric-cutting machine [one of the few loud ones on the floor], I realized how socially isolated her position was. It was very difficult to even hear any of the radio music properly. In contrast to the deep levels of communal feeling noted earlier, Sylvia described a very thin engagement with the shop floor community: “The people here are okay. But let’s put it this way, I keep myself to myself. The money from overtime is okay.” The third instance of the reach of music having an impact on the texture of community indicates that it was music that allowed social listening, rather than music per se, which was important. In the verticals room, for

1. There was also a very small percentage of the workforce who could hear the music but who did not engage with it in any way and who did not take part in the wider “Stayin’ Alive” culture. For this handful of people (in relation to whom, there was no pattern of sex, age, or ethnicity), the radio music on the shop floor was “neither here nor there” (Sian). If it was on, they listened to it, without either significant benefits or significant discomfort; and if was not on, they did not listen to it, again without significant benefit or significant discomfort.

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the first ten days of my time in the room, River radio station was played (through the central broadcast system). As noted, it almost exclusively played music released in the previous few months. I was also informed that this situation had existed for “a few weeks” prior to my working in the room. Around three-quarters of the workers did not know most of these songs, and so this music afforded fewer opportunities for social listening and participation. During my first two weeks in the room, it was clear to me that the texture of overall social interactions was thin— especially compared to that in the rollers room. Participatory musicking was rare, and it was difficult to pinpoint who were the cultural instigators. Further, it was not just musical interactions that were sparse, it was the case that humor generally was relatively rare and that social exchanges tended be thin, even strained. This was a typical entry in my field notes in this period: River on again. No overt musical engagement, no singing, no body movements, little humor.

During those first two weeks, I was told by a number of workers in the verticals room that the “atmosphere” in the room had “become terrible.” This referred to the relative lack of friendly, joking, and musical social interchanges on the shop floor, and to a sense of tension in the air, which on occasion, was almost palpable. Molly’s comments on the nature of relations within the room certainly contained an edge: “Here, they’re a right miserable lot. There are too many back stabbers on the floor.” Mandy’s comments pointed to a lack of communal culture on the shop floor: “The people here just come along. They’re not really bothered and just go away. They just do their work and go home.” In an effort to change this situation, a group of workers sought to change the radio station being played—in the clear belief that “we need some better music for a better atmosphere; we need something we all know.” The workers were successful in instigating a policy of swapping between two radio stations—between River and Diamond, which according to Julie played the sort of music “that we can sing along to.” Within a few days, I observed that the frequency of musical social interaction had increased considerably. Elizabeth, one of the workers who was involved in the change of radio station policy, noted to me that “the atmosphere is

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definitely better now.” Rose noted that “it’s been more boisterous, more laughter today. It’s because of the change in station, you know.” These workers clearly believed that a form of music that afforded more sociallistening opportunities could play a key role in creating and sustaining a stronger “Stayin’ Alive” shop floor culture. My observations were consistent with this belief. The following description relates to the early afternoon of the second day of Diamond being played in the verticals room after the period of its lengthy absence: For the first time since I’ve been in this room, there was key social singing and dancing that seemed to work in terms of sparking a sustained brighter mood for the afternoon. Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” was playing. There’s a really high bit at the end of the chorus where he sings in a falsetto voice “Laaa, la, la, la, la” a few times. Two small groups joined in on singing along with this, and hearing each other, they smiled across at each other. Everybody in the room looked up to see this, and many of them smiled. After this, somehow the mood seemed to be brighter. There was more talking and laughter.

These were the patterns that pointed to musicking facilitating the creation of community. There were also patterns suggesting causality in the counterdirection. The strongest pattern indicating a strong feeling of community leading to intensive musical engagement came from workers who told me of their experience at McTells when work had been organized as small integrated “cells.” This system of work organization had existed up until five years earlier. In the cellular manufacturing system, a small work group was responsible for the manufacture of a blind from beginning to end. Each work group was concentrated around one or two work tables. Workers would swap roles within the production system, as required, but they always stayed in the same work group. This system of work organization has a much tighter sense of interaction among a set group written into it than the work organization that pertained when I was there. A number of workers from the verticals room, where the cellular system had existed, told me that this was when they recalled the highest degree of social musicking during their time at McTells. This was not related to the type of music played but seemed rather to be linked to the higher density in the community that was experienced within the cellular group-based

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system of work organization. This was clear in a conversation between Molly and Sally: Molly and Sally together talking about how they used to sing along both when they were on machines in a row and when they used to be in networks in partitions or cubicles together [i.e., the cellular system]. “Nobody used to say they were bored. Oh, we used to sing. What’s her name used to put up her makeup and her scarf and have a fag and pretend to do the vocals. Oh, we’d have a laugh. There was a lot of togetherness; it was like a family. We were all friends sticking together.”

The following two quotes also from workers with experience of the previous system give examples of the intensity of the musicking that used to occur within the work groups: Billie the janitor has been here eighteen years: “We used to sing along a lot. It was great. We used to have a real good laugh. It was when we were in cubicles like. I was doing headrails. The radio was on full blast. Oh, we gave it some welly. The boss used to come out and tell us to keep it down.” I was talking to Donna, who’s a supervisor. She’s been here about ten years. She used to be on the shop floor. “We used to be in cubicles, all machines and headrails together and partitioned off, and there was lots of singing along. Yeah, it was the only thing that kept us sane.” I ask about why there was a change. She suggests that since it’s gone to an open plan [the current more fragmented system] . . . and now it’s different. Molly and Donna discuss being pulled into the office for swearing during singing. They used to sing, “Who the fuck is Alice” in relation to “Living Next Door to Alice” by Smokie, from the late 1970s. “God, we were loud, but it wasn’t that, it was the swearing.”

Conclusion Day in, day out, from eight in the morning to five in the late afternoon, McTells workers were compelled to step into a Taylorist social order. And yet within this alienating environment, they created something beautiful. They created a richly supportive caring, laughing, singing, dancing, and talking culture to insulate themselves from the ever-present threat of the

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deep experience of alienation. The pop music that they played on their radios or through the company’s loudspeakers was deeply entwined with this communal culture. Although I do not want to suggest that a warm, supportive, laughing culture could not have existed without the pop music, we can conclude from the evidence in this chapter that one of the key reasons that so many McTells workers clung so tightly to the pop music was that it played an important role in creating, expressing, and sustaining a sense of community on the shop floor. The pop music helped workers avoid being dragged into the darkness of alienation by allowing them to connect with one another. To say that music helped create and sustain community is an important statement, but there is a danger that it can also be a lazy statement. As Durkheim has suggested, there can be important differences in the forms of social solidarity that people have with each other in communities. To avoid this danger of laziness, we need to ask further what types of community were being created within the musically informed “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Durkheim distinguished between mechanical solidarity, in which there is an emphasis on the common and collective with little space of individuality, and organic solidarity, in which there is greater differentiation between individuals, who cohere through their mutual interdependencies. The musicking communities at McTells exhibited organic rather than mechanical solidarity. Consider the dancing and singing. For a mechanical form of solidarity to be present, there would be, for instance, uniform movements within the dancing and extended collective singing. At McTells, dance movements were individualized and often developed in a call-and-response way. Similarly, singing was often done in a call-andresponse way, and the collective singing tended to be short in nature. In the same way as there was to-and-fro in the singing and dancing, so there was in the discussions about music as well. Space was allowed to hear of each person’s specific history and feeling toward a song, within an overall appreciation of the cultural value and meaning of pop music for the people on the shop floor generally. This chapter is entitled “I Got All My Sisters with Me,” the second line in the chorus of the Sister Sledge late 1970s disco hit, because this suggests organic solidarity—both individuality—“me”— and social solidarity—“my sisters,” rather than the title of song, “We Are Family,” which on its own has rather blunt intimations of mechanical solidarity.

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The musical communities can also be described as class-based communities in two senses. First, the musical cultural activity only had meaning and relevance because of the class position of McTells workers whose work was structured as a Taylorist social order. The songs were given specific social meaning because of McTells workers’ search for one another to light the workplace against the shadows of alienation. Further, they were classbased communities in that they comprised only workers in the same subordinate position within the labor process while they explicitly and strongly excluded those in positions of hierarchical authority over them. They were class based, but they were not expressive of class in a mass sense. They were also based around elements of mass pop culture, but these mass culture artifacts were appropriated to be expressive of meaning primarily within a small group. These communities were of small size, where the direct human voice could be heard singing and could speak directly, and they took the cues of hooks to well-known pop songs to allow people to express specific forms of solidarity with one another. They were egalitarian communities, but they were also led by cultural instigators who tended to set the tone for open participation. To say that these musicking communities were class-based communities is the clue to understanding how the McTells workers managed to defy the prophecy of Lester Bangs of the demise of community’s articulation with music. It was because the workers needed community more than they needed a specific type of music that there was still a collective musicking “you” that refused to be buried with Elvis.

4

Music, Machines, and Clocks Songs and the Senses of Alienation

Thinking is good. But to think the truth of social things, one must first be able to feel them working in the bumps and grinds, bruises and blessings of daily life—in the small things. Charles Lemert, Social Things

I start the chapter with this quote from Lemert because this chapter, more than any other, relies on insights that I sensed within my position as a worker at McTells. It was through working in the factory that I came to understand how the sweetness, sadness, and, sometimes, the emptiness of the music related directly to the senses of alienation. These were Lemert’s crucial “small things” found within the interweaving patterns of music and alienation. A central argument I have already begun to put forward is that workers at McTells created the (musically informed) “Stayin’ Alive” culture primarily as a way of surviving in alienating structures, specifically in terms of preventing alienation from overwhelming their senses. The concept of senses of alienation is an important element in this argument. This is not the customary way that alienation has been used within social scientific literature, and therefore this concept requires some explanation. Marx, of course, introduced the concept of alienation. It was a key element in his political-philosophical understanding of the abstract essential nature of

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labor within capitalism. In declamatory phrases, Marx outlined the nature of alienated labor within capitalism as involving the self-estrangement of workers, their estrangement from the product of their labor, their estrangement from their species, and their estrangement from others (Marx [1844] 1964; Kolakowski 1978). Debates about Marx’s concept of alienation at first developed at a high level of abstraction, on the plane of politicalphilosophical understandings of the nature of capitalism. Then Blauner (1964) sought to apply the concept to how workers subjectively experienced work, outlining dimensions of self-estrangement, powerlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation. At the same time, he sought to measure these dimensions and argued that subjective levels of alienation varied, centrally in relation to elements in technological development. Blauner’s approach was subject to sustained critique (Noon and Blyton 2007) in that it was seen as inappropriate to transfer a concept from an abstract plane of political-philosophical understanding of an economic system to a measurable concept of workers’ subjective experience, and in that it was seen as technologically determinist. This created an arid terrain in which the concept has been all but abandoned by sociologists of work. My entry into this territory seeks to navigate the debates on concepts of alienation in something of the same way that E. P. Thompson navigated similarly arid debates on class. Thompson (1968) argued that the most fruitful way to approach class was to see it as a lived social process in which people were intimately and actively involved as agents. In the same way, I want to reclaim the usefulness of the concept of alienation for sociologists of work, as a way of understanding the lived experience of labor as a social process. In particular, I argue for the importance of understanding how workers sense alienation. That workers sensed alienation was manifest in many ways at McTells. It was there in the very frequent way that workers discussed “mood” on the shop floor. “It’s been a terrible this morning. There’s an awful mood” was a statement that meant that workers were palpably feeling their senses were being overwhelmed by alienation, sometimes in terms of powerlessness and sometimes in terms of meaninglessness and monotony. It was there in how they heard the soundscape of the factory. It was there in how they experienced time passing. It was there in their fabric of experience after they had just been subject to a public humiliation by a supervisor. Workers sensing alienation was also a social process in that they constantly fought back against their

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senses’ being dominated by alienation. They erected their whole “Stayin’ Alive” culture as a way of holding back the waves of alienation. This is what surviving at work at McTells meant. It meant understanding that the structures of the workplace could dominate your senses and that you had to strive to create a culture that allowed a different attunement of sensing. The best way into this is to turn to the McTells shop floor. The first half of this chapter examines the important ways in which music resonated with workers in their fight against being overwhelmed by waves of alienation. The second half outlines the patterns in the way in which workers, both individually and socially, engaged with music and examines how these patterns were related to patterns of workers sensing alienation.

Senses of Music and Alienation Music and Machines One of the reasons that music was so valued on the shop floor was the way in which it helped to block out workplace noises. It was not a particularly noisy workplace. As noted in chapter 2, most parts of the production process were undertaken in bench assembly, in which workers acted with tools on the materials—for instance, folding a hem at the bottom of a roller blind with the aid of a long metal ruler and then applying glue and keeping the two glued sides of the fabric together by placing weights on them. There were only a few powered machines—for instance, the machines that cut the fabric—where loud noises were created. Instead of the overwhelming noise of powered machines, there was more of a low-level drone and throb created by the sounds of the production process resonating around the room. Although the sounds of the production process in action were not loud, and were certainly not oppressively loud, these sounds were heard by workers as overwhelmingly negative. They were the noises of the alienating structure in which their labor was embedded, and one of the blessings of music was that it allowed workers to mask these sounds. I asked many workers why they liked the music at McTells. Many of the replies featured a statement that highlighted the value of music by contrasting it to the factory soundscape without the radio on. Shirley said,

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“You can just imagine what it would be like, just the machines and the silence. . . . It would be terrible.” The conditional tense used by Shirley here was changed by many others to express the same sentiment, this time calling on their own direct experience of the factory as musicless soundscape. Strongly negative words were often used to describe the factory without the music: Lana is showing me how to do the job. . . . She says, “Oh, you need the radio. Oh, it’s deathly, it’s deathly without it, oh.” Ratula: “Oh, it’s deadly quiet [without] music at work. It’s really dead.” Kathleen: “Just when it’s not on (referring to the music) it’s awful in here.” Robert: “When music’s not on you think, Hang on, what’s going on? and all you hear is the machines.”

The following excerpts from my field notes show exactly the same appraisal given in the moment of experiencing the soundscape without the radio: The two main radios in this room go on at 8:15 and 8:20. Before that Luis comes in and says “silence,” shaking his head. And I say, “I’m not quite sure how to take this. Is that good or bad.” And he says, “That’s bad. Terrible, silence is.” Bill, who worked on the intermittently loud cutting machines, was blunt in his explanation of why he brought his radio into the factory: “It masks out the sound of the machines.”

Lana took the logic of the point of the quality of music being in what it worked against to an extreme. The music could be almost anything, as long as it allowed her to hear more than the sounds of the workplace: Lana says it’s deathlike and tomblike without the radio. . . . “We’ve got to have something on. I don’t care what it is—River, Diamond, anything, even classical—I’ve got to have something on.”

Considerable frustration occurred when one of the key purposes of the radio—to mask the sounds of the factory and the machines—was turned

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upside down, and the radio actually served to amplify the sound of the machines, through a quirk of the frequency tuning: The radio by the water cooler is on River again. They tried it on Diamond, but they couldn’t really get it properly tuned. I asked Steve what was happening. “It does my head in when it screeches with the machines.”

The descriptions above of the sounds that existed in the absence of music are telling. “Deathly,” “awful,” “deadly quiet,” “bad terrible silence,” “the sound of the machines,” “tomblike,” “deathlike”—these are descriptors of the absence of life and the absence of meaning in the work being undertaken. The soundscape that existed in the absence of music was perceived as a profoundly alienating one. In other nonalienating contexts “silence” could have positive connotations, but not in the factory: At the main cutting table Ella says, “I can’t stand the silence. The silence is awful.” But then she says, “I have silence at home when I’m reading and cooking. I love it. But not at work. Factory work is bad enough, but at least we’ve got the radio here.”

The masking quality of the pop music on the radio was an important contributory factor as to why the radios were always on during the whole of the working day, from eight in the morning to five in the early evening. The fight against alienation was paramount for McTells workers, and the permanent presence of the pop music on the radio was a key resource in this. It was a social, cultural resource that allowed them to reach out to one another and experience community, but it was also a resource for individuals that allowed them to avoid the soundscape being heard as overwhelmingly alienating. I observed Doris put on the radio five minutes after she had started working. When she turned to me and said, “That’s nicer,” with a gentle smile, it was this quality of the masking of the sounds of alienation that she was truly commenting on. One more point here needs to be brought out. The relaying of the music, whether from locally situated radio sets in the rollers room of from the series of speakers in the verticals room, was rarely loud. The quality of the sound tended to be rather “tinny,” with little bass resonance. This meant that the music was not so loud as to prevent workers from hearing the

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noises of the production process reverberating around the room. In sum, the music joined the noises of the production process and people speaking, within a soundscape of overall medium volume. What workers did within this soundscape was to focus their listening ear toward the sound of the music, thus marginalizing the degree to which they consciously processed the sounds of the production process. In this way, they were active listeners who were able to prioritize one element of the soundscape and to marginalize another element. The clearest examples of the process of active listening prioritizing one element of the soundscape and marginalizing another came on the occasions when I was talking to people and noticed that they were standing in a position where they could hear two different radio stations. This was in the rollers room where there were small radios dispersed throughout the workroom. This was, understandably, perceived as annoying by some workers. What was notable, however, was that in around half of these situations, the workers did not note that they were caught within the range of two radios. They were actively listening to only one of these stations and were largely able to block out perception of the other. The following field note outlines the clearest example of this process: Downstairs, as you go down the stairs toward the canteen, there’s also a spot where you’re likely to hear different radios where the sewing machine is. I said, “That must be strange listening to two radios at once” because at the time there were two radios at once and it seemed that she did not understand what I meant. She said, “We’ve all got Diamond on at the moment.” Then I had to make the observation that in fact one of the other radios was talking while another one was singing and playing a song, so there had to be two different radio stations, and she said, “Oh yeah, you’re right.” She had not realized that there were two radio stations in her hearing range.

This process of active listening to prioritize one aspect of the soundscape in order to marginalize another was socially inflected. The participatory musicking of singing and dancing, often led by cultural instigators, helped workers focus on the musical aspect of the soundscape that had social meaning and resonance. Indeed, in the quote above, it is notable that the worker, whose name unfortunately I did not note, replied to my question about her hearing position as an individual, with an answer that talked about the social regulation of the soundscape: “We’ve all got Diamond on at the moment.” The participatory fields were social signals given by workers

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to one another to focus their listening on the music and, therefore, away from the alienating sounds of the production process. The following shows how Jo understands the importance of music in relation to the alienating work. She also implicitly points to the importance of participatory fields— singing along—in influencing the priority given to the music, which on its own is described as “background”— that is, on its own, it does not dominate the soundscape: They are taking me through the elements in their job. “Yeah, it’s braindead,” Jo says halfway through. And then when they have shown me the process that takes around two minutes, she says, “That’s it. Brain-dead. It’s a real challenging job.” “That’s it,” she says, “Real complicated, isn’t it? You’d commit suicide if there wasn’t something on in the background to sing along to.”

Just as the presence of participatory fields around music engendered a positive dynamic of marginalizing the sounds of alienation, so the absence of participatory musicking left workers more open to the perception of the soundscape of alienation, even when music was playing. On reflection, this appeared to be one of the factors in the period in the verticals workroom that led to the mood being widely perceived as “terrible.” As noted in chapter 3, during this period the station River was played, and there were only occasional and isolated instances of social singing and dancing. The lack of participatory musicking certainly affected the mood directly, and in addition, given that the music and the sounds of the production process mingled in a soundscape of medium volume, it affected it indirectly because without participatory musicking, the individual workers were more vulnerable to hearing the sounds of alienation all around them.

Music and Clocks Another key quality of music for the McTells workers related to the perceptions of time on the factory floor. Often, too often, time on the factory floor was experienced as alienated time—empty, meaningless, slow, and boring: Anna says, “Oh, I’ve got to go home.” I ask, “Are you fed up?” “No, it’s worse, I’m bored.”

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Songs of the Factory At 11:30 somebody looks up and says, “I wish it was 12:30 [lunch break time].” “The last hour really drags, doesn’t it?” says Maggie. Jill says to Pauline, “It’s been a long day.” Pauline answers, “Yes, it’s been slow.”

Black comedy was commonly used in discussing the desire for time to pass. Here is a selection of such comments: End of break at 10:50. Somebody says, “It’ll soon be 12:30.” Shirley says, “Just another five hours to go,” looking at the clock. Angela says, “Come on Friday,” as she yawns.

On the factory floor, time was often experienced as running more slowly than time appeared to run during breaks: Doris tells me that the break went too fast. “It’s funny, the time goes slower at McTells and quicker when you’re outside.”

Even when new recruits were experiencing time running quickly, it was agreed that this would not last long: In the canteen at lunchtime Lisa says, “Joyce [who’s a new braider] says time’s flying for her. Mind you she’s only been here a week.” “Give her a fortnight, then we’ll see,” says William to laughter and nods.

Workers were only too aware of the slow passing of alienated time, and they sought to avoid clock-watching as this only accentuated the perception of slow alienated time passing: Shirley says, “I’ve been clock-watching today.” And Terri says, “Yes, I have as well. That’s the third time I’ve looked since twenty-five to, and it’s now twenty to.” Nina says, “Yes, that’s the worst clock-watching, that’s the worst.” Andy walking past, “Don’t clock-watch—it’s bad for you,” he says, seeing me look up at the clock. I talked to Natalie about yesterday going slowly, and she said, “Yes, it was a really boring day, I was really tired, and I was just looking at the

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clocks all the time.” She said, “I think it would be better if there were no clocks in the place. It would be better if there were no clocks to watch.”

Indeed, workers signaled to each other to avoid clock-watching: I look around at the clock. “It’s not time to go yet,” says Shirley.

Humor again played a part in this process: Angela is making cuckoo sounds periodically, and Nina and Shirley laugh. I ask what the joke is and Angela says, “I’m being their clock. I go cuckoo every fifteen minutes.” Nina says, “That’s not annoying is it?” and everybody smiles.

The desire to avoid clock-watching and to avoid being aware of the precise time, and thus of the slow passage of alienated time in the midst of the alienating work, was in clear contrast to the sharp knowledge of the time that was exhibited when the period of alienating work was coming to an end: “One minute to go.” The countdown is being read out from the front of the line at the clock-in.

For the workers, one crucial value of music lay in relation to how time was experienced—music helped to alleviate the perception of slow alienated time passing: Natalie: “It’s remarkable how time passes when you’re listening to the music at work.” Completely unprompted, she said that. Kathleen: “Music makes the day go quicker, doesn’t it?”

My presence, as a researcher studying music at work, and the discussion noted above among Angela, Shirley, and Nina about the dangers of clockwatching led to Michele’s implicit knowledge of one of the values of music becoming explicit: Nina says to me, “Oh, it’s really dragged today, hasn’t it?” There was a discussion about watching the clock all the time. Michele notes, “That’s what

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Here again is a point where we must ask ourselves: “What is going on here?” What are the ways in which music assuages the perception of slow alienated time passing? It does this by allowing social participation, and interaction, and as a key social mood signal. These social processes were examined in the previous chapter. But there is also something going on at the level of the individual, as well. I examine this in terms of how listening to pop music on the radio in the factory created a sense of a permanent present, and I contrast this with the framing of slow alienated time perception linked to clock-watching. My way of feeling into the knowledge of pop music as creating a sense of the permanent present came from reflecting on the following scene: At the packing station that Dave and Luis share, there’s a computer that isn’t being used, and leaning against it there’s a green sign with letters about ten inches high saying today—that’s all. It is a green sign about eighteen inches long saying today. It strikes me as being particularly appropriate since the culture is all about sustaining an ability to get through today. I ask Dave where the sign comes from, and he says, “It’s been there since Christmas when we had a two-week shutdown.” They have codes on packing things, and green coding is for “today,” and that’s been there since Christmas [i.e., for three months].

Dave’s statement was less an explanation of why the sign was still up and was more an explanation of how the sign was originally used in the production process. The sign had served no purpose for months, and yet, there it stood, still prominently on display rather than discarded in a corner on a pile of unwanted things. Why was this? What was it in the sign that connected with the felt knowledge of Dave and Luis? My initial intuition was that it connected with the cultural aim of sustaining an ability to get through “today.” I began to see that it also articulated with the specific process of pop music–inflected time perception. The next step in feeling my way toward seeing a contrast between slow alienated time perception and music-inflected time was the recurring observation that individual workers could often not recall what pop songs they had heard and liked

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in the previous hour or part of a shift—even after I had observed them engaging individually by moving their bodies in rhythm with the music or by softly singing along to parts of songs. Here are entries relating to this phenomenon: I came in at 10 o’clock today and asked everybody how it’s gone, and I asked Doris whether she’s been singing along with anything today, and she said, “Oh yeah.” I said, “So what’s been on and what have you been singing along to?” And she couldn’t remember. I asked the same question of Charmain, who has just started this first week, whether she’s sung along to any songs today or whether she liked any songs on the radio today, and she said, “There was something, but I can’t remember what it was.”

What was it in the nature of the music perception that made a pattern in which workers engaged with the music in the moment but could not recall the song that had given rise to earlier instances of engagement? today was the clue I needed to answer this. It was that the pop music on the radio gave a perception of a permanent present. If the song was there, it could be engaged with in the moment; if it was gone, it was replaced by another song that opened space up for engagement in the moment. The previous song was forgotten in the process of engaging with the present song. A succession of three-minute opportunities for musical engagement in the present led to a way of perception that accented the present. This form of time perception involves a sense of a series of nows unfolding and moves perception away from a sense of time passing in a linear way. This was helped by the fact that the disc jockeys tended only rarely to say what time it was. When disc jockeys did step in frequently to tell listeners the time, this was experienced in a negative way, as it worked against the playing out of the permanent present. As Lauren said, “Oh, this guy. I swear that’s the third time he’s said the time in the last half-hour. He can shut up.” The final point that led me to see the clear contrast between alienated clock-watching time perception and music-inflected time perception came from a Sunday afternoon visit to the cinema with my girlfriend (now wife). The city’s arts cinema was showing a season of Ingmar Bergman films on Sundays. We went to them avidly. The important film for my

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understanding of music and time was Cries and Whispers. Here is my field note entry in which I begin to see further: Lana taps her fingers a few times when she’s kind of waiting for me to finish a job, and the tapping of the fingers on the desk when I’m doing the job came to be much louder than the music. It’s kind of equivalent to the ticking of the clock in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, which I saw yesterday. One of the reasons why music’s important is that it dulls the perception of the ticking of the clock.

The empty, slow, remorseless ticking of clocks is a central motif in Cries and Whispers. Bergman gives us close-up after close-up of clock faces, with the ticking of the clock frequently constituting the only or dominant sound on the film’s audio track. His film is an exploration of the alienated relationship among three women, and his focus on the clocks presents us with a startling metaphor: the perception of the ticking of the clock as a perception of alienation. Lana’s tapping clock-like fingers connected this to the factory floor and the specific structures of alienation there. Clock-watching was hated in part because the clock was intuited by workers as a metaphor for Taylorism itself. The depiction by filmmakers Fritz Lang (in Metropolis) and Charlie Chaplin (in Modern Times) of the clock as a symbol of industrial alienation (Goodale 2011) matched the everyday sociological knowledge of the McTells workers. The ticking of the clock is entirely predictable, repetitive, and monotonous. The Taylorized work, whether the work of hem folding, hem sowing, or testing was predictable, repetitive, and monotonous. The ticking of the anonymous, impersonal clock, on its own, is abstracted of meaning. The Taylorized work was abstracted of meaning. Indeed, the work was often not given a name that betokened substantive meaning. “Have you done your numbers?” the supervisors would ask each worker as they went round checking on production levels. Numbers of product units accumulated in a linear way that served to emphasize the lack of substantive meaning: two done, three done, four done, five done. Similarly, the face of the clock, on its own, shows time passing and accumulating, in a linear way that can emphasize the lack of meaning: five minutes past one, six minutes past one, seven minutes past one. At last, I felt able to fully see what it was in music that workers at McTells so valued in terms of the perception of time. I have laid out the

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TABLE 4.1. Comparison of alienated clock-time perception and musically inflected time perception Alienated clock-time perception

Musically inflected time perception

Structuring of time

Linear flow

Succession of nows

Relationship between intervals of time

Repetitive, predictable

Variation in song giving rise to perception of variation in the texture of the nows

Meaning

Empty of meaning

Meaning in song from aesthetic qualities (thin) and from song as index (deeper)

Symbolism linked to medium of perception

Factory clock as metaphor for Taylorist repetitive hierarchical social order

Pop song on the radio symbolic of agency and expression

Overall perception of time

Perception of alienated time passing slowly

Experience of nonalienated permanent present gives rise to post hoc sense of time having passed quickly

contrast between the perception of slow alienated time linked to clockwatching with the perception of time as inflected by listening to pop music on the radio in table 4.1. In the description I have given of feeling my way toward this knowledge I have already outlined much of the argument. But in making my implicit feeling into explicit knowledge in the table, I have developed additional relevant points in the analysis. First, I address the perception of alienated clock time, given in the second column of the table. I have only one additional point to make to complete the discussion of this column. I have already argued that the clock-watching was hated in part because the clock itself was experienced as a metaphor for Taylorism. In that discussion, I highlighted the repetitiveness and meaninglessness of the tasks. But Taylorism is more than a repetitive social order that strips tasks of meaning, it is also a hierarchical social order. Bringing this in, we can see another way in which the clock was felt as a metaphor for Taylorism. Notably, the clock that workers hated to watch (but which they sometimes did) was a factory clock, owned by McTells. Just as McTells owned their labor power during the time period of the shifts, so McTells owned the means by which

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time was measured. Workers wore no watches because it was not their time; it was alienated time owned and governed by McTells, and they did not want to be reminded of its passage. This left the factory clock as the only clock on the factory floor. This served to strengthen the way in which the factory clock was felt implicitly as a metaphor for Taylorism, and thus to deepen workers’ dislike of looking at it. I now turn to the final column and fill in the spaces in the argument relating to musically inflected time perception. I have argued that listening to pop music on the radio created a sense of a permanent present. Next, I must consider the degree to which workers created meaning within the series of nows that were the pop songs played on the radio. The previous chapter has covered the way in which meaning was created socially, particularly by cultural instigators. In this discussion, however, the primary emphasis is on McTells workers as individual listeners. There were two main patterns of meaning for individual workers. The first, and by far most common, form of meaning was a (usually thin) appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of a song per se. When a song that they liked came on the radio, workers would engage with the song as a piece of music, enjoying the aesthetics of the melody, the rhythm, and/ or the words. Here is Doris making this usually internal process external and explicit (presumably further to my presence as researcher working with her): When “Bridge over Troubled Waters” [Simon and Garfunkel] is playing Doris says, laying her elbows on the cutting machine, “This sort of song gives you goose pimples all over. It’s as close to music perfection as you can get.”

This was an unusually strong statement of aesthetic appreciation. There were other cases where workers were touched by a song. Occasionally, when this happened, in the rollers room with their dispersed radios, a worker might go to the radio to turn the volume up slightly. Here John (disapprovingly) notes the cumulative outcome of this process: “There’s always someone whose favorite song it is, and they go and turn it up. But they never turn it down, and it ends up like a screech.” This attention to putting the volume up for a “favorite song” and the failure to follow this by putting the volume down for the following song also gives further

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indication of a playing out of a series of musical nows. The person engages with the song in the moment of its playing, putting the volume up. Then when another song, another musical now, is played, the actions relating to the previous song are passed over, and the person engages with the current song on its own terms in the now—including the volume level at which it is playing. More common than pausing to consider the beauty of a song or moving to turn the radio up were indications of smaller forms of appreciation. For instance, here are my notes relating to Doris’s musical engagement signs over an hour: She, for about ten to fifteen seconds, drummed along to a big kind of grunge rock song that was being played and had a little sing-along to a couple of lines from that as well. She did a little dance step when a disco song came on, and she sang along to a chorus of a song later, as well.

These were primarily a playing out of an internal process of appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of songs rather than social signals to others to sustain the “Stayin’ Alive” culture through the creation of a participatory field. These were the forms of thin appreciation of aesthetic qualities of songs on the radio that were the main threads of the fabric of workers creating a sense of a permanent present through pop music, which, in turn, informed a sense of time having passed quickly. There were three key material factors in the structure of workers’ listening that led to a form of thin appreciation. The central factor was the functioning of the labor process. Although it was repetitive, routine, “brain-dead” work, there were material tasks to be undertaken that operated against workers experiencing a deep appreciation of the music. Indeed, here my notes regarding Doris while the radio played “Bridge over Troubled Waters” are very telling. As noted above, she had talked of the goose-pimpled beauty of the song as she recognized it on the radio. My notes continue: Then, as the song goes on, she doesn’t seem to listen to it anymore and goes over to talk to Irene about something on the work ticket regarding the blind she is working on, and she did it in the middle of the song.

The demands of the work, although small, still militate against a deep aesthetic appreciation of the song. A second important factor was that music

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was almost continually played on the factory floor, primarily because of its role in the social and individual fight against being overwhelmed by waves of alienation. Hearing so much music necessarily dulled people’s sensing of the aesthetic qualities of any particular song that was played. My field notes have a number of observations of this dulling of the sensing of music’s positive aesthetic qualities often occurring later in the day. These observations will be examined later in the chapter in the discussion of the points at which music, because of the way it was primarily used in relation to alienation, became, at some points, itself alienating. The final factor was the thinness of the audio equipment by which workers heard the songs. Whether in the verticals room, with the relaying of a centralized broadcast system through dispersed loudspeakers, or in the rollers room, with the distributed portable radios, the quality of the audio was considerably thinner and less rich than, for instance, the audio I experienced listening to songs in my car coming to the factory in the morning as well as the audio that I was used to in listening to songs at home. Both high- and lowfrequency elements in the texture of the music were lost in the way music was relayed in the factory. The thin quality of the appreciation of the aesthetics of songs is also brought out by the way in which many workers emphasized the importance of music in the factory to them in terms, not of the positive qualities of the music itself, but rather in terms of what it helped to move them away from. Music was seen as valuable because of what it directed mental attention away from. “It is important. It takes your mind off things. It stops boredom, I guess, really,” one worker says after being asked. Luis says, “I love music. I do. It takes your mind off things.” Music was needed to “take your mind off things” because the things that were likely to be on your mind were the lack of meaning experienced as boredom, the selfestrangement implied in the repetitive low-skilled labor that faced the workers, as well as the low pay and poor conditions that were tied to the work. Bill stated, “It’s [i.e., the work is] monotonous, isn’t it. Music takes you away from that.” Occasionally interspersed within this main pattern of thin appreciation of songs within a permanent present were songs that were experienced by individual workers as indices of moments in their life that resonated strongly with them. Since I was a researcher about music, workers sometimes shared these moments with me, and I was able to hear some of this

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resonance, a resonance that was usually experienced internally by individual workers. By far the strongest pattern here was a song resounding because it indexed some point in the person’s becoming in his or her youth and young adulthood. At these points, the song served as a signal for people to explore the memory indexed by the song playing. Here is an example of song as an index of points in a person’s youth: “Monday, Monday” comes on the radio, by the Mamas and the Papas. Lana comes over and tells me, “Now, this song, I used to walk around. I was fifteen years old. I had a boyfriend that my mother didn’t know. I didn’t want my mother to know about, and I was really frightened she’d find out. We’d be walking around Manor Park and this song was playing. I don’t know, it must have been a caravan or something, someone was playing it. But, I really remember, I was fifteen. I was frightened to death my mother would find out.”

Occasionally, I witnessed powerful emotions tied to memories being brought on by a particular piece of music: “Pretty Paper” by Roy Orbison is playing, and Carol tells a very moving story about how the song was playing when she met her first husband, who was her soul mate. They met on January 3, 1967, and they got married on January 7th. They were together for twenty years before he died of malaria, and she says they play it every Christmas and she’s holding the tears back when she’s telling us this. And I say, ”You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want.” But she carries on. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is playing, and Evelyn . . . brings out from her wallet an ABBA ticket from 1979 Wembley Arena Area A. She says, “Ooh, I long to take me back to that day, and when songs come on sometimes it can bring me back to that day. It was just beautiful. It was just perfect.” And then she tells the story of how they did an encore with “I Have a Dream,” and loads of kids came onto the stage to join in for the chorus. And she just thought it was just great, the most wonderful thing.

On both of these occasions the poignancy of the testimony came in part from the contrast between the immediate alienated context and the sense of self-transcendence at the heart of each story. Music in the factory could occasionally touch people’s humanity in a profound way.

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These points of deep memory brought on by pop songs on the radio also had an effect of allowing workers to avoid experiencing the passage of slow alienated time. At these points, workers could become largely given over to the memory of the particular moment indexed by the song. “When [ABBA] songs come on sometimes it can bring me back to that day,” as Evelyn said. These points tended to put people beyond the normal perception of time. Here, avoiding the experience of slow alienated time passing is facilitated not by a sense of a permanent present but rather by a sense of a relived past. In both ways, as permanent present and as relived past, music helped. In as much as songs served as media of time perception, the media here was not symbolic of alienating structures, as the factory clock was symbolic of Taylorism. As I will argue in detail in the following chapter, songs were felt as expressive forums for the articulation of a spirit of resistance to Taylorism. Furthermore, it is clear that workers felt that the songs that gave a flow to their day were, to a significant degree, their songs, and the medium through which the songs were played, the radio, was largely seen as theirs. I have already outlined a number of elements of agency of workers in the playing of the songs—the bringing in of the radios in the rollers room, the largely playful disputes over which radio station to play, the turning on of the radios in morning, the turning up of the radios when a favorite song came on, and the participatory musicking. Unlike the factory clock that belonged to McTells, these songs were felt, by workers, as belonging to them. They were not top-down injections of cultural expression, they were expressive of workers’ own culture. Because of this, the radio, although it was also a machine, was not perceived as part of the alienating structure— unlike the machines linked to labor. Workers used their culture to try to guide themselves away from slow alienated time perception toward a musically inflected way of perceiving time as having passed quickly, but these attempts were not always successful. In practice, their mode of time perception moved between the two frames. There was an inevitable fragility to music as a cultural resource in the face of the looming incessant structures of the workplace. Pop songs could come and go, bringing with them some small aestheticization and perhaps some memories of youthful becoming, but what was always there was the grinding monotony of the work. Fifteen blinds worked on this hour, fifteen more to come in the next, the only variation being a change in

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the shade and dimensions of the blinds. The next section, by looking at the patterns in the way musicking was related to points of alienation, takes up the importance of understanding the fragility of music in workers’ cultural fight to stop the waves of alienation from overwhelming them.

Ebbs, Flows, and the Fragility of Music In giving the main picture of music and the senses of alienation, I have necessarily simplified the situation, implicitly offering a static picture of this relationship. But there was little that was static in the role of music and the cultural fight against the sensing of alienation—there were ebbs and flows across the day, across the week, and across locations within McTells. This section focuses on the patterns within these ebbs and flows.

Heightened Alienation and the Limits of Music When the senses of alienation were too strong, music became redundant. This was evident on a number of occasions—after workplace participation meetings and after public reprimands from supervisors. As noted in chapter 2, management was attempting to introduce forums of workplace participation groups akin to quality circles. They were called AIM meetings. AIM stood for Action and Ideas at McTells. However, rather than being forums for suggestions to garner commitment and to elicit workers’ suggestions on improving the organization of production, these meetings were experienced as forums of frustration where a sense of alienation among the workers was often palpable. The way in which workers resisted management’s attempt to engage their commitment to the production process is outlined in detail in chapter 7. Overall, these meetings had the effect of considerably heightening workers’ sense of alienation. Perhaps it could have been expected that this time away from the monotony of the jobs would have been welcomed, but there were two factors that actually served to increase rather than decrease workers’ sense of alienation. First, in these meetings they were asked to engage with, to implicitly show some commitment to, the structures of work that alienated them day after day. This only served to heighten their understanding of the alienating nature of the structures facing them. Second, the meetings meant workers were

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taken away from their “Stayin’ Alive” culture. As I will explore in the following chapter, the cultural activity of music use, humor, and camaraderie were embedded within the functioning of the labor process. The culture lost its underpinning and its resonance when it was abstracted from the alienating labor process that gave it its meaning. Workers were often desperate for these meetings to end so they could return to the labor process: Rose and Christine, about the meeting: “It’s a waste of time. We got told about our errors. We switched off. We didn’t even listen. We wanted to get back to work, we did. An AIM meeting has just taken place for some of the people who missed the main ones. Shirley, the machinist, and Lauren: “Another waste of time. We know all about this. Why waste the time with another blinking presentation. We could have had another five hundred out the door rather than just sitting around like that.”

This desire to be back at work did not reflect a joy in the work but rather an intuited sense that their culture, which they so valued, was rooted in the process of working. When workers returned from these empty meaningless meetings their subjective senses of alienation were too strong, too intense for music to have any resonance. In these periods, music was too fragile a resource to have meaning. On five occasions, I was able to observe the work groups before they went to these meetings and immediately after they had returned from them. On each occasion, there was a normal level of musicking before the meeting, but after the meeting, for around twenty to thirty minutes, there was no musicking at all. For instance, my notes for Day 31 read: There’s a strong sense of lack of engagement and disenchantment from that meeting, and people had the similar movements when they came back from their meetings. In all, the team briefing and AIM meeting have lasted half an hour in total, and there’s no musical engagement from anybody in the first few songs after everybody’s back to work. Before the meeting there had been a few songs in our corner that had sparked discussion and a little bit of singing along.

A similar scenario of music being too fragile in the most severe points of alienation was played out after the occasions when workers had been

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(often publicly) disciplined by supervisors. The following extracts give an example of this following a piece of disciplining by a supervisor walking by a worktable: A big skit on “When Will I See You Again” with lots of ooh/aahs and dancing from Shirley, Irene, and Evelyn with Maggie looking on laughing and they’re doing a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing, and this is stopped in its tracks by Kate the team leader who says, “Get some work done, please. Can we get some finishing done now, Evelyn.” People are no longer smiling at their workstations after this, and there’s a temporary stop in the discussions, banter, and singing.

The cessation of musical engagement by the workers did not simply occur in order to comply with the supervisor’s instructions. In this case, the supervisor had moved on, and the workers certainly would have been able to do some singing along and smaller dance steps without fear of further disciplining. The complete absence of musicking for an extended period of usually at least fifteen minutes after such rebukes was a function of the sense of alienation being heightened because the supervisor’s actions had brutally highlighted their powerlessness. I experienced exactly this process a few days later: I get told off for some mistakes on my turning up [of blind hems]. “Somebody’s been turning up really badly,” says Rhona the supervisor, publicly, so everybody around can hear. She marches through with the blind and looks around and puts it on the refit table of Shirley’s so everybody knows it’s been my turning up. So she publicly humiliated me in a ritual kind of way. “Defective work,” she says. “You’re not meant to do that.” I feel awful, terrible after this, for the next few blinds I turn up. After a while I’m beginning to find a little bit of solace in singing along to “Big Yellow Taxi.”

After I had gone through this experience I waited to check if this was what was being experienced by the other workers after they had been disciplined and humiliated. I ask Angela about the music soothing you after you’ve been disciplined. I tell her about being humiliated by Rhona and how I felt terrible for like ten minutes and then you gradually feel better when a nice song comes on, you

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Sometimes, the supervisors would ritually discipline groups of workers in the middle of the workroom floor, thus making the humiliation even more acute for the workers involved. In these cases, the lack of music engagement that followed lasted longer than in the cases above. For example, the cutters were called together and shouted at loudly by the head supervisor for not reaching the productivity targets. The following notes describe the aftermath of this: The mood sours, and everybody goes away stiff and slumping. . . . Lana grimaces at me and says, “It’s a bit grim, isn’t it?”. . . In the aftermath of this speech, there’s no engagement to the music at all. . . . Bill, about half an hour after, does a little dance to himself to a dance song.

With the intense sting of alienation from the public humiliation from the supervisor beginning to subside, music could be used again in its everyday fight against sensing the alienation of the monotonous labor process.

Patterns across the Day, across the Week There were two conditions of alienation that led to workers not engaging with the music. We have seen that where alienation was heightened, music fell away in salience. The other condition was where alienating structures were almost completely absent. Here workers did not engage with the music because it was not needed to fight against the senses of alienation. Consider the simple observation that while music was almost always present on the factory floor, it was completely absent in the canteens during tea breaks and lunch breaks. Break times were experienced in largely positive ways, and each minute of the breaks was jealously guarded—on occasions, returns from breaks were preceded by extended discussions of whether it was actually the right time to go back. This was a time free from alienation. In this context, the key role of music in dulling the senses of alienation was redundant, and so music itself became redundant—no radios or personal music players were used by workers during break times. This

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pattern of music only having cultural meaning when there was work being done also came out clearly in the musical practices of Andy and Chris, who cut the metal for the vertical blinds off in a small room of their own— where they had considerable work and music-playing autonomy. When they were working they invariably had music playing: There’s a little cutting shop in here and Molly says, “They have their own CDs, and there’s two guys there.” They say, “Yes, it’s great. Do you want to hear what we’ve been playing this morning?” And they play me something from Riverdance. “Yes, that’s what we listen to. We love it. We have a little dance we do sometimes when we’ve got our stuff on. We’ve made our own mixes. We have our own dance. It’s great.”

Pacing themselves autonomously, they could also ensure that they had cigarette breaks, just standing outside the cutting room. Notably, they did not play any music when they were on their cigarette breaks and not undertaking labor. In addition, in the last few minutes before the end of the shift, workers’ senses of alienation fell away almost completely, and again, music lost its currency. There was a clear pattern when work was drying up, with the usual custom of the last blind being worked on around ten minutes before “clocking off” time: At a few minutes to one, Stella says to Jenny, “I’m not doing any more after this, are you?” Jenny shakes her head and agrees. Then the music had no relevance as we were packing away and counting down toward the end of the day—no engagement with it.

As well as patterns in the relationship between music use and the senses of alienation within a given day, there was also a pattern across days within the working week. Monday was the day of the week in which workers experienced a heightened level of alienation compared to other work days. The sensing of alienation was strong on a Monday, but it was not as intense as following a public humiliation by a supervisor or after an AIM meeting. It was accepted as obvious that Monday was the worst day of the week: it was the day on which the whole of the working week stretched out long before the workforce. Lisa said, “The rest of the week goes okay,

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but Mondays can be really hard. It’s a real grind to get through those Mondays.” By contrast, on Friday, workers tended to have less acute experiences of alienation. It was the day of imminent release: So Doris says, “Oh, Friday feels good. I like Friday, I do.” Early in the morning, Lana’s smiling. She says, “It’s Thursday today. Good. It’ll soon be Friday.”

There was considerably less musical engagement on Mondays than on Fridays. For instance, the same song played on the radio at similar times on the two days would typically be met with a reaction on a Friday but not on a Monday: There is a small singing to Robbie Williams’s “Angels.” Compare the reaction to the same song on a Friday to one of the Mondays I heard it when there was no reaction to it at all.

Two young workers engaged strongly with the music on Friday, feeling in it the promise of the freedom of the weekend to come. Brian said, “Junior Senior has just been on before—brilliant—Friday morning dance music, makes you think of going out, great!” The differences in levels of musical engagement on Mondays and Fridays were sometimes noted on the factory floor. For instance, in the quotes below, Doris’s judgment on the respective merits of the days are entwined with her statements about the music on those days: Doris says she hasn’t sung along this morning: “A bit boring. I hate Monday mornings.” Doris: “Oh, yes, I love Fridays. The music’s been good.”

The final color to add to the picture of the interweaving of music use and the senses of alienation concerns the points in the late afternoon when the accumulated uses of music throughout a given day could sometimes mean that workers would experience music itself as contributing to, rather than fighting against, alienation. Toward the end of the day, after the radio had been on for already six or seven hours, music would start to grate for some workers. It seems that the patterns of musicking could only work for

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so long, and when energy levels (crucial to the “Stayin’ Alive” culture) fell low, the music itself could be perceived as grating. Anne says, “At the end of the day, it can get too much when you get a bit tired. The music on, you just want a bit of silence.” There was also a microsocial underpinning of this late afternoon perception of music as grating—the absence of cultural instigators. Some cultural instigators worked shorter hours and finished their working day an hour and a half earlier than most workers. Without the encouragement of cultural instigators to lead workers to socially musick, the power of pop songs to fight against alienation had reached their limits seven hours into the shift. This was another element in the fragility of pop music as a resource against sensing alienation. Chapter 6 also contains another small picture of what happened when music fell out of the “Stayin’ Alive” framing and became tarnished with the brush of alienation.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how musicking by workers, mainly at the individual level, was centrally related to their senses of alienation. Sensing alienation was understood as a lived social process rather than a tightly defined concept that had measurable dimensions and that varied with forms of technology (see Blauner 1964). How does this argument connect with the ideas I put forward in the first two chapters—that music in monotonous hierarchical social orders can be multitonous and can be dialectically used to enact the social order while also expressing a sense of resistance to it? It is easy to see how workers used music to help enact the social order of Taylorism in the sense that they used music to cope within alienating structures. But there was more to it than just that. Throughout the chapter I have emphasized that workers understood the value of music not just in the “for,” in the positive qualities it brought, but also in the “against,” in the senses of alienation that had to be fought against. This meant that the process of “coping” through music did not equate to a process of accepting. Workers implicitly understood that there was an overarching structure to be against, and it was with this felt knowledge that they reached for the radio switch in the morning. They might forget temporarily about alienating social structures when caught in the now of a pop song or in

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the revisited past as indexed by a song, but they did not forget why they needed the radio to be there in the first place. The following chapter unearths more of the spirit of the “against” beside the “with” of the musical enactment of the social order by looking at how acts of work became musical, and what forms of meanings underpinned these movements.

5

You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk Music as Aid to Work and Critique of Taylorism

This chapter takes seriously Mark Franko’s (2002, 1) argument that “in the context of production, whether industrial or theatrical, choreography constitute[s] an analytic of organization.” Inspired by Joel Dinerstein (2003), I begin the chapter with two famous pieces of choreography taken from films that feature people at work.1 The scenes have important connections with the two main ways in which workers comported themselves as they enacted the Taylorized labor processes of making blinds. The first scene comes from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.

1. The contrast presented between the structured movements of Chaplin and the freer, rhythmical movements of Travolta is similar to the contrast brilliantly highlighted by Joel Dinerstein (2003) between the structured human body as part of a machine in Busby Berkeley films of the 1930s and the flowing, rhythmic body of Fred Astaire dancing with and against the machine in Shall We Dance? filmed in the same decade. Because my focus of analysis is on the human body at labor, I have used examples that feature Chaplin and Travolta at work.

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Songs of the Factory The assembly line. The line is moving quickly. Chaplin is keeping pace, just. His job is to tighten two screws on the small metal plates that pass him. He does this with both hands, each holding a spanner. His body makes the same jerky movement as he moves the spanners up from the screws just tightened, puts them down on the next metal plate—now in front of him, thanks to the moving belt—and tightens both screws with a simultaneous twisting action. The same motions, and only these motions, every two seconds. Chaplin, the director, accents the fact that it is only these exact same motions of machinelike repetition and speed by making a joke of a bee flying in front of the face of Chaplin, the actor, as he is working on the line. The simple human gesture of shooing an annoying insect away from one’s face is proscribed by the worker’s ability to make only those actions necessary for production. And then, lunch time. The line stops, but Chaplin’s jerky tightening motions are so inscribed on his body that his body cannot stop; it continues these motions, even after he has put down the spanners and is walking away from the line. This idea is so important for Chaplin that he shows it happening twice during the working day. He further underlines it by making it the structure for a visual joke in which Chaplin, his body still jerking with the motions of production, passes a bowl full of soup to his (unlikeable) colleague. The repetitive spasms of Chaplin’s arms mean that nearly all of the soup is spilled in the process of passing the bowl.

The second scene is the extended opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. Credits come and go as the scene unfolds. The scene centers on John Travolta’s walk down a busy Brooklyn street and the accompanying loud audio of the Bee Gees song, “Stayin’ Alive.” At the start, the camera shows only a man’s feet, as he compares his shoes against some shoes in a shop window. The camera keeps focusing on the shoes as the man starts to walk along the sidewalk in rhythm with the introduction to the song. As the first line of the song is sung —“You can tell by the way I use my walk”— the camera pans up the still walking body of the man to reveal John Travolta. We now see that he is strutting more than walking. He swaggers along the street, his clothes stylish, his arms swinging, his body loose. He is carrying a tin of paint. Such are the “surplus” movements of bobbing, swinging, swagger in this promenade that when the camera is close to him, the viewer feels that the whole picture is pulsating with Travolta’s movements. He looks at a woman passing. The audio fades briefly as he orders two slices of pizza, but it is soon back up to accompany him further

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on his walk up the street. He sashays along as if grooving to the dance music. The camera focuses on his shoes again for a short while and then on the tin of paint he is carrying, which sways along with the swinging excesses of his arm movements. He tries to engage a young woman wearing a dress whose hip movements echo his, but he is brushed off. He pauses to put down five dollars on a shirt in a clothing store (again the audio fades briefly for these few seconds). He breaks into a run, and the music fades completely as we see that he is carrying the paint to a hardware store where he works.

The central argument of this chapter is that there was an array of cultural practices undertaken by the workers on the McTells shop floor that were aimed at fighting against the dominance of the body by Taylorism as exemplified in the Chaplin scene. Stan Cohen and Laurie Taylor (1992, 50) have argued that “like the long-term prisoner, we fear that ‘giving in’ to habit could be a symptom of a more total deterioration, a disintegration of ourselves into automatons.” This fear is writ large in the Taylorized factory, and workers at McTells understood the importance of the fight against becoming automaton-like. Music played a key role in this fight, for it afforded the space for the bodily swagger, the musical swing to the motions of production, just as the song “Stayin’ Alive” seemed to open up space for the rhythmic swagger of Travolta. By adding excess, musically inflected, patterns to the motions of production, the McTells workers were offering a profound lived critique of the social order of Taylorism, even as they were also enacting this social order by undertaking the labor process within its parameters. This was a central dialectic of multitonous musicking within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture at McTells. Arguments concerning implicit bodily resistances to the social order of Taylorism have been considered by a number of scholars (Banta 1993; Franko 2002; Dinerstein 2003). Thus far, these (important) arguments have concentrated on how people have expressed resistance to Taylorism in the way they have moved their bodies outside of the workplace. It is perhaps assumed that the victory of Taylorism, in terms of the structuring of the comportment of workers’ bodies, can be taken as a given within the workplace. The assumption of the simple victory of Taylorism over the movements of workers’ bodies within the workplace is often played out by reference to examples of the pioneering of techniques of Taylorism. Notable here is the chilling process involving the attaching of lightbulbs to

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a worker’s body to allow the clear tracing of its movements. For instance, Lundermo (2011, 3) gives the following picture: Taylor’s time efficiency studies were invested with a chronophotographic complement when the American engineer Frank Bunker Gilbreth developed his “micro−motion method” to make work processes more efficient. . . . Gilbreth patented the Chronocyclograph in 1913, a camera coupled to a large number of small lightbulbs. These lights could be distributed on a body performing a movement, most often a work process, in order to chart the successive positions of a movement. . . . Through the study of these instants of a gesture, the irrational movements wasting time and energy (and in capitalist production, money) could be identified and eliminated.

The affective power of this picture seems to lead to a blind assumption that the enactment of Taylorist techniques passed automatically within the workplace. Where novelists have imagined the playing out of Taylorism within the factory, the dominance of the structure of Taylorism over the worker’s body is also often portrayed as complete. For instance, John Dos Passos in his 1938 novel The Big Money gives this description: “Reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown hold, shove in cofferpin, reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunderadjust, until every ounce of life was sucked off into production, and at night the workmen went home gray shaking husks” (55). Carol Wolkowitz (2006, 58) is correct in suggesting that industrial ethnographers have not accepted the picture of the industrial Taylorized body of the worker as a “docile, passive object.” They have shown the tacit skills that workers often need in enacting production and how this opens up scope for human agency. However, even Wolkowitz admits there is little in these ethnographies about the minute comportment of workers bodies and the relationship of this to the Taylorized movements of production. Further, labor relations scholars have documented widespread instances of battles between labor and capital over the terms of Taylorism—the wage rate, the speed of production, productivity targets to be reached. But again, a consideration of the patterns of movement of workers’ bodies (rather than their speed of movement) within Taylorized structures has been absent. Rather than assume the simple victory of Taylorism in the structuring of workers’ movements in the factory, we need to consider the potential

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role of the “body as working-class habitus” (Wolkowitz 2006, 66) in the enactment of Taylorized production—a body that can be potentially expressively resistive even as it enacts the social order. Wolkowitz uses the phrase “body as working-class habitus” to offer a way out of the assumptions of the docile, molded body, by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (2001) notion of the embodied habitus in which there is an accommodation between bodily dispositions and power relations. This is precisely what Willis (1977, 156) had in mind when he suggested that the bodily swagger of workers represents a form of implicit resistance to the constraints of repetitive production: “Even the codification and reduction of modern organization and methods . . . cannot remove atavistic traces of swagger, unnecessary movement and the expression of an essence which is essentially foreign to production qua production.” And this is where music comes in. Music may accentuate this by opening up more space for the resistive, but also laboring and hence accommodative, bodily swagger on the factory floor. Adapting the terms given by Simone Weil in her 1934 diary written during her time as a factory worker, music can allow the beauty of the human rhythm to replace the clocklike “cadence” of machine-dominated movements: “In factory terminology one does not describe the succession of movements with the word ‘rhythm’ but one speaks of ‘cadence,’ and rightly so, since this succession is the opposite of rhythm. Any series of movements that is attuned to the beautiful . . . contains momentary pauses, instantaneous as lightning, which form the secret of rhythm and give the observer, even in motions of great speed, an impression of leisureliness” (quoted in Marder 2006, 7). Albert Murray’s (1976, 189) discussion of African American culture becomes germane here. He observed that it is possible for “work movements [to] become dance movements.” Tia DeNora’s (2000, 144) call for a careful study of “mundane choreography” of the everyday minutiae of body movements in relation to music, therefore, is particularly apposite when applied to the context of music playing in the Taylorized workplace. In this chapter, I show how music was used by workers to create musically inflected acts of work. The simultaneous critique and enactment of Taylorism through music was not only present in the movement of workers’ bodies, it was also present in the overall pattern of the music that was listened to, and also in the way workers sang along to songs. In addition, I briefly outline how other cultural practices, particularly humor, operated in a similarly dialectical way.

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Music and the Movement from Chaplin to Travolta There were two main patterns in how workers moved their bodies as they worked. The first pattern involved workers working in a machinelike, repetitive, structured way, using only those motions necessary for production, in steady, monotonous motions. As they finished work on one blind, they would reach for the next blind, using exactly the same motions in exactly the same temporal pattern. The next blind would be worked on, using identical motions to the one previously worked on. I label this pattern the structured actions of work. This label is used to connect to the idea that workers’ bodies simply reproduce the structure of the Taylorized labor process, with no indications of agentic modification of this structure. This pattern of working was akin to Chaplin’s actions of work described earlier. An important contextual difference between McTells and Chaplin’s factory was that the speed of the assembly line, for Chaplin, was such that any movement away from the structured actions of work was almost impossible. As noted in chapter 2, at McTells production was not on a moving assembly line. It involved bench assembly. This meant that there was no set rhythm of labor imposed on workers by a machine. At McTells there was space for rhythmic innovations in the actions of work. Further, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7, for nearly all workers, apart from those new recruits just learning the job, the speed of production was not so fast as to limit workers to enact only those motions necessary for production. Even when workers used the structured actions of work to enact production, the dominance of the structure on the body’s movements was not absolute. For instance, even when working in this pattern, workers would still occasionally pause, usually between finishing work on one blind and starting work on the next, and would make actions such as rubbing the face, running hands through the hair, and stretching. Further, workers would, every few minutes, look up from their work to see if there were any social signals for communication from their colleagues. Or, at worst, they could look up for another reason. It was during the extended periods involving the structured actions of work and no social communication that looking up was most likely to feature the hated clock-watching. The second pattern of working involved workers undertaking production with some occasional excess motion and/or rhythmic innovation. I

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label this pattern as agentic actions of work. This label is used to connect to the idea that workers created their own modifications to the motions of work. Agentic ways of working typically played out as responses to music, such that the actions of work were also musically informed actions. In my second day at the factory I had an epiphany when I began to see that workers were often subtly musically aestheticizing the motions of work. At around four o’clock there was a sudden silence: the radio stopped for about a minute. People looked around at each other strangely like a texture of the workplace that changed. There was a real difference; you could hear knocking, banging, not much talking. There was an empty space, and people were strange, almost as if some of their clothes had been taken off. And then the radio came back on. What came on was rather beautiful; it was “Walk On By,” sung by Dionne Warwick, which has a gorgeous subtle introduction. From this silence came this subtle wonderfully arranged song, and for about thirty seconds I could see at least six people quietly either moving their lips or gently moving their bodies with the music while they kept on working.

It took the sudden break from music and then its subtle reintroduction to allow me to see what workers were already frequently doing. In response to the music, they were bringing surplus rhythmic motions to the enactment of production. To take examples from this particular case of the sudden appearance of “Walk On By,” one worker took a little side step in time with the music as she moved to the stacking table to collect the next blind to work on. In so doing, she was enacting production. She did so with an extra movement of her legs that was not necessary for her to reach the stacking table. It was timed to be in rhythm with the song. These elements made it a surplus, rhythmic motion. At the same time, another worker reached for a long ruler, and in so doing, she moved her arms not in a straight line but with a dancing sway in which the sway matched the rhythm of the clipped chords of the electric guitar that features prominently in the song’s introduction and first verse. Through these musical movements of work, workers were moving away from Chaplin’s structured body and connecting more with the body movements of John Travolta walking down the street. As if the subtle wisdom of “Walk On By” had not already shown me enough, its first line was already pointing me to this parallel with Travolta: “If you see me walking down the street.” Here

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was the musically informed “rhythm” that Simone Weil contrasted with the machinelike “cadence” of working in a factory. After this epiphany, I observed more and more musically inflected agentic ways of working in which production was enacted with surplus rhythmic motions. For instance: The Jacksons song comes on, and Lauren goes by carrying fabric to the next worktable singing, walking in a kind of dance-type step. There’s a bit of a sing to “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby.” In fact . . . Lauren does a kind of musical dance at first, carrying some blinds, and when she comes back, she does absolutely break into a . . . quick dance back to her worktable, at which Anna smiles.

On some occasions, these movements were undertaken subconsciously: Rose, to “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang, does a little dance step as she’s stepping backward. I ask her about this. She denies doing it and makes a joke out of it.

Most of these agentic ways of working were undertaken by individuals, with no attempt to offer social communication. Some were also social. Indeed, some of the participatory musicking that was examined in chapter 3 also involved workers jointly creating musical movements of work: Two people skip into the next room in time with a dance track.

The consistency of these observations was such that it became obvious that a musically inflected agentic way of working was one of the two main modes of working at McTells. What was also notable was the significant degree to which the agentic mode of working was undertaken as a response to music. It was only rarely that I observed clear cases of surplus motion in the enactment of production that was not linked to music. Mostly, workers had a script of work motions set into their bodies, which they were able to automatically enact without conscious thought, and they deliberately chose to stay within this script. I enquired of three workers whether they ever altered the pattern of how they went about undertaking their jobs. For instance, did they sometimes apply the glue from left to right, sometimes from the center outward, sometimes from right to left.

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The workers I asked took the question to be a strange one. Altering the script of their movements in this way made no sense to them. Given these responses, I did not ask this question any more—especially, as my observations confirmed that workers tended to enact a set script of actions. The musically inflected agentic way of working was a fluid, rhythmic way of enacting this script that kept the script from dominating the body. This contrast between Chaplin and Travolta, between the structured way of working and the musically inflected agentic way of working, was a contrast that was explicitly as well as implicitly understood as important by workers on the shop floor. The musical movements of work were seen as lying in a critical relationship to the mechanical movements of the structured way of working. This was clearly expressed by Tricia: She tells me how she always jigs and sings, and if there’s a song that she likes and she knows Rose likes, she’ll wave over with a little jig and smile (she does the actions). We talk about other singers on the shop floor. . . . “You’ve got to have something, don’t you? Otherwise you’ll be standing like this all day”—she gestures, accentuating the mechanical movements of work.

The contrast in Tricia’s gestures was crucial—between the expressive, flowing, free movements of her dance, wave, and smile in response to music, and the mechanical, repressed, robotic, and controlled movements of her (nonmusical) repetitive work. Tricia eloquently expressed both orally and through gesture that one of the key values of music lay in its relationship of contrast to repetitive labor. The music offered the opportunity for workers’ bodies to resist being dominated by Taylorism and to work in a musically inflected agentic way. The same point was made in a slightly different way by Bill and Steve, separately. They reprise the debate about which radio station should be played, and in so doing, they highlight the importance of music as critique of the repetitive structured way of working: Bill is talking: “We have some good music on this station. But I can’t stand River. It’s just awful, so many repeats it does my head in. It’s like you’re working along and you hear the same song again, and you think ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ ” During this, he does the mechanical actions of work, mimicking a double take of looking up at the speaker on hearing a repeated song.

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Steve says, “River is too repetitive, isn’t it? Same songs, and you’re working and listening, and then the same song comes on at quarter past ten and you say, ‘Hang on,’ and you look down, and you’re doing the same stuff.”

Bill and Steve’s gestures of work almost exactly mirrored the robotic gestures of Tricia. They structured their bodies as automatons, moving mechanically. This time the gesture was accompanied by a bewildered, despairing double take as Bill and Steve made as if to look up at the speaker. Steve finished this gesture by also making as if to look back at his work. The message in this gesture and look was that the music from the particular radio station was flawed because it accentuated repetitiveness. Usually, music allowed for movements beyond the structured movements of Taylorism, and in this way it allowed space for these implicit cultural critiques of Taylorism. This also came out in Maggie’s mimicking of freer work movements associated with nonrepetitive music: Maggie said, “You know, I think that the mood changes when we have Diamond on. We’re all singing along.” And she makes flowing work motions while she’s saying that we sing along. “And it’s great. We all have a smile and a laugh.”

Maggie’s gestures were eloquent. She showed her explicit understanding of the importance to her and many of her fellow workers of working in a musically inflected agentic way. Music here was used dialectically. It was both against and with. This was both a critique of the social order of Taylorism, but, at the same time, it enacted the labor process that resided within a Taylorized architecture. It is also notable that Maggie connects the freer flowing motions of work not only with music but also with humor—she talks about the importance of “a smile and a laugh.” Music was but one part of the wider cultural practices that were used by workers to fight against their bodies being experienced as structured by Taylorism. While the above examples involved workers mimicking the robotic gestures of structured ways of working, it must be emphasized that the structured way of working was the other dominant pattern in the motions of production. During periods of a heightened sense of alienation many workers’ bodies actually took on these gestures of work: they enacted the structured way of working without any surplus rhythmic motions. When

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workers’ senses of alienation were heightened by a public humiliating reprimand from a supervisor, the workers’ body movements were solely those necessary to undertake the labor. After a while, the sensing of alienation began to dull, and the movements of work changed to involve a rhythmic articulation with the music playing: Steve, about half an hour to three-quarters of an hour after the telling off, does a first engagement with the music: he drones and dances to two or three bars to a dance song.

Steve’s job was carrying material to the cutting tables, as requested by the cutters. His dance movement here was part of his labor process, as he moved back from delivering material to a cutting table. Previously, in the heightened period of sensing alienation, he had walked in an ordered, structured way without embellishment of movement or rhythmic inflection. As if the first line of “Walk On By” was not a strong enough hint to bring me to John Travolta’s walk, the following scenario meant that Travolta’s tin of paint was nearly swinging into my face. It was Red Nose Day, a charity day when many people came to the factory in fancy dress, as a way of raising money for charities. There were all sort of characters— footballers, cricketers, doctors, nurses, soldiers, and . . . one young man (Adam) dressed in the disco clothes of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Adam and his “team” had been away at an AIM meeting. Following the pattern discussed in the previous chapter, workers came back from this meeting with a heightened sense of alienation. Thus, the scene was Adam, dressed as John Travolta, working in a structured manner at the cutting table, enacting the motions of work with mechanical efficiency. And then, some thirty minutes later, the senses of alienation were fading, and workers began to hear the music again and to open up their bodies to engage with this music: Junior Senior, “Everybody” . . . [is playing. It is a thumping dance song with echoes of 1970s disco songs]. Adam now moves musically with freedom to the song as he collects the fabric.

Adam moved from Chaplin to Travolta, from the structured way of working to the agentic way of working in articulation with music. I also

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observed this contrast in the music-inspired agentic way of working and musicless structured movements of Stella: I ask Stella about how it’s going, the machining in the corner. She says, “Oh, it’s going all right. I’m missing my music though because in this corner the radio’s very low.” It’s on low volume today, and there’s quite a lot of machining, and when she’s machining as well, she can’t hear the music at all hardly, compared to when she’s braiding where it’s quite loud. I’ve seen her do musical movements when she’s braiding, but she’s sitting stock still, I think a bit bored, and simply mechanically doing the machining.

The Beat, Repetition, and the Pattern of Singing The simultaneous for and against of music’s relationship to Taylorism was not only present in the movement of workers’ bodies, it was also present in the overall pattern of the music that was listened to, and also in the way workers sang along to songs. The following quotes exemplify how workers understood the need for music that was “lively” or “something with a beat”: Liam: “At home I’m more likely to listen to REM say, songs with some meaning. The dance stuff [he makes a pulsing dance movement] gives you a lift when you’re mentally tired. It keeps you going.” Tricia: “Oh, there’s another one, “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go,” by Wham, that’s another on I’d like to nominate.” And I ask why, and she says, “Oh, you know, sometimes when you get down and tired and that comes on the radio and you have a quick glass of water and you’ve got the energy back and it’s great. You’ve got to have something to wake you up in this place.”

Music with a beat gave the workers a sense of having the energy needed to undertake the necessary work in their jobs. Lively music could help workers “keep going,” helping them to work through the tiredness. They interacted with the music to give themselves energy: “Billy Jean” from Michael Jackson’s playing, and Jenny comes in clapping to the beat as if to keep herself going for this period of the day.

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Creating a sense of energy through music was double-edged. It not only helped to maintain production, and thus supported the structure of the social order, it was also necessary for “Stayin’ Alive,” for the cultural work of surviving in the factory. For the culture to work, the dancing, the moving to the music, the singing, the stories, the laughter, the sharpness and the wit all needed committed energy from the workers. As noted in chapter 3, there were two main patterns of preferences for music on the factory floor. The majority of workers had a preference for hearing radio stations that mainly played songs that had been popular in previous decades. These workers, who were mainly thirty and older, were particularly critical of radio stations that kept repeating songs during the work day. Variety was cherished: Ann prefers Diamond and says, “There’s more variety—not many repeats on this station.” Repetition in the music that was played was disdained. I had a chat with Adam, the new guy on cutting. “I’m fed up now. I’m fed up. I’ve had enough. I’m not really tired, but it’s like the days are all confused and it’s doing my head in. Justin Timberlake song—god they’re playing it to death man, and Christina Aguilera, my God, if I hear it one more time. They’ve got their slots for it, and they just repeat them during the day. . . . Oh god!”

Workers explicitly argued that music had to be experienced as nonrepetitive because there was already too much repetition in their daily work: Justin Timberlake comes on again. John says, “It feels like Groundhog Day, a bad joke. We’re in the same position, doing the same thing, to the same song as yesterday.” Maggie says, “We get enough repetition in our job, we don’t need it with the music.” David says, “It [the radio] is the same thing, day in, day out, isn’t it? Just repeated, isn’t it? It’s like the work, just doing the same thing, one after the other.”

As noted, many of the younger workers had a different way of perceiving repetition such that they did not perceive repetitiveness in the

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practice of radio stations playing the same “new” songs many times during a day. Repetitiveness, although differently perceived from the main group, was still an issue for this group of workers in that their antipathy to “old” songs redoubled when they perceived repetition in the way these songs were played. Alicia said, “The radio’s good. It helps to get you through the day. I much prefer River; it’s better than Diamond. It’s too old and boring, too much of the same stuff.” If the liveliness of the songs played was primarily supportive of the social order, the strong preference for variety in music gave an implicit critique of the repetition that was Taylorism. The final main way in which music was used as a cultural resource in the shop floor culture as an implicit critique of repetition came in the way that workers sang along to songs. By the end of the second day on the shop floor, I had identified a clear dominant pattern in the way in which people sang along to songs: Doris sings along every few songs or so, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something was an absolute classic example of how she does it. She will sing along to the first hook of the chorus, and that will be about it, and she’ll leave it at that.

By the end of my time at the factory, I had noted this pattern played out on the shop floor many times every day. Singing along was common. Nearly everyone on the floor sang along, often quite quietly, to a song during a working day, while cultural instigators would sing along loudly to a large number of songs during a day. In each case, lack of repetition was the key to the pattern of singing. Most pop songs are centered around repeated choruses, with most songs containing between three and five choruses within the usual three-minute duration. However, it was extremely rare for anyone on the shop floor to sing a chorus in the same way more than once. It was typical for just one chorus to be sung along to (often the first or last chorus), with no singing of the other choruses. “Stayin’ Alive” comes on. Tracey, Lauren, and Jenny sing chorus bits at the start but nothing later. Carl sings along to Elton John’s “Sacrifice,” the first chorus but no more and the first line of “The Sound of Silence” but nothing more. Doris sings “The Sound of Silence” first chorus.

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It was particularly notable that on the occasions when someone did sing along to more than one chorus in a song, she or he did so in such a way that there was a difference—a lack of repetition—in the way that the choruses were sung. For instance: Carol sings along to a Rolling Stones song, and she sings the second chorus and a line in the third chorus that she had missed on the second. “Jive Talking” comes on the radio again, and Evelyn and Carol jointly sing the first line in very high voices, and for the second chorus Evelyn changes her voice to a lower register, and nothing happens in the third verse.

Choruses in pop songs often involve interplay between the lead vocal refrain and the backing vocalist(s) offering a counterpoint melody. Some of the above examples involved the workers following the lead refrain for one chorus and the counterpoint melody for the second. Even participatory musicking led by cultural instigators followed the pattern of not undertaking repetitive singing within a song: On the radio, “Help, I need somebody,” Angela looks up for people to join in on the rest of the chorus. A few join in, and she sings along boisterously to it, but it doesn’t happen the following times that the refrain comes in the song.

That even the participatory musicking did not feature repetition is highly revealing. Thomas Turino has carefully outlined the main characteristics of music that are designed to be open to participation among those with little or no acknowledged musical expertise. Perhaps the most centrally important aspect is that there should be a high degree of repetition within the music to open it up to participation. And yet, on the McTells shop floor, these participatory fields (which had other characteristics typical of participatory fields, such as the emphasis on participation rather than technical expertise) exhibited an antipathy to repetition. Like other forms of singing along, repetition was avoided. The repetition of the Taylorist social order was what structured their deadening, alienating labor, and thus, above all, it was to be avoided and critiqued at any cultural opportunity, even when it made wider sociomusical sense to culturally embrace it.

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Further Battles against the Taylorizing of the Body Although I am highlighting the potentially significant role of music here, it is also important not to overstate its role. We can understand the role of music better if we see how it links with other cultural practices on the shop floor that also may help workers shape a resistive enactment of the Taylorized labor process. Indeed, I have sought to embed the deeper understanding of the role of music on the shop floor in terms of the wider “Stayin’ Alive” culture created by the workers at McTells. In chapter 2, I characterized this culture as one of worked happiness. I noted that humor, as well as music, was central to this culture. I started my work at McTells intent on combining an ethnography from the classical industrial sociological tradition with an ethnography of musicking, but soon my focus widened. From my observations, there seemed to be too many similarities in the way workers used humor and the way they used music to let this go by without consideration. And so, I started also making notes on the minutiae not only of musical engagement but also of humor. I have written a separate article analyzing the fabric of the “dialectical sense of humor” that was played out in the factory (Korczynski 2011b). I return to explore some of the resistive edge to this humor in later chapters. Here, I concentrate on the key strand of humor enacted on the shop floor that related to the routine structures of the labor process. Many of the instances of this humor were part of an implicit fight by workers against their bodies being dominated by the structures of Taylorism: Just as I’m about to pick up my tape where I routinely place it . . . Lana, who’s walking past, takes it and puts it on the other side of me, so I reach for an empty space. She smiles as she does this. I smile back. A little ad lib, Natalie and Lana rearrange each other’s tools. It’s a little game.

The essence of humor here lies in how the overturning of the routine exposes the deep-seated routine that has become internalized in the body movements and expectations of the McTells workers. Here are implicit warnings to colleagues not to be dominated by the routine structures of the workplace. When I reached into an empty space where I thought my

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tape should be, the joke showed that I was reaching into the emptiness of alienated labor. But more than that, Lana, who moved the tape, was warning me against the danger of my body and myself becoming structured by Taylorism, against the danger of my becoming like Chaplin’s body, still twisting in the motions of production even after the assembly line had stopped. The above examples involve slight disruptions of the routine labor process, and as such they cannot strictly be said to enact the social order at the same time as they critique it. But more common were the forms of humor that did involve the enacting of the labor process: Alex down in headrailers did a “hi ho, hi ho” to someone: “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.” It was an ad lib. Someone was carrying something over their shoulder, just like a dwarf from Snow White. When two people walked past each other with barrels, they were pretending to joust.

Such routine humor was not confined to body movements. It could also reside in the use of words, often in the sense of vamping on routine work terms: Pluto Green is a color of a blind, and the improvisation was, “I’ve been to Pluto and it didn’t look like that—the green didn’t look like that there.”

Here, the essence of humor within was a mixture of two important elements. First, the humor partly lay in the playful human being imposed on the mechanically repetitive (actions and terms of work). Second, humor also flowed from the imposition of a frame of meaning on an action that essentially lacks meaning. In both ways, workers offered an implicit critique of Taylorism at the same time as they enacted the Taylorized labor process. Further, each time routine humor was played out, this offered another chance for workers’ movements (and words) to become less like Chaplin’s and more like Travolta’s. The highpoint in the similarity in the cultural uses of humor and music in relation to the Taylorized labor process came when routine humor also involved music. Here, workers turned the repetitive actions of work into musical actions, occasioning smiles and laughter. Humor lay in the

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musically playful being imposed upon the mechanically repetitive, and in the imposition of a frame of musical meaning upon the meaningless: Angela sings a fabric order to the tune of “Livin’ La Vida Loca” [playing on the radio]. ABBA’s “I Do, I Do, I Do” is playing. Steve asks if Sheila has a type of fabric. Sheila sings in reply, “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.” Betty and the new cutter, doing up-and-down dance version regarding collecting fabrics. One of them made a movement to go down to collect some fabric and the other one upped and changed position and they did a little ad lib dance.

Conclusion This chapter began with descriptions of the body movements of Chaplin and Travolta while engaged in labor. Chaplin’s was a structured body, completely dominated by Taylorism. Travolta carried the paint tin to the store in an expressive, implicitly resistive way. Some critics might scoff here and suggest that this is an essentially irrelevant point, for whether they behaved like a mechanical Chaplin or Travolta with a swagger, workers still enact production and thus do nothing to challenge the social relations of production. There are two powerful responses to this. The first and most important point is that for the workers at McTells, this was an issue of some considerable importance. To follow the quote from Cohen and Taylor used in the introduction to the chapter, the vast majority of workers at McTells feared that giving in to repetition was a symptom of disintegration into becoming automatons. Workers had an array of cultural practices involving humor and music by which they sought to avoid the dominance of the Taylorized structure over their bodies. They did not just have an implicit, intuitive, enacted knowledge of this but were also able to express the importance of this opposition explicitly, using descriptions involving both words and actions. The second response to the critic’s charge of irrelevance returns us to chapter 1’s discussion of forms and levels of resistance. The critic’s charge dismisses as irrelevant the multitonous musicking way of working because it does not offer concrete acts of resistance to the employer. This is clearly so—the musical movements of work

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do not constitute acts of resistance to the employer. If we extend the concept of resistance in two important and appropriate ways, however, then a rather different picture emerges. First, the concept of resistance should be extended to cover not only acts of resistance but also behaviors that express a spirit of resistance. Second, the analysis should consider not just the level of the specific employer/workplace but also other social orders—not just high-level ones such as capitalism but also middle-level ones such as Taylorism. With this extension of the concept, it becomes clear that a musically inflected agentic way of working is potentially profoundly important in expressing an implicit sense of resistance to the Taylorist social order. Overall, much of the texture of the multitonous simultaneous “with” and “against” of music use on the factory floor has been brought out in this chapter and the preceding ones. But there is still more to discuss in how music articulated a sense of resistance to not only to the social order of Taylorism but also to the employer McTells. I explore this in the following chapter.

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Pop Songs and the Hidden Injuries (and Joys) of Class

I get this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe Forty hours, thirty-six dollars a week But it’s a paycheck, Jack. . . . . . . oh would I could will a radio here James Brown singing “I Lost Someone” Or the Jesters and the Paragons . . . “Piss Factory,” Patti Smith and Richard Sohl

Patti Smith wrote “Piss Factory” after a summer doing piece-rate production in a New Jersey factory (O’Brien 1995; Shaw 2008). Her desperate call for music to help her through the day invites some crucial questions. We know about Patti Smith’s feelings about the factory through her own song, but did her fellow workers have songs that spoke to them about their experience of the workplace—probably not songs that they had written but, more likely, songs they heard and that somehow articulated how they felt about the factory? Patti Smith assumes not, for she feels alienated from the rest of the workforce, believing that only she has the “desire” for anything more than “every afternoon like the last one.” She ends the song underlining this distance between herself and the other workers by positioning herself as the bohemian artist able to rise above the everyday humiliations of the factory:1

1. See Bockvis (1999, 24) for Patti Smith talking about reading Rimbaud, the adopted apotheosis of self-styled bohemians, and being laughed at by her fellow workers.

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“I’m gonna get out of here . . . / I’m gonna be so big. I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return / Never return, no, never return, to burn at this piss factory.” There is something brilliant and there is something naive in this song. There is the brilliance of the pure cry of despair from having to face working in the factory, beautifully carved out of the song’s rhythms that play with the cadence of factory work. But there is the naiveté of assuming that it is only she who has the desire for anything better, that is only she who feels the hidden injuries of this work.2 To extend Grossberg’s insight, it is the sound not only of rock music’s refusal “to identify with everyday life, which was ordinary and boring” (1992, 180), but also rock music’s refusal to identify with the people living the ordinary, boring everyday life. If there is desire, if there are wounds and joys on the factory floor, are there songs that speak to people about their experiences? How far can workers find articulations of the “hidden injuries of class” (Sennett and Cobb 1972) within Top 40 songs—songs, which we know from the side step in chapter 2, are likely to be structured in part antithetically to work. Pushing the question still further, is it possible for workers to use pop songs in the factory as a medium of voice to articulate their interests and grievances? These are the questions that drive this chapter. The main method I relied on to investigate these questions was what I came to call the “nomination question.” I wanted to ask workers whether there was 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. Nobody had asked factory workers this question before. The first time I asked it, it was immediately clear that it was a meaningful question. I tagged it on the end of talking to Ellie. She was going round handing out chocolates, as she was about to leave. I was asking her about her time at McTells, and I asked her if she could think of a song that spoke to her about her time in the factory. She immediately understood the question, reflected a few short seconds, and then she talked. She talked of a pop song that no one would have imagined as articulating musical knowledge of a workplace. She talked

2. It is almost as if Sherwood Anderson had Patti Smith in mind when he wrote in 1931: “Who will sing the song of the factories? . . . Will you quit having contempt for those who work in the factories?” (1970, 17).

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around its meaning and the bittersweet taste of “Stayin’ Alive” within a Taylorist social order: There is one for McTells—that’s “Living It Up” by Alvin Stardust.3 And I go, “I don’t really know that one. What kind of song is that?” And she half sings one of the lines about somebody having a sad face. So I say, “What kind of song is it? Is it an upbeat song?” And she says, “Well, it’s kind of a bit of both. It’s a bit of being jolly, and there’s also a bit of sadness to it because I guess the singer is trying to cheer somebody up.” This is how she explains the song to me, and she says, “I don’t know why I’ve chosen that. I don’t know why I thought of that. It’s just something that’s come into my head .”And I say, “Maybe kind of it being a bit unhappy and a bit sad, and maybe that says something about how you think about McTells?’ And she said, “Oh I guess it is.” And so I say, “What would be the happy and what would be the sad?” And she said, “Well, the people here are great. I love the people, and I’m going to miss them. But then the job is awful; there’s no variety.” So I said, “That’s really interesting. So it’s like a bittersweet song you’re experiencing?” And she said, “Yeah.”

The nomination question was a question that was meaningful, sometimes very meaningful, to very many workers at McTells. In the next section, I give a Top 10 countdown on the answers to the nomination questions. Then I analyze the main patterns of meaning in the songs nominated and reflect on the interrelationship between the processes of how workers heard songs as speaking to them about their working lives and the meanings created. I also do a side step to discuss the song, “We Gotta Get out of This Place.”

Top 10 Countdown In the end, I asked the nomination question to eighty-nine workers on the shop floor, and seventy of these eighty-nine workers were able to give at least one song in reply to my question. Most talked animatedly

3. There is no song recorded by Alvin Stardust with this name. Nor is the phrase a key refrain in any of his hit songs. Perhaps the song was sung by another singer.

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in response to my question, and some offered more than one nomination song. There was a strong pattern, therefore, that most workers at McTells had a song that spoke to them about their working life. This section concentrates on outlining the patterns of meaning in what can be understood as workers’ musical knowledge of the workplace. It gives a Top 10 rundown of the nomination song categories.4 These categories were created by bunching song nomination together when the reasons given for a nomination were highly similar. Thus, categories are usually made up of multiple songs, nominated for the same reason. Some nominations had two or three meanings. In these cases, I place the nomination in the category that was implicitly the most important for the person nominating, and then in the textual discussion, I highlight other related meanings behind the nomination.

No. 10: Laughter at Management Rhetoric One nomination. Song chosen: “Beautiful Day” by U2. One afternoon about a year before I worked at McTells, the firm organized an event at a local hall to promote the launching of a new range of blinds. Workers were bussed over from the factory to the hall. As part of the presentation, they were shown a promotional video that featured footage of workers happily fitting blinds. As the workers worked in the promotional video, they smiled. The accompanying audio was U2’s “Beautiful Day”—presumably chosen for its apparently uplifting chorus call: “It’s a beautiful day / Don’t let it get away.” The whole occasion and the image portrayed of workers on the video was seen as deeply ridiculous by Barbara. Her nomination of “Beautiful Day” in response to my question was, therefore, a form of ridiculing management’s portrayal of a happy workforce: “Of course, we’re always smiling,” she said. “Can’t you see how much we all love working here? We love the work. We love the supervisors. We love the pay.” In fact, workers did often smile as part of their “Stayin’ Alive” culture of worked happiness. But that was a profoundly different smile to that

4. I exclude two responses to the nomination question that were offered as jokes and were not meant to be taken seriously as substantively meaningful answers.

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framed within the video. The actual smile of workers on the factory floor was the smile that comes from working culturally together to fight against being overwhelmed by the senses of alienation within the hated Taylorist structure. The smile framed within the video was the smile of workers’ simple contentment with the social structure and their place within it. Putting a wider frame on this nomination, it is possible to see it as a general rejection of the interpretation of the picture of a worker working to music and smiling and laughing as an image of “the happy worker.” This is highly pertinent for the questions explored in this book because, deep down, such an image actually underlies much of the Adornian-inspired literature on how music primarily helps to accommodate the powerless to exploitative social structures. For instance, we can see the image of the simply happy worker within Jones and Schumacher’s Adornian discussion (1992, 162) of the effect of functional factory music: Pop’s romantic conventions function to bring the sphere of the personal (the home) into the sphere of the impersonal (the factory). By feminizing the workplace, music encourages women workers to discount the boredom of repetitive work, deflecting them from more threatening collective activities. . . . Functional music had been designed to “put shop-talk into the background” and build “factory goodwill” with medleys featuring employee requests and sing-alongs.

The image given of the contented female factory worker given over to factory goodwill and concerned with affairs of the heart articulated by pop songs is a close cousin to the image of the smiling “Beautiful Day” workers of the McTells promotional video. It may appear strange to argue for the kinship of an employer’s propagandizing images of worker contentment and the critique of capitalist culture from the Frankfurt school, but family they are, for both share a one-dimensional understanding of workers and their cultural resourcefulness.

No. 9: Thinking of Being Somewhere Else Two nominations. Songs chosen: “Summer Holiday” by Cliff Richard; “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver. Jill really loves Cliff Richard, and I ask her which song she’ll nominate. She nominates “Summer Holiday.” “Ooh, it’s got to be something about a

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summer holiday,” she says. “Thinking of being away. How about ‘Summer Holiday,’ no more troubles for a week or two, that’s it,” she said.

Similarly, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was chosen because “it’s a song about being somewhere else.” Here is a category that really must be understood as tied to music as escapism. The idea of music as escapism is sometimes called on by those writers from the Adornian camp who critique the conservative qualities of popular music. Accurate, but only for two people.

Nos. 5–8 (4-Way Tie): Melancholia Three nominations. Songs chosen: “The Scientist” by Coldplay; “Stay Another Day” by East 17; “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Three people nominated a song that expressed a feeling of melancholia, of the sad despair that was part of their working at McTells. These nominations stemmed from the person recognizing something in a song that articulated the times when their senses were dominated by alienation. These nominations involve nothing of the bittersweet story of Ellie and her nomination of the “jolly” but also “sad” Alvin Stardust song. In these nominations, there is no motif of redemption, or resistance. The central motif is rather one of a recurring flow of sadness. James worked in a corner of the verticals room. Because his position was secluded, he was able to get away with listening to music on his portable player with headphones. Wearing the headphones, of course, also placed him outside of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. He nominated the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles, which was on one of the playlists that he liked to listen to at work. When discussing his experience of working at McTells, he talked in an accepting sort of way of the unrelenting drudgery of the work. He did not speak of any redemption of “the people here,” as so many other people did. His nomination was informed by this same sense of ongoing sadness, in which a sense of agency was profoundly absent. One line from the song that particularly spoke to him encapsulated this sense of a lack of agency: “Why that song?” I ask. . . . He’s been working away, listening to it, and the lines “You can check out, but you can never leave” make him think “Oh, yeah, that’s it, that’s here,” expressed with a shake of the head.

The recurring sadness that was behind the choice of “Stay Another Day” by East 17 was from seeing “so many people come and go from here.” Here

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are the key lines from the chorus to this song, which again expresses accepting sadness and a lack of agency: “I don’t think I can take the pain / Won’t you stay another day? / Oh, don’t leave me alone like this.” Here, we are given our first glimpse into how a pop song about a broken heart can be heard as articulating the injuries of class.

Nos. 5–8 (4-Way Tie): Rising Above Three nominations. Songs chosen: “Dignity” by Deacon Blue; “Rise” by Gabrielle; “The Only Way Is Up” by Yazz. In distinct contrast to the lack of agency underpinning the nomination songs categorized under Melancholia, the individual’s sense of agency against a potentially dominating structure underpins the three songs grouped under the heading Rising Above. For Claire, who was eighteen, the song she chose articulated the temporary need to put up with the indignities of working at McTells, for this forbearance would give her longerterm benefits: Claire’s song to nominate was “Dignity” by Deacon Blue. “It really makes me think of this place. It’s about putting up with somewhere, just putting your money by, so you can move on and get out of there. That’s what I’m doing here.”

The song itself tells the story of a garbage collector who suffers various indignities within his job, but he is able to put up with this because he is saving and planning for something better to rise above the current structures that demean him: “He let me know a secret about the money in his kitty / He’s gonna buy a dinghy / Gonna call her Dignity.” This is notably the only song nominated that was chosen explicitly because its narrative about work connected with the nominee’s framing of work. A more typical plucking of a song and reappropriating its meaning in relation to work was Vinny’s nomination of Yazz’s electro dance hit, “The Only Way Is Up.” Vinny smiles straightaway when I ask him the nomination question. “There is one, yeah—straight into my head. Yazz, ‘The Only Way Is Up,’ ‘cause when I got there [his first position at McTells] I knew that I was better than this. It was on the radio sometimes, and it’s just that feeling to help me rise above it all.”

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Individual agency in the determination to rise above a demeaning social position within the Taylorist social order was the central aspect of this category of nominations.

Nos. 5–8 (4-Way Tie): Cultural Instigators Three nominations. Songs chosen: “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers/Anna (x2); “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly/ unnamed McTells worker. Here is the first category in which the salience of community and the “Stayin’ Alive” culture is referenced. In chapter 3, I wrote about the importance of the cultural instigators for the generation of the participatory musicking that was a central element of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. I argued that many of the cultural instigators deliberately emphasized vocal shortcomings in order to generate humor and also to encourage others to sing, for it was a signal to others that it was the singing per se that counted, not a person’s technical ability to sing. These three nominations in this category referred to exaggerated forms of this process. Jenny says that her choice of song that captures McTells is “Unchained Melody” because there had been earlier banter about Anna singing and about how she’s really terrible at singing “Unchained Melody,” and Jenny says that’s her memory, a song that brings back McTells and when she hears it she thinks of Anna’s “absolutely awful version of it. She really belts it out.” She thinks of Anna doing that at McTells—“It’s all right here. I quite like it.”

The salvation that community offered to workers within the alienating Taylorist social order was helped by the musicking enacted on the shop floor, often led by cultural instigators. Rick’s explanation of his nomination implicitly connected the work of cultural instigators with the creation of community—“It’s the people”: I ask him whether he can think of a piece of music for his work, and he nominates R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” “because it was sung really highly there, really high-pitched voice by one girl, by one lass. It was comical. It brought the house down in stitches. It’s the people rather than the place.”

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Nos. 5–8 (4-Way Tie): Survival Three nominations. Songs chosen: “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor; “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream; “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees. Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem hit from the mid-1970s related the story of a strong woman’s spirit surviving despite her initial fears after her lover has left her. The song grows, with a sense of fierce pride and independence coming through stronger and stronger. The implication of this nomination was that active determination was needed to cope with and survive the indignities of the factory floor at McTells. Molly: “Well, what have you learnt while you’ve been here?” Me: “Mainly about how music is used to help survive in this place.” Turning to Julie, “It’s like the song you nominated, ‘I Will Survive.’ ” Julie nods, and Molly says, “Well you’ve got to, haven’t you?”

An example of this need for a spirit of survival came later that afternoon. The supervisors had imposed strict discipline for two hours in the afternoon to try to hit the daily production target. Supervisors imposed discipline by shouting out statements like “Less chat, more work! Come on, we need the numbers!” as they went round trying to ensure that all workers were working to maximum speed. This involved questioning anyone who left their work bench. After this period of strict discipline, Molly walked by and commented to me and my co-workers: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This category was more embedded in a sense of the social— in relying on one another—for survival than the Rising Above category, in which there was an explicit emphasis on the individual against the structure. Consider the social embedding of the nomination of “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream: “Oh, ‘Things Can Only Get Better,’ we used to sing to that,” Sally nominates with feeling. “And it was we all had our hands in the air. That’s it. We used to sing it, there was a lot of pressure on numbers [i.e., productivity] at the time.”

The song was important to Sally because the participatory musicking created around it, with the mimicking of the dance to the song and the

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waving of the hands as a signal to one another were redolent of the collective struggle for survival, to fight against your senses being dominated by alienation.

No. 4: Music as Hated Repetition Four nominations. Songs chosen: “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion; “Handbags and Gladrags” by Stereophonics (x2); “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus. As previous chapters have outlined, one of the things that made music so valuable to workers at McTells was the way it operated as a cultural critique of repetition, opening up space for workers to reject repetitive automaton-like movements as they worked. There was a divide within the workforce, however, over how repetition was heard. When one side of the radio station debate was dominant for too long, members of the other side could come to hear pop music, not as a critique of Taylorism, but as expressive of the hated repetition of Taylorism. Janice, who does dollying, nominates “that really depressing song from Titanic.” I say “Celine Dion?” She says, “Yes, when it was out, it was always playing as I walked in. It’s depressing enough to walk into this place, but that was just too much.”

For the people who disliked this nearly ubiquitous Celine Dion hit from 1997 the key lyrics in the song were “will go on and on.” The repeated hearings of this song emphasized how the form of this long and slow ballad echoed these words. The song was also notable for the repetition of the phrase “will go on”—which was central to both the verse and the chorus structures. For Janice, these points of repetition and the doleful subject matter of the song both caught and exacerbated the dolefulness she felt as she entered McTells each morning. For the three other workers who nominated a song coded under “music as hated repetition,” the process of hearing a song that they actually liked repeatedly played within the factory outweighed the fact that they had liked the song in the first place: Stuart nominates “Teenage Dirtbag” by Wheatus. “I used to love it, but I heard it here so often you go, ‘Oh no, not this again.’ ”

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No. 3: Despairing Frustration Six nominations. Songs chosen: “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles; “Road to Hell” by Chris Rea; “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC; “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees; Unknown by the Spin Doctors; “Birmingham Jail” by Johnny Cash. Songs nominated in this category stood with one foot in the Melancholia category and one foot in the Antagonistic Defiance and the Desire to Break Free category. The choices here were underpinned by a sense of being pressed down by a dominating structure but also a sense of kicking back and seeking release from that structure. The despair that was articulated was not experienced as accepted and recurring but as something to be struggled against. The nomination of “Birmingham Jail” was linked to resentment at the imposition of discipline: “Birmingham Jail” by Johnny Cash. And he says, “That’s what it’s like in that in here when I’m down there and having a little chat with someone the supervisor is on my back straightaway saying, ‘Get back to it!’ and follows me back up here and that’s worse than bloody jail that is.”

Here the song represents a frustration at the enactment of discipline by the supervisor. At the same time, it does not suggest a melancholic acceptance of this situation. The naming of the situation as a “jail” indicates that this is wrong and implicitly suggests that the ongoing desire for greater freedom will be played out on the factory floor. The choice of “A Hard Day’s Night” was centered on the key refrain of “It’s been a hard day’s night / And I’ve been working like a dog.” Leanne says, “That’s how you feel sometimes, working like a dog at the end of the day. Isn’t that how it makes you feel?” Tricia nods, “Yes, especially when they’re going on about numbers.” And she imitates the supervisor: “numbers, numbers, numbers.”

Again, there is a normative underpinning to this nomination. The song names the situation as wrong and thus implicitly positions the worker as a party in a struggle against that situation. At the same time, there is an acknowledgement that this struggle is far from an even one for the structures facing workers in these songs—the jail, the hell—loom large.

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No. 2: Community Twelve nominations. Songs chosen: “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge (x2); “Believe” by Cher (x2); “Mambo No. 5” by Lou Bega; “Two Times” by Ann Lee; “Hot in Herre” by Nelly; “I’ll Be There For You” by the Rembrandts; “Ooh, Aah . . . Just a Little Bit” by Gina G; Christmas carols by various artists; Unknown by Alvin Stardust; Unknown instrumental song. For the second most popular category, there is a large step up in the number of nominations. This category of Community has twelve nominations— twice as many as the previous category. This confirmed the importance of musicking community on the shop floor. At McTells, the bonds of togetherness and friendship ran deep—as a way of finding humanity and keeping the senses of alienation at bay. Note how Wendy’s narrative of her choice exactly connects the intensification of the alienating structure with the bonds of community forged within it: I ask Wendy for her nomination again. She’s been thinking about it for about a week. She’s on the twilight shift. “It’s ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge,” she says. “A little while back when we were working really crazy hours, working ‘till midnight, horrendous, massive overtime, we were doing because there was a big change over or something. We did a lot of overtime, and I spent so much time here it was like an extended family. It was really like we are family, that’s how it felt. My mates here.” She gestures with her arms as if she is walking along the street linking arms with her friends.

Sister Sledge’s famous 1970s disco anthem expressed to Wendy the strong and vibrant feeling of togetherness that she felt with her mates at work: “We are family / I got all my sisters with me.” A similar connection between relying on friends and colleagues to help you through the demeanings experienced at McTells underlay Betty’s simple and clear explanation of her choice of the Rembrandts’ song, “I’ll Be There For You” (aka theme of the TV show Friends). She nominated “that theme from Friends about having a bad day, and I’ll be there for you. You know that’s how it is here.” Nominations in this category also often referred to participatory musicking formed around specific songs: But also, a nomination she has is “Mambo No. 5” “a little bit of Monica in my life. . .” “It’s mine and Gloria’s song, and whenever it’s on, we go thumbs

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up and do a bit of a dance to each other whether we’re out or whether we’re at work. It’s our like fun song.” [Her choice is] “Two Times,” by Ann Lee. “It’s dead jolly it is. It’s a great song. I like it. Shirley used to put it on when it came on the radio. She’d put it up to really top volume. She’d always put it up, really crank it up, really loud and dance and sing. It used to get us going and cheer us up. It was great. I really liked it.”

No. 1: Antagonistic Defiance and the Desire to Break Free Thirty-one nominations. Songs chosen: “We Gotta Get out of This Place” by the Animals (x27); “I Want to Break Free” by Queen (x2); “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats; Adam’s song. Nearly half of the sixty-eight nominations went to songs articulating a sense of antagonistic defiance and a desire to break free. There was an immediacy and a directness when workers nominated a song in this category: I ask Doris a question about a song that speaks to her working life at McTells. “That’s a good question. ‘I Want to Break Free’ by Queen came straight into my head,” she said. I asked her why she’s chosen [this]. “It’s obvious, isn’t it. I wanna break free of this bloody place. Oh, sometimes it’s horrendous,” and her usual smiling generous face is temporarily distorted into hatred and then relaxing, and then she says, “although other times it’s all right.”

As my field note intimates, Doris usually brought an upbeat countenance to the shop floor. She was often smiling and laughing and was always ready to join in on participatory musicking. Indeed, perhaps she would be a strong candidate to be used on the next promotional video for a new range of blinds as an archetypal smiling, happy worker. But, of course, her happiness was a worked happiness, a culturally created happiness as a resource to fight against being overwhelmed by the alienating structure facing her, day in, day out. Her answer to the nomination question articulates the tension that underlies her worked happiness. Within this category, there was one song that stood out from all others, receiving twenty-seven nominations on its own—the Animals’ “We Gotta

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Get out of This Place.” Indeed, this song can be seen as a collective answer to the nomination question—in two senses. First, the song had a collective position within the cultural activity of the shop floor: “I know,” says Maggie straightaway. “I don’t have to think about it: ‘We’ve Got to Get out of Here.’ ” She means “We Gotta Get out of This Place” by the Animals. “Everyone sings it. We all sing along with that when it comes on. We all do,” she says smiling. May is on testing, and she says, “We’ve Gotta Get out of This Place.” She says, “Everyone sings along with it when it’s on because that’s how you feel when you get towards the end of the day. That’s really how you feel.”

Given this social element to its cultural enactment on the shop floor, it was clear that there was a considerable element of community also underpinning this nomination. “We Gotta Get out of This Place” was also a collective answer in another sense. After I had asked the nomination question to a few people, the news of this question spread around the shop floor. People talked about the question collectively, outside of my presence, and in this way came to a form of collective knowledge on the question: I asked her about what song she would nominate and she said, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that—“We Gotta Get out of This Place.’ ” Bill nominates “We Gotta Get out of This Place”—“These lot have said we’ve got to get out of this place, haven’t they? I think that about sums it up.” Deanne likes “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” “I was talking to Dave about this. He suggested that. I said that’s right, that’s a good one.”

At first, I was not sure how I should feel about the question being discussed outside of my presence. As a trained researcher, one part of me was worried—Did this mean that the data was now biased and contaminated? But this reaction was simple-minded—Why should I privilege the individualized mode of knowledge creation through one-on-one discussions? If there was a collective social knowledge on this question, was it not my good fortune to be able to access it in this way? Further, given that my question had become a topic of interested conversation among the McTells

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workers, this indicated that the question had meaning and resonance for workers. And, beyond this, I was also reassured that when people wanted to nominate a song that did not match this collective response, they felt able to do so: I asked Irene for her nomination. She says that “everyone’s saying ‘We Gotta Get out of This Place.’ ” I say, “Is that your choice then?” She says, “No, I’ll have a think about it.”

In addition, there was one song within the category of Antagonistic Defiance and Desire to Break Free that was written for me by Adam. Adam had just started at McTells. I talked to him quite a lot and found out that he had musical ambitions: I ask him how his music’s going. He says it’s great, he’s got this great Dire Straits–like riff, but it’s like he keeps adding bits over it when he gets back from work and “it’s blowing my mind now” . . . and I ask him whether he’s planning to write anything about working at McTells, and he says, “Yes, when I leave. When I leave I’ll come here and I’ll play them something. I’ll play everybody a song about this place and about working here and the people.”

Although he had hoped to be able to “stick it” at McTells for a while to earn some money, he decided to leave after six weeks: “I’ve had enough. I can’t take it here.” Only at the end of these six weeks, did I ask him to nominate a song. The song he wrote expresses a strong resentment of the work context, a strong statement that neither he nor his co-workers would be dominated by this work context, and a strong desire to break free from the factory. The desire for release is expressed plainly in the song’s last line, written by Adam to celebrate his leaving McTells. I ask Adam to nominate a song. He says, “I’ll write you one, man.” Half an hour later he’s written this: Working for the shark, Dodging his back when the sky goes dark, Bobbing and weaving for the time it will take ’Cos our minds are rocks and they will not break.

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Same old jazz, day in, a day out, Will make us run and scream and shout. The sixth week of boredom slowly it’s passed When the clock strikes one they can kiss my ass.

Patterns of Meaning, Processes of Meaning Creation In this section, I begin by drawing out the main patterns of meaning in the nomination songs and then link these meanings to the declamatory chorus form of the pop song. This leads me to a consideration of some notable songs that were not chosen and the reasons they were not chosen. The section ends by linking the patterns of a spirit of resistance expressed in the nomination songs to dominant elements in the genre of the pop song.

Defiance and Community Two main patterns can be discerned from the ten categories—those of resistance and defiance and those of community. The pattern of resistance and defiance in the song nominations is particularly significant for it clearly highlights one element in the key underlying argument of the book that music was used dialectically as a resource to simultaneously enact the social order and to express a spirit of resistance to that social order. The categories of Antagonistic Defiance, Despairing Frustration, Survival, Rising Above, Melancholia, and Laughter at Management Rhetoric may have articulated different ways of responding to the workplace structures—from individualized sad acceptance to energetic collective defiance—but underpinning all of these categories was the same normative understanding that the structures facing the workers were morally wrong, that they should not be expected to enact the same almost mindless repetitive tasks, day in, and day out, in a context in which they were frequently belittled by supervisors, and in which they were systematically given little recognition and underpaid by management. These categories together accounted for forty-seven of the sixty-eight songs, which is 69 percent of the nominations. The musically inflected “Stayin’ Alive” culture may have often given workers a smile on their face and a dance step on their feet, but it was also underpinned by a musical knowledge of the workplace structure as morally wrong.

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Further, the meanings underpinning the nominations tended to accent the agency of workers in response to these structures. Only the categories of Thinking of Being Somewhere Else and of Melancholia pointed to a simple accommodation with, and acceptance of, the alienating structure. Underpinning the categories of Rising Above, Survival, and Despairing Frustration there was a stronger articulation of agency of the workers. For workers who nominated a song in the Rising Above category, the songs chosen had meaning because they articulated the need for individual agency in going beyond the dominating structure. A different sort of agency reflected the categories of Survival and Despairing Frustration. Molly’s linked intimation of “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” articulated this well—here is not a call for an individual to seek a way beyond the dominating structure, nor is it an acceptance of the structure, rather it is a call to keep your humanity as best you can against the unrelenting structures facing you. It is a call to move with rhythm rather than as an automaton; it is a call to fight against being overwhelmed by alienation; it is a call to stand your ground against management’s pushing the terms of the structure further against you; it is a call for dignity. Further, a sense of collective agency was palpable in the No. 1 category of Antagonistic Defiance and the Desire to Break Free. When the radio played “We Gotta Get out of This Place” by the Animals, and workers joined in on this chorus, what was being expressed was a mixture of a broad spirit of defiance toward the current structures of the workplace, a call for a better way of being, and a reference to the many individual plans to leave McTells (see chapter 2). Given that “We Gotta Get out of This Place” was a form of collective answer, and given that the song was collectively sung, and given that “we” is a core word in this song, community was also an important element underpinning the many nominations of this song. When this is added to the twelve nominations that directly referenced community, and to the three nominations that referenced cultural instigators and their creation of participatory musicking, it is clear that community was the second key element underpinning the meaning of the songs chosen. That community was such an important theme speaks to the importance of the intertwining of music and community in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture’s fight against the threatening waves of alienation. Community was the key point of redemption at McTells, and the power of music was at its most intense when it

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folded into and supported community on the shop floor. And here the use made of the music was more relevant than the lyrical text of specific songs. Most of the nomination songs that referenced community (i.e., including the Animals and the Cultural Instigator nominations) were chosen because they indexed resonant participatory musicking on the shop floor. Perhaps the most poignant example of this was the nomination of the song “Ooh, Aah . . . Just a Little Bit” by Gina G, which was underpinned by a narrative of shop floor community lost (in the verticals room): I ask her about the question to nominate a song. “There was this one by Gina G,” she says straightaway. “This one song that used to be played all the time. It was when I started. I was working with Cheryl. It just reminds me, we had a great time. We used to all sing along, like together. We’d chat over the partitions and that they’d chat back. Not divided like it is now. People are all separated now. You can only talk to people if you move over, move around now.”

Gina G’s light piece of pop has no reference to community whatsoever in its lyrics. It only came to have meaning of community because of how it had been used in the participatory musicking of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. There were some songs where workers heard community in the lyrics of songs and connected those songs with the shop floor community—“We Are Family,” “I’ll Be There for You”—but in the main the meaning of community flowed from the social uses to which the pop songs were put.

The Appropriation of Choruses Already, I have begun to move from examining the patterns of meanings to examining the processes by which songs came to have meaning for workers as speaking to them about their working lives. The most notable aspect to highlight in the process of meaning creation is the process of avowal articulated through a declamatory chorus. This was the central process by which meanings of defiance were created through music. Avowal refers to the way in which music allows the direct articulation of a deep feeling that usually lies tacit. The process of avowal was the key process in meaning making for the songs placed in the coding categories of Antagonistic Defiance and the Desire to Break Free, Despairing

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Frustration, Survival, and Rising Above—the categories in which active defiance was at its sharpest.5 The songs ascribing forms of defiance were nominated not primarily for the narrative of the song, nor primarily for the aesthetic qualities of the music within the song, but rather because the lyrics of their choruses allowed the direct articulation of a deeply held, yet often tacit, feeling about work. This was particularly noticeable for “We Gotta Get out of This Place” by the Animals. When the song started to play on the radio, only a handful of people showed an acknowledgement of it, and there was no singing along nor other engagement with it until the release of the bridge into the chorus. And then, many people sang along to the chorus. The musical structure of contemporary popular music, with the buildup to the catchy, instantly memorable and singable chorus played a central role in the process of avowal. It is not just that these were an appropriate set of words that led to avowal. Rather, declamatory choruses that often musically released the tension built up during the verses were a central part of the process of avowal. As noted in the side step on the Animals song, there is a strong dynamic of growing musical tension released in the declamatory chorus. The process of avowal linked to the lyrics of a declamatory chorus was also strongly evident in Doris’s nomination of “I Want to Break Free.” When I asked her why she had chosen that song, her response was stark, and its very starkness contained the picture of avowal in a chorus refrain: “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I wanna break free of this bloody place. Oh, sometimes it’s horrendous.” This process of musical avowal also underpinned the common way in which people would give an answer to the nomination question that suggested that the answer was sufficient in itself and did not require further explanation—for instance: Julie nominates Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” “Yeah, that’s it,” she says, implying that her answer needs no further explanation, her face taking on the look of stoic determination.

5. The process of avowal was not significant for songs coded under Musical Instigators, Melancholia, Hated Repetition, Thinking of Being Somewhere Else, and Laughter at Management Rhetoric. In these cases, either a workplace incident tied to a song or the narrative or overall feel of a song underpinned the process of meaning making.

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That workers sometimes struggled to articulate the reasons underpinning the song they nominated can also be seen as arising from the musical knowledge, rather than the simply textual knowledge, that the songs’ choruses articulated. The process of avowal involved an embodied, musically felt knowledge being expressed—an example in Willis’s (2000, xii) terms of the way in which “embodied sense” may often “not (be) expressed in language”—or in this case, not solely expressed in language.

Some Notable Absences This discussion of the central role of the chorus for the nomination of songs now leads us to consider what songs were not nominated. The overwhelming majority of songs linked to a message of defiance were chosen for the way in which a key refrain in a declamatory chorus spoke to workers as articulating a key element in their relationship to work. This meant that these songs tended not to be about work. “Dignity” was the only song chosen primarily because it articulated a narrative of defiance against demeaning structures of work. “We Gotta Get out of This Place” stood in a middle ground in this respect. On the one hand, the McTells workers made the chorus over to be more about work than it was originally written as being. In the lyrics, the “place” that has to be got out of is the “dirty old part of the city where the sun refuse to shine.” On the McTells shop floor, the “place” became the factory. On the other hand, the framing that does pertain to work in the lyrics, within the verses, was not noted by workers, nor sung along to, by workers. Thus, there was no singing along to this explicit reference to work in the buildup bridge to the chorus. If we set aside the Animals song as a special case for a moment (I will return to it later), it is notable that the articulation of defiance and critique that was present in the nominated songs primarily came through a separated and recontextualized declamatory chorus—as in “I Want To Break Free” and “ I Will Survive.” It was not articulated through songs with a larger narrative of a critique of demeaning work structures. Such songs were the notable absentees in the songs that were nominated. Where were the contemporary blues that spoke of the degradations suffered by people in their struggles at work? Figuratively, where were the songs of Blind Willie McTell? In more contemporary terms, where were the songs that critiqued work within the corpus of Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, and

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of some rap, and some country-and-western artists who are more inclined to deal with issues of work? I sought to probe deeper on this question. In talking to people about music and work, I often discussed people’s wider tastes in music. When I found that a person particularly liked an artist who had written a song mainly about work, I asked whether the artist’s song spoke to them about their working lives at McTells. I always asked this as a follow-up, after they had already chosen a song in response to the nomination question. In the follow-up, I was effectively prompting them to give their artist’s song as a possible second-choice nomination. I managed to ask this follow-up question of three people. None of these three people felt that the artist’s songs connected with their working lives at McTells. Indeed, the absence of connection was almost deafening. First, I put the follow-up question to Ricky. Ricky’s unprompted nomination song was “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly. Ricky was a Bruce Springsteen fan. I asked him if he heard any Springsteen songs as speaking to him about his working life. He could not think of any Springsteen songs that spoke to him in this way. To prompt him further, I brought him in a copy of the album Darkness on the Edge of Town so that he could listen to the song “Factory,” in which Springsteen articulates the accumulating indignities and pressures of “the working, the working, the working life.” Ricky’s response to “Factory” was: God, that’s a depressing song, that is. I know the feeling though. In a mindnumbing job, you just keep going, the same thing, like a circle, just repeating. It’s a bit depressing, though.

The same pattern of responses played out when I asked Georgina, who liked Bob Marley, to listen to “Work” by Bob Marley, and when I asked Sian, who liked Merle Haggard, to listen to “The Working Man’s Blues.” These songs clearly did not speak to them about their working lives, even though the songs, like the Springsteen songs, were aimed at exploring something of the experience of people facing demeaning work structures. “I keep my nose on the grindstone,” sings Merle Haggard. “Five days to go: working for the next day,” sings Bob Marley. Ricky’s commentary gave a key insight into why these songs, and by implication other songs articulating critiques of work, failed to resonate with McTells workers. The songs were heard as “too depressing.” Also, consider Charmain’s wider

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discussion of a section of songs about work that had recently been played on the radio: “I can’t stand these miserable songs about work. Oh, shut up, it’s so depressing.” McTells workers did not nominate songs of overt and extended critique about work because such songs tended to be monolithically negative, monochromely black, too depressing, in short, and this did not match with most people’s experience of their working lives at McTells. The story of their working lives was a bittersweet one. It was a story of demeaning conditions and a Taylorist social order, but it was also a story of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, the shared laughs and consolations in community. The songs, the body swinging movements, were created as a way of stopping the alienating structures dominating their senses, which takes us directly back to chapter 2’s extension of Ian Watson’s point that the love-hate relationship with work that many workers have tends not to be articulated in contemporary pop and rock songs. And it loops us exactly back to why “We Gotta Get out of This Place” was so resonant on the shop floor. On the cold page of text, it looks to be a picture of simple critique. But three key things allowed it to be heard as a bittersweet statement of defiance, expressive of the love-hate relationship to which Watson refers. One was the declamatory chorus, a feature frequently lacking in the songs centering on articulating the demeanings of work. The declamatory chorus crucially invokes the importance of agency against the dominating structure. Second, was the “we” of the chorus. This immediately allowed it to articulate with what was best about the working life at McTells, “the people here.” And third, was its status as invoking participatory musicking at McTells. The singing of the chorus together, the punching of the air together in the chorus, meant that it articulated simultaneously critique, defiance, and community. This potent combination made it a working classic on the McTells shop floor.

What Kind of Resistance? In this final subsection, I reflect on what the processes of meaning creation meant for the nature of resistance articulated within the nomination songs. So far, I have argued that there was an overall tone of defiance and resistance in most of the songs nominated by workers as speaking to them

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about their working lives at McTells, and that this pattern was sculpted primarily from the reappropriation of meaning from declamatory choruses. Here, I would like to focus the analysis on the nature of defiance and resistance and link this to the social structuring of the songs from which the nominations are taken. Let me clarify, first, what is not being expressed within these nomination songs. These nomination songs do not suggest a challenge to the authority system operating in the factory. The songs do not put forward a call for an amelioration of aspects of work that workers might consider important—for instance, the low pay and deadening nature of the repetitive low-skilled work. The songs are not directly putting forward an argument for a better place to be created here. The chorus of “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” for instance, states that “there’s a better life” somewhere else, not that that better life can or should be created here. Nor do the songs contain a positive statement of what that better life somewhere else would look like—why it would be better, what the key elements are in social relations that need to be changed. Rather, many of the songs nominated were essentially statements of moral defiance. They were a loud No! They were statements of rejection: “I Want To Break Free,” “I Don’t Like Mondays,” “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” Exactly to what was being said No! is not clear, however. It may be the social order of Taylorism that is being defied; it may be the particular ways the workers were denied dignity by McTells as an employer; or it may have been the particular ways certain supervisors acted within their roles. Whatever was being defied, the nominations clearly had a strong moral impulse, and they also contained an implicit suggestion that there are limits to the demeanings that will be endured before there is an eruption of—. An eruption of what is not clear, but an eruption is implicitly suggested as lying waiting to happen if workers are pushed too far. Here I want to argue that this defiant No! as a specific statement of resistance is a product of not only the limitations of meaning from a declamatory chorus to an upbeat pop song, as already discussed, but also of a wider element in the structuring of rock/pop music that has been highlighted by Grossberg. In his book, uncannily titled “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” Grossberg argues that in its foundational, structuring stages rock music’s gesture was one of a refusal to identify with everyday life, in a celebratory search for youth’s transcending and extraordinary moments (1992, 180–81). Because of this, he argues, “rock is always trying to escape

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the prison of its own everyday life, although it never understands what is on the ‘other side’ ” (155). In other words, rock and pop music are genres in which the defiant No! is written large, and they are genres in which there is no need to articulate what alternative social relations are implied by the No! Pop and rock music are good at creating music of the defiant No!, and this element was a central part of what was picked up by workers at McTells when they nominated songs that spoke to them about their working lives. The side step on “We Gotta Get out of This Place” connects to this argument.

Side Step 6.1 We Gotta Get out of This Place In the journey of “We Gotta Get out of This Place” from the Brill Building in New York in the mid-1960s to its status as a working classic in a blinds factory in the next century in the middle of England, we can learn something important about the structuring of a lot of pop music as a “line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1981; Grossberg 1992) and how layers of appropriation can take a song some way from this structuring. The song was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who were part of the Brill Building stable of writers that included the likes of Bacharach and David, and Goffin and King. In the early to mid-1960s the songs of these writers dominated the US charts: Mann and Weil, working with Phil Spector, had just written a huge hit for the Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” They went to work, writing follow-up songs for the same act and sent over to them some demos of songs, including “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” The Righteous Brothers never recorded the song. Ken Emerson recounts the story (2006, 207): The demo for “We Gotta Get out of This Place” with Mann singing lead was so strong that it was scheduled for release. . . . But Weil and Mann had given a copy of the demo to Allen Klein who passed it on to [English producer] Mickie Most. Knowing a hit song when he heard one, Most produced a version by the Animals. . . . Kirshner summoned Weil and Mann to his office. The bad news, he said, was that Mann’s record would not be coming out. The good news was that in a single week the Animals’ version had leapt to No. 2 in England. “We were crushed,” Weil said . . . “they had changed the lyric and compromised the song.”

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To appreciate this crucial appropriation that opened the way for all the others that followed, we need to understand what the Animals changed from the original demo. They made alterations in five key areas: lyrics, melody, harmonic arrangement, instrumental rendering, and vocal style. Lyrically, the Animals made a series of important changes, such that their version is clearly characterized by a stronger, more direct critique of the place that the protagonists have to leave. The Animals’ version also has a more sustained focus on that place. By the second half of the second verse, Barry Mann’s version has shifted focus from the place to the belief that “we can make it” out of this place. In the Animals’ version, at the same point they reprise the picture of the singer’s “daddy in bed and dying.” The effect of this change makes an important change in the color of the song. In Mann’s version, there is tension but also over-riding optimism that the protagonists can make it out of the place. In the Animals’ version, the tension is never so clearly resolved. Further, this sustained focus on the place allows the Animals to give more detail of the place. In their version, the place is strongly linked to the strains and demeanings of work. Musically, the changes the Animals effected also serve to toughen up the song, specifically in the verse and bridge sections. This is accomplished primarily by their accenting of the blues vocal scale in the bridges. In Mann’s version, while the melody of the verse is clearly in the blues scale, the position of the melody of the bridge is more ambiguous. Already in the bridge to the chorus, the melody is suggesting a resolution of tension in line with the more optimistic, lighter tone of Mann’s version. In the Animals’ version, the vocal melody of the bridge stays firmly within the blues scale, keeping the tension going, linked to the stronger emphasis on the place that is to be escaped from. The Animals also made substantial changes to the harmonic arrangement. Mann’s version has a very similar guitar chord pattern to that of “On Broadway,” which had been written the previous year by Mann and Weil, with help from Leiber and Stoller, to become a Top 10 hit for the Drifters. This is a lighter song, with a story of “disillusionment and determination” in which we hear “a glimmer of hope” for the protagonists (Emerson 2006, 138). The Animals changed the guitar chord pattern to move away from these associations, creating a greater sense of unresolved tension in the verse and bridge. The sum of the changes made by the Animals creates a great difference between the two versions. Mann’s version suggests tension but ends up primarily being about the process of escaping. The Animals’ version is rooted in the place, and it articulates the tension this creates and the need for release from that tension. This is the first appropriation of the song and the one that opened it up for different bodies of listeners to appropriate it again. Soldiers in Vietnam were the

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first group to hear it speaking to them. Craig Werner and Doug Bradley have written a compelling and important manuscript on the role and meaning of music for US soldiers involved in the Vietnam War. It is entitled We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.6 US soldiers in Vietnam heard the Animals’ song as speaking to them of the desperate tensions of their situation and their holy aim of being back home again or, as many put it, “back in the world” again, thereby offering a chilling commentary on the place they were in. In the Animals’ version, the place to escape to is out of reach, but the US soldiers in Southeast Asia heard this song as a clear plea to be back home again. The sense of the place to move to was real and concrete. Werner and Bradley have brought together a number of moving commentaries on the meaning of this song to the soldiers in Vietnam. Here are the words of Bobbie Keith, Armed Forces Radio DJ in Vietnam, 1967–69: “We listened and danced to the tune in a state of heightened awareness that many of us might not make it back out . . . we danced, listened and sang along, shouting the words, ‘We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.’ It has become the vets’ national anthem.” Like the workers at McTells, the soldiers in Vietnam focused on the chorus as the force of the song. For both groups, the specific lyrics of the verse were marginalized in the process of listening. The difference in social contexts of listening meant a different meaning came from the chorus. At McTells, it reverberated as a defiant No!, while in Vietnam it was heard and sung along to as a desperate cry for release. Both forms of meaning making come from the chorus as reaction to the tension-ridden place that is at the center of the Animals’ version. In Vietnam, as at McTells, it became a song that expressed and created community. It was sung along to and became the collective expression of the soldiers’ experience. At live shows of bands, it was a compulsory part of the set list, in which its playing created participatory musicking. As Rod Shaughnessay, who served in 1969–70, put it: “Every band played that song; it was much better live—we all got into it.” Of all the strands of magic weaved into this song, the simplest, but also the most profound, is the “We” in the declamatory chorus. For that alone, Cynthia Weil deserves the letters of praise and thanks that she has received from Vietnam veterans. The chorus is also sung by multiple voices in both the Barry Mann version and the Animals’ version, thus inviting people into participating with it. Just as the Animals “roughened up” Barry Mann’s version in their appropriation of the song, so soldiers sometimes

6. All quotes and information relating to Vietnam come from Werner and Bradley’s manuscript.

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roughened up the Animals’ version in their appropriation. Sometimes, the lyrics were altered to “We’ve got to get out of this fucking place.” At live shows, it was roughened up by soldiers pounding on tables, and even smashing tables and chairs in time with the driving drum beat. The descriptions of the collective singing of the chorus suggest that the soldiers went beyond the Animals in taking the chorus away from its pop provenance. US soldiers in Vietnam were the first to hear the song as speaking to them, and many other waves of soldiers in different combat zones have heard the same resonance in the song. Eric Burdon, singer in the Animals, has borne witness to this: “For people like guys serving in the military, who really want to get out of a situation, each generation— except for, maybe, this one where now it’s all rap—but leading up to just recently, the British troops in Iraq voted it their No. 1 song. And that happened in every conflict that I know of, up until the advent of rap” (quoted in Something Else! Reviews, 2013). The other ongoing major appropriation of the song has been by workers on factory floors and in other workplaces. Bruce Springsteen certainly immediately recognized it as a working classic. In a lecture, Springsteen (2012) told his audience: “For some, [the Animals] were just another one of the really good beat groups that came out of the 60s. But to me, the Animals were a revelation—the first records with full blown class consciousness that I had ever heard.” For the workers at McTells, this song that Springsteen heard as expressing full-blown class consciousness became a statement of the collective defiant No! With all its limitations, it had nevertheless moved quite some way from its origins, crafted in the dominant texture of transcendence and flight of escape. To use Hirschman’s (1970) classic categories of political economy, it had moved from pop as “exit” to pop as “voice.”

Conclusion Patti Smith led me to the right question to ask. The nomination question was right, not just in terms of the insights it gave into how workers at McTells actively appropriated meaning to relate to work in songs, but it was right also in that it was a question that made intuitive sense to the McTells workers. It was a question that not only generated piercing reflections from individual workers to whom I talked, it also generated collective discussions among workers when I was not present, and these discussions ended up delivering a form of collective answer to the

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question. Patti Smith led me to the right question to ask, but the answers given by the McTells workers meant that I had soon to leave Patti behind as a guide. Her song about her own working life in a factory, “Piss Factory,” was both highly individualized and informed by an assumption that her co-workers were completely dominated by the alienating structure of the factory. Neither of these elements was in tune with the main pattern of songs nominated by McTells workers. The importance of community was sung in the songs nominated, and the songs also rang out with a loud, declamatory, defiant No! to the social order of the factory. The McTells workers’ love-hate relationship to their factory life, their bittersweet experience of working life, was expressed in the nomination songs. Hence the title of the chapter: “Pop and the Hidden Injuries (and Joys) of Class.” This extends Sennett and Cobb’s famous phrase to acknowledge that there are more than injuries that arise from class position. This pattern of meanings in the songs nominated backs up key parts of the argument about music and the “Stayin’ Alive” culture at McTells, but the song nominations did much more than simply support what I had already been observing. They offered a gateway into a fine-grained examination of the forms of the spirit of resistance articulated through music. One of the critiques I offered in the opening chapter of the debates between the Adorno school and the cultural studies school was that these arguments tend to be too abstract. What was needed, I argued, was a close reading of the social relations of specific contexts and how they relate to music and its meanings. I hope in this chapter I have delivered on this as I have focused on the form of the songs that were primarily heard in the specific location of the factory. This close reading allowed me to move away from a simple celebration of how workers reappropriated pop songs to articulate a spirit of resistance to also consider the limitations in the spirit of resistance that was able to be articulated through this reappropriation.

7

Collective Resistance on the Shop Floor

In chapters 3–6, I painted a picture of the musicking within the rich “Stayin’ Alive” culture that was lived out by workers on the shop floor at McTells. I have shown how underneath the apparent banality of the pop song on the radio a whole multitude of significant social processes were unfolding. Overall, I have argued that the workers used the pop music at McTells as part of a dialectical culture that enacted the social order even as it expressed a spirit of resistance toward it. My industrial sociology and industrial relations background, with its emphasis on acts of collective resistance, tells me that to talk of a culture and its spirit of resistance is not enough. For all the discussion of the contours of this culture, the unyielding materialist question is: What does this all mean for acts of collective accommodation and resistance on the shop floor? This is the issue that I directly address over the next two chapters. In this chapter, I concentrate on outlining the form and extent of the collective resistance on the McTells shop floor. In this way, I make good on my

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promise to conduct an ethnography with a focus not just on the cultural activities of workers but also on the issue of collective resistance, which is a traditional central concern of industrial sociologists. The next chapter examines what underpinned these forms of resistance.

Practices of Resistance on the Shop Floor There was no system of union representation at McTells. Lana suggested that the only reason that there was not a union presence at McTells was that people were scared of management’s response to their joining a union: Lana often wears a union badge on her bib. Her husband is a union official. She says they won’t join in here because they’re all frightened that management will find out. “I told them all they have to do is fill in these standing orders, but they won’t. But they say, ‘Oh, they’ll find out about us.’ ”

Anna told me of attempts to organize a union that were blocked by management intervention: Anna says, “We’ve tried a couple of times to get a union here but . . .” I ask her when was the last time, and she said it was a couple of years ago. In the car park they put leaflets in the cars, and they had a meeting in the pub to try and get people to sign up. But management went along to the pub and to people to say “You don’t want to join a union.” I say simply, “Basically they’re kind of—they frightened people away from joining the union?” And she says, “Yes.” Lauren says, “That’s the worst thing about this place. It’s about the only big company we can think of that doesn’t have a union.”

I asked the production manager in an interview if McTells was opposed to unions and she said, “Yes, management is dead against it. That’s the best decision McTells ever made, to be against it, that’s the best decision they ever made. Thank God, it would be even worse if there was a union here.” As this comment suggests, although there was no formal union body organizing resistance, there was significant informal resistance on the shop floor.

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Restrictions on Output and Effort An important form of ongoing collective resistance was the widespread adherence to a norm of limiting production. Each job had a target level of production that management expected workers to reach. It was a clear pattern in the factory that workers refused to go beyond this target figure.1 If workers did exceed the target in any given period, they would “hold back” this production so that it could be credited to a period when they produced less than the targeted production—thus keeping them overall in line with the target: I ask Nina whether when she does more than the twenty-five target per hour she keeps them back for the next day. She says, “Bloody right I do.” Pauline says, “They want us to work 150 percent. For that wage, there’s no way we’re going to do that.” So I say, “I guess you hold back then?” “Yeah, of course we do. Wouldn’t you?”

The process of holding back involved the following. Each blind had a series of stickers or docket labels, as they were known, one sticker for each part of the production process—cutting, hemming, braiding, sewing, and so forth. A worker who had worked on a blind, hem gluing, for instance, would take that sticker off the blind. The supervisors would go around periodically, asking to see evidence from each worker of how many stickers they had accumulated over the time period. This was the way to check on each worker’s productivity. To “hold back your figures” meant that if someone had exceeded the target in a period, they only showed the stickers that equated to the target for that period and did not show the supervisor the stickers for production above the target. This allowed workers to show the stickers at a time when they were producing below target levels. Many workers articulated that they were able to exceed the production targets quite comfortably but refused to do so because it would only lead to higher targets being imposed: Mark says he can do his numbers okay, sixty-five to seventy in a day, “But I don’t do any more. There is no incentive to. They would only put up the

1. See Korczynski (2011a) for a discussion of the one person who exceeded the production target.

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number, wouldn’t they? If I do seventy, I’ll just push the other five aside for the day.”

Keeping production down was also seen as increasing the likelihood of having the opportunity to work overtime (at a higher pay rate): I asked Rose whether she paces herself working overtime. She said, “Yes, I always do. I can do loads me. But what’s the point? There’s no incentive is there? I just do my number, no more. There’s no point, is there?”

There was a joke about the slower pace of Lana’s walk on the shop floor compared to that outside, which highlighted the consistent restriction of effort by workers: We talk about Lana being a much faster walker outside of the factory than inside it. Inside she shuffles about, and there’s a joke (from Mark) that you should have seen her running to the car yesterday to get out. “She’s faster than blinking Zola Budd [an Olympic runner] she is.” And Lana said, “I was only getting out of here, wasn’t I?”

Lana herself stated, “We don’t work too hard here and go to the loo and talk, mostly when you want to.” Sometimes, established workers would even produce a little below target levels, knowing that their established position meant that supervisors were unlikely to discipline them for falling marginally below the target: I ask Anna about the numbers, how many she can get. She asks, “What? When I’m trying?” “Yes.” “I can do forty or forty-two if I really pull my finger out. Not lately. Lately I’ve just been messing around. I’ve been doing sixteen or eighteen because I’ve been having a laugh with Lauren and Eva. I’ve been chatting away.”

Workers were also conscious not to accede to supervisors’ demands that they increase production above target levels to make up for absent colleagues. Molly said, “We don’t work any faster if there are absences, but they want us to. I’m not going to cover two machines. If I do it once, they’ll expect it all the time.” In the verticals room, Rose was faced with having extra production to cover in the process of “dollying.” Her colleague was absent, there was no

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cover person, and yet there was still the same number of blinds to be dollied. Rose pointed out to the supervisor that this was going to create a bottleneck in the production process for the floor: “Because I’m certainly not going to be doing any extra.” The supervisor tried to persuade her, “Just for today, can you just cover for her? There’s a lot off today, and I can’t get anybody else on dollying, so you’ll just have to cope.” “I’m doing my numbers and no more” was Rose’s unyielding reply.

Later in the morning, with the situation unchanged, Rose complained again about the situation to the supervisor. This time the supervisor’s approach was considerably mollified: “Don’t stress, then. You can only do what you can do.” Rose looked satisfied after this little victory. These practices were the outcome of collectively understood and collectively generated norms of output restriction on the shop floor. Natalie tells me about keeping the figures back when she’s hit her target for the day. That’s when she starts going to the toilet and starts slowing down. “There’s no point in doing more is there? There’s no point,” she says. I asked if most people in the place do that, and she said, “Yes, that’s right.” Bill, Shirley, and Anna are all on cutting today, having an informal chat about how many they’re each doing. Bill and Shirley seem okay about doing twenty to twenty-two, which is below the target of twenty-five, so it’s kind of a group norm-setting in process, which just kind of happened in passing.

When discussing with me what the targets for each job were, Anna emphasized the collective character of output restriction: “If you only had a target of twenty for the cutters, that’s what everybody would do and you’d lose the production of the ones who can do it quicker, because everybody would stick at twenty.” There was an informal process of checking that norms of output restriction were being adhered to: Deana nods in disgust, “I saw you put ten down the other day [i.e., two blinds above target].” Gloria was slightly ashamed that she’d done that. “It was only because they were the number ones [i.e., the least complicated form of production],” she says.

Even newcomers on the shop floor, such as Adam, quickly came to understand the operation of these norms:

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Adam said in the canteen, “I can do about eighteen to twenty. I do my best.” And a bit later he said, “Maybe if I was paid a decent wage I would really pull my finger out, but I’m buggered if I’m doing it for what we get paid for. I’m not killing myself for this wage.”

I saw Dave, a long-standing worker, tutoring Luis, who had been at McTells a few months, on the importance of not being intimidated into raising production levels. Luis begins by complaining about the supervisors’ pressure on him: Luis says, “It would be alright here, but she makes my life bloody living hell. It’s the bloody bull dog and the rottweiler: Kate’s the bulldog and Rhona’s the rottweiler. Make my life hell.” Dave says, “They only do it because they know you’ll work harder afterward. Every time she has a go at you, you always come back and you’re working bloody much harder. You’ve got to learn not to get walked over. They’ll just walk all over you if you don’t learn. Next time you’ve got to learn not to get intimidated by them. You don’t come back here and work twice as fast after getting a bollocking, You’ve got to learn not to respond. Go to the toilet or something. They’ll think, ‘Oh that bollocking didn’t work. I’m not going to bother next time.’ That’s what I’d do. That’s what you learn.”

The collective ethos of this process was underlined by the fact that sometimes workers even gave each other docket labels to help each other out when required: Anna and Bill have a kind of jokey interchange regarding docket labels. It turns out that Bill’s got the docket label off Anna’s work and is reluctant to give it back. Anna says, “And just to think I gave him some of my labels when he was doing his training, because I’d done my numbers already. I gave him some and look what he’s doing now.”

Indeed, the collective ethos was such that a supervisor had little chance of success when she tried to set up a small competition between the cutters: The supervisor Rhona tried some competition between the cutters. She said to Angela and Shirley, “Whoever finishes their re-cuts first can go off and do the number one table,” knowing that neither of them particularly like cutting re-cuts. Shirley says, “I’m not doing that, that’s ridiculous.” Angela says, “I’m not going with any competition. You do it today, I’ll do it tomorrow.”

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The process by which targets had been generated in the classic timeand-motion studies had also been subject to collective norms regarding restrictions on effort to be applied within production: Deana says yes, she can remember there was some guy standing next to her with a stop watch. She’s not quite sure whether it was done properly, but she can remember someone with a stop watch. But she wasn’t quite sure how meticulous it was. “I think people were sensible enough not to work too fast. This is it.”

There had even been collective conflicts on lowering some targets that had been seen as inappropriately high by work groups. I witnessed the cutters being publicly reprimanded by the senior supervisor for not producing enough. As part of her demand that they reach the target of twenty-five per hour, she made the case that she had already been reasonable by lowering the target from thirty to twenty-five. I asked Anna about this, and she explained that the cutters had been unhappy that this figure had been too high, and after a series of complaints from them, the senior supervisor had agreed to lower the target. Angela confirmed, “Yeah, we got it down to twenty-five.” Angela also led an approach to have the target lowered for the day when Steve the fabric fetcher was absent, meaning that the cutters had to fetch their own fabric for that day: Angela proactively says to Rhona the supervisor that we need to put the numbers down for today because we haven’t got Steve getting the materials. Rhona asked a couple of questions, and Betty turned to support Angela on this.

Workers were ready to argue their case when special circumstances meant that they had been unable to reach the target for the previous hour: Rhona goes round collecting the figures from everybody and discussed Shirley’s figures. “How many did you do that hour?” Shirley says, “About eighteen, but then there was about six re-cuts.” And she tries to argue with her about how many re-cuts there were, and Rhona has a kind of a joke with her, but there’s a sharp edge to it as well. Shirley’s discussing figures, this time a bit more pointed. Shirley’s trying to explain the figures, arguing that there were re-cuts and big ones and

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things like this to do, and difficult ones and how she helped Nina with her turning up job and discussing fabrics. And Rhona kind of smiled, but doesn’t look best pleased.

Later that week, they showed that they were still vigilant about any changes in work process and their effects on production targets: A supervisor orders the cutters to put the tape that’s on part of the barrels in the bins rather than just drop it on the floor. Shirley and Irene are really cross, pissed off about this. Shirley says, “Put our number down to fifteen then, after making us turn around every time. It takes time, you know.”

Related to the collective practice of output restriction was the collective approach to stopping production before the formal end of the working day as well as subtly extending the length of breaks by a few minutes. It was a clear pattern that workers would stop working on blinds some ten to fifteen minutes before the end of the working day. By the time it was five minutes to the end of the working day, there was usually already a line waiting to put their cards through the time clock: At the line for clocking off Irene is at the front, and she says smiling, “I don’t know why everyone is in such a rush to get out of here.”

The pattern of stopping work early was collectively enacted: When Tracey’s about to start a large cutting job toward the end of the day, about 4:45 [i.e., fifteen minutes before the end of the shift], Betty makes the observation, “You don’t want to do that at this time of the night.” In other words, stop your job now, there’s no point. At 4:40 Rose says, “That’s it, I’ve done enough.” “Yeah,” says Gemma, “I’m fed up.”

On one of the rare occasions when work was continuing close to the end of the shift, this was noted as transgressing the norm of stopping early: It’s eight minutes to five, and Irene says, “Why is everyone working?” She’s packed her tools away and got her jacket away. I say, “I was just thinking that as well.” “Why is everyone working?” she says. “It’s time for knocking off.”

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The pattern of stopping early was particularly strong on Fridays when the shift ended at 1:10 in the afternoon. “It’s five to one, and the weekend starts here,” says Bill walking past generally to people. Anna says, “I’m not doing anymore.” At 12:55, in fact, the whole factory stops.

On one Friday, this practice was challenged by the supervisors: On Friday we were all finished, and it was five to one, and Kate comes through pointing, “You’re paid to work until ten past one. Come on and do some work.” She’s shouting at us.

Forced to keep working to the end, the workers found a payback on the following Monday morning, when they delayed the start of production by ostentatiously showing that they had to clear up, because on Friday they had not been able to close down production properly: Bill tells Lauren about Kate bellowing and shouting about finishing up at ten to one on Friday: “She was screaming and shouting at us, so we were just covering up the tables so they wouldn’t get dust on. So we stopped that, didn’t cover up the fabrics or anything. We stripped the tables and worked until ten past. That’s why there’s dust everywhere on the tables and on the fabrics, and that’s why we get this all cleared up first.”

It was also common practice to shorten the working day at McTells in other ways, such as extending the length of time spent on breaks. Betty has noticed that people have started to take twenty-five minute breaks [rather than the formal fifteen minutes]. She’s got a good view of people going down the stairs. Sally reminds us in the canteen, as a few of us are getting ready to go back up to the workroom: “Remember you take twenty minutes for break, not less.”

Like other ways of shortening the working day, extending breaks was a collective practice:

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Gloria and a couple of others are sitting out in the sunshine. It’s already past their time to get back from lunch. “What time is it?” they ask, because they haven’t got a clock outside. And another guy says, “I’ll give you a knock at ten past.” In other words, when it’s ten minutes past the time to be going back, he’ll tell them the time.

The working day could also be shortened by seeking to extend the length of informal social celebrations that had been sanctioned by the supervisors. One such event was the presentation to Evelyn of her engagement present, at which Evelyn was gently critiqued for not giving a long-enough thankyou speech: Regarding the break for Evelyn’s presentation, just a couple of comments as we’re leaving: “Couldn’t she have dragged that out a bit longer?” and “You could have done a longer speech, couldn’t you?” People were wanting a longer time away from doing their work.

Many workers also restricted their effort, not just in terms of the quantity of production and production time, but also in terms of a lack of concern with the quality of production. In meetings with supervisors, workers generally showed disdain for the idea that they should be interested in hearing statistics about the quality standards of production: First of all [the senior supervisor] said, “Quality. You’ll be pleased to know that we hit all our quality targets for March.” Absolute stony silence meets this, looks of disdain at best, hostility at worst, arms folded in about threequarters of the people. Looks to one another and smiles and shakes of the head meet this.

Rose and Christine told me about a meeting they had been to: Rose said, “It was a complete waste of time. We got told about quality errors. We switched off, and didn’t even listen. We wanted to get back to work we did.” The same lack of concern about quality obtained during the labor process, where any concern related solely to whether the production would be able to pass any quality checks and not to whether the blind really was made to a good quality: Jenny says, “Well maybe if we just do a re-fold here and that might get through.”

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Doris says, “I think maybe we’ll get away with it” [referring to a blind, where she and I had made an error in the pattern we had cut].

It was commonly accepted that this was the way to work: Bill is talking about the poor standard of the machinists’ work, and he says, “What do they say? ‘It’s not going up in my window,’ they say. They just rush it through.”

Absenteeism Another ongoing form of collective resistance was the widespread pattern of absenteeism. In my first weeks on the job, I began to sense that it was quite common for people to take a day off. This was confirmed as a clear pattern when I examined a notice board in the verticals room that listed the absenteeism rate for the previous three days: 17 percent, 14 percent, 13 percent were written out in red. There was a clear collective norm operating on the shop floor that workers felt a right to take a day off when they needed to, whether for personal reasons or because they could not face going into the alienating structures of work that day. Irene had taken a day off to help Jill work in her garden: I asked Irene how is it going this morning and she said, “Okay.” And I said, “How did it go in the office?” And she said, “I’ve been told off in the office for taking yesterday off. I was helping Jill in her garden carrying bricks and everything, and it was bloody pouring down and my back hurts now.” And we have a bit of a joke about this, and I said, “I hope she cooked you a good lunch.” And she said she did: “She’s a good friend, anyway.” Jill’s taken the days off as well. “I hope she’s got her excuse,” she said.

It was understood that if a person had been absent for a day, they had simply decided to take the day off: John is back after being off yesterday. Ricky says to him, “Did you have a nice day off, then?” “Yeah,” he replies, laughing.

Management was clearly concerned about the consistently high levels of absenteeism. They had introduced an “attendance bonus prize contest”

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in which “those who consistently achieve a100 percent attendance record over a three-month period are entered into the special drawing as a reward for excellent service.” This was having very little effect, however. Minutes of a works council meeting reported that “the attendance bonus is not popular with employees or the personnel department. Perhaps it needs a rethink.” Management’s concern with absenteeism was underlined in another part of these minutes, when sick pay was being discussed. A senior manager was quoted in these minutes as saying: “If the absence level drops to acceptable level then further sick pay could be considered. Levels of absence . . . are still 10 percent in the factory. Four percent would be a more reasonable level.” In an interview with me, the senior supervisor stated that she was supposed to talk to any individual whose unauthorized absence level was above 5 percent. Her emphasis was on ”supposed to,” for she recognized that the problem was too big for this approach to be feasible. She said, “Absence levels can get to 20 to 25 percent. I’m getting sick and tired of it.” At one of the work group participation meetings, Sally, a shop floor worker from the verticals room, noted some further change in policies in trying to restrict sick pay and to police absenteeism. In the face of this, she articulated a clear determination that the norm of workers taking a day off when they needed to was going to continue: [Directing herself to the team leader], she complains about a new form that has been given out to fill in regarding a day off. She says there’s a list of boxes and you’ve got to tick one and then sign it to give them permission to investigate whether what you say is true. She says, “I’m sorry I’m not having that. I don’t mind them checking if I’m having two weeks off and claiming sick pay, but no way are they checking up on me when I take a day off because I’m fed up and they are not paying me. I’ll take a day off if I want. I’m not going to stop. I’ll tell you to your face that I was fed up and couldn’t face coming in, but I’m not signing no bloody form.” There are nods around the room. The supervisor smiles weakly and says he has not seen the form.

Disengagement from Formal Participative Structures Another important collective form of resistance was the refusal by workers to engage with the workplace participation forums, akin to quality circles, recently introduced by management. As noted in chapter 4 they were

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called AIM meetings (Action and Ideas at McTells). It is worth giving an extended quote from my field notes for one of the AIM meetings I attended, for this gives a sense of the active disengagement of workers from these meetings. The end of the extract shows the underlying low-trust conflictual relations with management. I go in the cutters’ AIM group, and we go to near Anna’s table and everybody’s going “Oh bloody hell, why bother.” Tracey, who’s the group rep, was just sitting up on the table and trying to explain the procedure, telling us about the system. Pete, William, and Tony sit in a corner away from us, showing absolutely no interest, closing their eyes, putting their hands on their heads. At one point they do a skit of ”See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” with their hands in appropriate places. This gets a few laughs. . . . Angela’s the group rep. She tries to guide the discussion further to Anna’s suggestion that they should look into getting more up-to-date kiddies fabrics, such as Barbie and people like that, and this prompts jokes about the current types of fabric. There’s no real engagement with the idea. Angela says, “Well, we’re supposed to vote on it, and if that’s our idea to go forward then Anna gets the twenty-five pounds.” But then it’s explained to her that it’s not Anna that get the twenty-five pounds, it’s that we’ve got twentyfive pounds to spend on the idea, and that they don’t know what individuals, how individuals are going to get rewarded. Angela goes, “Oh.” Betty says, “You know what the reward’s going to be if the idea is that you save McTells ten thousand pounds, then you get . . .” Shirley chips in, “You get ten pounds. That’s right: ten thousand pounds you’ve got to save to get ten pounds.” Three or four people join in on that, so that’s a strong feeling. All through this, which stretches for another ten minutes with nothing said. “Anybody got any other ideas?” “No.” Nobody says anything. There are smiles at the three in the corner doing their monkey routine again. Anna’s lying out on her worktable staring at the ceiling. Everybody else is kind of looking blank.

A little after the meeting, I went to talk to Anna: I asked Anna whether she was pissed off after the AIM meeting. “Yeah, it was a real waste of time. If you do have an idea they just treat you like idiots. There’s no point keeping the bloody meeting just to keep it going for half an hour. They go on about the numbers all the time. We could have got another seventy out the door in that half hour, and now Angela says she

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doesn’t want to do it anymore,” referring to Angela not wanting to be the group rep anymore.

I attended another participation meeting in the verticals room, slightly different from the AIM meeting in that it was led by the supervisor. It was called the DOR meeting, but nobody knew what these initials stood for, and we were not told at the meeting, either. The supervisor was aware that there was considerable discontent on the shop floor. He started the meeting by accepting that it was not going to be an easy ride for him: The supervisor says that at the previous meeting he really got it in the neck from the tech crew and he’s big enough to take more of the same from us. “I’ve been shouted at by bigger people than you,” he says.

He was right to expect expressions of antagonism in the meeting. Although he tried to keep control of the agenda in terms of looking for ideas to cut down error rates, the workers kept moving the discussion toward recent changes in policies with which they disagreed, particularly a recent change in policy on overtime payments (see below). Opposition to management policies was expressed in stark and bitter terms at the meeting: Tricia: “They talk about commitment this, commitment that. But if they want commitment from, they’ve got to give some first. And there’s none. It’s high time that they pay some attention to us lot that actually get the blinds out of the door.” Sally: “We get treated like shit, don’t we? It’s always the same. We’re the last people that matter.”

Later in the meeting, Sally articulated clearly that they were going to get no commitment from her: “We only work for the money. There is no other fucking reason to put up with what we do. We don’t do it for the company. I do it for myself because I need the money, but you lot higher up [referring to the supervisor], you get the perks and that, maybe you should be thinking of the company, because we’re certainly not.” As she said this, I noticed that she was sitting in front of a notice board that had a local newspaper article about McTells. After the meeting, I saw there was a quote in this newspaper report from the McTells managing director: “We are seeing

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real emotional commitment from the factory staff and they are really enjoying being able to influence operations.”

Beyond the Works Council—Informal Collective Action Despite the introduction by management of forums such as the AIM meetings and the works council, workers regarded these structures as primarily about the appearance of worker engagement. Certainly the staff handbook gave a window dressing to these structures: “Here at McTells we are committed to keeping everyone informed of the company’s latest developments and plans. We find that regular meeting and team briefings, along with the Works Councilor should keep you well informed.” Workers saw the structures as relatively powerless, and in practice, workers acted as though they were better off relying on their own informal collective action. Sam noted: “We have a lot of meetings here, but nothing ever gets done, nothing that really matters. When you do say something, they don’t really listen to you. Like we had one meeting up there (points up to the canteen), and everybody went along and all the managers and team leaders and that, and we had a meeting and they were writing things down, but they only wrote the stuff down when you agreed with them. Nothing ever gets done.” I asked a group of workers what they thought about the works council. The response was rather lukewarm. Betty said, “I think it’s just a talking shop. They haven’t done much for us really, have they?” Maggie says, “It’s quite good.” Then Betty says, “But what have they done for us?” And Maggie couldn’t think of anything.

John referred dismissively to the works council: “You mean the Benefits Committee? It is run by the directors. They say what they like.” In an interview with me, a senior manager emphasized that the works council was for consultation rather than for negotiation: I asked him about the works council, and he says, “They come up with things that they’d like, and basically if it’s sensible, we’ll give it to them. It’s not a negotiating forum. We look at what kind of benefits they’re after and try and find out what they’re interested in. But it’s not a negotiating forum.”

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Another manager noted that the works council agenda items tended to be about relatively trivial “environmental” issues. This chimed with the experience of many workers. For instance, Alicia had just found out that her workroom was soon to be relocated to a different part of the factory site: She tells me about how they’re moving downstairs, but they haven’t been at all consulted about that. “You’d have thought they would talk to us about that, but no.”

A change in overtime policy brought the powerlessness of the workers’ situation within these formal structures into stark relief. Here are my field notes covering the announcement by the senior supervisor of the change in policy. The essence of the change was that those who wanted to work overtime on Sundays (paid at double rate) would now only be able to do so if they also worked overtime on Saturdays (paid at one and half times the normal rate): She talks about overtime, how overtime is still on and is available, but she says that “there’s been a change to make it clear that if you don’t work on Saturday you only get time and a half on Sunday, not double time. I was told not to make a big fuss about it and that if when I went round somebody just put their names for Sunday not Saturday, I was to point it out to them. So I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, that’s what I was told to do. But now it’s got out of hand. Just to make it clear that’s the system.” This provokes considerable argument back, saying that’s not right, that’s not fair, and also on the issue of how they found out, that they only found out after the event. Kate explains that she was told not to make a big deal of it. “It’s bloody typical,” says Carol. “Nobody cares about us. Nobody cares about us in this room. They treat us like bloody animals, they do. Nobody bloody cares.” Jenny’s husband, who also works on the shop floor, says, “Spot on, that is. That’s exactly right.” Lauren says, “Yeah, nobody cares about us. Why don’t you tell us straight up front rather than doing it behind our backs? Typical.”

Anna, who was a representative on the works council, was visibly shaken by this change in policy and the mode of its announcement: She still looks really, really pissed off with things. She goes over and just stands by Eva, just holding the table, shaking her head. And after that she goes downstairs for about five or ten minutes. She’s sitting in the canteen.

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She was deeply skeptical of the works council being able to effect any change in this policy: Later I ask whether the works council will be able to take up the idea of challenging the overtime change, and she says, “Yeah, I’ll bring it up on Monday, but we won’t get anywhere. Once they’ve said it at that level there’s no backing down. They never do.”

In the following days, workers acted informally outside of the formal structures of consultation and participation. Anna told me that workers had to realize that they still had collective power to challenge this policy: Anna also tells me that there were people moaning about the overtime. “Some of them are really cross about changes in the overtime payment system. That you only get double time on the Sunday if you work on the Saturday, which didn’t used to be the way. But I say to them there’s no point in moaning, you know. You’ve got to say it together and vote with your feet— don’t go in on the Saturday.”

The clearest group of workers who held collective power in the rollers room were the cutters. The cutters were the group who battled most intensely over the effort bargain and frontiers of control: Natalie explained to me, “The supervisor says, ‘Angela, Betty to the office.’ Everybody else looks around. Everybody expects that it’s going to be a bollocking. They’ll be in for a bollocking is the word that goes round.” Lana says, “Betty will come back with a gob on. She argues back. She’ll argue back, you can expect that, and Angela as well.” I ask whether anybody else, any other group, gets called to the office for this sort of thing, and Natalie says, “No, it’s only the cutters, because they set the pace.”

Not only were the cutters the group that set the pace, they were also the group in which the labor process was semiskilled rather than low skilled. This meant that it was not possible for supervisors to easily draft in other workers to work on cutting the fabric. The cutters used their collective power to challenge the change in overtime policy. Lana told me that Anna and Angela, who were both cutters, had gone together to the production

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manager to highlight that the cutters were not prepared to work overtime under the new conditions: Anna and Angela went together to say that they weren’t prepared to come in on the Saturday but wanted double time on the Sunday, and management is scared because Betty [the other main cutter] is not coming in on the Saturday or on the Sunday, so they’re not going to get any cutters in, and they need the cutters in, so they’re scared.

Management was forced into making a concession. The amelioration in the new overtime policy was announced in a meeting led by a supervisor: He says, “From now on, for a trial period, if you can’t work Saturday for a genuine reason, and I mean a genuine reason, but you have worked at least four hours overtime in the previous week, you will still be paid double time on a Sunday.” There are points of clarification about this, and some grumbling. He says, “So I know one or two of you have come to raise this, so hopefully that will settle the issue.”

The informal collective response of workers had had some success, but it was recognized that the overall outcome was still a considerable worsening in the overtime policy: Nina said, “They’re taking the piss, aren’t they. There’s no consideration for working mothers. How can we do four hours overtime during the day, during the week. There’s no way I can, no way I can. I’m not going to, no way I’m going to be able to do work double time on a Sunday to get the double time pay. That’s the only decent pay we can get in this place. This means I can’t get it now. It’s not like I can have the whole weekend off, no.”

This was not the only example of collective action by workers forcing management into making concessions. Another example had occurred two years earlier, prior to the introduction of the works council and related structures. It was in the winter, and there had been inadequate heating in the workrooms. Workers had organized a walkout to protest the freezing conditions. Management was forced to improve the heating facilities in the affected workrooms. “When we stick together, we can get things done,” observed Kris.

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Collective Resistance to Supervisors The final main way in which workers undertook practices of collective resistance was through fighting back against and defying impositions of discipline by supervisors on the shop floor. The antagonism to supervisors exerting close discipline was expressed at a meeting when the agenda turned to the role of the supervisor: “I don’t want it to be like at school being told what to do, directed to do things, but you do need a supervisor sometimes” and “I don’t want a supervisor standing over me” were two comments. This antagonism was exacerbated by what was experienced as arbitrary changes in the “mood” of supervisors in the pattern of their imposition of discipline: Maggie notes that the supervisors are allowed to have changes in mood. She says, “What mood is Kate in today?” Rhona comes round, and Maggie says, “Oh, isn’t she pleasant” in a sarcastic way after she’s gone because Rhona, the supervisor, said something very dour. Doris says, “The best thing about the place is the people, lovely people. You can like get on and have great laugh, and then suddenly it gets ruined. They come along and shout at you.”

Here is one example of an enjoyable social exchanges being “ruined” by a supervisor’s unexpected imposition of discipline: Kate, the supervisor, goes to the corner where Lauren, Jenny, and Natalie are talking. “Get some work done” is the message, and she goes off. Jenny turns around and gives a really sour look and mutters some words to Lauren, who says something back, and Jenny nods. This is the first time I have seen Jenny genuinely not content and happy. She works away, and she’s really angry that Kate had treated her like this.

Workers made fun of supervisors as a response to their disciplining role: Irene says, “We’re not allowed to have any fun in here. It’s like a concentration camp. I know what we should do for Red Nose Day: we should come with those arrows on our suits like a prison uniform.” And Betty says, “Yes, let’s get some convict uniforms. That would be really good for Red Nose Day.” Evelyn thinks this is a good idea as well.

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Workers did not just make jokes about supervisors, they also challenged modes of discipline and gave gestures of defiance. In the following scenes, one of the cutters directly challenges supervisors for trying to push workers’ effort, when the real problem was management’s inability to properly organize production: Rhona, the supervisor, comes through all stern at 12:40, within minutes of our game and announces in a chastising kind of way, “Get some work done. We’ve got another hundred to get through in the next hour to get through in the next room.” Anna says, “What, in the next twenty minutes?” Shirley says, “Well, you should have had more than three cutters working then for the last half an hour, shouldn’t you?”

Another form of defiance was challenging the assumption of supervisors that workers were not working properly: Kate came walking along and said, “Can you get some work done, please. Less talking. Stop talking, please”—and this is in the middle of an interaction between Evelyn, Maggie, and Carol, and one or two of them turned round to briefly make a point, and Evelyn and Carol fight back and Carol says, “We are working. Catch the other buggers messing around. We’re working down here.” “I am getting on with my work,” says Evelyn. And they won’t take it lying down, and Carol tells Evelyn that they’re talking about some social occasion and trying to do something for Kate, and Carol is wagging her finger at the supervisor and kind of pointing her screwdriver in a kind of vaguely menacing kind of way toward her.

At other times, the defiance was sharper, but undertaken surreptitiously, although also socially and/or collectively: Irene’s on one of the cutting tables, leaning on it. Kate comes into the cutting room, shouts over to her, “Are you tired, are you, Irene?” And Irene explains that she’s just fixing a label from a barrel onto something and Kate says, “Oh, interesting that. Get some work done.” Irene says, “I’m just doing this.” And Kate turns to leave and immediately, Irene, Angela, and Betty give her the finger while she is walking away. Steve was having a chat briefly with Irene, and Rhona comes along and scornfully says, “Haven’t you got any work?” Steve walks away immediately. Turns round and gives her the finger. Irene smiles at him.

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The practice of workers standing up to supervisors’ impositions of discipline was collectively underpinned. Norms about not simply accepting the supervisor’s word were generated through the common practice of the telling of stories of when workers had stood up to supervisors. The first story features the experience of Maggie’s beginning to stand up for herself against a supervisor: Rhona had her in tears for the first month she was here, and Maggie said to herself, “That’s it kid. You’re older than her. You’ve had enough. You’re not putting up with this anymore, no more tears. So I decided to give as good as I got. She would come in and bring me work and just throw it down on my desk, and god did that get my goat up. Oh my god, that made me crazy. Ooh that woman! And so, one time I said, ‘Right that’s it, I’ve had enough.’ And when she did that, she went on to testing while I was doing the finishing. And there was one bit that she hadn’t done right, so I took this blind and I chucked it back down on her desk, and I said, ‘That’s for you to do!’ Just like she said to me, ‘Get your work done!’ I said, ‘Get your work done!’ And she said, ‘You treat me with the respect I deserve. I’m a supervisor here.’ And I said to her, ‘You treat me with the respect I deserve.’ And Doris said, ‘Ooh, what did you say?’ And I said, ‘I stood up for myself, I did. I stood up for myself.’ Another time she brought back another piece of work to do some refinishing on it and it was just fine, there was nothing to be done, so I said, ‘I’ve had enough with that’ and I chucked it down on the ground and stamped all over it. ‘There! There’s your bloody blind! You go and finish it now.’ You’ve got to stand up for yourself.”

The second story also features a worker expressing a sense of catharsis from fighting back: They also have a story, one or two similar stories about Kate, who is now a supervisor about fighting back against her. Carol says, “There was one time Kate was getting on to us about getting that finishing done and quit talking.” And Maggie says, “I hardly ever talk. I hardly ever get any chance to talk in here. Now is about the only chance we get to do any talking. But since we do it, and we get caught, and Kate will be on at us.” And Carol says, “Yeah, one time Kate was doing this. I think I was just a bit upset after the day, a bit pressured, and my husband had just walked out on me, and I’d been larking about with some water pistols in here, but they haven’t

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[inaudible] and I was like two minutes late coming back from a break, and she’d gone on at me. And I said, ‘Fuck off!’ I’d had enough. I said, ‘Listen, there’s lots of others getting away with much more than we are here. Bloody go and sort them out first before you come round talking to me like that.’ Probably shouldn’t have done it, but I’d had enough, really I’d had enough.” And Maggie said, “Fair enough, love, fair enough.”

The tension with supervisors was at its peak with regard to a specific supervisor named Rhona. She was frequently singled out at as the most arbitrarily vindictive supervisor on the shop floor. Bill spoke for many when he said, “Rhona is a stroppy [bad tempered] cow. You should write a book about villains at work, and half of it can be about Rhona.” Maggie spoke with an unusually caustic tone about her: “She’ll pick on you for no reason at all just because she feels like it. And there’s others getting on with things that are much worse than us, but she’ll pick on you because she just gets it in her head. She’s right there in front of your face, and she’ll pick on you, and that’s it. She’ll be on at you, on at you.” Two months prior to my arrival at McTells, the workers in the rollers room had been moved to act collectively to curb her behavior. Bill told me what had happened to tip the situation toward collective action. It all started because Trisha, who had been a previous supervisor, had agreed that during Sunday overtime, one person could go to MacDonald’s, down the road, to get an order for some food, because the sandwich seller did not come to the factory on a Sunday. But Rhona was the supervisor on duty, and she vetoed this and said, “No, you can’t go.” They were really, really cross about this, and then Trisha came down and confronted Rhona in the canteen, and everybody saw this and Angela said, “Okay, let’s do something about that.” And so they organized this petition, and individuals were brought into the office in front of her to say what she’d been doing. She’d tried to laugh them off, but she got really heated with Angela and had to drag her out, and you know, she was just humiliated at the time.

Other people confirmed the contours of the workers organizing a petition signed by all, demanding a change in Rhona’s behavior. Workers understood that a manager had given her three months to “mend her ways.” I asked whether the works council had been involved in any of this, but

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I was told that it was a case of workers collectively taking action on the issue outside of the official structures: Shirley smiles and says, “You should have been here two months ago.” I asked her whether the works council had anything to do with the petition. She said, “No, it wasn’t the works council, it was just everybody. People went to the middle manager; everybody did.”

Conclusion Important as it was for me to prepare an ethnography of the musicking at McTells, I wanted to see what the mixing of a cultural ethnography and a traditional industrial sociology ethnography would lead to. By pointing to the importance of understanding the “Stayin’ Alive” culture’s spirit of resistance, I did not want to lose sight of the enduring importance of uncovering and understanding collective acts of resistance. This chapter has concerned itself with the task of uncovering the informal collective resistance at McTells. Although there was no union on the shop floor, primarily because of management hostility to unionization, workers still enacted a wide range of forms of informal collective resistance. In the terms of Edwards, Belanger, and Wright (2006), McTells was a classic case of a workplace where “shop floor battles,” that is, conflicts over immediate matters of control on the shop floor, were fought out. There are a number of notable elements to the pattern of extensive informal collective resistance at McTells. Although this is not the first study to find extensive forms of collective resistance in nonunion settings (see, e.g., McKinlay and Taylor 1996), it is nevertheless the case that collective resistance tends to be associated with unionized workplaces (Roscigno and Hodson 2004). Readers familiar with ethnographies from previous decades may also be struck by similarities between some of those patterns of resistance and the patterns at McTells. For instance, the practices of workers restricting output and holding back from booking production already enacted has been found in a number of previous studies (e.g. , Walker and Guest 1952; Terry and Edwards 1988). What is notable here is the continued existence of such extensive forms of informal job controls by workers in an era of increased managerial proactivity and prerogative in

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employment relations (Edwards 2009). Considering the sectorial context, if the manufacture of blinds can be considered part of clothing/textile production, then the extent of collective resistance becomes even more notable, because, although some past studies of textile manufacturing showed widespread patterns of resistance (Lupton 1963), more recent studies show patterns of workers becoming individualized and lacking in power (Boggis 2003) and of the dissipation of craft worker job controls (Sayce, Ackers, and Greene 2007). My task in the following chapter is to examine the underpinnings of the extensive informal collective resistance at McTells.

8

Dotted Lines on the Shop Floor Cultural Connections with Collective Resistance

There are many sets of dotted lines on the floor of the factory. I asked a few people what they were for, but nobody knew. Research diary entry

The previous chapter detailed important and widespread forms of collective resistance on the McTells shop floor. It has not been unusual for ethnographic research to uncover collective resistance, but the patterns of resistance at McTells were particularly notable because they occurred without union presence and because they took place in an era of heightened management control of the organization of work. How can we explain such forms of informal collective resistance within a nonunion workplace? And, in particular, what is the link between the musicking “Stayin’ Alive” culture and the collective resistance at McTells? This chapter focuses on these questions. As I noted in the introductory chapter, there have been sufficient ethnographies of workplaces for scholars to be able to draw up maps of the main patterns of workplace conflict and to highlight key factors underpinning the main patterns identified. The most important contributions here are by Edwards, Beranger, and Wright (Edwards, Belanger, and Wright 2006; Edwards and Belanger 2007), and by Hodson and Roscigno (Hodson

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2001; Roscigno and Hodson 2004). Edwards and Belanger (2007) have outlined patterns of conflict and cooperation in workplace relations in terms of a schema created by examining the concerns of both capital and labor at two levels: control at the workplace and the development of the productive forces. They argue that it is relatively rare to have a meeting of capital and labor concerns that can underpin long-lasting compromises at the workplace level. Particularly relevant for the present chapter is their argument that patterns of “shop floor battles” can be seen as primarily arising when both capital and labor have low developmental concerns and high concerns regarding workplace control. It was clear that McTells represented a classic case of “shop floor battles” between workers and management with both focused on short-term issues of workplace control. Edwards and Belanger also argue that there are three key factors that “structure” workplace relations within this schema: technology, product market, and institutional regulation. The approach of Roscigno and Hodson (2004) has been to look at the underpinnings of workplace resistance, not just with regard to organizational structures, but also with regard to the texture of social relations on the shop floor, for instance in terms of relations between supervisors and workers. By coding and analyzing multiple workplace ethnographies, they developed a schema of three main clusters of relations: contentious workplaces, cohesive workplaces, and unorganized workplaces. Contentious workplaces, in which collective resistance is common, are characterized by interpersonal conflict with management on the shop floor, worker solidarity, and union presence. Cohesive workplaces are characterized by worker representation and little conflict. Unorganized workplaces are characterized by chaotic production organization and little workforce representation. In terms of this schema of workplace relations, McTells exhibited elements of both “contentious” and “unorganized” relations. There was interpersonal conflict with supervisors, a wide degree of workforce solidarity, and collective resistance—all of which fit with Roscigno and Hodson’s category of a contentious workplace (although this category also includes union presence). McTells was also characterized by a chaotic organization of production and little workforce representation, both of which fit with Roscigno and Hodson’s category of an unorganized workplace. I argued in chapter 1 that these analyses of the material factors underpinning workplace cooperation and conflict represent important steps

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forward. At the same time, the focus on the “structuring” factors leaves large unanswered questions regarding the agency of the actors within these structures. In chapter 1, I also argued for analyzing workplace culture as a way of beginning to understand the agency of workers’ resistance and its processes. Taking this as a point of departure for this chapter, I will focus on the relationship between the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, with its strong spirit of resistance, and the collective acts of resistance at McTells outlined in the preceding chapter. As I argued in the introductory chapter, we should appreciate that attempting to draw full straight lines from culture to acts of resistance is likely to be unfruitful. Although the dotted lines on the workroom floor at McTells served no purpose in terms of the production of blinds (see epigraph to this chapter), I use them as my metaphor in exploring the connections between the cultural “Stayin’ Alive” practices and the acts of resistance outlined in the previous chapter. James Scott (1990) offers important insight on the connections between cultural practices that articulate a spirit of resistance and collective acts of resistance. The first decisive step he takes is to show the fundamental shortcomings in the “safety-valve” theory. The safety-valve theory argues that cultural discourses offer an outlet for the frustrations of subordinate groups in such a way as to make the subordinate group less likely to undertake collective acts of resistance. Scott shows that this widespread theory is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that the expression of discontent somehow leads to a lessening of the discontent, and knowledge of the discontent. This is untenable. Rather, discourses expressing a spirit of resistance and collective acts of resistance have been historically mutually reinforcing. Indeed, perhaps we should see discourses and cultural practices expressing a spirit of resistance as necessary for collective resistance. As Scott puts it: “It would be more accurate, in short, to think of the hidden transcript as a condition of practical resistance rather than a substitute for it” (191). And: “It is impossible to separate veiled symbolic resistance to the ideas of domination from the practical struggles to thwart or mitigate exploitation. Resistance, like domination, fights a war on two fronts” (188). Scott also highlights the flaws in the modified-largesse version of the safety-valve theory, which states that because powerful groups openly allow and sometimes even encourage cultural practices that may contain articulations of a spirit of resistance—think of the carnival in the Middle

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Ages—these cultural practices must be cathartically harmless, and must not be able to inform collective acts of resistance. This approach has the fundamental flaw of reading the outcome of a social practice from the intentions of those who sanction it. Applied to the McTells shop floor, it is clear that just because management has sanctioned, and even encouraged, listening to the radio as a form of indulgence, it does not mean that musicking has no connection with acts of resistance. The preceding chapters have shown that workers listen to the pop songs not only in ways that help enact the social order but also in ways that articulate a spirit of resistance and defiance. It is how this then connects . . . in a dotted-line way . . . to collective acts of resistance that is traced within this chapter. First, I examine the material factors underpinning the informal collective resistance at McTells. In the remaining part of the chapter I consider the important role of the workers’ “Stayin’ Alive” culture in informing acts of resistance.

Material Underpinnings of Informal Collective Resistance At the most abstract level, the key material structural factor underpinning the informal collective resistance outlined in the previous chapter was the “structured antagonism” (Edwards 1986) that is inherent in the employment relationship within capitalism. This structured antagonism flows from the fact that management enacts strategies to extract surplus from workers’ labor power. There were a number of points when workers at McTells articulated clear grievances that it was fundamentally their lowpaid work that was building the wealth of the owners and senior managers of the factory. Kathleen and Rose are talking animatedly about the founder of the company. “He sold this bloody company for millions, for millions, it was. And who made those millions for him? We did, that’s who,” says Kathleen. “And you know what,” answers Rose, “and us making the blinds, we’re the ones who get treated like dirt, that’s the thing.”

This structured antagonism was also articulated within the labor process. One day, Bill walked out of the factory for the day after a supervisor refused to help him on a complex piece of cutting. As he flung the fabric

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on the worktable, he shouted, “I’m not working like a bastard for this money,” and stormed out. The structured antagonism over the extraction of surplus also underpinned workers’ discussions within and about AIM meetings: Maggie said, “Oh, I don’t know, Dave thinks if you give an idea [that makes] like ten thousand pounds to somebody they might give you half a day holiday, if you’re lucky. Or tell them to stick it and give someone else the idea.” There are nods of approval to this. Later we see that Jenny questions the share of the rewards for ideas. She says, “But what if we come up with an idea that’s going to save McTells thousands of money? What do we get? Do we get cream cakes? That’s the thing.”

Workers here were also expressing the contradictions of being subject to low-cost Taylorized production methods while at the same time being asked to bring creativity and ingenuity to these participation meetings (Hyman 1987). Beyond the structured antagonism within the employment relationship, there are other more contextual structural factors that need to be taken into account. Roscigno and Hodson (2004) point to the importance of disorganized production as usually informing a pattern of “unorganized” rather than conflictual workplace relations. Chaotic production was certainly present at McTells. Workers frequently experienced the chaotic organization of production through unexplained and unanticipated peaks and troughs in the work demanded of them, and this fed through into day-to-day conflict with supervisors: Rhona, the supervisor, is going round shouting and pointing at people, telling them to stop talking and get to work: “We haven’t done our figures the last two days. Stay where you are and work! No walking around!” Betty fights back: “You don’t know how to fucking organize a factory, you don’t. There was no bloody tables working yesterday, and that’s why it was. Look, if you just kept the tables organized properly we’d have some production. You can’t organize a fucking factory, you can’t.”

The chaotic organization of production was experienced not just by workers but also by supervisors. I discussed with Kate, the senior supervisor, the

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production targets that were in operation on the shop floor. She told me: “At the moment, we are working to an aim of 2.3 PPH. PPH stands for product per person hour. There used to be a figure of 2 PPH, but as soon as we hit that target, it got raised to 2.3. It gets changed throughout the year. I’ve got no idea really of why it changes. It’s ranged from 1.8 to 2.25. Someone decides and we get told. That’s how it is here. I was told last week that it’s going up to 2.4.” She then directly connected the ever-changing targets to the texture of the relations between supervisors and workers on the shop floor: “2.4. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to do that. We’re going to struggle to hit it, that’s for sure. Then I’ll get yelled at by my manager, and then I’ll have to really crack the whip here then. Sometimes, I feel like a right rotten so-and-so, going round shouting at everyone. I know that they say it feels like a prison, sometimes, don’t they?” This chaotic organization of production was also related to the exposure of McTells to product-market variability. In chapter 2 I explained that McTells’ competitive strategy of producing customized quick, lowcost blinds meant that it was exposed to a high degree of product-market variability because there was no buffer between (customized) demand and production. They also lacked control over the flow of demand because the agents, whose behaviors were key drivers of demand, were self-employed and hence outside of McTells’ close control. In my time at McTells, there were ebbs and flows in production that seemed completely random, and workers could not discern a pattern in these ebbs and flows. Management did not seek to communicate information on patterns of demand to workers. This chaotic organization of the production system can also be seen in the absence of any of the technological systems of production control and tracking that have become commonplace in recent decades in manufacturing (Zuboff 1988). The bench-assembly method of production was still tied to a manual form of production tracking. This was a key material structuring factor that allowed the practice of workers holding back booked production to another period, and this also structured the supervisors’ role as having an element of direct control over the labor process in relation to their checking on production levels. The product market is likely to have had an important structuring role here as well. McTells was the dominant firm in the local customized blinds market and had only local competition from a number of small firms. This dominant local position meant

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that McTells had been able to grow without giving serious consideration to issues relating to the development of productive forces (e.g., technology systems of production tracking). As well as considering the material underpinnings of the shop floor battles at McTells in terms of product market, technology, and managerial strategy, it is also possible to consider the material factors that underpinned the high degree of workforce solidarity on the McTells shop floor. Hodson (2008, 187) has examined material factors important for solidaristic peer relations among workers. One notable finding is that the use of contingent pay schemes, in which workers are pitted against themselves or against others for pay raises, undermines co-worker relations. It is important, therefore, to note the lack of a bonus system at McTells as an important factor underpinning the particularly collective nature of the informal resistance enacted. Further, as noted in chapter 2, there were no layers of job gradings that could lead to competition for promotion within a system of “bureaucratic control” (Edwards 1979). The supervisor position was the only grade above basic operative, and these positions were rarely available. Workers tended not to aspire to this position. All of the above factors were clearly important structural factors in shaping the nature and extent of the resistance on the shop floor at McTells. But to truly understand this resistance, we also need to consider the agency of the workers involved. And it is here that culture becomes crucial.

The “Stayin’ Alive” Culture and Collective Resistance The “Stayin’ Alive” culture was not enacted in order to foster and sustain collective resistance. Its character, however, meant that it did in fact engender and support the acts of collective resistance outlined in the previous chapter in a number of significant ways.

Resistive Solidarity within the Culture The creation and expression of community was central to the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, and this cultural creation of community, with its immanent spirit of critique, was a fundamental underpinning for the extensive informal collective resistance at McTells. The collective element of

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the resistance—the shared norms of output restriction and absenteeism, the collective refusal to engage with the participatory forums developed by management, the continued reliance on collective self-organization and action over the works council structure, and the collective patterns of defiance toward supervisors—did not just arise spontaneously from the structures of the workplace. Certainly, associational solidarity very frequently emerges in workplaces, with workers sharing common interests and experiences, but it must be recognized that the level of informal collective action was very high at McTells, particularly for a workplace with a high turnover rate and no union organization to formalize solidarity. Workers developed their “Stayin’ Alive” culture with and through the associational solidarity of shared labor, and thus created high levels of solidarity on the shop floor. Chapters 3 and 6 showed in depth how the musicking within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture was centrally linked to the creation and expression of community on the shop floor. Workers undertook participatory musicking by singing, dancing, and talking to one another in response to pop music. These interactions tended to be small and were often led by cultural instigators dispersed throughout the workplace. The cultural instigators ensured that these were open egalitarian fields of participation by opening their own singing up for humorous commentary. Chapter 3 also emphasized that there was a dynamic symbiosis between music and community. Chapter 6 reprised the importance of community within the musical element of the shop floor culture by showing how important community was within the songs that were nominated by workers as speaking to them about their working lives at McTells. Just as the song fostered community at McTells, so did the joke. I have shown (Korczynski 2011b) that humor was often initiated by the same cultural instigators who led the participatory musicking, and frequently the “audience” would join in on the humor use and sharp exchanges of wit, or banter, would occur. Every piece of humor that occasioned a smile or a laugh helped to cement the shared understandings of the workers in the factory. The very act of humor creation involved the expression of community: There’s a joke involving an imitation of a supervisor. Penny’s [a supervisor] leaning on the table and later on there’s an extended mocking of Penny leaning on the table in which everybody is leaning in imitation of her saying, “That’s enough talking now” and ”Haven’t you got enough work to do?”

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Not only did the “Stayin’ Alive” culture bring workers together but it did so in a way that was critical of the workplace structures. I have argued extensively that the key patterns and purposes of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture were related to the alienating structures that faced workers at McTells. Workers formed the culture primarily in order to defend their senses from being overwhelmed by alienation, and this comes out clearly in how the culture responded to the contours of how workers sensed alienation (see chapter 4). This meant that the culture had an immanent critique of the workplace structures embedded within it. Workers knew only too well of the alienating structures facing them and turned to one another, to the joke and to the song, in order to avoid their senses being dominated by these structures. The culture allowed workers to survive within these structures, and in that sense it was accommodative—but in a way that expressed a critique of these structures. The “Stayin’ Alive” culture was not an escapist culture that sought to deny the existence of the alienating context. If it was, then “Summer Holiday” by Cliff Richard, rather than “We Gotta Get out of This Place” by the Animals, would have been number 1 among the nomination songs. Rather, the culture was fundamentally based on a critical understanding of the workplace structures. In this way, the culture developed with and from the associational solidarity of workers’ shared position in the labor process. And thus it can be regarded as a key underpinning for the extensive informal collective resistance enacted by the workers at McTells. Management was certainly wary of the informal collective resistance on the shop floor. One production manager told me in an interview that “there’s too much sticking together out there on the floor. We’re looking to change that culture.” The “Stayin’ Alive” culture was fundamental to how workers were “sticking together” within the factory, resisting, as best they could, management’s attempts to alter the work-effort bargain against them. Something of the dotted lines between the resistive solidarity of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture and the informal collective resistance can be seen by examining the effects of social listening within the factory culture on the songs nominated by workers as speaking to them about their working lives. When workers nominated a song that had been heard within the musicking fabric of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, it was likely to be colored by an active, resistive defiance. Tellingly, by sharp contrast,

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when workers nominated a song that had been heard in an individualized way, outside of the shared culture, it tended to lack a sense of resistive defiance. The seven nominated songs heard away from the “Stayin’ Alive” culture of the workplace did not have the same flavor of active resistance and defiance that characterized the songs heard socially within the workplace. The most achingly eloquent of the songs nominated through individualized listening was put forward by Alicia (coded under Melancholia). Alicia works in finishing, nominates a Coldplay song from the CD Rush of Blood to the Head. She can’t quite remember what it’s called, “but the main theme is where do we go now, we go nowhere, something like that— anyway it reminds me of this place, where are we going? We’re all going nowhere, aren’t we? We’re going nowhere. Very miserable he [the singer] is. I was having a glass of red wine the other night, and it was playing and I thought of this place. Always rushing to get your numbers done, but then you’re just back where you started, another lot to do.” As if to emphasize the point, another bundle of work to be done is delivered to the trolley next to our table, just after we’ve worked hard to do the previous batch of blinds.

She was referring to Coldplay’s “The Scientist”: “Oh and I rush to the start / Running in circles, chasing tails / Coming back as we are. / Nobody said it was easy. . . / No one ever said it would be so hard / I’m going back to the start.” For Alicia, the song expresses the quiet but inevitable sadness of seeing more blinds to be finished, replacing the blinds just completed—the sadness of being part of a never-ending meaningless cycle. Although the song, regarded by many fans of Coldplay as a high point of their beautifully sad oeuvre, appears to be written as a lament for the end of a relationship, Alicia has given it new and perhaps deeper meaning in her choosing it as a song about the factory. Of the seven songs that were nominated from being heard outside of the workplace, five were coded under Despairing Frustration or Melancholia. Individualized listening outside of the workplace led to a stronger flavor of despair and melancholia in the creation of meaning regarding music and work. It was also the case that when songs were nominated further to incidents of individualized listening within McTells, the data contained a similar pattern. The melancholia in the nominations of the Eagles’ “Hotel

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California,” which had been listened to it in isolated fashion on headphones, was discussed in chapter 6. There was a great contrast between the collective defiance of “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” nominated as a result of being heard (and sung along to) within the resistive solidarity of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, and the individualized melancholia of “You can check out, but you can never leave” (the key line heard within “Hotel California”). And this contrast is telling. The structural position for workers nominating both songs was the same. What differed was the degree of participation in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. It thus gives an important insight into the dotted lines between the “Stayin’ Alive” culture and the collective resistance at McTells.

An Agentic Culture The “Stayin’ Alive” culture was a culture that accented agency. This accenting of agency also constituted a dotted line between the culture and the informal collective resistance. This was a culture that had agency in the form of workers creating new meanings out of songs such that Top 40 songs of heartbreak became expressions of the hidden injuries of class. The analysis laid particular emphasis on agency in terms of how workers used music to create musically informed agentic movements of work that expressed a critique of Taylorism, even as it enacted the social order. This was contrasted by workers themselves to the structured movements of work, expressive of Taylorism. In drawing out the contrast between the structured movements of work and the agentic movements of work in chapter 5, I contrasted the body movement of Chaplin in Modern Times and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Chaplin’s body was so structured by Taylorism that it internalized the motions and repeated them even after the assembly line was turned off for a break. In this vision, the potential for resistance was written out, so strong was the dominance of the structures. Travolta’s agentic body swaggered, as if to music, as he worked carrying the paint to the store where he was employed. Travolta’s body is not only agentic in its movements it also enacts resistance. Although a customer and his manager are impatiently awaiting his arrival with the paint, he takes his time. He stops to look at shoes in the window; he buys two slices of pizza; he puts money down on a shirt in a clothes shop; he doubles back to give a come-on to a woman on the street. It is no accident that

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Chaplin, with his structured movements of work,1 offers no resistance and that Travolta, with his agentic movements of work, does enact resistance. Taken together the films point to the dotted line between an agentic culture and resistance. Resistance necessarily requires that workers have an agentic culture with an implicit critique of structures. An implication of this argument is that there may be a degree of mapping of those who were active within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture with those who were active in the collective resistance. Drawing out these patterns, retrospectively, from my field notes, I found a strong relationship between being active in the shop floor culture and being active in organizing the collective resistance. It was particularly notable that all of the people who took leading active roles in organizing collective resistance were also cultural instigators. I laid the seeds for the readers to see this in side step 3.1, in which I introduced the cast of the main cultural instigators. In those small sketches of Anna, Evelyn, Angela, Lana, Molly, and Sally, I detailed not only their cultural activities but also their roles in organizing and leading collective resistance. For some of the forms of collective resistance, particularly the operation of norms of output restriction, it was not possible to identify key individuals who helped to actively organize the action; but where it was possible to do so, it was the case that the active agents were also cultural instigators. Those who were most active in bringing workers together to challenge or limit managerial authority also sang, danced, and joked the most, encouraging responses from others. Angela was a case in point. While on the shop floor, she was able to intuit a drop in the collective mood and used music and humor to help lift this mood: A-ha’s on, and Angela attempts that top note on “Take on Me”—it’s hilariously off. Shirley and Nina smile to themselves. I laugh outright, which causes Angela to look with mock hurt. Nina and Shirley smile some more.

Just as songs operated in much more critical ways than simply entertainment and distraction, so Angela was much more than simply an

1. Later in the film, Chaplin’s body throws off the structured movements of work, and it is then that he begins his famous carnivalesque resistive humor, culminating in his effectively sabotaging the production process by inserting himself within the cogs of the machine.

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entertainer. She was one of the key workers among the cutters who stood up to supervisors’ abuse and intimidations and who worked to achieve a reduction in the targets of production set for the cutting job. It was she who, along with Anna, another cultural instigator, pressured management to alter their sudden change in overtime payment policy. It was she who organized the petition of complaint regarding Rhona, the most capricious of the supervisors. In addition, she repeatedly and emphatically sought to spread norms regarding the need to stand up to supervisors and the need for workers to stick together to avoid being put into competition with one another. To take another example, in the verticals room, it was Sally who was so keen to have a policy of changing the radio stations played each day so that there would be more opportunity for the creation of participatory musicking. It was she who led some of the participatory musicking and noted to me how the “mood” in the room had become better. Like Anna, Sally was more than a cultural instigator; she also took a leading role in organizing collective resistance. In meetings, she spoke up eloquently and directly against management policies. She was also one of the key organizers of the walkout of workers in the workroom to protest the freezing conditions that they had been expected to endure during winter. The mapping of agentic culture onto collective resistance was also notable with regard to the small minority of people who took no part in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Those who did not sing, dance, or joke with their colleagues on the shop floor tended to play low, passive roles in the collective resistance. These workers, around 5 to 10 percent of the factory workforce, abided by the collective norms of output restriction and stood together with their colleagues in signing the petition against Rhona, as well as in walking out over the freezing conditions, but they did not take an active role in setting these collective actions in motion. Consider Sylvia. I had observed her in the verticals rooms. I only once saw Sylvia chat with anyone on the shop floor, and I never saw her engage with music in any way or share any jokes. When I went to talk to her at her fabric cutting machine [one of the few loud ones on the floor], I realized how socially isolated her position was. There was no one in range to have a conversation with, and it was very difficult to hear any of the radio music properly. Sylvia described a very thin engagement with the shop floor community (also quoted in chapter 3): “The people here are okay. But let’s put it this way, I keep myself to myself. The money from overtime is okay.

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You know, I can’t hear what the people are saying standing here.” When I asked whether she could think of a song that expressed something of how she felt about the workplace, her reply was telling: “Oh,” she says, shaking her head slowly, “No, not really. There’s lots of songs that remind me of life as such, but not of work, not really.”

With such a thin engagement with the shop floor culture, work was not “life as such.” Not engaging in the culture of the shop floor, Sylvia did little to actively engage with the collective resistance. Sylvia had taken part in the walkout over the freezing conditions, but she had taken no active role in organizing it. The final mapping to note between active participation in the shop floor culture and participation in the collective resistance concerns the cutters in the rollers room. As noted in the previous chapter, the cutters were at the center of many of the battles over the wage-effort bargain played out on the shop floor. Cutting was the only job that could be classed as semiskilled rather than unskilled, and the cutters set the pace for production. As a work group, therefore, they had much more power than other groups, and control over them was strategically important for management. As well as being the most combative group in the workroom, they were also the most culturally active workgroup in that there were more cultural instigators among the cutters than in any other group. Here there seemed to be more of a dynamic interrelationship between cultural activity and actively participating in the wage-effort bargain. The cutters combativeness vis-à-vis management and supervisors seemed to drive their cultural activity just as much as their cultural activity seemed to drive their combativeness. Consider the (unprompted) seamless flow in the way Betty, a cutter, went from discussing musical culture, in terms of the nomination song, to discussing the pressures of work and collective resistance, in terms of output restriction: Betty’s working, and I go over and talk with her. She nominates “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” “Yes, that one, that’s perfect that is. I’ve been here nine years. Oh, that’s a long time. It’s getting worse it is, it’s the pressure. I’ve been standing at this machine all day. I could do more easily [i.e., produce more], but I’m not going to tell them that, am I?”

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The dotted lines travelled back and forth between the agentic culture and the collective resistance. I have been able to draw a significant mapping between activity in the culture and activity within the enactment of collective resistance. It may not be a 1:1 mapping, but given that these are dotted lines that are being examined, such a direct mapping cannot be expected. Further, I do not suggest that being active in the culture is a necessary condition for being active in collective resistance. It is clear from many workplace studies that workplace trade union representatives, for instance, are not infrequently driven by a wider political framing that exists exogenously from workplace structures and cultures (Darlington 2002). There are other routes to becoming active in collective resistance, but cultural activity was clearly a significant route at McTells.

The Expressive Voice of the Culture as Collective Voice The “Stayin’ Alive” culture had an expressive voice that was directed primarily at fighting off the senses of alienation. On occasions, this expressive voice could also become at the same time a collective voice in the sense of articulating interests and grievances directly to authority. This was another of the lines between culture and resistance painted with little space between the dots. The two forms of voice—the expressive voice of the culture and the collective voice of grievance articulation—did not merge frequently, which was not surprising given that the form of music played for “Stayin’ Alive” only rarely alluded directly to work (as discussed in chapters 2 and 6), but they did merge occasionally. The musically expressive voice as collective voice could take the form of workers using singing to undermine the authority of supervisors. In the example below, Angela plays with the idea of the expressive voice of the culture as having many modes of articulation, and uses this as a way of defending workers’ cultural space: Rhona the supervisor told us again to stop talking. There was a brief silence then Angela starts singing, with a smile. Rhona moves on with a scowl.

In the next example, Anna again plays with multiple modes of articulation of the culture’s voice and defends the cultural space. In addition, she does

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it with a refrain in a song that points directly to the supervisor the power that workers can create when they stand together—a message that is underlined as other workers join in: The supervisor says, “Can I have it [the radio] down? I’m trying to work here,” and there’s a bit of a ding dong with Anna regarding it, “I can hardly hear it over here”. . . [the supervisors] turn it down a bit, saying, “We’ve got to work. Come on, turn it down.” And so there’s a bit of bad feeling between Anna and Paula and Rhona, the supervisors. Then a song that comes on while this is going on, with the refrain “Everybody,” by Junior Senior. “Everybody,” Anna sings loudly, “everybody.” And two or three of us sing, “Everybody,” in response to her cue, and there are smiles all around.

Given that these are the same workers who had just collectively organized a petition criticizing the capricious behavior of the supervisor, Rhona, this incident had a spike to its humor. When the opportunity arose for the expressive voice to become also the collective voice, it could defend not just workers’ cultural space but also challenge management’s attempts at control in the wage-effort bargain. The temptation to use the expressive voice as a collective voice was so strong in the following example, that this instant was the only time when workers engaged with music immediately after a public rebuking. As discussed in chapter 4, usually after a disciplining, workers felt alienation too strongly to be able to musick as part of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. But here Angela hears in a song exactly the sentiments she needs to express to the senior supervisor who is within hearing distance: Angela and Shirley are discussing numbers [i.e., their production in the last couple of hours], and Kate, a senior supervisor, calls them into her office again [for a disciplining]. Angela is pissed off as she comes out of the office. “What Tony said is right you know, in there.” Then she goes on to back this up. Shirley says, “Yeah, but you didn’t say anything.” “I didn’t say anything. There’s no point, they won’t listen.” Soon after this discussion, within a couple of minutes, Angela sings with some venom the first few lines of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”—“We don’t need no thought control / No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teachers, leave them kids alone”— with Kate [the supervisor] nearby.

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Twice I observed workers also using the expressive voice of the culture to eloquently articulate a general grievance regarding their material position. On both occasions, supervisors were within hearing range. Angela is saying out loud, “I want to go home.” A few minutes later, “I want to go home.” “Why?” asks Shirley. “I’m fed up.” Five minutes later, Angela is singing along with real melancholy in her voice, “How long, how long, how long has this been going on / How long, how long, how long has this been going on / How long, how long, how long, has this been going on?”2 “Oh what a feeling,” cries Anna, in a despairing way. She was listening to the Flashdance song.

In the last example, the contrast between the tone of despair in Anna’s voice and the vibrant energy of Irene Cara’s voice in the song on the radio brutally exposed the indignities of Taylorized labor. The strongest example of the expressive musicking voice as collective voice occurred with the working classic “We Gotta Get out of This Place.” At the chorus, workers came together to voice their collective defiant No! They sang to themselves primarily, but to the supervisors who were also there, they said, “We will fight back if you push us too far” as they sang along: The Animals “We Gotta Get out of This Place” comes on. People don’t quite realize it until it gets toward the chorus. Charlotte shouts out, “Hey, here’s our song!” And about three people say “Yes” and sing along with the chorus. Gloria comes through and says to me, “Here’s another one that’s good for this place.” I go through to the next room, and about ten people are singing along with it. There’s a strong intensity that doesn’t match the singing to other songs I’ve seen. I go back through, and Angela is punching her fist in the air, “We gotta get out of this place.” There was no singing along with any parts of the song other than the chorus lines: “We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do / We gotta get out of this place.”

Charlotte claimed the song as “our song,” and this claim was backed up by the communal singing of the chorus lines. In this way the song became a

2. The song being sung along to is Ace’s 1970s hit “How Long Has This Been Going On?”

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simultaneous mixture of both a celebration of community and a condemnation of the factory, a simultaneous mixture of both a celebration of their expressive collective culture and a collective airing of the will to defiance. The expressive voice of the culture was not just musical, it was also humorous. This humorous expressive voice functioned as collective voice when humor took the form of satire of hierarchy. Satire was a common form of humor on the shop floor, and it mainly took the form of satirizing either specific figures of authority, usually supervisors, or the satirical use of hierarchical discourses. Usually, this satire occurred as a form of “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) out of the hearing of the powerful. There were also a small number of instances when the expressive humorous voice of satire was spoken within the hearing of a figure of authority. One of the most common forms of humor on the shop floor involved workers satirically using the official hierarchical discourse of production imperatives. Here is an instance when this is turned against supervisors, who are the principal people who express this discourse: The supervisor is going around collecting dockets [as evidence of production achieved]. Angela said, “Gold star please, gold star please.” She’d obviously got her target for the hour. When Rhona came to pick up the figures, Angels said, “Gold star, please. You get them at school, don’t you?”

The Enactment of the Culture—Clashes and Flow Perhaps the clearest surface-level link between the “Stayin’ Alive” culture and resistance was when the processes of the enactment of the culture led to direct confrontation with supervisors. Chapter 3’s examination of how music was linked to the creation and expression of community showed that supervisors would sometimes clash with workers over supervisors curtailing the participatory musicking on the shop floor. Here is another example of the musical element of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture leading directly to confrontation with supervisors. “Jive Talking” comes on, and Evelyn sings the first line of the chorus and does a little dance. Kate, the team leader, is coming out of her office exactly at this time, and Evelyn’s doing the dance, so Kate did a little jiggy dance toward her and said, “Stop jive talking and get back to finishing” [finishing is a stage in the production process]. “I am finishing,” says Evelyn, frustrated. And after that there’s no more singing to that song. Carol has said

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something as a reply to this, which I didn’t catch. But she says, “She can put that in her bra and keep hold of it” to Evelyn, and repeats that as Kate walks past.

Here the clash with the supervisor centered on workers defending their space for the enactment of their culture. Such clashes were not infrequent and were often related to the chaotic organization of production, with the unexpected swings between a relative lack of concern from supervisors over production figures to a sudden intense focus on increasing production. It is clear that workers defending their cultural space from supervisors feeds into the wider acts of collective resistance of defying supervisors’ imposition of discipline. Evelyn and Carol, in the example above, are not just defending their cultural space from supervisors, they are also spreading the practice and the norm of standing up to supervisors more generally. This is the clearest way in which the “Stayin’ Alive” culture fed into acts of collective resistance, when the spaces between the dots on the lines are at their smallest, but it was not the most important. One reason not to overstate this connection between the culture and collective resistance is that, in the main, the enactment of the culture was congruent with the flow of production. Indeed, this quality was central to the dialectical quality of the culture—that it enacted the social order even as it expressed a spirit of resistance to it. In chapter 5 I gave a close analysis of how workers used music to enact the labor process through agentic movements of work, thus avoiding alienated structured movements of work. That chapter also showed how workers turned to music as a resource to give them energy to enact production, when they began to feel tired, and examined the pattern of nonrepetitive singing along that occurred as workers enacted the labor process. Further, the key use of music as helping to mask the sounds of alienation and as helping to avoid the sense of alienated time passing, also occurred as workers stood at their benches working. Although some of the participatory musicking involving collective dancing (discussed in chapter 3) meant that workers were not enacting the labor process as they were enacting the culture, much of the participatory singing occurred simultaneously with production. It is clear that, in its main elements, musicking was constitutive with the flow of production. This was true not just for the song but also for the joke in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Chapter 4 showed some of the key similarities in the

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cultural use of the joke and the song at McTells, with both tending simultaneously to enact production while expressing a spirit of resistance to the social order. The most common form of humor on the shop floor was what I term “routine humor,” in which the humor came from the playing out of incongruence through the juxtaposition of the human living, expressive body and its flow beside the dead, mechanical repetition of the structures of Taylorized production. Production had to be enacted in order for this humor to flow. Consider also how workers used the alphabet game as part of their cultural fight against their senses being dominated by the structures of alienation. The alphabet game involved a group of workers choosing a category, for instance body parts or England national football team players, and each had to take turns in naming something in that category, with the first letter changing from A to B to C, and so on. The surface point of the game was to challenge people to think of something in that category beginning with a specific letter. But, more fundamentally, it was used as a structure for ad-libbing humorously. The game set a repetitive structure within which workers sought to ad-lib names that could occasion laughter and smiles. Further, there was a norm against repetition in the playing of this game. The same category could not be chosen again until a number of weeks had elapsed. The game was often started by cultural instigators in the later part of the afternoon when tiredness began to set in, musicking began to fade, and a new cultural impetus was needed to sustain the “Stayin’ Alive” mood. The game was only played while workers were actively engaged in the labor process. It supported the labor process functioning, but, by accenting nonrepetitiveness and creativity, it did so in a way that expressed an embodied sense of cultural resistance to Taylorism. The “Stayin’ Alive” culture needed the labor process context to work with and against. A very common refrain at McTells was that the workers had a deep-seated dislike for periods in which there was little work to be done: Lana: “I hate this when it’s slow. It’s dead boring.” Nina yawned: “Now is the really boring bit with hardly any work to do.” There are not many blinds to work on now as we get toward 1:00 on a Friday.” Stella: “Doesn’t time go slowly when there’s not much work?”

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Recall that the workers found the work “monotonous” and “brain-dead,” and that they had commitment neither to supervisors nor to the firm more generally. With a flat-rate payment system, there was no financial incentive to explain why the workers disliked periods of little work. The antipathy toward periods of little work is best understood when one realizes that it was the “Stayin’ Alive” communal culture that workers most valued at McTells, and that this culture, and particularly the music use and humor use element of it, needed an active labor process to underpin it. Here is an example of Lauren pulling out of cultural activity because it lacked resonance given the lack of the flow in production: Lauren opts out from another round of the alphabet game. “I’m not playing that. I’ve had enough. There’s no work, and I’m going home soon.”

If you valued the joke and the song, and if these needed the presence of an active labor process, then you needed to have the flow of production. This meant that, on occasion, workers would actively seek blinds to work on: Mavis says, because it’s slow first thing in the morning, “There won’t be much work today. Monday’s always a slow day.” She takes a blind from me, just when I’m about to take it, because she hasn’t got one. She says, “I’d rather be busy.” Rose says, “I’d rather be busy than just standing around.”

Anna’s initial attempt to recover from an AIM meeting was to seek immediately to enact production, implicitly understanding that this was the way in which to kick-start the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, which she needed to sustain her. She was not alone in this: Anna’s first reaction after walking back is to do a bit of cutting. She starts her machine like she wants to get on with it straight away. “What a waste of time” is the common refrain. And there’s a sense that people are itching to get back to work, and the meeting is seen as empty time.

She had the same reaction after the meeting at which the change in overtime policy was announced.

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She seems to spark off into the group of doing some quick work. She does that for about three of four pieces of fabric, but she still looks really, really pissed off with things.

In all the time I was at McTells there was not one instance when a period of little work coincided with a period of heightened music use and humor use. Usually, there was virtually no musical engagement or humor use in periods of little work. For the culture to flow, production had to flow.

Cultural Practices as an Alternative Ideal? In this subsection I consider the idea that a link exists between culture and resistance in the sense that the cultural practices implicitly enacted an alternative ideal that collective resistive action could also be seen as striving toward. I consider this because there are some important literatures that suggest the idea of cultural practices as expressing an alternative ideal. Small (1998, 50) has put forward the idea of musicking as containing an alternative social ideal within it: “Musicking is an activity by means of which we bring into existence a set of relationships that model the relationships of our world , not as they are, but as we would wish them to be.” Abrahams (1992, 92) studied the cultural practices of African American slaves in Southern plantations and offers a concrete example of this argument with reference to cultural practices in the “ring” formed at one of the festivals: “This ring comes to represent the ideal of a community bringing itself into being through the chanter-response performance.” A remarkably similar argument has been put forward by a number of writers with regard to practices of humor being implicitly underpinned by a vision of an alternative and better social reality. Porcu (2005, 69) comes very close to Small’s ideas on music, when writing that “humor offers a place to dream a better reality.” Critchley writes that humor can act as “practically enacted theory” (2007, 27), such that humor springs from the incongruity between the current reality and a vision of an alternative reality that is implicitly put forward. If we are guided by these ideas and look for an alternative social ideal within the practices around the joke and the song within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, what is there to see? We see cultural practices that are

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egalitarian, social, agentic, creative, and that respect people’s individual humanity. Each of these areas contrasted with the structures that face workers at McTells. The participatory fields of singing and dancing led by cultural instigators were egalitarian and created and expressed community. The workplace structures facing workers were hierarchical, and if they were not directly individualizing they were asocial. Workers used the joke and the song in agentic, creative ways, creating humor out of routine structures, creating meaning about work in a song written about romance. The structures facing workers, by contrast, were highly structured and repetitive. The cultural practices of “Stayin’ Alive,” as well as being based around community, respected people’s individual humanity. The singing participatory fields were created where each person’s own singing voice could be heard—however weak, however discordant. People’s favorite songs were known and referenced by others on the shop floor. The structures of Taylorism and of the McTells workplace showed little respect for an individual’s humanity. One of workers’ complaints about the supervisors was that they showed no respect for the workers as individual human beings. As Wendy said, “And that new production manager. He just walks across the floor, and it’s like we’re not there. He just looks through you. Never says hello or nothing.” It may be tempting to suggest that the “Stayin’ Alive” cultural practices implicitly suggest an alternative ideal, but this idea misses the point of the embedding of this culture within the Taylorist social order at McTells. The culture is rooted in that context, and its meaning is related to that context.3 The idea of the culture putting forward an alternative social ideal is both overly romantic and rips the culture from its social and material roots. The

3. Ben Anderson (2002) and David Bell (2012) have put forward incisive and nuanced analyses of musicking as involving an alternative social ideal, specifically played out in relation to “utopia.” They argue that musicking allows people to experience a nomadic form of utopia (Bell), or utopia as a hope for a better way of being (Anderson). Noticeably, both instances of musicking involve music-centered contexts. In Bell’s case, the musicking is improvisational performance, and in Anderson’s it is the focused listening to a piece of music. When musicking occurs in contexts that are not music centerd, such as a workplace, then such flights of utopia-in-becoming are likely to be much rarer. Perhaps, there is a glimpse into such moments in the recollections concerning the ABBA concert and the teenage walk around the park, reported in chapter 4. There may be (rare) spaces for such individual moments within workplace musicking. My larger point is that we should not see the collective “Stayin’ Alive” culture as a form of social ideal because this rips it away from the very context that frames its meaning.

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point of highlighting how the qualities of the culture lay in opposition to the structures of the workplace was to move to the point that the qualities of the culture were fundamentally created in relation to the qualities of the workplace structures. Without the workplace structures, the whole sense of the culture evaporates. The culture needed the flow of production in order to operate. When the structures of the workplace were not functioning, when there was no work to be done, the culture fell away to almost nothing. There were no sharp jokes improvised against the blunt routines of the labor process; there were no participatory fields of singing and dancing to create community as a bedrock against the clock-ticking power of the alienating structures. The energy of and for the culture was generated by the culture’s relationship of tension to the workplace structures. As I have sought to argue throughout this book, it was a dialectical culture that enacted the social order even as it expressed a spirit of resistance to it. It is this understanding, not the vision of an abstract ideal expressed within the culture, that is central to tracing the dotted lines on the shop floor.

Limitations of the Logic of the Immediate Present in “Stayin’ Alive” The above discussion has pointed to some significant connections between the “Stayin’ Alive” culture and acts of resistance, but it is important to keep an awareness that these dotted lines operated only within the context of ongoing shop floor battles over control at the workplace level. Edwards, Belanger, and Wright (2006) remind us that control at the workplace level is only one level at which resistance and cooperation is played out. The other important level concerns the development of productive forces in regard to longer-term issues such as training and overall work organization design and technological strategy. The McTells workers were certainly active in battles regarding control at the workplace level, but they were inactive on issues concerning the development of productive forces. This observation begs the question of whether there was something in the “Stayin’ Alive” culture that limited the resistance to be played out at the workplace control level rather than at the level of the development of productive forces. Above all, the logic of the immediate present of the culture led to a marginalization of issues relating to the development of productive forces. The culture’s central focus was the immediate struggle against workers’

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senses being overwhelmed by alienation. This was an ongoing battle that was fought in the present over and over again from the start of the shift on Monday morning to the end of the shift on Friday afternoon. The logic of the immediate present of the culture was also excavated in chapter 4’s discussion of how listening to pop music led workers to experience time as a series of three-minute nows—which kept them away from experiencing the slowness of the passing of alienated time. This immanent nowness to the culture was structured by the alienating context of Taylorist work. By serving to keep workers’ energies in the present, it tended to keep workers’ energies and focus away from longer-term developmental issues. The dotted lines in this argument are quite spaced out, but there was one clear pattern in which the spaces between the lines become narrower. In chapters 4 and 7, I outlined how workers actively disengaged from taking part in work group participation meetings, the AIM meetings. Here was one forum where, potentially, workers could have begun to articulate some issues relating to the level of the development of productive forces. But by actively disengaging from the meetings, they did not raise their voice at this level. There were a number of factors underpinning this—there was the lack of trust in management, and there was the refusal to offer engagement with alienating structures. This refusal to engage with alienating structures was also folded into a desire to cease this waste of time in order to return to production, not because they were committed to production (quite the opposite) but because they needed their “Stayin’ Alive” culture to flow (in sync with production). The call of their culture helped to keep them in the present moment and made their engagement with issues concerning the development of productive forces less likely.

Conclusion How did the informal collective resistance at McTells emerge? The main writing on examining the underpinnings for workplace resistance looks at the structural factors that tend to be associated with resistance. The first part of this chapter, taking this journey as far as it would go, showed that the resistance was related to a number of key structural factors. This approach is useful but only takes us part of the way in our understanding. As with all explanations that are primarily structural in nature, it raises

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questions concerning agency, and here, culture becomes crucial. The chapter pointed to four important dotted lines between cultural practices and acts of resistance: dotted lines from the resistive solidarity within cultures, from the agentic nature of cultural activity, from the way in which the expressive voice of the culture could also become an articulation of a collective voice, and from the logic of the immediate present of the culture. The McTells workers created an architecture of resistance as they enacted their culture.

9

Conclusion Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance

Chapter 1 began with the scene of Lana pausing to turn on the radio at the start of the shift. “Reach Out I’ll Be There” came on, and I let Christopher Small ask the deceptively simple question, “What is going on here?”—a question that asks us to look for meanings within everyday, usually unnoticed, musical practices. The close analysis of the textures of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture provided in this book has allowed us to see the deeper social processes unfolding in this scene, the sort of scene that neither industrial sociologists nor musicologists had previously focused on. Lana is about to start work, but pauses. She pauses because she realizes that she is about to start her alienating labor without the resources yet in place to help her and her colleagues in their hour by hour, day by day, week by week fight against their senses being overwhelmed by alienation. By turning to the radio, she is signaling both the start of the daily enactment of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture and the importance of music to that culture. Workers turned to one another through music and humor to create a dialectical culture of worked happiness in order to keep the shadows of alienation at bay.

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Music played an important role on its own in that it masked the alienating soundscape of the factory, and it took workers away from experiencing the passing of alienated time, epitomized by the dreaded clock-watching. The pop music opened up cultural space for workers to enact production with agentic and aestheticized movements—Lana’s small dance step to her worktable—rather than with the structured movements expressive of the dominance of alienating structures. Pop music was part of a culture that both enacted, and relied on, the social order of Taylorism in production, and which simultaneously expressed a sense of resistance to it. But music was not enough on its own. Music helped workers reach out for each other. It was a happy accident that it was “Reach Out I’ll Be There” playing so that the implicit message of the music became explicit—perhaps there was something of recognition of this in the smile exchanged between Lana and Shirley. Lana and many other workers at McTells used music to create community, leaning on one another’s humanity to fight against the incessant threat of sensing alienation. We may also infer that Lana, through the act of turning on the radio, is showing herself to be a cultural instigator, one of the individuals dispersed throughout the factory who would lead cultural interaction, particularly centered on music and humor, when they intuited that the “mood” was deteriorating and people’s senses were becoming sclerotic with alienation. We also know that this small moment has significance not only as part of a spirit of resistance against the social order of rationalization and Taylorism but also for the playing out of collective resistance against the employer. It was through the musically informed “Stayin’ Alive” culture that workers stuck so tightly together, and this sticking together was (rightly) seen by management as underpinning the extensive forms of collective resistance that were enacted at McTells, even without the presence of a union. The culture also supported resistance through its agentic inflection and the critical knowledge of the workplace that it held and expressed. All this was found within one small scene at the start of the working day. This textured understanding allows us to see why music meant so much to so many workers at McTells—why it was that Jo said, “You’d commit suicide if there wasn’t something on in the background to sing along to” (also quoted in chapter 4). These are strong words that, although clearly rhetorical, should not be overlooked by sociologists or musicologists. This understanding also potentially allows us to see why many other

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workers in many other alienating workplaces have clung desperately to music. And why it was that workers, at least in Britain, wrested control of the radio and its music from their employers after the top-down carefully controlled and designed introduction of radio music into the factory in the middle of the twentieth century.

Returning to the Bigger Questions In this chapter, I return to the bigger questions raised in the introductory chapter, to reflect on how the story of McTells can throw new light on them. One of the sharpest points of tension in writing an ethnography occurs in the move from constructing a picture of the deep social process of the workplace studied to seeing what is relevant in this picture to the wider world of workplaces. The ethnographer spends so much time developing a picture of the social world in which he or she is embedded, drawing out its holistic patterns, that the idea of a wider world can easily fade into the background, and what becomes important is drawing out the picture of the social processes in the ethnographic site into an abstract holistic pattern. This is then delivered as “new theory.” The problem with this new theory is that there is often little or no consideration of what in the patterns outlined is conditioned by specifically local contextual factors and what is conditioned by social processes and structures that have broader currency. I hope to avoid this mistake in this chapter. I do not argue that the whole of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture should be theorized as having patterns of resonance in other workplaces. There were some elements in the McTells workplace, such as the disorganized nature of production and the intense community that was related to the feminine culture alongside the absence of structural points of tension between workers, that made that culture as a whole unlikely to have wider resonance. But, by proceeding carefully, we can still see key patterns within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture that can be conceptualized in a way that resonates with other workplaces and other important settings in contemporary society. In returning to the bigger questions raised in chapter 1, I draw on, and draw out from, the dominant patterns within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, which is primarily understood as a working-class culture. It was a working-class culture in that it lived with and against structures of

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workplace domination. This emphasis on the class position of the workers does not mean that I have been blind to age, gender, or ethnicity as potentially important patterning factors. As I note in the appendix, the research methods were undertaken with considerable sensitivity to these elements. Some of them have been important in telling some of the story of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. Age was an important factor in the discussion of potential fissures in musicking communities. Gender has been raised as important in that the friendly, caring texture of the overall culture was seen as partly informed by a supportive feminine culture. Ethnicity did not play a significant role. Ethnic minorities were neither less nor more likely to play an active part in the widespread “Stayin’ Alive” culture. But ultimately, it was workers’ class position that informed the texture of the culture and workers’ musicking. They collectively chose “We Gotta Get out of This Place” not because of their gender or ethnicity or age but because they understood it to be a working- classic.

Popular Music and Contemporary Society: Multitonous Musicking Seeing Multitonous Musicking within the “Stayin’ Alive” Culture In the introductory chapter, I put forward two main critiques of the debate between those who prioritize popular music’s link to structures of order and control and those who emphasize its emancipatory and resistive role. First, I argued that this debate is carried out in too absolutist a manner. People create understandings and meanings of music in specific social contexts, and so our understandings of popular music should be similarly contextualized. In particular, the recent focus on the role of music in everyday life suggests that we should pay particular attention to how music is embedded within nonmusically centered social contexts. The most important area of life in which people hear and use popular music that has received only limited academic attention is the workplace. A proper understanding of how people musick in the workplace needs a close understanding of the structures of the workplace and how people experience and understand these structures. In that sense, an ethnography of musicking in the workplace requires also an industrial sociology ethnography to be tied to it. The second argument I developed was that rather than seeing pop music as either with or against social orders, we should create theoretical space for seeing the possible simultaneous with and against in how people musick with

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pop. The multiple layers of text within music, and the subsequent polysemy of that music, means that it is a medium that has the potential to be used simultaneously to enact a social order and to express a spirit of resistance toward that social order. Taking this forward, I argued, we need to see how this with and against is played out in specific contexts without romanticizing the space for the against but with an appreciation of how important limits to the against may be embedded within the social structure of the context and the social structuring of the music. I deepened this point in chapter 2 to highlight the way in which popular music is largely structured as antithetical to work— which is likely to put important limits on the sorts of meanings that might be reappropriated by workers. I have described a set of musicking “Stayin’ Alive” practices within the specific setting of a rationalized Taylorized workplace. Some of these musicking practices cohere into a pattern of multitonous musicking. Multitonous musicking is that which is situated in monotonous social settings. Multitonous musicking is rooted in the monotone. Thus, the musicking at McTells was rooted in the monotone, in that its practices, by and large, were simultaneously constitutive with the enactment of the monotone, in this case the Taylorized labor process. Some parts of the culture were in tension with the flow of production, and these were related in no small part to the locally contextual disorganized nature of production. The rootedness of the musicking to the monotone makes it a distinct set of musical practices in which the engagement of the senses with the aesthetics of the music is thin. People do not give themselves, their bodies, their senses, their emotions over to the music within multitonous musicking, but rather they use music to prevent their senses from being dominated by the monotone. This makes it a set of music practices quite distinct from the deep immersion and aestheticization that occurs in many spheres devoted primarily to music, such as clubs, gig venues, and symphony concert halls. These latter are music-centered contextual settings, in which music is separated from the wider social world. Multitonous musicking is musicking rooted in the context of the social structure as monotone, but the multitonous involves both with and against. Multitonous musicking involves practices that accent the nonrepetitive, as a critique of the repetitive, while also being constitutive with the enactment of the repetitive. At McTells, the “Stayin’ Alive” musicking mapped onto this with its emphasis on the importance of variety in the music played and the

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nonrepetitive modes of singing along. Multitonous musicking also tends to create a sense of a permanent, and immediately forgotten, present, in which there may also be small journeys to points of the remembered past as indexed by music. Multitonous musicking also involves the development of opportunities for agentic movements of work to take the place of monotonous structured movements of work. Through multitonous musicking, space is opened up so that the structured movements of work can be altered to become agentic musical movements of work, in which people move with the beauty of human rhythm rather than the clocklike cadence of structuredominated movements. Again, these are cultural practices of the “with” and the “against.” The overall structure of the Taylorized process is enacted at the same time as the mode of enactment contains an embodied critique of the underlying principles of the rationalized social order. Multitonous agentic movements of work involve the workers enacting Taylorism at the same time as the motions of the body state that they are human beings, not simply rationalized structured bodies. It is too easy for the analyst to pass by scenes such as that in which Lana takes a small dance step to her work station without seeing the deeper social meaning. Certainly, her multitonous agentic movement meant nothing directly in terms of resistance toward the immediate employer. But they meant rather a lot in terms of her relationship to the institutional logic of rationalization. This is profoundly important—that while workers enact structures of rationalization, they also express their resistance toward it. These are small moments, small actions, which hold deep meaning. It is important not just because of its substantive meaning but also because such small moments constitute one of the few ways in which resistance to the abstract institutional order of rationalization can be expressed. Once the initial battles over the introduction of Taylorism had been fought, trade unions in many economies turned to dispute not the principles of Taylorism, not the institutional logic of rationalization, but the terms under which Taylorism could be deployed. Unions negotiated wage-effort trade-offs in local variations of Taylorism and left the underlying principles of Taylorism to be played out. It is left to workers’ bodies to enact an embodied critique of Taylorism, in a dance to the pop songs on the radio. Note that, so far, in the discussion of the against within the dialectic multitonous musicking, the element of critique has related to the musical

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elements of the pop songs and has not related to a critique through the lyrics to pop songs. There was relatively little scope for direct critique of either the social order of Taylorism or of the immediate employer within the lyrics of the pop songs played at McTells. The broad structuring of pop music as primarily outside of everyday life, and as antithetical to the social arena of work, already positioned the likelihood of lyrics directly addressing workplace concerns as very low. This likelihood became even lower when it is realized that the primary role of the “Stayin’ Alive” musicking meant that upbeat socially recognized pop songs were the main songs played within this culture. Chapter 6 did show, however, that workers were able to hear declamatory parts of choruses to pop songs and reappropriate their meaning as referring to the workplace. Chapter 8 also showed that very occasionally elements in the lyrics of pop songs could be reappropriated and used to air collective voice toward figures of authority on the shop floor. Given that there are significant structural elements, rather than local contextual factors, underlying this pattern within the McTells workers’ “Stayin’ Alive” culture, it is appropriate to define multitonous musicking as also involving actors reappropriating meaning within the lyrics of songs (usually within the declamatory choruses of pop songs) to inform critical musical knowledge of the monotonous social order. Chapter 3 clearly outlined the central role of feminine community within the “Stayin’ Alive” musicking. The McTells workers enacted a collective form of the multitonous. But, given that some important locally contextual factors underpinned the strong community within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, it is appropriate not to seek to include the process of forming community within the concept of multitonous musicking itself. It is wiser to offer the idea that the multitonous can be either individually or collectively enacted. It is also appropriate to suggest that collective multitonous musicking may be a more engaged and sustained process than the individual mode. This is an implication of the finding that cultural instigators played a key role in re-engaging people through musicking, just when they were being lost to the monotone. Only the collective mode of musicking involves the role of the cultural instigator. Moreover, below, I develop the argument that central to whether cultural practices, such as multitonous musicking, inform collective acts of resistance depends on whether they are enacted individually or collectively.

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In sum, I have sought to draw together the abstract core (rather than locally contextual) patterns of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture into the theoretical concept of multitonous musicking. The multitonous is rooted in the context of the monotonous social structure. It is a form of musicking that allows the enactment of the social order within the monotonous while also allowing the expression of a spirit of resistance to that social order. It does not involve deep immersion of the senses within music but, rather, tends to use music as a way of preventing the senses from being dominated by the monotonous. It accents nonrepetitive cultural practices as a critical response to structural repetition within the monotonous and opens up space for agentic rather than structured movements. It involves the reappropriation of meaning of lyrics in pop songs (often in choruses) to express critical understandings of the monotonous social setting. And the multitonous may be enacted collectively or individually. Finally, a word on the use of the word “multitonous.” Multitonous is a neologism that invokes a dialectical cultural interplay with the monotonous. It is meant to be a slightly jarring and disturbing term that asks the reader to think anew about the two distinct constituent elements in the word “monotonous”—single and tone. That monotonous as a word has come to be used primarily in its figurative sense of wearisomely uniform points to an implicit sense of the soundscape as a key arena in which the emptiness of repetition is experienced and, perhaps, also to an implicit understanding of the importance of the wider sensorium within the experience of alienation. The neologism multitonous pushes for these implicit considerations to be made explicit. In the rest of this subsection I consider the relevance of this concept, first in relation to musical cultural practices within other workplaces and in other monotonous social settings in the wider society. Then I argue that other cultural practices, not just musicking, can potentially be characterized as multitonous. The Wider Relevance of Multitonous Musicking Two preliminary points are necessary to examine before we can determine if the concept of the multitonous allows us to understand musical cultures in other workplaces. First, it is clear that it should not be expected to be relevant to musical practices in all workplaces, rather only those rationalized workplaces that are experienced by workers as monotonous social spaces. Second, although there are some pictures of musicking in other rationalized workplaces,

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often these data are not sufficiently fine-grained to articulate easily with the concept of multitonous musicking. With these points in mind, it is still appropriate to say that the concept of multitonous musicking has considerable relevance to what we know about musical practices in other rationalized workplaces. The overview of music in factories in Britain in chapter 9 of Rhythms of Labour (Korczynski, Pickering, and Robertson 2013) gives a picture that corresponds well with the concept of multitonous musicking. Although studies have not gone into the detail of considering how workers move their bodies in response to music while working, we can see something of the multitonous agentic body movements within the frequent use of the word “swing’ in descriptions of factories with music broadcast in them in the mid-twentieth century. As the authors put it: “Music was frequently described as helping work to go with a swing: ‘We don’t like the same gramophone record over and over again. We like jazz best. You sort of get a swing in with you work,’ observed one woman to a Mass Observation researcher. Another woman, soon after talking enthusiastically about music during the night shift, observed that it was ‘swinging production’ ” (259–60). “Swing” seems to be used in these descriptions not simply because of its correspondence with the genre of music popular at the time but because it alludes to agentic body movements of work. Workers in factories in the middle of the last century appeared to predate McTells workers in musicking to enact the Taylorized labor process through agentic rather than structured movements. Travolta, it seems, was doing battle with Chaplin on factory floors decades before he was even born. Furthermore, the argument in Rhythms of Labour, that factory workers used music to “survive at a critical distance,” also has clear parallels with a core element within the concept of the multitonous, that of expressing a spirit of resistance (“a critical distance”) while also enacting the social order through production. (A degree of accommodation to structures of production are implicit within the idea of survival.) There is also some evidence of the appropriation of song for critical commentary within this overview—another element of the multitonous. The authors (253) note that in a cookie factory that had an in-house radio station workers would put in requests for “Rawhide” to be dedicated to a disciplinarian supervisor. In the context of assembly-line production, this song with its refrain of “keep those doggies moving. . . . Move ’em on. . . . Move ’em out” offered clear satirical

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commentary, quite beyond what the writers and singers of the song had originally in mind. I now present the case that the concept of multitonous musicking has relevance to many parts of society in contemporary advanced economies beyond rationalized workplaces. Indeed, the concept of the multitonous allows us to understand the common observation that while music is becoming more and more ubiquitous in contemporary life (DeNora 2000; Bull 2007), the level of engagement of people with this music appears to be growing thinner. In drawing out the argument from rationalized workplaces into other spheres of society, I do not mean to suggest that there are directly similar patterns of social relations between the rationalized workplaces and these other spheres. Being an industrial sociologist, I want to hold tight to the idea that there is something importantly distinctive about the structured antagonism within the employment relationship and the distinctive ways in which workers sense alienation within a Taylorized factory. Indeed, we should see that multitonous musicking will be at its most intense when the setting is not only monotonous but also alienating, and when long periods of time are spent in the monotone. In other words, multitonous musicking will be at its most intense in the Taylorist workplace. Nevertheless, it is possible to build bridges to see common patterns in musicking across different spheres of society. The support pillars for these bridges are made from the insight that many spheres of social life are experienced as monotonous, and sometimes as part of a dominating structure, by groups in society. Truck drivers can experience driving as monotonous; homemakers can experience domestic labor as monotonous; commuters can experience their journeys as monotonous; teenagers walking through suburban streets can experience these spaces as monotonous and part of a dominating structure. In such cases, it is increasingly common for participants, drawing on a range of portable music technologies, to engage in multitonous musicking, perhaps more often in an individualized mode than in a collective manner. In each case, people increasingly turn to music, not to lose themselves aesthetically within the music, but to prevent their senses from being dominated by the senses of monotony. Music becomes ubiquitous, but levels of engagement are likely to be thin. In each case, music allows tasks to unfold—commuting, driving, cleaning, walking— while there is also space for a mode of agentic movement to be introduced that allows the participant to express being more than just a structured

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part of the monotone. The driver slightly shakes her body to the beat; the househusband does a dance step while vacuuming; the commuter taps his knee; the teenager struts down the street—all in response to the music they hear. This is the sort of action DeNora (2000, 144) had in mind when she coined the term “mundane choreography.” Although the songs the participants play only rarely refer to the spheres of everyday life in which they are engaged, they may often hear meanings in songs that articulate a critical understanding of the monotonous social context they are negotiating their way through. For instance, Bull (2000) shows that many commuters use music to create an aestheticized “filmic” sense of the space they move through. The very act of aestheticizing implicitly critiques the lack of aesthetic appeal in the monotonous space through which they move. The process of multitonous musicking is likely to be stronger, more intense, when the social context is experienced not only as monotonous but also as part of a repressive power structure. Thus, multitonous musicking among teenagers from a poor neighborhood is likely to be more intense than that of the driver , who may experience driving as monotonous but not as part of a structure that dominates. Indeed, the common pattern of musicking movements across these spheres, some freighted with intense meanings, some loaded with lighter gestures, perhaps gives an insight into why scholars have tended to ignore these practices. Scholars have seen the lighter meanings and assumed that all such musicking must be not only “mundane” but also banal, ephemeral, and not worthy of study. I do not advance the argument that there are often certain core elements of multitonous musicking across the different participants in the different social spheres (all experienced as monotonous) as a complete statement of the (different) musickings going on. Each sphere, each different texture of the monotone may inform a difference in the texture of the multitonous. Furthermore, the timbres of cultural practices adopted are likely to vary according to a participant’s gender, ethnicity, and age. The concept of the multitonous can give an insight into what is happening, but it cannot give the complete story. Seeing the Multitonous in Other Cultural Practices Finally, I want to take the multitonous back into the workplace, but with an altered sense of the cultural practices to which it refers. There may not be just multitonous musicking, there may be other cultural practices, particularly humor, that

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share many of the core characteristics of the multitonous. In many rationalized workplaces, workers’ sense of humor is often a multitonous one. At points in this book I have pointed to similarities in the cultural role and meaning of the joke and the song within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture at McTells. In chapter 2’s overview of the culture, I showed how “having a laugh” and a bit of music was seen as crucial to workers in their struggle for survival against being overwhelmed by alienation. Chapter 5 outlined the way in which the joke and the song were both modes of dialectically moving with and against the social order. Chapter 8 noted that when the flow of production stopped, so did the flow of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, in terms of both the joke and the song. Elsewhere, I have discussed in more detail the fabric of the dialectical sense of humor at McTells (Korczynski 2011b). Here, I draw on these similarities played out in practice to draw out theoretically the core elements of a concept of multitonous humor and to highlight the commonalities of this with the concept of multitonous musicking. If the starting point is the rootedness of humor within the rationalized monotone, then Henri Bergson and Charlie Chaplin are our guides. Bergson wrote an extended essay, Laughter, which can be thought of as a theory of humor in modernity, for it locates humor in the context of the rationalized mechanical. His is an incongruity theory of humor, in which humor is seen as arising when there is a playing of practices and expectations between the rigidity and repetition of the mechanical, for example, the rationalized monotone, and the fluidity and flow of the living, for example, the human. Through imposing the living on the mechanical, the humorist makes an implicit critique of the mechanical, and does so by also enacting the mechanical so that the contrast between the two can be made. Here is the core parallel between Bergson’s theorizing of humor and the concept of the multitonous. Bergson wrote the script in 1901: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” (13). And Chaplin played it out on cinema screens in Modern Times in 1936—most directly in the scene described at the beginning of chapter 5 in which Chaplin’s body takes on the mechanical gestures of tightening screws even after the assembly line has stopped. Bergson’s conceptualization of humor in modernity is at the center of the concept of multitonous humor. Table 9.1 draws the concept out and shows the parallels with multitonous musicking. Specifically, the table compares the concepts of multitonous musicking

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TABLE 9.1. A comparison of the concepts of multitonous musicking and multitonous humor Multitonous musicking

Multitonous humor

Dialectical nature

Rooted in and constitutive with the repetitive/monotone, while expressing spirit of resistance

Rooted in and constitutive with the repetitive/monotone, while expressing spirit of resistance

Relationship to senses

Music used to protect senses from alienation with thin engagement of senses with music; allows avoidance of experiencing passing of alienated time

Humor used to protect senses from alienation; allows avoidance of experiencing passing of alienated time

Relationship to repetition

Accenting nonrepetitive cultural practices

Makes fun of, and out of, repetition

Space for agency in movement/expression

Space opened for agentic rather than structured movements of work

Agentic movements and words of work part of playing out of humor

Expression of explicit critical meanings

Reappropriation of critical meanings in songs

Satire of hierarchy involving reappropriation of terminology used by authority figures

Individual/collective process

Either individual or collective

Collective, as humor is necessarily a social process

and multitonous humor by breaking them down against key dimensions of dialectical nature, relationship to senses, relationship to repetition, space for agency of movement/expression, expression of explicit critical meanings, and individual/collective process. Against most dimensions there is a strong correspondence between musicking and humor in the multitonous. There are two areas in which there is a small difference between the multitonous in musicking and that in humor. First, the expression of critical meanings in multitonous musicking comes from the cultural source, the song, that is broadcast within the workplace, whereas there is no such outside cultural source for the expression of critical meanings within humor. Instead, we can see such explicit critique in humor in the way in which workplace humorists satire hierarchy, often by drawing on, and in the process, reappropriating hierarchical terminology. Here is an example from McTells: Somebody’s left on Penny’s desk a mock-up of an official sign saying “No eating on the shop floor,” and she goes around showing this sign to people who are eating on the shop floor.

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Sometimes, this humor involved the direct mocking of a supervisor: Lyn to the supervisor, as she’s passing, “Come on, I’m timing you.”

The same reappropriation of terminology is discussed in Taylor and Bain’s 2003 article about humor in a call center. Workers in one call center had made a leaflet that featured a picture of a toilet with a workstation in front of it. The managerial terminology that was used to accompany the picture was a crucial part of the humor: “Due to an increase in staffing, along with a lack of available space and funding, all cubicles will be converted to the new efficiency model pictured below. This new model should alleviate stress and increase productive work time” (1500). The second point of difference relates to whether the process is individual or collective. Although the “Stayin’ Alive” culture’s playing out of multitonous musicking was clearly collective, I have argued that there may have been significant local contextual factors that informed this and that it is better to consider both individual and collective forms of multitonous musicking. By contrast, because humor must be a social process, because there must be a humorist and an audience/coparticipants, multitonous humor must be, by definition, collectively enacted. These are small points of difference in the fabric of the musicking and the humor forms of the multitonous, but they are not significant. Overall, there is a high degree of correspondence between these concepts. As such, it was not an accident that music and humor overlapped so much at McTells and that the joke and the song were both central to the “Stayin’ Alive” culture. In terms of the way in which they can both be used in a multitonous cultural manner, the joke and the song are central cultural weapons of working-class people who are compelled to work within rationalized structures experienced as monotonous and who enact these structures at the same time as they express a spirit of resistance toward them. The joke and the song are both multilayered cultural forms of expression in which workers find ways of simultaneously being with and against a rationalized hierarchical social order. Scott (1990) put forward the question of seeking a theory of voice under domination. This is an important question, but one that is framed in an impossibly abstract way. There are different forms of domination, and there will be different voice modes connected to those. In Taylorized forms of workplace domination, in which workers are

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compelled to enact the structures of domination, they raise their voices in modes that allow them to be against even as they are with. To this end, the joke and the song are uniquely suited.

Shop Floor Cultures and Collective Resistance Key Dotted Lines at McTells In this subsection, I return to the introductory chapter’s argument that the analysis of patterns of workplace cooperation and resistance should be strengthened by considering not just material structuring factors but also the everyday lived culture of actors and the link of this to agency. In chapter 1 I made the argument that to see the dotted line connections between shop floor cultures and resistance, it is necessary to extend our understanding of workplace resistance in two ways. First, it is necessary to consider not just acts of resistance but also the spirit of resistance. This is not a quest to move away from a focus on acts of resistance but to widen our focus to include an analysis of the spirit of resistance, and to look at the links between this and acts of resistance. Notably, and persuasively, Scott (1990) has argued that acts of resistance need a spirit of resistance to underpin them. Second, it is necessary to extend our understanding of the levels at which resistance is played out. Currently, the default approach is a focus on resistance to the immediate employer. But the social relations of a workplace relate to much more than an individual employer. They are also nested in a range of social orders, or institutional logics. There are gendered and radicalized social orders, and there are rationalized social orders (or an institutional logic of rationalization), most clearly manifest and epitomized within Taylorist forms of work organization. These two extensions to our understanding of resistance within a workplace allow us to create much more nuanced understandings of shop floor cultures, and these richer understandings of the textures of shop floor cultures can give us a better chance at seeing some of the patterns of the dotted lines between these cultures and acts of resistance. I was able to trace four dotted lines of significance at McTells relating to the following qualities of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture: the resistive solidarity within the culture, the emphasis on agency within the culture, the use of the expressive voice of the culture as collective voice, and the logic of the immediate present within the culture. The first three of these dotted lines supported

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the playing out of collective acts of resistance, while the last served to limit resistance enacted to the shop floor rather than the strategic level. None of these dotted lines appeared to be significantly colored by specifically contextual factors at McTells, but rather they were informed by patterns of social relations with wider resonance. There was one dotted line at McTells between cultural practices and resistance that was centrally informed by the locally contextual, and as such it is not one that resonates with many other workplaces. This was the dotted line relating to when the enactment of the culture clashed with the imposition of discipline. This was colored by the local context in that such clashes were often played out from dynamics that had their roots in the disorganized nature of production. Tracing the Dotted Lines into Other Workplaces Here I consider, in turn, each of the four dotted lines between culture and resistance that are likely to have resonance for other workplaces. First, a culture in which community is built with an immanent critique of workplace structures stands as a clear bridge to collective acts of resistance. There is clearly some distance to travel from workers turning to each other to survive in the alienating workplace structures to workers joining with each other to enact resistance when the material structuring factors allow it, but the journey is not a long or arduous one. Indeed, Noon and Blyton (2007) see these dotted lines as so straightforward to trace that they develop an argument that workers develop a range of coping strategies to survive alienating tendencies at work, and among these coping strategies, they include both cultural practices, such as joking, and enactments of resistance, such as restricting production. They assume that both cultural practices and resistive actions are ways of thwarting being dominated by alienation. This is taking the relationship between cultural practices and resistance as too close, and diminishing the meaning of resistance, but it does show an understanding of the closeness between workplace community arising out of critical understandings of the workplace and collective resistance. An elegant implication of this is that, quite counter to the myth of the contented smiling worker, the workers who smile and laugh together, through taking part in a culture of worked happiness in order to keep alienation at bay, are more, not less, likely to be workers who resist the employer. In developing this point, I have pushed Scott’s (1990) arguments a little further. While Scott blew apart the argument of laughter as pressure valve that makes resistive

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action less likely, here I hang the argument upside down, so that it is laughter (within a certain cultural form) that makes resistance more likely. Second, a culture that accents agency can play a key role in underpinning acts of resistance. Resistance requires agency on the part of workers, and if workers are embedded in an agentic culture, then they have this embedded sense to draw on in enacting resistance. One example in which a worker comes close to making this connection explicit is that of Mary Brooksbank, who worked in factories in Dundee in the middle of the twentieth century. Her autobiography (1968) gives the following observation of her work in a chocolate factory: “Miss Robertson, a Personnel Officer, at one time said to me in passing, ‘I think you’re really plucky.’ I answered, ‘so are they,’ meaning the girls for they were singing at their work” (24). Note that Mary Brooksbank directly links the idea of being plucky, being ready to stand up for oneself, with the agentic culture of singing. For Mary Brooksbank, the fact that her fellow workers are singing indicates that they are not people who will just accept structures, and this has implications for the likelihood that they would take part in acts of resistance. Moreover, if the agentic culture argument holds, and if the role of cultural instigators is common within workplace cultures, then it may be that the pattern at McTells of cultural instigators also being resistance leaders may have currency in many other workplaces. Indeed, it may be that the cultural instigator route is a significant one in how individual workers come to be leading players in the organization of resistance, particularly in nonunion workplaces. At present, because ethnographers have tended not to look at microcultural practices, most data are not fine-grained enough to draw on in looking more deeply. One exception is Taylor and Bain’s article about humor in a call center. This study shows how activists, seeking to build union organization, used humor to make the union popular and to weaken managerial authority. In effect, these activists were simultaneously cultural instigators and potential resistance leaders. Third, a culture can support acts of resistance when its expressive voice also becomes a collective voice in terms of the articulation of interests and grievances to supervisors or managers. Chapter 2 highlighted that the structuring of pop music was such that very few songs explicitly allude to work. As such, the opportunities for the musically expressive voice to become the collective voice are limited to those points where workers can reappropriate a lyric to express a resistive meaning. These are likely to be

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fleeting and rare moments. Stromberg and Karlsson (2009, 641) detail one instance of the musically expressive voice becoming the collective voice in a factory where workers had no broadcast music but where they occasionally turned to music through singing: After a while, a rather long period of intense work and silence, one woman starts to hum the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from the Verdi opera Nabucco. The other women join in and the humming ends when someone asks for missing materials. The women continue to work and start singing again following a period of hard work. This time they pick up another tune dealing with the same theme—prisoners and captivity. The women smile in mutual understanding and one of them asks me if I’m able to recognize a pattern in their songs.

If the song is a relatively unlikely medium with which to draw this particular dotted line, the joke is a much more promising medium. An agentic joking culture can easily turn its focus to the hierarchy and express a resistive collective voice through satire against individual figures of authority or hierarchical logics and terminology. In this respect, Ackroyd and Thompson (1999, 103) are wise in emphasizing the potential importance of satire, not least in contemporary times: “A good deal of contemporary joking at work features cynical comment on the validity of managerial claims and the actions and motives of managers. It is no exaggeration to say that it constitutes a continuous undercurrent of satirical debunking of management pretensions.” Worthington, Willmott, and Ezzamel studied (1997) the introduction of the Japanese manufacturing technique known as Kaizen and provide a good example of the expressive joking voice also operating as collective voice. They detail how a management consultant was satirized by one worker by using the consultant’s own terminology against him. The consultant had first put forward the metaphor of Kaizen as like growing a flower in that it needs patience, but he subsequently started talking of workers’ indiscipline as productivity figures fell. A worker asked the consultant at a presentation, “If my flowers in the garden at home don’t grow straight away when I water them, should I carry on watering and wait for them to grow, or hit them with the watering can?” (16). Even managers present laughed at this brilliantly executed way of using the expressive voice in a joke as collective voice to resist the idea that there was a problem of worker discipline.

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The final dotted line to consider is one that works to limit resistance to the level of short-term battles over control. Collective multitonous cultures that create a mood of worked happiness, such as the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, to protect workers’ senses from being overwhelmed by alienation have their immediate focus on surviving in the present. The cultural practices are embedded in the immediate. There is a logic of the immediate present within such cultures. This logic is likely to work against workers seeking to address longer-term, less immediate, more strategic, and potentially much more important issues that could significantly ameliorate the quality of their working lives. The strength of how far the logic of the immediate present works against a longer-term horizon for resistive actions is far from clear, but the limiting direction of the logic of the immediate present of such cultures is clear. Arguably, left to their own logics, informal cultures of the sort played at McTells are unlikely to direct actions at the longer-term level. Such actions require a system of representation that allows a break in the pull of the logic of the immediate present for the energy to be applied at the longer-term, more strategic level. Even then, there is likely to be cultural tension between the workforce representative, abstracted at least partially from the culture of the immediate present, and the workers, still firmly embedded within cultures reacting to and expressive of the immediate present. Perhaps the pull of cultures created to survive against alienation in the present has been one of the hidden factors underlying the common pattern of failure of workplace participative forums (Dietz, Wilkinson, and Redman 2009)—forums that are located beyond the immediate present. Returning to McTells: for all the sociological brilliance, beauty, and resilience of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, here lies its central tragedy—when workers resisted, it was primarily in reaction to immediate issues, such as the behavior of a draconian supervisor, not to proactively seek a change in the overall structure of Taylorist work organization. By keeping workers in the now, it kept them away from addressing the structuring factors that need to be addressed within the alienating Taylorist social order. Important steps forward have been taken with regard to understanding the key structuring factors that underpin acts of resistance. Similar steps forward need to be taken with regard to our understanding of the processes of agency within the context set by the structuring factors. If unionized workplaces continue to become less common, and if, as seems

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entirely likely, researchers continue to uncover collective acts of resistance within nonunion settings, then the question of agency underpinning acts of resistance will become ever more pressing. A focus on culture is crucial here, and my suggestions of four dotted lines between culture and acts of resistance are made in a hope that they can contribute to the steps forward that are needed.

The Last Song What was the last song playing at the end of my last shift at McTells? I could not say. Living within the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, taken up by its rhythms, even as I tried to stand outside it to analyze it, meant that the last songs at the end of the shift had no real meaning to me, or to the other workers at McTells. With the flow of production already ended, the flow of the musicking culture had also stopped, and the pop songs on the radio were forgotten. With the preceding section’s focus on resistance, this is a useful reminder of the dialectical quality of the musicking culture: that it was rooted within the enactment of production, and its energy and its meaning came from its relationship with and against the flow of Taylorized production. I have tried to keep true to this “Stayin’ Alive” culture in this book, not just in terms of outlining its deep and subtle contours of meaning, not just in terms of drawing out how the core elements of the culture may have resonance in other workplaces and in other parts of society, but also in terms of how I have prepared the book. The “Stayin’ Alive” culture required a buzz, a spark, to keep it firing. And in the movements of this book, I have tried to render something of this vitality within the texture of the writing. I have tried not just to deepen understandings but also to give an energy in the journeys from Chaplin to Travolta, from lightbulbs tied to a worker’s body to the darkness of the encroaching shadows of alienation, from Patti Smith singing her bohemian isolation to the profound sociological knowledge shown by Anna, Evelyn, Lana, and the other cultural instigators as they promoted participatory musicking, from the misplaced questions inspired by Bob Dylan to the insights generated by seeing how workers responded to Dionne Warwick, from the loud ticking clocks in a Bergman film to the timeless memory brought on by a song of a youthful

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walk around a park with a boyfriend, from noise to song, from the monotonous to the multitonous, from the Brill Building in New York to the shop floor of a blinds factory in England. Perhaps, in this way, readers may have felt a little something of the embodied way of “Stayin’ Alive.” Perhaps some might be inspired by my insights, and by my mistakes, to take up the approach to combining an ethnography of the workplace with an ethnography of microcultural practices, such as musicking. I hope so. Let us continue to dignify those small moments of human activity that are so freighted with meaning.

Appendix: An Ethnography of Working and of Musicking

For Willis (2000) ethnography is not merely about the process of undertaking the research—being there, living in people’s social worlds as a participant observer. It is about the development and articulation of an “ethnographic imagination.” An ethnographic imagination involves a deep iteration between data and theory, where theorizing is grounded in the lived social worlds of people (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, 159). As Hammersley and Atkinson (189) put it: “The ethnographic imagination is always grounded in the local practicalities of everyday life in particular social settings. But the analytic gaze does not have to remain fixed on local circumstances. We must repeatedly ask ourselves how we are to make sense of local cultures and actions in terms that relate to wider analytical perspectives.” I structured this book in part to mirror this process of the back-and-forth between observations of lived experience and theorizing. I presented the broad questions that motivated me in the opening chapter, and I began to articulate—in the concept of multitonous musicking—a way to theorize patterns in the observations made. But that was a sketch

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concept that only came to full articulation through an immersion in the key patterns in the findings. The ethnographic imagination extends to writing as well. Crafting the ethnographic text is integral to the work of ethnography. The ethnographic imagination asks that the sensuousness of the data come out in the texture of the writing. The way an ethnography is written should help the reader leave with the impression of having entered and understood a social setting. Sharpness was central to the factory workers’ “Stayin’ Alive” culture. I tried to write the book with a vitality to match that of the “Stayin’ Alive” culture, a culture that was lived by the workers who made and constantly remade it, day in, day out. It was a culture that suffered blows from autocratic supervisors and management keen to have their commitment while paying them barely above the minimum wage, while applying Taylorism to the design of their jobs. It was a culture that came out singing, smiling, and dancing after all these blows. I wanted the book to be alive, replete with direct quotes from my field notes, to both express and analyze this vibrant musicking shop floor culture. There is, of course, a tension between energy and dynamism in the style of writing, on the one hand, and depth and precision in the analysis, on the other hand. One way I navigated this tension was through the device of the “side step.” There have been many good justifications already made for ethnography being an appropriate method for studying the social relations of work. Particularly important is the ability of the ethnographer to uncover the subterranean within the workplace, especially relating to patterns of resistance (Topie et al. 2005). In the introductory chapter, I argued that ethnography is particularly appropriate to studying musicking within the workplace. Being there to see and hear what was going on as someone who was working on the blinds was crucial to my being able to sense in my body what the work felt like and what the music meant in that context. Through personal contacts I negotiated access to McTells blinds firm in the English Midlands. I knew in advance that radio music was played on the shop floor, but I had no prior idea as to how important it was as a cultural resource. I worked for three months in this factory, undertaking four shop floor jobs in two different workrooms—a workroom for making roller blinds (the rollers room) and a workroom for making vertical blinds (the verticals room). As noted in chapter 2, in the rollers room, music was played on dispersed worker owned-and-controlled portable

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radios. In the verticals room, a centralized broadcasting system relayed the radio through speakers, with the choice of radio station subject to worker control. My research role was overt. I introduced myself in a brief meeting to the workers and explained my research aim as trying to study music at work. This was greeted with humor by some of the workers. Some did not seem to quite understand what as I was doing, as I was asked in the rollers room when I would be recording them singing. But I explained my aim in small group conversations, and the aim came to be understood. While working, I observed the behavior of the workers, and I also talked with them about their jobs and their feelings about music generally, and particularly about music and work. In Gold’s (1958) terms, my research role was one of “participant-as-observer.” Because I was not a normal worker (and also because I was not being paid for my labor by the firm) I had some latitude to walk around the shop floor and talk with people beyond the immediate milieu of my worktable. Like Ditton (1977, 5), “I found it impossible to keep everything that I wanted to remember in my head until the end of the working day… and so had to take rough notes during the day.” During the day, at break times I quickly scribbled reminder notes to myself on a small notepad while in the toilet—again, like Ditton. At the end of each day I tape-recorded my field notes. Once the research was complete these tapes were transcribed, creating a document of eighty thousand words. In addition, I was able to conduct four formal interviews with managers. The transcribed data were coded using NVivo software. There were three main coding trees: one on work organization factors (e.g., nature of the work, informal collective resistance, work group participation meetings); one on the people who worked in the factory; and one on the microcultural practices undertaken by the workers. Within the latter tree, a main branch was on the specific practices associated with music. There were twentythree nodes within this branch, covering data on such elements as “ways of singing along,” “musical instigators,” and “music movements of work.” The research was conducted with an awareness of the potential importance of systematic differences in the experience of work (and of music and work) between different ethnic groups, sexes, and age groups. Following Vallas (2003), I knew that we must be conscious of potentially important spatial segregations of ethnic groups at work. Extending this insight to an ethnography of musicking in the workplace, it is also necessary to be conscious of the potential for an aural segregation across ethnic groups. Indeed,

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it is also necessary to be conscious of a potential aural segregation across sexes and age groups. Just because one group hears a song in a certain way does not mean that other groups will hear it in the same way. As Middleton (1990, 105) puts it: “It needs a considerable act of sociological sympathy to grasp that other listeners may actually hear different things, or hear them in different relationships.” At McTells there was no clear ethnic or age segregation of jobs or spaces on the shop floor. The only clear gender segregation was that the jobs of packing and barrel cutting were exclusively done by men and the job of machine sewing was exclusively done by women. When I asked informal questions of workers, I consciously chose workers across the different categories of sex, age, and ethnicity. My notes always contained information on respondents’ sex, age, and ethnicity. A commentary on ethnographic research requires a reflection on ways in which the researcher may affect the research environment. In my first workroom, the rollers room, as is common in ethnographic research, after a brief period in which I was treated as something of a curiosity, my presence appeared to be taken as a normal part of everyday shop floor life (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). In the second workroom, the verticals room, for the first three days, my immediate work colleagues told me, there was a suspicion that I was a “management spy.” This suspicion only dissipated after I supplied the address of my university web page to Molly, who held the deepest suspicion about me. (Note, again, the coincidence of Molly, who was a cultural instigator, also leading a resistance against a threat of increased surveillance.) After this was resolved, my presence became accepted in the same way as in the rollers workroom, and I was able to access the same quality of data in both workrooms. In both workrooms, I was often invited by workers to take part in musical engagements. I resolved that when directly invited to join already existing engagements then I would accede but that I would reject cues to proactively start or accent instances of such engagements. I assessed the effect of my presence on the factory’s social relations by asking workers and supervisors whether they perceived any changes in people’s behavior because of my presence. A number of workers observed that the supervisors had become a “bit nicer.” Nevertheless, I was still able to witness supervisors enforcing discipline in humiliating ways. In sum, my presence as a researcher on the factory floor had only small and short-lived effects on the social relations of the factory.

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Index

Absenteeism, 150 – 51 Adorno, 7 – 8, 36 Age, 30, 55 – 58, 61, 105 – 6 Agency, 7, 13 – 14, 17, 27 – 29, 84, 117 – 19, 128, 166, 174 – 78, 202, 204 – 8 Agentic actions of work, 12, 99 – 104, 198 Alienation, 29 – 32 music as, 90 – 91, 121 senses of, 67 – 69 and soundscape, 69 – 73 Banana time, 14 Bangs, Lester, 41 “Beautiful Day” (U2), 115 – 16 Bergman, Ingmar, 78 Bergson, Henri, 201 Blauner, 68 Blues, 24, 131

Call and response, 65 Cellular production, 63 – 64 Chorus, 45, 129 – 31 Christmas music, 60 Class, 29 – 30, 193 Clock, 73 – 85 Cohen, Leonard, 4 Collective voice, 138, 178 – 81, 207 Commitment, 153 – 54 Cultural instigators, 44 – 54, 91, 107, 119 Cultural studies, 7 – 9, 16, 139 Culture as alternative ideal, 185 – 87 multitotonous, 200 – 204 and resistance, 12 – 20, 164 – 67, 170 – 88, 204 – 9 Dancing, 99 social, 47 – 48, 63

222

Index

De Nora, 6, 7, 9, 15, 97, 199, 200 “Dignity” (Deacon Blue), 118 Dinerstein, 10 – 11, 93 Dylan, Bob, 24 Edwards, 13 – 14, 17, 162 – 63, 164 – 67 Effort bargain, 156, 172, 177 – 79 Ethnicity, 30, 49, 60, 61, 193, 213 Ethnography, 4 – 6, 211 – 14 Ethnographic imagination, 59, 211 – 12 Everyday life, 9–11, 36–37, 113, 134–35, 200 Gender, 14, 43, 193, 214 Grossberg, 10 – 11, 19, 36, 55, 113, 134 Habitus, 97 Haggard, Merle, 132 Headphones, 27, 49, 54, 117 Hodson, 13, 17, 162 – 65, 168, 170 “Hotel California” (The Eagles), 117, 174 Human resource management, 26 Humor, 14, 19, 32 – 33, 47, 50, 52, 62, 171, 181, 185, 200 – 204 routine, 108 – 10, 183 “I Will Survive” (Gloria Gaynor), 120, 130 – 31 Identity, 17 Indulgency pattern, 18, 27, 29 Industrial psychology, 4, 7, 28 – 29 Korczynski, Pickering, and Robertson, 4, 198 Listening, 72 – 73 social, 61 – 63 Management music strategy, 26 – 27 strategy, 24 – 26 Mann and Weil, 135 – 37 Marley, Bob, 132 Marx, 67 – 68 Mechanical solidarity, 65 Modern Times (film), 78, 93 – 94 Multitonous cultural practices, 200 – 204 Multitonous musicking, 11 – 12, 193 – 200

Music and commuting, 199 – 200 and driving, 199 – 200 and energy, 104 fragility as a cultural resource, 86 – 88 and happiness, 46 and housework, 199 – 200 as index of youth, 55, 83 structuring of, in relation to work, 35 – 38 in the workplace, history of, 28 – 29 Musicking, definition, 6 Music While You Work (radio program), 29 “My Heart Will Go On” (Celine Dion), 121 Organic solidarity, 65 Organization of production, chaotic, 26, 165, 168 – 69, 182 Output restriction, 142 – 50 Overtime, 155 – 57 Participation meetings, 85 – 86, 151 – 54, 187 – 88 Payment system, 26, 44, 170 Presley, Elvis, 41 Product market, 24, 165, 169 – 70 Radio, 1, 28 – 9, 71 central broadcasting, 26 – 27 portable, 27 station, 27, 38 – 39, 55 – 58, 62 – 63, 101, 105 – 6, 120 – 21 Resistance acts of, 16, 19, 110 – 11, 140 – 41, 166 – 67 levels of, 17 – 18, 95 – 97, 101 – 4, 110 – 11, 195, 204 spirit of, 16 – 17, 110 – 11, 127 – 29, 166 – 67, 170 – 74, 197 – 98, 204 Roy, Donald, 14 Saturday Night Fever (film), 35 – 38, 94 – 95 “Scientist, The” (Coldplay), 117, 173 Scott, 16, 166, 181, 203 – 5 Singing nonrepetitive pattern, 106 – 7 poor, by cultural instigators, 50, 52–53, 119 Smith, Patti, 112 – 13, 139

Index Soundscape, 69 – 73 Springsteen, Bruce, 39, 131 – 32, 138 Structured actions of work, 12, 93, 98 – 104, 191, 195 – 98 Structured antagonism, 167 – 68 Supervisors clashes with, 181 – 82 collective resistance against, 158 – 62 outside of community, 58 – 59 Taylorism, 25, 28, 78 – 84, 95 – 96, 195 Technology, production, 25, 165, 169 – 70 Thompson, E. P., 68 Time, 73 – 85, 147 – 49, 183, 188, 202 Travolta, John, 35 – 37, 94 – 95, 103, 175 Turino, 6, 8 – 10, 42, 52, 107 Turnover, 31, 171

223

“Unchained Melody” (Righteous Brothers), 52 – 53, 119 Union, labor, 13, 15, 26, 141, 165, 178, 206 Voice, expressive as collective voice, 178–81 “Walk On By,” 99 “We Are Family” (Sister Sledge), 44, 65, 123 “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” 124 – 30, 133 – 35, 174, 177, 180 origins, 135 – 36 soldiers’ use of, 136 – 38 Willis, 3, 5, 15, 59, 97, 211 Wolkowitz, 96 – 97 Works Council, 26, 151, 154 – 62 Youth, 55 – 56, 83