Multinational Companies and Domestic Firms in Europe: Comparing Wages, Working Conditions and Industrial Relations, by Maarten van Klaveren, Kea Tijdens and Denis Gregory. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013, 440 pp., ISBN: 978 1 137 37590 2, £79.00, hardback.
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Author | Stefanie Hürtgen |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12133 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12140
53:3 September 2015 0007–1080 pp. 628–643
BOOK REVIEWS
Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture and Resistance, by Marek Korczynski. ILR
Press, Ithaca, 2015, 240pp.,ISBN: 978-0-8014-5154-6, $75.00, hardback.
Rhythms of Labour: Music at Workin Britain, by Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering
and Emma Robertson. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, 354pp.,
ISBN: 9781107000179, £69.99, hardback.
Many years ago, I worked as a signalman on the London Underground. One of the
staple pieces of unocial equipment kept in each personal locker was a radio, vital
in whiling away the hours in quiet locations or for helping to set the pace in busier
ones during the rush hours. We were not ocially allowedradios or televisions for that
matter,but there was a strange shadow moral economy, or indulgency pattern, between
frontline management and workers whereby a ritual dance would ensue whenever a
manager appeared on a boxvisit. The signal worker would turn o the radio and either
cover it up, or put it back in the locker, and nothing would be said. Sociologically, one
can say all sorts of things about what this tells us about power, how it is realized or
deflected, about respect, and about the hidden unocial culture of the workplace. I
was reminded of my former working life while reading two new books on music at
work and how a taken-for-granted aspect of the everyday is overlaid with all sorts of
social meaning, struggle and resonance. Songs of the Factory and Rhythms of Labour
are dierent types of books but share a common focus on the role and meaning of
music at work – either as something workers actively engage in, as in singing, or as
something workers consume,as an audience, while they work.
Rhythms of Labour is a general historical overview of the role of music at work,
especially the practice of singing at work. The volume is divided into three parts
focusing initially on musicin the pre-industrial workplace. Part 2 looks at music under
industrialization and the third section examines broadcast musicat work. Songs of the
Factory , by contrast, is an ethnography carried out by Marek Korczynski, one of the
authors of Rhythms of Labour. In this second volume,Korczynski reports on a period
of participant observation in a factory manufacturingblinds. The volumes share some
material and emerge from the same research programme. While Rhythms of Labour
reads as a textbook attimes, Korczynski’smonograph is a welcome return to workplace
ethnography, albeit with a more narrowfocus than others in the genre.
Rhythms of Labour is a fairly comprehensive account of the historical recordof the
presence of music at work in largely British workplaces. Like any scholar who tries
to resurrect long-disappeared working class culture, the authors are forced to search
a highly fragmentary set of sources from disparate trades and occupations, ranging
from sailing shanties to the songs of textile workers and agricultural labourers. They
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Book Reviews 629
show how music and song played the role of consolation, as well as at times being
a form of protest and grievance. In part 2 of the book, which examines music in
industrial settings, the argument shifts to suggest that these new forms of workplaces
witnessed the silencing of workers’ voices; a move aimed at exercising greater control
and discipline in order to maximize eort. In this section, Korczynski, Pickering and
Robertson outline the traditional explanations of the marginalization of singing at
work. This involves broad general shifts in society and culture including factors such
as urbanization, a move from oral to text-based cultures as well as a more general
rationalization and commodification of musical forms. While acknowledging all of
these factors, the authors of Rhythms of Labour go beyond these more generalizing
accounts to examine in more detail what the presence and falling away of singing
cultures can tell us about the role of music at work. This silencing then is due to a
complex pattern of direct prohibition, the increased volumeof industrial noise, moral
regulation and the separation of work and leisure. In many ways then this silencing
was part of what Max Weber saw as the process of disenchantment in modernity, a
separating out of culturesof creativity, a bifurcationbetween work and leisure, between
workplace and home, domestic and economic realms.
Section 3 of Rhythms of Labour is,for this reader,the most interesting and satisfying.
In part, this is a reflection of the greater completeness of the historical record in the
twentieth century. This section looks at the way new technology in the form of radio
and broadcast systems allowsfor music programmes specifically aimed at workerssuch
as the BBC’s Music While You Work.There are some fascinating details of the debates
that took place in the Corporation as to the role, purpose and limits to the type of
music broadcast and the influence it might have, for good or ill, on production.
Songs of the Factory has a far more contemporary focus and looks at the role of
music in a small factory producing domestic blinds.Here, the role of music is complex
and varied, acting, in turn, to unify workers, to console, to pace and to simplyget them
through their days.At the beginning of the book, Korczynski takesa well-deserved side
swipe at Pollert’s account of the role of music in a cigarettefactory: ‘Twice a day there
was a reprieve from the grey sameness of a working day: Muzac . . . it was .. . keenly
looked forwardto’ (p. 2). By contrast, Korczynski gets the important role music plays
in allowing expression and release in a workforce; music helps to create and sustain
workplace culture and individual and collective bonds betweenworkers. Much of this
account of the role of music is reminiscent of Donald Roy’s classic ‘Banana Time’,
where workers in a small Chicagomachine shop broke up their shifts through the use
of rituals – like banana time. Music, and sometimes the accompanied singing, plays
the same role of breaking up the day, or breaking down clock time and the monotony
of manual labour. Korczynski showshow workers use music in a variety of waysto get
them through their days,using the tunes and lyrics to pull them along or to provide a
pause.
Both Songs of the Factory and Rhythms of Labour are important and welcome
additions to the sociological exploration to music in the workplace. They provide, in
turn, both a detailed contemporary case study and a moregeneral historical account of
the role and meaning of music and song atwork that illustrate that music is not simply
a soporific for bored alienated workers which they passively consume. As such these
volumes providea valuable platform from which others can build a morerounded and
deeper understanding of employment.
While taken together the books oer a highly original set of understandings, they
also have some interesting areas of neglect. In Rhythms of Labour, for example, I
was surprised that more was not made of the British folk revival and especially the
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