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Music at Work: An Introduction

Article  in  Group & Organization Management · February 2007

DOI: 10.1177/1059601106294485

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Massey University Institutional Repository

Prichard, C., Korczynski, M. & Elemes, M. (2007). Music at work:

An introduction. Group and Organization Management, Vol. 32,
No. 1, pp. 4-21.

Massey Author: Prichard, Craig

http://hdl.handle.net/10179/164
 Music at work: An introduction

Craig Prichard

Department of Management 214 (Tari Whakahaere Kaipakihi)

Massey University (Te Kunenga Ki Purehuroa )
Private Bag 11-222 (Pouaka Motuhake 11-222)
Palmerston North (Papaioea), 4442, New Zealand (Aotearoa)
Phone: 0064 (0) 6 350-5799 ext. 2244
Fax: 0064 (0) 6 350 5661
Email: c.prichard@massey.ac.nz
Info-Page: www.massey.ac.nz/~cprichar

Marek Korczynski

The Business School

Loughborough University
Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire
LE11 3TU
United Kingdom
Phone: 00441509 223122
Email: M.Korczynski@lboro.ac.uk

Michael Elmes

Department of Management
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road
Worcester, MA 01609-2280
USA
508-831-5182 (Voice)
508-831-5720 (Fax)
Email: mbelmes@wpi.edu

1
Abstract

There are many ways in which music and the management of work, space, time,

bodies and feelings are linked and there is a small but rich tradition of academic

research that has attempted to explore these connections. This special issue aims to

contribute to this work. Our introduction identifies existing work, introduces the three

articles that make up the substantive contribution of this special issue, and points to

opportunities for researchers to make further contributions.

Key works: music, work, management, music-scape, organizational musicality

2
Introduction

Stop reading this form a moment. Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the

space you’re in. Try and forget what you have seen, feel or smell. Instead listen to the

aural landscape - what some researcher called the soundscape i or music-scape

(Altman, 1992, Oakes, 2002). Is this soundscape organized? Is it managed in some

way? If you’re in a library, a café, a shopping mall or restaurant then the soundscape

is likely to be monitored, and possibly conditioned with music or some aural

backdrop. Or perhaps you or your group are producing the soundscape. There might

be singing or some kind of musical performance underway. Or perhaps you’re

wearing a Walkman or iPod that creates your very own soundscape and possibly

drowning out the ambient noise around you.

There are many ways in which music and the management of work, space, time,

bodies and feelings are linked and there is a small but rich tradition of academic

research that has attempted to explore these connections. This special issue aims to

contribute to this work. Our introduction identifies existing work, introduces the three

articles that make up the substantive contribution of this special issue, and points to

opportunities for researchers to make further contributions.

Connecting music and work- three directions

For us there appears to be three literatures that address the relations between music

and work. The most extensive, and perhaps most significant for managers, is the

empirically-focused literature on the role and impact of recorded music in work

environments (see for example, Korczynski et al, 2005, Oakes, 2000; Oldham et al,

1995; Sterne, 1997, Jones and Schumacher, 1992; Uhrbrock, 1961). Alongside this is

3
a smaller literature that asks us to consider what scholars can learn from music about

managing and organizing (Albert and Bell, 2002; Humphreys et al, 2003, Hatch and

Weick, 1998; Barratt and Peplowski, 1998). This work use musical concepts,

metaphors and representations of work in music genres as resources for analysis. The

third literature meanwhile asks what structures and processes pattern both music and

work (e.g. Weber, 1958, Adorno, 1990; Attali, 1990). We suggest here that all three

strands offer numerous opportunities for researchers interested in extending and

contributing to research in and around music at work. The three papers in this special

edition contribute in different ways to the first two strands of work – what we identify

loosely as ‘empirical’ and ‘methodological’ forms of inquiry. Two papers represent

this methodological strand. The first from Carl Rhodes entitled ‘Outside the Gates of

Eden: Utopia and Work in Rock Music’ provides a vivid and engaging response to the

question of what rock music tells us about the popular understanding of work and

organizations. The second paper, ‘Making it, By Keeping it Real’, by David Sköld and

Alf Rehn, approaches Hip Hop music with a similar question. The authors provide a

rich and fascinating exploration of the problematics of entrepreneurship as it is

articulated in rap and hip hop music. The third paper in the special issue contributes

to what we term the empirical literature – the impact and use of actual music in work

organizations. In ‘Management and Music; The exceptional case of the IBM

Songbook’, Amal El-Sawad and Marek Korczynski unravel the complexities, use and

significance of the IBM songbook by this icon of US business, during the 20th

Century.

Before discussing these three literatures in more detail we should note here what our

discussion does not include. There a rich and engaging tradition of academic work

4
that uses the music industry as a site of empirical analysis (e.g. Cameron, 2003;

Negus, 1999; Serwer, 2002; Watson and Anand, 2004; Bowen and Siehl, 1992). This

work broadly takes the music industry to an empirical site for the analysis of business

and management processes. It tends to assume that the music industry is much like or

analogous to other industries. This work is not addressed here. Our focus is on

research that sees something distinctive in the use of music either as management or

organizational practice or as the basis for understanding work and organization (e.g.

as a metaphor or analogue).

Music at work- empirical instances

Before we explore the three literatures we noted above we first want to offer some

sense of the range of instances in which music is used to manage space, time, relations

and identities in contemporary settings (and thus some of the research opportunities

available for those interested in connecting music and the study of organizations,

management and work). Let us start with instances where music is used to condition

work and service environments. Some of these of course have a distinctive therapeutic

purpose. In her wide ranging book ‘Music in Everyday Life’, the sociologist Tia de

Nora (2000) describes for example the playing of recorded music to premature babies

in some hospitals in an effort to regularize their heartbeats. In the same vein, but with

a more mature client group, organizational well-ness initiatives aimed at combating

obesity and reducing workplace stress have (in some cases) filled office stairwells

with recorded music. The music combines with art, bright colours and encouraging

signs that aim to encourage desk-bound workers to take the exercise offered by

climbing the stairs rather than riding the elevator (Boutelle et al, 2004). Such efforts

are akin of course to the ubiquitous telephone queue music, and the muzak piped into

5
service environments (Radano, 1989). And these in turn as analogous to instances

where music is used to enhance the aesthetic appeal of particular environment, and to

drown out undesirable noise and sounds. Laura Kruska reports in her ethnography of

Japanese corporate environments, for example, that toilet paper dispensers have been

designed to play tunes when touched (1998:190). Kruska explains that this ‘dispenser

music’ is designed to disguise or conceal un-lady-like noises that might be emitted

from the toilet stall.

If we look beyond these aesthetic and motivational instances we can note family

resemblances with more brutal and martial uses. Albert and Bell report in their study

of the US Federal Bureau of Investigations siege of the Branch Davidian complex in

Waco Texas (Albert and Bell, 2004) that the authorities used, among other things,

high volume popular music (Barbara Streisand) to weaken and disable their targets.

More recently US Marines are reported to have used loudspeaker broadcasts of AC-

DC rock music (along with the sounds of screaming cats and crying babies) at ear-

splitting intensities as they stormed the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the US-led

invasion of that country. And, at the time of writing, a Cruise ship attacked by

Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean is reported to have used a high frequency acoustic

weapon to ward of the attackers ii .

Of course attempting to manage an environment with ‘rough music’ is not new. The

social movement historian Charles Tilly and Marxian historian E.P. Thompson both

identify the charivari – or noisy protest – as an important popular protest practice

from the Middle Ages onward. The charivari was put to work to voice discontent with

authorities and toward those whom the community considered moral transgressors

6
(Tilly, 1986; Thompson, 1968, 1993). Contemporary examples of charivari abound.

Aside from silent protests of course, most major protests and demonstrations include

marching bands, such as ‘Infernal Noise Brigade’ iii (INB). The INB, which was

mobilized at various high profile protests in recent times (e.g. Republican Party

Convention in New York prior to the 2004 election and the WTO protest in Seattle),

is a 15-piece drum-based marching band that, as the band notes, aims to ‘provide

energy and motivate crowds to do whatever it is that they want to do’(Frizzell, 2005).

Music regulating work

These examples are of course just instances of the innumerable ways that performed

and recorded music is engaged to achieve particular social and political objectives. If

we turn to work and its management, and take a long historical perspective (calling on

a wide range of literatures – including folklore studies, social history scholarship,

industrial psychology, sociology, and management scholarship), it is clear that, under

particular conditions and at particular times, music has played a crucial role in the

regulation of work. Table 1 lays out the broad pattern of the role of music in the

regulation of work in four periods – pre-industrialisation, industrialisation, Fordist

industrialisation, and post-industrialisation. The state of existing research for each

period is briefly outlined below.

[Insert table 1 about here]

Pre-industrialisation. Research by social historians and folklorists has shown that

work songs, ie. songs sung by workers as they labour, were commonplace among a

number of the most populous occupations in pre-industrialised Britain – weavers

(Thompson, 1968; Elbourne, 1980), agricultural labourers (Palmer, 1979; Pickering,

1982; Flora Thompson, 1954), drivers of horses, cattle and wagons (Palmer, 1979,

7
p.19; Clayre, 1974), miners (Lloyd, 1967), sailors (Hugill, 1961; Proctor, 1992),

hawkers (Palmer, 1979; Cohen, 1993) cobblers (Porter, 1995), tailors (Richards and

Stubbs, 1979, p.57), those employed in tweed waulking (Campbell and Collinson,

1969), and those undertaking domestic labour (Clayre, 1974; Pickering, 1982).

Research in North America has also documented the work songs accompanying non-

mechanised manual labour in the case of slaves (Fisher, 1954; Epstein, 1977), prison

work-gangs (Jackson, 1972) and lumber-workers (Doerflinger, 1951). In many of

these cases, work songs appear to have been functional to the labour process in terms

of pacing and co-ordinating labour. In addition, it is clear that work songs could

function as a form of voice for workers, allowing them to articulate grievances in

ways that were proscribed in written or spoken modes of communication.

Industrialisation. A number of social historians have argued that singing was one of

many folk customs that were seen by many employers as inimical to the discipline

demanded in the factories of the industrial revolution (Thompson, 1968; Thomas,

1964; Watson, 1983). With machinery increasingly pacing and coordinating labour,

the functional role of work songs fell away after industrialisation (Lloyd, 1967). For

many workers, the noise of machinery would have provided a formidable obstacle to

singing in the workplace. The imposition of musical silence by many employers can

be seen as a wider development of management increasingly seeking to control the

soundscape of the workplace. At its most extreme this took the form of management

seeking to ban talking in Ford’s first factories iv . Yet there is also evidence of

intriguing cases of factories where strong singing traditions among workers were still

able to flourish (Messenger, 1973; Cooper, 1992, also see argument by Biggart,

1994). There were also cases, such as that of French manufacturer and financier

8
Jaques Vernes, who in 1913 attempted to start a national movement to introduce

music into factory. According to Cornell work psychologist Richard Uhrbrock

Vernes argued that ‘industrial efficiency was low because factory workmen were not

‘singing at their benches’ (1961:12).

Fordist industrialisation. Jones and Schumacher (1992) and Korczynski and Jones

(2006; Jones, 2005) have documented how music was re-introduced into workplaces

in the form of music broadcast through loudspeakers in many factories in the USA

and UK in the 1940s. Research by industrial psychologists into the effects of

broadcast music on various work-related outcomes such as productivity and tiredness

mushroomed with the growth of broadcast music in factories (see references in

Oldham et al, 1995). It is also clear that this industrial psychology research informed

the decisions of management regarding broadcast music in private and public sector

workplaces. For instance, Wyatt and Langdon’s pioneering study of the effects of

music on fatigue and productivity in 1937 played a key role in informing the agenda

of policy-makers in the UK (Korczynski and Jones, 2006). With music commonly

played in factories, we might have expected ethnographic and factory-based

qualitative research by industrial sociologists to have uncovered more about the way

in which music worked on the factory floor. However, with only a few minor

exceptions (Morgan, 1975; Garson, 1994; Delbridge, 1998), what we find is the

casual disdain of the industrial sociologist towards broadcast music in factories. For

instance we can note Pollert’s dismissive reference (1981, p.132) to music in her

ethnography of life in a cigarette factory:

9
 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!

Underpinning the lack of interest of industrial sociologists in the topic is perhaps an

implicit agreement with Adorno’s characterisation of popular music as offering little

more than an affirmation of the hierarchical relations of capitalism (see discussion

below). Whatever the reasons, this research lacuna still persists today. It, in part,

underpins Grazian’s (2004, p.206) identification of ethnographies of ‘the consumption

of music in real time and space’ (for instance, on the factory floor) as one of the key

research opportunities in the sociology of music.

Post-industrialisation. With the hollowing out in advanced economies of much of the

manufacturing settings where broadcast music had flourished, we have to turn to

broadcast music in service settings and the opportunities afforded individuals to

regulate their work through the use of iPods and personal stereos to find major roles

for music in the regulation of contemporary work. Again, there are important

research opportunities here. Such work sit’s alongside a rich genre of experimental

and more interpretive forms of research on the conditioning and consumption of

music in work and consumption environments (see Oakes, 2000; Oldham and

Cummings et al, 1995). Primarily the preserve of psychologists, this work often

provides guidance on how to use music to extend control over workers and

consumers. For example experimental studies of consumers subject to music shows

that background music has a positive effect on consumer spending and turnover

10
(North et al. 1999; 2003). Background music tends to reduce frustration at queuing

and waiting and supports the adoption of helpful forms of behaviour (e.g. offering to

do volunteer work). Experimental studies on retail environments, some of which use

the notion of ‘musicscape’ (Oakes, 2000), show that differences in type, tempo,

complexity, and volume of music can have a bearing on a consumer’s experience of

time in a particular space, and have a positive impact on consumer spending. And in

relation to workers, music can increase work performance on relatively non-complex

tasks, reduce workplace turnover and enhance in general terms the mood of those

subject to it, or using in portable devices (Oldham and Cummings et al, 1995).

The implication for managers is of course quite clear. Particular types of music

together with demographic factors allow managers to alter to some degree the

experience and thus to some degree control the experience and behaviour of workers

and consumers. Much of this experimental work has been done by psychologists

(Reybrouck, 2004: Hagen and Bryant, 2003). Some of this work is based on the

assumption that music’s effect is a result of the extra cognitive work done by

listeners. As Oakes notes, if listeners ‘devote a greater attention to liked music,

increased cognitive processing could lead to the perception that more happened during

the time spent listening to the liked music and thus augmenting the perceived

duration’ (2003:667-668).

Researchers working in the interpretive sociological tradition offer us a different view

of the impact and effect of consuming music in these settings. For example De Nora

and Belcher’s field work (2000) in a range of retail sites explores the symbolic

processes engaged by consumers and workers. They argue that music provides a set of

11
cues for particular kinds of social performance by both customers and staff. For

example customers and staff were seen to ‘strike a pose’, ‘hone a vague desire’, dance

and swagger to the particular genres of music in the store. In other words the music

provided a resource for the performance of consumptive identities, as well as a sense

of form, timing and pace for the consumptive and service practices (2000:95-98 see

also de Nora, 2002).

The more critically orientated literature meanwhile explores the power relations and

politics that organize and produce such conditioning. For example, Jones and

Schmacher’s work on Muzak (1992) and Sterne’s analysis of the shopping malls

(1997) shows the various forces that music conditioning signifies. These authors

argue such conditioning is one element in the broad range of ideologically powerful

practices prevalent in post-fordist accumulation regimes.

Alongside this managerial, interpretive and critical work on recorded music, there is a

small literature on the history, practice and nature of performed music in work places

(Korczynski et al, 2005; Korczynski, 2002; Nissley, 2002). Such work highlights the

importance of social bonds and community building in work environments and the

often ambivalent or resistant approach taken by management to workers’ musical

performance. In some settings of course managers have moved in the opposite

direction and explicitly used music performance (of corporate songs and anthems) to

develop company culture (El-Sawad and Korczynski, this volume; Nissley and

Taylor et al, 2002; Nissley, 2002; Lynn, 2002:49-54).

12
In our view there is considerable scope for further research on music as it is used in

and around work environments. Such work might explore further the use and effect

of music on service workers or the impact of individualised listening to music in

contemporary workplaces. This work would for instance go beyond studies by

Oldham et al. (1995), and the references made by Bull (2000; Bull, 2005), and explore

the use of new portable music technologies in the workplace (e.g. iPod).

This overview of the changing role of music in regulating work has necessarily

focused on the broad patterns identified by different bodies of research. This should

not preclude researchers from examining cases which do not sit easily with these

broad patterns. El-Sawad and Korczynski’s work on the IBM songbook in this

special issue is a case in point. The songbook is regarded as a ‘extraordinary case’

that casts light on the ordinary. The extraordinary is the widespread singing of

corporate songs by managers and workers in an iconic USA firm. The ordinary is the

widespread absence of Western employers using music to actively engage workers in

the terrain of meaning-making (see also Nissley and Taylor et al, 2003; Nissely,

2002). This suggests a wider point for future scholarship – we should be as concerned

with understanding absences of music as much as with analysing the presence of

music in the regulation of work. Meanwhile the presence of actual musical recordings

or performance in work environments is only one way to explore music at work.

Connecting music and work methodologically

The founding figures of social science took an interest in music. Freud, as might be

expected, had something of ambivalent relationship to music. As Neil Cheshire notes

(1996) the great theorist of the unconscious boasted of his ‘disability’ with music but

13
maintained an in-depth knowledge and admiration of the great operas of his time (e.g.

Wagner). On occasion this knowledge was used metaphorically by Freud. For

instance he referred at times to patients as ‘the instrument [which] responds willingly

to the instrumentalist’s [Freud] confident touch’ (1996:1135). Marx also played with

musical metaphors. In his celebrated chapter on cooperation among workers in the

first volume of Capital, he alludes to the similarities between the manager and the

conductor.

All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing

authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual

activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the

action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its

separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra

requires a separate one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting,

becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour

under the control of capital, becomes co-operative. (1976:448-449)

This metaphorical approach to the relationship between music and management has

been developed in recent years by a range of organization analysts. Examples draw

lessons from Jazz or music theory to analyse organization and management problems

and issues (Albert and Bell, 2002; Humphreys et al, 2003, Hatch and Weick, 1998;

Sudin, 2002; Mantere and Sillince et al, 2002; Hunt and Stelluto et al, 2004). In the

midst of this literature there is a stream of work that treats music as a resource for

unpacking popular understandings of work and organizing. Here we can point to:

Clayre’s (1974) suggestive and wide-ranging analysis of images of work in ballads

and folk-songs; Porter’s (1992) systematic examination of English occupational

14
songs; and Foners’ (1975), Roscigno and Danaher’s (2003), and Lynch’s (2001)

analysis of labour movement songs. If we turn to more contemporary genres of

popular music there appears initially to be a striking absence of references to work. v

Frith, for instance, noted that music with ‘its intimations of fun, irresponsibility and

fulfillment’, had come to act as ‘an implicit critique of work’ (1981, p.265). The first

two papers in this special issue pick up this point.

Building in part on Charles Conrad’s analysis of country music lyrics (1988), these

two papers, by Carl Rhodes, and by David Sköld and Alf Rehn, explore the

presentation of management, business and work themes in the lyrics of prominent

Rock and Hip-Hop artists respectively (see also Rhodes, 2004). Skold and Rehms’s

explore the work of hip-hop stars for their engagement with the problematics of

entrepreneurship, business practice and authenticity, while Rhodes offers a mapping

and analysis of the position of work and utopian themes in rock lyrics. Both Rock and

Hip Hop present work and business in complex and contradictory ways. The

argument here is that while some prominent researchers have turned to jazz and

orchestral music of inspiration in understanding management and organiations

processes, popular music genres also offers resources (see Hatch and Weick, 1998)

and these two papers, we hope, set the scene for further scholarship in this area.

Connecting music and work theoretically

Alongside these empirical and methodological strands there is a third strand of work

that we wish to highlight here. While not represented in the three papers in this special

edition, we suggest that this strand provides an important backdrop, grounding and

site for the development of research into the relations between music and work.

15
Above we mentioned the cursory metaphorical points found in the writing of Freud

and Marx. The more potent and enduring treatment of music and work (understood

broadly as a social and political phenomenon) are found in the writings of Max

Weber, Theodor Adorno and Jacque Attali. Weber’s analysis of rationalization of

music (1958) as an exemplar of the same processes underway in other social realms,

along with Adorno’s critique of mass music culture (1990), and Attali’s (1990)

predictive analysis of the relation between musical forms and social structures all

provide important theoretical guides for further work. Attali, for example, argued that

music acts as a kind of barometer for the social and political structures emerging in

any one society. Music is simply the institutional field where such movements and

changes appear before it is possible to achieve their articulation elsewhere. Of course

the work of these authors has significance beyond management and organization

studies. But contributions to the problem of the relation between music and work, that

draw lessons from these key works (and extend and refine them), are possible. For

instance these themes can be found in Niina Koivunen’s recent paper on listening and

organization (2002), in Leanne Warren’s work on the importance of the ‘score’ in

the creation of organization (2001), and Martin Corbett’s paper entitled ‘Sound

Organization’ (2003). Each of these suggests important epistemological and

theoretical moves that could be further explored and extended.

Underpinning these papers is a common element: the critique of our epistemological

dependence on the ‘eye’. Corbett (2003) argues that organization scholars have been

bewitched and enslaved by a single epistemological organ – the eye. The

consequences of ocular-centrism are plain to see (see!). Our attention to image,

perception, and figure has tuned-out the ear as an epistemological ‘organ’. The ‘ear’

16
meanwhile with it preference for rhythm, harmony and temporality seems much better

placed to address the complex, chaotic and multi-layered character of organizing.

While the ‘eye’ locates us in space, in things, visions, perceptions, inscriptions,

foregrounds and backgrounds, the ‘ear’ tunes us ‘in’ to routines, performances, cycles,

relations, resonances, speaking and listening. The ‘ear’ is no less interested in patterns

than the ‘eye’ but suggests a different register that is more attuned to flow, movement,

noise, rhythmicity, synchronicity and, in some cases, harmonic structures where

particular set of practices, relations, and processes could be said to resonate (or not)

with each other.

An example and of this kind of work is Dale Cyphert’s ‘Learning to ‘Yo!’ (2001, see

also Cyphert, in press). Cyphert offers a rhetorical analysis of the work of a concrete

laying gang. Interestingly Cyphert began her study as an observer armed with a video

camera but ditched the camera and became a participant when the gang was short

handed. This change of positioning proved a revelation. She writes that after a while:

We quickly settled into a rhythmic harmony, the beat of the laborer’s signal
coordinating each individual’s actions and decisions into the collaborative
action of a concrete pour. An assertive, "Yo!" directed everyone in the group
to coordinate their various measurements, adjustments, and actions. (ibid.:)

Cybert’s work highlights the musicality of cooperative effort and challenges scholars

to explore the rhetorical communities created by the rhythms that work groups

achieve or develop when they engage in complex, coordinated tasks vi . Here music is

understood in its broadest sense as a property of work and organizing. Of course

‘musicality’ refers to our ability (or not) to coordinate our movements or responses to

actual music being broadcast or performed (to dance or sing along to a tune or

rhythm). Organizational musicality we would suggest has a similar meaning but

17
refers instead to our ability to adjust or adapt the character of our practices, e.g. their

rhythmicity, tonality and resonance in ways that make up or are defined the group or

organization in which we are embedded. Here the object of analysis is not music as an

aural ingredient added (or removed) from a particular workplace to enhance, dull or

provoke a particular experience (monotony, tedium, resistance etc). And neither is

music treated as an autonomous sphere of activity that hold’s metaphorical, symbolic

or representational clues to the nature of work and organizing. Rather in this stream of

work researchers might address our learned ability to be tune-in to (or not) rhythms,

codes and interactional processes involved in working with others. As already noted

Marx made much of the astonishing productive forces unleashed by cooperative

human effort (1967). His analysis assumes that ‘capital’ brought workers together and

the cooperative effort unleashed was largely a free gift to capital. Clearly cooperative

effort under capitalist relations is only one of the many modes of organization in

which the productive effort is realized through the power of cooperation. While some

economic organizations clearly appropriate the surplus effort produced by

organizational musicality, the reverse is also the case. As Hoskin (2004) notes

organizing processes create ‘in us’ an embodied sense of timing and spacing that

includes tempo, anticipation of others, and a sense of how to improvise around

routines. In other words, organizing processes create a sense of ‘organizational

musicality’. This dynamic is at once cultural, task and routine specific, embodied and

unconscious. It is in part what makes ‘organization’ more likely, if not possible in the

first instance.

Our brief discussion of these three streams of work aim at challenge researchers and

practitioners to exploring such themes and ideas. Yet at the core of this is, in our

18
voice, the challenge to the ‘ocular-centricism’ of organization studies. This special

issue contains a modest number of contributions and each in different ways is both a

part of this challenge, and a step toward the development of engaging forms of

sonorous management and organizational knowledge. While the theoretical

challenges to developing these forms of knowledge are significant, the

epistemological first move is quite modest. Rather than using one’s eyes and looking

for organization, we suggest that the first move is to explore the soundscapes of work

and organizations, and through this to take the epistemological step offered and start

listening to organizing.

Notes
i
The term ‘soundscape’ was coined in the late sixties by Canadian composer,
writer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer (Schaffer, 1969)
ii
See news report at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4418748.stm ( accessed
November 9, 2005)
iii
See
http://www.postworldindustries.com/audio/cd_inb_insurgentselections.html
iv
As Beynon (1983) and Corbett (1994) report workers were able to get
round this by developing the ‘Ford whisper’ – a mode of talking without
moving one’s lips, so that supervisors could not visually observe the
transgression.
v
See also MacInnes’ (1967) discussion of the relative absence of references
to work in the songs of the British music hall.
vi
This same dynamic would appear to be found also in the work of other
scholars using different conceptual frameworks: in Engstrom’s activity theory
(1987), Weick and Roberts’ work on collective mind/action (1993), in some
aspect of actor network analysis, and recently in Hoskin’s Foucauldian
analysis of timing and spacing systems as the basis of management (2004). In
Weick and Robert’s presentation of the ‘collective mind’ for instance they
explore our ability to act in concert where organizational reliability is
demanded. Their empirical example case is the flight operations of military

19
 aircraft carriers. As part of their illustration of this complex activity system
they note how pilots continually ask themselves ‘Does this feel right’, ‘Is the
rhythm right’. Here coordinated activity is accomplished by monitoring in a
heedful way the rhythm, flow and synchrony of the various decision and
material processes as they unfold. In our terms we might suggest that such
participants both affirm and explore the musicality of the flight operations
system.

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 Biographical notes

Craig Prichard teaches organizational change papers for the Department of

Management at Massey University. He gained his PhD from the University of
Nottingham and contributes to the field of critical management and
organization studies. He has published on higher education, creativity and
organizational discourse analysis.

Marek Korczynski is Professor of the Sociology of Work at Loughborough

University Business School. He gained his PhD from Warwick University. His
publications on the nature of service and sales jobs include the 2002
Macmillan/Palgrave book, Human Resource Management in Service Work,
and the 1999 Cornell University Press book, On the Front Line (co-authored).

Michael Elmes is Professor of Management in the Department of Management

at WPI in Worcester, Massachusetts. His research interests include workplace
resistance and ideological control, critical perspectives on spirituality-in-the-
workplace, the implementation of IT in organizations, organizations in the
natural environment, narrative and aesthetic perspectives on organizational
phenomena, and the psychodynamics of group and inter-group behavior. His
research has appeared in numerous management journals including the
Academy of Management Review and the Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science. He is also a co-editor of Managing the Organizational Melting Pot:
Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity (Sage Publications, 1997).

28

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