No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

Whilst there are ever-increasing oppor­tun­it­ies to explore work in the new eco­nomy through altern­at­ive medi­ums, here in organ­iz­a­tion stud­ies (a dis­tinct­ive, though I hope wel­come, cousin of the soci­ology of work move­ment), we often equate sen­sual forms of know­ing with all things visual. Not to dis­miss this visual turn of course: it helps us to cap­ture the more emotive dimen­sions of work that can­not simply be reduced to logo­centric accounts, as artic­u­lated by many organ­iz­a­tional the­or­ists in a far more elo­quent fash­ion than my own mus­ings (e.g. Strati, 2000; Hopfl and Lin­stead; Han­cock, 2003). How­ever, whilst this ocu­lar seduc­tion of the work­place takes place, little is writ­ten on the other sen­sual dimen­sions of work­ing — and even less of which is empir­ic­ally explored. 

In light of this, and my own interest in sound, I began to con­sider the aur­al­ity of our work­ing lives. There is a dis­par­ate lit­er­at­ure explor­ing the rela­tion­ship between music at work, either through music as a cul­tural aide, as seen in Niss­ley et al’s (2002) study of com­pany songs, or the role of music in the dom­in­a­tion – or sub­ver­sion – of work­space (e.g. Lanza, 2004; Kor­czyn­ski and Jones, 2006). How­ever, music is ‘tamed sound’, often intrins­ic­ally linked to some form of pro­duc­tion (Attali, 2006), and has been cre­ated and pack­aged prior to con­trib­ut­ing to one’s sonic envir­on­ment. In com­par­ison, sound is ‘live’: it can be affected and have an effect the social set­ting; it is a response and an ini­ti­ator, impro­vised or fleet­ing, imbued with mean­ing but also tran­scend­ing a dimen­sion of know­ing by hav­ing sub­con­scious or other effects at a sen­sual level. The excit­ing poten­tials of explor­ing these dimen­sions in rela­tion to work have already been dis­cussed by a few organ­iz­a­tional schol­ars, though pub­lished work is rarely found. For example, Corbett (2003) has demon­strated sound and hear­ing were part of the organ­iz­ing pro­cess as far back as the middle ages, whilst Koci­atkiewicz and Kostera (2003: 308) chal­lenge the concept of ‘no sound’ being defined in only neg­at­ive terms through explor­ing the role of silence in one IT firm. Such stud­ies not only high­light the insepar­ab­il­ity of sound and silence, both being forms of ‘noise’ and reli­ant on one another, but chal­lenge us to look towards an acous­timo­logy of work. 

We only have to reflect on our own exper­i­ences to see the poten­tial aven­ues wait­ing to be heard. As I write this, I can hear the frantic tap­ping of my col­league next door (she seems to be far more pro­duct­ive that I am…), the sound of someone in the gents — some­times, but not always, fol­lowed by the sound of water run­ning out of the taps, and the buzz of my faulty lamp that shows little sign of being replaced. Becom­ing excited about the poten­tial of explor­ing the aur­al­ity of work­ing lives, I decided to ask a num­ber to people to record their day at work. This was met with hes­it­a­tion: not only did they fear that this might involved some tricky nego­ti­ations with their col­leagues, but they found the idea of any­one hav­ing to listen back to record­ing of eight or more hours of ‘banal bor­ing blah‘; a form of tedium pre­vi­ously unknown to man. As an altern­at­ive, they were asked to record ‘going to work’, set­ting the recorder run­ning when they star­ted to think about work (for most, as soon as they got up) and switch it off when they decided that they were ‘at work’ (although many chose to leave it run­ning until the digital record­ing space ran out). After receiv­ing the record­ing and listen­ing to it over and over, I met up with each of the ‘co-composers’ a num­ber of times where we either listened and dis­cussed the record­ing together or I asked ques­tions within a more con­ven­tional research inter­ac­tion. Through both aural and qual­it­at­ive ana­lysis, sound­scapes for each ‘going to work’ epis­ode were recor­ded. Here are two of them: jour­ney to work 1
jour­ney to work 2.

Of course, sound­scapes have a long his­tory in research inter­ven­tions. The work of early pion­eers of the explor­ing sound and the envir­on­ment, not­ably R. Mur­ray Schafer, a Cana­dian com­poser and musi­co­lo­gist whose sem­inal series ‘World Sound­scape Pro­ject: The Acous­tics of the Envir­on­ment (1971), sig­nalled a new way of think­ing about the envir­on­ment through the medium of music by con­sid­er­ing what con­sti­tuted noise in over 200 com­munit­ies across the world. Mur­ray argues the ‘acous­tic iden­tity’ of people’s daily lives was been taken over by the mass of indus­trial noise to the det­ri­ment of their well­being. Cit­ies across the developed world, that have unique­ness in their geo­graphy, land­scapes, archi­tec­ture and people are becom­ing increas­ingly homo­gen­ised aur­ally, acous­tic ‘non-places’, to use Augé’s (1995) term. In order to acknow­ledge our respons­ib­il­ity within (and to) our sonic envir­on­ment, Schafer argues we must con­sider ourselves as the audi­ence, the per­former and the com­poser sim­ul­tan­eously (1977: 205) In order to explore his ideas fur­ther, Schafer went on a mis­sion to ‘hear Van­couver’ with an acous­tic stroll through the city. 

I feel far more attached to my own col­lec­tion of sound­scapes than any other research pro­ject. It is tempt­ing (and of course inev­it­able) that I will have to at some point accom­pany them with the textual-based ana­lysis that I under­took when com­pos­ing them, should I wish to extol the vir­tues of using sound­scapes as a medium for explor­ing work­ing life. How­ever, bey­ond being a lens through which to explore other phe­nom­ena, I have found that the sound­scapes have allowed me to not only think about the rep­res­ent­a­tion of sound, but the express­ive exper­i­ence of sound, some­thing that now makes me hes­it­ant to erase the noise I encounter in my other research interactions. 

Ref­er­ences

1. Attali, J. (2006) Noise: The Polit­ical Eco­nomy of Music, Lon­don: Uni­ver­sity of Min­estota Press.
2. Augé, M. (1995) Non-places, intro­duc­tion to an anthro­po­logy of super­mod­ern­ity, Lon­don: Verso. 
3. Corbett, J.M. (2003) ‘Sound organ­isa­tion: A brief his­tory of psycho­sonic man­age­ment’, Eph­em­era 3(4): #1
4. Koci­atkiewicz, J. and M. Kostera (2003) ‘Shad­ows of Silence’, Eph­em­era 3(4): #5.
5. Hopfl, H. (2000) ‘The aes­thetic approach in organ­iz­a­tion stud­ies’, in S. Lin­stead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aes­thet­ics of Organ­iz­a­tion, Lon­don: Sage, pp. 13–34 
6. Han­cock, P. (2003) ‘Beau­ti­ful untrue things — Aes­thet­i­ciz­ing the cor­por­ate cul­ture industry’, in A. Carr and P. Han­cock (eds) Art and Aes­thet­ics at Work, Basing­s­toke : Pal­grave, pp. 174 — 194 
7. Kor­czyn­ski, M. and Jones, K. (2006) ‘‘Instru­mental Music? The Social Ori­gins of Broad­cast Music in Brit­ish Factor­ies, Pop­u­lar Music, 25(2): 145–164.
8. Lanza, J. (2004) Elev­ator Music A Sur­real His­tory of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Mood­song. Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press.
9. Niss­ley, N. S.S. Taylor and O. But­ler (2002) ‘The power of organ­iz­a­tional song: An organ­iz­a­tional dis­course an aes­thetic expres­sion of organ­iz­a­tional cul­ture’, Tamara: Journal of Crit­ical Post­mod­ern Organ­iz­a­tion Sci­ence 2(1), pp. 47–62.
10. Schafer, R.M (1977) The Sound­scape: Our Sonic Envir­on­ment and the Tun­ing of the World . Ver­mont: Rochester.
11. Strati, A. (2000) ‘The aes­thetic approach in organ­iz­a­tion stud­ies’, in S. Lin­stead and H. Höpfl (eds) The Aes­thet­ics of Organ­iz­a­tion, Lon­don: Sage, pp. 13–34 

In 1982, Miriam Glucks­mann pub­lished a book about the exper­i­ence of women work­ing ‘on the line’ at a fact­ory in West Lon­don which pro­duced speedo­met­ers for cars. She had left her higher edu­ca­tion teach­ing job to work in this fact­ory, not with the inten­tion of pro­du­cing an eth­no­graphy, nor with any illu­sions of ‘join­ing the work­ing class’, but as some­thing which arose from her involve­ment in fem­in­ist and social­ist polit­ics. When she later decided to write about and pub­lish her account, she was obliged for legal reas­ons to do so under a pseud­onym, Ruth Cav­endish. Last year, Rout­ledge decided to repub­lish Women on the Line, with a new intro­duc­tion, and this time, under Glucksmann’s real name. Here Miriam Glucks­mann responds to some ques­tions posed by Dawn Lyon about the ori­ginal book and its repub­lic­a­tion in 2009. (more…)

Richard Alcock in The Guard­ian writes today about the ever-increasing pay gap in the UK between rich and poor. I do like his idea that pro­fes­sional hater Melanie Phil­lips be nom­in­ated for a nice big pay cut to see the effect on her work motiv­a­tion (though if Alcock’s eco­nom­istic account of what drives people to work harder is true, a pay cut will make Phil­lips put in more hours, and that can only mean more diatribe.)

How­ever, I’ve never met an eco­nom­ist with a reas­on­able explan­a­tion for human beha­viour. (more…)

Dawn and I recently watched Mes­rine: Killer Instinct and Mes­rine: Pub­lic Enemy Num­ber 1, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Jacques Mes­rine, France’s most fam­ous bank rob­ber. Apart from a brief period work­ing in an architect’s prac­tice, Mes­rine (played by Vin­cent Cas­sel) made a liv­ing from illegal activ­it­ies. A pro­fes­sional crim­inal has to do more than rob one bank, kill one thug. He must com­mit to the life, wear the bul­let scars and break out of the pris­ons that try to con­tain him. Dick Hobbs says a pro­fes­sional crim­inal isn’t one who works full time as a crim­inal, (more…)

Earlier this year, I star­ted hanging around Billings­gate, London’s whole­sale fish mar­ket. I tell the fish mer­chants there that I’m try­ing to under­stand the whole pro­cess, of where the fish comes from and goes to, how it gets dis­trib­uted, who’s selling what, and more gen­er­ally what goes on at the mar­ket. It’s part of an ongo­ing pro­ject on fish, on all the work that’s involved in brin­ing fish ‘from sea to table’. ‘Well, if you really want to under­stand, you should come and work for me one day!’ Roger, a long-established fish mer­chant at Billings­gate, chal­lenges me. ‘OK,’ I say, ‘When can I come?’ We arrange a Sat­urday in Novem­ber so I can see things when it’s busy, Roger insists. I start to pre­pare myself. ‘You’ll need water­proof boots and a body warmer,’ he instructs me – and a lot of nerve, I think. (more…)

What’s the fast­est grow­ing occu­pa­tion in the UK, quiz-fiends? Well, the smart-Alecs amongst you will point out that with unem­ploy­ment rising, there’s very little growth in any part of the labour mar­ket. But you will have slipped into the trap (more…)

In tune

I recently went to the work­shop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was tak­ing his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and oth­er­wise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attend­ing to the fin­ish rather than the sound. Appar­ently there is value in lay­ers of var­nish and Roger is cau­tious. It seems to me that he’s sort of ‘read­ing the wood’ as he looks at the instru­ment, and he knows not to touch where he can’t be sure of the impact of chan­ging some­thing. ‘No, you wouldn’t want to do that…’ he con­cludes. (more…)

I toured the dental lab at the Uni­ver­sity of Essex’s Southend cam­pus, and this set of ‘prac­tice teeth’ caught my eye.

Before stu­dents are allowed to touch a patient, they get a set of false teeth caked in fake plaque to hone their scrap­ing tech­nique on. I thought that the hard part would be deal­ing with the teeth at their dirti­est, but it turns out that scrap­ing is more of a chal­lenge as the teeth get cleaner. This means that the stu­dents start with few skills but an easy task. Who makes these dirty fake teeth?

Visual Soci­ology

Inter­na­tional Visual Soci­ology Asso­ci­ation: http://www.visualsociology.org/

Brit­ish Soci­olo­gical Asso­ci­ation Visual Soci­ology Study Group: http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/

Visual Soci­ology, A Field Guide: http://visualsociology.wordpress.com/

Soci­olo­gical Images: http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/search/label/work

(more…)

Nik Rose’s con­cep­tu­al­isa­tion of the late mod­ern self as being com­pelled to engage in the act­ive gov­ernance of the soul has been pro­voc­at­ive for those who study inter­me­di­ary work. Inter­n­al­ising norms of self-exploitation, to work harder, longer, faster, to let work dom­in­ate ‘the social’ (more…)