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