Like many newcomers to China before me, I struggled to comprehend the scale and ferocity of the productive forces that have changed Dongguan forever. According to my travelling companions, a young academic and four young female labour activists, Dongguan’s 10 million inhabitants form one physically indistinct node along an urban corridor that stretches for hundreds of kilometres beyond Guangdong province and across south China’s manufacturing heartlands. Perhaps as recently as 20 years ago, the broken concrete pavements upon which we walked and the broad roads along which our minibus rattled would have hosted fertile agricultural lands producing some of the region’s most cherished rice crops. Instead, the descendants of the villagers that once worked this land have found a new and on occasion spectacular source of wealth in the rents derived from the arrival of the factories and their workers.

The scale of what I surveyed was matched by a sense of its brutal functionality. These factories are no dark satanic mills but rather stark utilitarian places of labour, austere physical units of production barely indistinguishable from one another; and possibly from thousands of others in East Asia. Buildings both cheap and quick to erect, and fenced in by high block walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire, there was little visible to betray any effort to create some sense of corporate identity, pride or purpose beyond that conveyed by an occasional national flag fluttering in the warm breeze or by the Spartan, sometimes tatty corporate signage.

Perhaps this functionality could be equally understood in terms of instability, as Dongguan’s current predicament hints at an underlying impermanence. The 2008 financial crisis hit the area hard as orders were lost and the factories let workers go. Since then, according to my companions, few of the factory’s workforces have returned to pre-crisis levels and continuing labour shortages now besets Dongguan. Among the most visible signs of this, for me at least, were the numerous billboards, posters and leaflets pasted to factory walls and doors, or tied to street signs and lampposts proclaiming opportunities for employment. Work, these advertisements announce, is readily available for healthy workers aged 18 to 40 and the pay on offer for a 40-hour week is well above the local minimum. In the most conspicuous examples, the large lettering and bright eye-catching colours also seek to tempt itinerant workers with promises of social insurance and paid holidays, alongside vistas of the seemingly model factory beyond the high walls and the varied entertainments on offer to its workers. And yet the factories of Dongguan continue to struggle to recruit. Wages remain insufficient to meet the spiralling costs of rent and sustenance, the living conditions inside and outside the factories are lonely and unwelcoming, and the work insufficiently engaging. Labour turnover, I am told, can be as much as 50% each year. It is to deal with this labour ‘problem’ that some of Dongguan’s factories, themselves no more than a few years old, are looking to relocate to other parts of mainland China where labour is more plentiful and cheaper.

For the time being at least, the workers still muster a conspicuous presence on the streets of Dongguan’s industrial enclaves. Leaving the factories for lunch or when their shifts end, they spill onto the streets looking for somewhere to eat, refresh themselves, watch TV, telephone a loved one or simply escape their workplace. The ‘uniform’ of this new working class is the ubiquitous polo shirt, its youthful, preppy western signification reconfigured into a utilitarian industrialism that attributes the workers to their factories, and thus to the products that they make, according to the shade of blue, mauve, yellow or orange that they are wearing. To my eye, the bearers of these bright colours are young; some look very young indeed. And perhaps it is only the young that are willing and capable of uprooting themselves from families and friends in order to traverse China’s vast distances in search of a better life in Dongguan’s industrial districts.

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