Here’s the trailer, though you can’t hear the exchange about passports.

At the UK border there are signs remarking on (not apologising for) the delays in passing through border control. These signs invite you, the good citizen, to celebrate the stricter checks for blocking incomers, they normalise and institutitonalise your fear of the other. The eyes of the border guard needn’t worry you, red passport holder, you’re allowed through. But they’re sharp eyes, nonetheless and you might still flinch at the gaze of power.

So when the border guard is staring down the queue, not at the person in front of her, you wonder what, who she’s looking for. But she’s got soft eyes, that’s unexpected. She’s looking for the crying baby, and stands up to go and bring the baby’s family to the front of the queue. There’s a moment of care in amongst the regime of control.

I wonder if jobs that are made up of looking are tedious because they require repetitive glances at bland faces, or exciting because there is always something to see – someone new. I wonder also what it’s like to look for the shock, the unexpected, the wrong, the absent, the abnormal. It’s a difficult mental process, I guess. And I wonder also at the pleasures of power.

The set of photos by Suzanne Lee/Panos London, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hypertheorising of supermodernity. Here, an older story of gender, family and work is on display. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s discovery of freedom and subject status through their entry into taxi driving. For Meenu Vadera, director of the Azad Foundation which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giving women citizenship: the driving license is a document which proves existence.

Photo by Suzanne Lee for Panos London

One of the women interviewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own identity other than a wife and mother.” There is extensive research to show how paid work provides empowerment and connection and freedom, but taxi driving differs from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobility is a way of gaining subjectivity, of becoming a person; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it matters what the mobility is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake?

It seems here that it is work as much as mobility, that offers this subject status, and mobilities research should take work seriously. The female taxi driver challenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Running a taxi, of course, is not merely a process of learning how to negotiate those city streets with that machine, but of negotiating the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the challenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only customers she considers are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I wonder and worry about the dangerous customers. However empowering it is to learn to drive, being at the vanguard of gender equality and working as a driver is a risky place.

References

1. Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
   Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.

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

Walking matters to get to work and leave again; look at Alan Bates as Vic Brown in A Kind of Loving, trying to track Ingrid when the buzzer goes and all the staff of Dawson Whittaker walk out of the gates; walking here is flirting (from c 4 minutes into this clip).

But we don’t often think about walking as a way of doing work. It is one of many dimensions of working lives that is taken for granted: the sales assistant rushes from fitting room to clothes rail and back again in response to a customer request, or the administrator wanders down the corridor to ask a favour, workers in Durand’s Peugeot factory must walk sideways, as they work up the line, and they walk to the store area to get more equipment, carrying double the amount they’re supposed to, to save needing to take another trip.

Walking is often a taken for granted bodily movement, an action most of us do often and unthinkingly, the leg swing, foot levering and the many tiny but essential adjustments the body makes at each step. It is integral to many forms of work as skill, training and knowledge are, though we might only notice it when we or someone else can’t manage it.

References

1. Durand, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France. Palgrave Macmillan.
2. A Kind of Loving (1962) dir John Schlesinger.