Songs of the Factory

Marek Korczynski is Chair in Sociology of Work at the Nottingham University Business School. He is coauthor of On the Front Line, also from Cornell, and Rhythms of Labour and author of Human Resource Management in Service Work.

• 1. Reach Out I'll Be There: Pop Music, Work, and Society2. Stayin' Alive at McTells3. I Got All My Sisters with Me: Music and Community4. Music, Machines, and Clocks: Songs and the Senses of Alienation5. You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk: Music as Aid to Work and Critique of Taylorism6. Pop Songs and the Hidden Injuries (and Joys) of Class7. Collective Resistance on the Shop Floor8. Dotted Lines on the Shop Floor: Cultural Connections with Collective Resistance9. Conclusion: Pop Music, Culture, and ResistanceAppendix: An Ethnography of Working and of MusickingReferencesIndex

Marek Korczynski makes an enriching contribution to the study of workers' informal organization in the workplace.... Songs of the Factory is a real contribution to the development of a sociology of music as well as to the sociology of work. We learn from it how to make use of musicking as a conceptual approach to thinking about music's social functions, and we get some fresh insight into what Korczynski likes to call the 'with and against' of wage labor.- Richard Flacks (American Journal of Sociology) Music is complex, and people use it in differently complex ways. Rather than reducing both expressive culture and its participants to flat caricatures, we ought to investigate real settings and explore the variety of ways music functions in peoples' lives. This is what Korczynski has done, and we are better for it.- John Pippen (Notes)