Description:
Marek Korczynski reports on his ethnographic fieldwork in a British factory to show how workers make often-grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes:
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"