Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance
Marek Korczynski
Abstract
This book examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. It shows how workers make often grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, the book draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life. Music, the book argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regim ... More
This book examines the role that popular music plays in workers' culture on the factory floor. It shows how workers make often grueling assembly-line work tolerable by permeating their workday with pop music on the radio. The first ethnographic study of musical culture in an industrial workplace, the book draws on socio-musicology, cultural studies, and sociology of work, combining theoretical development, methodological innovation, and a vitality that brings the musical culture of the factory workers to life. Music, the book argues, allows workers both to fulfill their social roles in a regimented industrial environment and to express a sense of resistance to this social order. The book highlights the extensive forms of informal collective resistance within this factory, and argues that the musically informed culture played a key role in sustaining these collective acts of resistance. As well as providing a rich picture of the musical culture and associated forms of resistance in the factory, the book also puts forward new theoretical concepts that have currency in other workplaces and in other rationalized spheres of society.
Keywords:
popular music,
factory floor,
assembly-line work,
factory workers,
musical culture,
industrial workplace,
collective resistance
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780801451546 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801451546.001.0001 |
