Music and Work

Conceptual Overview

At the core, relations between music and organization studies are empirical studies of the use of music in industrial work environments. These show that subject to some conditions (e.g., the complexity of the task), background music increases work performance, enhances mood, and reduces workplace turnover. This modern usage can be regarded as continuous with, and [Page 939]a development on, preindustrial practices. Historians, folklorists, and anthropologists report that in nonindustrial and preindustrial settings, work songs and musical instruments were used extensively to coordinate activity, manage work groups, and assert occupational identities. As with factories, so too with consumer environments and interactions; psychologists have shown that background music has a positive effect on consumer spending and turnover, reduces frustration at queuing, and supports the adoption of helpful forms of behavior. Here also differences in type, tempo, complexity, and volume of music can have a bearing on a consumer's experience of time in a particular space and have a positive impact on consumer spending.

Musical conditioning of work and consumer environments is meanwhile part of a broader movement that includes usage in medical, educational, and military fields, including, for example, music therapy and the use of music as a nonlethal weapon. The latter use might be regarded as an appropriation of popular protest strategies such as the Charivari—a medieval practice used to voice discontent with authorities or toward those whom the community considered moral transgressors. Purposive and instrumental use of music has attracted critical analysis. For instance, Simon Jones and Thomas Schumacher's work on Muzak and Jonathan Sterne's analysis of the use of music in shopping malls make the point that musical conditioning is one element in the broad range of ideologically powerful practices prevalent in Fordist and post-Fordist accumulation regimes.

Along with its usefulness for empirical work, music also provides a rich conceptual resource for organization studies. Scholars have studied musical groups, musical genres (such as jazz), and music theory to illuminate organizational phenomena. For example, music theory has been used by Stuart Albert and Geoffrey Bell to analyze the composition of seemingly unplanned events. It also uses song lyrics to explore popular understanding of work and organizations. For instance, see Charles Conrad's analysis of country music lyrics, Carl Rhodes's work on rock lyrics, and David Sköld and Alf Rehn's analysis of management, business, and work themes in the lyrics of prominent hip-hop artists.

Meanwhile a third more recent strand of work takes a more methodological route. Possibly inspired by the work of Theodore Adorno or Jacques Attali, this work includes a number of new, critical, and challenging agendas for organization studies. Central here is the epistemological challenge to what Martin Corbett refers to as organization studies'ocularcentrism. Corbett argues that scholars of organization have been bewitched and enslaved by a single epistemological organ—the eye. Our attention to image, perception, and figure has tuned out the ear as an epistemological organ. Such analysis would suggest that the ear, meanwhile, with its preference for rhythm, harmony, and temporality, seems much better placed to address the complex, chaotic, and multilayered character of organizing. The eye locates us in space, in things, visions, perceptions, inscriptions, foregrounds, and backgrounds, but the ear tunes us in to routines, performances, cycles, relations, resonances, speaking, and listening. The ear is no less interested in patterns than the eye but suggests a different register—more attuned perhaps to flow, movement, noise, rhythm, synchronicity, and in some cases, harmonic structures, where particular sets of practices, relations, and processes could be said to resonate (or not) with each other.

...