Stayin’ Alive on the factory floor: An ethnography of the dialectics of music use in the routinized workplace

This article goes beyond a dichotomous view of music as either control or resistance by developing a theory of music use in routinized structures as a dialectical cultural practice that simultaneously enacts, and expresses an embodied sense of resistance to, the repetitively patterned social order. The findings from an ethnographic analysis of how workers used music in a Taylorized blinds factory support this approach. Workers used music to simultaneously enact the labor process and express an embodied sense of resistance to the structure in which they worked. They also used music to express their understanding of the alienating structure facing them, and to create communities to help them fight against the more debilitating aspects of the experience of alienation. The analysis also highlights the key role of contextual social relations in influencing the degree to which music use informs collective acts of resistance. The conclusion argues that we need to find out much more about the dialectical cultural practices embedded within labor processes that offer key ways of living with and against the structures of rational capitalism.

Research highlights
► Going beyond a dichotomous view of music as either control or resistance, the paper develops a theory of music use as a dialectical cultural practice that simultaneously enacts, and expresses an embodied sense of resistance to, the repetitively patterned social order.
► Workers used music to simultaneously enact the labor process and express an embodied sense of resistance to the structure in which they worked. They also used music to express their understanding of the alienating structure facing them, and to create communities to help them fight against the more debilitating aspects of the experience of alienation.
► The conclusion argues that we need to find out much more about the dialectical cultural practices embedded within labor processes that offer key ways of living with and against the structures of rational capitalism.