Marek Korczynski

Cameron MacDonald

Everyday, we are bombarded with advertising images of the smiling service worker. The book is written with the aim of focusing beneath the surface of these fairy tale images, to seek out and understand the reality of service workers’ experience. Within the sociology of work and related literatures, there are an increasing number of empirical studies of different types of service work, but there has been little progress in attempts to theorize the nature of service work, per se. This book fills this gap by bringing together major scholars from the US and UK who use a range of critical perspectives to explore key elements in the organization and experience of contemporary service work. It will make an invaluable secondary text for advanced undergraduates and graduates studying courses/modules such as sociology of work, industrial sociology, social theory and work, organization studies, and organizational theory.

Critical Perspectives

Service Work

Michael Pickering

Emma Robertson

Whether for weavers at the handloom, labourers at the plough or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialisation. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical silence reigned with industrialisation, until the carefully controlled introduction of Music while You Work in the 1940s. Continuing the analysis to the present day, Rhythms of Labour explains how workers have clung to and reclaimed popular music on the radio in desperate and creative ways.

Music at Work in Britain

Rhythms of Labour

Randy Hodson

Paul K. Edwards

This study offers a comprehensive review of all major classical and contemporary social and economic theories and the way they aid our understanding of work.

Social Theory at Work

Whether for weavers at the handloom, laborers at the plough, or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialization. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical silence reigned with industrialization, until the carefully controlled introduction of Music While You Work in the 1940s. Continuing the analysis to the present day, Rhythms of Labor explains how workers have clung to and reclaimed popular music on the radio in desperate and creative ways.

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.

Marek Korczynski

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