Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in semi-structured interviews within music research

This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.     

First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain

This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.     

‘CRASH’ – TOWARDS A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WHITENESS?

Critical whiteness studies has produced significant analysis of the terrors of white supremacist power. However, in relation to cultural-media studies pedagogy, impassioned calls for the denouncement of whiteness raise troublesome concerns and limits for productively addressing students' racialized identities. I maintain that renouncing whiteness in anti-racist teaching does not adequately connect with commonsense and affective experiences of ‘race’ in everyday life for many students. Through a ‘materialist’ analysis of the film Crash (2005), this article opens up the question of the im/possibility of engaging whiteness from an anti-racist stance that neither condemns nor buttresses white identity. Crash, considered from a reading practice that does not simply dwell on textual meaning and interpretation, offers an opportunity to pedagogically engage with the ambivalent representations of ‘race’ which pervade contemporary culture.     

Precious,Pure, Uncivilised,Vulnerable: Infant Embodiment in Australian Popular Media

This article describes how infants' bodies were portrayed in a range of Australian popular media texts. Four main discourses on infant embodiment were identified: the infant as ‘precious’, ‘pure’, ‘uncivilised’ and ‘vulnerable’. While, on the one hand, infants were positioned as the most valuable and affectively appealing of humans, they were alternatively represented as uncivilised. Infant bodies were portrayed as appropriately inhabiting the domestic sphere of the home and as barely tolerated or even as excluded in the public sphere. The discussion looks at how concepts of ‘nature’, civility and Self and Otherness underpinned the identified discourses.     

What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism,culture and the power of the information technology sector

This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’ to what we call ‘networked mobile personalisation’. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent ‘digitalisation’ of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism’s tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.     

Chamber music and organization theory: some typical organizational phenomena seen under the microscope

In this paper I suggest, on the one hand, that organization theory offers an interpretation of the reality of arts producing organizations and, on the other, that the empirical analysis of these realities can supply new input for organization theory. As a practical example of artistic production I refer to an international chamber music festival. Close inspection of chamber music will reveal characteristics that apply to any type of organization. I begin by looking at the nature of arts management and the arts manager. I go on to analyse the characteristics of the production process in the performing arts, which can be seen as communication taking place on three levels: between audience and performers (concept of ‘prosumer’); within the performing group (‘listening ability’); between the author of the written text and the performer/interpreter (‘concept of value’). I finish by showing how in a symboliccultural framework the features identified in the paper can feed back into organization studies.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets     

Boundaries of Frenchness: cultural citizenship and France’s middle-class North African second-generation

Based on 45 interviews in the Paris metropolitan area, I focus on the middle-class segment of France’s North African second-generation and use the framework of cultural citizenship to explain why these individuals continue to experience symbolic exclusion despite their attainment of a middle-class status. Even though they are successful in terms of professional and educational accomplishments and are assimilated by traditional measures, they nonetheless feel excluded from mainstream French society. Because of this exclusion, they do not feel they are perceived as full citizens. I also discuss how this segment of France’s second-generation draws boundaries around being French and how they relate to these boundaries. Despite their citizenship and their ties to France, they are often perceived as foreigners and have their ‘Frenchness’ contested by their compatriots. I argue they are denied cultural citizenship, because of their North African ethnic origin, which would allow them to be accepted by others as part of France. Applying cultural citizenship as an analytical framework provides an understanding of the socio-cultural realities of being a minority and reveals how citizenship operates in everyday life.     

Where the mystical meets the market: creativity and commerce in the production of popular music

Taking as my theme the familiar opposition between commerce and creativity, this paper contrasts different sociological approaches to the production of popular music and questions some of the assumptions about the rational nature of the market and mystical character of creative inspiration, that are often implied when these terms—‘creativity’ and ‘commerce’—are used in this binary oppositional manner. In arguing for a sociology of the mundane practices that produce‘commercial’ and ‘creative’ texts, I suggest that the production of popular music does not so much involve a conflict between commerce and creativity, but a struggle over what is creative, and what is to be commercial.     

Understanding the Alteration and Decline of a Music Scene: Observations from Rave Culture1

The sociological study of scenes—music and otherwise—has flourished in the latter twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Most research has documented a scene’s origins or its “evolution” into mainstream culture. Fewer studies have systematically addressed what leads to a scene’s alteration and decline, although many scholars have partially addressed it in authenticity studies anchored in the Frankfurt School’s claims about culture and economics. Are culture industries sufficient in explaining music scene transformation? The present article attempts to explain the cultural transformation of the Philadelphia rave scene and to articulate its relevance for other kinds of social worlds. Using a multimethod ethnographic approach, I show that five forces (generational schism, commercialization, cultural otherness/deviance and self destruction, social control, and genre‐based scene fragmentation) help explain the alteration and decline of the rave scene from its high point in the mid to late 1990s to its diminished and fragmented state presently. In describing these forces, I hope to move beyond culture industry narratives toward a broader explanation of cultural change, one that is lacking not only in music scene studies, but also in literatures on many other kinds of social worlds.     

Invisible,undervalued and excluded: Practicing working-class girlhood in affective space

In contemporary culture of Empire and its ‘cult of the self’, to be a young person means to be recognized, and the display of the self is read as a display of value. However, working-class girls who are economically oppressed, marked by a history of racialization, colonization, and stigmatization are assigned no value, thus remaining unrecognized. In this article, I explore the affective economies circulating for female youth who are navigating both marginal social conditions and experiences of long-standing exclusion in urban Canada. This article draws from a two-year long critical and visual ethnography conducted at a drop-in social service center for youth and the adjacent neighborhoods, where I explored the everyday gendered youth culture of a group of Canadian, working-class girls who are marked as ‘a problem’. Here I uncover the role of affect in working-class girls’ attempts to be recognized in various aspects of their everyday life. I also discuss how affective economies operate as the present expression of the girls’ collective histories to reveal the structures in place that produce the abject girl.     

Unpopular culture: The case of ‘white trash’

ABSTRACT

This article examines ‘white trash’ as a rhetorical identity in a discourse of difference that white Americans deploy in deciding what will count as whiteness in relation to the ‘social bottom’. Surveying historiographic efforts to valorize ‘poor whites’ in contrast to ‘white trash’, and tracking the redemption of ‘redneck’ as a popular identity, the author delineates how a pollution ideology maintains a portion of whites as fitting problematically into the body of whiteness. Rather than finding an authentic voice in the numerous, current uses of ‘white trash’ in a range of popular culture production, the author instead summarizes ‘white trash’ as an other within the popular — an unpopular culture.     

Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

The media of sociology: tight or loose translations?

Sociologists have increasingly come to recognize that the discipline has unduly privileged textual representations, but efforts to incorporate visual and other media are still only in their beginning. This paper develops an analysis of the ways objects of knowledge are translated into other media, in order to understand the visual practices of sociology and to point out unused possibilities. I argue that the discourse on visual sociology, by assuming that photographs are less objective than text, is based on an asymmetric media‐determinism and on a misleading notion of objectivity. Instead, I suggest to analyse media with the concept of translations. I introduce several kinds of translations, most centrally the distinction between tight and loose ones. I show that many sciences, such as biology, focus on tight translations, using a variety of media and manipulating both research objects and representations. Sociology, in contrast, uses both tight and loose translations, but uses the latter only for texts. For visuals, sociology restricts itself to what I call ‘the documentary’: focusing on mechanical recording technologies without manipulating either the object of research or the representation. I conclude by discussing three rare examples of what is largely excluded in sociology: visual loose translations, visual tight translations based on non‐mechanical recording technologies, and visual tight translations based on mechanical recording technologies that include the manipulation of both object and representation.     

DEEWAANA (the mad one): the lover of music

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as ‘social’ and ‘public’.     

Between sociology and the business school: critical studies of work,employment and organization in the UK

This is a paper about what happens when a form of knowledge moves to another part of the university. The author, identifying himself as an ‘ex‐sociologist’, investigates the relationship between the sociology of work, employment and organization and various ‘critical’ traditions within the business school. I argue that the contemporary divide between sociologies of work and employment, and Critical Management Studies (CMS) within the business school rests in part on developments in UK sociology in the 1960s and 70s. This means that divergent understandings of the role of sociology and its relevant theoretical resources provided the deep structure for the current tension between CMS on the one hand and research on work and employment on the other. The movement of sociologists and industrial relations academics to the business school provided the preconditions for two very different critical traditions. The paper concludes with thoughts on what it means to be an outsider inside an institution, and on the future prospects for Burawoy's ‘critical’ or ‘public’ sociologies in UK business schools.     

(Auto)Ethnography and cycling

This article discusses the formation, salience and reformation of everyday bodily routines and resources in relation to cycling; it also examines how we can study them ethnographically in different places. I discuss forms of embodied, sensuous and mobile ethnography that can illuminate how routines, habits and affective capacities of cycling are cultivated and performed. The article argues that autoethnography is particularly apt at illuminating the embodied qualities of movement, and it sits within established ethnographies of ‘excising’ and ‘mobile bodies’. In the second part of the article, I draw upon ongoing autoethnographies of cycling in a familiar place (my hometown, Copenhagen) and by learning to cycle ‘out-of-place’ (in London) and ‘in-a-new–way’ (when commuting long distance on a racer bike). The study challenges static notions of the body by analysing how cyclists’ (and researchers’) affective capacities develop as they practice cycling.     

Diasporic youth culture of K-pop

This study examines how diasporic Korean youth engage with the recent global circulation of South Korean pop music (‘K-pop’). It explores how young diasporic Koreans negotiate K-pop as an ethnic and/or global cultural form in their transition to adulthood. Drawing on interviews with young people of Korean heritage in Canada, the study addresses how a diasporic sound, which connects the nostalgia for the ancestral homeland and the global mediascape, is appropriated for young people’s identity work. By examining diasporic Korean fans’ consumption of K-pop, this study suggests a perspective for understanding the recent K-pop phenomenon as a diasporic youth cultural practice.     

Transnational spaces of exclusion in Glasgow: multi-story,photography and spatial practices

Mobilising what Jean-Marie Floch calls the semiotic square, this article explores the transition from ‘this thing’ (the car itself) to ‘that thing’ (the car in the advertisement) and what the concomitant transitivity between a global brand and a national culture can entail through a close textual analysis of British television and poster publicity for the Renault Clio, and in particular for the Clio III. Organised around the ludic rheme, ‘Twice the Va Va Voom’ and the critical valorisation, ‘French Car, British Designers’, the advertising campaign, launched in 2005, elaborates a double-code that sets up the idea of ‘country-of-origin’ as a contest, pitting Britain, in the guise of Ben, against France, in the guise of Sophie. Accordingly, I want to deal with the tension between sameness and difference in Anglo-French relations that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the publicity connotes in the context of the ‘entente cordiale’. I take into account its deployment of cultural stereotypes, addressing sex and gender identities, white nationalism and white foreignness, and the racial blind spots of the advertisement in comparison to the preceding ‘Va Va Voom’ campaign, which starred the black footballer Thierry Henry. At the same time, as we observe Ben and Sophie driving their respective Clios around London and Paris in the television advertisement, and the conjunction of London and Paris signified in the poster, the city is objectified as a kind of meeting point or passage for the negotiation of new social relations and networks that enunciate the transition from political to commercial globalism in the Single European Market.     

Affective Interaction as a Determinant of Musical Involvement*

Music may be understood as a structural representation, or symbolic “model,” of social interaction processes. Since music is a readily available expressive system in our society, individuals may use it as a socially meaningful symbolic medium within which they manage conflicting affective associations with interaction. Music listening then becomes one means by which individuals may maintain psychological well-being while adapting to complex social structures. Three initial points in this argument were examined, using high and low music listeners. High listeners were found to have more conflicting positive and negative affective associations with interaction than low or medium listeners, as measured by a TAT-type technique. The effect of role playing an affective interaction situation in an experimental design increased listening absorption in music for high but not for low listeners. High listeners were also more likely to describe musical effects in terms of symbolic participation in group processes.