From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

Conclusion Woody Guthrie's ashes were spread by the wind over the water from a Coney Island, New York pier a few days after he died on Oct. 3, 1967. His wife and children, including his 19-year-old son Arlo, were present as America's greatest folksinger was laid to rest. One of the last things Woody heard before he died was Arlo's recorded voice singing the draft-dodging tale of Alice's restaurant. He must have sensed that the spirit had been passed on. Woody Guthrie died just as the second great wave of popular interest in American folk music was coming to an end. Alice's Restaurant was in many ways one of its last echoes. The symbolism could not have been more poignant. At the center of the first folk revival, Woody Guthrie was a vital source of inspiration for the second.The new generation of singer-songwriters who marked the second wave was largely composed of those with at least some contact with the new mass higher education and those multi-versities that were built to dispense it. They were neither members of a déclassé elite, as could be said of Charles and Pete Seeger and John and Alan Lomax, nor were they authentic folk singers, like Woody Guthrie. Nor could they be. By the 1960s, the conditions that had created the possibility for the first wave of the movement had been irretrievably altered. After the Second World War, with a postwar economic expansion and population explosion under way, America was a different place. Besides, the first folk revival had already claimed authenticity as its own. For the most part, if there was any aspiration toward authenticity amongst the topical singer-songwriters (those in New York City in any case), it was to be as close a copy of the first generation, Guthrie and Seeger, as possible. Purism was the second wave's answer to the authenticity of the first.Being part of an expanding generation of white, college-educated youths affected the form and content of the music that characterized the second wave. The most obvious aspect of this was the arena of performance and the audience who filled it. Gone were the union halls, the singing in working-class bars and beerhalls and at Party functions, all of which had characterized the first wave. These were replaced first by coffee shops and small clubs, either in Greenwich Village or those surrounding college campuses. The forays into the South in support of the civil-rights movement were for the most part short-lived and highly symbolic, not to say self-serving. The real mass audience arrived with the antiwar activity and was largely university centered.It was also this audience that filled the auditoriums and concert halls for the more obviously commercial performances by the singer-songwriters of the second wave. This overlapping public provided the grounds for a new mass market in folk music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang in front of many mass demonstrations in protest against the war in Vietnam or in support of civil rights, were, although they saw themselves as carrying on in the spirit of the Weavers, an entirely commercial creation. In the article from the East Village Other cited above, written just after the first big concert in America against the war in Vietnam, Izzy Young angrily notes that everybody was a part of it except the people managed by Albert Grossman - Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan. When the war in Vietnam became popular, three years later, Peter, Paul and Mary flew down to Washington, D.C. to take their place in front of the cameras.Commercial rationality was much more a factor in defining the second folk revival than the first. The possibilities were greater and the structure of the music industry was different. With a new mass market still in the process of formation and thus unspecified in terms of taste, the larger record companies could afford to take a liberal attitude and to include under their label, all the revolutionaries, as Columbia Records proudly announced in its contemporary advertising. Commercial possibilities thus were more important in shaping the musical form and content of second folk revival than politics, which were so central to the first. As opposed to the old left, the new left was a loosely organized contingent of organizations and groups with little coordination between them. In fact, many if not most of the organizations were ad hoc committees formed for a specific strike or demonstration. No one group was thus in a position to exert ideological hegemony. Following from this, at least during the period under discussion, there was little political dogmatism to be found. With no powerful organization to impose it, there was no clear political line to defend and thus to sing about. Even the notion of the people, so central to the first folk revival, was relatively absent in the second. Who were the people addressed? Certainly not the working class or even the common man. I am just a student, Sir, I only want to learn, sang Phil Ochs.During the second folk revival, the people had become the silent majority, the province of the conservative right. Neither in music nor in politics did the new left make many attempts to reach the common man in the street. The people had been massified, according to new left theory, and in the new one-dimensional mass society the grounds of political and social identity were always shifting. Besides, country music had already established itself as the musical genre of the rural, southern, western and white, common man. From a commercial point of view, there was little need to look for authenticity or the people; the market was sufficiently large and getting larger as more and more young people entered the institutions of higher education. Politically, this was not a serious problem either, as long as the aim was not revolution as it had been for the old left. It was sufficient, then, to address the masses of youngsters gathering together at institutions of higher education. If there was a revolution at foot, this was it.While the first wave practically had to invent folk music, the second could draw on the reservoir of public culture that to a large extent resulted from this invention. The networks and institutional support provided by the old left and the personal authority of a figure like Alan Lomax made possible the imposition of rather strict criteria for determining in what exactly folk music consisted. Neither networks nor gatekeepers were so determinate to the second wave. With the folksong and folksinger already invented, the new generation could pick and choose from a rather wide range of options. In addition, by the time the new left and the topical-song movement achieved at least a semblance of cohesion, folk music was already institutionally supported by radical entrepreneurs like Izzy Young and the more commercial recording industry. There were, thus, strong institutional bases for folk music outside of politics. Politics, in other words, was not the only game in town. But neither was commerce. The civil-rights movement and the new social movements that developed out of it opened for a short period a space, a public arena, in which the idea of folk music could be reinvented anew. Within this space the traditions constituted during the first wave of folk revival were experimented with and modified in light of the new social and historical context. America was not the same place in the 1960s as it had been in the 1930s and neither could its folk music be. The actors, the setting, and the songs were all different, yet still the same.In attempting to account for both this continuity and change in the two waves of folk revival we have drawn from both the cognitive approach to the study of social movements, which calls attention to the creative role of social-movement actors in the production of knowledge, and the production of culture perspective, which highlights the effects of institutional arrangements in the production of cultural goods. From the former, we have focused on the changing character of movement intellectuals, those to whom Ralph Rinzler in the epigraph that begins this article gave special place; from the latter, we have noted how, among other things, the changing nature of the recording industry helped recast the folk music revival. We hope that the foregoing has demonstrated that in combining these approaches, as well as areas of research interest, we have uncovered aspects of the folk revival others may have missed.     

An Exploration of the Meaning and Consequences of Workaholism

Although much has been written aboutworkaholism, rigorous research andtheoretical development on the topic is in its infancy.We integrate literature from multiple disciplines andoffer a definition of workaholic behavior. We identify three types ofworkaholic behavior patterns: compulsive-dependent,perfectionist, and achievement-oriented workaholism. Apreliminary model is proposed; it identifies potential linkages between each type of workaholismpattern and important outcomes such as performance, joband life satisfaction, and turnover. Specificpropositions for future research are articulated. Weconclude that, depending on the type of workaholicbehavior pattern, workaholism can be good or bad, andits consequences may be experienced or evaluateddifferently by individuals, organizations, and societyat large. Researchers and managers should avoidmaking judgments about the positive or negative effectsof workaholism until more carefully controlled researchhas been published.     

On the shrinkage of local linear curve estimators

Local linear curve estimators are typically constructed using a compactly supported kernel, which minimizes edge effects and (in the case of the Epanechnikov kernel) optimizes asymptotic performance in a mean square sense. The use of compactly supported kernels can produce numerical problems, however. A common remedy is ridging, which may be viewed as shrinkage of the local linear estimator towards the origin. In this paper we propose a general form of shrinkage, and suggest that, in practice, shrinkage be towards a proper curve estimator. For the latter we propose a local linear estimator based on an infinitely supported kernel. This approach is resistant against selection of too large a shrinkage parameter, which can impair performance when shrinkage is towards the origin. It also removes problems of numerical instability resulting from using a compactly supported kernel, and enjoys very good mean squared error properties.     

Reading,writing and word processing: Toward a phenomenology of the computer age

Ethnographers read cultures and in writing inscribe memory into texts; in literature, a reading is a dialogue with a writer through the medium the text, and writing translates text into action. In a study of humanists using the microcomputer as a writing technology, changes were perceived in the phenomenology of writing, the writer's relation to the text, and the relation to the reader. Typists remarked that the computer enabled them to recover a spoken voice because the screen gave the text a processual and temporal form which replaced the inflexible typed page. Handwriters often remarked that the computer changed humanistic craft labor into industrial production: the screen gave privilege to the lexical in place of the graphic; the sentence replaced the paragraph as a unit of meaning; writing became a medium for transmitting information rather than an artistic performance. Humanists perceived that technical norms were embedded in technical culture and software, and that the computer marked a shift in the reward structure of their professions toward productivity and efficiency. This suggests three issues for the writing crafts of ethnographers. Electronic memory may replace the interpretive text, making fieldnotes public and treating them as information. The technical capacity to organize fieldnotes in data bases may shift the fieldworker's conception of knowledge from interpretation to information. And consuming the norms and concepts of technical culture may shift the craftlike norms of the field worker's culture.

—Mallarme

     

Scientific management and class relations

Conclusion It has been the contention of this article that the true significance of the scientific management movement lies in what it can tell us about the engineering profession. Scientific management was not simply capitalist ideology, nor were the engineers who developed it simply the prisoners of capitalist ideology. Instead, scientific management was the product of the insertion of once-independent engineers into the complex, collective labor process in large corporations. It reflects both their inability to break loose fully from the dominant ideology and the fact that their interests as engineers were in conflict with the interests of their capitalist employers.The significance of this point, however, lies beyond the experience of turn-of-the-century shop culture engineers. For, if even as unpromising a group as the scientific managers could develop a program with implications inimical to the interests of capital, what of other, less commercialized groups? We have already seen that the early school-based engineers initiated a professionalizing project that included a claim to autonomy that was incompatible with the needs of their employers. It seems clear that the engineer's status as an employee, albeit an employee in an ambiguous position in the labor process, constitutes a basis for the development of conflicts with capitalist employers. This has been the thrust of our earlier discussion of the process of class formation. Gramsci's analysis of the situation of engineers in capitalist class relations, then, may not be without foundation:With the urban intellectuals it is another matter. Factory technicians do not exercise any political function over the instrumental masses, or at least this is a phase that has been superseded. Sometimes, rather, the contrary takes place, and the instrumental masses, at least in the person of their own organic intellectuals, exercise a political influence on the technicians.It may very well be that engineers, given a more militant labor movement, a more penetrating ideology, or a weaker capitalist class, could find themselves on the same side as more subordinate employees in conflicts with their employers.It is all the more important, then, that we understand the process by which American engineers have been domesticated. This has not happened automatically; far from it. Although there are ambiguities in the engineer's situation that make this process easier, the rapprochement of engineers with capital has had to be made. In this regard, the active intervention of business interests has been of particular importance, especially their efforts in fostering among engineers a safe variant of professionalism.Nor does this historical lesson apply only to engineers. For, there are other professional occupations that, increasingly, find themselves in situations comparable to engineers. Accountants, nurses, teachers, even certain kinds of lawyers have long been employed in large numbers by complex organizations. More recently, even doctors have begun to experience the condition of being an employee. For each of these occupations, we must avoid the easy assumption that there is something inherent in their social structural position that leads them into an accommodation with capital. On the contrary, as with engineers, we must stress the existence of real conflicts generated by capitalist relations of production, and then examine each occupation historically, asking what specific circumstances explain why its members do or do not enter into explicit conflict with their employers. However, while we must be aware of the possibility that professionals can (and sometimes do) enter into conflict with their employers, we also need to be sensitive to the complexity of the structural position of many professionals. Many professionals find themselves in positions of authority of some kind - either over subordinate workers in the case of engineers, or over clients in the case of doctors. This can be conducive to the attitude that the professionals' interests are different from those of the groups over which they have authority, or that their interests are the same as their employers'. Alternatively, as we saw in the case of engineers, this structural ambiguity may promote the formation of narrow occupational ideologies among professionals - i.e., the idea that their interests differ from those of both employers and subordinates. Therefore, while we need to be aware of the existence of employer/ professional conflict, we also need to recognize the existence of barriers to, and complexities within, the evolution of such conflicts.It is with this in mind that this article has stressed the importance of developing an adequate approach to the process of class formation. To restate briefly some of the arguments made earlier, the process of class formation in capitalist society is set in motion by the antagonisms inherent in capitalist relations of production. This is not, however, all that we need to know about the process of class formation - we also need to recognize the existence of both objective and historical barriers to this process. Nevertheless, one must be clear about what exactly these barriers are. There is, for example, an important difference between the relations of production that constitute class in the first place and workers' functions in the labor process. Similarly, one should not confuse barriers to the process of class formation with full-fledged class divisions. If we fail to distinguish among these various factors, we will be in danger of artificially placing a class barrier between engineers and other forms of wage-labor. If, on the other hand, we do make these distinctions, we will be able to account for both engineers' opposition to their employers and their domestication.

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An analysis of simple counting methods for ordering incomplete ordinal data

Measurement in the social sciences often involves an attempt to completely order a set of entities on the basis of an underlying attribute. However, limitations of the measurement process often prevent complete empirical determination of the desired ordering. Nevertheless, the ordinal data obtained from the measurement process can be used in attempting to recover or construct more of the underlying order than is provided by the data. Previous research (Fishburn and Gehrlein, 1974a) has shown that a simple one-stage construction method, referred to as the cardinal rule, is fairly effective in correctly identifying ordered pairs in the underlying linear order that are not identified by the measurement process. The present paper re-examines the cardinal rule from the perspective of construction methods based on simple counting measures derived from the data, and argues that it is the best one-stage method in this class when a natural monotonicity assumption holds for the measurement process. The paper then examines two-stage construction rules that are based on the cardinal rule and the simple counting measures. It is shown that one of the two-stage rules gives better overall results than does the cardinal rule by itself.     

Specification of nonverbal behaviors for clinical assessment

Nine categories of nonverbal behavior (extremity movements, self-manipulations, facial expression, posture, orienting, gestures, voice quality/tone, speech rate/pressure, and sense of timing) were tested in a standardized role play situation of social skills. Each category was judged using a new midi-level system of assessment which permitted specification of component behaviors but allowed observers to make single ratings at the ends of videotaped episodes. The midi-level measurements were as reliable and practical as more traditional global measures of social skill and social anxiety. Midis were superior to globals (i.e., single overall ratings of skill and anxiety) in terms of predicting physiological indices of social anxiety. Voice quality/tone and sense of timing appeared to be the best predictors of criterion social skill measures and self-manipulations, extremity movements, and gestures had the highest weights in predicting criterion measures of social anxiety.