This thesis investigates the socio-political effects of music listening in the contemporary workplace. Existing studies at the crossroads of music and work cover, on the one hand, the histories of music in the workplace, and on the other, the functional, psychological and scientific nature of music at work. However, few studies to date take a critical sociological approach to music listening in the modern workplace. The following research provides such analysis, informed by theory from both studies of work and employment and music studies.
Four case studies were selected for analysis, presenting data from a variety of workplace environments: Amazon warehouse workers, Uber drivers, US and UK postal workers, and commercial truck drivers. For each case study, multiple online forums were combed for data referring to music listening, which was then coded under themes derived from themes arising within existing literature in music and work studies: namely, control, resistance, and musical experience. By contextualising this authentic data from online communities within critical sociology, the aim was to explore the role music listening plays in the politics of the contemporary workplace.
Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis of workers’ experience, the study shows that music listening plays a significant role in control and resistance in the workplace. Control is experienced via music listening through concrete rules, technological surveillance, and ideologies of work—specifically ‘common sense’ and ‘customer service’ ideologies. Music listening was also found to play an important role in resistance in the workplace, be that with regards to specific union or otherwise organised action, or acts of misbehaviour and rebellion. In the latter case, music listening technologies such as headphones and aux cables were central to workers’ resistance. Musical experience was also shown to have significant implications for social relations at work: music listening helps people get through the working day because of its effects on the mind and body, while also representing a site of community-building and solidarity-forming, with the online spaces surveyed providing spaces in which workers share, discuss, and debate musical experience.
