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What does music do within organizational settings?

It has been suggested above that music can be usefully conceived of as a device of scenic placement. It provides contextual cues (Gumperz 1977; DeNora 1986b) that can be used to shape up the meaning of character and situation. It works, within the scenes of ‘real life’ as it works in the cinema, bestowing meaning upon the actions and settings that transpire within its sonic frame (Brown 1994; Mundy 1999; Flinn 1992). As the manager of Persuasion put it during an interview, ‘When you’re trying something on, you picture yourself in a place where they are playing this kind of music.’ In similar vein, the manager of Directions opined, ‘The music is to get people into the mood of the style of the clothes and the store image.’ In retail settings, then, music can serve as a cultural material, a resource to which customers and sta can turn when, with varying levels of discursive awareness, they articulate and execute forms of agency, perhaps particularly under conditions of uncertainty. For example, customers may attend to the shop environment – music and décor – so as to form an overall impression of the setting and the goods purveyed, and also of themselves. Thus music’s secondary significations have an impact on the cognitive and interpretive dimension of consumer agency.

But the fact that music is, by definition, a temporal medium, and that it is capable of fluctuating from moment to moment, song to song, and tape to tape, means that music is also an ideal medium for corporeal and social forms of entrainment. Music adds rhythm and pace to settings, temporal qualities with which consumers may, perhaps mostly without conscious awareness, interact, to which they may adapt in (non-cognitive) embodied and emotional ways. Here, through its links to bodily conduct, music’s relationship to the ‘motional’ and emotional aspects of agency are often visible.

One of the most obvious topics in this regard is the connection between musical tempo and movement style. At Babe, fast-paced music is used to create activity and also to reinforce activity, to match fast flow. There, and in other stores, the sta we spoke with believed that fast music encouraged fast shopping. At sale time, when it is host to greater numbers of customers and more goods crammed into the shopping space, Mistral uses faster-paced, snappier music, the kind that may serve as inspiration and template for snappy bodily movements and – implicitly – snap decisions. In this regard, consumption behaviour can be understood – at least sometimes – as a kind of dance.

At other times, when business is slow, shops may attempt to hold customers in the store, to encourage them to look at things slowly, and to

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seduce them, ultimately, into handling the goods, trying them on and making a purchase. As the manager of Elysium put it, ‘Slow music creates a slower mood among sta and shoppers.’ There are a number of experimental studies of commercial or catering environments that have also reported correlations between ‘slow’ music and ‘slower’ patterns of behaviour (Milliman 1986; Roballey et al. 1985).

Beyond the link between music and bodily pace, however, are yet more intriguing issues concerning what one could think of as mundane choreography. These issues concern the interrelationship between musical rhythm, motional and emotional form. In a discussion of parallels between musical structures and choreographic structures perceived in dance performances, the music psychologists Carol Krumhansl and Diana Lynn Schenck have suggested that dance may express the ‘basic “kinetic feel” or “energy shape” of the music’ (1997:65). At the more workaday level of mundane movement, we observed in our ethnography of the retail scene a similar phenomenon that we came to term ‘brief body encounters with music’. These were moments – sometimes of only a second’s duration – where shoppers could be seen to ‘fall in’ with the music’s style and rhythm and where music was visibly profiling consumers’ comportment, where it had an impact on the mundane choreography of in-store movement. Some of the ‘brief encounters’ we witnessed consisted of snapping the fingers or nodding the head (to jazz), waving the hands, palms outwards (to show tunes), slowing movement, making it more fluid and putting the body in balletic postures and subtly raising the chin and head (to slow-paced, languorous music). All the managers we interviewed told us that they commonly observed customers engaging bodily with the music. In Euphoria, the manager told us it was common to see the young male customers ‘singing and dancing in front of the mirrors’. In Babe, young women frequently danced, especially in the changing rooms when they were trying on outfits. In Directions, ‘People dance around the store, especially when they are trying on stu ’, the manager told us. The manager of one of the local record shops was also quick to speak of how he saw people ‘singing and dancing all the time’. He described how he saw a variety of imitative behaviour, for example, when he plays a Tom Jones CD he sees male customers putting ‘a swagger in their walk’. (Conversely, he told us about ‘a certain country and western artist who, when played, empties the store, because it’s so depressing. So we don’t play him.’)

Dancing, toe-tapping, moving about in front of the mirrors, even singing, were all common occurrences in our study. Indeed, the matter of ‘mundane choreography’, or micro-stylistic changes in comportment and its relationship with social and cultural settings, is an area ripe for

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development within the field of sociology of everyday life. For how the body is entrained – the motional character of the body in music – may provide a basis for the formulation of emotional matters, energy levels and action styles; in other words, how one moves may provide, through gesture, as discussed in chapter 4, media for the autodidactic process of self-constitution in real time. Dance and/or mundane choreography are, in Scruton’s (1995) sense (and also discussed by Frith 1996:265–7), providing a means of grasping the (perceived) aesthetic character of music. ‘We should not study listening,’ Scruton argues, ‘which has so much in common with reading and looking, but dancing, which places music in the very centre of our bodily lives’ (quoted in Frith 1996:266). How one moves one’s body – and the connotations that one ascribes to those movements (‘funky’ or ‘graceful’) – is a resource that, once generated, can be used in turn to clarify or constitute the connotations of the merchandise displayed and its ‘desirability’ – cool versus uncool, sexy versus cheap, for example.

This bodily ‘falling in with’ music was evident in our ‘consumer shadowing expeditions’ (we shadowed a volunteer shopper such that both shopper and shadower wore clip-on microphones: the shopper was asked simply to ‘think out loud’ and the shadower commented on the volunteer’s activities. Tapes could be synchronized because they shared the same in-store soundtrack (see DeNora and Belcher 2000)). We found that, irrespective of what the volunteers said (and irrespective of what we said about the volunteers we were observing!), how they spoke turned out to be as important as what they said in so far as it seemed to correlate, noticeably, with the in-store aesthetic environment. For example, on a shopping expedition with a volunteer that included a spacious shop, decorated with fresh flowers, furniture and laid-back music from George Michael, both volunteer and shadower, who were some distance from each other, commented on how ‘nice’ the shop was, the volunteer commented that the shop was ‘quite relaxing’ and, on both tapes, voices audibly slowed, became less clipped and lowered in pitch.

Here, then, we can begin to get at possible connections between musical style and bodily conduct on the one hand, and bodily conduct, browsing and purchase activity on the other. According to the manager of Euphoria, ‘Music helps [customers] buy.’ What he means by this is that customers purchase products that have stylistic a nities with the background music and with the kind of corporeality that comes to be associated with that music – for example, ‘If drum-and-bass music is playing, they will buy street wear, if “clubby clubby” music is playing, they are more likely to purchase tight tops.’ Similarly, at Naked, the manager told us that the music may not increase the market niche that his store occupies

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locally (it is a specialist shoe store featuring ‘club wear’ style shoes and there are only so many members of the local population interested in this kind of shoes) but that it may ‘enhance’ his market share because the type of customers who come to him like the music and return to his store for the music (they are more intensely loyal to his store’s culture, and making a purchase in his store is a cultural act in its own right – that is, the store has a high semiotic profile). Conversely, the music provides a mechanism for sharpening his client image by repelling customers whose personal style would be less ‘cool’.

In all of these circumstances, the retail outlet produces potential sources of identification for the consumer, who may visit such a location as a kind of identity repository, as a storehouse of possible ways of being and possible stances. By making a purchase, the consumer is exporting a way of being from the shop and importing it into her or his personal repertory of modes of being, where it becomes a resource for the production of self-identity. In this sense, the shop, like the art gallery and the temple, is not only a distributor of fashion and trend, not only a promoter of commodities, but an instrument of social stability, of a particular version of order and its associated modes of consciousness and aesthetic agency. The retail outlet provides cultural resources that in turn structure agency; it is a setting in which the public – goods, images and ambiences – is transposed on to and serves to construct the private realm of subjectivity, value and expressive action. In this sense, music is employed to tune the spirit, to remind the faithful of its value commitments and to align agency with organizational images of model actors. It has the potential to operate at the connotative level and can put its recipients ‘in mind’ of other social situations, scenes and relations. This is precisely why there have been so many controversies about liturgical music over time. For example, when J.S. Bach was reprimanded in 1730 for including ‘new and hitherto unknown’ hymns in the liturgical service, ‘such an arbitrary procedure is not to be tolerated’, wrote the members of the Consistory of the Elector and Prince of Saxony to Bach’s boss, Dr Salomon Deyling, the Superintendent of the Thomas-Schule in Leipzig (David and Mendel 1966:118–19). Thus, just as Janice, owner of Persuasion, put it in reference to music’s role as a medium that fosters the mental and emotional tuning in a context where one might be wearing the garb one is trying on (‘When you’re trying something on you imagine yourself in a place where they’re playing this kind of music’), so, too, in situations ostensibly devoted to worship it is possible that music helps actors to picture their relation to God and to religious values. In both cases, sacred and profane, music helps to order consciousness, imagination and memory.