Recent scholarship has increasingly addressed the ways that social movements creatively use cultural products and themselves fashion new cultural creation. Because of its temporal synchronicity and its lyrical expression, music has been an especially powerful form of cultural expression. It is music's dual nature as a set of cultural objects and an activity fostering solidarity that explains its effectiveness for social movements. Music not only serves as an important resource for social movements but is also something they actively “do.”

What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors.

This chapter reviews the history of how the modern corporation developed as a form of socialized property. It enumerates some of the important consequences of those developments and briefly mentions recent trends. The empirical focus is the corporate revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the large publicly traded corporation became the dominant form of enterprise. The main point is that the socialization of property originated in the corporation when it was an extension of state power and over time retained its social character while shedding its accountability to the public.

This chapter describes how the fusion of financial and industrial capital structured the new segment's relation to the means of production and how the segment organized itself in pursuit of institutional class hegemony in the context of class conflict. It explains how the corporation altered the relationship of capitalists to the means of production and how the new class segment organized itself politically and socially. Marxists more accurately portray the enduring saliency of class in the twentieth-century United States (US), but they have too often neglected to specify exactly how different segments are related to the means of production or describe how the organization of the segments differs in specific historical contexts. The US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of a new segment of the capitalist class based on the fusion of financial and industrial capital in large corporations—the corporate class segment.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968. By Michael James Roberts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+254. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).William G. RoyWilliam G. RoyUCLA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 120, Number 5March 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679642 Views: 60Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

What are the potentials and limits of culture (in the sense of arts) to mitigate the alienation of manual work? How are these potentials and limits different in contrasting modes of production? Dudley's Guitar Makers epitomizes not only Becker's insistence that the art objects help explain how art operates but also Braverman's focus on the labor process in the social relations around the production of fine acoustic guitars. Korczynski's Songs of the Factory crosses the Becker/Braverman bridge from the other side, demonstrating how the workers at a blinds-making plant created a culture of sustenance and resistance through song and humor. The two books together reveal how music affords opportunities for mitigating alienation. A relational perspective is applied to conceptualize the social nature of music and work.

Journal Article Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States Get access Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States. By Ronald D. Cohen. (Crockett: Carquinez Press, 2010. x, 190 pp. Paper, $24.95, ISBN978-0-974412-48-1.) William G. Roy William G. Roy University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California billroy@soc.ucla.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 497–498, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar324 Published: 01 September 2011

The sociology of music has become a vibrant field of study in recent decades. While its proponents are well aware of this field's contributions and relevance, we focus here on demonstrating its merit to the broader sociological community. We do so by addressing the following questions: What is music, sociologically speaking? How do individuals and groups use music? How is the collective production of music made possible? How does music relate to broader social distinctions, especially class, race, and gender? Answering these questions reveals that music provides an important and engaging purchase on topics that are of great concern to sociologists of all stripes—topics that range from the microfoundations of interaction to the macro-level dynamics of inequality.

While much social science literature has analyzed the cultural bases of social movement, activity, and the content of cultural production by social movements, relatively little has been written about the concrete social relations within which social movements do culture. This paper addresses the issue of what social movements are doing when they produce culture. Four dimensions of social relations within which culture is enacted are identified: the division of labor, the relations of power, tuning in, and embeddedness. A contrast between the how the People's Songsters Movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s used American folk music illustrates how variation in these dimensions affects the effects that cultural production had on social movement outcomes.