School staff
Professor Marek Korczynski BA, Liverpool; MA, PhD, Warwick
Head of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Group
Chair of Sociology of Work
My current research interests centre on the sociology of service work, on the relationship between music and work, and on the application of social theory to the arena of work.
Sociology of service work
In my research on service work, I have attempted to frame a sociological understanding of the nature of service work. To this end, I have put forward the concept of the customer-oriented bureaucracy as a theoretical tool to analyse the essential contradictions underpinning the nature of service work.
I have also argued that consumption in service work is framed by management’s promotion of an enchanting myth of sovereignty to customers. All this has important implications for how workers self-organise, and I have argued that service workers tend to form informal, but dense and important, communities of coping.
As such, emotional labour has important collective, social implications. My 2002 book, Human Resource Management in Service Work, brings together many of these arguments. They are also reprised in my chapter in the 2009 collection, Service Work: Critical Perspectives, which I edited with Cameron Macdonald. My other book in this area is the co-authored, On the Front Line, published in 1999 by Cornell University Press.
I continue to write on aspects of service work such as participation in decision-making, the nature of customer-worker relations, control, emotional labour, and trade unions. I am undertaking a project on the systematic analysis of ethnographies of service work, for which I have been awarded a grant from the British Academy.
I have successfully supervised 2 Ph.D. students in the sociology of service work – Victoria Bishop on job centre staff and customer abuse (joint supervision with Prof. Laurie Cohen), and Ken Brown on home care staff and surveillance technology. I currently co-supervise Zahra Amani, a Ph.D. student studying migrant women workers and emotional labour.
Lund University in Sweden is holding a conference on ‘Services, Markets, and Society’, at which I am a keynote speaker http://www.msm.lu.se/index.php?id=1544. I am also a plenary speaker at the stream on emotional and aesthetic labour at the 2010 Work, Employment and Society conference.
Music and work
While we spend many hours at work hardly any popular music even refers to the arena of work. For last 8 years I have been examining this gaping wound in our popular culture.
With colleagues, Mike Pickering (Social Sciences Dept., Loughborough) and Emma Robertson (Sheffield Hallam University), and with grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy, I have sought to chart the social history of how music has related to the arena of work – from the pre-industrial work songs common to many occupations, to the imposed musical silence of industrialisation, to the carefully controlled reintroduction of factory music through radio programmes such as Music While You Work.
We are currently writing all this up into an overview book to be published by Cambridge University Press, entitled Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in the British Isles. The Harbourtown music label have agreed to release a linked CD, entitled Rhythms of Labour: Work Songs of the British Isles – to be made up of work songs that have been recorded by disparate song collectors in the twentieth century.
Eliza Carthy, the noted folk musician who has been nominated twice for the Mercury prize, has given a concert at the university in which she gave her interpretations of some of these work songs. The concert was part of a wider series of events which was centred on the research and which was organised by the Loughborough University arts programme, RADAR. The research was also featured as the subject of the Radio 4 programme, Thinking Allowed, in January, 2010 (archived at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pktr5).
In addition, I am writing up ethnographic research completed on the role of radio music in survival on the factory floor. My 2007 article in Work and Occupations based on this research shows how workers can and do use popular songs to understand the workplace and to express resistance to management control.
Social theory and work
I have edited a book jointly with Prof. Randy Hodson (Ohio University) and Prof. Paul Edwards (Warwick University) on Social Theory at Work, published by Oxford University Press. The book brings together leading academics from Europe and the USA to analyse the role that different social theories have had in aiding the understanding of work.
I am currently writing an overview book, Work Sociology for Palgrave-Macmillan’s Management, Work and Organisation series. I was a member of the Editorial Board of Work, Employment and Society between 2004 and 2007.
I welcome enquiries from students interested in completing Ph.D. in the above areas as well as in other areas of employment relations and industrial sociology more generally (I currently co-supervise Fernando Duran-Palma on trade union responses in the Chile copper mining sector, and Joyce Jiang on collective action among migrant workers). Gladly, my teaching reflects my research interests.
I teach modules on service work (HRM in Service Industries, BSB045), Sociology of Work (BSA052), social theory and work (Organisational Theory and Practice, BSC095), and on music and work (Music, Work and Organisation, BSC092).
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