Drawing from a participant‐observer study of volunteering in the context of UK music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from (1) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communitas’ frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and (3) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo‐normative forms of ideological control.
The current article argues that video-based methodologies offer unique potential for multimodal research applications. Multimodal research, further, can respond to the problem of “elusive knowledges,” that is, tacit, aesthetic, and embodied aspects of organizational life that are difficult to articulate in traditional methodological paradigms. We argue that the multimodal qualities of video, including but not limited to its visual properties, provide a scaffold for translating embodied, tacit, and aesthetic knowledge into discursive and textual forms, enabling the representation of organizational knowledge through academic discourse. First, we outline the problem of representation by comparing different forms of elusive knowledge, framing this problem as one of cross-modal translation. Second, we describe how video’s unique affordances place it in an ideal position to address this problem. Third, we demonstrate how video-based solutions can contribute to research, providing examples both from the literature and our own applied case work as models for video-based approaches. Finally, we discuss the implications and limitations of the proposed video approaches as a methodological support.
Johansson, M. and Toraldo, M. L. (2017) 'From mosh pit to posh pit': Festival imagery in the context of the boutique festival. Culture and Organization, 23(3), pp. 220-237. (doi:10.1080/14759551.2015.1032287) This is the author's final accepted version.There may be differences between this version and the published version. This paper addresses market-based cultural production in the context of the UK festival field, with a focus on the framing of the festival experience through anticipation. In particular, boutique festivals are discussed as examples of a contemporary cultural 'product category' which has emerged and proliferated in the last decade. Through discourse analysis of media representations of boutique festivals we situate the boutique festival in a broader sociocultural discourse of agency and choice, which makes it meaningful and desirable, and outline the type of consumer it is meant to attract. For the contemporary consumer the boutique festival is presented as an anticipated experience based on countercultural festival imagery, whilst simultaneously framing cultural participation through consumption. The paper contributes to a wider debate on the construction of the consumer in the cultural economy.
This paper contributes to debates about craft authenticity by turning attention to the craft imaginary. We suggest that the significance of craft stems from its role in constructing an alternative social imaginary that challenges dominant, modernist imaginaries of industrial production and consumption. Our focus is on the role of imaginaries in determining how societies, communities, organizations and individuals embody temporal relations to the past that extend into the present and future. We show how the craft imaginary comprises histories, traditions, places and bodies and use this to develop a distinction between the imaginary of craft-in-the-past and future-oriented craft imaginaries. Through this, we seek to highlight the organizational possibilities of craft as a source of innovation, inclusivity and disruption.
The Organization of Craft WorkThis edited book focuses on the organization and meaning of craft work in contemporary society. It considers the relationship between craft and place and how this enables the construction of a meaningful relationship with objects of production and consumption. The book explores the signifi cance of raw materials, the relationship between the body, the crafted object and the mind, and the importance of skill, knowledge and learning in the making process. Through this, it raises important questions about the role of craft in facing future challenges by challenging the logic of globalized production and consumption.The Organization of Craft Work encompasses international analyses from the United States, France, Italy, Australia, Canada, the UK and Japan involving a diverse range of sectors, including brewing, food and wine production, clothing and shoemaking, and perfumery. The book will be of interest to students and academic researchers in organization studies, marketing and consumer behaviour, business ethics, entrepreneurship, sociology of work, human resource management, cultural studies, geography and fashion and design. In addition, the book will be of interest to practitioners and organizations with an interest in the development and promotion of craft work.
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