described in chapter 2. Moreover, applications in marketing provide access to ‘the question that philosophers have posed as the cornerstone of their most complex theoretical edifices: the relationship between subject and object’ (Hennion and Meadel 1989:191). To interrogate this relationship is to delve into the sociologically profound matter of how a species of organizationally sponsored agency – mood, energy, desire, action – is informed by and shaped up with reference to organizationalaesthetic materials. How and to what extent, then, is music, as one of the more subtle of these materials, a building material for the production of consumption?

Music in public places – the case of the retail sector

One of the most appropriate settings for investigating music’s ‘public’ powers is the retail sector, where, in recent years, the nature of consumption has undergone development and change. As it is characterized, the shift consists of a move from a utilitarian acquisition of needed objects (such as, when shoes wear out or when a forthcoming social engagement demands ‘appropriate’ dress) into a key component – particularly for the young, but increasingly the middle-aged as well – of identity construction. Indeed, identity construction and maintenance has become a leisure pursuit in its own right, through the various activities of self-care and cultivation such as body shaping, grooming procedures, therapy and the appropriation of ‘style’, where a good part of the pleasure associated with these pursuits is linked to the playing out of fantasy life (Bocock 1993; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Zepp 1986; Friedberg 1993; Bowlby 1985; Williams 1982). In short, the role of expressive action has expanded in late modern culture. At the level of practice, identity is now construed as put together in and through a range of identifications with aesthetic materials and representations, perhaps most clearly visible in the consumer realm where shopping is now about much more than status distinction (Campbell 1987; Baudrillard 1988; Featherstone et al. 1991; Bocock 1993). It is perhaps best encapsulated by Baudrillard’s, ‘I shop, therefore I am’, but also exemplified in the ways individuals interact with self-help literature (Lichterman 1992), museums (Macdonald 1998; Zolberg 1996) and new social movements (Hetherington 1998; Rojek 1995).

At the level of social theory, the Enlightenment tradition upheld by Max Weber’s (1970) belief that the realm of feeling and the romantic were perilous to proper citizenship (which also deeply concerned the critical theorists such as Adorno) has been counterposed, in recent years, to a Durkheimian emphasis on the cultural and aesthetic bases of the subject

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who is conceptualized as standing well inside the frame of cultural structures and is interpolated by them (Hetherington 1998:41–59). To delve into this matter in relation to the retail sector is to speak about the matter of how identities are constructed from within the technologically configured ‘landscapes of power’ (Zukin 1992), which in turn merges with the more general concern with the interface between material culture, social action and subjectivity as discussed in chapter 2.

Interest in the interaction between environment and emotional action is by no means new with regard to consumption; as Anne Friedberg has observed, nineteenth-century commentators viewed the large department stores as ‘machines’ for producing consumption, a metaphor that lives on in the discourse of 1990s shopping mall planners and their preoccupation with ‘generators, flow and pull’ (Friedberg 1993:112). With regard to music, it was not uncommon in the department stores of the early twentieth century for live music to be performed (for example, the pipe organ at the Philadelphia store, John Wannamakers). However, it was not until the advent of mechanically reproduced ‘muzak’ that in-store sound was converted from overt ‘entertainment’ to more subliminal ‘ambience’. Studying music’s in-store presence thus raises the question of how retail spaces may make designs upon the shopping subject, and how consumer agency is produced locally, in-store. Moreover, consideration of retail environments’ dependence upon and attempts to advance emotionally flexible, pliable consumer-subjects (as described below) draws together the otherwise incongruous disciplines of critical social theory and marketing research. It is in this context, then, that we need to conceptualize in-store music; it is deployed as a device of social ordering, an aesthetic means through which consumer agency may be articulated, changed and sustained. In this sense, the sociology of consumption cannot a ord to ignore the soundtrack of consumer purchasing.

Music is a ubiquitous feature of shopping. Wafting discreetly from concealed speakers or blaring from a prominent VDU, it is as integral to the artificial environment of the retail sector as climate control, lighting and interior design. Yet music’s presence has passed virtually unnoticed within the social sciences, where attention has been devoted to the field of vision in-store, to the mobilization of desire via ‘displayed’ objects. This ‘visualist’ conception of in-store subjectivity and its construction (BuckMorss 1977; Friedberg 1993) implicitly conceives of shopping as involving the gaze and the mobilization of the gaze.

Perhaps this is because the ears of sociologists, like those of the general public, are, as Adorno once observed (1976:51), passive. The eye, by contrast, attends selectively – it can close, rivet, avert itself – and so, Adorno suggests, it is linked more closely to consciousness. By anatomical design,

the ear is ‘always open’, less, as Richard Middleton puts it, ‘subjectively organized than the eye’ (1990:94). Moreover, sound objects are fleeting, mercurial; without musical training, it is di cult to ‘point’ to them or ‘see’ them, it is more di cult to be aware of and remember sound objects, as they are configured and reconfigured within an instant. Our conceptual vocabulary for music’s e ects and the mechanisms through which these e ects are produced is undeveloped. For these reasons music’s powers remain invisible and often fall into a residual category of analysis. (For example, one of the international chain stores we studied handled in-store music under the rubric of ‘Visuals’ (that is, store design).)

The sound of consumption

The ethnomusicologist Jonathan Sterne (1997) has developed this line of thinking in his study of a U.S. mega-mall, the Mall of America. Sterne conceives of music as a sonic ‘framing’ device, one that helps mall management to define and di erentiate and link together mall spaces through manipulations of the auditory environment. Following the notion that daily life poses a heterogeny of opportunities for existence, Sterne speaks of music as, ‘one of the energy flows (such as electricity or air) which continually produce . . . social space’ (1997:29). This idea is promising, but it does not go far enough to illuminate the actual mechanisms and moments through and within which such ‘flows’ are appropriated and get into action. If, moreover, we adhere to the concept of agency, in the sense that has been used so far in this book – as a capacity for emotional, embodied and cognitive being, the shaping up of action in relation to aesthetic parameters – we can apply that concept to the study of the retail sector by investigating the matter of how that sector engages in the activity of helping to sponsor or structure the materials with which agency is constructed in-store.

To be sure, the music of the retail space is organizationally sponsored; it is one of a range of devices by which forms of a ective agency can be understood to be placed on o er to shoppers who not only try on or try out goods, but who use the retail space to try on or try out new subject positions, identities and stances. Key, then, is that the shop can be seen to provide a ‘natural laboratory’, one within which actors may be followed as they are acted upon by aesthetic materials, that is, as those materials are deployed with particular organizational designs on the structure of its object – the structure of the consuming subject. We can also track actors as they enter, move around in and exit the aesthetic field of the retail scene, and we can observe, throughout that time, actors’ interactions with the material environments of those scenes. In short, the

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retail environment is a place where subjectivity and action may be examined as they are constituted in real time and in a sonic setting the parameters of which lie for the most part outside of actors’ control. The retail outlet is a useful enclave, then, for considering the matter of how music may function as an organizing device and the related issues of so-called ‘people management’ and ‘social control’. Here, music serves as part of a collection of cultural resources that can be used to create scenic specificity, and to place on o er modes of being. Deliberately and de facto, retail outlets seek to foster particular in-store cultures and images of implied clientele.

Clothes have always been carriers of meaning (Davis 1985; Lurie 1992; Mukerji 1994) and key resources for identity work, but their role as resources for identity work varies across age lines (Vincent 1995). Whereas the older women typically make fewer excursions to the shops and have in mind aims and objectives when they do and do not enjoy being distracted, younger women are more likely to view shopping as a leisure-time pursuit, more likely to visit a shop with no specific purchase in mind. The clothing purchases of older women are more likely to be linked to specific needs (professional and social) or to their household budgets. For these women, identity will be further removed, than for younger women, from how they look and its significance. It will be linked to matters such as professional standing, children, social roles and obligations. By contrast, younger women purchase things that help them expand and alter their self-perceived identities and images. Entities far more complex than clothes are being tried on in the changing rooms, where a dress becomes something that ‘fits’ or may be ‘grown into’ in a symbolic as well as a physical sense. Young women purchase things they believe to be ‘cool’ (this word was used repeatedly by shoppers observed in our study) or somehow expressive of how they feel or of images to which they aspire. In our own fieldwork, we viewed, time and time again, young people trying things on as an end in itself, as part of the formation of group culture, and as part of the project of identity work.

These are the kinds of shoppers most likely to make ‘impulse purchases’, unplanned, on-the-spot spending. Market researchers describe many of these impulse buys as ‘experiential purchases’, that is, purchases accompanied by emotional reactions such as ‘sudden desire to purchase, feeling of helplessness, feeling good, purchasing in response to moods and feeling guilty’ (Piron 1993:341). Key to the concept of the ‘experiential purchase’ is that the arena where desire is formulated as desire ‘for’ something is the in-store environment. The emotional dimension of shopping and the unplanned purchase is thus of major interest to market researchers, who suggest that up to 60 per cent of all purchase decisions