Serving Time: Volunteer Work, Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

• Author: Gianluigi Mangia,Gazi Islam,Maria Laura Toraldo
• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12414

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

Serving Time: Volunteer Work, Liminality and the

Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

Maria Laura Toraldoa, Gazi Islamb and Gianluigi Mangiac

aUniversità della Svizzera italiana; bGrenoble Ecol e de Management/U. Gren oble Alpes ComUE-

IREGE an d Insper; cUniversity Feder ico II of Naples

ABST RACT Drawing from a par ticipant-observer study of volunteering in t he context of UK

music festivals, we ex amine how the sense of meaningfu lness and community relate to inst ru-

mental goals of consu mption and eff iciency. We argue th at the liminal nature of the fest ival

setting support s an ambivalence in which meaning fulness is established th rough construc tions

of community, while the commod ification of community feeli ngs leads to heterogeneous

understandi ngs of the work setting. Our find ings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was

rendered meaning ful by festival volunteers, rangi ng from (1) A commodity fr ame, character-

izing work as dr udgery seek ing ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communita s’ frame, empha-

sizing a tra nscendental sense of collective immed iacy and (3) A cynical frame, where

communitas di scourse is used instrumenta lly by both managers and workers. We discuss

meaningf ul work as caught between creative community and ideolog ical mystification, a nd

how alternative workspace s vacillate between emancipatory pr inciples of solidarity and

neo-normative forms of ideolog ical control.

Keywo rds: meaningfu l work, lim inality, music festivals, tran sitory spaces, volunteer

INTRODUCTION

When power wants to make people forget, music is ritual...when it wants them to

believe, music is enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is

reproduced, normalized. Attali 2009, p. 20

Morning: work at Park. Conversation with Rudi around chakras and colour

energy. I cleaned the toilets. Sutcliffe, 2003, p. 168

Journal of Man agement Studi es 56:3 May 2019

doi: 10.1111/ jom s.124 14

Address for re prints: Gazi Isl am, Grenoble Ecole de Management/U. Grenoble A lpes ComUE-IREGE a nd

Insper (gislamster@gmail.com).

618 M. Laura Toraldo et al.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

Contemporary work is increasingly marked by discourses of meaningfulness, self-

expression and personal fulfilment (e.g., Bailey et al., 2016; Brannan et al., 2015; Fleming,

2009). Combining work and personal satisfaction with a critique of bureaucratic ‘tradi-

tional’ work, contemporary organizations imbue labour with a new meaningfulness, in-

citing both praise and cynicism (Endrissat et al., 2015; Fleming and Spicer, 2007). While

meaningful work is existentially fulfilling and personally satisfying (Shershow, 2005), it

also brings up issues of control around the encroachment of organizations into the pri-

vate sphere (Bailey et al., 2016). Especially where work is unpaid, invisible or precarious

(e.g., O’Toole and Grey, 2015), meaningfulness may obscure inadequate working con-

ditions and the instrumentalization of social relations for economic ends. Increasingly,

scholars are noting how the ‘new spirits’ (Du Gay and Morgan, 2013) of self-expressive

and meaningful work, demonstrate tensions between emancipation and new forms of

ideological control (e.g., Bailey et al., 2016; Bunderson and Thompson, 2009; Fleming

and Sturdy, 2011), by which positive work climates are promoted instrumentally to mask

workplace exploitation. This work increasingly questioned how such tensions in work-

place meaningfulness are experience in practice by workers (Ekman, 2014; Endrissat

et al., 2015; Mitra and Buzzanell, 2017).

Considering meaningfulness as a source of workplace control and commodification

is particularly salient where work involves the liminal aspects of society: the transitory,

in-between spaces where norms are symbolically bracketed and alternative configura-

tions of meaningfulness can emerge (e.g., Dale and Burrell, 2008; Shortt, 2015; Turner,

1969). Looking to liminality recognizes that meaningfulness is not only a question of

work tasks, but of the way that work is positioned in relations of social production con-

sumption, and collective life more generally. Liminal spaces mark the interstices of social

structures and point towards the limits of society, yet also are moments of renewing the

social; as both a ground and limit to the social, liminal spaces are described as central to

establishing a sense of collective unity or ‘communitas’ (Esposito, 2013; Turner, 1969).

However, in situations where social interactions are the basis for productive economic

activity, liminality may open up ‘spaces for capital’ (Harvey, 2001), where meaningful col-

laboration supports capital accumulation. Early theorizing on liminality (Turner, 1969)

in rituals and festivals recognized this ambivalence between communitas and control, an

ambivalence which parallels tensions described in the meaningful work literature (e.g.,

Bailey et al., 2016; Bunderson and Thompson, 2009). This ambivalence is at the core

of liminality. On the one hand, liminality represents the limits of the everyday, and is

used in ritual to mark a utopian outside of authentic communal experience and mean-

ingfulness (Islam, 2015; Lips-Wiersma and Wright, 2012). On the other hand, harness-

ing liminality through ritualized spaces and ceremony is a quintessential part of social

control (Turner, 1969; see also Cohen, 1985). Festival volunteer work (see Chen, 2009;

Lucas, 2014) provides an ideal context for understanding how the ambivalence of work

in liminal spaces is experienced in practice.

Festivals operate on the frontier between work and pleasure, tight organization and

‘creative chaos’ (Chen, 2009). Festivals are temporary, mobile and focused on the expres-

sion of desire and communal celebration (Parker, 2011; Toraldo and Islam, 2017). This

liminal character of festivals most probably influences work experiences, as scholarship

Uses of Meaningfulness 619

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

around liminality at work suggests (e.g., Howard-Grenville et al., 2011; Shortt, 2015;

Sturdy et al., 2006). While liminality involves communitas (Esposito, 2013; Turner, 1969),

evoking feelings of transcendence and unity that are closely aligned with current concep-

tualizations of meaningfulness (Lips-Wiersma and Wright, 2012), we know little about

the ambivalence of communitas as a source of both meaningfulness and exploitation.

With this objective in mind, we explore the research question: How does festival work

create opportunities for meaningful experience, and how are the ambivalent features of

such work experienced in practice?

To address the ambivalence of meaningful work, we report the results of a case study

of music festival volunteering, exploring how otherwise tedious and exploitative work

may be experienced as meaningful, enlightening or socially valuable. Studying festival

volunteers (i.e., workers receiving only free entry or other nominal compensation), al-

lows us to examine how work is experienced as being rewarding for participants, while

simultaneously entrenching forms of control by ideologically masking work’s economic

instrumentality (O’Toole and Grey, 2015). Although volunteering is not historically a

new phenomenon, examining volunteering work can reveal insights for contemporary

labour transformations on the dimensions of temporary work, liminal work and commu-

nity-oriented practices (O’Toole and Grey, 2015).

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. First, we discuss the ambivalence of

meaningful work in its relation to new forms of normative control, and we describe how

festival spaces frame liminality to affect the work experience. Liminality, associated with

a sense of social unity or communitas, draws volunteers to festival work and rational-

izes volunteers’ willingness to work without pay (e.g., Barron and Rihova, 2011). Next,

we describe the findings of an in-depth, participant-observer study of three UK-based

music festivals, where communitas was used by organizers to infuse meaning into work

and to obscure its monotony, while volunteers used communitarian rhetoric to build

relational bonds and reframe consumption practices as socially-conscious action. Finally,

we discuss our findings’ implications for understanding meaningful work within liminal

spaces, offering resources to understand ideological control at work, while evaluating the

emancipatory possibilities for meaningful work.

THE AM BIVALENCE OF MEA NINGFUL WORK

Meaningful work is characterized as being ‘particularly significant and holding more

positive meaning for individuals’ (Rosso et al., 2010, p. 95), and is of growing interest to

management scholars (Bailey et al., 2016; Dempsey and Sanders, 2010; Lips-Wiersma

and Morris, 2009; Yeoman, 2014a, 2014b). Although interest in meaningfulness itself is

not new, its challenge to traditional bureaucratic control is attracting renewed attention

(e.g., Aguinis and Glavas, 2017; Bailey and Madden, 2017). This is particularly so in

contemporary work settings that are both sources of self-expression and also marked by

precarity (see Petriglier i et al., 2018; Vallas a nd Prener, 2012). How to think of mean ing-

fulness in the instability of ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000) is an ongoing question.

Increasingly, scholars are exploring the emancipatory possibilities of meaningful work

(e.g., Aguinis and Glavas, 2017; Yeoman, 2014a, 2014b), while some are investigating