A finished song hides the work that made it. Behind a release stand files passed from one person to another, versions approved and versions discarded, a vocal session that ran late and pushed back the mix, a contractor replaced halfway through, and someone deciding whether the singer needs a week off. None of this is heard. Most of it is not written down either, or is written down only when something goes wrong. This study reads a set of public records that try to turn that hidden work into questions before anyone has answered them, and it asks what those questions make visible and what they leave out.
The records come from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family. Dionyas does not publish judgments. Its list of 1,539 inquiries describes itself as editorial question design and gives its count of generated judgments as 0. Each inquiry is a question with a short title, a scope that says what it covers, a list of the material it would need, a boundary that says what it may not claim, and a state such as "awaiting judgment". Dionyas does not say who drafted the thirteen read here. What they offer is not a finding about the music business but a design for finding something out, written down and left open.
The research question and the contribution
The research question is this: how do inquiries about the operations of music production design their questions before any judgment, that is, which work between the finished works do they make into a question, what do they ask to be recorded, and whose work and terms do they leave outside the question?
The study reads thirteen inquiries chosen by one rule, set out in the method section, and makes two contributions. The first concerns the study of coordination. Read as this study frames it, that literature turns on whether the work that holds cooperation together is best captured in formal objects, such as lists, forms and schedules, or whether much of it is tacit, local and best left to the people who do it. The Dionyas inquiries take a clear side in the design of their questions: they make the handover, the passage of work and files from one hand to another, the thing to be examined, and they ask again and again what object should carry it. At the same time, this study reads each of their five cases as refusing to let one artefact stand for the work behind it. The second contribution concerns the debate on creative labour in music. That debate centres the conditions of the people who do project work in studios and cultural industries. The inquiries see those people from the side of whoever commissions the work. They ask how to commission, receive and replace outside work, and how to provide for a performer's rest without guessing at their health; they never ask what the outside worker is paid, or what the work costs the worker. The study names that design choice and its consequences without deciding any of the questions the records leave open.
Coordination, articulation work and boundary objects
One line of work holds that the division of labour is best understood by looking at the work rather than at the workers. Anselm Strauss, in Work and the Division of Labor (1985), draws a necessary distinction between work and workers, and among the matters it considers are the actor, accountability, and the division of rights as against the division of labour. That last pair matters here, because several of the inquiries ask whether the handing over of work and the handing over of rights are the same thing.
The same tradition gave a name to the work of fitting other work together. Elihu M. Gerson and Susan Leigh Star, in Analyzing Due Process in the Workplace (1986), hold that every office is an open system whose products result from decentralised negotiations, so that knowledge and procedures become inconsistent and there are no globally correct answers, only competing solutions. They call the reconciling of incommensurate assumptions and procedures articulation work, and argue that the problem has no formal solution but must be solved in practice through local closures. Lucy Suchman, in Making Work Visible (1995), takes up the claim that how people work is one of the best kept secrets, set against a literature that represents work in order to transform it. She asks for care about what making work visible implies, holds that it may be valuable for people to know their own work in ways others do not, and argues that people should be able to shape how their work appears to others.
A second strand asks what objects let different people work together without agreeing on everything. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, in Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects (1989), describe how the amateurs, professionals and administrators of a university museum of zoology managed the tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for general findings. Two activities were central: standardising methods and developing boundary objects, which adapt to different viewpoints yet keep their identity across them. They name four types: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardised forms. Paul R. Carlile, in A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries (2002), studies product development across four interdependent functions and describes knowledge as localised and embedded within a function, so that working across functions generates problematic boundaries; a boundary object is a means of representing, learning about and transforming knowledge at a given boundary. Beth A. Bechky, in Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities (2003), finds that misunderstandings between engineers, technicians and assemblers were rooted in different language, places of practice and ideas of the product, and were overcome by building common ground. Thomas W. Malone and Kevin Crowston, in The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination (1994), give the most general frame: coordination is the management of dependencies among activities, and its processes include those for shared resources, producer and consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints, and tasks and subtasks.
The debate, as this study puts it briefly, runs between formal objects and local practice. Boundary objects and coordination processes can be designed and written down; articulation work is partly invisible, and Suchman asks what making it visible implies. The Dionyas inquiries are a chance to see which way a published set of questions leans, and where it hesitates.
Creative labour in music
The second debate concerns the people who do the work. Andrew Leyshon, in The Software Slump? (2009), shows how software first encouraged a vertical disintegration of recording production and later, as cheaper digital rigs spread, ushered in a regime of distributed musical creativity that left the recording studio sector in a crisis of closures, redundancies and underemployment. Allan Watson, in 'Running a Studio's a Silly Business' (2013), draws on interviews with producers and engineers in London to describe a sector moving to temporary, project-based and freelance work, which shifts the pressure of finding work, and the financial risk of failing to, onto individuals and produces exhausting yet bulimic work regimes. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, in 'A Very Complicated Version of Freedom' (2010), find workers' experiences of pay, hours, insecurity and networking in three cultural industries, recording among them, at best highly ambivalent, with pleasure and obligation blurred, and conclude that policy has paid too little attention to creative workers' experiences. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, In the Social Factory? (2008), bring the theory of immaterial labour, writing on precarity and the empirical study of cultural work into dialogue, around affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity.
This study reads these works as asking what project-based production, and the change in the studio sector around it, mean for the people inside it. The Dionyas inquiries are about project-based production too. They are written, as the case sections show, from the position of whoever commissions, schedules and receives the work. The second debate is used here to see what that position includes and what it does not.
The paper proceeds as follows. The first section of the chapter sets out the data, the selection rule and the method, including what in the records is copied from inquiry to inquiry. The second reads how the inquiries make the handover the object of inquiry and doubt the single artefact. The third reads how they reach the worker, through agreement and refusal, and whom they leave outside. An appendix gives every record read, word for word. The conclusion returns to the two debates.