Speakers: Dr Yvonne Kiely (Dublin City University) & Dr Jim Rogers (Dublin City University),
Moderated by Dr. Carolina Matos (City St George's, University of London)
Abstract
In their research of power and music organisations, Jim Rogers and Yvonne Kiely have adopted different theoretical perspectives and arrived at complementary conclusions, which highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to studying organisational power. In this webinar, they combine their findings into a framework for analysing how music organisations strategically respond to their societal contexts.
In his macro-level, social/political-economic analysis of who owns copyrights in music industries and the impact of digitalisation, Rogers finds that major labels have repeatedly fuelled a ‘crisis of digitalisation’ narrative that frames file sharing, streaming, and now AI, as threats to the music industry ecosystem. While pushing this rhetoric to public audiences and industry stakeholders, in the background these companies are restructuring and expanding their operations, pushing for harsher copyright enforcement and strengthening copyright controls.
By leveraging the strategic benefits of such narratives, music organisations consolidate power with legitimacy and neutralise the disruptive potential of technological innovation for redistributing power to artists and audiences.
The idea that music organisations strategically respond to their social world is shared by Kiely in her meso-level, feminist sociological analysis of the lived realities of the workers of Ireland’s music organisations. Music organisations communicate reassuring messages to audiences regarding their compliance with legal obligations and social expectations towards ‘equality’ and ‘equal opportunity’.
This surface-level compliance is masking the reality that structural harms against workers, and women in particular, are reinforced by the equality policy solutions offered by HRM and its ‘EDI’ models, that music organisations lean on to secure their public image as compliant employers.
By ensuring that the market needs of the organisation are considered in all judgements of what’s fair for workers, HRM allows management to legitimately make decisions that continue to prioritise the needs of the organisation over the needs of workers. In doing so, music organisations reproduce punitive, patriarchal cultures that are harder for workers to challenge. Music organisations arguing that all is well while predicting imminent catastrophe are two dimensions of the same process, where official narratives obscure material realities.
Kiely's finding that HRM/EDI policy absorbs equality demands without structural change maps directly onto Rogers’ idea that legal/institutional innovation absorbs disruption without redistributing power. Both researchers view the same institutions from differing theoretical vantage points, using grounded, interview-based analysis. Their combined arguments demonstrate how feminist sociology and political economy are useful and complementary perspectives for investigating organisational power.
About the speakers
Yvonne Kiely recently completed her PhD at the School of Communications, Dublin City University, where she conducted the first feminist study of music organisations in Ireland. Her research is concerned with the internal policies and practices of music organisations and their implications for men and women workers. To understand the gender effects of organisational power, she applies perspectives from feminist sociology and political economy through methods of organisational research.
Earlier this year she published findings about the hiring practices of music organisations in the Irish Communication Review, and her previous publications examine histories of gender representation on the covers of popular music magazines, Hot Press and Rolling Stone. During her PhD she worked as a coordinator with Ireland’s PhD labour union where she gained hands on experience campaigning, negotiating and agitating for worker’s rights, and she also publishes the feminist zine, Spread.
Jim Rogers is Associate Professor of Communications in the School of Communications, Dublin City University, where he has taught and researched for the past twenty years. His research focuses on media and cultural production, especially popular music, with particular emphasis on the role of intellectual property in shaping the outcome of new technologies in the music industries.
He is author of The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2013), A Critical Guide to Intellectual Property (w/Mat Callahan, Bloomsbury, 2017), Sounds Irish, Acts Global (w/Michael Murphy, Equinox, 2023), Rethinking Intellectual Property: A Radical Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of the Ownership of Ideas (w/Mat Callahan, Bloomsbury, 2027). He has also published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. His wider professional engagement includes advisory and consultancy work on copyright, digitisation and governance, as well as editorial roles with international journals.
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