Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences: The Advent of Pop Music (New Horizons in Institutional and Evolutionary Economics Series)

Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences NEW HORIZONS IN INSTITUTIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS Ser...

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Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences

NEW HORIZONS IN INSTITUTIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS Series Editor: Geoffrey M. Hodgson Research Professor, University of Hertfordshire Business School, UK Economics today is at a crossroads. New ideas and approaches are challenging the largely static and equilibrium-oriented models that used to dominate mainstream economics. The study of economic institutions – long neglected in the economics textbooks – has returned to the forefront of theoretical and empirical investigation. This challenging and interdisciplinary series publishes leading works at the forefront of institutional and evolutionary theory and focuses on cutting-edge analyses of modern socio-economic systems. The aim is to understand both the institutional structures of modern economics and the processes of economic evolution and development. Contributions will be from all forms of evolutionary and institutional economics, as well as from Post-Keynesian, Austrian and other schools. The overriding aim is to understand the processes of institutional transformation and economic change. Titles in the series include: Globalization and Institutions Redefining the Rules of the Economic Game Edited by Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack The Evolutionary Analysis of Economic Policy Edited by Pavel Pelikan and Gerhard Wegner The Evolution of Scientific Knowledge Edited by Hans Siggaard Jensen, Lykke Margot Richter and Morten Thanning Vendelø Evolutionary Economic Thought European Contributions and Concepts Edited by Jürgen G. Backhaus Economic Institutions and Complexity Structures, Interactions and Emergent Properties Karl-Ernst Schenk The Economic of Knowledge Sharing A New Institutional Approch Edited by Ernst Helmstädter The Economics of Energy and the Production Process An Evolutionary Approach Guido Buenstorf Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences The Advent of Pop Music Wilfred Dolfsma

Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences The Advent of Pop Music

Wilfred Dolfsma Economist and Philosopher, Erasmus University, Rotterdam and University of Maastricht, the Netherlands

NEW HORIZONS IN INSTITUTIONAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS

Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Wilfred Dolfsma 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Glensanda House Montpellier Parade Cheltenham Glos GL50 1UA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 136 West Street Suite 202 Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Dolfsma, Wilfred. Institutional economics and the formation of preferences: the advent of pop music/ Wilfred Dolfsma. p. cm.—(New horizons in institutional and evolutionary economics) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Popular music—Economic aspects. 2. Popular music—Social aspects. 3. Institutional economics. 4. Economics—Sociological aspects. 5. Consumers— Psychology. I. Title: Advent of pop music. II. Title. III. Series. ML3470.D64 2004 306.4´8424—dc22 2004041565 ISBN 1 84376 233 1

Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Frimley, Surrey Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents List of figures List of tables List of boxes Preface Acknowledgements

viii ix x xi xii

1. The amazing advent of pop music 2. How not to explain the advent of pop music 3. Consuming symbolic goods 4. Radio and magazines: valuing pop music through institutional changes 5. Consuming pop music/constructing a life world 6. The social construction of value 7. Conclusion: forming preferences, valuing pop music

63 94 121 137

References Index

144 157

vii

1 18 36

Figures 1.1 A stylized picture of the music industry 2.1 Different learning paths 3.1 The standard prisoner’s dilemma 3.2 Why people learn 3.3 The social value nexus

viii

9 24 43 45 49

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 A1.1 A1.2 2.1

The radio audience for pop music Sales of LPs and singles, the Netherlands The ten biggest music markets, 2002 Some economics of pop music The five major record companies Economies of scope in entertainment industries Relative prices of LPs and singles compared to the relative general price and income levels in the Netherlands 2.2 The spread of radio, television and record players 2.3 Decline of cable radio – ‘draadomroep’ 3.1 Socio-cultural values and character ideals in Western Europe, 1965 4.1 Tuney Tunes popularity poll, 1961 4.2 Categories of radio programmes, Dutch broadcasters, 1958 A5.1 Consumers of pop music – the survey A5.2 Group interviews

ix

3 6 7 8 16 17 20 21 22 41 68 81 115 117

Boxes 1.1 The study of pop music 2.1 Does technological change explain the advent of pop music? 2.2 Pop music and Baumol’s disease 3.1 The mountain of experience: how people learn in a complex, evolving environment 3.2 Values and the Veblenian Dichotomy

x

11 21 29 53 57

Preface This text, like a pop song (and its valuation), emanates from a social process. Every word is ‘mine’, of course, but the influence of others is apparent through the whole of the text. Influence is not synonymous with responsibility, and so I should emphasize immediately that I am the only one responsible for the views expressed and any mistakes or omissions remaining. There are widening circles of identification and interaction as far as my work on issues related to this line of research is concerned. Closest are, of course, Paul Bush, Metin Cos¸gel, John Davis, Mark Granovetter, David George, Geoff Hodgson, Hella Hoppe, Elias Khalil, Arjo Klamer, Jürgen Lange-von Kulessa, Dick Langlois, Fieke van der Lecq, Deirdre McCloskey, Lanse Minkler, Bert Mosselmans, Juliet Schor, Irene van Staveren. A William R. Waters Summer Research Grant, generously provided by the Association for Social Economics, allowed me to visit some of them in the summer of 2002 to discuss how best to reorient my argument on institutional economics, consumption theory, values, rhetoric, and pop music (symbolic goods). Inspiration and intellectual stimulus have also come from Hans Abbing, Ash Amin, Ellen Bal, Wim Blauw, Theunis Ijdens, Albert Jolink, Jeroen de Kloet, Edith Kuiper, Berend Jan Langenberg, Tony Lawson, Judith Mehta, Monika Mokre, Mary Morgan, Klaus Nielsen, Martha Paas, Ester-Mirjam Sent, Fred van Raaij, David Throsby, Marc Tool, Ruth Towse, Andrew Tylecote, Olav Velthuis, Rudi Verburg, Geert de Vries, and Peter-Wim Zuidhof. I would like to thank each of them for kind, yet critical comments, and for their support. Institutional logic has it that personal remarks come last in the acknowledgments. One should have good reasons to break with well-established institutions, formal or informal – reasons I do not have. Thanks very much to Marion, Marnix and Jorinde. For being there, and more. Rotterdam and Maastricht, August 2003

xi

Wilfred Dolfsma

Acknowledgements The texts one finds in every book have a history. The texts in this book have grown gradually over a number of years. Much of it was included in a PhD thesis (1999). Parts of it were published previously in a number of journals. Traces of articles in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (1999), the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (1997), and two articles in the Journal of Economic Issues (1997, 2002) can be found in this manuscript. I would like to thank the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Routledge, and the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) for allowing me to include those contributions in this book, albeit in (sometimes substantially) revised form.

xii

1. The amazing advent of pop music Well, the Blues had a baby and they named that baby Rock ’n’ Roll Muddy Waters [R]ecorded music readily pervades virtually every culture and every level of society. As such, it may be considered as the most fundamental of the entertainment businesses. Harold Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics (1998, p.132)

Pop music now has an important place in societies across the world. Most of us, most of all in Western societies, cannot imagine a world without pop music. Within a short time, pop music gained the central place it now has in people’s experience; the process through which this happened must have been an exciting one. Pop music is, some would suggest for good reasons, the cement of society, a stimulant for work, and the grease of commerce. Social gatherings tend to be accompanied by pop music, be they in a private or a more public setting. Pop music can take away a solemn atmosphere and can create one of bonding and sharing. Pop music is often played where people work, shop, recreate. Bosses and supervisors often promote it, or at least do not forbid it, because jointly appreciating pop music increases people’s sense of belonging together, which is likely, in its turn, to increase productivity.1 Shops and the hotel and catering industry play pop music – in most cases the easy to digest Middle-of-the-Road (MOR) kind, Muzak – to induce people to feel at home and buy or consume more. Pop music supports all kinds of advertisements on the radio and television.2 A new and fast-growing market is that of ring tunes from pop songs for mobile telephones.

1.1 POP’S AMAZING ADVENT So pop music pervades society’s every fibre. This has not always been the case, however – in fact, its emergence has been relatively sudden and can be localized precisely. How, thus, can the emergence of pop music be explained? Why did people in droves start to consume pop music? 1

2

Institutional economics and the formation of preferences

Somewhere around 1954–7 a tectonic change took place in the music industry and society at large, taking everybody by surprise. Pop music arrived on the scene with a bang, not only causing much distress in society, but also shaking up the music industry in a major way. In a matter of one to two years, the big companies (‘majors’) that had dominated the market were reduced to mere bystanders, marginalized entirely by the independent firms in the industry that did recognize pop music as an important contribution (Peterson 1990). The business models developed by the majors were entirely inappropriate for the kind of music that had emerged. Never since has the industry been so much in turmoil; neither the tape recorder, the large-scale spread of radio, the CD, the Internet, nor any single new development in the music itself has threatened the position of the majors in the same way as the advent of pop music. Eminent musicologist Charlie Gillett (1996, p.10), referring not just to the business aspects of pop music, but also to the music itself, has put it thus: ‘In almost every respect, the sounds of rhythm and blues contradicted those of popular music [of the time before 1954]’. Elvis Presley (‘That’s All Right’), Bill Haley (‘Rock Around the Clock’), Chuck Berry (‘Roll Over Beethoven’), Little Richard, Cliff Richard, and others like them replaced crooner music and the Big Bands. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and others did not lose all of their audiences, but their heyday had gone. Although the majors soon re-established themselves, gradually over the years taking an even bigger share of the market than they had before pop music emerged (see Table A1.1 in Appendix 1), the music scene had changed irreversibly. Resistance to pop music was widespread, as it challenged many established positions: politicians, administrators, teachers, parents, the press, and even the parties that gained most later on such as broadcasters and the major record companies. One commentator on US syndicated television, John Crosby, remarked of Presley that he was an ‘unspeakably untalented and vulgar young entertainer’, adding: ‘Where do you go from Elvis Presley, short of obscenity – which is against the law?’ (Gillett 1970 [1996], p. 17). Protestations about, and fights because of, the movie Blackboard Jungle, featuring Bill Haley’s song ‘Rock Around the Clock’, were widespread throughout Europe and the United States. Telling the story of the advent of pop music in terms of a conflict between generations – as is not uncommon in both popular as well as academic parlance – would be too simple, however. This popular belief must assume that pop music – as well as its audience and its providers – is homogeneous, while in fact pop music was not homogeneous at all. In fact, it marked distinctions between different groups. The Netherlands is not unique in this, and comparisons with other countries will bring out the similarities as well as the differences in the advent of pop music. Changes occasioned by pop music are both quantitative and qualitative. A few statistics can perhaps indicate the impact of the shift in the consumption

The amazing advent of pop music

3

of music towards pop music. I will have to make do with the few statistics available to provide some understanding of how pervasive the changes have been and how important it is to have an explanation of them. One source of data which allows for meaningful comparisons over a long period of time is time budget data (Knulst 1989). Table 1.1 shows how many people listened to ‘light’ music. Light music includes what we would now call pop music, though it is difficult to determine in what proportion. The figures indicate that the people listening to ‘light’ music are predominantly young, with a working-class or self-employed background. Unfortunately, for 1953, not much can be said about how many people under the age of 18 years old listened to light music and for how long, other than that they reportedly, especially in working-class households, tended to decide which programmes to listen to (CBS 1954, p. 92).

Table 1.1 The radio audience for pop music Dutch audience for light music (%) (I)

(II) Total, 1953a

(III) Total, 1962–3, with televisionb

(IV) Total, 1962–3, without televisionb

(V) Average (hr/wk) spent listening to ‘light’ music (1953)

Farmers Self-employed Executive positions Workers Age 12–17 Age 18–28 Over age 60

34 (6) 35 (11) 14 (5) 39 (10) * 32 (11) 30 (6)

7 7 5c 9 5 * 12

48 52 43c 46 19 * 66

2.45 5.30 2.30 5.15 * 5.15 3.15

Total

33

7

46

4.30

Notes: a The category ‘light’ music was not used in 1953. According to Wijfjes (1994) light music in 1953 consisted of airy (‘luchtige’) music and motley (‘bonte’) programmes, including programmes described as dance music, operetta, motley programmes, regional programmes, cabaret, and ‘reviews’. Figures presented in parentheses in column II are listeners to airy music – these people are included in the group of listeners to light music. b 443 of every 1000 Dutch households consisting of more than one person owned a television set in 1962 (CBS 1964, table 1). c Includes ‘the wealthy’. * No data available. Sources:

Statistics Netherlands (CBS 1954, 1964), time budget data.

4


The Dutch radio audience mostly listened to light music, and also appreciated that kind of music most (CBS 1954, p. 32). The same groups that liked light music also wanted to hear more of it on the radio. Table 2.2 will show how from the beginning of the 1960s television rapidly takes over the role of radio as the major medium. At the same time, the transistor radio penetrated Dutch households at the expense of cable radio (‘draadomroep’), individualizing listening patterns (see Table 2.3). Each household used to have at most one connection to cable radio, giving it a central position in the household. Living rooms used to be arranged around the radio. In effect this meant that parents could closely control what their children listened to and how loud the music would be played. Transistor radios made it possible for (young) people to listen in a room other than the living room and in the privacy of a bedroom control over what was listened to was less strict. The number of hours of radio broadcast doubled, while the number of hours for television increased more than sevenfold (Knulst 1989, p. 239). Cable radio gave people a choice of four channels: the two official Dutch ones and two where programmes from various radio stations – German, British, French – would be compiled for the audience. Transistor radios allowed people to listen, for example, to Radio Luxembourg which scheduled programmes in Dutch every Sunday from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. For the last 30 minutes a programme called ‘Teenagermuziekparade’ played pop music aimed exclusively at teenagers. Luxembourg would have been difficult to receive in northern parts of the Netherlands, however. Radio Veronica, broadcasting from the North Sea, had similar problems reaching people in the eastern parts of the country. The language barrier was an additional problem. Not many people were able to understand English, the language that the BBC and British pirate stations broadcast in. The Allied Forces Network (AFN) aimed at American soldiers, mostly in Germany. Some of the programmes of the German NWDR and most of Luxembourg would also be in English. The audience who looked for programmes that played pop music on the radio were thus not well served by the official public broadcasters, broadcasting from Hilversum. After some time, though not immediately after they started broadcasting, pirate radio stations began to cater more closely for the demand for pop music that the official broadcasters in the highly regulated media market of many European countries at the time could not or would not satiate. Radio London and Radio Caroline started in 1964, directing their broadcasts to England, and were immediate hits. Radio Veronica was the most important pirate aiming at the Dutch audience. It started in 1959, but changed its policy drastically in 1964–5, imitating the American way of producing radio more closely and directing more of their programmes towards a young audience. In a short period of time around 1964–5, pirates began to draw a large audience forcing the officially sanctioned broadcasting organizations to adjust their programming.


5

Developments for broadcasting in that particular period were similar for most Western European countries.3 Other pirates were broadcasting to, for instance Belgium, Denmark, Sweden. Still, even in a comparatively laissez-faire media market like that in the United States this unsatiated and yet-to-be-articulated demand was not met for some time (Peterson 1990). Sales figures in the Netherlands for records may indicate the nature of the changes in this period. Disaggregated figures along music genre lines would be preferable, but these are not available. Table 1.2 shows how aggregated record sales – singles and LPs (developed only in 1947) – soared during the 1950s and 1960s, though the increase in sales was not a steady one. Rapidly increasing sales of a product would make an economist think of decreased relative prices for that item. Here the economist is partly correct. Price increases for records lagged behind general price rises and rises in the average income per person. It should be clear that these are indications of relative changes. In absolute terms records were, and remained, expensive (see Table 2.1). Goudsblom (1959, p. 98) presents anecdotal evidence of the monthly expenditures of a two-person household in the Netherlands. In the late 1950s, a married couple without children, in their 20s, could have bought 1.5 LPs for the money needed in a month to clothe themselves. An LP then cost 18 Dutch guilders, while such a couple reportedly needed 30 guilders for clothing. For these precursors of present-day ‘yuppies’ buying records was expensive indeed. Average income per person only started to increase rapidly in the second half of the 1960s, as many economies approximated full production capacity. In the Netherlands, government policy started after World War II to regulate – that is, keep down – wages broke as a result of increasing pressure on the labour market (see for instance Van Zanden 1997). This is also a time when immigrant workers were brought to or at least were welcome in Western European countries. The income of the young, however, is likely not to have risen as fast as that of older workers, and part of their increasing income would flow to their parents, with whom most of them still lived and now had to pay for board and lodging. Increasingly young people stayed at school or university longer, postponing the moment when they would start earning an income (Righart 1995). The purchasing power of younger people remained (severely) impaired. In addition to these economic trends, a number of scholars have suggested that macro-sociological trends in Western societies are related to the advent of pop music. Dutch society, formerly strongly organized around ‘pillars’, began to individualize (Lijphart 1968). It was no longer possible for leaders of the pillars to agree amongst themselves on all kinds of policy issues, to communicate this to their flock, all in order to develop and implement policy that would best serve the reconstruction of the economy. Catholic, Protestant,

6


Table 1.2 Sales of LPs and singles, the Netherlands Year

LPs sold (000s)

% Change prev. yr

Singles sold (000s)

% Change prev. yr

1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970

400 700 900 1 000 1 000 1 000 1 000 1 000 1 200 1 600 2 200 3 400 4 700 6 200 9 200 11 800 14 600

(–) + 75 + 29 + 11 0 0 0 0 + 20 + 33 + 37.5 + 54.5 + 38.2 + 31.9 + 48.4 + 28.3 + 23.7

3 200 4 600 5 900 6 900 7 200 7 000 7 100 7 700 7 600 7 000 7 200 9 300 7 800 7 100 7 300 7 500 7 800

(–) + 43.8 + 28.3 + 16.9 + 4.3 – 2.8 + 1.4 + 8.5 – 1.3 – 7.9 + 2.9 + 29.2 – 16.1 –9 + 2.8 + 2.7 +4

Source:

Polygram, Department for Corporate Research and Planning.

socialist and liberal organizations began to lose their grip on their respective constituencies. Righart (1995) suggests that this development was especially strong for the religious pillars. The decline in the number of people actively involved in religious or confessional organizations was particularly dramatic in the 1960s. Churches, for instance, lost many people from their congregations. Pillarization affected broadcasting and the media generally, as well as political parties and the labour unions. Catholic bishops would forbid their flock to listen to the ‘socialist, anti-religious, and heretic’ broadcaster VARA; the broadcaster of their pillar was the Catholic Radio Organization (KRO). VARA in its turn would not allow appreciative mention of religion in its programmes – religion being ‘the opium of the people’. The grip of the pillarized organizations on their constituency decreased steadily.

1.2 SOME ECONOMICS OF POP MUSIC The effects of pop music on society manifest themselves in the economic, social and cultural spheres. Indicators for the economic impact provide some


7

Table 1.3 The ten biggest music markets, 2002 Gross revenues ($ m.) United States Japan United Kingdom France Germany Canada Italy Spain Australia Mexico Total, top 10 Total, world Source:

12 609 5 001 2 936 2 070 2 053 621 565 551 532 462 27 401 32 228

Share (%) 39 16 9 6 6 2 2 2 2 1 85 100

IFPI (2003).

idea of pop music’s import. The United States is by far the largest market for music, with a 39 per cent share. As pop music, the most important kind of music sold today, originated in the United States, that may not come as a surprise. Table 1.3 gives an indication of the direct economic importance of the music industry for the ten largest music markets measured in terms of recordables sold. Nowadays, the CD album is the most important recordable on which to store music; vinyl accounts for less than 1 per cent of all the recordables sold (IFPI 2003). A few countries dominate this industry, not only in terms of production, but also in terms of consumption. The first countries mentioned in the table have remained the same for years. The countries lower in the list fluctuate more. Over the years, the share of the ten largest music markets has increased steadily; in 1997 they had 80 per cent of the global market (IFPI 1997). In addition to recordables, the revenues brought in through copyrights and neighbouring rights,4 and the direct and indirect economic impact of concerts and public performances should be considered to get a clearer indication of the economic significance of music. Table 1.4 presents these data for the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. For a genuine indication of the direct economic impact of pop music on an economy, value added would have to be known instead of gross sales figures. Such more accurate data, however, are not available. In 1996 the direct economic impact for the Netherlands adds up to 1.8 billion Dutch guilders, or

8


Table 1.4 Some economics of pop music United States Revenues recordables, gross (US$ m.), 2002 Sales recordables, per capita (US$), 2002 Copyrights, gross royalties (US$ m.), 2001 Concerts (Dutch guilders, m.), 1996 Sources:

12 609

Japan

5 001

United Kingdom 2 936

The Netherlands 397.6

45.56

39.68

49.6

25.1

1 940.42

759.64

669.73

176.57

n.a.

n.a

n.a.

550

IFPI (2003), NMPA (2002), Rutten (1997).

0.5 per cent of GDP (Rutten 1997). Measured thus, the music industry is more significant than, for instance, the economic contribution of the combined movie, video and pay television sectors (Rutten 1997, p. 34). As hinted in the introduction to this chapter, the indirect effects of this industry are substantial, though difficult to pin down. Indeed, as Vogel (1998, p. 132) observes, the music industry is an increasingly important industry in economic terms – in particular among the entertainment industries but more generally as well, partly because of its indirect effects and relations with other sectors in the economy. ‘[R]ecorded music readily pervades virtually every culture and every level of society. As such, it may be considered as the most fundamental of the entertainment businesses.’ To indicate how important music is to many people nowadays, it could be observed that Britons spend more on recordables than they do on fruit and vegetables per capita. The music industry is a complex industry, and includes such players as record companies, retailers, music publishers, but excludes the music press and the media. Figure 1.1 provides a stylized view of this industry. Many of the actual firms involved are highly integrated firms. Economies of scope are strong, which entails – as Table A1.2 in the Appendix to this chapter indicates – that firms in the entertainment industry are involved in most of the subsectors. Since entertainment industries in general face a highly uncertain environment, as has been known at least since the early study by Peterson and Berger (1975), diversification is a way to spread risks and creates opportunities for exploiting a product across genres once it turns out to be successful. Economies of scale are equally important. A few firms in the industry today together control almost 80 per cent of the market, both for most of the countries concerned as well as globally (Table A1.1).


9

Creative artists

Music agents

Distribution

Copyright owner • composer • text writer

Agencies Manager

Concerts

Musicians

Publishers Record company

Distribution

Media • TV • radio • press • video

Production

Retail

Marketing

Consumers

Producer Sound engineer Remixer

Club/Disco

Record studio Press plants Source: Dolfsma (2000b).

Figure 1.1 A stylized picture of the music industry Life without pop music, in most countries around the globe nowadays, would be different in so many ways that it almost becomes unthinkable. Pop music accompanies us wherever we go. What exactly these social and cultural effects amount to in quantitative terms can probably not be known; a large part of this will continue to elude researchers.

1.3 ON POPULAR MUSIC Pop and Rock The term ‘pop music’ used to refer to music that was popular among the majority of people. There was no link to any specific kind of music. Nowadays the term tends to be associated with a particular kind of music. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that what people now call ‘pop music’ did not come out of the blue. Precursors to the famous artists of those early days of pop music had been known in subcultures for long periods of time (see, for instance, Frith 1983 and Maultsby 1996). Black rhythm and blues and white country music (folk), both having their origin in the lower social classes in American society, strongly influenced Bill – ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – Haley, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Little Richard, Pat Boone, and others. Definitions

10


must always have a certain purpose and use. Rather than trying to define pop music in the strictest of senses, a rather broad and imprecise description must do; not even an expert on and long-time student of pop music such as Denisoff (1975, p. 1) has attempted to go beyond such a description. The use in America of the term ‘rock music’, denoting the broad range of music originating from blues and folk, including a more commercially oriented subtype called pop, may be less confusing. Since this study focuses more on Europe – and the Netherlands in particular – I prefer to use the word ‘pop’. The advent of pop music also marked a drastic change in the themes of songs. An important indication of this change is that lyrics changed to become more ‘progressive’ by talking about, for example, love and sexuality (Rutten 1991). Openly singing about kissing, being in love, and making love was new. The perspective taken by the singer was also much more individualistic than before; the narrator presenting himself as an individual who could rather easily be identified with. These changes in the themes of songs can be interpreted as implicit criticism of society. Some songs express defiance or, more explicitly mild/ludicrous forms of revolt against established codes in society. The immensely popular ‘Kom van dat dak af [Come off that roof]’ by a Dutch band called Peter and his Rockets (released in 1960) is still considered a milestone in recent Dutch music history and is an example of such a mild form of rebellion. Songs that explicitly revolted against the establishment without being veiled by irony or metaphor were a later development. Stroop (1974) identifies these as well as some other ‘romantic’ themes in pop music. Content analyses of chart songs in a large number of (Western) countries all present this same picture (for example, Kleijer and Tillekens 1994a). Pop music originated in the working class, thus probably constituting one of the first important instances where the direction of imitation was reversed (Wouters 1998). Up to then, the lower classes or groups in society were thought to imitate the higher ones. Scholars like Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899 [1994]), Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process (1939 [1978]) and Pierre Bourdieu’s La Distinction (1984) are the best known social scientists to have developed a theory about emulation, which they have incorporated in their larger theoretical framework for explaining developments in societies. Pop Music: Low Culture? The distinction between high and low culture seems well established in many people’s minds. Both in everyday life and in academia, expressions of high culture are considered to be more valuable than those of low culture. The distinction is based on an intuitive notion about what is low and what is high.


BOX 1.1

11

THE STUDY OF POP MUSIC

Almost single-handedly, sociologist and music journalist Simon Frith established pop music as a separate field of study for the social sciences. Many others have added to this now growing body of literature over the years. IASPM – the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, with a quarterly journal called Popular Music – plays an important role in promoting the study of pop music. Two recent studies in this field of research are of particular interest for the question of how to explain the advent of pop music. In his recent book Performing Rites – On the Value of Popular Music, Frith (1996) suggests that the value of pop music is socially constructed. To determine the value of music, Frith says, one has to ask the audience. This suggestion of consulting consumers is a suggestion that I follow up. Frith bases his argument mostly on introspection, which of course is in itself a valid method (Earl 2001). There are of course limits to focusing on consumers only – shortcomings that become apparent when comparing Frith (1996) with Peterson (1990). Where Frith advises students of pop music to focus exclusively on the audience of pop music, Peterson examined only the production aspects of the music industry and how that industry coped with changing music preferences. Both of these approaches are important, and both need to be considered. The value of pop music is established in the interplay of the various actors in the music industry and the audience of pop music.

Opera and jazz music are now highly revered, for instance, but they used to be perceived as typical expressions of low culture (Levine 1988; Storey 1991). What is at one time perceived as low culture may thus at another time be seen as a form of high culture (de Swaan 1985 [1991]; Crane 1992). In this dynamic process, pop music is not (yet) generally held to be a form of high culture. People involved in the music magazines and in broadcasting corporations, for instance, experienced this as such, and believed it to be unjust. Academics, too, thought pop music was a form of low culture – one only has to take a quick glance at Adorno’s 1941 seminal article on jazz/popular music to get an impression of the contempt with which it was approached by academia. ‘Popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes’ (ibid., p. 22), according to Adorno; it is the ‘subservience of

12


improvisation to standardization’ (ibid., p. 25). The sociological literature published in the 1950s and 1960s discussed pop music and its fans in similar ‘normative’ terms (Hessen 1965; Krantz and Vercruysse 1959; Langeveld 1953). Despite the social nature and dynamics of the distinction between high and low culture, Adorno’s appeal to a supposedly inherent value of cultural expressions – amazingly – continues to be an important reference in the study of pop(ular) music (cf. Negus 1996; Frith 1996). Even though few people in academia and elsewhere would now uphold that high and low culture are strictly separate spheres (see, for instance, Levine 1988; Crane 1992), the mental gap still looms large. And pop music is on the downside of the equation. This has theoretical as well as practical consequences for this study. Practically it means, for instance, that organizations have often not kept records on activities related to pop music. Scripts of radio programmes, for instance, have not been stored properly and saved for future study. In words Storey (1991, p. 2) might use, alluding to the broad three-way division in the definitions of the concept of ‘culture’: the cultural texts that the cultural practice of pop music produces are not generally considered of any ‘intellectual, spiritual and aesthetical’ significance.

1.4 SCOPE, AUDIENCE AND SIGNIFICANCE To the social scientist, the advent of pop music presents a fascinating case of a dramatic structural change. Within a relatively short period of time, people began to change their consumption behaviour. Changes generally present hard cases to economics, and this is true in particular of changing preferences. Pop music’s sudden popularity thus presents a theoretical challenge to economists. Consuming pop music is exemplary for the consumption of other symbolic goods. The system for the provision of pop music is a social system (see Fine and Leopold 1993). Cross-references between the chapters and evidence of mutual influence between ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ underscore the idea that pop music is provided within highly interpenetrating economic, social, and political systems. The concept of the ‘system of provision’ emphasizes that there are a number of players interacting with each other, each with specific purposes and possibilities of getting things done. Some of these players are more influential in changing the system of provision than others, as this and other studies suggest (for example, Frith 1983). Much of the focus will be on Dutch radio stations, including pirate radio stations, the audience or consumers of pop music, and the music press.


13

Scope and Audience Explaining Elvis was the title Deirdre McCloskey suggested for this book. There are several reasons why this is not an entirely appropriate title. First of all, Elvis (Presley) was probably not as popular in Europe as he was elsewhere, particularly in the United States. As such, a title such as Explaining Cliff (Richard) would have been more to the point. Making reference to a musician in the title might also give the impression that I will discuss pop music itself at length and talk about artists. This is not the case. Others (most notably Gillett 1970 [1996]) do a far better job than I could ever do of tracking developments in pop music of the time, meticulously tracing who influenced whom in what way, and with which record companies (labels) these musicians had a legal contract. Instead the reader will find here an account of the life world of consumers of pop music. I reconstruct the life world of people who consumed pop music, and track and analyse the development of organizations such as radio and the music magazines which provided pop music in those early days. Together consumers and producers shaped the environment in which pop music became a significant phenomenon in both cultural and economic respects. In separating consumption from production, I have followed the analytical distinction economic theory proposes, despite the argument of recent work in the economics of consumption that this distinction is substantially blurred in the study of consumper behaviour (see most notably Fine and Leopold 1993). Although fans of pop music who have an inclination to take a broader perspective will find this book rewarding, the primary ‘targets’ of the book are social scientists and economists interested in understanding the consumption and valuation of (a symbolic good such as) pop music. Interdisciplinary Perspective While the point of departure is, and will remain, that of economics, studying the advent of pop music and looking for a plausible explanation have brought me to consider insights from other social sciences. Sociology and psychology in particular are sources from which an increasing number of economists studying consumption behaviour draw (Ackerman 1997). One of the arguments in this book is that institutional economics can and must incorporate insights from other social sciences to understand, for instance, the consumption of symbolic goods such as pop music. My approach to studying pop music is how ‘sociologists’ might study it. For most economists, sociologists rank (much) lower in the hierarchy of the sciences.5 Besides expanding their domain of enquiry, economists have been concerned with establishing and defending the boundaries of their discipline.

14


Rather than opting for what Phelps-Brown (1972) has called a ‘field determined’ approach to scientific research, the vast majority of economists have let the theoretical approach define their discipline. The starting-point of enquiry is too often, according to Phelps-Brown, the theory rather than the problem. For me, the problem has primacy. In a number of ways, then, this study is different from many other studies in economics. Readers will not find formal models. Similarly, readers may be surprised by the reliance on ‘qualitative’ material in the empirical parts of this study. To the hard-nosed, positivistically minded social scientist or economist, this study may be too ‘descriptive’. Institutionalist research has frequently been ‘accused’ of the ‘sin’ of description-without-theory (for example, Schumpeter 1954, pp. 954 and 795, fn. 29). Even if this accusation is true, which it is not, it should be pointed out that philosophers and others nowadays agree that all perception as well as description is theory-laden. ‘Bare’ facts do not exist. The interpretive approach advocated and adopted here requires that small and subtle signals be noticed (Geertz 1973). Such things as the choice of words or images, twists in sentences, as well as non-verbal communication in interviews can reveal much and must not be missed. Researcher and actor must have (access to) a common social background for this method of research to be applicable (cf. Finch 1997). Making sense, giving a plausible account by a ‘thick’ description is the methodological angle taken here (Taylor 1991; Geertz 1973), with a view to providing a plausible account. Plausibility as a criterion for (economic) theories is said to be an arbitrary and conservative measure. This drawback notwithstanding, taking it as a criterion at least acknowledges the fact that science is (also) a social enterprise with booms and busts in Kuhnian scientific paradigms (Mäki 1993). An important objective of the present study is to contribute to the argument that value is socially constructed. ‘Social value theory’ is not new. In fact, many scholars have contributed to this project. Social value theory has gone through cycles, sometimes being held in higher reverence than at other times – as a closer look at the history of economic thought makes evident. It seems that there is an upswing in the present era.

NOTES 1. 2.

Pop music – like humour, and gifts – has the potential to create such a shared understanding, facilitating the emergence of trust. It can also cause or elicit deep and lasting differences of opinion (cf Dolfsma 1998a and 1998b). Artists and their representatives increasingly recognize the commercial value of music. Copyrights, neighbouring rights, and other related intellectual property rights are purportedly introduced and enforced to ensure that creative artists benefit from the use of their creations.


15

3. See Van Elteren (1994) and Wijfjes (1994) for a historical overview of developments related to Dutch radio, Burgelman (1990) for Belgium, and Chapman (1992) for a more general story, nevertheless emphasizing the British case more than other ones. 4. Copyrights are due to the artist and his representatives each time a song is played on, for instance, the radio or television. Neighbouring rights are due when a song is played in a public place, performed by artists other than the creative artists, or for example on a CD player (Towse 1999; Vogel 1998). 5. Leibenstein claims he develops a coherent and rigorous theoretical account of consumption patterns that Veblen has analysed in his Theory of the Leisure Class, portraying Veblen as a ‘sociologist’ (cf Dolfsma 2000a). Jocularly, Krugman (1994, p. xi) talks about a Native American fellow-economist who explains his theory of reincarnation to his students: If you are a good and virtuous economist, you reincarnate as a physician, but if you are an evil, wicked economist, you will return as a sociologist.

16


APPENDIX 1: THE MUSIC INDUSTRY NOW Table A1.1

The five major record companies (% of sales, 2000) Global

Universal Sony EMI Warner–Time Warner BMG–Bertelsmann Independents Source:

Music Business International (MBI 2000, various issues).

21.1 17.4 14.1 13.4 11.4 22.6

Table A1.2

Economies of scope in entertainment industries Time Warner

17

Television, production Film Music Publishing Television, Broadcasting Cable television Satellite television Internet Theme parks Retail Source:

√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √

Disney √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √

Sony √ √ √

Seagram √ √ √

Bertelsmann

√ √

√ √ √ √ √

√ √ √

√ √ √

Viacom

√ √ √

The Economist (1998) ‘Wheel of Fortune – A Survey of Technology and Entertainment’, 21 November.

Newscorp √ √ √

√ √ √ √ √ √

√ √ √ √ √

2. How not to explain the advent of pop music When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them (Plato, The Republic, Book IV)

What can explain the reactions to Blackboard Jungle, the movie that appeared in 1956 and featured Bill Haley’s song ‘Rock Around the Clock’? Why were young people attracted to it and older people shocked by it, and why did Elvis Presley make such an impression? An objective and clear-minded look at the lyrics of Presley’s songs, for instance, does not seem to suggest deep thoughts or emotions of the kind that would merit the hysteria the world witnessed then. What then explains the antagonism between people who liked Elvis and those who enjoyed music by Cliff Richard (or, just a little later, between fans of the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones)? Answers to these questions interest economists too, since the consequences are economic and not just cultural or social. Within a period of two years after 1955, for instance, the music scene changed dramatically (Peterson 1990, p. 97). Pop music plays an important role in the economic sphere nowadays. The economic significance of music reaches beyond the size of the market for recordables. Music is important in promoting other entertainment goods, which explains why diversified firms are the rule in the entertainment business. Pop music is used extensively in places or fields that seem at first sight not directly related to it, for instance, to promote sales in supermarkets. These are just a few ways in which the advent of pop music can be seen to have had economic consequences. For many people, music defines who they are. Socially and culturally, music has a strong symbolic value. This chapter looks at existing explanations of the advent of pop music, and argues that some of these accounts do hold some water, but that none of them has sufficient explanatory power – not even if combined with others. At times, this review will lead us inevitably to philosophical discussions one would not suspect to be related to a frivolous topic such as that of pop music. Even though the philosopher Whitehead (1925 [1956], p.18) discussed the natural sciences, I would still like to quote him in regard to this issue: ‘If science is 18

How not to explain the advent of pop music

19

not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations’. The first section looks at under-socialized (Granovetter 1985) explanations where the concept of preferences, in line with the way in which it is understood in mainstream economics, is central. The second section looks at an influential over-socialized explanation advanced most fervently by Adorno. Two arguments do not fit nicely within this structure; these are presented in separate boxes. Some scholars have addressed the advent of pop music explicitly, while the arguments of others have been developed and rephrased so that they become relevant.

2.1 PREFERENCES – GIVEN, LATENT, META, AND SO ON Since the late 1950s and early 1960s pop music has become an important way for many people to distinguish themselves from others (Frith 1983, 1987a). They have consumed music as a way of showing who they are and what they want to be. Consumption of pop music should be broadly defined; it includes the consumption of all material and immaterial goods related to pop music. Examples are records, radio programmes, music magazines, and concerts. Given Preferences Neoclassical economics assumes that individuals act ‘as if’ they have given preferences that they want to maximize under given constraints (cf. Stigler and Becker 1977; Becker 1996). Preferences and technology are determined outside the realm of economics, and as such are ‘given’. Constraints such as budgets or a given technology have a limiting effect on the extent to which the economic agent’s goals can be met. The neoclassical argument is simply that young people suddenly became more affluent and the constraint on their budgets was alleviated. Youngsters had more money to spend as they pleased as compared to previous generations. Price and income statistics show that in the 1950s average prices for working-class households1 and average income levels per person rose in more or less equal measure, with income rising somewhat more than average prices (CBS (Statistics Netherlands) 1994, pp. 160 and 181). The budget did indeed seem to become less of a constraint, but this may have masked a change in relative prices, as Table 2.1 seems to indicate. The general consumer price index (CPI) rises somewhat more than the average price for LPs. What these data at least indicate is that, on average, budget constraints did not change as dramatically in the late 1950s or even the early 1960s as would be necessary to explain the advent of pop music. Budget

20


Table 2.1 Relative prices of LPs and singles compared to the relative general price and income levels in the Netherlands (index: 1955 = 100)

Singles (45 rpm)a LPsa CPIb Income per personb

Mid-1950s

ca.1960

Mid-1960s

End 1960s

100 100 100 100

112 109 118 135

125 120 141 195

135 130 173 258

Sources: a Computed from figures provided by the Polygram, Department for Corporate Research and Planning; b Consumer price index (CPI) and index for income per person; computed from: Statistics Netherlands (CBS 1994, pp. 161, 181).

constraints only relaxed considerably in the second part of the 1960s in the Netherlands and Europe generally. In addition, note that this does not explain why they wanted to buy pop music instead of Big Band music, jazz or the French chansons that were around at the time, or instead of candy, or literary books. There has to be a reason why the difference between Big Band or French chanson on the one hand, and pop music on the other – for which Rutten (1991) and Stroop (1974) present evidence based on content analysis – mattered. Secondly, Kleijer et al. (1992) have observed that the size of young people’s income or of the income of people in general cannot be the only – or even the major – reason for the phenomena examined in this chapter. They point to the differences in the developments in Belgium and in the Netherlands. Belgium is in many important ways similar to the Netherlands, especially in economic respects – in fact, they used to be unified. Young people in Belgium, however, had an even higher disposable income on average than teenagers in the Netherlands at that time. Nevertheless, the advent of pop music in Belgium began later, was slower and had less severe consequences than in the Netherlands. The budget constraint argument entails that, as budget constraints become less binding, consumption of all goods rises proportionately, for all groups in society. An early study on teenage consumer behaviour in the United Kingdom of the 1950s showed how teenagers spent a large proportion of their money on ‘symbolic goods’ that have a social and symbolic role, such as records, clothes, cinema tickets (Abrams 1959, p. 10). Music and music-related goods are prime among them. An explanation in terms of budget constraints would have to show why an alleviation of the budget constraint did not make these groups buy more of other goods, and, alternatively, why other groups in society did not consume more pop music. The arguments discussed here suggest that increased purchasing power is only a minor part of the explanation for the advent of pop music and needs to


21

BOX 2.1 DOES TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE EXPLAIN THE ADVENT OF POP MUSIC An argument similar to the one on given preferences and a budget constraint is that a given technology can be an exogenous constraint on people and firms. By the 1950s, and certainly the 1960s, the technological devices needed to consume music had been developed and were relatively widely available – especially the radio (Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Although record players and tape recorders became cheaper, compared to people’s incomes they remained expensive – in nominal terms as expensive as they are today. Radios and television sets were widespread, but would have been placed such that control over them rested with parents. Technological developments could influence the costs of hardware and software for producers as well. However, although recording music and printing records became a lot easier than they had been before and the quality of recordings and records increased dramatically, production costs only began to decrease after the introduction of specific new technologies such as the drum machine or synthesizers from the late 1970s and early 1980s (Colonna et al. 1993). In addition, the relationship between costs of production and prices for records is not a straightforward one (Klaes 1997). Table 2.2 The spread of radio, television and record players (number per 100 households, the Netherlands)

1951 1957 1960 1965 1970 Source:

Radios

Television sets (b&w)

Record players

Households (m.)

77 95 97 148 172

– 8 25 68 82

– – – 46 68

2.8 3.1 3.2 3.5 4.0

Knulst (1989, p. 235).

22


Furthermore, in order to be used as a way of explaining the advent of pop music, there should be a difference between this music and competing kinds of music in terms of the effects of technological development for each of them. It is not at all clear whether or not pop music was less expensive to produce than the types of music that had been in vogue earlier. Most likely it was no cheaper to produce or consume pop as compared with other kinds of music. Table 2.3 Decline of cable radio – ‘draadomroep’ (number of households) 1956

1958

1960

1962

543 710

507 726

480 713

467 584

Source: Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging (NCRV) annual report, 1962.

be complemented. Kleijer and Tillekens (1992b) even contend that their empirical observations show that the purchasing power argument is irrelevant to an explanation of the advent of pop music. On the basis of my empirical material I can say that budget constraints did not so much influence the decision to buy a record (or refrain from buying it), but rather how to acquire a particular piece of music. Consumers of pop music could and did find ways to circumvent the challenge of a limited budget. Internally Produced Preferences – Gary Becker’s Individualist Stance Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate in economics in 1992, has taken the neoclassical economic framework and used it to analyse a range of phenomena that one would not tend to perceive as being in the economic realm (Becker 1976). He is, in actual fact, the best-known proponent of the perspective that argues that preferences are given. However, Becker has developed a more elaborate account of the formation of preferences than is generally acknowledged. It is fascinating to read Becker’s Accounting for Tastes (1996). Arguments levelled against Becker’s work in the past, most notably against his 1977 article in cooperation with yet another Nobel Laureate (from 1982), George Stigler, have reached him. Work for which he is best known and with which he had most influence – work on preferences (Stigler and Becker 1977) and human


23

capital (Becker 1964) – was criticized for not being ‘realistic’. The most important point of the critique was that the social environment has a major influence on the individual, but that Becker did not acknowledge this. An important question to ask is whether any way of conceiving of social relations is realistic and fruitful. Does it really add to our understanding? Does it explain important phenomena, and can it possibly help us to predict developments in the future? Becker’s way of dealing with the effects of the social environment on the individual in terms of different kinds of capital does not come as a surprise, considering that he is a colleague of James Coleman at the University of Chicago. Coleman (1988) is known for contributing the concept of ‘social capital’ to the social sciences.2 Coleman’s interpretation of the concept appeals because a well-known concept in economics – capital – is transformed into a metaphor to try to account for social relations and knowledge generally (Dolfsma 2001a). The metaphor of capital is thus a suitable way for neoclassical economics to try to incorporate social relations into the framework; the methodological individualist position is saved while seeming to yield to criticism. Central to Becker’s accounting for preferences is his ‘extended utility function’ (Becker 1996, p. 5): u = u (xt, yt, zt, Pt, St)

(2.1)

Here x, y, and z stand for ‘different goods’, while P and S stand for personal and social capital, respectively. Becker says on page 5 that ‘the utility function itself is independent of time, so that it is a stable function over time of the goods consumed and also of the capital goods’. This is a puzzling statement, but some clarification is at hand on the same page: utility does not depend directly on goods and consumer capital stocks, but only on household-produced ‘commodities,’ such as health, social standing and reputation, and pleasures of the senses. The production of these commodities in turn depends on goods, consumer capital, abilities, and other variables.

The shape of a utility function remains the same throughout a person’s life, while somebody may attain higher levels of satisfaction in terms of the more fundamental ‘goods’ by investing in his or her social and personal capital. And: ‘a person’s personal and social capital form part of his total stock of human capital’ (Becker 1996, p. 4). Learning takes an effort that is like an investment and creates human capital. Human capital can take different forms, the differences between which Becker does not make too explicit. Now preferences for particular goods are no longer fixed and given, but the extended preferences are. Of course, Becker asserts that this is what he had been saying all along (1996, p. 6), and technically he is right. In their De Gustibus Non est

24


Disputandum, he and George Stigler (Stigler and Becker 1977, p. 77) do not speak of particular goods either. These more basic things are ‘health, social standing and reputation, and pleasures of the senses’ (Becker 1996, p. 5). This view boils down to the belief that people know from the start what kind of person they want to be. So, Bill (Clinton) always wanted to be president, Keith (Haring) always wanted to be a painter, and (Little) Richard had no other goal in life than to be a rock musician. Behind Becker’s cold analytical foreground, there is thus an oddly romantic background. The view of individuals is the romantic and modernist idea that he or she remains an utterly independent and autonomous person. Even if people do know what they want to do from the time when they were first able to form such ideas and pursue this path vigorously, circumstances may prevent them from taking their chosen path. What about former economics student at the London School of Economics Mick Jagger? What psychologists call cognitive dissonance will probably ensure that, whatever work people are doing, they will feel rewarded by it. Becker’s individualist perspective does not allow for complex psychological processes, nor does it account for social interactions (cf. Davis 2003). A serious epistemological problem, however, relates to how Becker perceives information; this is a crucial part of Becker’s argument and of neoclassical economic arguments in general. Becker’s perspective on information is that it

A

B

Source:

Dolfsma (2002a).

Figure 2.1

Different learning paths


25

speaks for itself, that it does not need interpretation. Different interpretations of a situation can only be temporary. The Bayesian view that Becker adopts excludes the possibility of uncertainty (in the sense of Frank Knight 1921). Risk does exist, but is due to incomplete information. As soon as more information is gathered, differences of interpretation disappear in Becker’s view (cf. Dolfsma 2002a). So, with reference to Figure 2.1, Becker allows for a ‘learning path’ to fork at any point in time, but is at a loss when trying to explain persisting differences such as those between learning paths A and B. For this reason Becker’s treatment of ‘culture’ is somewhat awkward. Culture implies differences of interpretation that are persistent and do not reduce to a lack of information. When in the United States a woman and a man, for instance, walk hand in hand, one can reasonably infer that they are intimately related. It is most likely that they are in love. When in India a woman and a man walk hand in hand, they are frowned upon. A woman and a man who are in love with each other do not walk hand in hand in India; only two or more women or two or more men who are friends walk hand in hand in public. By dealing with culture as though it were a kind of capital with an extremely low depreciation rate (Becker 1996, p. 16), differences such as these remain puzzling. An institutional economist would analyse these differences in terms of the different institutions or norms that exist in the different societies. Such an economist would study the emergence, change, and consequences of institutions closely, paying attention to the rich and overwhelming quantitative and qualitative empirical material that bears on the issue. Not so Becker. To him, individuals who stand to gain from them create institutions. Because he acknowledges that, in reality, people have imperfect foresight and are not omnipotent, he takes a position that is known in philosophy as ‘ruleutilitarianism’ instead of that of ‘act-utilitarianism’. Not every single action can be utility maximizing because of human fallibility, but people create rules of thumb that are optimally imperfect (cf. Baumol and Quandt 1964). The human intellect is then just another constraint, besides budget and time constraints. This should explain how habits are formed and addictions start. If, however, personal habits or social institutions (culture) are merely perceived as some kind of capital, however low their depreciation rate may be, how do we explain the persistence of habits and institutions that are obviously detrimental or risky? How does one explain why evolutionary mechanisms3 do not weed out inefficient habits? People must (temporarily) have a distorted perception, and Becker does indeed talk of ‘distorted perceptions’ (1996, p. 22), but he stresses that: they may receive excessive attention at the expense of more significant weaknesses in standard models of rational choice for explaining behaviour in real, as opposed to experimental, situations. These models typically assume that preferences do not

26

Institutional economics and the formation of preferences directly depend on either past experiences or social interactions. . . . To highlight these neglected constraints, the book does not emphasize cognitive imperfections, but rather the influence of personal and social capital on choices.

Hence, these phenomena can safely be included in a ceteris paribus clause. Becker yields to his many critics by giving a different reason for doing the same thing, claiming now that his problem is empirically the more important one. He now acknowledges, that it is important to have realistic assumptions on which to rest your theoretical framework.4 For the comparative static framework that neoclassical economics presents, changes are bound to be a major complication, especially those of the magnitude constituted by the advent of pop music. If changes can be addressed theoretically at all, this can only be done for gradual changes over time. Sudden changes that affect social and economic structures and have a deep impact such as the advent of pop music would remain baffling for the comparative static framework of neoclassical economics. Pop Music as a Fashion? Economists addressing the question of why and when changes in fashion occur also deal with changes in preferences. Changes in fashion are short-lived changes in consumption patterns. Fashion changes can have a large impact in economic terms, similar to changes in the music consumed by people. The idea that pop music itself is a fashion, or consists of successive fashions, is an idea many people have. Economists’ arguments to explain changes in fashion might offer an explanation for ‘pop’s popularity’. Neoclassical economists can take up one of two positions with regard to fashion without breaking away from their paradigm. A first approach elaborates on Lancaster’s argument that products may have several characteristics. Lancaster (1966) argued that products are not unidimensional but instead have a number of characteristics or attributes. Further, it is not the products that consumers want, but their attributes. Physically different products – records, live performances, T-shirts, caps, posters – may all have ‘pop music attributes’. Karni and Schmeidler (1990) now say that products not only satisfy material needs, but have social attributes satisfying consumers’ preferences for ‘the social’ as well. Commodities are ‘extended’ into the social realm. Karni and Schmeidler (ibid., pp. 262–3) say that the social attributes of an extended commodity consist of information concerning the users of this commodity and of information concerning the users of other commodities satisfying the same material needs. . . . Therefore, a consumer’s preferences between two standard commodity bundles depend on the entire allocation in the economy.


27

Thus, consumers may have fixed preferences concerning their social environment: we all want to be part of a group that distinguishes itself, for instance by consuming pop music. As their social environments change, people’s tastes for particular items or products change. Karni and Schmeidler (ibid., p. 263) assume ‘that social attitudes are, by and large, a reflection of the class affiliations of the individual’. There are some people (‘a consumers’) who are of a higher class and want to distinguish themselves from the others (‘b consumers’). ‘a consumers’ are not pleased when they find that too many ‘b consumers’ consume the same thing as they do. ‘b consumers’, however, want to improve their position on the social ladder and like it when more people of any class consume what they are consuming, especially a consumers. Simmel (1957, p. 541) observes, however, that ‘man [that is all people] has ever had a dualistic nature’. The phenomenon of fashion consists of two factors: an element of demarcation and an element of imitation (ibid., p. 545). All people (‘a consumers’ and ‘b consumers’), thus, want both to belong to a specific group of others and to distinguish themselves from others at the same time. The way to distinguish oneself may alter (Campbell 1987), and there are different dimensions to characterize the process of people distinguishing themselves from others (DiMaggio 1987). It seems that until the 1950s and 1960s people indeed tried to imitate the upper classes. After this era young people from the upper classes often tried to gain status by imitating the socially and economically lower classes, for instance by adopting pop music – emulation patterns changed (cf. Wouters 1998). Changes in fashion and behaviour during a given fashion involve an active role for consumers: they continuously need to interpret their environment. Even worse, interpretations are not straightforward either but will change: what is considered good (‘in the swim’ as Pigou called it in 1903) may change. Karni and Schmeidler see people as passive creatures, reacting to exogenous developments and having fixed and unchanging preferences (for ‘the social’). Their account is therefore inadequate. Much like Karni and Schmeidler, Pesendorfer assumes two types of people, ‘high’ and ‘low’. People will buy new fashion products in any event because there is only one way of gaining status. Pesendorfer (1995) introduces a new element in his explanation. Much like Meyersohn and Katz (1957), fashions are seen as having cycles, each with different identifiable stages. Producers start fashion cycles by introducing new products onto the market whenever that is worth their while. When the benefits of introducing exceed the costs of developing and bringing a new fashionable item onto the market, a firm induces a fashion. This manipulist view of fashion and consumption is not very convincing, however, as discussed later in more detail (cf. Campbell 1987). Firms experience notorious difficulties in predicting the next fashion in a particular field. They spend considerable amounts of money just to be able

28


to reduce some of the uncertainty. One could also object to this manipulist perspective by asking why firms are not immensely profitable: ‘If they’re so smart, why aren’t they rich?’ Moreover, even if it was so easy to manipulate consumers into buying the fashionable products a firm sells, and profits are soaring, competitors would undoubtedly contest this market. The manipulist view of fashions is a caricature of the social processes that constitute fashion, which is not to say that firms operating in markets prone to changes of fashions have no influence at all in the process. In addition, the same critiques levelled against Karni and Schmeidler (1990) apply: consumers are not passive, and the way in which they gain status is not static and unidimensional. A Meta-preference for Pop Music? 1998 Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (1982) has called the image of the economic agent with given preferences and a utility-maximizing frame of mind a ‘rational fool’ (cf. Cowen 1989). His suggestion for solving this problem is that people can be conceived to have meta-preferences: they rank their rankings of preferences. According to Sen, people may, for instance, choose to become vegetarian, while they may not be vegetarian yet. People can also choose to be somebody who likes pop music, or somebody who likes Elvis (rather than Cliff Richard). Preferences do not simply reveal themselves, but need to be discovered through means that include introspection and communication (Sen 1982, p. 102). Sen says that meta-preferences need not be complete; they can be partial. In addition, Sen (ibid., p. 101, emphasis added) says that ‘the tool of meta-rankings can be used in many different ways in different contexts’. This is a puzzling statement. Does it mean that the researcher uses this tool to conclude that, apparently, in this particular context, and for this particular person meta-preference M prevailed? (That is, are we talking about ‘revealed meta-preferences’ here?) Or does Sen say that the economic agent can ‘apply’ different meta-preferences in different circumstances? If Sen means the former, he is only moving the problem without solving it.5 But if he means the latter, why not directly adhere to the idea that preferences themselves are socially formed and refrain from further complicating the issue by introducing the notion of meta-preferences, raising problems of infinite regress (cf. Brennan 1989; Davis 2003)? Producing Pop Music to Meet a Latent Demand In an article entitled ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’ Peterson (1990) uses a ‘production of culture’ approach6 to explain why pop, or rock music as he calls it, gained primacy. In a way, his ‘production of culture’ argument relates to the literature in industrial organization. Peterson


BOX 2.2

29

POP MUSIC AND BAUMOL’S DISEASE

Baumol’s disease (see Baumol and Bowen 1965) – addressing the allegedly increasingly difficult financial position of the performing arts and services in general – is alluded to in cultural economics as an explanation for the advent of pop music (DeBoer 1985). Technological developments affect the different sectors in the economy differently. Service sectors, and by implication the cultural sectors, are at a disadvantage compared to other sectors in the economy. They are less able to use technological developments to reduce costs, but cannot escape increases in (labour) costs that follow the general pattern in society. In the case of pop music the argument would be that the Big Bands could not improve their productivity as fast as the newer styles of music (DeBoer 1985) and thus lost their position. The Big Bands are more labour intensive and so prices for Big Band and crooner music would have to increase relative to those of their competitors. If customers buy the music that is cheapest, either the market share or the incomes of Big Bands and crooners would decrease. As in the previous paragraph, the argument does not explain why Big Bands would lose out to pop music. The Big Bands too could have changed their way of playing music and could have adapted to the changed technological environment. The problem is that the Baumol argument separates the content of music from the form it takes (DeBoer 1985, p. 54), assuming that the content is irrelevant to economics. This separation is ridiculous not only in musical terms (see also Goehr 1994), but also in economic terms. The Big Bands have not changed their ways. The reason why process innovations would not be acceptable in the eyes of their audiences are very much related to the form that Big Band music takes. This kind of music produced in a very different (and cheaper way) was inconceivable. ‘Baumol’s disease’ offers no explanation for the substitution of Big Bands and crooner music by pop music as the dominant music. wants to explain the sudden rise of pop music, and he (p. 98) discards the ‘demand-side’ explanation for the advent of pop music: baby-boomers were too young to have any effect on the market. He assumes the existence of an ‘unsatiated demand that spoke more directly to the condition of young people’.

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For a long time the music industry was blind to this unsatiated demand. He analyses what adjustments the music industry had to make when it realized the existence of such latent preferences for a new kind of music. An explanation stressing latent preferences can easily be suspected of using the benefit of hindsight. One needs to be explicit about what exactly changed to allow the latent preferences to emerge. Which, as Peterson would put it, ‘conditions of young people changed’? This cannot be increased disposable income, as I argued earlier, or changes in relative prices for music products. Although Peterson may have in mind the characteristics of the music available in the market, he does not address explicitly what these changes amounted to and how they related to what ‘young people’ latently wanted to consume. Only when this sudden change in behaviour is explained, can the production of culture perspective developed by Richard Peterson be of use in looking at how the production of cultural goods changes. Peterson begs the question of what caused the need for changed production in the first place.

2.2 OVER-SOCIALIZED ADORNIAN PUPPETS Human behaviour is not random. People behave in a regular way and scientists look for what might explain this regularity. Some see or postulate regularity in people’s motives: people seek, for example, to reach a level of preference satisfaction which presumably nicely translates into the behaviour they show. Other social scientists prefer to think of people behaving according to customs. When a number of people share the same custom one could talk of an institution. Culture might be defined as a coherent set of institutions. Marshall Sahlins said, ‘it is culture which constitutes utility’ (1976, p. viii). How individuals’ behaviour is influenced by or dependent on social entities is rather an old problem in the social sciences. It is a matter that is related to the question of how social cohesion or order arises and persists, a matter to which scholars such as Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville have been particularly drawn since the 17th century (Hirschman 1977).7 Pretending to be able to make a contribution to this discussion would be presumptuous. Where Becker denied the existence of, let alone any influence from, a social entity on the individual, Frankfurter Schule theorist Theodor Adorno (1941), advocates the other ‘extreme’ of the individual – social scale. Adorno explicitly discusses the reasons people have for consuming the popular music of his time – jazz – and holds that they are like puppets in the hands of the music industry. The music industry, in turn, is only interested in maximizing its profits. Not only do people who show a liking for popular music, in the eyes of Adorno and his followers, not have a will of their own, but the social environment relevant for the study of music consumption is shaped only by the


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music industry. I will not consider the conspiracy theory-like aspect of Adorno’s argument about the music industry, but instead focus on his ideas about how people’s behaviour is determined by their social environment. The legacy of Adorno’s (1941) article on the study of pop music from the perspective of the social sciences is surprisingly strong. In a recent textbook on theoretical perspectives for the study of popular music, Negus (1996) still seems to feel obliged to contrast recent studies of pop music with the views that Adorno expounded more than half a century ago. Where pop music itself seems to have emancipated to the extent that many of its constituent substyles have gained quite some prestige, the study of pop music is (still) not quite accepted as a respectable field of research. According to Adorno (1941, p. 17) the popular music of his time (jazz) can best be described as the photographic negative of serious music: ‘popular music . . . is usually characterized by its difference from serious music’. The differences are ‘generally taken for granted’ (ibid.), whereupon no further discussion follows about these differences. Popular music is everything serious music is not, the idea seems to be, and what serious music is, every sensible person ‘knows’ almost by intuition. Popular music’s structure, especially, is standardized, making every detail substitutable: ‘the whole is pre-given and preaccepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts’ (ibid., p. 18). Economist Tibor Scitovsky (1977), by the way, also claims that mass production is wrong and leads to banalization. Adorno contrasts Beethoven – and ‘good serious music in general’ (ibid., p. 21) – with what he apparently perceives as the homogeneous totality of popular music. ‘Good serious music in general’ is distinct from what he calls ‘bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music’ by virtue of the fact that here ‘the detail virtually contains the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, while, at the same time, it is produced out of the conception of the whole’ (ibid., p. 21). Whole and part being interrelated and interdependent, ‘good serious music in general’ is – as if by definition, or by hinting at ‘well known facts’ – complex and sophisticated. Popular music’s standard structure is to evoke a standard reaction from the audience. Frozen standards in popular music ‘hear for’ the listener leading to a negation of the individual (cf. ibid., p. 24). Why would people listen to (consume) standardized, popular music, in effect negating their personal identity, according to Adorno? In contrast to Beethoven, says Adorno, popular music bands create trademarks, which lead to ‘the institutionalization and standardization of listening habits themselves’ (ibid., p. 27). Listeners become automatons, ‘so accustomed to the recurrence of the same things that they react automatically’ (ibid., p. 27). ‘Publishers’ of popular music are to blame. They want ‘a piece of music that is fundamentally the same as all the other current hits and simultaneously fundamentally

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different from them’ (ibid., p. 27), using techniques such as what Adorno called ‘plugging’. Plugging of music by the music business, along with ‘advertisement as a business’, ‘tricks’ listeners. Listeners are easily tricked since they are (made) much like babies, to be talked to in baby-talk, being presented with popular music much as children’s songs are presented. Listeners want to recognize the music to appreciate it. Recognition requires standards,8 the music industry supplies the standards and the audience sheepishly listens in search of ‘simultaneously . . . distraction and inattention’ (ibid., p. 37): distraction from their daily toil under circumstances that are the same as those in which popular music is purportedly produced – in a factory (ibid., p. 38). To Adorno, then, it was evident without further investigation that what drove people to listen to popular music (jazz for Adorno) was an utter abandonment of their personality to the whims of the music industry that only sought to earn as much profit from them as possible. Fans of popular music are manipulated into rigid listening customs that resemble the monotony in factories from which they cannot break free. If one believes that music has evident and intrinsic qualities that every autonomous person can readily perceive and that popular music obviously lacks those qualities, this seems an obvious point to make. If one takes the experience of the audience of music more seriously and asks them about their perception of music, a different and more nuanced picture emerges. Early studies in this vein, such as Riesman (1950), were not able to question the generally and strongly held perception of an inherent distinction between what is high culture and what is low culture. This perception relies on the belief that the distinction is a ‘natural’ one. In reality, the perception of a distinction between high and low culture is socially constructed. The case of opera is well-documented (Levine 1988).9 Instead of the automatons of neoclassical economics, where economic agents slavishly follow their given and unchanging preferences without reflecting upon them, in Adorno’s view people consume popular music according to ingrained customs and cannot reflect upon them but are bound by them. If a person is not able to reflect on either his preferences, or his customs or habits, one could say he is not an individual at all (cf. Frankfurt 1971).

2.3 CONCLUDING REMARKS Although for experts, certainly when they have the benefit of hindsight, pop music does have known sources and did not fall from heaven like manna, its advent was sudden and had important cultural as well as economic consequences. There is no satisfactory explanation for the advent of pop music. Neoclassical economics in particular fails. Neither scholars who have directly


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addressed the issue, nor those who have developed arguments that could be construed so that they address the issue have managed to develop a satisfactory explanation. Reviewing the different arguments has, however, shown that a few important aspects of pop music need to be carefully considered. One is that it is a social phenomenon with a very specific history. Another is that pop music has a meaning for its audience. To consumers pop music is permeated with sociocultural values and ideals. Social scientists need to be able understand these, before being able to understand why pop music has become so popular. By consuming pop music, people want to express who they are, to which groups they belong, and what their identity is. This I will pursue in the remainder of the book. People’s identity, however, is not strictly individual, but is highly influenced by the underlying socio-cultural values that exist in a society and the way in which these are ‘objectified’ or institutionalized. The message that people express by consuming pop music must be recognized and understood by relevant others. There will at any time only be a limited number of recognized ways of communication that will become institutionalized. Institutional economics can take them into account in a realistic way. In the next chapter I will propose a conceptual framework for doing so.

2.4 NEITHER AUTOMATONS NOR PUPPETS Discussing both extreme positions with regard to the individual in his social environment places me implicitly in between the two, in the middle ground.10 The psychology that such a conception of the individual draws on is necessarily less simple, taking social influences into account, while at the same time allowing for free will (Bandura 1977; Rottschaeffer 1991). A person is embedded in a social environment and social relations – affecting the goals that person seeks to attain, the constraints faced, the way in which decisions are made, and how the results are perceived (see also Granovetter 1985; Markus and Kitayama 1991; Dolfsma and Dannreuther 2003). The boundaries that institutions create impose homogeneity and certainty, creating a common ‘institutional furniture’ (as Veblen (1898 [1961a]) expressed it) that allows for interpretation and coordination without direct involvement of specific other individuals in a specific role (Dolfsma and Dannreuther 2003). The interrelated institutions that make up the environment form a culture that nudges people’s behaviour but does not determine it.11 Even before conceptualizing institutions, and their relations to meanings and socio-cultural values, as in Chapter 3, it should be clear that a middle ground is taken. As Veblen (1898 [1961b], p. 243) observes:

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Institutional economics and the formation of preferences it is, of course, on individuals that the system of institutions imposes those conventional standards, ideals, and canons of conduct that make up the community’s scheme of life. Scientific inquiry in this field, therefore, must deal with individual conduct and must formulate its theoretical results in terms of individual conduct. But such an inquiry can serve the purposes of a genetic theory only if and in so far as this individual conduct is attended to in those respects in which it counts toward habituation, and so toward change (or stability) of the institutional fabric, on the one hand, and in those respects in which it is prompted and guided by the received institutional conceptions and ideals on the other hand.

In that sense, as Bush (1987, p. 1077) has argued, values when institutionalized, ‘correlate’ human behaviour.12 Thus, while institutions influence individual action by altering the scope of action and individual decisionmaking, socio-cultural values do so by altering its content and basis (Davis 2003; Dolfsma 2002b). Much of the information exchanged is ‘institutionally generated’ and, as Veblen (1961b, p. 243) added, ‘It is, of course, on individuals that the system of institutions imposes those conventional standards, ideals, and canons of conduct that make up the community’s scheme of life’.

NOTES 1. It probably doesn’t need stating that working-class milieus were the first to embrace pop music (see Kleijer and Tillekens 1990). 2. Deirdre McCloskey, who was at Chicago University at the time, claims the actual influence was in the opposite direction. 3. Alchian’s (1950) emphasis on evolutionary mechanisms making sure that economic actors behave efficiently is a mainstay of neoclassical economics. For the argument here, imitation or eradication will ensure that efficient habits will grow into institutions that many adopt. 4. This goes against an important underpinning of neoclassical economics formulated by Friedman (1953). Friedman defends a deductivist approach in theory and claims that the assumptions which are the foundation for economic theory need not necessarily be ‘realistic’. Correct prediction is the criterion by which Friedman prefers to judge theories. 5. Fundamental issues about, for instance, the relation between motivation and behaviour are obfuscated. 6. Peterson’s approach does not represent the production of culture perspective (cf. Crane 1992) Discussing and comparing the different approaches in this research paradigm is beyond the scope of this chapter. I will restrict myself to discussing Peterson’s (1990) because he takes on the same problem as I do. 7. In later times the discussion of these early scholars has often been misrepresented, specifically the positions of Smith and Mandeville (see Bianchi 1993; Verburg 1991). 8. One could argue, of course, that people similarly need standards to appreciate ‘serious music’, or music generally for that matter (Scitovsky 1977), but that compositions that are considered of extraordinary beauty are valued because they were composed with the proper rules in mind, though not completely according to the rules (Manns 1994). 9. Nevertheless, empirically, there is a strong statistical relationship between some ‘objective’ musicological measure of the quality of an artist’s singing in popular songs as measured by how they voice the word ‘love’, and their commercial success in terms of the amount of


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money that they have earned (see Hamlen 1991). This holds for perceived quality differences – translating into incomes earned by these artists – within a music genre. 10. The discussion is on how to combine notions of reason (rationality), adaptation (learning), and volition (cf. Finch 1997; Handlbauer 1997; Dolfsma 2002a). It is a discussion that touches on fundamental issues such as whether the social system is to be viewed as an open system, what role (if any) uncertainty plays, and what role shared frames of reference play in social interaction (Beckert 2002; Berger and Luckman 1966 [1991]; Giddens 1984; Siegenthaler 1997). More on this in the following chapter. 11. Albert and Ramstad (1997, 1998) make a compelling argument in support of this assertion from the perspective of institutional economics. 12. These elements provide further means to come to grips with the sometimes highly ephemeral phenomenon of culture (see also Mayhew 1987 and Wildavsky 1987).

3. Consuming symbolic goods It is culture which constitutes utility. (Marshall Sahlins (1976, p. viii))

The question we face now is the same, although more specific, as the one Campbell (1987, p. 49) addresses in his eloquent study: how do goods take on meaning and value and what consequences does this have? How does the want or desire for a novel product develop? In less abstract terms: what meanings does pop music have, and how have these emerged? How have people developed a preference for pop music? Campbell (1987) observes that economic theory cannot explain levels and patterns of consumption (see also Falk 1994). From his position as a sociologist, Campbell discusses three possible explanations for the way in which items may become meaningful for consumers, all of which he finds to be inadequate. There are three accepted views on the sources of tastes, he surmises, none of which is adequate in explaining modern consumer behaviour. These may partly overlap with the views on consumption I discussed earlier. Both the instinctive and the manipulist views of the emergence of preferences assume that the consumer is passive and cannot explain change in patterns or differences between patterns. People do not have innate desires that can be satisfied in only one specific way. Hunger can be satisfied in many different ways: how can instincts account for the fact that people in India eat chapatti and people in the Netherlands eat bread? Moreover, there are acquired desires as well. Decades ago people did not know about washing-machines or stereo sets; now many cannot do without them. A manipulist explanation – consumers are forced, deluded, or scared into buying – is inadequate as well: how can it explain a situation where strongly promoted products fail to find a market? The third perspective Campbell called the ‘Veblenesque’ perspective; it is not an unusual position to take according to Campbell. In economics, Frank (1985) has taken it, and in sociology Bourdieu (1984; see also Trigg 2001), amongst others, has adopted the same perspective. Consumption in the eyes of Veblen (1899 [1994]) and others is explained by emulation: people want to attain a higher status in society; they envy those that have a higher status. Although he is sympathetic to the fact that this view underlines the fact that consumption is a social event, Campbell (1987, pp. 43–57) criticizes the 36

Consuming symbolic goods

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approach of which Veblen is an example for not being able to cope with innovation. The way to attain a position of status can change over time, possibly as a result of conflict between groups over the way to define status. Society is not a cultural monolith where wealth and leisure alone measure status. Consumption is, furthermore, not only ‘other-directed’; it may reflect personal traits in a character as well. Goods are not only striven for for ‘negative’ reasons – as instruments to distinguish the self (possibly as a member of a group) from others – but can also act as ‘positive’ representations (Falk 1994). Goods may be ‘good objects’ to be striven for, irrespective of the social position they imply for their consumers. Over the past decades and centuries, where affluence has become a part of life for most people in Western parts of the world individuals do not so much seek satisfaction from products, as pleasure from the self-illusory experience which they construct from their associated meanings. The essential activity of consumption is thus not the actual selection, purchase or use of products, but the imaginative pleasure-seeking to which the product image lends itself. (Campbell 1987, p. 89)

The self-illusory experience where associated meanings are created takes place in the individual’s imagination, Campbell (1987, p. 93) goes on to argue. People’s imagination must be about situations that could occur, however unlikely the chance that they do occur (ibid., p. 84). What people imagine themselves doing or having is intimately intertwined with the ideals that exist in a society. People buy records by famous pop musicians and imagine themselves to be in their place or in the place of the person who features in the song – being that perfectly independent and autonomous person who enjoys life and chooses to live in freedom and prosperity for instance. Campbell shows that in the Western world romantic, modernist values – increasingly emphasizing that desiring and having pleasure are legitimized – dominate. Thus he claims to be able to explain how consumption levels (the insatiability of demand) and patterns (changes or fashions in demand for products) in the Western world have led to its immense economic wealth. ‘Romanticism provided the philosophy of “recreation” necessary for a dynamic consumerism: a philosophy which legitimates the search for pleasure as good in itself and not merely of value because it restores the individual to an optimum efficiency’ (Campbell 1987, p. 201). In Campbell’s vein Jonathan Friedman (1990) introduces a number of nonWestern consumption patterns that resemble the way in which (especially young) people in the West consume pop music. Like Jonathan Friedman, sociologists and anthropologists see consumption patterns as an expression of underlying socio-cultural values. Friedman’s argument (1990, p. 327) is that production, but especially consumption, should be viewed in different terms than it used to be: ‘[it is] more than simply material aspects of subsistence . . . they can be further understood as constituent of selfhood, of social identity’.1

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The example of La Sape, a way of being a consumer (more particularly, of elegant clothes) in the Congo, can make the point clear. According to Friedman (ibid., p. 316) ‘for the Congolese . . . tendentially, appearance and being are identical – you are what you wear. Not because, “clothes make the man” but because clothes are the immediate expression of the degree of lifeforce possessed by a person.’ Consumption is an activity that defines identity, the nature of power, sickness and well-being (ibid., pp. 318–19). The cases Friedman describes and analyses show that consumption can only be fruitfully understood as a means of expression and communication (see also Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Differences in consumption patterns between cultures do not indicate the rationality or irrationality of people, but indicate that different basic cultural values are involved or that the same values are expressed differently. Sapeurs are not less rational, arational or irrational when compared to the consumption patterns of people in the West. The sapeur . . . is entirely authentic. No tricks are played on reality. The strategy is not to fool the audience, to use appearance as a means to status that is not rightfully attained. In a world where appearance tends to fuse with essence rather than merely representing it, dressing up is not simply a means but an end in itself. (Friedman 1994, 181)

How valuation differs in different social and historic contexts or between different items in the same society is shown in a large number of sociological and anthropological studies. Titmuss’s (1970) study is a classic example. He examined the different ways in which blood was made available for those who needed it. In the United States, at the time, people could sell their blood to special clinics, while in Great Britain people donated blood voluntarily without a direct material reward. In the United States the value of blood was expressed in terms of money, representing underlying socio-cultural ideals or values of efficiency, independence, commercial spirit, and so on in that country. Values held by most people in Great Britain would not allow for the sale of blood. People in need of blood, because they have had an accident or because they are haemophiliac, have to be given blood and should not be ‘forced’ to buy it. For Britons it was an act of good citizenship to donate blood voluntarily. Zelizer (1979, 1985, 1997) provides another example. She describes the changes in the socio-cultural values, and thus the institutional setting, for the United States with regard to life insurance. Prices are thus but one way in which values for particular items can be expressed. The suggestion is that there is a direct relation between the institutional setting on the one hand and the way in which value is expressed on the other. In order to explain a host of phenomena in Western societies and beyond, phenomena which have a symbolic meaning for people, reference to sociocultural values is inevitable. Explaining the advent of pop music in the 1950s


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and 1960s is no different. Indeed, of all the cultural expressions, music is most frequently banned, testifying to its symbolic meaning.2 Before taking up the challenge of how to incorporate such insights into an economic theory, I will show which socio-cultural values are intertwined with pop music, and how they are intertwined. To quote to Jonathan Friedman (1994, p. 169): ‘Acts of consumption represent ways of fulfilling desires that are identified with highly valued life styles. Consumption is a material realization, or attempted realization, of the image of the good life.’

3.1 VALUES IN POP MUSIC To explain the advent and value of pop music, an important point to note is that it is not just the ‘content of the music performed’ that changes when the socio-cultural values expressed in music change, as DeBoer (1985, p. 54, emphasis added) asserts. The complete organization, economically and socially, of the music industry (broadly conceived) changes as well. Content and form cannot be separated. From Frith’s many publications on pop music a picture emerges about the consumption of music that underlines the idea that people express sociocultural values constitutive of their identity through its consumption. Certainly teenagers conspicuously consume pop music in particular, expressing identity related to socio-cultural values (Frith 1983, p. 183). Especially by using pop music we ‘create for ourselves a particular sort of self-definition’ (Frith 1987a, p. 140). An ‘us’ and a ‘them’ are simultaneously constructed (Frith 1987b, p. 98). Authenticity and independence are important among the socio-cultural values people want to express through pop music: ‘the rock aesthetic depends, crucially, on an argument about authenticity. Good music is the expression of something – a person, an idea, a feeling, a shared experience, a Zeitgeist’ (Frith 1987a, p. 136, italics in original). Authentically expressing feelings is an important part of pop music, something it takes from the black music that was part of its roots (Frith 1983, p. 17). In an article where Frith addresses the question of why songs have words and, consequently, how songs get meaning, he makes the connection between the expression of such socio-cultural values on the one hand and institutions on the other: ‘in analysing song words we must refer to performing conventions which are used to construct our sense of both their singers and ourselves, as listeners’ (Frith 1987b, p. 97, emphasis in original). Frith (1987b, p. 101) further says that interpretation of songs and song words should at the same time be open to some extent – open to interpretation by both singer and listener.3 Although the institutional setting (and resulting consumption pattern) reflects the socio-cultural values that underlie it, there are likely to be more

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ways in which such values could be reflected. Ballantine (1984) presents an example of a study that can be read as a deterministic view on the relation between socio-cultural values and the institutional setting. He believes that the explanation for the emergence of rock or pop music lies solely in the fact that it expressed protests against the establishment at that time. For somebody to explain the existence of an institutional setting, showing that it expresses certain socio-cultural values for its participants is necessary, though not sufficient. The emergence of any particular institutional setting should be explained in the light of particular historical developments leading to its coming into existence. Things might have turned out differently. Why they did not develop in another direction is what needs to be explained. The protest referred to by Ballantine could of course have been voiced differently. We need a historical and institutional perspective to explain why it did not. Showing a liking for the music of Bill Haley, for instance, expresses underlying values of wanting to be independent from others (especially of parents), trying to find one’s own way, experimenting, wanting to express and enjoy oneself, and so on. A particular way of expressing one’s socio-cultural values institutionalizes into a pattern of consumption (cf. Campbell 1987), but also into a way of performing, a way of communicating with the audience, the use of instruments, technology and media. Institutions on both the demand and supply side are shaped by socio-cultural values;4 this holds for all kinds of music, from pop music to classical music. Goehr’s (1994) example of the composer Hanns Eisler attests to this point. There may be different ways to express that you would like others to think that you are an independent being (and so on), but the most effective way in extant circumstances may be by showing a liking for Bill Haley. Only then is the value of a particular thing – CD, T-shirt with print, and so on – established. In the market, or in another institutional setting, the terms of trade, the worth of some particular thing, the value (price) of it is established. The difference in the speed and extent of the acceptance of pop music of Belgium compared with the Netherlands (Kleijer and Tillekens 1992a) is, in this light, explained best by differences in basic socio-cultural values. Lutte et al. (1969, especially p. 28), in a study based on extensive empirical fieldwork that is in a way a precursor to the work of Inglehart (1990) and Hofstede (1980), show that these cultural values are quite distinct in different European countries for the relevant time period (see Table 3.1). Inglehart has argued that there is a gradual, age-group-related shift away from materialist towards postmaterialist basic values. The movement has all kinds of consequences, including economic consequences. From the table, the impression could arise that young people in the Netherlands do not care about anything, have no values they adhere to, and are cynical nihilists. Such an impression arises because of the way in which Lutte et al. have set up their research. Socio-cultural values


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subscribed to by younger people were different from those the researchers (and older people generally) found significant and were thus depicted in negative terms.5 A further note for caution is due in relation to the interpretation of the terms. We may now interpret them differently from how younger or older people would have interpreted them at that time. ‘Independence’, for instance, might have been interpreted as ‘being an autonomous person’, but might also refer to not being financially dependent on others. The table nevertheless is an important contribution in providing an explanation of the advent of pop music. Despite having a higher income, young people in Belgium did not opt for the newly emerging pop music because their cultural values were not conducive to it. Dutch youths were more individualistic (Kleijer et al. 1992, p. 389), and less likely to conform to the generally accepted frame of reference. The majority of them did not adhere to family, patriotic and especially religious socio-cultural values (Lutte et al. 1969, p. 28; Knulst 1989, p. 88; Righart 1995). In some respects, they had a more post-materialist perspective on life, to use Inglehart’s terminology. On all these important counts they score Table 3.1 Socio-cultural values and character ideals in Western Europe, 1965a Character traits/ values (1) Sense of duty (2) Responsibility (3) Independence (4) Sedateness (5) Forbearance (6) Sociableness (7) Simplicity (8) Exemplary figures

Netherlands

Belgium

France

18.7 7.6 4.2 5.3 2.4 24.8 6.4 celebrities, friends

32.9 14.3 7.5 10.0 7.1 30.1 13.6 abstract ideal figures, adults

26.5 13.5 7.5 12.9 8.4 32.4 14.5 abstract ideal figures, celebrities

2.0 4.2 0.5

19.9 12.0 0.9

15.1 11.6 0.9

(9) Religion (10) Family (11) Country

Germany (Fed. Rep.) 35.7 19.8 5.0 8.4 5.7 32.2 8.7 abstract ideal figures, heroic figures 25.2 18.2 1.8

Note: a Percentage of young people mentioning these ideal character traits as important, or subscribing to these socio-cultural values (except for (8)). Source:

Lutte et al. (1969, p. 28).

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markedly different from their peers in surrounding countries such as Belgium. The people chosen as ideal figures in surrounding countries are rarely the ideal figures whom Dutch youth aspired to be, for instance (Lutte et al. 1969, p. 35). Ideal figures to Dutch young people tended to be celebrities and friends (ibid., p. 153), most of whom were of the same age as the people then surveyed. Campbell (1987) argues, of course, that which ideal characters are chosen strongly depends on cultural and historically founded ideals. According to Righart (1995, p. 69) the lengthened period during which young people are being educated has strengthened the process. More young people stayed within a peer group for longer periods then ever before, having a relatively sheltered life among equals. Thus, in the late 1950s, in many Western countries, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and even Cliff Richard came to be the (institutionalized) symbol of autonomy, independence and related socio-cultural values for many – especially young – people. By listening to pop music on the radio, buying records and music magazines, and subsequently talking about music with friends, you showed yourself to have the values that mattered, you distinguished yourself from other generations as well as from others within your own generation (for an early empirical study on this, see Johnstone and Katz 1957).

3.2 INSTITUTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE Until the 1920s institutional economics constituted the mainstream, and was subsequently replaced by what is now known as neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics has a number of features that differentiate it from the institutional theories that dominated in the early days of the 20th century and which have persisted and developed since then in the margins of economic thought.6 In neoclassical economics people are like automatons. They have one given goal that they seek to accomplish with the least possible effort, thus maximizing their utility. Preferences, neatly ordered in such a way that they never contradict within an ordering, do not change as people learn or interact with others. Homo Economicus is like Robinson Crusoe, a mature man alone on his island who has learned all he needs to know (cf. Lucas 1987).7 Circumstances are never so complex that economic man cannot determine what will bring him most utility, never does he make a mistake or is in doubt. Such people, who are like the monads of the 17th century philosopher Leibniz, would fit rather well into formal models. With Douglass North (in 1993) and Ronald Coase (in 1991) winning Nobel Memorial Prizes for research in institutional economics, and the growing reverence for game theory8 – which tries to model interdependencies between people’s decisions to explain the outcomes of social processes – the idea that


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people’s behaviour is influenced by entities that transcend their behaviour is again recognized by large groups of economists. Game theory models some aspects of people’s interactions to show that the rational maximizers of utility from neoclassical economic theory may not end up maximizing their utility after all.9 There are many forms of games, but the best known and oldest is the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) (see Figure 3.1). Given certain rules and a pay-off structure that every player of the game is assumed to know, it explains how a sub-optimal situation may result from people interacting with each other. The characteristic PD story is that two people are caught on suspicion of a crime. They are interrogated separately and don’t have the opportunity to agree on a common strategy. The best joint outcome would be for both to confess to the crime (they both cooperate), each being sentenced to jail for one year. However, each prisoner could deny being involved (could defect), hoping for the other to confess, and be released without a prison confinement himself. If both of them do this, they will both go to jail for six years. In many ways, game theory does not change the constitutive metaphor that underlies neoclassical economics.10 However, there are important ways in which game theory constitutes or necessitates changes to the paradigm. As Amartya Sen (1973), 1998 Nobel Laureate, has shown, the idea of the wellbehaved preference function of neoclassical economics, as revealed in people’s behaviour, becomes problematic. When people take other people’s strategies into consideration it means that their behaviour does not necessarily reveal what they want: their ‘real’ preferences may remain hidden. Preferences and people’s behaviour are thus linked in more intricate ways than generally presumed in economics. Subsequent theorizing in game theory has shown how

Prisoner 2 Cooperate

Defect

Cooperate

(–1, –1)

(–9, 0)

Defect

(0, –9)

(–6, –6)

Prisoner 1

Figure 3.1 The standard prisoner’s dilemma

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much more problematic the overarching idea of equilibrium becomes as interactions between people are considered. In particular, unique and stable equilibria are rare in the formal models of recent vintages in (evolutionary) game theory. Importantly, as Field (1984) has argued, there are some (regulative) rules of the game, the emergence or change of which game theory can explain (see also Gilbert 1990). Other rules, rules that constitute the game, cannot be explained with game theory. Cultural or historical conditions need to be referred to to explain their existence and form. One branch of institutional economics – New Institutional Economics (NIE) – has become dominated by game theory (Janssen 1998). One reason for this is the way that institutions are seen in NIE as efficient solutions to problems of individuals interacting with each other, which means their emergence and change can safely be ignored. An important exponent of this position is North (1981, 1990). North (1990), contrary to what others in NIE hold and contrary to his earlier position (North 1981), takes the position that institutions are not necessarily efficient. ‘Frictions’ that prevent economic exchanges from proceeding as economic theory predicts cause inefficient situations to arise. Persisting inefficiencies arise from differences between people’s bargaining power and relevant information. These two asymmetries raise what North calls, in line with Coase (1937), the transaction costs of an exchange. Inefficient institutions prevent economic agents from maximizing their utility; constituting ‘humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction’ (North 1991, p. 97, emphasis added). There are, then, things that act as constraints preventing people from doing what they want to do. Apparently these ‘things’ that keep people from doing what they want for other than strategic reasons, do not alter their preferences. People have not internalized these constraints, have not, through for instance socialization or processes of cognitive dissonance, changed what they want because of them. Not a realistic perspective on human behaviour, one would be inclined to say. North, in cooperation with Denzau (Denzau and North 1994), has clarified and further developed his views on epistemology. To explain why human behaviour is often predictable North and Denzau consult Heiner (1983). Heiner talks of a CD gap when a person’s competencies (C) are inadequate to deal with the difficulties of a situation (D) – see Figure 3.2. Uncertainty results, but it is not the kind of uncertainty Frank Knight (1921 [1948]) has in mind. A CD gap results in what Knight calls risk, a situation where it is not clear what will happen but the number of possible alternative developments is limited and known. The chance for each alternative to come true is known as well. People are then able to make a cost–benefit calculation to determine what is the best thing to do, what would maximize their (expected) utility. Further accumulation of knowledge decreases the CD gap (see Figure 3.2) only if the complexities of the social and physical environment do not increase significantly. It allows


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Complexity

Uncertainty

Learning

Complexity Source:

Dolfsma (2002a), see also Heiner (1983).

Figure 3.2

Why people learn

people to do and appreciate things they could not before. Knowledge in this Bayesian conception of learning develops unidirectionally (Figure 2.1 and discussion in that section). Denzau and North do recognize the limitations of this Bayesian perception of learning (1994, p. 22). Bayesian learners can never be surprised by what they learn; nothing is really new to them. Surprise would, of course, mean that somebody behaved ‘irrationally’ prior to a particular learning experience, that knowledge firmly believed turns out to be unreliable. Denzau and North (1994, p. 23) propose to amend this theory of Bayesian learning by allowing for ‘punctuated equilibria’ which ‘we can presume to be periods of representational rediscription’. They are brief about how such learning in spurts should be envisaged and how it can be incorporated in economic theory. In crafting their argument, which builds up to their suggestion of learning in punctuated equilibria, they discuss a number of notions and present the mechanisms according to which people learn and how shared preconceptions (or ideologies as North (1990) would express it; the term used by North and Denzau is ‘mental model’) assist in that. What exactly triggers a change of the mental model that is not merely incremental – and is thus a radical or revolutionary change in somebody’s mental model, what some psychologists call a Gestalt (attitude) switch – is not clear. Open, rather than Closed, Systems Intricately related to ideas of how people learn, how to conceptualize knowledge in economics and the notions of uncertainty and risk is the stance a social scientist takes with regard to the question of whether the subject he studies constitutes a closed or an open system (Grunberg 1978; Dow 1997; Hayek 1989). In open systems

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Institutional economics and the formation of preferences each element depends in a significant way on each other element and . . . the number of elements is indefinitely, if not infinitely, large . . . [moreover] some or all of [those elements] are themselves dependent variables in other theories, ad infinitum. (Grunberg 1978, pp. 548 and 546, emphasis in original)

Unlike closed systems, open systems are not subject to known or knowable universal laws. If these are indeed correct characterizations of the concepts open and closed systems, the bone of contention between the different subfields in economics becomes an ontological one. Arguments in favour of either position cannot be made – all one can do is profess one’s conviction on the issue and argue what consequences that has. Herbert Simon (1962), the behavioural scientist and 1978 Nobel Laureate in economics, believes the economy is a closed system. Formal theorists need to assume, implicitly or explicitly, that they deal with a closed system. On the other side of the chasm is a range of economists who believe that the economy is an open system. These go from Austrian (cf. Hayek 1989; Loasby 1976, 1996), to (post-) Keynesians (cf. Dow 1997) and institutionalists (see, for example, Grunberg 1978; Wilber and Harrison 1978). Study of an open system, where historical, local and cultural contingencies play, does not mean the student cannot go beyond mere descriptions. Theories that presume the social sphere to be an open system will not present the illusion of certainty that closed-system theorists present, and yet they do not ‘run aground the reef of relativity’ either. The idea of an open system calls for a pluralist perspective on the economy (Dow 1997), where the approach is not (singly) deductivist (Wilber and Harrison 1978). Theories and assumptions are subject to change in the face of new findings in pursuit of understanding of the economy. Explanations of social phenomena by means of individual behaviour are not very convincing or ‘realistic’. They beg the question of how shared understandings, or mental models if you will, come about, of what an institution is and what it means to behave in accordance with or in breach of its prescriptions. For this reason, social scientists who are strict in meeting the demands of methodological individualism are rare. Pace Hargreaves Heap (2002), I argue that the beings that inhabit mainstream economic thought do not, need not, and indeed cannot, interpret the sensations they have. Giving meaning to information that does not have unequivocal meaning of itself does not fit into the basically Bayesian theoretical framework which draws on behaviourist psychology. People must ‘know’ what it means to behave according to, or in violation of, the rules of their community or society. They must have ‘mentally modelled’ how to interpret certain signals from their environment and how to act on them. People are therefore involved in a continuous process of learning.


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3.3 VALUES, INSTITUTIONS, AND VALUES IN ECONOMICS In everyday life people recognize that socio-cultural values play a critical role in economic processes. When people want to make sense of what happens in their surroundings, or want to understand why others do certain things, or even to make decisions themselves about what they should do, they invoke what might be called (socio-cultural) ‘values’. For social scientists to use this common-sense notion of value in a more circumscribed and precise manner is an almost insurmountable step to take. Economists have more difficulties taking this step than other social scientists seem to have (see Klamer 1998). Scholars such as Hofstede (1980), Inglehart (1990), Kluckhohn (1951 [1962]) have taken this step. The influential economic theorist Frank Knight (1942 [1982]) also readily acknowledged the importance of what he has called ‘value deliberation’ in understanding human behaviour. ‘Human beings are at once, physical, biological, intentional and social entities’ (Hands 1997, p. 199): any simple methodology would not be able to account for their complexity. They have shown that, although thinking in a way that pays heed to socio-cultural values requires flexing the mind almost to the extent of unlearning many things that scholars in economics are taught to take for granted in their formative years as undergraduate and graduate students, it is possible to take such a step. So when I propose to study the advent of pop music in terms of sociocultural values and the institutionalized way these come to be expressed, I realize that some readers may be surprised. But when other approaches have not been successful, when other phenomena have been studied and explained by taking this perspective, and when people themselves plausibly understand their behaviour in terms of expressing socio-cultural values – however implicit, circumlocutory and sometimes far from fully conscious – why can a more scientific and analytical tack on this not be illuminating? My suggestion here is to explicitly incorporate socio-cultural values into an economic theory, rather than to be implicit about it in a way that institutional and social economics have largely been thus far. People consume certain kinds of music because that music expresses certain kinds of basic socio-cultural values they are attracted to and want to express. In what people consume, they express who they are or want to be; consumption (partly) creates identity; consumption is a way of communicating messages to the relevant ‘audience’ (cf. Cos¸gel 1992, 1994; Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Douglas and Isherwood (1979, pp. 59–60) argue that consumption enables individuals to ‘make and maintain social relations’. For music this seems true in the extreme, and one would think so especially for adolescents. However, a liking for particular kinds of music is a very powerful way of communicating basic, socio-cultural values for everyone. National

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anthems are an example showing that it is not only adolescents who are prone to communicate their values primarily through the music they like. Music and its social/political environment are closely related (Goehr 1994). There is considerable confusion concerning the term ‘value’. ‘Value’ is a central notion in ethics; economists equate it with ‘price’, and some other scientists think of normative science when the word ‘value’ is used. I propose, therefore, to clarify this confusion somewhat. A distinction between sociocultural values (or VALUES, in capitals) and values (in italics) seems necessary given the widespread confusion. I would like to use the expression socio-cultural value to denote strong underlying convictions held, consciously as well as unconsciously, by many people in a group or in society, convictions, most of which would be considered to be of an ethical or philosophical nature. These include matters of justice, beauty, love, freedom of will, rightful ways of government and governance, social standing and behaviour, and personal identity. The socio-cultural values that ‘exist’ in a society or community, and are expressed in its institutional settings, may change over time (see Campbell 1987), but are likely to be persistent. In Walzer’s (1983) terms, different institutional settings – representing different VALUES – constitute separate ‘spheres of justice’. In a similar vein, Hutter (1996) talks about ‘plays of meaning’, arguing for a theoretical perspective that understands value as constructed in a social context where people interact with each other in a structured manner, according to certain ‘rules of the game’ (see also Klamer 1996). Values, on the other hand, are the terms of trade/exchange established in society for specific goods or services. A value need not be a price – it can be the importance attached to having (a) close friend(s) or children (Zelizer 1985, see also 1979 and 1997). This distinction is not meant to be exhaustive. The way in which values are expressed – prices are one example, but again there are more ways – differs between different institutional settings where different VALUES are expressed.11 The distinction between socio-cultural values on the one hand and values on the other is rooted firmly in institutional economics and economic sociology, albeit that it has not been emphasized and elaborated to the extent that I propose here. Sociologists Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, for instance, argued that norms, ideals and ultimate ends should be considered if a social scientist is to understand society and the economy (Beckert 2002). Social economics makes much the same claims (Davis 2003; Lutz 1999), as do institutional economics (Bush 1987; Neale 1987; Samuels 1995). The cultural theorist Wildavsky (1987) showed how people’s voting behaviour, their preferences for politicians or political points of view, depend on the institutional setting, reflecting what I would call underlying socio-cultural values. Figure 3.3, the Social Value Nexus, graphically presents the argument in this section that behaviour and valuation need to be understood as institutionalized expressions of underlying


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Socio-cultural values (VALUES)

Institutional Setting/Institutions

Values Source:

Dolfsma (1999b, 2002b).

Figure 3.3

The social value nexus

socio-cultural values. The framework as I suggest it is not deterministic. Socio-cultural values do not determine exactly which institutions emerge; lines instead of arrows connect the concepts. Change can and does go in both directions. Some changes are more likely than others, however. Small, incremental changes in an institutional setting can, for instance, result in a tension in the relation between socio-cultural values and institutions. Such tension could set in motion a process whereby a community’s socio-cultural values change. Certainly in the context of the research reported in this study, the institutions change in response to changes in (the constellation of) VALUES. Below I will elaborate on this point by developing the concept of tension. One of the few schools of thought in economics that takes basic underlying socio-cultural values into account is that of institutional economics (Hodgson 1993a, 1998; Samuels 1995). Many have contributed to the theory of institutional change, although not all of these would acknowledge the role socio-cultural values play. From sociology, scholars such as Böröcz (1995) and Scott (1995) could be mentioned. Within economics there is a distinction that could be made (Hodgson 1993a) between Old (or Original) Institutional Economics and New Institutional Economics. Original institutional economists build on the work of, amongst others, the economists Thorstein Veblen, John Commons and Clarence Ayres on the one hand, and the pragmatic philosophers Charles Saunders Peirce, William James and John Dewey on the other (Mirowski 1987);12 scholars such as Bush (1987), Neale (1987) and Hodgson (1999) would be part of this group. New Institutional Economists include scholars who have worked on institutional economics such as Knight (1992) and North (1990). New Institutional Economics is more in line with neoclassical economics, for instance in the way it presents economic agents as rational utility maximizers, and perceives institutions as constraints on

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people’s behaviour that are efficient in that they increase social welfare, and by taking a methodological individualist perspective (Eggertsson 1993). Social entities have no existence of their own. Phenomena in the economy or in society have to be explained in terms of individuals’ behaviour in this perspective.13 How the two perspectives on institutions within the field of economics relate to each other is a hotly debated issue. Some argue that they are not fundamentally at odds, that bridges might even be built (Groenewegen et al. 1995; Rutherford 1994, 1995). Others point to the methodological differences between the two schools to argue that the two cannot be combined (Dugger 1995; Hodgson 1993a, 1998). Without further elaborating this issue, the latter position seems to be the more convincing one. Defining Institutions Neale (1987) has provided a characterization of an institution which is most appropriate in this study of the advent of pop music. Neale says that when (1) there are a number of people showing (2) the same kind of behaviour in (3) similar situations, (4) each justifying or explaining their behaviour in the same way, an institution exists. Condition (4) points to socio-cultural values that underlie people’s behaviour, and is thus a crucial element. It goes without saying that an institution concerns social phenomena. Therefore, it should be possible to change institutions. In this view, then, institutions can be as much enabling as they can be constraining; enabling or constraining of social, that is non-natural or non-biological, behaviour – behaviour that can be changed.14 The use of money is an example of an institution, and so is the disc jockey. An institutional setting is the specific combination of a number of interrelated institutions. A market is an example of an institutional setting, as it combines a number of institutions including the institution of the use of money. A bank may be seen as an institution, the American banking system also; institutions can be studied at different levels of analysis (Neale 1987, p. 1188), depending on the perspective one takes. In a similar vein, radio programmes, broadcasting organizations and a country’s broadcasting system could be looked at as institutions, the first of these combining, indeed, such institutions as the chart and the disc jockey. For Neale (1987, p. 1182) an institution does not have to be something that exists, that has an ontological status. It can be ‘merely’ epistemic, a mental construct (ibid., p. 1184): either a mental construct of the social scientist – a device to make sense of the world – or what Veblen calls ‘a habit of thought common to the generality of man’. Neale, then, talks about an institution when a number of actors behave according to similar rules of conduct in similar circumstances – giving the activities stability and repetition, making behaviour predictable – and where actors justify or explain their behaviour in similar


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ways. Behavioural patterns are ‘learned and for the most part habitual’ as Bush (1987, p. 1077) argues. Institutions can thus be both formal and informal. Many scholars tend to be implicit about the importance of including people’s explanation or justification of their own behaviour in a description of the concept of institution. Besides asking the question of how people behave in the way that they behave, however, we need to address the question of why they do. Being reflexive, people’s perception of their own behaviour is implicated in how they behave. This brings into consideration people’s own justification or explanation of their behaviour. As Ullmann-Margalit (1978) argues, the combination of answers to these questions renders adequate explanations. Neale’s definition of an institution allows the analysis of institutional change to be broadened so as to include both the more common question of how institutions have changed and why changes have occurred. Without an answer to the why question the theory of institutional change is incomplete. It is people who (try to) change institutions. People have a purpose in mind when they change institutions: they want, for instance, to alter the distribution of the particular benefits allocated by the particular institution. Benefits can also be of a non-monetary or non-material nature and that makes it difficult to maintain that people’s only objective is to maximize utility.15 The most important benefits to people may even be non-monetary benefits.16 Ignoring the purposes that people have would then deprive the scholar of the possibility of explaining the changes. Aristotle is not alone in arguing that purposes are the one thing that distinguishes people from other beings. Whether or not a situation will arise in which people find their purposes materialized is another matter, however. For many reasons, consequences that were not intended can result from people’s behaviour.

3.4 INTERRELATED INSTITUTIONS ‘Institutional values are socially shared cognitive representations of institutional goals and demands’ the well-known student of culture and people’s values, Rokeach (1979, p. 50), observed. Socially shared conceptions of ‘the desirable’ are learned by individuals who are subject to the external and internal ‘forces’ of socialization on the one hand, and imitation, or the urge to belong to a particular group of people on the other (ibid., p. 48). Another student who establishes the link between the study of socio-cultural values and institutions is Kluckhohn (1951 [1962], p. 396): ‘A value is a preference which is felt and/or considered to be justified’. The socio-cultural values as shared in a community point to the kinds of things that one can (is socially allowed to) aspire to; they point to the kinds of things that are preferably pursued and the direction in which society in general moves.

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The quest is, then, for a perspective in the social sciences that incorporates, or allows for, learning behaviour at different levels, interpretation of information and meaning; institutions, institutional change and possible inefficiencies, and a historical and context-sensitive perspective. I will mostly draw on Old/Original Institutional Economics (OIE), analysing people’s cognitive limitations and their consequent need to interpret the world they live in. People make models of their world, have beliefs that shape their behaviour. Preferences are not fixed, and may differ in different times and circumstances. When individual behaviour is influenced by, and dependent on, the social environment that consists of institutions related to each other in some way, three issues become important. The first is how the social environment influences people’s behaviour. Socialization is one way of looking at this. A second, clearly related issue is how institutions are interrelated to shape what can be called a culture. The third issue is that of institutional change: how and why do institutions change? Bush (1987, p. 1106), drawing on the same literature as Neale (1987), emphasizes ‘the interdependence of institutional structure’ to the point where he argues that the dislocation of the institutional structure that a change causes needs to be ‘minimal’ in order to be feasible. In a similar vein, in studies of the concept of culture, its systematic, almost organic nature is uniformly stressed (DiMaggio 1994; Eckstein 1996; Peterson 1979; Rokeach 1979). Changes in a ‘culture’ are, consequently, more likely to be evolutionary than revolutionary. Changes in the institutions that make for culture are not just relatively slow; they are also in large part dependent on what went before. Institutional change is, to put it in terms that are broadly used in economics nowadays, a path-dependent process. ‘Path dependence’ may make many readers think about technological developments and the use people make of technology17 on the one hand, and/or the technical explanation scholars have developed to analyse and explain processes where ‘history matters’ on the other. Neither of these two connotations is what is meant here. Path dependence here is conceived as a social process, analysed in terms of changes in interrelated institutions, and therefore bears on the matter of how institutions change (see also Waller 1995). As Bush (1987, pp. 1077–8) observes, emphasizing the role also of institutions in understanding path dependency and lock-in, ‘values not only correlate behaviour within the behavioural pattern, they also correlate behavioural patterns with one another’.

3.5 HOW VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS INTERACT: INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: TENSIONS Many scholars have contributed from various perspectives and disciplines to the theory of institutional change, with the exception of economics, perhaps.


BOX 3.1 THE MOUNTAIN OF EXPERIENCE: HOW PEOPLE LEARN IN A COMPLEX, EVOLVING ENVIRONMENT Whatever perspective is taken in economics, a perception of the concepts of knowledge and learning always underlies it, implicit or explicit (Dolfsma 2001a, Hodgson 1999, 2001). A more complete picture of learning than the one provided in neoclassical economics and NIE requires, I argue here, that the individual acquires rules of conduct, and that these rules of conduct are interrelated (Holland et al. 1989). Without meaning to invoke the connotations that Schumpeter (1911 [1949], p. 40) has given to the term, I would like to use his words and coin the term ‘mountain of experience’ for the individual’s system of interrelated rules of conduct. A rule of conduct is a person’s solution to the problem posed by a specific kind of situation that he has found to work. A person’s collection of rules thus can be called his ‘experience’. What works for a person not only depends on whether or not he was externally rewarded, but also on vicarious and self-rewards (Bandura 1977, 1986). Institutions should be distinguished from rules of conduct. The former refers to the social, whereas the latter refers to the individual level. At the social level it is difficult to talk about preferences in the same way as for individuals (Elster 1986). The Humean distinction between customs and habits, therefore, seems necessary from an analytical point of view. I would like to use the phrase ‘the mountain of experience’ to indicate that an individual’s rules of conduct are interrelated to form a whole that is coherent in some way, and that there are different orders or levels in the rules of conduct which an individual has. In terms that the philosopher Ryle (1949 [1966]) suggests: knowledge-how and knowledge-that is included. The two kinds of knowledge are related, but knowing-that by no means entails or naturally flows into knowing-how (Ryle 1949 [1966], p. 56). Knowledge-how is often tacit, and is more elaborate than knowledge-that. Rules higher in the mountain deal with situations of a more abstract or general nature. Among these rules are the search rules that Simon proposes (see Simon 1955; Vromen 1995). Michael Polanyi has developed a theory of knowledge acquisition that should also be of interest to economists (see Scitovsky

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1977). Polanyi (1966 [1983], p. 7) argues that (tacit) knowledge is acquired in a process he calls ‘subception’. Any piece of information to be transplanted from one person to somebody else is ‘recepted’ (ibid., p. 5) by this other person and integrated or ‘subsumed’ into a larger framework of knowledge in which meaning is given to this new piece of information (ibid., p. 19). To the extent that information is subsumed (and it has to be subsumed if it is to have any meaning) into a larger framework of knowledge, it is interiorized (ibid., p. 29), as it were, to become a part of the body (cf. Douglas 1986, p. 13). From this it follows that man cannot always accurately state what it is that he knows about a certain topic. Such knowledge is typically ‘fraught with further intimations of an indeterminate range’ (Polanyi 1983, p. 23). Where knowledge relevant to the particular subject becomes irrelevant is difficult to ascertain. The reason that knowing-how is more encompassing than knowing-that is, in my opinion, just this difficulty of separating relevant from irrelevant knowledge. Veblen (1961b, p. 74) goes even further than this in asserting that man is ‘a coherent structure of propensities and habits’. Other people’s mountains of experience cannot be taken over without effort; people have to form their own mountain of experience. I assume that persons have at any time in their life a mountain of experience — nobody is a tabula rasa when born. This may, for example, be because some rules of conduct are genetically formed (Bandura 1986) or because actual learning starts before childbirth (Nossent 1995). A mountain of experience consists of rules of conduct that must both separately and in combination be found to work. The consequences of their application must be satisfactory to the individual. The idea of a mountain of experience explains why people cling to beliefs they have, sometimes in the face of evidence to the contrary. Because rules are interrelated, doing away with one rule will most likely have consequences for other rules. If the rules to be discarded are an essential part of the mountain, the whole mountain may need to be deconstructed. Empirical studies show that this may take a long time and lots of effort (Baldwin 1992). Personal accounts of economists making a ‘Gestalt switch’ attest to this as well (Klamer 1983; Klamer and Colander 1990). An individual has to believe that it is worthwhile to change his rules of conduct. If he thinks there will not be other rules that


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can be adopted that are more satisfactory, he will not change them. In line with Bandura (1977, 1986), it needs to be stressed that the degree of satisfaction that a person perceives is not only related to the external, possibly material rewards that result from particular behaviour. Vicarious and self-rewards also influence a person’s behaviour. Source:

Dolfsma (2001a, 2002a).

Economics has modelled itself on the natural sciences for a long time, and has therefore been loathe to incorporate such social entities as culture or institutions into its theoretical framework (cf. Mirowski 1989). In recent years a changing attitude can be observed in this regard. Literature in institutional economics is now proliferating. How do institutions change? In order to understand the link between institutions, institutional change, and preferences, or behaviour more generally, two additional ideas need to be introduced – the concepts of interpretation (perception) and tension.18 The discussion draws on the Social Value Nexus introduced earlier, which argues that behaviour and valuation of individuals relates to how socio-cultural values are mediated by institutions. The Nexus suggests three sources for institutional changes, arising from different tensions: 1. 2. 3.

Value tensions, Institution tensions, and Value–Institution tensions.

These three kinds of tensions are important in explaining institutional change and stability, I submit. The three tensions are, of course, ideal typical forms. When, for instance, people (consumers) perceive a tension between the values that they subscribe to on the one hand, and the institutional ‘furniture’ that mediates (consumption) behaviour on the other, there will be pressure for change. This kind of tension thus arises when a particular institution or institutional setting has emerged or been set up with reference to a particular combination of socio-cultural values, but then drifts away from these values. Institutions may, over time, come to represent different socio-cultural values than they had originally; they may thus be hollowed out, or revalued (Böröcz 1995, and discussion in section 3.6 below). In the case of perceived tension of type 3, either the institutional setting or the values subscribed to will have to change. Socio-cultural values change much less quickly than institutions do. Changes in the former may take decades or even centuries to materialize (cf.

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Campbell 1987; Inglehart 1990; Hofstede 1980), even though changes in the latter are (usually) not overnight either; for one reason because institutions are interrelated.19 What does happen is that the socio-cultural values most prominently emphasized or subscribed to may change rather sooner for a particular situation or practice. At any given moment, socio-cultural values that exist in a community but which have been associated with differing practices may come to clash, giving rise to value tensions of type 1. Institutional tensions (type 2) arise when related institutions or institutional settings that build on the same socio-cultural values, but in a different way (are (suddenly) perceived to) clash and pressure for institutional change emerges. Emerging tensions may only be perceived after some time has passed. In all cases, it is asserted here, a process of institutional change will start with the effect that tensions disappear or are abated. Figure 3.3 did not signal that there is a strictly deterministic influence from socio-cultural values down to the institutions or the institutional setting. Contrary to Bush (1987) and others, I will not argue that socio-cultural values have primacy over institutions. Central to an understanding of processes of institutional change is the idea that tensions between, or mismatches of, sociocultural values on the one hand, and institutions on the other, is the motor of change. When it becomes apparent to people that institutions have evolved such that they no longer express the socio-cultural values for which they were created, or that circumstances have changed externally with the effect that institutions cannot ‘do’ what they were supposed to do, ‘a change is gonna come’. Rather than further developing these different tensions theoretically at this point, however, I will discuss them in the context of pop music. Pop music is a good with an important symbolic meaning for many people, and therefore socio-cultural values can be more clearly associated with it. However, many activities that people engage in have similar importance to them. Even something that economists generally assume to yield disutility – work – in reality gives people much pleasure, and is even a source of pride and establishes people’s identity (Lane 1991). Pop Music, Tensions and Institutional Change The rise of pop music is an important example of how preferences change, mediated by institutions and socio-cultural values. The advent of pop music is best explained as a process whereby people started to subscribe to a different set of values than before. Over time, different kinds of tensions arose, giving rise to processes of institutional change. The process of institutional change, in its turn, affected people’s preferences for music on a more concrete level. In the following, I will focus on those instances of institutional change that are


BOX 3.2 VALUES AND THE VEBLENIAN DICHOTOMY (Old) Institutional Economists give primacy to values over institutions: ‘It follows from this that institutional change must entail a change in the value structure of the institution’ (Bush 1987, p. 1078). In this context, they discuss the so-called the CeremonialInstrumental or ‘Veblenian’ Dichotomy (Waller 1982). ‘Values function as the standards of judgment by which behavior is regulated’ (Bush 1987, p. 1077–8). Ceremonial values are opposed to instrumental values; each have their ‘own logic and method of validation’ (ibid., p. 1079). Instrumental values are progressive, whereas ceremonial values favour the status quo where the distribution of status and privileges is skewed. Instrumental values are problem-solving and dynamic. (Socio-cultural) values can thus also be standards of judgement according to institutional economists. Distinguishing neatly between ceremonial and instrumental presupposes an objective, ‘scientific’, true perspective, however, that seems hard to come by (Edgren 1996). Does playing pop music on the radio constitute progress or does it not? Institutions hindering ‘progress’ may, other institutionalists argue, nevertheless have a rationale (Sjöstrand 1992). ‘Irrational’ institutions present a way of dealing with uncertainties that people may prefer in itself. Changing these institutions may be costly – the costs seeming higher than the future benefits – resulting in a continuing status quo and inefficiencies (Sjöstrand 1992, p. 1031). In the ‘real’ world, human behaviour has characteristics that can be perceived as both a ceremonial and as an instrumental value – at the same time or alternatively. Some institutionalists observe that ceremonial values tend to dominate over instrumental ones (Bush 1987, p. 1093). Forces of change may escape this ceremonial encapsulation (ibid.), partly because they may be unintended consequences of developments started in the past. Another reason may be that the institutional changes that some groups may want to prevent, come to be perceived as related to sociocultural values that these groups also subscribe to, thus making it difficult to ceremonially encapsulate them. Here, I will not discuss the role of socio-cultural values in allowing (scholars to make) value judgements, but instead I will focus on such values as allow understanding of institutional change and people’s behaviour.

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best suited to explain and further develop the three different tensions introduced above. Pop music alludes to highly modernist socio-cultural values such as novelty, speed, autonomy, independence, pleasure, success, and youth among others (Frith 1996; Dolfsma 1999b). Up to the 1950s such values had not been extensively associated with music. This changed when contacts between Europe and the United States became closer and the direction of emulation started to be from the latter to the former. The Second World War, as well as the use of modern communication technology (radio), is an important explanation for this development. To an audience consuming music mainly through the radio and the music press it appeared that institutional changes were necessary. Rather than having to rely on music selected by ‘experts’ (that is, outsiders, not part of the peer group), there was pressure for the institution of the chart to emerge. The chart points to the songs and artists that are successful and therefore deserving of attention. Charts seem objective: the audience is now allowed to be autonomous, independent from older people who want to teach the right taste and manners so that their own choices are reflected. Hence, a process of institutional change began to resolve this value tension by forming institutions that reflected the modernist socio-cultural values associated with pop music. As suggested by Bush’s principle of minimal dislocation, the process was gradual as parties tried to limit the (effects of the) changes as much as possible, something the following chapters make clear. In the process in which pop music came to be the most important kind of music played on the radio, the role of the person presenting music to an audience changed from that of ‘presenter’ to ‘disc jockey’. A presenter of music programmes on the radio would choose the music to be played herself, in an attempt to educate her audience. She would also have reverence for the music; shortening a song and talking through its introduction were considered offensive. Commercial influence was not allowed – this could take extreme forms. Playing songs from a chart constructed on the basis of sales figures was therefore not an option. Increasingly, the institutional context that allowed programmes to be produced without taking into account the concerns of their audiences came under pressure. Versions of the chart with not so obvious commercial overtones were experimented with, and the presenter gradually transformed into a disc jockey. A disc jockey presents herself as part of her audience, a primus inter pares. She will be heralded when she is able to be the first to play a song that has just been released – playing into the modernist socio-cultural values that are tightly associated with pop music. Criticizing songs that are played because they do not meet the modernist ideals for pop music was also allowed. Disc jockeys thus proved their knowledge about the fast developments in the field, and their autonomy and independence in making judgements on them. They should, however, not move too far afield,


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losing their relations with their ‘peers’. The content of the institution of the presenter of a radio programme featuring (pop) music changes – to the extent that this is the case, one may talk of value institution tension arising. During a transition period, different types of institutions co-exist, referring (partly) to the same socio-cultural values. Their co-existence does, however, create tensions. In the case of the presenter/DJ of radio programmes these tensions were felt by the presenters/DJs, the organizations for which they worked (amongst other broadcasters) as well as by the audiences. In actual fact, this example of the DJ is a mixed case of institution tension and institution-value tension. On the one hand, the DJ had to do the same things in similar ways, referring to the same values, as the presenter, and thus the changes were due to institution tension. On the other hand, the sociocultural values which all of the people directly involved in playing or consuming pop music in or through radio programmes believed the disc jockey had to be referring to were different, modernist values associated with pop music, and thus the institution presenter/DJ itself was re-valued. Anand and Peterson (2000) analyse changes in the institutions through which information about the music market (in the form of charts) in the United States are compiled. Their analysis shows that institutions in this market are important for participants to make sense of the market, creating a shared focus of attention. To indicate how strong they believe the influence of these institutions is, they use the term ‘market information regime’. A change from a ‘chart position’ type of chart as championed for a long time by Billboard to a ‘unit sales’ one as introduced by Soundscape had a number of important effects for the music industry. It made comparisons across genres possible, it strengthened the position of the larger record labels/companies, and it created more possibilities for segmentation of the market. In addition, country music came to be represented more strongly in the charts, while the charts themselves grew more volatile. Most importantly from the perspective of the argument developed here, however, is that it was no longer possible to hide behind the known shortcomings of the previous Billboard system. When an artist was successful, she would invoke the Billboard chart as evidence; when she was not, she would point to its known faults. Most market information regimes have political overtones such as these attached to them, and are subject to interpretation. Anand and Peterson (2000) describe a pure case of institution tension in the US music market, as the socio-cultural values associated with the institution of the chart did not change. Changes only relate to the different way charts were being compiled, shaking up the instituted information regime of this market. In its purity as an institution tension, it is a rare case. Institutional change can take a number of forms; making distinctions between these forms is a valuable exercise. Referring to examples of institutional

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changes to be elaborated upon in the following two chapters will make the distinctions easier to grasp and underscores their importance.

3.6 DIFFERENT FORMS OF INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE Like Böröcz (1995, p. 7) I look for a ‘properly historical-comparative approach to social change, i.e., one that is neither a-historical nor overhistoricized’. Böröcz proposes a useful taxonomy of different ways in which new and old aspects of a particular institutional setting are creatively fused (ibid., p. 36). In such a ‘non-reductionist’ way (ibid., p. 35), the ‘ ‘‘sticky” features of social change’ (ibid., p. 2) stand out. Institutional change is thus a process of both continuity and rupture (ibid., p. 7). An important part of Böröcz’s paper is devoted to classifying forms of institutional change. He distinguishes several forms, which he describes as ‘neither mutually exclusive, nor do they exhaust all possibilities of institutional creativity’ (ibid., p. 41). Institutional change can be both conscious and unconscious. Institutions can suddenly appear without having existed earlier or disappear never to return. Böröcz compares this to extinction and birth, adding that these play a minor role. For shorter or longer periods of time institutions may submerge to re-emerge again later. Sometimes the reemergence of dormant, possibly ‘empty’ institutions may be done on purpose to serve some political or ideological goal.20 Empty institutions may also re-emerge without people consciously striving to attain a goal, or for other than self-serving purposes. Concerning these first two forms of institutional change Böröcz observes that often the informal institutions survive (cf. North 1990). His term for the tendency of informal institutions to outlive the formal ones is ‘informalization’. Elements of a number of institutions can be recombined creating new institutions. Cultural practices (institutions) can be imitated in such a way that they cross or transcend cultural boundaries. Institutions that belong to a specific context can be applied in a different context provided some elements undergo (important) change; such recontextualization is becoming an increasingly important form of institutional change (Böröcz 1995, p. 45). The institutions of pop music on radio and in the music press are almost all examples of recontextualization. The DJ and the charts are all copied from examples in the United States, first indirectly but soon imitation was more direct, although never a perfect imitation. Two special cases of institutional change relate to form versus content issues. First, institutions can become less or more important because of changes in their content, while formally they remain the same. For example, the institution of text control at many public radio stations (see next chapter) was rather influential in the early years when pop music was being played on


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Dutch radio. Gradually, however, its influence on the form and content of radio programmes diminished. The second case is one where, especially formal, institutions change their form or ‘skin’ while otherwise remaining the same. When either form or content changes, the other is, of course, affected as well. One of the two kinds of changes – form or content – will typically be of primary importance. When the process of institutional change is fast, or in other circumstances that are conducive to it, a redoubling of the institutional setting can occur. People can manoeuvre from ‘front’ to ‘back’ areas, giving the impression that the foreground is somehow fake and the background somehow shameful. Redoubling may also indicate that different and possibly contrasting sociocultural values may be associated with an institution. An example may be the institution of the black market that is strong and persistent in some countries. Another example is the institution of the charts on Dutch radio in the early 1960s. In the turbulent circumstances of the late 1950s and early 1960s, producers of programmes with pop music experimented with different forms of the chart, which is an indication that the chart in a ‘pure’ form was considered shameful, but that doing without it would be inappropriate for a programme focusing on pop music.

3.7 CONCLUDING: STRUCTURE AND AGENCY To understand processes of institutional change, one needs to both know why it is believed that an existing institutional setting needs to change, as well as how institutions change. The Social Value Nexus presented and developed in this chapter provides insights on both counts. Emphasis is placed on concepts at a level of aggregation that supersedes that of the individual or individual acts. At this point I can only say that this position by no means excludes agency and freedom of choice in the sense that Frankfurt (1971) defines this (Beckert 2002; Davis 2003; Dolfsma 2002b; Giddens 1984). The Social Value Nexus neither implies an under-socialized, nor an over-socialized view of the individual, while it does account for the influence of the social environment on people’s behaviour in general, and the way in which they form their preferences and consume in particular.

NOTES 1. See Hogg et al. (1995) for an overview of theories of identity from psychology. 2. The Economist (‘Hold that tune – banned music’, 28 November 1998, p. 110). 3. Cf. Manns (1994) on how ‘composing by the rules’ can (nevertheless) result in a good composition – indeed, good compositions are very mindful of the rules to compose by.

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4. As Fine and Leopold (1993) elaborating on their concept of the ‘system of provision’ argue, demand and supply are in actual fact intertwined; the concepts are primarily of heuristic use. 5. Other studies show a similar bias (Hessen 1965; Krantz and Vercruysse 1959; Langeveld 1953). 6. ‘Neoclassical economics’ is – ironically – a term coined by a founder of the American Institutionalist tradition, Thorstein Veblen (Aspromourgos 1986). 7. There is a marked difference between the Robinson Crusoe of Defoe’s novel and the person bearing the same name alluded to by many economists in their narratives and this difference is telling for the discipline, as Grapard (1995) argues. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe brought a British culture with him to the island, a background that shaped his behaviour and attitude, in particular towards Friday. 8. In 1994 John Harsanyi, John Nash and Reinhard Selten won the Prize for their contributions to game theory. 9. Game theory was ‘founded’ by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944 [1947]) and Nash (1950), but given a decisive impetus by the work of Ullmann-Margalit (1977), Lewis (1974) and Schotter (1981). 10. The methodology is individualist: explanations have to refer to and be based on the actions of individuals only. 11. Valuation of concrete objects or situations may thus be in terms of money, too (see also Tool 1991), despite the admonitions of Hamilton (1987, p. 1549) that ‘no institutional theory of consumption would attempt to link value and price’. As all institutionalists know, however, money and its use in a society are institutions as well, deriving value from the social environment money is used in (for instance, Zelizer 1997). In the terms suggested by both Veblen (1961c) and John Searle (1995): money is thus not a ‘brute’ fact, but an ‘institutional’ fact. 12. The influence of, or at least similarities between, the American Institutionalist School and the German Historic School is clear too, notwithstanding Veblen’s critique of the Historic School (Veblen 1961a; see Hodgson 1993c, p. 290, fn. 9; Hodgson 1997, pp. 117–19; Reuter 1996, chapter 3). See also Beckert (2002). 13. Hodgson (1988, p. 66) has argued persuasively that there is no clear reason for taking the individual level as in any way categorically different from any other conceivable level of explanation. He argues – in contrast to 1972 Nobel Laureate in economics Kenneth Arrow’s (1994) methodological individualist stance – that ‘economic evolution operates on a number of levels’ (cf. Hodgson 1993b, p. 237). 14. In principle, the definition of institution could also apply to people’s heartbeat. The fact that somebody’s heartbeat cannot, usually, be changed without severe consequences for the person involved, distinguishes it from an institution. 15. As a matter of principle, it is not possible to discard the theory that every motive people might have can be translated into a form of utility maximization without problems (Boland 1981). The more important question is whether such a translation is a fruitful one, and whether the theory has any ‘realisticness’ (cf. Mäki 1989). 16. How material/monetary motives relate to non-material/non-monetary motives is an intricate issue. Frey (1997) points to circumstances in which the former may impede, crowd out, or weaken the latter. 17. David’s (1985) QWERTY example of the design of a typewriter/keyboard springs to mind here, but lock-in can also be social in nature (David 1994; Dolfsma forthcoming). 18. Interpretation relates to discussions on such issues as knowledge, cognition, and learning. It would necessitate relating economic thought to the field of (social) psychology and, within sociology, symbolic interactionism in particular (Berger and Luckmann 1966 [1991]); see Dolfsma (2001b, 2002a). The concept of tension has not been developed to date, to the best of my knowledge. In this contribution I will not do so either. In lieu of ‘tension’, Wildavsky (1987, p. 12) uses the related concept of ‘distance’. 19. Bush (1987, p. 1106) suggests a ‘principle of minimal dislocation’ suggesting that institutions that are under pressure to change will change such that the effects of the change on the setting as a whole are minimized. 20. In history, the term ‘the invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) is pertinent in this regard.

4. Radio and magazines: valuing pop music through institutional changes Radio One, you’re the only one . . . for me Just turn that dial, make your music worthwhile Radio One, you stole my gal, but I love you just the same Jimi Hendrix

Pop music came to be the kind of music that people enjoyed listening to, that they enjoyed consuming, that they valued highly quite suddenly. The advent of pop music, superseding Big Band and ‘Crooner’ music, is a remarkable phenomenon. Pop music has come to be seen as the mark of important changes in Western societies (Righart 1995; Kennedy 1995; Sociologische Gids 1997). Some observers even argue that the advent of pop music was among the prime causes of those changes. When pop music arrived in the Netherlands and other countries in the developed world, it met with both enthusiasm and repulsion. How exactly pop music ‘conquered’ each country differs between countries. Resistance from players in the Dutch system of music provision was strong at first. Enthusiasts were mostly young people; older people were mostly repulsed. Tensions between people thrilled by developments in popular music and those aghast at it even showed within organizations. A number of people involved in making radio programmes and music magazines wanted to jump on the bandwagon of pop music – although, as I will show, they did want to influence somewhat the direction in which the bandwagon was heading. Others in these same organizations, in general those people who could make decisions, tried to resist paying attention to pop music. Managers and members of boards were, of course, older men. Musicologist Gillett (1970 [1996], p. 13) has hinted at ‘the crucial role [of Alan Freed’s famous radio programmes in the United States] in popularizing rhythm and blues under the name rock ’n’ roll’. The radio and the written music press had a much more far-reaching role than is suggested by this observation of Gillet’s (see also Berland 1990; Burgelman 1990; Frith 1983; Kloosterman and Quispel 1990; Negus 1993). This is a role that has not been researched much in the past, however. In continuous interaction with their audience, institutions for providing pop music became established. The nature 63

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of this process of institutional change played an important role in valuing pop music. Pop music’s ‘conquest’ of the Netherlands has been peculiar in comparison to other countries, including adjacent ones. In order to study and explain this phenomenon, it is necessary to analyse the advent of pop music in terms of the theoretical framework of institutional economics developed in previous chapters. Here I explain the institutional sclerosis of Dutch radio and the music press in particular – the reluctance of organizations to be more responsive to what their audiences wanted. In brief, the institutional arrangements present in most Western countries were not welcome to pop music because they were based on socio-cultural values that were different from those imbued in pop music. Tensions resulted from the incompatibility of socio-cultural values, the resolution of which extended over many years.

4.1 INSTITUTIONS AND THE ADVENT OF POP MUSIC Some of the most remarkable institutions to be found in the music industry broadly conceived emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most of the people involved are still alive and willing to talk about their role in the process – that is to say, if they can be found. Some 40 years have passed, a period of time in which much has happened. Furthermore, the people presenting radio programmes often used pseudonyms so as not to be recognized. Then, more than now it seems, pop music was not considered to be valuable as an expression of high culture. Being involved in it could mean shutting down future options for work. I was often surprised, however, that people could give me factual information about what actually happened, when and why, that withstood the historian’s test of cross-checking with other sources. Which players in the system of provision of pop music are prominent and which are not changes over time. Thus, it is necessary to be more precise about the period of time I am dealing with. The year 1955 is important, as it was then that rock ’n’ roll moved to centre stage. The institutional changes the music industry – including the media – had to go through in the following few years in the United States (Peterson 1990; Negus 1993) began later in Europe and the Netherlands and were more protracted. Blackboard Jungle, the movie released in 1956 featuring Bill Haley’s song ‘Rock Around the Clock’, had a tremendous impact. The uproar in some towns made the authorities in other towns decide to prevent the movie from being shown, or to show it without sound. The sound, the music, was thought to stir the audience and cause them to lose control and do improper, indecent things. The music press and the daily newspapers unanimously denounced

Radio and magazines

65

the movie and the music. Elvis Presley, appearing on stage at that same time, was greeted with similar disdain. Rock and pop songs on the radio were scarce; as somebody in a group interview (see next chapter) said, it was ‘one piece of cake a day’. All of this soon changed. The music press, for instance, became more appreciative of pop music, and some of the broadcasters changed their policy as well. In 1955, a second, less paternalistic and condescending music magazine was launched: Muziek Expres. Robert Chapman (1992) talks about a quantum leap that the BBC in the UK had to make in the mid-1950s – a quantum leap it was not prepared for. The first radio programme that experimented in Holland with the institutional form of a ‘presenter’ (not yet a ‘real’ DJ) – ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ – began in September 1959 and was an immediate success. Others followed, as did the pirate radio stations. The idea that radio had to educate its audience only began to disappear after 1965, however. The year 1965 is a watershed in the rise of pop music for several reasons. When the Beatles became popular, the world of pop music changed dramatically (Frith 1983, p. 212). It was not just from a musicological perspective that one can say that their influence on pop music has been tremendous.1 Looking more closely at the situation in the Netherlands, 1965 was the year in which pirate station Radio Veronica started with its chart ‘Nederlandse [Dutch] Hitparade’ (later renamed ‘Top 40’). The impact of this institutional development, the chart, was tremendous, partly evident in an increase in singles sales of around 30 per cent. From an institutional economist’s perspective, it is fascinating to observe that Radio Veronica’s chart was a success by any measure, in contrast to earlier forms of charts on public radio which were hardly noticed by the audience of pop music radio programmes. In an attempt to counter what was seen as a detrimental development, the Dutch government in that same year commissioned a third national radio station to be aimed at young people and (thus) airing predominantly pop music. The period between 1955 and 1965 is crucial in explaining the advent of pop music in Western Europe. Looking at it from a distance, it appears to be a sudden change; looking at it from close up, several bifurcation points can be seen. One is in 1959 when radio programmes started on public radio and pirate radio stations emerged across Europe; another is in 1962–3, years when public broadcasters and pirate stations alike began to focus on a youth audience. As Chapman (1992, p. 25) has observed ‘by the early 1960s there were entire subcultures whose distinctive tastes were not being recognized’. These are structural changes in the institutions characterizing the system of provision of pop music. Responses to most of the changes that public broadcasters experimented with ranged, as Chapman (1992, p. 1) puts it, from ‘bemused indifference to outright hostility’.

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4.2 THE MEDIA – RADIO AND THE MUSIC PRESS According to Frith (see especially 1983), radio and, to a lesser degree, the music press played an important role in promoting the acceptance of rock or pop music among large sections of the population of the world, especially in Western countries. They have, for instance, played a pivotal role in the diffusion of black music first throughout the United States and subsequently throughout the entire world (Kloosterman and Quispel 1990). The organization of radio, particularly in the United States, is a major factor in the process which determines which musicians become superstars and what songs will become hits. More importantly still, radio is significant in determining which musicians or songs will not become successful (Negus 1993). Radio therefore plays an important role in the process by which people change the value they attach to pop music (cf. Berland 1990). In what follows, I concentrate on Dutch radio, the music press and television to some extent, relating it to developments in other countries such as the UK and the United States. Radio is a part of the system of provision of pop music that is hardly looked at – in contrast to other parts of the music industry such as the record companies. Quantitative changes attest to the amazing story of pop music, but qualitative features are at least as telling. In a period of two years from 1955 to 1957, the US music business – including record companies, radio, television, retailing, and concert organizations – changed its organization completely (Burnett 1993; Peterson 1990). Peterson’s point is that the division of labour in the media changed as television became the most important national medium. Radio had to specialize and focus on niche audiences. Radio stations all over the United States changed to format radio in just a few seasons. Radio time sales figures underline this process (National Association of Broadcasters 1961, pp. 18 and 20). Local radio time sales increased, whereas national radio time sales decreased. The growth of the first more than compensated for the decline of the latter. In the Netherlands and other Western European countries, the circumstances are different. Most of the broadcasters were public. Tuney Tunes, a monthly Dutch magazine on popular music, started during the Second World War (1942). Up until 1955 it was the only magazine on music, aiming for the mass market by printing pictures, charts, and lyrics. The stories were often no more than an excuse for the pictures, were often made up and sometimes ludicrous to the point of being incredible.2 Around 1956 two new magazines started – Muziek Expres in 1955 and Muziek Parade in 1957 – aiming at a readership that wanted better information and were somewhat more knowledgeable. Rather like broadcasters on the radio at a later date, the music magazines were not appreciative of rock ’n’ roll at all. In July of 1955 Tuney Tunes talks

Radio and magazines

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about a ‘disease’ which would never affect ‘normal people’. The workingclass character of both the audience and the artists is emphasized in a derisive way, while the music itself is described as ‘primitive’, with a ‘killing beat’ but no melody whatsoever. As if to soothe parents who may have become worried, the final note is that we need not worry: this music would disappear as fast as it had appeared, leaving no trace in its wake! Worries grow as Elvis Presley becomes popular in the United States and threatens to gain an audience in Europe as well. ‘That terrible, degrading crying accompanied by sounds uttered in a sinister way can not appeal to us’ Tuney Tunes comments in September of 1956; ‘as far as we are concerned, he can stay where he is: we might not survive a second Heartbreak Hotel’. The title of the comment is: ‘Elvis Presley – Hysteria in Optimal Form’. Such reactions were provoked by the reception of the movie Blackboard Jungle in the Netherlands. The rebellion in the classroom depicted in the movie was accompanied, if not provoked, by the rock ’n’ roll music of Bill Haley. Blackboard Jungle’s Dutch première was on 1 September 1956. When mayors in some towns forbade the showing of the movie entirely, or allowed it under the provision that there would be no sound, riots broke out. Attempts to prevent rock ’n’ roll (pop music) from gaining a foothold, or at least to minimize its influence, did not succeed. Not long after they realized this, the music magazines climbed down and began to be openly jubilant about pop music. Even records by the black artist Little Richard, who was generally seen as an uncompromising and unpolished rock ’n’ roll musician (more so than Elvis), were recommended. This apparent attempt not to lose touch with their audiences did not prevent the music magazines from promoting artists and kinds of music more generally that they found more ‘appropriate’. Cliff Richard and Pat Boone are perhaps the most prominent examples of pop musicians acceptable to the establishment. One means to achieve this was by manipulating the yearly popularity polls – such as the one reproduced in Table 4.1. Printing lyrics turned out to be an important ingredient for the success of a music magazine, and so were printing the charts from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. In subsequent years posters became an important reason for people to buy music magazines; ordinary pictures would no longer make the difference between magazines. These magazines were widely and thoroughly read by young fans of pop music. Sharing magazines was a common practice. December issues were devoured for their ‘popularity polls’, for which readers could send in their personal favourites. Competition between the magazines concentrated on these polls, each magazine claiming to have the broadest and most reliable one. Results of these polls are not very reliable, however – artists, programmes, or disc jockeys ranked at number one were generally indeed the most popular, but those ranked lower on the list might not be as popular among the readers of the

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Table 4.1 Tuney Tunes popularity poll, 1961 (December) Best Foreign radio programme 1. English programmes Radio Luxembourg 2. Chris Howland (NWDR) 3. Top Twenty (Luxembourg) Top songs of the year 1. ‘Hello, Mary Lou’ – Ricky Nelson 2. ‘Temptation’ – Everly Brothers 3. ‘Muss I denn’ – Elvis Presley

(%) 53 15 12

62

Best Dutch radio programme 1. ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ VARA)

(%) 63

2. Radio Veronica 3. ‘Tussen 10+ en 20-’ (AVRO)

21 10

Top songs of the year, Dutch 1. Och was ik maar – Johnny Hoes 2. ‘Rocking Billy’ – Ria Valk

39 17

6 5

3. ‘Tommy uit Tennessee’ – Ria Valk

9

Foreign singers, male 1. Elvis Presley 2. Cliff Richard 3. Ricky Nelson

29 23 17

Foreign singers, female 1. Connie Francis 2. Caterina Valente 3. Helen Shapiro

49 11 10

Dutch singers, male 1. Herman van Keeken 2. Willy Alberti 3. Harry Bliek

44 20 15

Dutch singers, female 1. Ria Valk 2. Corry Brokken 3. Anneke Grönloh

43 25 12

52 21 10

Groups, Dutch 1. Peter and his Rockets 2. Trio Pim Jacobs 3. Cees and his Skyliners

27 26 1 0

Groups 1. The Shadows 2. John and the Hurricanes 3. Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band N = ‘over 7500’ Source:

Tuney Tunes.

music magazines as their listing suggests. Journalists for these magazines sometimes tried to promote their own favourites, and fan clubs would also urge their members to send in the forms in November’s issue on a large scale. Changes in countries where the government has (had) more influence on society in general and on broadcasting in particular appeared later, were sometimes more protracted, but were equally thorough in the end. The Dutch government heavily regulated the mass media; there was even censorship for a while. Sponsorship of radio was banned in many countries of Western Europe from the early 1930s onwards (Chapman 1992, pp. 6–9), and official broadcasters were given a monopoly in producing radio. The motivation for this was that exposing especially young, immature people to the ‘cheap’

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images of the mass culture was thought to have detrimental effects on their personality, and its development. Adults, again especially in the lower classes, were not trusted to have or develop appropriate tastes either. It was only in 1959 that radio programmes dedicated exclusively to pop music were scheduled on official Dutch radio stations. And only reluctantly so – pressure from radio stations in other countries and the large and growing audiences these drew made it almost impossible not to schedule pop music on the radio.3 As was the case for the BBC, the idea that decision-makers in broadcasting entertained was that listening was a refined art, and that audiences needed to be educated in it (Chapman 1992, p.11). In 1962–3 there was another spurt of activity. Music magazines were restyled – became more glossy – and radio programmes started to experiment by changing important institutions. Although programmes with pop music on official radio were still popular, the audience started to move away from the public broadcasters. Until that time insurmountable language barriers had prevented a massive shift away from the official broadcasters to Radio Luxembourg, which only broadcast a few hours in Dutch each Sunday, to the American presenter Chris Howland at the German station NWDR, or to the Allied Forces Network (AFN) which aimed mainly at the US military in Western Europe. During these years pirate radio stations broadcasting from the North Sea and aiming at the United Kingdom began, and drew a large Dutch audience as well.4 It is during this crucial period that experiments with the institutions of disc jockeys and charts based on retail sales figures began on Dutch radio; this bifurcation point for radio does not show up in the data, however.5 As television took over the role of most important mass medium and radio began to draw less attention from politicians, radio could experiment somewhat more. The fact that television gained a supreme position among the media ‘overnight’ can for instance be inferred from the magazines of that time that informed people what was scheduled on radio and television, most of which were published by the public broadcasters and issued to their members. Within a period of two years, between 1959 and 1960, the focus in these magazines moved away from radio to television. Another indication is the dramatic increase in the relative number of households that owned a television set. Radio had to change its position, not only because it lost its audience to television, but also because independently from that people tended to listen to the radio less often and for shorter periods of time (CBS 1962b, especially tables 4 and 5). The golden era for radio – the 1950s – had ended, but control over radio was also relaxed. Radio began receiving less attention from regulators in the government and in the broadcasting organizations themselves, and was able to develop relatively undisturbed. The number of radio stations – especially FM – increased

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dramatically in the late 1950s in the United States, as did sales of radios and employment in the sector (National Association of Broadcasters 1961). Investment in tangible property by and broadcasting revenues of all US radio stations and networks, for example, increased dramatically in the mid-1940s (NAB 1961). Another significant statistic is the number of radios that people owned in a country. During the period from 1951 to 1960 Dutch purchases of radios more than quadrupled (CBS 1954, 1964). Other figures indicate that there had been significant quantitative changes in the industry before this period of time. Increases in the number of radios available, in combination with the decrease in their price, made possible by technological developments, changed the way in which people listened to the radio. What the individualization of the way in which people listened to radio programmes meant for the emergence of pop music is discussed later, especially in the following chapter. These are developments that are not restricted to the role of the media in the advent of pop music, or to the Netherlands for that matter. As Peterson (1990) and Burnett (1993) show for the United States, when pop music appeared on the music scene like a bolt from the blue, the important record companies needed to reconsider their position in the industry. If they had not changed their ways of doing business, they would have gone bankrupt. In a period of one to two years their seemingly unassailable positions proved to be very vulnerable to changes in people’s tastes. Pop music’s growing popularity created an arena where socio-cultural values clashed. Clashes are particularly evident in radio and the music press. The Social Value Nexus developed earlier informs the approach of this chapter.

4.3 THE STAGE FOR INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE Pop music did not enter a social and institutional vacuum. Similarly, despite their public position, broadcasters, for instance, did not have unrestricted monopolistic or manipulative powers. The story of institutional change in Dutch radio and the music press due to the advent of pop music therefore needs to be set against a background of developments in society at large. Setting the stage makes it possible to better understand the meaning and impact of the institutional changes that occurred. In the process, some players that figure in subsequent sections will be introduced – among them radio programmes such as ‘Swing and Sweet from Hollywood and 52nd Street’, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ and ‘Tussen 10+ en 20-’, and music magazines such as Tuney Tunes, Muziek Expres and Muziek Parade, as well as the people who were involved in them.6 According to Simon Frith (1983, pp. 165 ff.), who almost single-handedly started the scientific study of pop and rock music and made it prosper, the music press played and still plays an important role

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through the process in which people give meaning to music. I would add, in line with the argument of this book, that these players were important in giving music the value it now has – including the economic sense of the word ‘value’. Some have called the Dutch broadcasting system unique in the world (Van Vree 1994). To be able to understand the institutional changes taking place in Dutch radio, a broader picture of Dutch society is needed, bringing out the socio-cultural values incorporated in Dutch broadcasting. Broadcasting corporations in the Netherlands are closely associated with religious or political positions. They are allotted time on radio and television based on the number of members they have. Once a particular threshold of members had been reached, the government had to provide facilities, including financial means, for an organization to be able to start broadcasting.7 As Lijphart (1968) shows, what is referred to in the political science literature as ‘pillarization’ was strong in Dutch society in those days; it only began to be of lesser importance in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Institutional expressions of pillarization persist to this day, perhaps most strongly in broadcasting. Since radio, and later TV, was thought to have a strong – and not necessarily a positive – influence on its audience, and the audience was considered to be rather passive, Dutch broadcasting was strictly regulated. Until 1947, radio was censored by the government (De Wagt 1995). After that the networks censored themselves for a long time. Each pillar had its own broadcaster: VARA was socialist, KRO was Roman Catholic, NCRV Protestant, and AVRO purportedly neutral.8 The board that governed socialist broadcaster VARA, for instance, used to have members appointed by the social-democratic party, or its scientific bureau (Sluyser 1950, 1965). The boundaries between pillars or socio-political segments were difficult to cross; there was even a time (1954) when Roman Catholic bishops successfully forbade their flock to listen to ‘heathen’ socialist programmes. Many listened, but to forego pop music – which received more attention from VARA than it did from KRO – seemed to have been too heavy a toll. Socialist VARA, in its turn, forbade any mention of religion in its programmes.9 Rivalry between different broadcasters was there from the start, but was especially rife in the 1930s between AVRO and VARA (Wijfjes 1994). AVRO considered itself the general, public broadcaster – the Dutch BBC – and was the only broadcaster for some time after it started broadcasting in the Netherlands in 1923. Disagreement between broadcasters focused on how to allot the available time to broadcasters. Each pillar would mobilize its constituency and its politicians to exert pressure to be given more air time. The socialists were especially successful at this, organizing massive rallies and acquiring a relatively large

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proportion of broadcasting time, mainly at the expense of AVRO (De Wagt 1995). Competition between the two was vigorous for a long time. The idea broadcasters had of ‘owning’ musicians and employees is partly related to this rivalry between the different broadcasters and their constituencies from the respective pillars. ‘Ownership’ of musicians and employees, especially disc jockeys, relates to and must be understood in terms of the effects of the strong pillars for Dutch radio. Both producers of programmes and listeners thought that musicians and employees were ‘owned’ by a broadcasting organization – employees were not thought of as people who were simply paid to do a job. These people needed to communicate the VALUES their respective broadcasters represented and thus, it was thought, needed themselves to subscribe to these socio-cultural values in order to be persuasive. This becomes especially apparent with respect to musicians or employees working for the pirate radio Veronica. The fact that this point was raised repeatedly in VARA programme meetings (see minutes) indicates both that there was considerable concern about the matter, and at the same time that there was not much that could be done to prevent people from being in some way or another associated with Veronica, in particular. Even when an alias was used, there was concern that people’s voices would be recognized by the audience as ‘pirate voices’ (interview with Van Zijtveld). For a long time radio stations not officially sanctioned by the Dutch government were not a threat to this system. Radio Luxembourg, a privately owned commercial undertaking broadcasting from Luxembourg, only broadcast for two hours in the Dutch language on Sunday morning and could only be heard clearly in the southern parts of the Netherlands. The BBC, British pirates and the Allied Forces Network (AFN – broadcasting from the Netherlands, aimed at American and British soldiers stationed mainly in West Germany) were not major competitors either, because of the language barrier: not many people in the Netherlands were able to understand English. When Radio Veronica started its broadcasts in April 1960 from a ship just outside Dutch territory, pressure built up. After only a few years Veronica drew many, especially young, listeners. From 1962 to 1963 Veronica’s programmes began to feature in all the popularity polls published in the music press, sometimes even as winners of these polls. The programme ‘Nederlandse Hitparade (Dutch Hitparade)’ in particular was an immediate success when it started in January 1965.10 Pressure from other parties involved, domestic and foreign, increased in the wake of the rising popularity of pop music and the pirate radio stations: something had to be done to save the Dutch system of public broadcasting, it was felt. Some months before a third official channel (Hilversum III) that would focus on a young audience was finally commissioned on 8 October 1965, the Dutch government of the time – the Marijnen administration – resigned over

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the issue. Broadcasters representing different pillars had lobbied their respective political parties to make sure the new station would take shape according to their wishes, aligning with the socio-cultural values these broadcasters adhered to. However, the new government decided, more or less against the desires of the established networks who wanted a station focusing on highbrow culture (Vahl 1996), that Hilversum III had to focus on a young audience to regain the audience that Veronica had won (Van Elteren 1994). Hilversum III was to be a more ‘commercial’ broadcaster. Years of discussion came to a conclusion with the decision taken by the newly installed government to go against the wishes of the established public broadcasters.11 An obvious way of drawing a young audience to Hilversum III was by paying attention to the kind of music young people preferred. Vahl’s (1996) conclusion that the pirate radio Veronica was not solely responsible or to blame for the creation of a third official radio station is probably correct – this is, however, a discussion in political history that I will not get involved in here. The Dutch broadcasting system had to become more inclusive than it had been, and a new law on broadcasting coming into force on 2 October 1966 had to make sure that would and could happen. A popular, aspiring-to-be-legal broadcasting corporation (TROS, successor of the organization known as the Advertisement Exploitation Agency, or REM, that exploited the island-like construction in the North Sea that broadcast television to the Netherlands) was incorporated into the system in October 1966 (Vahl 1996; Bardoel 1994, p. 345). In that same period the government expanded the total time available for broadcasting on TV by commissioning a second channel (1 October 1964) and by expanding the financial means of the networks by cautiously allowing advertisements on television (2 January 1966) and radio (1 March 1968).12 According to Van Elteren (1994) it was the purpose of the Dutch government to crowd out revenue from advertisements – and not just audience – for Radio Veronica especially, but for other broadcasters as well. In addition, a new European law had just come into effect in January 1965 that made it illegal to cooperate with pirate stations, giving countries the legal means to crack down on organizations or their aides, undertaking such illegal activities. Some networks had difficulty finding people to come up with ideas for programmes that would attract young people, something which was the objective of the newly commissioned Hilversum III.13 Besides the fact that few such people were available, corporate culture within the networks was not appreciative of pop music and the people who liked it. Radio programmes with pop music tended to be made by departments responsible for making children’s programmes, instead of by light music (‘Lichte Muziek’) departments. Operetta was aired on a radio channel that needed to attract a young audience, or pop music records were simply played without being introduced or commented upon. In 1969, a committee from the combined networks

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addressed the issue, soon after which the official radio stations regained the audience they had previously lost and in 1976 Veronica finally opted to join the system sanctioned by the Dutch government as well (Bardoel 1994). In the period starting around 1958–9 and culminating in the years 1964–6 the broadcasting system had to respond to the pressure created by the advent of pop music. Socio-cultural values that characterized the system formerly clashed with the socio-cultural values for which pop music was an important symbol. The institutional restructuring was drastic. Old institutions decayed or submerged and new institutions were formed, often imitating similar institutions from different contexts and countries. Some of the existing institutions would also appear to survive, but would change in terms of their content.

4.4 POP MUSIC ON THE RADIO14 Pop music represented completely different socio-cultural values than those represented in the institutions of Dutch broadcasting up to then. The conflict between them was prolonged in the Netherlands, and in other respects as well was different from the experience of the United States or the United Kingdom (Peterson 1990; Chapman 1992). In the transition from a system of music provision that was alien to pop music, to one that could at least incorporate it, some noteworthy institutional changes occurred. Some newly formed institutions stayed; some other experimental institutional forms were soon superseded. In the process the Dutch broadcasting system and music industry changed dramatically, resulting in a situation in which it now continues to have important economic and cultural leverage, though of a different kind. Comparison of the programmes made by a pioneer of Dutch radio – the first to present American music to the Dutch directly – and later programmes that played popular music, best highlight the changes Dutch radio went through. The comparison also emphasizes that clashes between different socio-cultural values have a remarkably long history, where early clashes resonate for many years. Pete Felleman’s experience in making radio programmes is the first example of clashing socio-cultural values; what happened to him influenced developments in later years. Felleman introduced jazz music, known and appreciated by only a few people at the time, to Dutch audience through his radio programme ‘Swing and Sweet from Hollywood and 52nd Street’ that he started for VARA in 1947. Later, for the same broadcaster, he started ‘Hitparade’ in 1949. Here he played the top ten records from the American Billboard Hit Parade each month, with a grand finale he himself compiled at the end of each year. He allowed the Dutch audience to become acquainted with American popular music and the institution of the hit parade or chart.

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Music magazine Tuney Tunes advertised the fact that it published the chart compiled by Felleman, mentioned when it would be broadcast, and added that it was ‘produced by Pete Felleman’. Broadcasts of ‘Hitparade’ continued until 1957 when Felleman was given the choice: continue making radio programmes for VARA or take up the offer to become label manager at Capitol. Capitol was then owned by a record company called Bovema, later to become known as EMI. Apparently, the decision was not just a decision made by VARA director Broeksz. In the meeting Phonogram – a Philips subsidiary – director Solleveld and Bovema director Oort were also present (Felleman). Before moving to Bovema he was a freelance employee of record company CNR for four years, an activity that had not elicited the kind of response elicited when Felleman started to work for Capitol. Bovema was, however, and in contrast to CNR, Phonogram’s most important competitor in the Dutch record market at the time. Because of Phonogram’s influence on Dutch broadcasters and – related to that – on Dutch politics, one might therefore think that concern over possible commercial influence on Felleman’s programmes was not the only reason that spurred the management of VARA to insist on him making a choice. Felleman chose, what he himself called, the challenge and the higher income that went along with being a label manager. Had his only source of income been what he earned making radio programmes for VARA, Felleman claims, it would not have been an easy life for him. All the time, though, he was immensely popular in the Netherlands, as is apparent from the popularity polls in music magazine Tuney Tunes, and so the socialist broadcaster VARA lost one of its best known producers of radio programmes. As Felleman left VARA and stopped making ‘Hitparade’ and other programmes, music magazines such as Tuney Tunes started printing what they would present as the American charts. The demands of pop music on the institutions of radio programmes were in conflict with the broadcasting practices/institutions prevailing at that time. Conflicting socio-cultural values showed in a number of ways, one of which directly motivated the departure of Felleman from VARA. Pop music depends on records becoming available to be aired soon after they are released. What would be preferable would be to have them before they are officially released – in the Netherlands or, even better, in the world in general. Somebody presenting pop music on the radio must be able to get their hands on ‘hot’ records and the best way to do this is by developing close relations with record companies. Over the years Felleman cautiously developed such connections, but in the early period he obtained the records he needed by buying them himself in the United States with illegally exchanged American dollars, or he asked airline pilots to bring them over from the United States for him (Felleman). While he had relationships with record companies, these did not

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provide him with records. This practice of presenters (DJs) being given records by representatives of record companies is hardly ever questioned these days, but was considered highly suspect at that time. So when Felleman was offered part-time employment for a record company, which would allow him to play newly released records before anybody else could and draw a large audience of young people, he was not allowed to continue his programmes for the socialist broadcaster VARA. VARA director Broeksz feared he would not be able to withstand the pressures large record companies were likely to exert on an employee who produced radio programmes as well. Although the extent of such influence would have been evident in the scripts of each programme that then had to be handed in 48 hours prior to a broadcast, and Broeksz said Felleman’s independence was not an issue, he was still forced to make a choice. The socio-cultural values of broadcasters’ independence and radio’s role of setting an example to its audience, teaching it good taste and manners, conflicted with what were perceived as the commercial values of pop music and the requirements of playing this kind of music on the radio. While Felleman had to leave VARA because of the possibility that his integrity might be in jeopardy, close ties with records companies did not harm two other wellknown VARA producers of pop music radio programmes, Herman Stok and Co de Kloet, who were in a way successors to Felleman. At the start of their well-known programme ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, when Stok’s role was a limited one and Dick Dusters15 presented the programme, the Felleman legacy was still looming large. It seems as if VARA wanted to conceal what might be perceived as a loss of its independence as much as possible in order to hide the conflict of VALUES that was involved in playing pop music. One indication of this is that delegates of record companies (‘pluggers’) were not allowed to enter VARA premises. Afraid of being accused of ‘payola’16 or the like, they could not even openly accept a new and hot record by Elvis Presley from somebody high in a record company’s hierarchy (RCA in this case) in the VARA canteen (interview with Stok). Had they been unable to play the record, they would have lost a splendid opportunity to attract the attention of the target audience with their programme. Stok and de Kloet, however, and only a few years later, were provided with a company car to visit the record companies and collect records (interviews with Stok and de Kloet). From the present perspective, these changes, and particularly the objections they met with at first, are amazing. Institutional arrangements of radio programmes which we now take for granted and never questioned have a history in which their existence and form was discussed fervently. Dutch radio was supposed to educate its audience and teach it good manners and taste (cf. van der Haak 1994). The correct pronunication of the Dutch language was important in this regard – grammatically and phonetically.

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Inappropriate words could not be used either. Christian broadcasters, like NCRV, would make sure appropriate language was being used. The name of the Lord, for instance, should not be used in vain (interviews with Voogd, Brink and Rosekrans). The socialist broadcaster VARA would not allow religion to be mentioned, as indicated earlier. All Dutch public broadcasters emphasized correct pronunciation of the Dutch language. To these ends certain institutional arrangements were made. Presenters on the radio had to read a text that was written down earlier; there was no room for improvisation. Moreover, programmes were recorded and edited before they were broadcast – live broadcasting would have meant relinquishing control. One broadcaster – VARA – even went as far as to require the scripts of each programme to be checked prior to recording. The people of this ‘Tekstcontrole’ had no affinity whatsoever with pop music, nor did they have any knowledge or even understanding of what was going on. A reference to the death of Ritchie Valens in the text was not understood, even as late as 1967.17 During the time when the twist reigned, ironic references to a famous writer from Holland’s Golden Age (Joost van den Vondel – the ‘Dutch Shakespeare’) who, in an important work in Dutch cultural history (Gijsbrecht van Aemstel), had also spoken of ‘twists’ (in Dutch: fights, rows) were taken seriously and praised.18 People who had to control scripts thus failed to have any understanding of what would entertain Dutch youth, what their life world was, what kind of music was popular. Nor did people in control of the public-broadcasting corporations have a command of the English language. AVRO would check scripts of radio programmes afterwards, while NCRV directors would occasionally listen to programmes (interviews with Rosekrans, Brink and Voogd). Those people involved with the production of radio programmes were made to believe that, if they did not comply with these standards, their programme might be discontinued, or they might be replaced by others who would then produce the programme in their stead (interviews with Felleman, de Kloet, Stok, Voogd and van Zijtveld). AVRO and NCRV gave people a fixed (short-) term contract to produce programmes playing pop music; they could easily be laid off. Members of the VARA and AVRO programme board regularly listened to programmes to determine their quality,19 and VARA had a department called a Programme Advisory Board that evaluated programmes that were broadcast. Programmes were an end in themselves, radio programmes needed to be of high quality, with intrinsic standards of quality.20 If directors of broadcasters and producers of (radio) programmes thought about the audience they would address at all, they seemed to believe that their audience would be identical with the constituency of that broadcaster. Songs, too, were perceived to be valuable intrinsically. Skipping or shortening the introduction of songs was not allowed, and neither could the presenter or

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disc jockey talk while a song had already started (interviews with de Kloet, van Zijtveld, Voogd, Stok, and Brink). Jingles were not used to persuade the audience to start or remain listening. Using such means (‘tricks’) to approach people in the audience was perceived as a disrespect for these very same people; as if they were unable to form an opinion of their own about the quality of a programme or a song and had to be ‘lured’ into listening to a song or a programme. To reiterate, these songs and the programmes that did not play jingles had, or so it must have seemed, intrinsic, easily recognizable quality and value. As a consequence of these institutions of playing music, programmes with pop music produced by Dutch official broadcasters did not have the (appearance of) speed and novelty that their increasing number of competitors, especially the commercially operated pirates, had. As is apparent from group interviews I have conducted with music consumers and which I analyse in depth in the next chapter, the audience did perceive such institutional innovations as not increasing or underlining the sense of speed, novelty and other socio-cultural values associated with them. Dutch public radio lost out at first in large part because of a reluctance to adopt these and other institutional innovations. Only from 1970 onward did the public broadcasters and Hilversum III regain their position as the most popular players on radio, undoubtedly in part because of legislative measures to cut pirate stations down to size and even to outlaw the organizations and people they relied upon entirely (see Chapman 1992, Van Elteren 1994, pp. 110–11). Television is a different story. Here, the pressure for change was less strong and at the same time the space allowed for change by the broadcasting corporations (in response to overt and covert pressure from the board of directors of the broadcasters themselves as well as from the national government) was small. ‘Top of Flop’ (Top or Flop), the first programme with pop music on Dutch television presented by Herman Stok starting in 1961, was intent on establishing the intrinsic, inherent value of popular songs. A jury of mature, ‘knowledgeable’ experts would value new songs and thus predict if they would become a hit (in Dutch: ‘top’), or if that song did not have value and would thus be a failure (‘flop’). Television being a new medium, the very VALUES institutionalized in particular ways in the production of programmes that radio programmes had started to subvert some time earlier, were enforced strictly. Televisions was also not sufficiently diffused in Dutch society to allow for individualized consumption of what was broadcast (see Table 2.2). Television sets were large and expensive. In such a small ‘market’, given too the considerable expense of setting up a rival television station, Dutch official broadcasters enjoyed the position of a de facto monopoly.21

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‘Commercial’ influence was not allowed in radio and television programmes. Advertisements as an institution were not allowed for a considerable number of years. Only much later, when a third radio station was set up in reaction to the activities and successes of pirates, were advertisements allowed in an attempt to ‘crowd out’ money from the pirates (Van Elteren 1994; De Ruijter 1987). For VARA, prohibition of adverting would go as far as forbidding it to mention when an artist whose song was played in a radio programme would perform on television in the near future – even in the case of a VARA television programme.22 To accept records from record companies was not allowed; records should be ordered from the ‘discotheque’ – a library with records from which the official broadcasters could borrow (interviews with de Kloet, Stok and Voogd). Pop music, however, is about new records by artists who are in vogue (‘hot’) at the time. Borrowing from the discotheque could take a few weeks when a record had just been released and many producers of programmes wanted to borrow it. This rule or institution of enforcing producers to borrow records from a discotheque does not work for pop music. Pop music is about new records and hits. It is about speed and novelty. Hence, after some time it became acceptable to receive records from record companies, (possibly) involving (informal) arrangements – ‘we will give you this scoop, if you do x’. This situation is accepted nowadays, but was unacceptable well into the 1960s. As discussed at some length before, a famous Dutch presenter of radio programmes where popular music was played – Pete Felleman – had to leave socialist broadcaster VARA because it was feared that commercial influence was or could have been exerted on him and it was feared that he would be unable to withstand this pressure. The legacy of that episode exerted an influence on developments in the years that followed the episode (interviews with Stok and de Kloet). The audience needed to be educated on what good music is. VARA’s ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ was under strict scrutiny from the programme board: its people at some point even had to write a report to attest that they were sufficiently critical towards pop music (cf. VARA 1961a). Within this board some were urging ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ to be more critical of pop music – many more records should be criticized and fewer objectionable records should be played. In the report, the response by Co de Kloet and Joop Söhne to this objection was the following: As far as critical comments in Tijd voor Teenagers are concerned: many bad teenager records are not broadcast, because it is better not to play a record than to ‘crack’ it. You do pay attention [to the record] and the only consequence usually seems to be that sales figures rise. This is the reason why German tear-jerkers, American hits without anything special to them and records by, for instance: The Jumping Jewels, Jack Dens, Johny Blanco, Bob Rocky, The Yellow Birds, Winny

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Institutional economics and the formation of preferences Dobber, all kinds of sisters and brothers and a whole range of other ‘artists’ can not be heard in Tijd voor Teenagers.

The occasion that had directly led to these questions being raised was, by the way, the playing of a populist [Schlager] song in Dutch of the ‘Jordaan’ type – an issue to which I will return later in the chapter. Söhne, director of youth programmes, and de Kloet, producer of many of them, suggested that the margins in which they operated were small. They noted that they produced a popular programme (and referred to the popularity polls), but they feared that too much criticism would scare the audience away to Radio Veronica or Radio Luxembourg. Besides, the authors observe: ‘Teenagers believe that they themselves are very well capable of making judgments and want to decide themselves what they like or do not like’. In contrast, people directly responsible for the radio programme ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ prefer to: ‘play good records that have little or nothing at all to do with so-called teenage music, but by their difference stand out in Tijd voor Teenagers. Thus teenagers will understand that TvT believes teenager music is not singly soul-saving’. Songs and programmes have intrinsic value, they believe, which the audience will (eventually) recognize. While their young audience does not want to be manipulated, leaving that same audience to make decisions entirely undisturbed is equally unattractive. Maintaining some influence on a young audience will make sure ‘they will learn something’ from listening to the programme and could start to appreciate ‘serious music’. In the 15 January 1962 meeting of the VARA programme board, the report was discussed. Following this discussion there is no indication in the minutes that such strong critical comments about the programme were made again. ‘Serious music’ was an important category of music in those days, receiving a large share of the budget of each of the Dutch broadcasters (as shown in their annual reports). It was common for broadcasters to have their own orchestras, for instance. This was not so much because the audience wanted it – they were simply not asked about their preferences – but because it was perceived as the mission of Dutch broadcasters to educate their respective audiences to appreciate proper music. Classical, or ‘serious’, music had a central place in the programming schedules as well, as Table 4.2 indicates. One has to note, in addition to this, that much of what was then classified as ‘light music’ would probably now be listed as classical or ‘serious’ music. Operetta is an example of this: in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dutch public broadcasters perceived it as ‘light music’. Later, when the development of pop music was well under way and was gaining momentum, pop songs would be played (‘covered’) by those orchestras in an attempt to make pop music more serious and at the same time to make sure the orchestras could find employment and survive what was sometimes seen as a transitory period.

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Table 4.2 Categories of radio programmes, Dutch broadcasters, 1958 (% of total air time)

Serious music Light musica Discussion and commentaryb Total

AVRO

KRO

NCRV

VARA

22.6 48.6 28.7 100

24 31 45 100

40 24 36 100

16.1 39.1 44.8c 100

Notes: a Includes dance music (‘dansmuziek’), operetta, motley programmes (‘bonte programmas’), regional programmes, cabaret, reviews. b Including speeches, religious programmes, radio plays, commentary, courses, reports and news. c Of which 13.8% are programmes combining music and talk/commentary. Source:

Wijfjes (1994, p. 63).

When programmes with pop music were scheduled, these were given names that did not appeal to their audiences, as the next chapter indicates. ‘Teen’, ‘teenager’, and so on, were words that were used the titles of programmes, but these were not attractive to the young people who were supposed to listen to the programmes, as the next chapter shows. Programmes produced by pirate station Radio Veronica, or programmes by Radio Luxembourg directed at Dutch youth initially had similar names. Young audiences were not taken seriously, were not recognized as individuals who were able or allowed to make their own decisions freely – that, at least, is how they experienced it. They were not ascribed (much) autonomy and independence by producers and directors of radio programmes. An indication of the changed conditions of broadcasting after the late 1950s and early 1960s is that when an official committee – the Program Advisory Board (PAR) – was established by VARA in 1964 to make sure that its socialist ideals were realized, it was virtually impotent (Eijkelestam 1991). The PAR was a way of appearing to meet the demands of people within the VARA organization that it live up to the socialist ideals or socio-cultural values it used to stand for. These ideals, however, attracted ever fewer listeners and viewers. The quality of a programme was increasingly measured by audience reaction. It was evident that pop music was what a large part of the audience wanted to hear more of on the radio, since non-Dutch, non-public broadcasters were drawing large audiences, and even the one or two Dutch programmes that played popular music had a large and faithful audience. Soon, from 1962–3 onwards, other Dutch broadcasters started programmes that played pop music and were directed at a young audience. These programmes, however, were not

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allowed to play the ‘wilder’ songs. Partly, in addition, because the Dutch music press (amongst others Tuney Tunes, Muziek Expres, Muziek Parade) paid more attention to Cliff Richard, for instance, than to Elvis Presley and Little Richard, in contrast to other countries, Cliff Richard and other artists were more popular in the Netherlands than elsewhere. Had they played ‘wilder’ music, the programme would have been in danger of being stopped. When there really was no way of getting around playing ‘wild’ music because its popularity among the audience of a radio programme was too great, the instrumental version would sometimes be played (interviews with Voogd and Rosekrans). In such cases, presenters would be critical of the music. In general, however, little criticism of songs would be indulged in by presenters. They would prefer to avoid playing a record that was considered unsuitable, as the quotes alluded to earlier from an internal report on ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ for public broadcaster VARA indicate (VARA 1961a). In fact, apart from some idea of what they did not want a music programme to be, people in charge Dutch broadcasting had little clue as to what should be done to attract a young audience. So they experimented, or rather, allowed some of their employees to experiment in the margins. Changes in the names of programmes, days, times, length and frequency of broadcasts were common. A sign of such experimenting is that the programme which made AVRO famous as the first official Dutch broadcaster with a programme dedicated exclusively to pop music, also existed under the same name with a different format one year before the date that historians set for its inception. ‘Tussen 10+ en 20-’ is said to have begun in October 1959 (see, for example, Righart 1995, p. 163), but in November 1958 there was a programme with the same name that was aired by AVRO.23 On 11 November 1958 – the date of the first broadcast of the programme under that name – as far as it is possible to tell, there was nobody who presented, or commented upon, the seven songs by Fats Domino and Billy Vaughn that were played in the 15 minutes between 4.15 and 4.30 p.m. In 1959, a programme under the same name was broadcast, which was compiled on the basis of ‘collective requests from high school students and members of fan clubs’ (AVRO annual report, 1959). This format turned out to have some success. Many requests were received, as the annual report of that year proudly mentions. When VARA began its ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, which was almost an instant hit thanks to the fact that it had a presenter who did not address his audience in an overly condescending way, AVRO looked for a way to match the success of VARA and increasingly of the foreign broadcasting stations. They had to have the programme presented by somebody well-known to its public, somebody able to create a sense of ‘us [pop music lovers]’ against ‘them’, someone who would present himself as equal to his listeners; somebody who was more like a disc jockey. Only in 1963, after some unsuccessful attempts to select

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somebody who was more like a presenter than a disc jockey, did AVRO appoint Jos Brink for the job. Brink and the programme became hits, not least because of the influence of ‘Tussen 10+ en 20–’ producer Skip Voogd in the music press. Brink, for instance, appeared on the cover of a number of magazines addressed at a young, pop music-consuming audience such as Tuney Tunes (for instance, August 1963), and ranked high in the popularity polls of the music magazines as presenter. In an interview with Tuney Tunes (July 1963), Brink explains how he got the ‘trademark’ he became popular for (a sultry ‘pas goed op jezelf [take care of yourself]’ ): it was a translation into Dutch of a phrase used on Radio Luxembourg. Voogd, producer of the radio programme that Brink presented, however, claims to have invented this slogan. Brink was much more of a disc jockey than his predecessors on the same radio programme, although still not a ‘real’ one. He was a popular person himself, receiving many (love) letters from fans, and signalled in the way he presented the programme that he did not believe himself to be superior to his audience. Brink, however, was no expert on pop music and relied heavily on his producer for the programme, Skip Voogd (Brink). Voogd selected the songs and wrote the text. Brink is still no expert on pop music and talks about Mike Jagger, singer of the Rolling Stones (for those who may not know: the first name of the lead singer of the Rolling Stones is Mick.) Brink was chosen to present the programme for reasons that include his attractive appearance and his impeccable pronunciation.24 The idea that what the audience wanted was important did not occur to ‘the powers that be’ in public broadcasting for a considerable time. It did not match with the educational mission that public broadcasters were imbued with and took upon themselves, which was to confer certain socio-cultural values upon their audience. The preferences of the large majority of the audience should not play a role because that would mean that ‘vulgar’ music and programmes would ensue – such preferences needed to be changed. When VARA installed Luister- en Kijkonderzoek, similar to the Nielsen reports in the United States, to discover how many people were listening to which programmes and how they evaluated these programmes, it did so to ensure that the democratic voice of its members could be heard and not to find out what the audience wanted in order to be better able to cater for those preferences (VARA 1961b). In the NCRV annual report of 1965, it was explained to NCRV’s constituency how such research could help to ensure that the mixture of programmes was broad and the schedule balanced such that its members would all be served. The difference in motivation – by alluding to certain VALUES – for installing Nielsen ratings as either a way of bolstering democratic VALUES or, alternatively, as a means of trying to cater as much as possible for the preferences of an audience seems small and a mere difference in emphasis, but it is crucial,

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even if the result in terms of which programmes to schedule at which times turned out to be the same. It means that the institutional arrangements develop in a different manner – different data are looked for, and the use made of those data by the broadcasters is a different one. Subsequently, after 1965, when an institute took over VARA’s tasks on behalf of all official broadcasters, and partly as a result of technological developments that made it easier to collect these kinds of data, this institution began to lead its own life (see Bekkers 1990; Dolfsma 1997). From a way of expressing democratic VALUES, it changed to producing figures that showed the extent to which a programme met the general audience’s wants, to being an indication of commercial success or even viability. Therefore it became an indicator of how ‘commercial/lowbrow’ a programme was (Dolfsma 1997). Before Nielsen-type reports began in 1965, to people directly involved in making programmes the polls in the music press and other ‘external’ indications of ‘success’ were of importance, while the people in management positions in broadcasting corporations mainly had internal or intrinsic measures of a programme’s quality. Slowly, institutions were sought to give expression to the preferences of the audience, to reflect to increasing degrees that (young) people in the audience were autonomous and independently able to make judgements. In Wijnberg’s (1995) terms, the selection environment changed, becoming one where expert (or possibly peer) selection gave way to market selection. Producers and presenters on the one hand evaluated the intrinsic quality of programmes, making for a process of peer selection where those who made radio programmes also decided on the standards for measuring quality. On the other hand, the boards of broadcasting corporations and the institutions they commissioned (for example, text control) also evaluated the quality of programmes. The latter were influential due to the institutional arrangements in place, making the system of provisioning pop music on Dutch radio one where expert selection reigned. ‘Expert’ seems to indicate that the persons who do the evaluating are knowledgeable about pop music, while in fact they were not; they merely are ‘not members of the group in which the selection process takes place’ (Wijnberg 1995, p. 223). In addition: neither are the ‘experts’ part of the group of final consumers. Note that we talk of ideal types here, and that the name might not always be appropriate. The challenge is, of course, to be detailed about the process of selection in an environment, and changes therein, using an appropriate theory to explain the process. Institutional economics is just such a theory capable of explaining changes in the selection environment. Music magazines have also become increasingly sensitive to the demands of their readers, moving from a system of expert or peer selection to one of market selection. Over the years, as competition between magazines increases,

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there are more institutional features that explicitly attempt to meet the demands of readers. Popularity polls, charts from foreign countries (especially the United States and the United Kingdom, but also other exotic countries), posters of ever larger size instead of or in addition to simple black-and-white photographs, and the printing of the lyrics of popular songs are prominent examples of how music magazines tried to cater for the preferences of their audience. Charts are the obvious solution to the problem of how to measure and then cater for the preferences of the audience for particular songs,25 but there was no independent organization that collected sales figures for the Netherlands. Besides, relying on a commercial organization to collect such figures was regarded with suspicion, still. Other institutional forms of the chart were tried for various lengths of time – VARA’s ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ in particular was ingenious in this respect. Initially, they did not want to rely on the music industry (retailers) to produce figures, and hence sought other kinds of ‘charts’. One of those forms was a personal chart of one of the listeners. A reporter for the programme would visit a member of the audience and ask for his or her favourite songs, which would then be played. Another of chart was based on the amount of money sent in the form of extra stamps attached to postcards. The extra money was to go to a good cause, in line with the VALUES this broadcaster adhered to, and the amount a song raised was a measure of its popularity. Songs that were most popular would be played in the programme. These institutional forms had a short life, however: they were not popular in themselves. In order to maintain its position as the most popular programme playing pop music, institutional changes were needed.26 ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ had to play the kind of chart based on retail sales figures more common in America, the United Kingdom, and on Radio Luxembourg. It was decided to gather such information for the programme by phoning record shops (interviews with de Kloet, Stok). In the institutional form of the process of gathering sales figures, once again biases show that relate to socio-cultural values upheld by this public broadcaster. First, there was a reluctance to trust figures provided by record companies, because commercial influence was feared. Secondly, in phoning record shops, few outlets in the eastern area of the Netherlands were contacted. As Stok expresses it: ‘there was a Randstad [western area of the Netherlands] bias’. German popular music (Schlagers particularly), that especially had many fans in those eastern parts of the country, was not favoured by the board of VARA (cf. VARA 1961a, quoted above). Amongst other reasons this was due to resentment against Germany because Germany had occupied the Netherlands for several years during the Second World War. Nor was (Dutch) folk music welcome in this broadcaster’s programmes. A station that many people turned to later, Radio Veronica, had the same policy in compiling charts. To claim a

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causal relation between this way of compiling charts and the gradual disappearance of German music from people’s music preferences would be impossible. Circumstantial evidence, however, seems persuasive. While the character, or institution, of the ‘showman-entrepreneur DJ’ fully developed in the United States in just a few years during the 1950s (Peterson 1990, pp. 109–10; Berland 1990), it took many years in the Netherlands. Pete Felleman, Herman Stok and Jos Brink were not DJs in the genuine sense of the word. Although they were well known, adored and received a lot of attention in the media, their behaviour did not communicate that they were one with the audience, a primus inter pares. In some way or other, they meant to educate their audience, showing the proper way to speak, the proper tastes in music, and so on. Interviews with presenters and producers of these radio programmes show this. De Kloet, for instance, says, ‘the really terrible [music] you did not play, of course’. Only if that music was very popular and they could not ignore it would they play it, adding that they believed the song was ‘terrible’. Rather than playing Elvis Presley, for instance, they would play songs by Cliff Richard very often. De Kloet claims that that ‘played an important role in making Cliff Richard famous’.27 Group interviews I conducted, and analyse in the next chapter, underline that the audience clearly perceived disc jockeys on the official stations to be different from disc jockeys of, for instance, pirate stations. They preferred the latter. Elections for the most popular disc jockey in what was then, still, probably the most influential and best-known music magazine at the time in the Netherlands, Tuney Tunes, started in 1963. There was no separate poll for foreign DJs. In this poll, Joost den Draayer, inspired in the way he presented radio programmes for pirate station Radio Veronica by American disc jockeys, won decisively.28 Most of these polls were concocted, as producer of radio programmes and contributor to various music magazines in that particular period of time, Skip Voogd, now admits (Voogd). Nonetheless they are a sign of the increased importance of the person who presented a programme, especially since for a long time people believed these polls to present a genuine picture, and many people (especially the erstwhile audience) still do.29 The first real, Dutch disc jockeys worked for Radio Veronica after this station changed its image to a station for the young, mainly playing pop music. Joost den Draayer, an immensely popular DJ who even had his own fan club (called ‘Turkish Delight’), had made a trip to the United States to learn how to make radio programmes. Afterwards he became director of Veronica and made sure Veronica DJs behaved more like their American role models. He introduced a chart based on the American example, relying on retail sales figures (see De Ruijter 1987). A good DJ should, of course, have more than just the good looks that work well on the covers of magazines. As Negus (1993) and

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Berland (1990) have argued, good DJs have to play by certain socially recognized rules, or institutions. They need to know what they talk about, have a ‘feel’ for the music, and they need to talk about it smoothly. He – disc jockeys were (are) typically male – has to be able to make a coherent whole of his programme, which means talking through the introduction of songs, something which needed a lot of practice and caused awe when a presenter/DJ moved from the pirate station Veronica to a public broadcaster such as AVRO (interviews with Out and van Zijtveld). Good disc jockeys in the Netherlands also needed to be proficient in English, or at least to give that impression. English and pop music were closely related in the perception of the Dutch audience. Songs in Dutch or any other language could not be pop music, as if by definition. Good DJs could hardly be (talking) Dutch. Articulation of English song titles or pieces of the song text had to be perfect, but also in ordinary presentation English words or proverbs had to be used.30 Most importantly, perhaps, was and still is that a disc jockey does not claim to be more important than his audience. The tone of voice he uses must not be the kind of condescending one that presenters of programmes on Dutch public radio mostly used up to that time. The music industry was interested in the possibilities created by pirate stations such as Radio Veronica, as they focused more on pop music and its young audience.31 Earlier, when public broadcasters were dominant and deprecated any hint of commercial interests, the music industry’s space for manoeuvring in media land was limited. When pirate radio Veronica’s ‘Top 40’ started in 1965, singles sales increased by 30 per cent that year (Table 1.2). Soon after, the Dutch government commissioned a third official radio channel, to focus on young people, mainly playing pop music. Broadcasters imitated the institutions of the DJ and the charts in order to (try to) regain a lost audience. Indeed, the official broadcasters did regain those listeners, albeit that legal measures against pirate stations were needed for this ‘success’ (Chapman 1992; De Ruijter 1987; Vahl 1996). Although Radio Veronica is perceived by many to be the prime example of a commercial broadcaster that aims solely to maximize its audience and/or profits, this was not entirely so in reality. To have done so would have entailed focusing on a young audience. Young people were not catered for, and were even neglected entirely, by some of the existing, public broadcasters and radio stations because they were not among their members and there was therefore no grounds for devoting resources to them. In the first few years of its existence, Veronica did not devote its time exclusively, or even primarily, to producing programmes and playing pop music for a young audience (Van Elteren 1994, p. 106). Even more, when in 1965 Veronica began broadcasting its Top 50 in a programme called ‘Nederlandse Hitparade’ – later known as the ‘Top 40’ – it refused to include German songs that many people in the

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Netherlands liked. When collecting the sales figures, Veronica would not call shopkeepers in the eastern parts of the Netherlands to enquire about their sales of records (Bossink). Hence, one is inclined to conclude, German songs would not appear in the list. Similarly, Country and Western music – with folk roots and an audience that consisted of rural, working-class (conservative?) people – did not appear to match the socio-cultural values Veronica stood for, although pop music had originated in part from folk music. Veronica is the self-proclaimed champion of the American way of life (as it is perceived in Western Europe). In the process, Veronica – becoming the most popular broadcaster in the Netherlands within a period of just a few years – played an important role in the disappearance of both German songs and Country and Western from the minds of the Dutch radio audience.32 While the institutional forms they have adopted are quite similar, unlike Radio Veronica, VARA claims to base its decision not to play these kinds of music on other, non-commercial socio-cultural values (cf. VARA 1961a). A look at the charts of recent years shows that few people in the Netherlands appreciate German songs or Country and Western very much nowadays. Assuming that present lists of bestselling songs are more reliable than they used to be, one can see that no German popular songs (Schlagers) or Country and Western songs have appeared in many years. By going against the grain of people’s apparent preferences then, commercial, market-oriented broadcasters such as the pirate station Radio Veronica were revealed to adhere to socio-cultural values.33

4.5 CONCLUDING REMARKS People’s preferences for pop music are not given. Rather, they are formed and take shape in a social environment that consists of interrelated institutions. In the case of pop music, this almost amounts to a truism. The cultural environment that pop music encountered in the 1950s and (early) 1960s in the Netherlands as much as elsewhere was one where the socio-cultural values differed significantly from those of pop music. Resulting tensions had to be dealt with – and the institutions of providing pop music changed accordingly. Tensions between the different sets of socio-cultural values perceived to be represented in pop music on the hand, and the existing broadcasting system on the other even led directly to the resignation of the Dutch Marijnen administration in 1965. Institutional sclerosis in the broadcasting system had become the primary flashpoint of a process of de-pillarization in Dutch society. Institutions usually evolve slowly, and so do the institutions of pop music for most of the time. In the 1950s and early 1960s, however, many Western countries experienced a sudden and major change in the institutions of pop music. Peterson (1990) documents this for the United States and locates it in

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the years 1955–6. A similar shift, though much more prolonged, happened in the Netherlands as elsewhere in Europe. In these cases pop music was embraced much more slowly than in the United States and the United Kingdom (cf. Chapman 1992). The first steps were slow and careful; from 1962–3 developments were faster, as organizations were becoming much more responsive to their audiences. It was only then that pirate stations also changed strategy, but once they had done so, they were quicker to implement changes. Examples from neighbouring countries such as West Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg played an important role. Most important, however, were the examples set in the United Kingdom and the United States. Experiments to find the right format (institutional form) for radio programmes or music magazines attest that this process of institutional change was complicated. Public broadcasters sought to reach young people who were attracted to pop music and they wanted or had to remain as far as possible true to their own ideals or socio-cultural values as representatives of a particular pillar, teaching their constituency proper tastes and behaviour. The tensions between the two differing socio-cultural sets of values explain why the search for the ‘right’ institutional format was so protracted. It explains the institutional sclerosis that characterized the system of provision of pop music for years. The tensions explain why a successful programme might still be under threat of being cut in time or moved to a more disadvantageous day of the week or time of day. The advent of pop music is one where the three kinds of tensions introduced in Chapter 3 can be seen to play out, shaping institutions in the system of provision of pop music. In the search for an appropriate institutional setting that would remove or at least alleviate the tensions, much experimentation occurred. My reconstruction of this story in this chapter is necessarily partial, as the responses of audiences of pop music were increasingly perceived as important by the players involved. The next chapter deals with this aspect, where it becomes clear that pop music is much more than just a means of establishing a position on the social ladder. Consumption, and the consumption of pop music especially, is symbolic, involving at least the possibility of a multiplicity of interpretations. The next chapter looks at the (informally) institutionalized consumption behaviour in relation to pop music. I reconstruct the life world of consumers of pop music, and especially their responses to the institutional changes in the way in which pop music was provided.

NOTES 1. 2.

See Tillekens (1998) for a musicological analysis of Beatles songs. For instance when the May 1960 issue of Tuney Tunes asserts that Fats Domino’s favourite dish is boiled elephant’s trunk.

90 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Institutional economics and the formation of preferences See the first chapters in Chapman (1992) for a sketch of developments; he concentrates on Britain. Out (1974), for instance, talks about a pirate station that aimed at Dutch listeners – Radio Veronica. His perspective can hardly be described as detached, however, given that he was responsible for programming in the late 1960s and was director of Veronica later still. According to Chapman (1992, p. 9) Radio Luxembourg had a huge market share for its broadcasts on Sundays. Quantitative indications that the years 1962–3 were a crucial period for radio are absent or cannot be produced. Sales figures (see Table 1.2) do not show important relative developments, and singles sales in particular are slow. See Van Gelder and Carvalho (1994) for a much more detailed, epic account of music magazines in the Netherlands. In addition to membership fees, membership was a basis for distributing among the broadcasting corporations financial resources collected by the government from the compulsory contributions of people who owned a radio or television set. A pillarized society and broadcasting system need not imply that a public broadcasting system has different broadcasting corporations for each pillar, as is the case in the Netherlands. Belgium is a strongly pillarized society, but still has one general, public broadcaster (Burgelman 1990). Unlike the single public broadcaster that the United Kingdom has – the BBC – Belgium’s public broadcaster BRT is pillarized internally. Broadcasting of Pier Sybrandy’s – who called himself ‘the Dutch Pat Boone’ – record ‘Het Ruw-houten kruis [the wooden cross]’ in the ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ radio programme of 16 October 1959, just after the start of that programme, for instance, was strongly criticized (minutes of VARA programme meeting, scripts of ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, interview with Co de Kloet). ‘Dutch Hitparade’ started on 2 January 1965 and not much later was renamed ‘Top 40’. The market for singles grew by almost 30 per cent in the year that ‘Dutch Hitparade’ started. After some years these growth rates faded somewhat (see Table 1.2). The conclusion reached turned out to be a temporary one and government policy towards broadcasting remained a contested area. The revenue from these advertisements went to a government-controlled fund that distributed money to the networks. Formerly, the source of income for the broadcasting system was a special contribution that every owner of a radio or television set was obliged to pay to the government plusmembership fees, once contacts with commercial players had been ruled out back in 1930 (see Bardoel 1994). Radio One in the United Kingdom started under similar conditions and for the same reasons as Hilversum III in the Netherlands (Chapman 1992). The following account is based on material from archives, interviews with the people involved and secondary literature, which allowed for cross-checking. Sometimes archives were incomplete or badly ordered – parts were lost. This reflects how important it was considered to be to preserve anything relating to pop music. Dick Dusters is an alias for Dick van ’t Sand, an actor in radio plays chosen to present ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ because of his impeccable pronunciation of the Dutch language. Presenters needed such abilities of speech, but were often reluctant to use their own names for fear of being associated with pop music and (thus) jeopardizing their careers as actors in radio plays. Payola is the attempt by (commercial) record companies to covertly promote the music they publish, for instance by buying records themselves so they will rise in the charts and draw attention from the audience (compare Coase 1979). See Scripts, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, 4 February 1967. Scripts, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, 19 April 1962. VARA, minutes of programme meetings; interview with Voogd. Directors of Christian public broadcaster NCRV would listen to the radio programmes that focused on pop music on a less regular basis; interview with Rosekrans. Producers of public radio programmes radio that focused on pop music emphasized this as well; see interviews with de Kloet, Stok, Voogd and Felleman. Their standards for measuring quality differ from those of the directors of broadcasters. Although they believed recognition

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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of the quality of a programme by the audience was important, they did not entirely rely on ‘extrinsic’ measures of quality and value. In terms of concepts used in the economic literature on industrial organization, the Dutch television market was a contestable market. Remember that television broadcasts from August 1964 onwards from the so-called REM island in the North Sea called this monopoly into question. Some people could also enjoy public and private broadcasts from neighbouring countries. Cf. scripts, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, 5 October 1962 and 8 February 1963. I owe this point to Evert Vermeer. Brink was an actor in, among other things, radio plays, much like other presenters of radio programmes. Assuming, of course, that those who buy pop music records also listen(-ed) to programmes on the radio that feature pop music, which seems to be a realistic assumption. Polls in the music press in the years 1959–1962/3 consistently show a decline in popularity of programmes playing pop music produced by official broadcasters. The audience knows now that these polls were manipulated to some degree, but then they were widely read and believed by people involved with making radio programmes to give genuine information. They were, moreover, not contested for a long time. In addition, polls by different magazines were consistent. Interview with de Kloet. Voogd concurs in an interview. The magazine Muziek Expres included elections for the most popular DJ earlier – from its start in 1955. Muziek Expres did not organize the polls each year and if it did, it did not consistently include a category for DJs. Where these polls were organized in the same year and included the same categories, their results were similar. Cf. Chapter 5, as well as interviews with Stok, de Kloet, Rosekrans and Brink. Not only interviews with former disc jockeys point this out, the next chapter will show that the audience for pop music on the radio held that pop music and the Dutch language do not mesh. Out is outspoken about the importance for Radio Veronica of establishing and maintaining good relationships with record companies (interview). This is a claim that is difficult to substantiate. To the best of my knowledge, records on Radio Veronica’s decision-making during the time that it had an illegal status have not been saved, if indeed they were kept at the time. In an interview, Out avoids talking about this issue. Out’s (1974) saga of Radio Veronica’s early years as a pirate station is silent here as well. Some scholars perceive of markets as devoid of socio-cultural values and their institutionalization. The advance of markets is, in this light, often portrayed as a replacement of Gemeinschaft by Gesellschaft as community or social values disappear – this discussion goes back to the sociologists Simmel and Tönnies (cf., however, Zelizer 1997). Markets do not constitute a sphere devoid of socio-cultural values, and may indeed promote certain ideals that are held in high esteem generally (cf. McCloskey 1996).

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APPENDIX 4: ADDITIONAL SOURCES AVRO [Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep], various annual reports, AVRO archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. AVRO, AVRO–programme magazines, AVRO archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. Bossink, Bert (interview); collector of music from the 1950s and the 1960s as well as collector of other material on this subject, publisher of magazine on pop music, occasional producer of radio programmes. Brink, Jos (interview); AVRO presenter/disc jockey of ‘Tussen 10+ en 20-’. De Kloet, Co (interview); VARA producer of ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ and several other programmes that featured pop music, as well as children’s programmes. Dirkse-de Leeuw, Judith (a.k.a. ‘Anuschka’; interview), Radio Veronica and Radio Luxembourg presenter (a.o. ‘Jukebox’). Felleman, Pete (interviews); VARA and Radio Luxembourg presenter and producer of radio programmes featuring jazz, pop music, soul from 1947 onwards. Muziek Expres, various issues, NPI Archives, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Muziek Parade, various issues, VARA Archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. NCRV [Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging], various annual reports, NCRV archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. NCRV, NCRV-gidsen, NCRV archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. Out, Rob (interview); presenter with NCRV, AVRO and Veronica; later he was manager with Radio Veronica. Rosekrans, Hans (a.k.a. Peter Blom; interview), NCRV presenter, various radio and television programmes. Stok, Herman (interview); VARA presenter/DJ of radio (‘Tijd voor Teenagers’) and television (‘Top of Flop’, the Netherlands’ first TV programme about pop music), programmes on pop music. Tuney Tunes, various issues, Muziekbibliotheek, Hilversum, the Netherlands. VARA [Vereniging van Arbeiders Radio Amateurs], reports of programme meetings, VARA archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. VARA, various annual reports, VARA archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. VARA, scripts, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’, VARA Archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. VARA, 1961a [Report on ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ discussed in a Programme Board meeting of January 1962. Written by Co de Kloet and Joop Söhne.] VARA archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands.

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VARA, 1961b. Verslag van de Proefneming met opinie-onderzoek in februari/maart 1961. VARA archives, Hilversum, the Netherlands. Voogd, Skip (interview); AVRO and NCRV producer of radio programmes on, a.o., pop music. Zijtveld, Cees Van (interview); Radio Veronica and AVRO presenter/disc jockey; the ‘first Dutch DJ’.

5. Consuming pop music/constructing a life world Look around and choose your own ground Pink Floyd

Why did so many people in the late 1950s and early 1960s start to consume pop music? Why did they begin to listen to programmes on the radio where pop music was played? What explains why broadcasters, record companies and other players in the music industry in many countries had to make dramatic changes in response to changing consumption patterns? The institutional changes on what can be called the production side have been studied to a considerable extent. Increasingly, the argument in such studies was that institutional changes were influenced by responses to them from the audience, from consumers. A systematic study of the consumption of pop music in this crucial era of its ‘conquest’ of most Western countries has not yet been undertaken. All the attention in the research has focused on the production aspects of music and the music industry (Berland 1990; Burnett 1993; Chapman 1992; Gillett 1970 [1996]; Negus 1993, 1996; Peterson 1990; Vogel 1998). Instead, motives for consumption have been invoked, based on the method of introspection, for pop music’s consumers (Adorno 1941; Ballantine 1984; Righart 1995), a strictly individualistic psychological approach is taken (Holbrook and Schindler 1989), or a (latent) demand for this music is assumed (Peterson 1990). Here, I provide such an integrated analysis, focusing on the situation in the Netherlands. Frith (1996) argues that one should ask the people involved to answer the question of why people consume pop music.1 This is my approach here, in terms of what Cos¸gel (1997) has called ‘consumption institutions’. Riesman (1950) has been the only one to take a similar approach to the one adopted here. Regularities in people’s consumption behaviour that they themselves explain or justify in similar ways may be called consumption institutions.2 In this chapter, I seek to uncover the full range of reasons why people consume pop music; what it meant to them, why they listened, what made them consume this new kind of music in the way that they did? In other words, then, I reconstruct the life world of consumers of pop music during the arrival of this 94

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new music. I use and analyse ‘the subjective accounts people provide of their everyday experiences, . . . the propositions people actually use to persuade each other’3 in order to understand why and how people suddenly started consuming pop music.

5.1 DE GUSTIBUS EST DISPUTANDUM Looking at the advent of pop music in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter takes the consumers’ perspective. Of course, I am aware that the dichotomy between supply and demand so common in economics is difficult to sustain (Fine and Leopold 1993; Falk 1994). Especially in the fields of art and culture, this divide becomes fuzzy, and it is in those cases particularly that tastes and valuations are discussed and contested (Frith 1996). In the fields of art and culture, goods that are important for people’s identity are exchanged. Goods from which people derive their identity, or by which people signal what kind of person they are, may be called symbolic goods. The dominant approach in economics – as expressed most fervently by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker – is to take people’s preferences or ends as given and focus on finding the optimum way of attaining these individual goals (Stigler and Becker 1977; Becker 1996). Assuming given preferences, a rule of choice that applies to everybody (optimization) and ‘unbounded’ rationality still leaves the economist in the uncomfortable position of not being able to explain changes in consumption patterns or consumption institutions. Hodgson (1993a), North (1990), Rutherford (1994) and Samuels (1995) have developed the framework of institutional economics that informs this chapter – a framework that is able to explain social changes and has a theory of the individual (Davis 2003). These authors offer a perspective that differs in important ways from the neoclassical economics, of which Becker is a representative. In reality, valuations and preferences are socially constructed and often ambiguous. They are set in a history of interactions between many different people. To bring this out, I will have to carefully analyse the texts the group interviews and survey have produced. In a social setting, many goods are or may become symbolic goods: goods related to people’s identity. Pop musicrelated goods, however, are particularly strong symbolic goods as Frith (1983, 1996) has shown. By reconstructing the meanings that consumers of pop music had, through ‘thick descriptions’ the result of which is ‘really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’ (Geertz 1973, p. 9), I recreate the music fans’ life world. ‘Sorting out the structures of signification . . . [the] established codes . . . and determining their social ground and import’ (ibid.). Discussing the value of symbolic goods such as pop music is what many people have in common

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(Frith 1996). In reality, and unlike what is held by most economists, de gustibus est disputandum.

5.2 SOME METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS The questions I address here require qualitative data rather than quantitative material. The purpose of the qualitative material I have systematically gathered and analysed in this chapter is to reconstruct the ‘life world’ of people who consumed pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 4 Life world is, of course, a concept the German sociologist and philosopher Habermas uses.5 Sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have much more experience in collecting and interpreting qualitative data than economists (Spradley 1979; Silverman 1993; Schouten 1991). A questionnaire with open questions was used, forming a basis for the more informative series of group interviews (focus groups). The literature on qualitative research recommends group interviews, instead of personal interviews, as a method of collecting the material required to reconstruct people’s life world (Morgan 1988; Krueger 1994). Dolfsma (1999a) provides more details about how the qualitative data was collected. Some information on the participants in the survey is presented in Appendix 5.1. Some studies of young people’s behaviour written in that era, sometimes touching on the consumption of pop music, are available (Goudsblom 1959; Hessen 1965; Krantz and Vercruysse 1959; Langeveld 1953; Saal 1950). These studies, however, are either highly speculative (Langeveld 1953), based on a single case of a dance hall using participatory research methods that for these reasons did not suite my purposes (Krantz and Vercruysse 1959), or address issues that are much wider and are sometimes much more normative than those focused on here (Goudsblom 1959; Hessen 1965; Saal 1950). Other studies implicitly argue that a direct link exists between the message of a piece of music (as evidenced by its lyrics) and its reception among consumers (Ballantine 1984; Gillet 1996; Tillekens 1998). Frith (1987b, 1996), however, rightly raises methodological and theoretical doubts about the possibility of linking the intentions of artists directly to the meaning inherent in music, and subsequently to the life world of its audience. A broad division of the remainder of this chapter is between, on the one hand looking at why pop music was consumed, and, on the other hand, how people consumed music. The why-question is further divided, along lines Falk (1994) suggests, into two parts. First, people consume pop music because it allows them to relate to each other in relation to others, within and between generations. Pop music is bought for whom it represents. Reasons for consuming pop music go beyond that, however. To its audiences, pop music represents something they

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also perceive as inherently good, irrespective of who else appreciates that good. Pop music is, therefore, secondly, bought for what it represents too. Note that I take a broad view on what exactly consumption of pop music is. It means listening to pop music on the radio, buying records and music magazines, listening to those records and reading the magazines, and so on. People consuming pop music in this way I sometimes call ‘fans’, or ‘listeners’, or ‘audience’.

5.3 REPRESENTING WHOM . . . Certainly Ballantine (1984) is right to state that rock music, or pop music as it came to be known, was consumed because it presented a ready-made way in which to distinguish yourself from the older generation(s). This is the popular explanation and it is also supported in this study. However, this picture is not complete: the findings of this research point to a more complex reality. Pop music was also consumed and listened to for different reasons than just for the purpose of distinguishing oneself from different age groups. Furthermore, the generation gap hypothesis implies that generations are homogeneous; one generation as a whole is thought to act in concert with regard to another generation. Pop music plays a role in the conflict between generations, but it is also used in making distinctions within generations. Part of the thrill of pop music was that it upset, or at least baffled, parents and people of older generations generally. As John expresses it during the Amsterdam interview: ‘I thought the nice part was, that you, well . . . there was music on the radio, and . . . there was music which made my father say: “What is this?” That was of course what you wanted.’ A little later, when I asked him for clarification, he continued: ‘Yes . . . that was what you wanted. “Can you turn down that noise!” I had to listen either in the living room when the others were elsewhere, or take the portable radio, the transistor to the attic.’ Posters of artists from music magazines were also used to shock parents. As Karel in Amsterdam recalls: ‘Especially when larger posters became available . . . that was to shock your mother a little’. Some perceive of their interaction with their parents as a ‘fight’ over the control of the radio, to be able to control the volume regulator.6 Such disagreements were most common in households where only one radio set was available. Transistor radios were not common at that time in the Netherlands and other countries in Western Europe, as they were expensive. Many households were connected to what was called the ‘draadomroep’ (cable radio). They would have a built-in radio with a choice of four channels, two of which were the official Dutch channels while the other two would broadcast a selection of radio programmes from public broadcasters in Germany, Belgium, and France. Both radio sets and cable radio could only be listened to in the living

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room. In the living room, parents could, of course, control what their children listened to. Decreasing numbers of households relied on cable radio, however. At the same time, the number of (transistor) radios increased rapidly: households that possessed more than one radio were increasingly common. These two related developments created important conditions for subsequent events – conditions that are necessary though not sufficient to explain the advent of pop music. Radio programmes played on these sentiments of rebellion. The very first ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’7 broadcast on 11 September 1959 started by introducing the programme, then played a song by an artist introduced as ‘the Dutch Elvis [Presley]’, and then stated: ‘Good afternoon everybody, today we start with the one and only, unadulterated programme for all Dutch teenagers, who some less sympathetic people sometimes called bobby soxers [“tiener”].’ The Dutch word ‘tiener’ used in this announcement would be perceived as denigrating by the young audience. The English word ‘teenager’ is used in Dutch too and appealed more to young people. Older people would, of course, be the ‘less sympathetic people’ who use the word ‘bobby soxers [tiener]’, instead of using a word borrowed from the English language. Then, more than now perhaps, one would be praised for using English words. In the Rotterdam interview, participants discussed strategies parents resorted to to try to stop their children from consuming the musical ‘trash’ of pop music. HANS: EMMY: HANS: EMMY: HANS:

‘Once they threw my radio down the stairs. They always pulled out the plugs. Pull the plugs out in the evening. Pull the plugs out in the evening! Your father would come in your room, the door would open with a bang, ‘Quiet now! Stop it!’

A large part of the excitement that pop music produced for many young people then was that of the forbidden fruit. Cathy lived in a northern province of the Netherlands where reception of the Dutch pirate station Veronica would often be problematic: ‘Veronica was most exciting; it was not allowed, but I loved it. Very exciting.’ Many listened to British pirates when these appeared from the early 1960s. These broadcasters played the latest songs, but also had ‘real’ disc jockeys. Real disc jockeys were people who presented pop music as if they were one with the audience, sharing the same frame of reference, making jokes and other remarks, the understanding of which required sharing that frame of reference. In these institutionalized ways of communication, they created a understanding of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Participants in the Amsterdam interview were in agreement when talking about Radio Caroline, other British pirates, and their DJs:

Consuming pop music WIL: JOHN: KAREL:

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‘You had the feeling he [they] was part of the conspiracy . . . Against the older people . . . Against the government.’

For disc jockeys and the audience of radio programmes alike, parents and people from older generations generally represented ‘the establishment’, an establishment that wanted to teach the Dutch youth the correct taste for music and proper manners, an establishment that in the Netherlands, England, and elsewhere wanted to get rid of the pirates. When ‘real’ pop music was played in those few programmes on official Dutch radio that featured pop, it was felt that Dutch disc jockeys did this only reluctantly. In describing official Dutch radio, descriptions like ‘docile’ and ‘too clean’ are used. The audience felt they were ‘being watched’, ‘being controlled’. And, indeed, both the format of the programmes, as well as the content aired, was held under strict control by the broadcasters (Dolfsma 1999a). Real DJs were believed to play what they themselves liked, as opposed to what they were supposed to, let alone explicitly told to, play. JOHN:

‘On Radio London, disc jockeys played what they liked themselves, what they themselves liked. Which they backed themselves. They had personal preferences. Alan Freeman had to play the English Top 20, but, of course, the English Top 20 set the tone for Europe then.’

Even when disc jockeys had to play what was in the charts, which included songs not appreciated by fans of pop music, their behaviour was explained away, rationalized. Disc jockeys with other stations, such as Alan Freeman, although they were sometimes older than their audience, were seen by that same audience as a part of the same generation. JOHN:

WIL:

‘On Sunday afternoon, on the BBC, Alan Freeman played the English Top 20. Half of the songs were unbearable. But I had the impression he too thought so. I had the impression that when he said ‘and now for the seventh week on number one: Distant Drums by Jim Reeves’ he was crying. Whereas when he said ‘the latest song by the Who is new on number seven’ he thought: Yes! This will succeed. And the way he said . . . In contrast to this I always thought people on Dutch programmes, like the one by Skip Voogd, when they had to play the better kind of music they thought: ‘my God, do we have to play this?’

Dutch presenters were not treated so leniently. Dutch presenters were perceived as part of the older generation, part of the establishment. There seems to be a consensus about what makes a good disc jockey, although participants in my group interviews found it difficult to give a clear description – let alone a definition – of what a good DJ is, or list his most important capacities. Little things seemed to indicate whether a disc jockey was knowledgeable or

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not, whether he really liked the music he played or not. In Nijmegen, part of the conversation concerned on this issue is as follows: WILFRED: CLEMENS: OLAV: ILJA:

JOOP: OLAV:

‘But what did you hear [that made you suspicious about the authenticity and knowledgeability of a DJ] ? Backgrounds, comparisons with other artists, origins of it. Who plays with whom. . . . You hear it from how somebody says something whether he has lived it himself or he reads it like it is history. It’s in little things, sometimes. A small difference of accent or a slip of the tongue. It’s when you say: there! Now I’ve got him: he is reading it! Or mispronouncing a name; it’s when you think: Hey! Or when he says it’s an original when it is not.’

Words like teenagers, or, even worse, according to the people so addressed, the Dutch word ‘tieners’, were increasingly used to refer to young people and adolescents. Titles for radio programmes reflected this. In all the group interviews, people felt this was used as a way of putting them down. They did not feel addressed by these names, were even repelled by them. It was a way of controlling them, an indication that they were not taken seriously. The names for the programmes were seen as just as condescending as the way in which presenters behaved in the programmes. When I raised the point that ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ had been the first to broadcast charts on Dutch radio, even before Radio Veronica introduced this institution, and raised the question of why this did not have an impact, the discussion in Rotterdam went as follows: WILFRED:

‘But Tijd voor Teenagers also began to make their own charts in 1963. They phoned retailers to ask them for sales figures. Apparently, this did not have an impact. Well, it may have had an impact, but not an overwhelming one. HANS: MEERTEM: I think that if you should have told me then: You are a teenager, I would have said: Really? That word! CATHY: Yes. WILFRED: It does not have a nice meaning to you? MEERTEM: It has no meaning for me. It is no word by which I . . . JOSHUA: That’s right, names for radio programmes were very clumsy. ‘For Twens’ it would be called, or ‘Bobby-soxers’ [in Dutch: ‘Bakvissen’]. Tussen 10+ en 20–. . . CATHY: JOSHUA: Yes, that was a really annoying name to which I was not attracted.’

One reason, apparently, why charts in ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ were barely noticed was that the programme itself was not considered attractive in comparison to programmes playing pop music on the pirate stations or from foreign broadcasters. This is an issue that transpired in the previous discussion as well. In passing, I touch on the issue of identity and identification here. People used it to define who they were, what kind of person they were, to which group

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they belonged. Titles for Dutch radio programmes featuring pop music were clearly given by adults. For many young people, especially those who considered themselves to be ‘progressive’ and who listened to foreign broadcasters, for instance, this was perceived as a way to put them down. Pop music was not only an important way for the younger generation to distinguish itself from the older generations and the establishment. Pop music is not homogeneous and can be used to create distinctions within the younger generation. Within pop music at that time, the fans themselves drew classifications of ‘progressive’ versus ‘commercial’ and these were acknowledged by many, it seems. Those who generally liked ‘commercial’, middle-of-the-road music, seemed to agree that their taste for music was not as well developed as others who were seen as ‘progressive’. This distinction is close to the classification drawn in the arts. Those who liked what they themselves called ‘progressive’ pop were called upon to organize school parties. They were asked to be disc jockeys or to engage a band because they knew what good music was. School parties (sometimes called ‘Big Nights’) played an important role here. Kees organized such nights for his school. One of his central concerns was to make sure that ‘outsiders’ would not come into the room where the band played. Before the concert, it had to remain a secret that a band would come, but afterwards ‘outsiders’ had to be told so that they would be jealous. KEES: JIMMY: WILFRED: KEES:

‘I really was not in favour of allowing everybody from Delft in. It was your own school party. It would make it less special . . . Right.’

Being an ostensible fan of pop music made one feel ‘avant garde’, as Wil put it. Knowledge of music and the programmes had to be combined with the right behaviour towards others and the right looks. Frith (1996) and others who use the concept of ‘cultural capital’ would say that fans of pop music need ‘pop music (cultural) capital’.8 One might expect that consuming pop music was to a large extent a social activity. Some people in my research indeed ‘confessed’ that they had started listening to pop music (more intensely) because they wanted to belong to a particular group. From this perspective it may come as a surprise to learn that the favourite way of listening to pop music on the radio was alone, even for those who were attracted to pop music because of the groups they could then belong to. I was certainly surprised by the relative absence of the consumption institution of listening to or consuming music with others, an institution that is common today. Only if there was no other option, because there was only a single radio in the house, for instance, would other members of the family

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listen to pop music along with the fan. Usually this was the mother. Friends were not invited to listen together to a common favourite programme for two reasons. It was not the custom and did not fit the pattern of social life to invite friends to the home and go to one’s room to listen to the radio or to records. The social custom of parents not allowing friends over to the house seemed to be a more important reason than the fact that the young did not possess their own radio, as was apparent from the interviews. Having no private bedroom might have been another reason. Most importantly, however, and this is mentioned in every group and also in the survey, fans did not want to listen to the radio with friends, even if they could have done so. MARY:

‘I didn’t have the need to do that [invite friends over]. I wanted to do it alone, I liked that. Otherwise you get situations such as: I like this, and you like that, and then they start babbling when the music is on. I would probably do the same, but I simply didn’t want that [talking when the radio was playing pop music]. I didn’t consider that a problem, I liked it that way.’

Listening together with friends would prevent fans from creating a fantasy world around the favourite music and musicians, as Olav in the Nijmegen interview put it. It was also at odds with the idea that pop music was something personal, something to express your identity and the message you wanted to stand for, that you were an autonomous person. Although fans preferred to listen by themselves, they knew or felt connected to many people. Meertem felt related ‘to everybody . . . You had the feeling that so many people were listening. And the next day you heard others say: Did you hear this? Did you hear that? That is really cool.’ Talking about what you had heard on the radio afterwards was, therefore, a completely different matter. ‘It only starts to get fun . . . What is funny is to talk about it afterwards’ as Ilja says. You would have to be among experts, however, as he said later. It would make you feel better when you knew some hit was a cover from a song that had remained somewhat obscure, but you could only talk about these things with others who could appreciate your knowledge. Otherwise ‘you could not make play with it’ as Olav said. With the exception of listening to pop music on the radio, girls appeared to have had slightly different consumption behaviour. Cathy recalls how she spent many hours with one or more friends memorizing the lyrics of songs so that she would be able to enjoy listening to the radio more. As she cycled to school in a group, Mary would sing the lyrics she memorized with her friends. As compared to the men, the competitive aspect is not stressed in the way in which the women talked about their experiences in consuming pop music.

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5.4 REPRESENTING WHAT . . . As Falk (1994) argues, people consume not simply for the status that ensues. Consumer goods represent not only (groups of) people, they also present what somebody perceives as ‘the good’. Goods or items are, in many cases, perceived by many to be good in themselves: they represent something, not just somebody. If pop music were only used to make distinctions between groups of people and did not mean something for its audience besides this, pop music would be one of many fads. Instead, for many people pop music also, and probably more importantly, represented some very desirable things. People experienced pop music as being intrinsically valuable. For many people, the meanings of pop music became represented in the institutions of pop music. For its audience, pop music was more than simply a means of creating distinctions. If it were only that, listening to the faint broadcasts in English, which nobody really understood, by Radio Luxembourg, the Allied Forces Network (AFN), or the West Deutsche Rundfunk (WDR), for example, would not have been necessary. Listening to the few programmes on official Dutch radio stations would have sufficed. Why spend long hours in the evening or at night listening to the radio, hoping to hear new records, when many did so alone and did not talk about it in much detail with others? Pop music must have some special attribute for its audience. When one reads the questionnaires and analyses the group interviews, it is striking to see how eager young people were for new music, programmes, and radio stations. Besides radio programmes, music magazines were an important source of information, both on pop music itself as well as on how best to be able to listen to it. To get as much as possible from the money spent, the few records or magazines that were bought would be played until they ‘were translucent’ or read from cover to cover and vice versa. Joop in Nijmegen said he ‘drank’ these magazines; others say they read them ‘until they had memorized it all’, they ‘devoured them’. Of course, exchanging or sharing magazines and records was a common practice. Magazines and records would sometimes be bought together. The objective was to stay informed about new developments in the world of pop music, and especially to learn about what was happening in the United States and the United Kingdom. Lyrics were also published in the Dutch magazines, first only by Tuney Tunes, but soon by the others too. Although everything in English was considered better almost by definition, fans did not understand much of what was sung. JOOP:

‘The nice thing about Tuney Tunes were the lyrics. I was 16, 17, and 18 then and had had English in school, heard the songs, but the quality of the sound was not very good either . . . you thought you heard a few things, but that

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Institutional economics and the formation of preferences was not . . . And when you saw the lyrics it was a little different from what you thought. I can remember ‘Singing the Blues’, Guy Mitchell; the text was completely different from what I thought. I had fantasized a whole story to go with it . . . I thought I heard something in the song that made it even more romantic, which turned out, when I saw the text, to be a lot more banal [laughter in recognition from the others]. The song remained beautiful for me, that’s not it, but it was a bit of a disappointment.

About songs in Dutch Meertem said that ‘it was not fast enough . . . they were not at it’. Hans said a little later in this conversation in Rotterdam that he thought English songs were ‘more fun’ because they had a different rhythm or beat. Everybody confirms this. Covers of English or American songs by Dutch bands – keeping the same music while translating the words to Dutch – were considered a ‘fake’ because of, for instance, a ‘bad’ translation. As Clemens put it: ‘the Dutch text, compared to the English, seemed a world of difference’. To a large extent the reason for disliking songs in the Dutch language seems more likely to have been that the English language was so strongly associated with the associated meanings of fastness, newness, youth, creativity, and vitality that lyrics in the Dutch language stood little chance of being appreciated. Joop would like almost any music ‘as long as it was in English’. It wasn’t just Dutch bands that attempted to play up to these perceptions by covering English and American songs, or by advertising themselves as ‘the Dutch Elvis’ or ‘the Dutch Pat Boone’. Magazines had a similar strategy, for instance by publishing foreign charts. ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ – ‘your programme entirely’ presenters would imprint on their audience – would say it played songs of ‘today’s and tomorrow’s rising stars’, thus alluding to these very same sociocultural meanings. Tunes or jingles were an imitation of an American institution on the radio. The audience could easily recognize the programme that was playing on the radio, or a feature within a programme. Hans still knows them all, including the advertisements. To Meertem it was a signal that would tell him to ‘turn up the radio or shut it off’. Tunes were an important way of alluding to the kind of meanings just mentioned. Radio Veronica was the first Dutch station to start this institution when they were still illegal and immensely popular, broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. Many of the tunes stressed, for instance, that the next song would be new (repeating, while fading the word ‘nieuw’, which means: new), was a hit in the United States (‘In New York it’s nr. 1’ – note that English was the language used in this jingle), or was rising rapidly (‘Alarmschijf’, which is a record that is the strongest climber of the week): winning appeals to many people. The Dutch audience saw America and England, and their music, as almost intrinsically better than any other kind of music. Posters were a further important reason to buy magazines. Posters could be hung on the wall, not just to shock one’s parents, but as a visible and quasi-

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imaginary personality to identify with. Both boys and girls would do this. Many girls used to cut out pictures and lyrics from magazines and collect them in a notebook or school diary. Lyrics were learned so as to be able to sing along with music on the radio, with a friend. Singing together on the way to school is something Cathy has such clear memories of that when she hears certain songs now, she again feels as if she is cycling to school with her friends. Boys, too, created a world of fantasy around pop idols. Joop was shocked to find out that Buddy Holly was not the incredibly handsome man he had thought he was. Ilja was particularly shocked by the fact that he was bald and Clemens by the fact that he wore glasses, as if they wanted to say: How can you be young, sing so beautifully about such meaningful things, be so far away, unknown and unattainable and not be handsome, be so ordinary? Still, this was no reason not to read the magazines. Their curiosity for news about pop music was stronger than the fear of shattering a dream. Boys used magazines more as a means to inform themselves about new developments, it appears, than girls. To them cultural ‘pop music’ capital seemed more important as a means of creating hierarchies between different groups and among themselves, within groups. Magazines from abroad, like Melody Maker from Britain or Billboard from America, were evidently better. Ilja still feels proud to have followed Billboard and Cashbox then and is admired by the others in the Nijmegen group for it. The Dutch magazines like Muziek Expres ‘were months behind . . . they were weeks, weeks behind’. He was, and still is to some extent, particularly troubled by the fact that the magazines did not acknowledge that the news they presented was weeks old, and often copied from American or English magazines; this he could tell by comparing, for instance, the charts printed in the different magazines. He found that charts printed in Dutch music magazines that would purportedly give the present list of hits in the United States were in fact dated. Nevertheless, for many, these charts were another reason to buy the magazines. They kept you informed about what was new. New and authentic pop music originated, people thought, from the United States or the United Kingdom. Magazines were aware of these perceptions and would publish charts purportedly from these countries. What appeared in the Billboard chart would then take some time to be ranked in continental European charts. Each year every Dutch music magazine published a popularity poll (‘populariteispoll’) – a list of the most popular songs, musicians, singers, programmes and disc jockeys of the year according to the readers of the respective magazine. They were asked to send in their personal list of favourites. Tuney Tunes started doing this and soon the others followed suit. Among the magazines there was some competition on this point. Competition focused on the issue of credibility; one magazine even saw fit to mention that the polls were authorized by a notary. Still, according to Skip Voogd, who first

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compiled the polls for Tuney Tunes and later for Muziek Expres, they were all rigged. Unless there was no way to get around it, his personal favourites would rank as number one. Otherwise, they would be runner-up. Readers of the magazines, however, all seem to have believed the polls were genuine. I asked questions about it in all of the group interviews. In Delft, I asked participants if they knew these polls were tampered with. GERRIT: WILFRED: PETER: WILFRED: MARY: GERRIT:

‘Were those things made up? You didn’t know that? I always sent in the forms. [Mary confirms.] Did you all send in these forms? [General confirmation.] I really don’t want to hear this . . . You take away an illusion.’

New, fast, and the unknown go together. Fans liked programmes that played many new records, especially at a high speed that, as Clemens put it, ‘took your breath away’. Disc jockeys would talk while the next record was starting to play which would increase the impression of speed. Talking through the introduction of a song was not customary on the official Dutch stations, not allowed even. This, and shortening a record by skipping parts, would also give the impression that there was something left to be discovered by the fans. As Ilja in Nijmegen suggests, it roused their curiosity, but did not entirely satisfy it, keeping the idea alive that there was so much more of that new record to hear. Looking for news relates to the idea that pop music needed to express autonomy. New information is something other people do not have, do not know about. To possess news about pop music can make you an authentic person. It is something you can use to distinguish yourself from others, but also – and often at the same time – something that may connect you to different others who are also knowledgeable about something. Disc jockeys who did not make their audience feel as if they (the DJs) chose their own records without interference from others, were not held in high esteem. If others influenced their choice of music, this either meant that these others were more knowledgeable, or that the others had influence over the disc jockeys. The audience would perceive either one of the two as an impeachment of the autonomy of the disc jockey. DJs who ostensibly wanted to teach their audience the correct taste for music were not popular; these disc jockeys interfered with the autonomy of their audience. Pop music, to its fans, was all about personal autonomy. What fans used the radio and magazines for was, in the words of pop band Pink Floyd, to ‘look around and choose your own ground’. To support their (1994b) argument that pop music established ‘modern rules for friendship, pair-bonding and the formation of identity’, Kleijer and Tillekens study the lyrics of well-known songs of the time. Young people,

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according to Kleijer and Tillekens, acquired a new romantic code of how to interact with the other sex. The music gave young people other institutionalized means of communicating: the conversation changed. Change and uncertainty are related. Uncertainty about what was the proper way to behave or what to talk about and how prompted institutional innovations. By presenting a way of behaving in a specific kind of circumstances that is or would be socially accepted, institutions provide (a sense of) certainty. Especially in interactions with the other sex, uncertainty reigned. For instance, in 1961 advertisements used to appear in Tuney Tunes for lessons in kissing to be concluded by a ‘kissing certificate’. As shown by Rutten (1991), sexuality and love began to be more and more directly referred to in the pop music featuring in the charts, addressing this sense of uncertainty. As Frith (1987b, 1996) suggested forcefully, I would like to argue that the value of pop music for its audience cannot be established by musicological research.9 In the group interviews, participants all said they were very aware of the sexual overtones in many of the songs, although their parents might have failed to understand because of a limited command of the English language. Cathy, even though she knew it would make her mother very angry, translated the lyrics of the song ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones, and it did make her mother angry. Which is what she intended; it was ‘nicely provocative. I liked it.’ How it influenced their behaviour towards the other sex at the time or afterwards, however, is difficult to say with any degree of certainty based on my material. Nevertheless, the ambiguities surrounding pop music and the meaning it had for its fans was considerable. What to do when the presenter made a derisive remark about Elvis Presley when you are an Elvis fan? Clemens, who was a member of two Dutch Elvis fan clubs, would be deeply hurt if a presenter said something ‘bad’ about Elvis, but he would not switch the radio off. ‘No, no, come on, no. . . . That was also because there were so few other programmes; these were the times to listen to music. You didn’t have money to buy records either.’10 You would, of course, boast of having heard the latest single by The Who. Admitting to liking a song in Dutch by a Dutch female singer – ‘Mijn Dagboek’ [My Diary] by ‘crooner’ Willeke Alberti was Ilja’s favourite – you just could not do, however much you liked the song. Or could you? These were the kinds of dilemmas people found themselves confronted with: conflicting socio-cultural associated meanings, perceived by the audience as partly internal to pop music itself and partly a result of its relation to other spheres. Pop music is about expressing that you are an independent and authentic person, and finding new ways of being this. At the same time, by consuming some kind of music you indicated that you belong to a particular group of people, preferably a group that has status (for instance, because it is winning).

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Consuming pop music thus seems oddly paradoxical. One important reason for people to be attracted to it is that it expresses autonomy and independence. By consuming pop music you show that you are an autonomous person, that you determine what you prefer on your own and are not influenced by or dependent on the judgement of other people such as parents or the media. For this reason, those who prefer ‘progressive’ music receive some measure of respect from people who do not like ‘progressive’ music. To be recognized as an autonomous and independent person and music fan, others need to understand the message that you convey by your choice of music. You therefore have to signal in a socially understandable, institutionalized way: understandable to people within and outside the group you are a part of. Consumption of music that signals autonomy and independence, therefore, paradoxically it might seem, has to abide by social institutions. Emerging consumption institutions reconciled the two, though they were never entirely rid of all ambiguities.

5.5 THE EVERYDAY PRACTICE OF CONSUMING MUSIC People went to a lot of trouble to be able to consume pop music. A few of the difficulties, and the ways fans found of getting around them, are considered in this section, giving an indication of how eagerly consumers of pop music wanted to listen to the radio and read music magazines. Parents often did not approve of pop music, records and magazines were expensive, as were record players and radios, and the number of radio programmes or stations that featured pop music were limited. Young people were inventive, however, in finding solutions for these problems. This section is about how eager many young people were to consume pop music. Many knew exactly when their favorite programmes would be aired. They had memorized the days and times of these programmes for the whole week, and still remember parts of the schedule now. In Nijmegen, the conversation was like this: ILJA: WILFRED: ILJA: OLAV: CLEMENS: ILJA:

OLAV:

‘You built yourself some kind of scheme for the week, to know on which days to . . . Did you write it down? We knew it completely by heart. You knew it by heart. You didn’t have to write it down. You knew exactly: on Sunday evening turn on this, so normally I can listen from 10 to half past 12 to that. Monday morning listen to this there. And Sunday afternoon after ‘No problems at all with your Volkswagen’ there was ‘Tienertoppertijd’ by Guus Jansen Junior . . .’

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Music magazines printed overviews of programmes on radio that their audience would want to know about; competition between them was based in part on publishing such information. Programming by Radio Luxembourg and Radio Veronica was of special interest since these would not be included in the magazines the official Dutch broadcasters published. Luxembourg and Veronica, in contrast to the Dutch broadcasters, would have a schedule for their programmes that did not change for a month, or even months. The monthly music magazines printed these schedules – see Appendix 5.3 for an example – it was a way for them to compete with each other. Frequencies for radio stations would also be given, sometimes also for stations that were less well known or even obscure. The idea was to appear exotic, independent, knowledgeable, and therefore a credible source of the latest information on pop music. Not surprisingly, later on in the 1960s, programmes on television gained a place in these overviews. Getting a radio for oneself was an important step. This way, tensions in the family that arose over what to listen to because there was only one radio, located in a room where other family members gathered, could be avoided. Jon, for instance, was given an old radio by his father. To hear his favourite programme on Radio London, he himself had to hold the wire that was the antenna, in the air in front of the window for an hour. Karel also developed all kinds of tricks with the antenna and wires to improve sound quality. A buildit-yourself radio was another solution, something which could be made by self-confessed non-technical people. The Dutch electronics manufacturer Philips advertised this kind of radio widely, including in music magazines. Records, record players, tape recorders, and regular radios were expensive and many would save money for a long time in order to be able to buy them for themselves. Once somebody had a record player at home, a group of friends would put together the money to buy a single in order to listen to it. Jon remembers, ‘there were those who had a pick-up at home, so you would buy singles. Or you would put money together with a group of four to buy the latest Rolling Stones record.’ In the Amsterdam and Nijmegen interviews, participants all recognized this situation. Borrowing records or magazines from each other was common practice. Money earned by doing odd jobs, sometimes at the weekend, such as delivering the newspaper, or washing cars, was spent on magazines and on records. Before buying a (new) record, fans would listen extensively to it in small booths at the record store, deciding after they had heard the record several times not to buy it. Everybody in the Nijmegen interview, for instance, clearly remembers having done this and how it upset shopkeepers, which was part of the fun of it. The more docile fans would finish their homework as fast as they could and make sure they got good grades in school in order to be able to, or be allowed to, listen to the radio and to pop music. More rebellious types just listened to

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pop music as much as they could and did not bother about what parents or schoolteachers thought of it. They would rather listen to a new record 20 times, over and over again, until they had memorized the lyrics than study. Collecting lyrics, pictures, and charts in a diary or exercise book, or posters to fill the walls in a bedroom took up a lot of time.

5.6 WHY POP MUSIC? A song (or programme or magazine) reminds people of certain events. Many of those recollections for the participants in my research were strong. Pop music brings structure and meaning into the lives of many young people – it is indeed a symbolic good. Adolescence is known to be, what Schouten (1991) and others call, a ‘liminal’ period: a period in which people are very impressionable, when their experiences are likely to be formative. Important and persisting parts of a person’s behaviour related to (music) consumption behaviour developed in adolescence. Adolescence, of course, is not or need not be the only liminal period, nor are its experiences necessarily the most impressive and longest lasting for people. Nevertheless, with regard to people’s tastes in music, it is known that after adolescence musical preferences do not tend to change dramatically (Holbrook and Schindler 1989). Hansman (1996) shows that habits of buying records that are established in adolescence exert their influence for many years. Earlier I argued that a convincing account of the advent of pop music must explain why pop music came to be the carrier of the meanings people sought for. Why did it become as powerful and valuable as it did? French chansons, folk music, Big Band music, blues, Country and Western, or jazz from America, or German songs (‘Schlagers’) might have played the same role. That it was American music is not such a surprise. America stood, and still stands for many people, for new, fast, and modern. America had also liberated Western Europe from Nazi Germany and had (has) a strong economy. America stood for victory, wealth, and progress. Arguing that the sudden increase of the products of pop music during the 1950s and (early) 1960s in the Netherlands, and elsewhere, can be explained by something these products stood for, and not so much for what the products are, seems to be begging the question, however. In terms developed earlier in this thesis, the inquisitive reader would like to know: How do these meanings arise? While running the risk of indeed begging this question, I would like to leave this issue with only a brief mention of a few relevant places were one can look for clues in this matter. Snapshots, such as in studies by Inglehart (1990), are important as indicators for which socio-cultural meanings play a

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role in society in particular eras. Such associated meanings, however, are subject to developments in society that last for long periods of time, even centuries, and change themselves in the process. Campbell (1987) focuses on how the search for pleasure evolved as a legitimate motive, while modernist ideals such as newness, fastness, and the autonomous are connected to modernism (see also, for example, Taylor 1991). These meanings are associated with America and the American lifestyle for many people in both Europe and America itself (Kroes 1992). To understand why it was the amalgam of blues and folk that became known as pop music which became so popular in many Western societies in the 1950s and 1960s, it is not sufficient to point to the associated meanings this music came to stand for. Some players in the system of provision played crucial roles in the process by which people generally tended to associate certain meanings with institutions of pop music. In the Netherlands, as in other countries, broadcasters and pirate stations that broadcast pop music aimed at a young audience played a key role in this process of institutionalization. Imitating examples from the United States, institutions such as that of the appreciation by an audience of disc jockeys, jingles, charts, ways of treating records and songs, and so on evolved to relate in a powerful way to the kinds of meanings or ideals that young people especially were drawn to. Resistance against such institutional changes that now seem to have been inevitable was strong. Official, public broadcasters, the music press as well as the best-known Dutch pirate stations(!) resisted these changes for a long time.

5.7 RADIO IN LIMBO Early adopters of this innovation in popular music, those fans who tuned in to foreign radio stations when most other fans still had not and when the official broadcasters paid scant attention to pop music, were imitated to the point where institutional changes in the system of pop music provision were unavoidable. Dutch broadcasters – not just the official, public ones, but also pirate radio stations, albeit to a lesser degree – and the music press had to adapt their ways, they had to overcome the institutional sclerosis. Diffusion theory in the social sciences would however be the step after an explanation has been given for what an item means for people, why it has value. Although the answer to this why question is related to the answer to the how question, the former question has relative primacy over the latter one. Even more so than at that particular period, many social scientists and historians nowadays take the position that pop music was one of the most important social and cultural phenomena of the time (Frith 1983; Righart 1995; Kleijer and Tillekens 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 1997; Kleijer et al. 1992;

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Tillekens 1998). Because Dutch radio stations increasingly wanted to attract larger audiences and had done so to some degree, the direct or indirect influence of that audience on the institutions of radio stations and radio programms grew. In the previous section, I argued that foreign and pirate radio stations were an example for many fans of pop music. The official Dutch radio could only regain the audience it had lost to its competitors by adopting the same kind of institutions such as, for instance, the charts, tunes, DJs, fixed and frequent broadcast of programmes that they had. This process of imitation started some time before the Dutch government and especially the official broadcasters in Hilversum were convinced of the need to imitate these institutional arrangements, and eventually started a new radio station, Hilversum III. Therefore, they lost out for quite some time and only regained part of their audience because the competition was not numerically strong and did not have broadcasting equipment of sufficient quality to reach the whole of the Netherlands for the entire day. Legal actions against pirate stations, in conjunction with measures in support of public broadcasters, by a number of European countries were no doubt also conducive in this regard (Van Elteren 1994; Chapman 1992).

5.8 SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS The rise of pop music is a peculiar phenomenon. Pop music is an important symbolic good, the advent of which in the 1950s and 1960s is not well understood. A reconstruction of the life world of people who listened to pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s draws one to the institutionalized forms of communication. Analysis of the communication of consumers brings out a more complex picture than is usually presented in everyday discussions of pop music (Lewis 1983). Pop music is not merely a means for younger generations to rebel against older ones, but it is also a means of creating distinctions within generations. Moreover, pop music is not just used as an instrument in a struggle between different groups, but it is consumed for the ‘good life’, for the socio-cultural values it is thought to represent. It is important to acknowledge that both whom and what pop music represents need to be understood. Pop music was and still is associated with modernist meanings of newness, speed, difference, emotion, a means of expressing that you were an autonomous and independent person. Pop music being from the United Kingdom and the United States – which are themselves places associated with the values mentioned – plays an important part in an explanation of why exactly this type of music rose to prominence. Such values come to be expressed in (consumption) institutions. Why pop music was consumed thus relates to how it was consumed.

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NOTES 1. See Denisoff (1975), Gillett (1970 [1996]), and Maultsby (1996) for a description of pop music. 2. See Neale (1987) and Dolfsma (1999a, 1999b, 2002b) for a conceptual discussion. 3. Callahan and Elliot (1996, p. 91). See also Schouten (1991). 4. Even when such analysis would be indispensable for a particular study (particularly Righart 1995, but see also Tillekens 1998), this has not been undertaken, but personal recollections of the author have been relied on (Ultee 1997). By systematically collecting primary empirical data from erstwhile consumers of pop music, and comparing that to what other material is available, a coherent picture emerges. As the kind of issues addressed are very concrete and as they occurred in a period when the subjects in the study were in their formative years (Holbrook and Schindler 1989), the material collected is reliable. 5. The original German word Lebenswelt is used in English as well. Discussing the concept of life world here in a way that would do it justice would distract from the main line of the argument too much. For a conceptual discussion, relating the concept of life world to economic theory, see Murphy (1992). 6. Such as former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of Social Affairs in the Netherlands, Elske ter Veld (personal conversation). 7. ‘Time for Teenagers’; the first ‘real’ radio programme with pop music in the Netherlands. 8. Bourdieu (1984) proposed the concept of ‘cultural capital’. He seems to have been influenced by Becker (1964), who used a similar ‘economistic’ term: human capital. 9. However, such research can provide important information. See Kleijer and Tillekens (1994b), Rutten (1991), and Stroop (1974) for evidence of the changes in the themes and choice of words in pop music. 10. All presenters on Dutch radio liked Cliff Richard’s music much more than that of Elvis Presley, influencing Cliff Richard’s popularity in the Netherlands.

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APPENDIX 5.1 FURTHER METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS The methodology used here is not commonly used in economics. Appropriate methods for doing qualitative research are discussed more extensively in the other social sciences (for relevant sources, see, for example, Silverman 1993; Krueger 1994; Thompson 1978 [1988]; Morgan 1988; Spradley 1979). Some explanation of my approach is therefore warranted. Participants in the survey and group interviews were sought in three different ways. First, on Tuesday, 12 November 1996 I placed a small announcement in five national, daily newspapers (Trouw, Het Parool, De Volkskrant, Het Algemeen Dagblad and Het Rotterdams Dagblad), reaching a broad audience in terms of social, cultural and economic backgrounds. The previous day the fourth documentary about pop music in the 1950s and 1960s had appeared on Dutch national television in a series of five weekly broadcasts entitled ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’. This documentary focused on my target group. In the ad, I asked people who had listened to pop music on the radio in the (late) 1950s and (early) 1960s to phone me. The text of the ad read: ‘Did you listen to pop music in the 1950s & 1960s? Please assist research at Erasmus University: [phone number]’. Secondly, I was interviewed on Dutch public radio (‘Radio 2’) on 15 December 1996 about the research project, and was given the opportunity to ask the audience to cooperate by calling to the studio. The AVRO radio programme ‘Het Steenen Tijdperk’ focuses on my target population. A third opportunity to call for participants was just before Christmas 1996 at the national finals of a pop quiz in Delft, the culmination of preliminary contests which had been held across the country during earlier months. The organizer of the quiz allowed me time to tell the audience about the project and recruit people for the study. I asked people who responded to one of my requests for cooperation to fill in a questionnaire (see Appendix 5.2). A selection of the answers to questions in the questionnaire is presented in Table A5.1. What respondents answered to the questions in the questionnaires – in Dutch – provided the first clues as to their life world and I used this to add topics to the list of issues I wanted addressed in the group interviews.1 I then selected people for group interviews.2 To my own surprise, willingness to cooperate was very high. Group interviews bring out the qualitative differences in the positions people take or the opinions people have, provided the groups are not too large, which might preclude some individuals from being heard. The size of a group of people interviewed should not be too small, either. In small groups, the opinion of one person might unduly dominate to the exclusion of the others’ points of view. To ensure that a conversation would get started and touch upon a diversity of relevant topics the aim was to have at least four people in each group. These and other practical preparations ensure that three semi-structured

Table A5.1 Consumers of pop music – the survey (% of respondents)

Listened (mostly) alone a Listened (also) with friends Listened (also) with family Bought magazine(s) Favourite magazineb

Favourite programme/station

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Talked about music with/at:

Willing to cooperate with group interview Women (no.) n (no.) No form returned

Group A (newspapers)

Group B (radio programme)

Group C (quiz)

Total

84 19 22 81

87 32 26 87

66 (–) 33 100

85 24 24 85

1. Muziek Expres (59) 2. Tuney Tunes (31) 3. Muziek Parade (22) 1. Veronica, ‘Tijd voor Teenagers’ (TvT), Radio Luxembourg (RL) (50) 1. friends (59) 2. school (53) 3. family (16)

1. TT 2. ME 3. MP

90 9 32 (9)

(58) (39) (35)

1. RL (74) 2. TvT, ‘Tussen 10+ en 20–’ (71)

1. 2. 3. 1.

ME (100) TT (33) MP (33) TvT, Veronica (66)

1. 2. 3. 1. 3.

ME TT MP TvT, RL Veronica

1. (81) 2. (39) 3. (39)

1. (66) 2. (66) 3. (–)

1. (70) 2. (47) 3. (26)

94 8 31 (16)

100 0 3 (–)

91 17 66 (12)

(52) (29) (29) (61) (45)

Notes: a Because respondents said they listened both alone and with friends or family, these figures add up to more than 100 per cent. Whenever people reported having listened to radio programmes alone and with friends and family, they always mentioned having listened alone first. Listening with family or friends was second-best. b A number of participants in the survey listed more than one magazine. Some people reported that they had read music magazines, but either could not remember the names or bought more than one on a regular basis. Source:

Survey conducted by author.

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group interviews of 1.5 hours each will bring out the different perspectives of a subject. I transcribed the group interviews. The purpose is to reconstruct the life world(s) of young people who listened to pop music in the 1950s and (early) 1960s. To this end, groups as diverse as possible – in terms of gender, favourite music, favourite music programme or station, extent to which people are or were involved in pop music, and so on – were formed. One way of indicating my own involvement in the interviews is to add questions I asked or the sentences I used to prompt comments, mentioning my first name among the other names. Presenting actual first names, including my own, is indicative of the personal atmosphere in which the talks took place. Because people were asked to contact me in response to a general request, some self-selection was undoubtedly involved. A relatively larger number of people joined from the entire audience at the quiz, than from the listeners to the radio programme or from readers of the advertisement in the newspaper. The degree and nature of the bias is difficult to establish. Whatever the bias may be, the method used is appropriate because my primary objective was to gather qualitative material and not necessarily to arrive at a representative view. The request that the respondents fill in and return a questionnaire may have been a hurdle. The bias from this hurdle was not too great, judging from the number of non-respondents. It was clear that pop music played an important role in the lives of the respondents now, and that they had pleasant and vivid memories of the times and the music. This does not imply, however, that the participants were also more closely involved with pop music then in comparison to others, or that the music they liked or the way they experienced it was in any way biased. In fact, the sample appeared to be a mix of people from backgrounds that differed on these points. My two-step procedure of selecting respondents has an important advantage. By comparing what people wrote down on the forms to what they said during interviews, I could get some idea of the extent to which participants conformed to (emerging) group norms. Conforming to social group norms was minimal.

NOTES 1. 2.

This is not the only form that the mutual interaction between the survey and the group interviews took. For a discussion on the relation between the method of the survey and that of group interviews, see Morgan (1988, pp. 33–6). To indicate the commitment of participants, travel expenses to a conveniently located restaurant or cafe was offered, but only one participant accepted. Drinks during the interview were on my account, except for the interview in Nijmegen which took place in one of the participants’ home. He provided drinks and snacks; I gave a present as a gesture of gratitude. Some of the participants in the other three interviews even asked what they should contribute to the expense.

Table A5.2

Group interviews

Date Location 117

Participants (no.) Male First names

From: newspaper radio pop quiz

Delft

Rotterdam

Nijmegen

Amsterdam

27 Jan. 1997 evening ‘Grand café’

5 Feb. 1997 evening ‘Grand café’/ restaurant 6 (of 6) 4 Meertem, Hans, Emmy, Charlie, Joshua, Cathy 4 2 –

11 Feb. 1997 evening One participant’s home (Ilja) 4 (of 4) 4 Clemens, Ilja, Joop, Olav

20 Feb 1997 afternoon ‘Artistic’ café

6 (of 6) 4 Peter, Kees, Mary, Gerrit, Jimmy, Jeanette 2 2 2

– 4 –

3 (of 5) 3 Karel, Jon, Wil

3 – –

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APPENDIX 5.2 SURVEY ‘LISTENING TO POP MUSIC ON THE RADIO IN THE 1950s AND EARLY 1960s’ Wilfred Dolfsma (Affiliation, address; including telephone number, fax number and email) Thank you for your willingness to cooperate in this research. I would like to ask you to answer some questions with regard to the radio programmes you listened to in the late 1950s and early 1960s that played rock and pop music. I would like you to be as elaborate as possible in answering – use the back of the page if necessary – and send the form to us in the enclosed envelope. No postage is necessary. Personal interviews will be conducted with a selected number of respondents subsequent to the written survey. If you are willing to participate at this stage as well, please indicate this in answering the last question. If you do not wish to participate in a personal interview, or if you want to remain anonymous, you may skip question number 1. 1. Name: Address: Telephone number: 2. Sex: 3. Year of birth: 4. How would you describe your social background at that time? 5. What was your taste in music in the late 1950s and early 1960? Please provide genres or artists 6. What is your taste in music now? Please provide genres and/or artists 7. Which radio programmes did you listen to, how often, and in which periods 8. How did you know about these programmes? 9. With whom did you listen to these programmes? 10. Did you talk to others about these programmes? If so, to whom? 11. How did others in your direct surroundings react to your listening to those programmes on the radio? 12. Did you buy records? If so, what kind [EP, LP, single] and how often? 13. Did you buy music magazines? If so, which ones, and how often? If not, why not? Did you read them? 14. If you bought or read music magazines, why did you do so? 15. Would you be willing to have a personal conversation with us on this subject? Yes/No Thank you very much for your cooperation!

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APPENDIX 5.3 SCHEDULE OF RADIO PROGRAMMES CENTRING ON POP MUSIC, 1965 ‘A Handful of Hits Each Day’ Sunday 12.30–14.00 13.00–14.00 14.00–14.30 16.00–18.00 17.00–17.30 17.45–18.45 18.30–19.00 19.00–19.30 22.30–24.00 23.00–24.00

Veronica Luxembourg Veronica BBC Light VARA BRT 2 AFN Luxembourg Veronica Luxembourg

Showtime Tiener Topper Tijd Teenbeatclub Fabulous Forty Discobal (every fortnight) Toppers voor Tieners Golden Records Gallery Jukebox Show (Decca) Alle Remmen Los Engelse Top 20

Monday 16.00–17.45 19.00–20.00 21.30–22.00 22.00–23.00 22.30–24.00

Veronica Veronica AFN Luxembourg Veronica

Hits uit Zee Never Mind en Cliff Richard Show American Music Hall (pop) Top Pops & Hitparade (Decca) Alle Remmen Los

Tuesday 13.30–14.30 17.35–18.00 19.15–20.00 21.30– 22.30 22.30–23.00 23.00–1.00

Veronica AVRO Veronica Luxembourg Luxembourg Veronica

Verleden Tijd Tussen 10+ en 20– Joost mag het Weten EMI shows (Sam Costa, Jimmy Young) 10 & 20 Disc Club (Decca) Alle Remmen Los

Wednesday 15.35–16.00 17.00–18.00 17.15–18.00 19.00–20.00 21.30–22.00 22.00–22.30 22.30–23.00 22.30–24.00

BRT 1 Veronica BRT 1 Veronica AFN Luxembourg Luxembourg Veronica

Met Naald en Plaat voor u Paraat Teenagermuziekexpres Voor de Tieners Amerikaanse Hitparade (Joost) American Music Hall (C&W) 10 & 20 Disc Club (Decca) Record Show (Decca) Alle Remmen Los

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Thursday 16.30–17.00 17.00–17.50 17.15–17.50 19.00–20.00 21.30–22.30

BBC Light Veronica NCRV Veronica Luxembourg

Playtime Beatleshow Op Tienertoeren Seven o’Clock EMI-show (Top Pops, New Gear, Record Roulette)

Friday 17.30–18.00 17.30–19.00 19.15–20.00 19.30–20.00 20.30–21.20

Veronica KRO Veronica KRO Luxembourg

21.00–21.45 23.30–1.00

VARA Veronica

Teenbeatclub Coda (every fortnight) Joost mag het Weten Vliegende Schijven Decca Show (Peter Murray, Alan Freeman) Zorro (every month) Alle Remmen Los

Saturday 6.05–6.55 12.00–12.30 12.00–14.15 13.00–14.00 14.00–16.00 17.30–18.00 18.20–19.10 19.00–20.00 22.30–23.30 24.00–0.30

AFN BRT 2 Caroline Veronica Veronica Veronica VARA Veronica Veronica Luxembourg

Country & Western Hitparade Tussen 20 en 40 Caroline Top 50 Teenagermuziekexpres Nederlandse Top 40 (Joost) Teenbeatclub Tijd voor Teenagers Engelse Top 20 (Joost) Voetjes van de Vloer Girls, Gals and Groups (Decca)

Source:

Teenbeat, nor. 5, July 1965.

6. The social construction of value As David Hamilton (1987, p. 1531) succinctly observes, noting the centrality to economics of value theory yet the almost complete absence from discussion of that theory: ‘All economic theories of value have consumption implications . . . [b]ut these are often only implicit, rather than explicit, and hence obscured’. In a text critically discussing the contributions that the Austrian economist Shackle has made in light of Adam Smith’s and Alfred Marshall’s work, Loasby (1996, p. 20) succinctly and perceptively relates discussions in economics of ‘value’, ‘knowledge’ (or learning), and ‘conventions’ (or institutions) in the following quote: ‘the incompleteness and dispersion of knowledge is a constant source of opportunities for creating new knowledge and for entrepreneurship, thus contributing to the complex dynamics of economic evolution.’ The discussion thus far has covered many issues, further developing a social value theory in the process. I now discuss how such a theory relates to other theories of value in economics. Contributions to a social value theory by others will be reviewed as well. Since scholars in economics who have contributed to a social theory of value are few and far between, and since discussions of value generally have not stirred the science of economics recently, the remainder of the text will rely to some extent on the curiosity of the reader for the history of economic thought. Still, this discussion is of interest to understand the context of the discussion as well as the methodological and theoretical objections that may be raised as an economist against an argument for perceiving of value as socially constructed. Value theory is central to economics. Economics is, one might observe, about explaining why some object or situation is worth striving for, why something is preferred instead of many other things. Few economists would deny the centrality of value theory for economics. Some economists have indeed denied value theory a place in economics, but by doing so they ‘close off the option of any specific economic theory’ (Mirowski 1990, p. 702). It should therefore not come as a surprise that, whenever an important change in economic theory has taken place, value theory has always been the first and most important aspect of economic theory to be questioned and subsequently to be replaced. Especially in the early days of economics as a science the concept of value was first among the topics considered (see, for instance, the 121

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textbook by Ekelund and Hébert 1983). Several ways of explaining value have been proposed, chief among which are the labour theory of value and the marginal utility theory of value. The first was found to be lacking and was replaced by the latter. This occurred at the end of the 19th century (the year of 1871 is often said to be a watershed) by economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger. The latter theory, however, also fails to provide an adequate explanation of the way in which value comes about, as Robert Heilbroner (1988) convincingly argues. Economics is left with a ‘Problem of Value’. What is missing is the interaction between people, or the sociological aspect. Certainly when one studies a phenomenon of substantial societal and economic import such as the advent of pop music, this becomes almost selfevident to everybody except the most ardent neoclassical economists. It is not a subject that economists can steer clear of. The development of value theory in the history of economic thought can be seen in the light of John Locke’s (1691b [1991]) framework of qualities, as presented in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (cf. McDowell 1985). As for any classification, there may be scholars who present difficulties for the scheme because it is hard to classify. I will not dwell on this point too long, however, since this is not the main thrust of the chapter. Until the Marginalist revolution in the 1870s, the value of an object was, broadly speaking, supposed to inhere in objects. The value at which something was exchanged was thought to be independent of the people who needed or wanted the particular object. Either God had given an object value, or human labour (and perhaps capital) had given it its worth. The Marginalists made a radical break with this way of thinking. Their idea was that it is human preferences that give an object its value. In line with modernist thinking, human wants are believed to be formed in isolation from other people. Economic man is autonomous and independent, and he can decide for himself what he likes. That there are problems with this Marginalist, value-as-secondary-quality approach is reflected in the fact that value theory is hardly ever debated in present-day economics. When you consult an economic dictionary (where the state of the art in economics is introduced to the layman), you will find that value is simply equated to price. When the Marginalist perception of how value is constituted is still unsatisfactory – that is, when neither the primary, nor the secondary qualities of Locke suffice – how then to explain its current appeal to many, if not most, economists? How to explain why some attempts in the history of economic thought to think of value as a tertiary quality – such as those of B.M. Anderson (1911 [1996]) and J.B. Clark (1886 [1967]) – failed? There are other ways in which the many different value theories have been classified. Although I owe many insights to Robert Heilbroner (1988), I do not want to adopt his system of classification. Both Heilbroner and I, however, end up arguing for an economic theory of value that is historical and makes due

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allowance for the institutions in society. Amariglio’s project, in particular in his (1988) paper, was to analyse the development of economic theories of value from the perspective of the French philosopher Michel Foucault and classify accordingly. Not only do I choose not to pay much attention to these other classifications, the reader will also find that I have not gone into the many intricacies of the different value theories themselves.

6.1 JOHN LOCKE ON PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES According to Locke, primary qualities inhere in an object. Primary qualities are ‘utterly inseparable from the body [of an object], in what state soever it be . . . and the mind finds [them] inseparable from every particle of matter’ (1691b [1991], p. 58). Locke thinks of solidity, extension, figure and mobility when talking about primary qualities; every physical object of a specific matter, in however small or large a particle, has these properties. The properties cannot be separated from the object. Anybody is able to observe the qualities correctly. People are not deluded. Secondary qualities, however, are ‘produced in us’ (ibid., p. 63) by the primary qualities. We ourselves ascribe certain qualities to objects on the basis of the primary qualities these objects have. We, fallible human beings, ascribe such qualities as colour, sounds, tastes and the like to certain objects, but ‘there is no discoverable connexion between any secondary quality and those primary qualities that it depends on’ (ibid., p. 283). McDowell (1985, p. 111) has eloquently characterized secondary qualities as understood by John Locke: a secondary quality is a property the ascription of which to an object is not adequately understood except as true, if it is true, in virtue of the object’s disposition to present a certain sort of perceptual appearance: specifically an appearance characterizable by using a word for the property itself to say how the object perceptually appears.

Secondary qualities can be delusive, while knowledge of the primary qualities is of the certain type. The famous example given by Locke is the pole that, before it is placed in water, seems straight, whereas it later appears to have a kink. People are or may be deluded by these appearances. The distinction I propose here between secondary and ‘tertiary’ qualities is related to or informed by the way in which economists perceive preferences. Most – neoclassical – economists take preferences as given, unchanging and the same for all economic men (cf. Stigler and Becker 1977). I propose that if preferences are perceived as continuously changing, ambiguous, and dissimilar

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for individuals because of the complex and uncertain social environment they are in, we should talk of value as a tertiary quality. In principle, there is no reason for Locke’s secondary qualities to be seen in the same way as a neoclassical economist would look at preferences: perception, like valuation, need not be thought of by Lockeans as given and unchanging. In fact, the formation of habits does influence an individual’s perception (Locke 1691b [1991], p. 68). Locke’s position is similar to the position taken by many mainstream economists (cf. Lucas 1987): learning does influence perception or valuation, but when people have matured – and we only talk of mature human beings – they will not change any more. Nowhere in his Essay does Locke hint at the possibility that the perception of the qualities of an object by mature men might be socially formed. I would think that such a view is incompatible with Locke’s philosophical position. Suggesting that what we see, feel, or in any other way sense, depends on our social environment and upbringing, does not accord with Locke’s perspective. The senses of humans are all the same, are unchanging, and they are given, once people have grown up. Powers in objects, based on their primary qualities, are the explanation for the different sensations in different states of the world (see the example of the pole) which people get from being in contact (seeing, feeling, and so on) with particular objects.

6.2 VALUE AS A PRIMARY QUALITY The quest to found value on, for instance, the amount of labour (production factors) incorporated in an object can now be viewed as an attempt to treat the value of an object as a primary quality. Value inheres in the object because God or man has instilled it. The value of an object is (like) a primary quality that under no circumstances parts from it. I will concentrate on the best-known economic theory that conceives of value as if it were a primary quality: the labour theory of value.1 The labour theory of value can be seen as one way of trying to find an objective basis on which the conception of value could rest. Labour was seen as the only production factor that could add to the value of something, and thereby to the wealth of nations. Smith is the best-known protagonist of this view. A famous and often quoted statement by Smith (1776 [1981], I, vi, p. 1) captures the main thrust of his argument: In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstances which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a


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deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer. It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days’ or two hours’ labour, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day’s or one hour’s labour.

Clearly, Smith’s theory of what constitutes value is related to Locke’s views as expressed in his Second Treatise (1690 [1980]) and his Essay (1691b [1991]). When Smith says ‘the property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable’, his views on property are the same as Locke’s. ‘Whatever then [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’ (Locke 1690 [1980], p. 19, emphasis in original). Locke continues on the same page to say that: ‘it is the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property; without which the common is of no use’. If there is one thing on which Smith and Locke seem to agree, it is that only labour gives something its value: ‘for it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing’ (Locke 1690 [1980], p. 25, emphasis in original).2 Smith (1776 [1981], I, iv, p. 13) distinguishes between value in use and value in exchange, setting the example for later economists. Only (value in) exchange is considered a worthy subject of analysis. This is an important distinction in economics, but I will not have anything more to say about it here. I will only refer to Heilbroner (1988, p. 114) to say that the term ‘use value’ may be very deluding. Heilbroner discusses three problems with the labour theory of value. Of two of these problems he says that they are minor objections, while the last one is fundamental. Smith’s argument is intuitively appealing, but fails in its logic. In his writings, and in the extensive statement quoted earlier, Smith assumes that people show maximizing behaviour. Whenever people do not show such behaviour and society does not operate in an efficient manner, his argument breaks down. Furthermore, disutility of labour is assumed. People do not take pleasure or pride in their work; work does not give pleasure in and of itself. More importantly, however, ‘the nature of labor itself and the manner in which it can endow an object with properties’ is not clear. How does labour impart a ‘substance’ to commodities, and how does one measure this? There is a conceptual problem here, Heilbroner argues. The problem hinges on the question of how to compare the value of qualitatively different types of labour, how to add up apples and pears. The only way out of this problem may be to add up the wages of the different types of labour. Wages (as much as rents and interest) are, however, values or prices themselves, and so the argument becomes a circular one. Smith seems to be ambiguous himself about how to

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perceive value. Frank (1937) accuses Smith of not being clear as to what labour does or is: does it cause value to arise, or is it a measure of value? Ricardo has criticized Smith in a similar way. Marx’s theory of value was not a labour theory of value to be compared with those of Smith and Ricardo. Heilbroner (1988, p. 120) says that it is often mistakenly believed to be so. Marx’s main argument concerning the constitution of value is that whenever labour creates commodities for the purpose of exchanging them with others, it makes labour an abstract activity. Because the commodities are exchanged, the socially necessary labour expended for their production is compared to the labour expended for the production of other goods. For Marx, abstract, not concrete, labour is the substance that gives value to objects (Heilbroner 1988, pp. 124–5). How exactly does abstract labour do this? And what differentiates abstract from concrete labour? According Heilbroner the questions that both the labour theory of value in the vein of Smith, and the Marxian approach face are not answered. To this day they have not been answered in a convincing way – probably they cannot be answered. Therefore, the advent of Marginalist economics seems ‘natural’ in a way.

6.3 VALUE AS A SECONDARY QUALITY Marginalists argue that people derive utility (pleasure and pain) from the consumption of an object. According to their argument, it is the utility derived from consuming the marginal item that determines the value of the objects exchanged. Value thus depends on the impact objects make on the people exchanging them (in the market presumably). What the value of an object turns out to be thus depends on the individual who is confronted with it. The individual ascribes value to an object because he has certain wants or preferences. The object has certain primary qualities, for sure, but there is no unambiguous relation between these and the value ascribed to the object. Potatoes satisfy a human being’s wants in terms of nutrition, but so would other foodstuffs; the relation between potatoes and their value for a person is not ‘adequately understood’. The idea in this line of reasoning is, however, that objects have a certain disposition to present an appearance, for example the appearance of satisfying certain human wants (for instance, hunger). Being dissatisfied with the objectivist account of value, the marginalists looked for a different approach. Menger, Jevons, Böhm-Bawerk and also Von Mises were leading figures. Their methodological point of departure is the individual. Whenever the consumption (defined in a broad sense) of something gives psychological utility to a person, the particular object (broadly defined) is said to be valuable to the person. Verspaaij (1929) is, for instance,


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very outspoken about this. To him economic value is always subjective (ibid., p. 6) and the term should only be used when explicitly referring to concrete, subjective, individual utility (ibid., p. 15). The argument runs something like this: people have a fixed, consistent, transitive order of preferences that is known by themselves. By consuming goods (defined broadly) they get a ‘shot’ of utility. People try, given the constraints they face (primarily their budget constraint), to maximize the utility they will draw from consumption.3 For any good that is exchanged there is a continuum of people who would like to have the good with differing intensity. The people who want to part with the good are similarly distributed with regard to the eagerness with which they are willing to exchange the good. These two sides of the picture are depicted by the well-known supply and demand curves. The market is in equilibrium at the point where the two curves intersect. When there are no changes in the relevant circumstances, the equilibrium will remain like this because everybody has all the relevant information. Modern, mainstream, neoclassical economics adopts a similar position with some minor alterations. These alterations or modifications have been introduced to make the presuppositions eligible for mathematico-analytical work. Debreu (1953 [1973]) and Parchure (1989), for example, approach the theory of value from this perspective. The people who figure in this theory are like Leibniz’s monads; they have no relations with each other, their behaviour is not influenced by what others do or want. In this view, it is hard to see how the system will come to a resting point, to an equilibrium. If nothing is known ‘but their utility maps and their maximizing propensity’ (Heilbroner 1988, p. 127), how can a situation of general equilibrium be specified? Given the objective of neoclassical economics to specify the conditions for equilibria, this objection, if valid, would be a serious blow. Secondly, the motivation of people in neoclassical economic theory is often said not to be realistic, leaving all kinds of relevant behaviour out of scope. Producers are also motivated by mere profits and not by what these allow them to do (Heilbroner 1988, p. 129),4 moral aspects play a role in the decision-making of people (Hirschman 1977, 1988; Etzioni 1988), and emotions further complicate matters (Frank 1988). Conceiving of value as a primary or as a secondary quality does not explain how it is constructed in social contexts.5

6.4 VALUE AS A TERTIARY QUALITY Theories of value of the secondary and tertiary qualities kind take an individual’s preferences as a point of departure. As explained earlier in the text, preferences are not perceived in the same way. There are at least three ways in which the individual’s preferences have been seen as influenced or determined

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by his social environment. The first and the second are by John Bates Clark and Benjamin Andersen. In recent times Philip Mirowski has worked on what could be seen as a social value theory.6 Around the turn of the last but one century and just after, some then influential scholars argued for value as a social construct. J.B. Clark (1886 [1967]) and B.M. Anderson (1911 [1966]) need to be mentioned here. With reference to the kind of value theory he proposes, Anderson himself says that in it ‘values are tertiary qualities’ (Anderson 1911, p. 96). These two authors are proponents of a larger group of scholars who argued for a different kind of economic theory of value. By arguing for a theory of value so different from the more generally accepted ones, they argue for a different economic theory. Clark and Anderson take positions that differ from each other in important respects, however. By briefly recounting their arguments, the question that is raised in the next paragraph (‘Why did a social value theory not take root then and why might it now?’) may be more fruitfully addressed. ‘A man is not independent. So close is the relation between him and others of his race [sic] that his conduct is dictated and his nature transformed by it’ (Clark 1886 [1967], p. 37). A belief in social determinism, conjoined with the strongly felt influence of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism at that time in academia, led Clark to this view. Thus, Clark in his Philosophy of Wealth (1886) sees society as a ‘social organism’, or as a ‘social body’. In this perspective it seems a logical step to the view that ‘it is society, not the individual, that makes the estimate of utility which constitutes a social or market valuation’ (ibid., p. 83). ‘Value is a quantitative measure of utility’ adds Clark (1886, p. 74). Value-in-exchange is thus the measure of utility that is estimated by society. Society as a whole seems to be making a cost-benefit analysis to determine what will yield the highest utility. Society is studied in an analogous way as individual man. Clark now faces the famous dichotomy in economic theory between value-in-exchange and value-in-use. ‘A measure of utility made by an individual gives value in use’ (ibid., p. 81). Given Clark’s social determinism, however, it would seem that value-in-use is identical to value-inexchange; man’s behaviour is dictated by his relations to other people of his social group (his ‘race’). Anderson argues for a social value, but does not consider the social utility idea that J.B. Clark proposed to be useful (Anderson 1911 [1966], p. 9). According to Anderson, the relation between the individual and the group is more complex than Clark and others suggest. Only when all men are ‘normal’, have equal wealth (and are undifferentiated on any other basis in power), is the marginal utility of a product to an individual equal to its (social) value (ibid., p. 31). On the same page Anderson seems to imply that such circumstances


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will not occur: ‘marginal utility to an individual is not the same as value’. The marginal utility of a product to society is a useless, because too general, concept (ibid., p. 32). Because price refers to a social level of enquiry, and marginal utility to the individual level, the latter does not determine the former. Marginal utility only ‘has something to do’ with price (ibid., p. 33). Value emanates from the human mind, Anderson (1911, p. 45) argues in line with the Classical economists, but the human mind has a ‘vital and organic union with the social milieu’. ‘The individual is [not] an isolated monad’ (ibid., p. 64). Human volition needs to be studied (ibid., p. 198), but individual motives alone do not suffice to explain economic value (ibid., p. 199). ‘Ends, aims, purposes, desires of many men, mutually interacting and mutually determining each other, take tangible, determinate shape, as economic values’ (ibid., p. 199). Contrary to Clark’s views, therefore, Anderson’s argument hinges to a large degree on psychological notions. Social psychology is what we would nowadays call his approach, I would say. Anderson’s work is suggestive, though incomplete as a theory of value. Mirowski (1990, pp. 705–06), therefore, states that Anderson had great difficulty specifying what ‘value’ is and how it is constituted. ‘Value, as everyone knows, is about prices; but it is also about much more than prices. It analyzes fundamental beliefs concerning why seemingly diverse objects and human endeavors are comparable; and even more outlandishly, how such comparisons can be reduced to a single common denominator of number’ (Mirowski 1990, p. 695, emphasis in original). Mirowski argues that a study of the institutions that bring such valuations about is needed; ‘to trace precisely how these curious conventions come about, and how they are enforced’ (ibid., p. 696). Institutions conserve the value of commodities in a market system; institutions make the environment stable and invariant to some degree. Social value theory, according to Mirowski, needs to allow for mathematics; the socially constructed attributes of commodities are to be amenable to mathematical (ibid., p. 709) or logical treatment (1991).7 Thus, the mathematics of value theory is socially embedded. Next, what is purportedly needed is a ‘transpersonal index of gain and loss’ (Mirowski 1990, p. 711). Money serves this purpose, according to Mirowski. Therefore, his (1990, p. 712) conclusion is that ‘in a social theory of value money is the embodiment of value; but precisely because it is socially instituted, its invariance cannot be predicated on any “natural” grounds, and must continually be shored up and reconstituted by further social institutions’. The institutions of the market, including the institution of money, are lasting but in no way permanent, inevitable, or determinate, Mirowski observes (1991, p. 578). When he means by this, first, that the realm of the market economy is not fixed, but can expand, contract and

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change in nature, and, secondly, that money is not necessarily the only way in which value is expressed, I agree. An obvious example is the way in which children are valued. Zelizer (1985) showed that in the Western world not too long ago, children were often valued in terms of money. In present times most people would find the mere thought of cost–benefit analyses when it comes to children abhorrent. Other examples of items that one could buy and sell in different times and places but that are or may be ‘beyond the measure of money’ presently – and vice versa – abound.

6.5 WHY DID A SOCIAL VALUE THEORY NOT TAKE ROOT THEN, AND WHY MIGHT IT NOW? The sense in which social value theory is taken here is not the same sense as it is taken by, for instance, Marc Tool. In his Essays in Social Value Theory, Tool (1986) takes a meticulous look at the most influential economic theories of today, to see whether they are normative in any way. That is, he looks at whether or not economic theories prescribe what should be done on the basis of some ideal type of society. Tool argues that economic theory cannot be neutral in this sense, and should not purport to be neutral. Economic theory, according to Tool (1986, p. 50), should try to effect ‘the continuity of human life and the non-invidious re-creation of community through the instrumental use of knowledge’. Ridley (1983) has made a similar point about the normative sides to the avowedly neutral mainstream of economic theory. Why did social value theory, which had some influence around and after the turn of the last century, dwindle away, and why does it seem to be a stronger and more lasting theory now? Part of the answer is, of course, related to the matter of what time-frame is used. At the time of Clark’s and Anderson’s writings, social value theory seemed strong and lasting, too. Appearances may deceive here, but I will nevertheless attempt to provide an explanation. The three reasons I offer in this section will probably not exhaustively explain the phenomena I am interested in (see also Hodgson 1998). American institutionalists, such as Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons,8 have been the most prominent economists to try to elaborate the idea that (e)valuation is not individual but social. Their research programme did not take root for several reasons. First, institutional economics at that time was associated with Social Darwinism.9 J.B. Clark seems responsible for this, of course, since Veblen for instance turned Social Darwinism on its head, according to Mirowski (1990, pp. 703–05). For several reasons, both political and theoretical, Social Darwinism was evicted from the intellectual or theoretical stage after a short period of time. Social Darwinism was able to justify circumstances


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of blatant exploitation; it was, more generally, a defence of the status quo. Furthermore, how could social entities for example have preferences? Joseph Schumpeter (1951, p. 3) has put it thus: ‘society as such, having no brains or nerves in a physical sense, cannot feel wants and has not, therefore, utility curves like those of individuals’. With the bathwater of Social Darwinism, however, the baby (social value theory) was thrown away as well. ‘Binarythinking’ has long plagued economic theories of value. If the social environment does not strictly determine the individual’s preferences such that we can talk of a ‘social organism’, the argument seems to have gone, individuals must be completely autonomous and free of influence from their social environment. There are, of course, positions between these two extremes. Taking any one of these positions would imply a social value theory along the lines set out previously in this book. A second important reason for the submergence of institutional economics was the idea that it was thought to be a-rational or even anti-theoretical, taking an active political stance and strongly advocating the method of case studies. All of this, it must be added, at a time when theory and science were only thus called when they tried to mirror the natural sciences. A mechanical metaphor has informed economic thinking during most of the time that has elapsed since the turn of the last century. In the natural sciences, mathematics is extensively used on ‘objective facts’. Norms or political considerations do not enter here, so it was thought.10 Mirowski (1990, p. 706) says that ‘the institutional program ran aground on the reef of relativism’. Perceiving of value as socially constructed was seen as far too relativistic. In any case, an institutional or social economics went against the predominant current in the economics of the 20th century. Colander (1996) observes that the neoclassical framework provides people with the simple structure to organize principles in their mind. ‘The lure of neoclassical economics is the same lure that religion offers – a relatively simple way of organizing one’s understanding of an otherwise almost hopeless chaos’ (Colander 1996). Yet, the structure allowed for complicated mathematics as well, making it attractive to intelligent students too. A related practical reason is that the large influx of students at institutes of higher education made neoclassical economics more attractive. Neoclassical economics can produce clear-cut answers that fit into a multiple choice format. When quantum mechanics was discussed in physics in the 1920s and 1930s the mechanical metaphor should have lost much of its attractiveness to economists, one would tend to think. The contrary happened, however. After the Second World War this metaphor began to assert an even stronger influence than it had earlier. It remained the most important – if not the only – worldview in many of the social sciences and certainly so in economics. Mirowski has made this point in many publications (for example, 1989). The combination of,

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among others, the fact that knowledge of quantum mechanics eventually trickled down to economists and Mirowski’s project, made the mechanistic metaphor much less attractive. Other approaches to economics were considered to be feasible again. Evidence of this may be the current interest in institutional and evolutionary theory in economics. Not only did the predominant example for the sciences – the natural sciences – preclude a social value theory in economics, the methodological canons were not favourable to its advent and acceptance either. Truth is what science is or should be after, and this is done by observing ‘facts’ and thus discovering the underlying structures that can be found in ‘reality’. Such a naive logical-positivist position will not find many defenders nowadays in economic methodology, although it may find a large but decreasing number of defenders in economics. Arguments and findings that philosophers make in methodological discussions trickle down slowly. Facts are never simply ‘there’ to be observed by the impartial scientist, they are constructed by scientists in a social environment. Furthermore, people and scientists are not only persuaded by logical arguments; sociological and rhetorical dimensions need to be added to the study of economists and scientists alike. Facts need to be interpreted, and interpretation implies that relations with other aspects of reality or the (social) environment have to be taken into account. At this point the area of epistemology is entered. Perceiving an individual as interpreting his environment implies taking an epistemological position that departs from the favoured one in economics, especially when the relations individuals interpret cannot always be articulated, when they partly remain tacit. The epistemological position this implies is in line with the one advocated by Michael Polanyi in his Tacit Dimension (1966). Again, Mirowski (1995) has pointed out how differing views on epistemological matters lead to different economic theories or views on the economy (cf. Dolfsma 2001a). Mirowski does so by comparing how two eminent economists – Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi – have over the years come to take differing epistemological positions. Their diverging epistemological positions have important implications for the economic theory they hold. Implicit in his account is, I believe, the idea that the two economists represent different schools in economics. Hayek represents a view that is closer to neoclassical economics, whereas Polanyi stands for an institutional or a hermeneutic approach to economics. The concept of ‘truth’ then becomes a more problematic one than it used to be. Thinking of ‘truth’ as coherence with the views held by the relevant peer group of experts, instead of as correspondence to the real world, seems an almost natural position to have. Whether or not one moves further towards a post-modern stance in saying that ‘truth’ does not matter, is not relevant in the context of this chapter. What is relevant is that the methodology of institutional


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or social economics can no longer be condemned out of hand. The ‘old’ American institutional economics finds much of its inspiration in the philosophical tradition of pragmatic thought (with philosophers like Charles Saunders Peirce and John Dewey being prominent figures), which is close to the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (see Mirowski 1987, 1991) and rhetorics (see Wilber and Harrison (1978), for example, who give ‘the methodological basis for institutional economics’). Pragmatism, hermeneutics, and rhetorics are alien to a logical-positivist approach.

6.6 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF VALUE11 The argument thus far suggests that there is something wrong with the conceptions of value that have featured prominently in economics. Value needs to be conceived as a social construct, a tertiary quality. This is apparent especially in the art world (see Klamer 1996). Value is constructed in a social environment. ‘[V]alue cannot be grounded in or deduced from the nature of the commodity itself: it cannot be collapsed to a problem of arbitrarily picking a numeraire’ (Mirowski 1991, p. 569, emphasis in original). That is the thesis that I submit in this chapter, following Mirowski and many others. Taking such a position implies rejecting the Lockean framework altogether, or adding a third quality to it. Alfred Marshall sets the stage for an economic theory that perceives of value as a secondary quality. Value is a relation says Marshall (1891 [1920]) on page 61 of his magnum opus; ‘[t]he term value is relative and expresses the relationship between two things at a particular place and time’. He rests his case at this point, just as it is becoming interesting. For: how is this relation established? Does the relation change? And if the relation can change, how does the relation change? Is the relationship strictly determined by the qualities of the objects; is value a relation of the primary quality sort? If not, do people create the relationship? If people create the relationships, how is this done? Davis (1995, but most notably 2003) argues that a social science should conceive of people as inseparable from their social environment. People’s resources, knowledge, and skills have no use or meaning without, and can therefore not be separated from, their relations to the social environment. People themselves have, over the years, made these relations. Often, however, it may turn out to be difficult or impossible to change them at will. A way in which such an analysis of social phenomena in terms of relations might become more familiar to economists, is to observe that relations within different cultures or social environments show many similarities. Hence, they can be called institutions in the sense in which Walter Neale (1987) characterizes them.12

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According to Dewey (1939, 1949), value is not something that is intrinsic to objects, or that people privately impose on objects. ‘All conduct that is not simply blindly impulsive or mechanically routine seems to involve valuation’ (Dewey 1939, p. 3). Valuing involves the selection or rejection of certain things (Dewey 1949, p. 66). Like many other acts or kinds of behaviour, what is selected or rejected depends on the social environment. A social environment ‘determines’ what people see and how they see it.13 Enter semiotics and hermeneutics. ‘In any valuation, the personal and the social are endlessly layered between acts of interpretation and signification’ (Mirowski 1990, p. 705). The human intellect thus creates the relations between men and the objects that are valued, partly based on the social environment it happens to be in. Only if the ‘relation’ in question is understood to be plural (since involving a variety of space–time connections of different things) not singular and it is also definitely observed that the relations in questions are across spaces, times, things, and persons, will ‘relational’ theory lead to any commonly agreed-upon conclusion. (Dewey 1949, p. 69)

Thus, ‘[v]aluing is not a special isolated type of act performed by a peculiar or unique agent, under conditions so unique that valuing and values can be understood in isolation’ (Dewey 1949, p. 68). For a social science to conceive of these relations, it seems that it needs to take the point of view that allows for categories or concepts that transcend the level of the individual. It further seems that it has to allow for people’s interpretation of their environment, which implies a specific epistemological position. As argued and elaborated at some length earlier, what Hodgson (1993a, 1998 and 1999) calls ‘old’ institutional economics meets these requirements.

6.7 CONCLUDING REMARKS Value theory is central to economics. Whenever new economic theories appear, their theory of value is different. I classify value theories along Locke’s lines of primary and secondary qualities. When value is thought to inhere in objects, value is a primary quality. The marginalists perceive value as given to objects by autonomous individuals independent of their environment (much like monads) with given preferences. Value here is a secondary quality. Both perceptions of value are unsatisfactory, and I argue for value as socially constructed, value as a tertiary quality. The question then arises why social value theory, that Clark and Anderson, amongst others, worked on around the turn of the 19th century, didn’t take root. What people value or prefer is not something they decide on in a vacuum. People are shaped and moulded by their environment. On the other hand, the


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social environment does not strictly determine people’s behaviour either. They can decide which group(s) of people they want to belong to, and can to some extent change the actions of these group(s). Sometimes the issue of whether man needs to be conceived of as either solely a social being (Homo Sociologicus) or a strictly individual being (Homo Economicus) is presented as if one should take one of these two extreme positions. Exploring the middle ground seems a more fruitful exercise. The Social Value Nexus allows for this, and I have positioned this value theory against the others in this chapter. Social institutions are important when looking at people’s behaviour. Their existence cannot be explained in terms of the actions of individuals – a methodological individualist approach is not warranted (cf. Hodgson 1999). As I argued in Chapter 4, institutions express socio-cultural values. These values can, however, be expressed in different ways, and often institutions change without the socio-cultural values changing in concord. At some point, however, tensions are likely to arise, inducing institutional changes. What I have argued here goes against Schumpeter’s (1909 [1951], p. 4, emphasis in original) dictum that ‘[f]or theory it is irrelevant why people demand certain goods’. Leaving out the why-question arbitrarily constrains the economist, and confines her to a rather narrow field of research. It also means having no adequate value theory. Introducing the why-question, however, implies entering a field of research that economists thus far have been able to disregard or steer clear of. Preferences are, of course, formed in a social context.

NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Amariglio (1988) points to sixteenth-century economists, like Bodin, Davanzatti, Gresham, Copernicus, Malestroit, who conceived of value as a primary quality, but did not subscribe to a labour theory of value. They claimed that (some) goods are intrinsically valuable not because God or labour give them value (Amariglio 1988, p. 589). In his later writings Locke takes a somewhat different position with regard to value theory. See for instance his ‘Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and the Raising of the Value of Money’ (1691a [1989]). I will not discuss developments in Locke’s thinking in more detail. Schumpeter (1951, p. 3) said that all economists need to know is what people want and how wealthy people are. Furthermore, for economic theory it is irrelevant why people demand certain goods (ibid., p. 4). For instance because profits give status to an entrepreneur as Frank (1985) argues. Now the realism versus instrumentalism debate is touched upon. What I argue for is an account of how value is constituted that is in line with ‘reality’. At a later point I will come back to this discussion. The term ‘social value theory’ communicates that value is socially constituted, and a theory is needed to explain how this can be perceived realistically. Another institutional economist, David Colander (1996), argues that a similar strategy

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Institutional economics and the formation of preferences should be adopted in other fields of economic research to combat ‘the orthodoxy’ as well. His case in point is distribution theory. According to Mirowski (1990) Anderson belongs to this school. In general it might be said that a social value theory is or would be closely related to institutional economics. Hayek, for instance, perceives this as an important ‘error’ of institutional economics, despite obvious similarities between his ideas and those of institutionalists (Leathers 1990). Other prominent economists were, however, equally enthusiastic about Social Darwinism, and associated eugenics with it. In addition, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes were convinced of the scientific value of the study of heredity (see Peter Groenewegen 1994, pp. 101–2). The deeply felt need to abstain from political considerations and norms in general even led economists to disregard factors like power, class conflict and cooperation altogether (Heilbroner 1988, p. 130). Social value theory appeared to be normative, and was thus not accepted as a feasible alternative to the mainstream of economics. The title alludes of course to the influential book in sociology (of knowledge) by Berger and Luckman (1966 [1991]). Neale (1987) argues, to repeat, that an institution can be said to exist whenever a group of people behaves in the same way in the same kind of circumstances, and similarly justifies or explains this behaviour. See, for example, Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Douglas and Wildavsky (1982), Douglas (1986) on the social influence on individual valuation. Dolfsma (2002a) proposes a view on individual behaviour that is, or at least may be, in accord with this.

7. Conclusion: forming preferences, valuing pop music When the music is over . . . Turn out the lights The Doors

The value of pop music is socially constructed, even though many of its fans and social scientists – economists in particular – believe pop’s value to be an entirely subjective matter. I have studied a particular period of time in which the valuation of music by people changed dramatically. As pop music became prominent, overtaking Big Band and Crooner music, consumption patterns, the music industry and society in generally were undergoing tectonic, structural changes. To explain the advent of pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Netherlands, as in other developed countries in the West, one needs to study its social context in terms of the institutional changes it instigated or even imposed. The interplay of consumers and producers of pop music – together constituting pop music’s system of provision – led to institutional changes. As it turns out, both providers of pop music such as people making radio programmes and music magazines, and consumers of pop music were equally surprised by the pace of the institutional changes that were taking place. Not only was the pace surprising, but people were in the dark about the direction in which the changes would take them. The period of the late 1950s and early 1960s was an exciting time for everybody involved with pop music. It was therefore a time full of uncertainty and ambiguities as well. Changes taking place in a particular period of time are not only exciting for people who are involved in them, but also pose a challenge to all those who aim to explain them. The latter motive has been at least equally important for this study as the goal of understanding why people consume symbolic goods such as pop music. As Colin Campbell (1994, p. 43) has expressed it: ‘the actual subjective meanings which prompt and guide action remain an indispensable ingredient in any successful theory of conduct and the only proper place in which to search for such meanings is in the conscious minds of acting individuals’. I will therefore start this concluding chapter by discussing the theoretical perspective I have adopted and elaborated upon in this study. 137

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7.1 INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIO-CULTURAL VALUES Theoretical arguments and empirical research presented here make clear that distinguishing between producers and consumers, although possible in principle, is problematic. Recent developments in consumption research, to which I refer in this study, have made this argument persuasively. What is more, if studied in isolation, the changes observed in relation to the advent of pop music cannot be made sense of. Here, I propose to analyse a context such as the system of provision of pop music in terms of institutions and institutional changes. An institutional economic approach brings together the theoretical and empirical considerations about the interdependence of consumption and production mentioned above. Both the emerging consumption institutions, and the newly emerging provision or production institutions such as that of the disc jockey (DJ) and the chart, take shape in a complex field where institutions are interrelated. I analyse the dynamics of institutional change in this field as a process in which one might see a clash of generally and deeply held convictions. What I call the Social Value Nexus suggests that institutions and institutional settings are rooted in deeply held convictions within a community, or what I call here socio-cultural values. When the relation between the two becomes tenuous, tensions arise, giving rise to institutional change. People’s behaviour, what they find important, follows. Pop music represents socio-cultural values that were in conflict with extant convictions people had. Institutional dynamics is a result of that clash, of the tensions that arose. The conceptual framework proposed and applied here links up with the existing literature in (economic) sociology, (social) psychology, and institutional economics. What has remained rather more implicit in the literature I have tried to make more explicit. Socio-cultural values are shown to be pivotal in understanding many phenomena of interest to economists, and most adamantly perhaps in understanding the rise of pop music. Theoretical and colloquial discussions of value and values are confused sometimes, partly because the two discourses intertwine. To clear up some of the confusion I introduce the Social Value Nexus framework, which distinguishes underlying socio-cultural values (or in short, VALUES) from the value that people attach to a particular thing or object (in short, value). Not all of the confusion will have vanished as if by magic, of course, and the model does constitute a specific approach that may not be applied in any straightforward way to explain other phenomena. Nevertheless, the framework seems to be applicable beyond the particular application in this study. The Social Value Nexus links socio-cultural values and values by interposing institutions and institutional settings (sets of interrelated and interdependent institutions). Such a perspective entails taking the middle ground between

Conclusion: forming preferences, valuing pop music

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overly individualistic position of the under-socialized agent on the one hand, and a perspective that focuses on social entities only with an over-socialized conception of the agent on the other (cf. Granovetter 1985). Institutions as defined here, rooted in socio-cultural values, do not of course strictly determine what people do. Socio-cultural values, I have argued, influence the direction and shape institutional changes take, but are influenced by them as well. Empirical studies, as well as studies of the history of ideas, suggest that the influence of socio-cultural values on institutions and the institutional setting is more pervasive than the influence operating in the other direction. One obvious reason is that (a set of) socio-cultural values may be expressed by a number of different institutional settings – tensions or mismatches between the two are thus more easily resolved by changing an institutional setting than they are by changing the socio-cultural values that are adhered to. This study presents and analyses a case where one could say that sociocultural values do seem to change more rapidly than the institutions do. Pop music, which represents to its fans socio-cultural values that were different from the VALUES ascribed to the other kinds of music that had been adhered to before, conquered the developed world in just a few years. The institutional changes that this forced or prompted in the system of provision of pop music were dramatic. A new and distinct audience for music emerged and people different from the incumbents started to gain influence in the music producing organizations. Partly this is a younger generation rebelling against older ones. But this is not the entire story.

7.2 THE ADVENT OF POP MUSIC One of the most persistent misconceptions is that young people, to distinguish themselves from the older generations, used pop music for instrumental reasons. It is insufficient and therefore incorrect to suggest that a conflict of generations would in and of itself explain the advent of pop music, as this study has shown on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Chapter 5, where I analyse a survey among and a series of group interviews with erstwhile consumers of pop music focusing on consumption institutions, shows that they indeed wanted to provoke their parents to respond. At the same time, however, and this is significant, pop music could not simply be replaced by any other general kind of music, or good. An argument that points to the conflict between generations could not explain why pop music played the role it played. One should acknowledge that pop music itself meant something important to its fans; it was the institutionalized means for them to allude to sociocultural values such as autonomy, success, sexuality, novelty, independence,

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and pleasure. These socio-cultural values had been increasingly associated with pop music, especially pop music in the English language from Britain or the United States. Exactly because of what pop music signified to its consumers, it also played an important role in making distinctions within generations and between groups that the generations argument assumes to be homogeneous. Those socio-cultural values associated with pop music came to be expressed in consumption institutions discussed in Chapter 5 as well as institutions on the providers’ side like the DJ and the chart (see Chapter 4). A related, generally held misperception that has largely remained implicit is that pop music was instantaneously recognized for the merits people attributed to it and was immediately embraced by them. It is suggested that large numbers of people immediately began to consume pop music, most importantly by listening to radio programmes and reading music magazines that paid more attention to pop music than others did. While the advent of pop music was sudden, even those who were most attracted by it or had most to gain from it did not immediately and unambiguously accept it. Most notably, the people involved with producing radio programmes were at pains to find ways to accommodate pop music to the existing ways of doing things, and to existing institutions. Consumers struggled to accommodate pop music as well. One might suspect that the public broadcasters would be bothered more by existing institutions than the pirate, for-profit broadcasters. The response of the forprofit music magazines to the advent of pop music was indeed much faster than that of radio – faster than public as well as private, pirate radio stations. Yet, even the magazines and pirate radio stations took a number of years to realize that if they mended their ways, they stood to benefit substantially. Public and private broadcasters did not respond immediately to the advent of pop music by adopting this kind of music wholeheartedly. The pirate stations did take the lead in adopting pop music, but only some years after it first appeared on the scene. In addition, there was no wholesale imitation of the institutions provided by the country where pop music originated: the United States of America. In addition to people’s possible reluctance to change existing routines and institutions, the search for new institutions by the organizations providing pop music was a protracted one because the socio-cultural values that the people who were directly responsible for the content of radio programmes or music magazines wanted to subscribe to conflicted with those of people managing such organizations. This held for public radio in particular, of course, but was not limited to these players. Indeed, the group that actually wanted to produce radio programmes and music magazines were ambiguous themselves with respect to which socio-cultural values to find expression for in the products they made, and how. Numerous attempts were made to reconcile these conflicting socio-cultural values by institutional innovations – for a long time to no avail.


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Consumers, too, did not flock to the radio station or music magazine that paid more attention to pop music than their competitors. People’s consumption institutions were more persistent than that. Ambiguity about, differences between, or conflict over the socio-cultural values consumers adhered to as an age group, a social group within a generation, or as an individual, existed as well. Even the younger people were confused by the rapidly changing situation they faced. It was a period of great ambiguity even for fans and consumers of pop music. Their search for suitable consumption institutions lasted longer than the two related myths about the advent of pop music allow for.

7.3 POP MUSIC, INSTITUTIONS, VALUES, AND ECONOMICS The theoretical approach chosen suggests a focused, interpretative kind of research. To understand why and how pop music came to dominate the music scene in a relatively short period of time, strongly affecting society in general, one needs to take a close look at what happened, how people behaved and for what reasons. Institutional economics, inclined to some extent to use the method of case studies as exemplified in this research, provides a theoretical framework that allows for analyses of developments both at a macro level as well as at the micro level. Given its conception of individual behaviour, it does not have the fundamental problem that neoclassical economics has of how to understand the relationship between the two levels of aggregation. Institutional economics is by no means devoid of theory, of course, although it does invite analysis with an eye for detail. But, as Buchanan (1987, p. 22) has observed: ‘Economists “should” concentrate their attention on a particular form of human activity, and upon the various institutional arrangements that arise as a result of this form of activity.’ In addition to the theoretical approach, the specific case of the advent of pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s necessitates in-depth research. Interviews, archives, and group interviews were important sources of material that had to by analysed in order to understand why and how a symbolic good such as pop music, which is constitutive of people’s personal identity, is provided and how it is consumed. One therefore needs to be able to detect and interpret the smallest of signals. This means that one has to be knowledgeable about the frame of reference used by people taking part in the research project – one needs to be versed in their language literally as well as by figure of speech. An important motivation for this study was to question the ‘standard’ approach in economics, particularly its conceptualization of human behaviour and its understanding of how the social and the individual interrelate. In tackling

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problems of consumption behaviour and the (dramatic) changes therein, glaring shortcomings of this mainstream, neoclassical approach became apparent. In order to explain why people consume something like pop music, why they value it, and why they have a preference for it, one has to examine the underlying socio-cultural values these people subscribe to, and – at least as important – how these have become the institutionalized way of expressing the socio-cultural values associated with pop music. In this study I have proposed a framework for explaining why people come to value something and why they came to value pop music. This entails looking at how the good is consumed as well as provided. Many instances of mutual influence between the way pop music is consumed and how it is provided emerge from this research. These have shaped the way the institutions of the provision of pop music have changed and how they have developed since. Making explicit in the Social Value Nexus what has largely remained implicit in the institutional and social economic literature so far is not without merit, and has substantial theoretical consequences. Institutional and social economics has not been explicit about the relation between institutions and values. This may be partly due to the confusion surrounding the term ‘value’. Distinguishing between socio-cultural values and values has hopefully provided some clarification. A theoretical contribution is the framework’s focus on sources of possible tensions, each giving rise to institutional change. At the same time, the Social Value Nexus also allows one to explain why there is an absence of institutional change. Explaining institutional sclerosis is as important as explaining institutional change. The framework allows one to explain why and when institutions change, and in what directions institutional changes are likely to occur. To wit, where a mismatch between the (set of) socio-cultural values that a particular group of people subscribes to and an institutional setting occurs, tensions arise that result in changes in either the socio-cultural values or in the institutions – although usually the institutional setting has to change. In effect, this book argues that changing preferences are something that need to be addressed by economists, drawing on perspectives they have been trained in, but not necessarily sticking to them. In addition, the book proposes a specific explanation of changes of preferences, understanding endogenous tastes. This is a break from the attitude generally seen in the mainstream of economics, which cautions one to assume preferences as given. Theoretically, this is a position that is not only unsatisfactory, but is also intellectually disappointing. In effect, it means that a scholar is not interested in addressing a problem, but allows himself to be restricted by the boundaries given by his discipline. For an academic, this seems disappointing (Dolfsma 2001b) – he is like the drunk looking under a lamp-post for the keys to his door, not because


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he is sure he has lost his keys there, but because it is where the light is. I take a pluralist perspective, bringing together insights from different disciplines in the social sciences, even though this may not be a parsimonious approach (cf. Hirschman 1988). The theoretical core of the research presented here is still, however, the economic body of thought, and in particular, as it can integrate insights from the other social sciences, that of institutional economics.

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Index Abrams, Mark, 20, 144 Ackerman, Frank 144 adolescents, social relations 47 Adornian puppets 30 Adorno, Theodor 11, 12, 19, 31, 94, 144 advertisements 31, 104 on television 73 Albert, Alexa 35, 144 Alberti, Willeke 107 Alchian, A. 34, 144 Allied Forces Network (AFN) 4, 69 Amariglio, J. 123, 135, 144 American music 104 soldiers, music for 4 American Institutionalist School 62 Anand, N. 59, 144 Anderson, Benjamin 128, 129, 134, 136, 144 Anderson, John E. 146 anthropologists 96 Aristotle, on purposes 51, 144 Arrow, Kenneth 62, 144 Aspromourgos, T. 144 audiences for radio 3, 4 authenticity 39, 106, 108 automatons 33–4 autonomy 58, 108, 139 AVRO radio programme 71, 77, 81–3, 87, 114 Ayres, Clarence 49 baby-talk 32 Baldwin, T.T. 54, 144 Ballantine, C. 94, 97, 144 banalization 31 Bandura, A. 33, 53, 54, 55, 144 Bardoel, Jo 73, 74, 90, 144 Baumol’s Disease 29 Bayesian perception of learning 24, 45 Beatles 18, 65, 89 Becker, Gary 19, 22–6, 95, 144–5, 155

Beckert, J. 35, 61, 145 behaviourist psychology 46 Bekkers, Wim 84, 145 Belgium 20, 41, 89 pirate radio 5 pop music 5 Berger, D.G. 153 Berger, P. 35, 62, 136, 145 Berland, J. 63, 87, 04, 145 Berry, Chuck 2 Bianchi, Marina 34, 145 Big Band Music 2, 20, 29, 30, 63, 110, 137 Billboard 59 Blackboard Jungle 2, 64, 67 black market 61 blood donating 38 blues, 110 Boland, L. 145 Boone, Pat 10, 67 Böröcz, J. 55, 60, 145 Bossink, Bert 88, 92 Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 36, 145 Bowen, W. 144 Brennan, Timothy, J. 28, 145 Brink, Jos 83, 91, 92 British Broadcasting Corporation 4, 72 British culture 62 broadcasting, radio corporations 6, 11, 84 Dutch 81 systems 50, 71, 90, 91 in Western Europe 5 Buchanan, James M. 141, 145 Burgelman, Jean-Claude 15, 63, 90, 145 Burnett, R. 66, 70, 94, 145 Bush, P. 34, 48, 49, 52, 56, 57, 62, 145 cabaret 3 cable radio 22 television 17 157

158


Callahan, Charlene 113, 145 Campbell, Colin 27, 36, 42, 56, 111, 137, 145 Capitol 75 Carvalho, Hester 148 Catholic Radio Organization (KRO) 5, 6 Caves, R.E. 145 CD albums 7 censorship 68 chansons, French 110 Chapman, R. 65, 68–9, 74, 78, 87, 90, 94, 112, 146 charts 10, 58, 85, 99, 105, 111, 138 Christian broadcasters 77 see also Catholic Radio Organization churches’ congregations 6 Clark, John Bates 122, 129, 130, 134, 144 closed systems 45–7 CNR record company 75 Coase, Ronald H. 42, 44, 90, 146 Colander, David 54, 131, 136, 146 Coleman, James S. 146 Colonna, Carl M. 22, 146 commercial broadcasting 73, 87 influence 58, 79 success 34 commodities 126, 129 Commons, John R. 49, 130 competition 105 concerts 8, 95 consumer price index (CPI) 19 consumers 11, 36–61, 103, 115 consumption of pop music 7, 37–9, 47, 108–10, 138 behaviour of girls 102 patterns 2, 15, 37, 95, 137 copyrights 7, 8, 14 Cosgel, Metin M. 94, 146 Country and Western 10, 59, 88, 110 Cowen, Tyler 28, 146 Crane, Diana 11, 34, 146 crooner music 2, 29, 30, 63, 137 Crosby, Bing 2 cultural values 30–32, 38, 48, 69, 88 culture, high and low 10–12 customs and habits 53

dance music 3 Dannreuther, C. 147 David, Paul 62, 146 Davis, John B. 24, 28, 34, 48, 61, 133, 146 de Kloet, Co 76, 79, 86, 90, 92 DeBoer, Larry 29, 39, 146 Denisoff, R.S. 113, 146 Denmark, pirate radio 5 Denzau, A.T. 44, 45, 146 Dewey, John 49, 133, 134, 146 diffusion theory 111–12 DiMaggio, Paul 27, 52, 146 disc jockeys 50, 58, 59, 67, 72, 99, 111, 137 Dolfsma, W. 147 Douglas, M. 38, 47, 54, 136, 147 Dow, Sheila C. 45, 147 Drayer, Joost den 86 Duger, W.M. 147 Dutch language, correct pronunciation 77 radio 61, 70 Earl, P. E. 11 Eckstein, Harry 52, 147 economics of pop music 8 economic trends 5, 121 economists 96 Edgren, John 57, 147 Eggertsson, Thraíin 50, 147 Eijkelestam, R. 81, 147 Ekelund, Robert B. 47, 147 Elias, Norbert 10, 148 Elliot, Catherine S. 145 Elster, J. 53, 148 Elteren, M. von 15, 73, 78–9, 87, 112, 148 English language 4, 72, 103, 104, 107, 140 songs 87, 104 entertainment industries 8, 17 epistemology 44 establishment, protests against 40, 67, 99 ethnographers 96 Etzioni, Amitai 127, 148 evolutionary theory 34, 132 Falk, P. 36–7, 96, 103, 148 family life 102

Index fan clubs 68, 97 fashion, pop music as 26, 27 Fats Domino 82 Felleman, Pete 74–6, 79, 86, 90, 92 Field, John 14, 34, 148 film 17 Fine, Ben 12, 13, 62, 95, 148 folk music 10, 85, 110 Foucault, Michel 123 Frank, E. 126, 127, 148 Frankfurt, H. 61, 148 freedom of choice 61 Freeman, Alan 99 Freeman, J. 149 French chansons 20 Frey, Bruno S. 62, 148 Friedman, Jonathan 37, 38, 148 Friedman, Milton 34, 148 Frith, Simon 9, 11, 12, 65–6, 70, 95, 101, 148 game theory 42, 43, 62 Geertz, C. 14, 95, 148 Gelder, Henk van 90, 148 generation gap 96, 97, 101, 139 German Historic School 62 German popular music (schlager) 85, 86, 88, 110 Germany, charts 67 Gestalt switch 54 Giddens, A. 35, 148 Gilbert, Margaret 44, 148 goods, symbolic 95 Goudsblom, J. 5, 96, 148 Granovetter, Mark 19, 33, 139, 148 Grapard, Ulla 62, 149 Groenewegen, Peter 149 group interviews 117, 139 Grunberg, E. 45, 46, 149 Gustafsson, B. 152 Haak, Kees van der 149 Haley, Bill 1, 2, 10, 40, 42, 64, 67 Hamilton, David B. 121, 149 Hamlen, W. 34, 149 Handlbauer, Gernot 149 Hands, D. Wade 149 Hannan, M.T. 149 Hansman, H. 149 Hargreaves Heap, Shaun 149

159

Harrison, Robert S. 156 health 23 Hébert, Robert F. 147 Heilbroner, Robert L. 122, 126, 127, 149 Hemel, A. van 152 Hendrix, Jimi 63 heredity 136 hermeneutics 133–4 Hessen, J. S. 12, 62, 149 Hilversum III 72, 73, 78, 90, 149 Hirschman, Albert O. 30, 127, 149 hits 105 Hobbes, Thomas 30 Hobsbawm, Eric 62, 149 Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 49–50, 53, 130, 149 Hofstede, Geert 56, 150 Hogg, Michael A. 61, 150 Holbrook, M.B. 110, 150 Holland, John H. 53, 150 Holyoak, Keith J. 150 human behaviour 30, 44, 141 capital 3 volition and value 129 Hutter, Michael 48, 150 identification 100, 105 identity 39, 47, 95, 100, 102, 107 imitation 60 independence 39, 47, 95, 108, 139 Inglehart, R. 40, 56, 111, 150 institutional changes 38, 42–7, 56–61, 70–74, 142 economics 25, 42, 84, 131, 133, 141 tensions 55 theory 132 institutionalization 111 institutions 34, 47–52, 87, 141–3 intellectual property rights 14 International Association for the Study of Popular Music 11 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry 150 Internet 2, 17 interviews, group 114–17 Jagger, Mick 24, 83 James, William 49 Janssen, Maarten C.W. 150

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jazz music 11, 20, 30, 31, 74, 110 jingles 78, 104, 111 Karni, Edi 26–8, 150 Katz, E. 150, 152 Kearns, Patricia, M. 146 Kempen, G. 152 Kennedy, James C. 63, 150 Kerstholt, F. 149 Keynes, John Maynard 63, 150 Kitayama, S. 152 Klaes, M. 22, 150 Klamer, A. 48, 54, 133, 150 Kleijer, H. 10, 20, 34,0 40, 107, 112, 151 Kloosterman, Robert C. 66, 151 Kluckhohn, Clyde 51, 151 Knight, Frank H. 151 knowledge 54 Knudsen, C. 152 Knulst, W. P. 3, 41, 151 Krantz, D. 62, 96, 151 KRO, Dutch radio programme 81 Kroes, R. 111, 151 Krueger, R.A. 96, 114, 151 Krugman, Paul, 15, 151 labour theory of value 125, 126 labour unions 6 Lancaster, Kevin 26, 151 Lane, R.E. 56, 151 Langeveld, M.J. 62, 151 language barrier 69 learning 53 Leathers, Charles G. 136, 151 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 42, 127 Leopold, Ella 148 Levine, L.W. 11, 32, 151 Lewis, D.K. 62, 151 Lewis, G.H.J. 152 liberal organizations 6 light music 3, 4 Lijphart, Arend 5, 71, 152 listening survey 118 Little Richard 2, 10, 67 Loasby, Brian J. 152 Locke, John 122–5, 133–5, 152 long playing records 5, 6, 20 love 10 Lucas, R. 42, 152

Luckman, T. 145 Lutte, G. 40, 42, 152 Lutz, M. 48, 152 lyrics of pop songs 85 McCloskey, Deirdre 34, 152 McDowell, J. 123, 152 macro-sociological trends 5 Mäki, Uskali 14, 152 Mandeville, Bernard 30 manners, proper 76, 99 Manns, J. 34, 61, 152 Marginalist economics 122, 126 market information regimes 59 market selection 84 Markus, H.R. 33, 152 Marshall, Alfred 133, 136, 152 mass production 31 mathematics 131 Maultsby, P.K. 9, 113, 152 Mayhew, A. 35, 152 media 66–70 Melody Maker 105 Meyersohn, R. 27, 152 Mirowski, Philip 49, 55, 128–33, 136, 152 mobile telephones 1 modernist values 59 Mommaas, H. 152 monads (Leibniz) 42 Mönks, F. 152 Morgan, D.L. 96, 113, 115, 153 movies 8 Muddy Waters 1 Murphy, J.W. 113, 153 music 58 black 39, 66 classical 34, 80 economic significance of 18 entertainment industries 17 industry 2, 9,11, 16, 29–30, 39, 94 magazines 11, 42, 63, 69, 84, 137 market 7, 59 press 12, 64 Muziek Expres 92 Muziek Parade 92 Nagelkerke, A. 149 Nash, John 62, 153 national anthems 48

Index National Association of Broadcasters 70, 152 National Music Publishers Association 153 Nat King Cole 2 natural sciences 131 NCRV, Dutch radio programme 77, 81, 83, 92 Neale, Walter C. 48–52, 133, 136, 153 Negus, K. 63, 64, 86, 94, 153 neoclassical economics 49, 53, 95, 127, 131 Netherlands 4, 41, 64, 82, 99 broadcasting 66, 72 New Institutional Economics 44, 49 Nisbett, Richard E. 150 Nordwest Deutsche Rundfunk (NWDR) 4, 69 North, Douglass, C. 44, 45, 60, 95, 146, 153 North Sea, pirate radio 4 Nossent, S.P.M. 53–4 novelty value 58, 139 Old Institutional Economics 49, 52, 57 Old institutions 74 open systems 45–7 opera 11, 32 operetta 3, 80 orchestras 80 Out, Rob 92, 153 pair-bonding 107 Parchure, R. 127, 153 parental customs 102 parents control by 4 shocking of 105 path dependence 52 Payola 90 peer selection 84 Peirce, Charles Saunders 49, 133 performances, live 26 performing arts 29 Pesendorfer, Wolfgang 152 Peterson, Richard A. 5, 11, 18, 28–34, 52, 64–6, 70, 74, 86, 88, 94, 153 Phelps-Brown, E.H. 14, 153 phonogram 75 Pigou, A.C. 27, 153

161

pillarization 6 Pink Floyd 94, 106 pirate radio 4, 12, 69, 87, 98, 140 British 72 Dutch 11 Plato (Republic) 18 pleasure 58 Polanyi, Michael 53, 54, 132, 153 politicians 2 pop idols 105 pop music 110–11 audience 12–14 consumption of 94–120 economics of 6–9 latent demand 28–30 on the radio 74–88 resistance to 2 scope and significance 12–14 symbolism of 56 and tensions 56–60 value in the Netherlands 137 valuing 39–42, 137–143 pop and rock 9–12, 70 popularity polls 85 posters 26, 105 preference forming 95, 126, 127, 137–43 preferences 19–26 for pop music 88 Presley, Elvis 2, 10, 18, 42, 64, 87 price and income statistics 19 primary qualities 123 prisoner’s dilemma 43 privileges 57 production institutions 138 progressive pop 101 pronunciation, correct 76 Protestant broadcasting 5–6, 71 see also Catholic Radio Organization psychology 13 public performance 7 publishing 17 puppets 33–4 Quandt, Richard E. 144 Quispel, Chris 63, 151 radio 21, 111–12 cable 22 control of 97 and the music press 66–70

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and pop music 119–20 presenters, Dutch 99, 103 sponsorshp of 68 stations 12, 65, 69, 112 Radio London 4, 99, 109 Radio Luxembourg 69, 72, 80–85, 90, 103, 109 Radio One, UK 90 Radio Veronica 4, 65, 72–3, 80–88, 100, 109 Ramstad, Yngve 144 rebellion 10, 98 recontextualization 60 records 21, 26, 42 cable radio, decline of 22 companies 13, 16, 76, 91 labels 59 in the Netherlands 4 players 21, 109 regionalists 126 religion 131 in programmes 6, 71 REM island in the North Sea 91 rents 125 reputation 23 retail 17 Reuter, Norbert 153 revenues 8 rhythm and blues 2 black 9 Richard, Cliff 2, 10, 18, 28, 42, 67, 82, 86 Ridley, F.F. 130, 153 Riesman, D. 32, 94, 153 Righart, H. 5–6, 41–2, 63, 82, 94, 153 Rock around the Clock 64 rock music 10, 28, 65 rock ‘n’ roll 67 Rokeach, Milton 51–2 153 Rolling Stones 18, 83, 107, 109 Rosekrams, Hans 92 Rottschaeffer, W.A. 33, 154 royalties 8 Ruijter, Eric De 154 rules of conduct 54 Rutherford M. 50, 113, 154 Rutten P. 8, 10, 20, 113, 154 Ryle, G. 53, 154 Saal, C.D. 154

Sahlins, Marshall 30, 36 Salanti, A. 154 sales figures 90 Samuels W.J. 48–9, 95, 154 Sarti, S. 152 satellite television 17 Schindler, R.M. 150 Schmeidler, David 150 Schotter, Andrew 62, 154 Schumpeter, Joseph A. 14, 53, 131, 135, 154 Scitovsky, Tibor 31, 52, 154 scope and audience 13 Scott, W. 154 Screpanti, E. 154 secondary qualities 123 selfhood 37 Selten, Reinhard 62 semiotics 134 Sen, Amartyua K. 43, 154 senses, pleasure of 23 sexuality 10, 139 in song 107 Siegenthaler, H. 35, 154 Silverman, D. 114, 154 Simmel, Georg 27, 154 Simon, Herbert 46, 53, 154 singles, sale of, in Netherlands 6, 20 Sjöstrand, Sven-Eric 154 Sluyser, Meier 154 Smith, Adam 30, 34, 124–6, 155 Smithuijsen, C. 152 social attributes 26 capital 23 change 60 and cultural phenomena 5, 112 determinism 128 environment 30 identity 37 influences 33 institutions 108 life 102 phenomena and individual behaviour 33, 46 sciences 13, 31, 133 standing 23 utility 128 value theory 14, 55, 61, 70, 137, 142

Index Social Value Nexus 48, 55, 61, 70, 137, 142 Social Darwinism 129, 130, 131 socialist broadcasting 71 organizations 6 socialization 52 socio-cultural values 41, 49, 50, 51, 56, 64, 88 sociologists 13, 96 Soundscape 59 speed 58 Spencer, Herbert 128, 136 Spradley, J.P. 114, 155 standard reactions 31 standards 84 status 57 Stigler, G.J. 19, 22, 123, 155 Stik, Herman 78–9, 90 92 Storey, John 11, 155 Stroop, J. 10, 20, 155 success 58, 139 supply and demand 127 Swaan, Abram de 155 Sweden, pirate radio in 5 symbolic goods 36–61 synthesizers 22 T-shirts 26 tape recorders 2, 21, 109 Taylor, C. 111, 155 teachers 2 technological change and pop music 21–2 teenagers 39, 100 consumerism 20 music 80 rebellion 98 telephone ring tunes 1 television 4, 8, 21, 69 cable 17 tensions 52 Terry, Deborah J. 150 tertiary quality 134 Thagard, Paul R. 150 theme parks 17 themes of songs 10 Thompson, P. 114, 155 Tijd voor Teenagers 79–82, 85, 98, 100, 104

163

Tillekens, G. 89, 96, 107,112, 151, 155 Titmuss, Richard M. 38, 155 Tool, Marc, R. 130, 155 transistor radios 4, 97 Trigg, A.B. 36, 155 tunes 104 Tuney Tunes 66, 83, 92, 100, 103, 105, 107 popularity poll 68 Twist, The 77 Ullman-Margalit, Edna 51, 62, 155 Ultee, W. 155 United Kingdom 89, 99 charts 67 music 104 United States 89 charts 67 utilitarianism 25 utility function 23 Vahl, Rutger 155 valuations 95 value in exchange 12, 85 (price) 40 primary quality 124–6 secondary quality 126–7 as a social environment 133 tensions 55, 58 tertiary quality 127–30 theory of 121, 126, 134 in use 125, 128 Value-Institution tensions 55 values 47–51, 57, 72, 76–8, 84, 85, 134, 139–43 ceremonial 57 in economics 47–51 and institutions 42–61 instrumental 57 VALUES (sociocultural) 41, 48 VARA, Dutch radio programme 6, 69–76, 81, 84–5, 90, 92 Vaughn, Billy 82 Veblen, Thorstein 10, 15, 33–7, 49–50, 62, 155 Veblenian dichotomy 57 Verburg, Rudi M. 34, 155 Vercruysse, E.V.W. 151 Verspaaij, L. J. 155

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video 8 Vogel, Harold 1 Von Neumann, J. 62, 155 Voogd, Skip 86, 93, 106 Vree, F. Van 71, 155 Vromen, J.J. 155 wages 125 Wagt, Gabi De 156 Waller, William 52, 57, 156 Walzer, Michael 8, 156, Wealth of Nations (Smith) 124–5 White, Katherine M. 150 Whitehead, A.N. 156 Who, The 107 Wijfjes, Huub 156 Wijnberg, Nachoem M. 84, 156

Wilber, Charles K. 46, 133, 156 Wildavsky, Aaron 35, 48, 62, 136, 147, 156 working-class music 67 Wouters, C. 10, 156 youth 19, 28–9, 37, 41, 58, 63, 87, 107, 112 audiences 72, 81, 82, 98 behaviour 96 Dutch 81, 99 income of 5 Zanden, Jan-Luijten 156 Zelizer, Viviana A. 38, 48, 62, 130, 156 Zijtveld, Cees Van 72, 93

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