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

Maria Laura Toraldo, Gazi Islam and Gianluigi Mangia
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Maria Laura Toraldo: USI - Università della Svizzera italiana = University of Italian Switzerland
Gazi Islam: MC - Management et Comportement - EESC-GEM Grenoble Ecole de Management, IREGE - Institut de Recherche en Gestion et en Economie - USMB [Université de Savoie] [Université de Chambéry] - Université Savoie Mont Blanc

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Abstract: Drawing from a participant-observer study of volunteering in the context of U.K. music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from 1.) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking "fun" through consumption 2.) A "communitas" frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and 3.) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo-normative forms of ideological control.

Keywords: liminality; volunteer; ethnography; ideology; Meaningful work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-cul
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01959041v1
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Published in Journal of Management Studies, 2019, 56 (3), pp.617-654

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Journal Article: Serving Time: Volunteer Work, Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals (2019)
Working Paper: Serving Time: Volunteer Work, Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals (2019)
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