Notes on group fitness regimes and music as organisational technology

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Introduction

The purpose of this article is to discuss literature about music in relation to organisational activities, and especially in relation to group fitness class businesses. It arose out of my interest in the Les Mills group fitness business, and a funded project on Music and Work. This article is a general introduction to the use of music in fitness. It mainly mainly discusses the cultural meaning of the group fitness 'dance'. 

Music as technology

It is often said that we now live in an ‘experience’ economy. Businesses of all kinds try and find ways to ‘add value’ to products and services through enhancing ‘experience’ factors (Ashforth & Tomiuk, 2000; Minor et al., 2004). Accompanying this interest in exploiting the profit-making potential of enhanced experience has been a raft of organizational processes that support the cultural/aesthetic properties of the organization. Several writers have attempted to critically engage with the implications of the service and cultural milieu for ordering or ‘manufacturing’ the subjectivities of workers and consumers. Music, like that in a group fitness class, can be seen as an organizational discourse or ‘text’ used in the activity of organizing people.

Music pervades organizational aesthetics and life: communication technology is musical with cell phones’ intrusive ring-tones, work-place elevator musak anaesthetizes with its deliberate blandness and non-ness (Lanza, 1994), shopping malls advertise their strangeness with odd disembodied music to encourage a sense of being lost in time and space (Kowinski, 1985), and in fashion retail outlets to help customers imagine themselves enjoying wearing a dress (De Nora & Belcher, 2000). Coffee (Starbucks CD range), and even furniture comes with its own range of mood-music now (Freedom Furniture, 2002).

Music is also used inside organizations to induct employees or subjects through organizational song (Nissley et al., 2003), or through the highly ordering 2-2 beat of the military march (Hockney, 2002), and has been used deliberately in factories to facilitate the production process by merging the body’s movements with the rhythms of the music (Korczynski & Jones, 2004).

Clearly music in say, a Les Mills group fitness class,  is being used to evoke, coordinate and entrain emotional states in service environments (e.g. Minor et al., 2004). Even further than  emotional and physical experiences, spiritual experiences are also being encouraged (Belk et al., 1989; Casey, 2002). We feel strongly about music and its ability to enhance our lives, but to companies music is an  aesthetic design element to be manipulated to enhance ambiance and experience and increase company profits (Bitner, 1992).

Agents interact with and use the musical material. Music is an aesthetic prosthetic technology according to De Nora (2000): a material that can extend what the body can do. Work involves labour — the activity of the body, intellect or emotion to add value in the business process. Music may extend the capabilities of the mind, the body and/or emotion to add value to products and services. Service, which by its nature is intangible, simultaneous, reciprocal and perishable, is a natural companion for music in the service production process. Service is facilitated by the sounds of music. 


Dancing in time to the labour process

Unlike music, dance cannot be disembodied. We may watch someone else dance, but you can only dance when you dance. Dance in group fitness is the performance of the ‘musical consumer’: dance pulls the music in, moves it through the body, and then it is turned out in a cultural display. Dance displays are historically and culturally situated; gender relations are reproduced and accentuated; conflict and emotion is expressed and controlled; young people mate through dance; gods are worshipped and cosmology expressed; rituals of power and control are produced and reproduced; and cultures are fused and intertwined (Jonas, 1992; Buonaventura, 2003). Dance can be a safety valve, a process of social control, self-generational, educational, a form of initiation, competitive, ritualized dramatic theatre, and a challenge to established power, showing alternative possible realities (Spencer, 1985). Through dance, cultures enact life, and music fuels the show.

Music and dance in the context of a group fitness class is an organising technology. Music is not value-free and musicians have always used the language of music to manipulate perceptions of time and space. The language of this creation is sophisticated and for timing involves rhythm — pulses, beats and rests (Holst, 1963). Musically proficient people (not only musicians, but producers, marketers, choreographers, designers and other symbolic analysts) can use music — for instance, its genre or place of origin — to evoke in the listener moods and experiences. In short, time and space is organized through music.

Liquidity in time and space echoes with liquidities in gender and racial identity (Butler, 1993). The exercise-dance is a dance that expresses fluid gender identity through androgyny and camp. Camp is a common theatrical device in modern rock music (Rodger, 2004): women become men; white women become black women; white women become black men; and men become women. Participants stomp — using the body as a percussive instrument, pretend to be John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever as they disco dance down the Step box, surf to the Bee Gees, box like Mohammed Ali, or pretend to be a voodoo priest shaking his totem stick. Racial identities (stereotypes?) are also played with through doing different aspects of different dances like flamenco, cha-cha, stomp, hip hop, disco, soul and gospel. In the imagination one travels to a Latin American Mardi Gras, the ghettos of Harlem, nightclubs in 1970s America, or stomp in a West End stage production. The actions of the dance are about transience through space - walking, climbing, surfing, running, dancing, flying through space, scooting, skiing, even riding horses. The pleasures of travel and movement itself are evoked: travelling in a car, in a plane, in a bus, a train, stopping off in an airport and at all the major destination places in between. Music evokes exotic other places — tourist experiences in other words (Connell & Gibson, 2003). Some songs evoke ‘blasting off’ in a rocket, travelling between planets in outer space, and even flying like superman. In short, you can take a trip and never leave the room. Yet, these movements all take place in a very confined space.

The activity almost always takes place inside. The step exercise routine is based on walking up a hill and, as with outdoor walking (Edensor, 2000), the movements of the body symbolise process and expansion of the self. Walking can be a spiritual practice, and is used in the fitness-to-music session to help participants achieve a meditative rhythmic state (Slavin, 2003). Constantly moving feet give the impression of movement, but spatially the activity happens almost on-the-spot. This is in direct contrast to the other gym activity most participated in by men, circuit training, which has considerable mobility and spatial conquering involved (Crossley, 2004). Group fitness is mainly participated in by women.

Gyms as cultures

There has been considerable literature written about gym cultures and the aesthetic discourses around physically perfect, fit bodies that gyms convey, encourage and sustain (Sassatelli, 1999;Wacquant, 1995; Lloyd, 1996; Crossley, 2004; Monaghan, 1999; Frew & McGillivray, 2005). Gyms are social and technical environments with specific discourses around the body that encourage “an ongoing activity of enhancing bodily aesthetics” (Monaghan, 1999: 267), where participants attempt to stabilize their self-identity through attention to the body, changing its ‘plastic’ form (Thompson & Hirschman, 1999).

Generally speaking this discourse is a technical/scientific one, where the body is seen as machine. People are building cyborg bodies (Haraway, 1991) as they work on themselves to lose weight, strengthen, tone, and enhance themselves. The exercise regime is often filled with patter from instructors about the body as machine – its capabilities, its inside workings, how to make it run more efficiently through nutrition. The body is the machine being ‘fixed’. If you look good, you’ll feel good. Or alternatively, if there is no chance of that, if you feel good, then you’ll think you look good. By changing the body the intent is that the Self will be transformed. What is currently wrong - esteem, confidence, relationships, sexual fulfilment - will be set right through physical renewal.

Conclusion

Dance is an expression of culture, and so what culture is expressed in the aerobics-dance? In an organizational context the group fitness session is an organizational dance where the consumer and the instructors dance and so embody and produce the labour that has the value in the commercial exchange. There is a creation of fantasy and desire. There is the manufacturing of a ritual of 'escape' from everyday life. There is an obsession with looking and being looked at. There is an affirmation of admiring looking as a virtue.

Nothing wrong with all this. But if this is a cultural dance, and it is, what does it say about our culture?

References and Further Reading

Ashforth, B., & Tomiuk, M. (2000). Emotional labour and authenticity: Views from service agents. In S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in organizations (pp. 184 — 203). London: Sage.
Rodger, G. (2004). Drag, camp and gender subversion in the music and videos of Annie Lennox. Popular Music, 23(1), 17 — 29.

Belk, R. W., Wallendorf, M., & Sherry, J. F. (1989). The sacred and the profane in consumption behaviour: Theodicy on the odyssey. Journal of Consumer Research, 16(June), 1 — 38.

Bitner, M. J. (1992). Servicescapes: The impact of physical surroundings on customers and employees. Journal of Marketing, 56(2), 57 — 76.
Buonaventura, W. (2003). Something in the way she moves. Cambridge: Da Capo Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (1999 ed.). New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge.
Casey, C. (2002). Critical analysis of organizations: Theory, practice, revitalization. London: Sage.
Cohen, S., & Taylor, L. (1992). Escape attempts: The theory and practice of resistance to everyday life. London: Routledge.
Connell, J., & Gibson, C. (2003). Sound tracks: Popular music, identity and place. London: Routledge.
Crossley, N. (2004). The circuit trainer's habitus: Reflexive body techniques and the sociality of the workout. Body and Society, 10(1), 37 — 69.
De Nora, T. (2000). Music in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Nora, T., & Belcher, S. (2000). When you're trying something on you picture yourself in a place where they are playing this kind of music: Musically sponsored agency in the British clothing retail sector. Sociological Review, 48(1), 80 — 101.

Edensor, T. (2000). Walking in the British countryside: Reflexivity, embodied practices and ways to escape. Body and Society, 6(3), 81 —106.
Fitzsimmons, J., & Fitzsimmons, M. (2006). Service management: Operations, strategy, information technology (5th ed.). Sydney: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Frew, M., & McGillivray, D. (2005). Health clubs and body politics: Aesthetics and the quest for physical capital. Leisure Studies, 24(2), 161 — 175.
Gluck, P. (1993). The use of music in sports performance. Contemporary Thought, 2, 22 — 53.

Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto. In Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149—181). New York: Routledge.
Hockney, J. (2002). 'Head down, Bergen on, mind in neutral': The infantry body. Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 30(1), 148 — 171.
Holst, I. (1963). An ABC of music. London: Oxford University Press.

Jonas, G. (1992). Dancing: The pleasure, power and art of movement. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc.
Korczynski, M., & Jones, K. (2004, 1 — 3 September). Instrumental music: The social origins and meaning of tannoyed music in factories. Paper presented at the Work, Employment and Society, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Kowinski, W. S. (1985). The malling of America: An inside look at the great consumer paradise: William Morrow.
Lanza, J. (1994). Elevator music: A surreal history of musak, easy-listening, and other moodsong. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Monaghan, L. (1999). Creating 'the perfect body': A variable project. Body and Society, 5(2), 267 — 290.
Minor, M., Wagner, T., Brewerton, F. J., & Hausman, A. (2004). Rock on! An elementary model of customer satisfaction with musical performances. Journal of Services Marketing, 118(1), 7 —18.

Nissley, N., Taylor, S., & Butler, O. (2003). The power of organizational song: An organizational discourse and aesthetic expression of organizational culture. In A. Carr & P. Hancock (Eds.), Art and aesthetics at work (pp. 93 — 114). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sassatelli, R. (1999). Interaction order and beyond: A field analysis of body culture within fitness gyms. Body and Society, 5(2), 227-248.
Seitz, P. (2005). Starbucks perking in music business as it expands its CD-burning outlets. Financial News, Investor's Business Daily Retrieved 16 March, 2005, from http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/050216/tech01_1.html
Slavin, S. (2003). Walking as spiritual practice: The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Body & Society, 9(3), 1 — 18.
Spencer, P. (Ed.). (1985). Society and dance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, C., & Hirschman, E. (1999). An existential analysis of the embodied self in postmodern culture. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2(4), 337 — 464.
Wacquant, L. (1995). Review article: Why men desire muscles. Body and Society, 1(1), 163 —179.
Wasserman, V., Rafaeli, A., & Kluger, A. (2000). Aesthetic symbols as emotional cues. In S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in organizations (pp. 140 — 165). London: Sage.