Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: CARRADINI, STEPHEN ANDREW.The Professional Communication of Extrainstitutional Musicians.(Under the direction of Jason Swarts.)This dissertation focuses on the professional communication of extra-institutional musicians.The organizational support available for musicians has diminished over the past thirty years to a point where many musicians make careers without the assistance of a large organization.Technical and Professional Communication has explored how extrainstitutional individuals use professional communication in their careers, but has not asked if musicians might shed light on how extra-institutional individuals communicate.Arts Entrepreneurship has begun to investigate how musicians make careers outside large organizations, but has not explored how professional communication is involved in those extra-institutional careers.This interdisciplinary dissertation investigates what professional communication musicians use, how they use that professional communication, and why they use that professional communication in the process of career-building.Using grand-tour and stimulated recall protocols, I conducted 80 interviews with 40 musicians (20 indie rock musicians, 20 classical musicians) about the professional communication used in their careers.I used quantitative (frequency, keyness, collocation) and qualitative (in vivo, provisional, and descriptive coding) methods to analyze the data.I found that musicians use a huge array of professional communication elements.Musicians used these professional communication elements as a means to complete music-oriented tasks, such as touring, publishing content, managing professional relationships, and developing a career.Indie rock and classical musicians used different professional communication elements and employed them to do different, group-specific tasks.This study investigated the reasons why these subgroups used professional communication differently, resulting in the discovery of four organizational structures that governed the use of professional communication in the lives of musicians.The build structure, teaching structure, repertoire structure, and composing structure each possessed unique characteristics that shaped what professional communication the musicians needed to use and reframed the exigences in which they used it.Musicians were able to participate in multiple organizational structures at once, but these structures largely operated independent of each other in the musician's life-as if the musicians had two jobs.Further analysis of the organizational structures of musicians revealed that professional communication developed and maintained these organizational structures.Musicians used communication as infrastructure in the absence of organizational support: organizational structure was stabilized when musicians repeatedly responded successfully to the characteristics of organizational structure that manifested in multiple exigences.Musicians could project how to write future communication, even in exigences they had not encountered before, by creating professional communication that responded to the characteristics of organizational structure.This study adds to the understanding of extrainstitutional individuals in Technical and Professional Communication.The professional communication and the tasks musicians were undertaking with them add to Arts Entrepreneurship's knowledge of what communication is necessary in the lives of musicians and intervene in theories of organizing and the arts entrepreneurial mindset.Organizational structure for extra-institutional individuals allows for identification of genres within their work; without an organizational structure, genres are difficult to identify, because an organization is necessary for recurrence of stable exigences from which genres emerge.
Author: Stephen Carradını
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2732245288