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This personal, non-fiction essay explores the punk subculture and themes of death as a teenager growing up in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, New York, in the 1990s. Within this text, punk and indie music releases, exposure to live performances in unconventional spaces, independent record stores as an alternative education, and participatory fanzine culture, serve as a pivotal catalyst for rejuvenation and release – for creativity and self-expression while grieving the loss of one’s mother from cancer. The punk subculture and its related ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) media communities which eventually led to a professorship prove to be both inspirational and a transformative method of healing and being.

This chapter examines and discusses the unintended outcomes of the production bonus scheme the mine had instituted to motivate and increase the productivity of the frontline mining teams. This is crucial given that the maladministration of the bonus system could lead to a range of undesired outcomes such as deteriorating levels of trust between management and frontline workers, prioritisation of production at the expense of safety, poor work relations and ultimately low levels of organisational, employee and team performance. There are a number of organisational, management and labour factors that can render a production bonus scheme effective or ineffective. These factors influence the nature and extent of worker reactions to the bonus scheme.

This chapter examines and discusses the factors that influenced the reaction of the mining teams to the team-based production bonus scheme and the extent to which mine management fulfilled its side of the bargain in the implementation of the production bonus. The chapter highlights the manner in which the team-based bonus system influenced teams of stope workers to engage in their informal organisational practice of making plan (planisa) in order to offset the snags that jeopardised their prospects of earning the production bonus. The chapter reveals that, to a large extent, the productivity bonus generated conflict rather than cooperation at the point of production down the mine. As a result, the incentive scheme failed to live up to expectations by not eliciting the desired levels of organisational, worker and team performance at the rock-face.

The author examines the inter-relationship between authenticity, music and gender in relation to a particular contemporary genre, emotional hardcore or emo. Noting how hard rock often defined itself as authentic in contrast to (feminine) pop music, the author argues that it is possible to see the ‘persistence of masculinism’ in wider debates around the performance of (appropriate) fandom. Drawing on a wealth of online data from platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook, the author observes that even as male fans of emo distance themselves from hyper-masculine forms of hard (or cock) rock, they also critique the presence of female fans as ‘inauthentic’.

Previous research suggests that women receive less critical attention and acclaim in popular music. The authors expect that gender differences in the amount and content of media discourse about popular musicians occur because music critics draw on the cultural frame of gender as a primary tool for critical evaluation. In order to explore the role of gender as a frame through which aesthetic content is evaluated, the authors conduct detailed content analyses of 53 critical reviews of two versions of the popular album 1989 – the original released by Taylor Swift in 2014 and a cover version released by Ryan Adams less than a year later. Despite Swift’s greater popularity and prominence, the authors find that reviews of her version of the album are more likely to focus on her gender and sexuality; less likely to describe her as emotionally authentic; and more likely to use popular aesthetic criteria in evaluating her music. By contrast, Ryan Adams was more likely to be seen by critics as emotionally authentic and to be described using high art aesthetic criteria and intellectualizing discourse. The authors address the implications of the findings for persistent gender gaps in many artistic fields.

One way of thinking about “theory” in sociology is that theory is the ideas, concepts, and frames, which we get from reading the insights, interpretations, and explanations of other sociologists. Doing theory is about being in a conversation with the discipline. It is in this spirit that I approach talking about theory in the work of my colleague, Peter Hall. This idea of theory as conversation is particularly apt for talking about Peter’s work, about Symbolic Interactionism today, and Peter Hall’s contribution to it.