Networking innovation: the case of the Singapore jazz musician community

Thesis

Intercohesive labour or the work of sustaining membership to multiple communities allows access to diverse resources, thereby affording actors the requisite resources for innovation. However, while theoretically advantageous, intercohesion is risky as evaluative criteria determining membership utilised by some communities potentially precludes inclusion to other communities. Here, I provide a microsociological account of intercohesive labour in the context of music genres by deploying an inductive, multimethod research design that explores the interplay between boundary-work, community structure, and network position among members of the Singapore jazz musician community, in the process arguing that innovation is a byproduct of actors navigating intercohesive dissonance at the overlap of communities. To begin, I use qualitative data derived from semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with respondents (n = 30) sampled from the Singapore jazz musician community and biographical material available online to identify the salient forms of boundary-work utilised by them, initially focusing on ideal-typical adopters of these forms of boundary-work through relating the adoption of these various forms of boundary-work to the community structure of the network. Having identified the evaluative criteria and forms of boundary-work that both divide and unite jazz musicians in Singapore, I proceed to parse a collaboration network (n = 491) consisting of jazz musicians who performed together in Singapore during 2019 to 2020 with the Weighted Clique Percolation Method (CPMw) algorithm. In doing so, I discover four distinct but overlapping social worlds comprised of clusters of detected communities that share various degrees of overlap and are organised according to the genre ideals of their members. Having identified the genre ideals of members of the Singapore jazz musician community and their relation to community structure, I end off by unpacking the intercohesive labour of “hybrid” respondents who straddle multiple communities and, by extension, multiple evaluative criteria at the overlap of communities.

Authors: Low, BCW

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-dxexvqzza
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English