‘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

Despite the philosophical tradition from Plato onward, sociologists have not yet explored in full music's role as an active ingredient in social formation. This project has been left to environmental psychologists and market researchers who are more interested in ‘what’ music can cause than in exploring its mechanisms of operation and the implications of these mechanisms for the constitution of social agency. This paper draws upon ethnographic...