This article follows the alchemical political economy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield for whom Kāi Tahu whenua served as a laboratory. Wakefield’s clever formula for the transubstantiation of an incendiary social situation in Britain into new terrain for capital was designed to secure the transplantation of English economic and social relations to the colonies to ensure the persistence of a landless class compelled to sell their labour for wages. Ingeniously, the transport of that labour to the colonies was to be paid for by the market in land in the new colony: Kāi Tahu would be made to fund their own colonisation. I track the fate of capital’s settler dream for ready land and labour as it was brought into being by the New Zealand Company, subsequently taken over by the Crown, and as it continues into our present. The argument is divided into two parts. The first is the classical moment of primitive accumulation, clearing people from the land to provide a market in land and labour, ‘legal’ dispossession, and commodification. The second is the more recent continuation of the initial processes of dispossession and commodification as these assert themselves in processes of redress and as they are expressed in the corporatisation of Ngāi Tahu.

Rather than being exceptional for Māori and Pacific Peoples, Covid-19 is the latest iteration of virulent disease that arrived with European colonisation. The various pandemics are connected; they exacerbate and intensify existing conditions of colonial inequality and injustice. The political and economic marginalisation of Māori and Pasifika within Aotearoa New Zealand ensures that Covid-19 will have disproportionate impacts upon them. Covid-19’s impacts will be felt in the academy as everywhere else. The immediate issue will be the culling of less popular ‘uneconomic’ courses, and of precarious instructors (where Māori and Pacific teachers are over-represented). Colonisation never ended. Ongoing domination is secured through the reproduction of social life, including via social institutions like the university. While sociology likes to think of itself as the critical edge, it often fails to be so in relation to its own assumptions. In order for sociology to be part of the solution, instead of simply perpetuating the problem of racism as it is wont to do, its practitioners must recognise our place in the world, must speak to our ways of knowing and being, and must validate the aspirations of Māori and Pacific communities, Māori and Pacific students and Māori and Pacific staff.

This article examines the relationships between three areas of activity within the music and media industries: the construction of music formats for commercial radio programming, audience research and music production. With specific reference to two companies located in the United States, this research explores some of the ways in which these practices impact upon one another and help to develop the organization of music genres into discrete, strictly controlled, radio formats. In order to illustrate the relationship between music formatting and audience research, this work makes a case study of Broadcast Architecture, a Los Angeles-based research and consultancy firm. Prominent in the radio industry since 1988, Broadcast Architecture is the primary exponent of the smooth jazz format and a leader in audience research technologies. To examine the relationships between Broadcast Architecture and the production of music used in smooth jazz radio programming, the case study considers the work of GRP Records, a popular jazz label established in 1982. The findings of this research are used as a basis for asking questions about the relationships between musical creativity, radio programming and audience tastes. The case of GRP Records, which has existed as both an independent jazz label and a subsidiary of major labels, illustrates how record companies can cater to the needs of radio formats and therefore the ways in which radio formats can exert influence upon the music available in the record market. The primary research presented herein draws upon a series of interviews with the founders and senior executives of Broadcast Architecture plus the founders, staff and artists affiliated with GRP Records.

This article examines articulations of the role of passion in accounts of the life and work of the songwriter. It draws upon a range of interviews with successful artists captured in the Sodajerker On Songwriting podcast. It is suggested that these interviews capture the 'voicing' (Toynbee, 2003) of the conventions of creativity in popular music, exploring a context in which passionate motivation, expression and understanding of the (potentially) affective responses to songs are paramount to the labour of the songwriter. The article explores how the core of this labour deals in emotion, attempting to articulate feelings in recognizable, tradable form. This is a process that is both instrumentally rationalized but often felt to be a deeply authentic process, understood (and believed) to spring from the individual's emotional experience, so conferring identity in a generic field. In light of current debates about the nature of creative work and emotional labour, the accounts drawn upon here can be seen to epitomise many of the qualities of what constitutes 'good work' through a mode of self-actualisation.

Drawing upon interviews conducted as part of the Sodajerker on Songwriting podcast this paper explores professional songwriting as musical labor. It explores how songwriters conceptualize creativity and what strategies they employ for the delivery of original songs. It argues that individuals evince a faith in their own autonomy in the face of the demands of form and industry, expressing intuitive concepts of inspiration and practical insights into the nature of their work as work. The paper suggests that achieving and maintaining success is affirmed in a conjunction of value that is both economic and aesthetic, personal and public.