Robert Faulkner is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He researches, writes, and lectures on social organization, white-collar crime, and the culture of jazz and improvisation.
Books published with Transaction Publishers: 

Hollywood Studio Musicians: Their Work and Careers in the Recording Industry

​Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry​

Books and Monographs:

Pensando juntos: la historia de un proyecto de investigación*, 2013. Annenberg School of Communication. With Howard S. Becker. 

Thinking Together: An E-Mail Exchange and All That Jazz, 2013.
e-book, The Annenberg Press. With Howard S. Becker. 

Corporate Wrongdoing and The Art of The Accusation. 2011. London: Anthem Press. Tracts of Our Time Series.

“Do You Know?” The Jazz Repertoire in Action.   2009.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. With Howard S. Becker.   

 El Jazz en Accion: la dinamica de los musicos sobre el scenario.  2011.  Buenos aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editors.

 Qu’est-ce qu’on joue, maintenant?  Le repertoire de jazz in action. 2011. Paris: Editions La Decouverte, Collection. 

Repertoires of Wrongdoing in Markets.  2007. University of Lodz.  Institute of Economics and Sociology.  Poland. Cykl Wyktadow Dziekanscich. Gospodarka i  Spoteczenstwo.

Repertuary przestepstw gospodarczych.  2007. Wydzial Ekonomiczny  Socjologiczny.

Art From Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations.2006.  Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (editors).  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Music On Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry.  1983.Robert R. Faulkner.  New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.  Paperback Edition 2002. 

Varieties of Qualitative Research: Studying Organizations.  1982. With John Van Mannen.  Innovations in Methodology  Series.  Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. 

Hollywood Studio Musicians: Their Work and Careers In The Film Industry.  1971. Robert R. Faulkner. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.  Observations Series. Reprinted 1985.  Lanham, MD: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. University Press of America.  
Selected Review Essays and Book Reviews

The New Economic Sociology: Developments in an Emerging Field, edited by Mauro F. Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer.  New York: Russell Sage. 2002.  Contemporary Sociology, A Journal of Reviews 32: 445-447.  

Markets in Fashion. By Patrik Aspers.  Sweden: City University Press.  2001. American Journal of Sociology.  March 2002. Volume 107: 1371-1373. 

“Chops.”  Review Essay.  The Birth of BeBop.  By S. DeVeaux.  California: University of California Press.  Contemporary Sociology, A Journal of Reviews.  28:  431-433. 

“Karl Polanyi Meets The Masters of The Universe.”  Review Essay. Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street.  By Mitchel Y. Abolafia.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1997.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 26: 688-691.  

Careers and Creativity: Social Forces in the Arts.  By Harrison D. White.  1994.  Colorado: Westview Press.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 22: 880-882.

The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts.  1993. By Diana Crane.  Newbury Park, CA: Sage.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 22: 740-742.

Nonprofit Enterprise in The Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint.  Edited by Paul J. DiMaggio.  New York: Oxford University Press.  Administrative Science Quarterly. 1990, 34: 652-656.

Music Matters: The Performer and the American Federation of Musicians.  By George Seltzer.  Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press.  American Journal of Sociology. 1989. 95: 1079-1081. 

The Production of Culture in the Music Industry: The ASCAP-BMI Controversy.  By John Ryan.  Lanham, MD: University Press of America.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 14: 393-394.

“Designs on Demand.”  Review Essay of  Architects and Firms: A Sociological Perspective on Architectural Practice. By Judith R. Blau.  Cambridge, MA/: MIT Press.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 14: 545-548.

Fieldwork Experience: Qualitative Approaches to Social Research.  By W.B. Shaffir.  New York: St. Martin.  Review Essay.  Qualitative Sociology 4: 174-176.

Qualitative Sociology.  By J. Jacobs and H. Schwartz. New York: Free Press.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews  9: 740-743.

“Five New Journals and Some Thoughts on Old Ones.”  Invited Feature Essay.  Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews.  9: 477-482.  With Malcolm Spector. 

Recent Work -- Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of Accusation

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"Robert Faulkner adds a new, fascinating, and persuasive dimension to our understanding of corporate law-breaking, by demonstrating that it is accusations rather than official actions against capitalist enterprises that hit the hardest. Accusations claim the infliction of grievous harm, assume guilt, and employ defamatory language and derogatory portraits of alleged perpetrators that are far severer than those which appear when the enforcement and adjudicatory agencies take over. This is a book that will enlighten readers seeking to comprehend the dynamics of the recent economic meltdown and earlier episodes of malfeasance in the corporate world.’"—Professor Gilbert Geis, University of California, Irvine

To purchase a copy, click here.

Le Monde, August 28-29, 2011
Book of the Day: Jazzmen/Sociologists

_ "The enigma the two authors want to resolve is the following: how can musicians—who don’t know each other, who might be of different nationalities and speak different languages, and who have never played together—after exchanging a few short muttered words or a few gestures, perform without a score in front of them a coherent music with an introduction, themes, solos, and conclusion and with that rhythmic energy on the beat that we call “swing”?

The answer is simple but requires scholarly development, in musicology as well as in history, economics, sociology of culture, and aesthetics in order to understand how the musicians agree on a tune, a key and a tempo.

Until the appearance of rock’n’roll in the mid-Fifties, concomitant with victory of television over radio and of the concert in clubs and other places specifically devoted to jazz over playing for dancing, this music was routinely played  by what Marc Perrenoud called, in his book Les Musicos, “ordinary musicians,” who made their living, more or less well, from music, and who inevitably did not take themselves to be artists. But it was among them that there arose the artists whose names attracted the public, the stars and even the unanimously recognized geniuses, like Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane, those who changed the path that the music took.

All of them, the famous and the unknowns, drew from a common body of tunes tey all knew, both ”standards” from the Great American Song Book and tunes composed by jazz players for themselves, new melodies often based on the chords and harmonic patterns borrowed from standards with some harmonic alterations (so What Is This Thing Called Love {Porter 1929} became the be=bop tune Hot House recorded by Parker and Gillespie in 1945).

Consider that an experienced jazz player will know between 300 and 600 items from this repertoire, and will know their melodies, harmonic progressions, structure, and if possible the words in order to create on the spot, on these forms a new melody: a solo.

 From the Sixties on, the repertoire diversified, more or less abandoning the standards in favor of more complicated compositions which no longer made it possible for musicians of different generations to play together easily. The artists took over the venues, and the ordinary musicians continued to play whatever was necessary for whatever jobs they could get, whatever the audience wanted.  The book by Becker and Faulkner is a work of public health because it dissipates the mysteries of creation."
Book Chapters and Articles:

The Social Organization of Treason: Anti-Nazi Networks in The Third Reich, Robert R. Faulkner and Eric R. Cheney

"On Sensitizing Concepts.”  2009. Chapter  4, Pp. 79-91.  Ethnographies Revisited: Constructing Theory in The Field.  Edited by Antony J. Puddephatt, William Shaffir and Steven W. Kleinknecht.  London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

"Breakdown of Brokerage." 2011. With Eric R. Cheney. 

“Social Capital, Double Embeddedness, and Mechanisms of Stability and Change.”  American Behavioral Scientist.  2009. Volume 52, Number 11: 1531-1555.  With Wayne Baker.  

"Studying Something You Are Part of: The View from the Bandstand,"Ethnologie Française, XXXVIII (2008), pp. 15-21. With Howard S. Becker

“Le repertoire de jazz.”  2006. Pp. 243-48 in Enonciation Artistique et Socialite, edited by Jean-Philippe Uzel.  Paris: L'Harmattan.  With Howard S. Becker.  

“Corporate Crime and Its Consequences.”  2006.  Chapter in International Encyclopedia of  Economic 

Sociology.  Jens Beckert and Milan Zafirovski (editors). London: Routledge Publishers. With Donald Palmer and Michael Maher. 

“Shedding Culture.”  2006.  Pp. 91-117.  In Art From Start to Finish.  University of Chicago Press.     

“Hollywood Film Music: Movies.net. two-mode network.”  Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek.  2004.  W. de Nooy, A Mrvar, and V. Batagelj.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Chapter 5.  
                        
“Are they Playing Our Song? Programming Strategies on  Commercial Music Radio.”  2006. Pp. 155-176.  Chapter 10 in The Business of Culture: Strategic Perspectives on Entertainment & Media.  Joseph Lampel, Jamal Shamsie and Theresa Lant, editors.  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.  With Jarl A. Ahlkvist.  

“Social Networks and Loss of Capital.”  2004.  Social Networks 26: 91-111. With Wayne Baker.

“Diffusion of Fraud: Intermediate Crime and Investor Dynamics.”  2003. Criminology 41: 1173-1206.  With Wayne Baker.

“Crime by Committee: Conspirators and Company Men in The Illegal Electrical Industry  Cartel, 1954-1959.”  2003.  Criminology 41: 511-554.  With Eric Cheney, Wayne Baker and Gene Fisher.

“Our Turn.”  2002. Accounts: A Newsletter of Economic Sociology.  3: 1-4.

“Inter-organizational Networks.”  2001.  The Blackwell Companion to Organizations.  Joel Baum, editor.  Pp. 520-540.  Blackwell Publishers.  2005 paperback edition.  With Wayne Baker.  

 “Will This Record Work For Us?  Managing Music Formats in Commercial Radio.”  2002.  Qualitative Sociology 25: 189-215.  With Jarl Ahlkvist. 

“Hazards of The Market: Continuity and Dissolution of Interorganizational Market Relationships.”  1998.  American Sociological Review 63: 147-177.  With Wayne Baker and Gene Fisher.  Funded by The American Sociological Association and The National Science Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline. 

“The Social Organization of Conspiracy: Illegal Networks in the Heavy Electrical Equipment Industry.”  1994.  American Sociological Review 58: 837-860. 

2012. Reprinted in Organizational Networks Research, edited by Martin Kilduff Diageo and Andrew V. Shipilov. Sage Library of Business and Management Publications.   

2008.  Reprinted in The Analysis of Markets in Modern Economical Sociology, edited by Vadim Radayev. Chapter 5.  Moscow, Russia: State University, Higher School of Economics Publishing House.  

2005. Reprinted in Critical Studies in Economic Institutions, edited by Walter Powell and Gernot Grabher. Chapter 10. Edward Elgar Publishing 

2005. Reprinted in The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics: New Development in Economic Sociology, edited byRichard Swedberg.   Chapter 14.  Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.     

“The Dynamics of Role Enactment.”  1994.  Chapter in Self, Collective Behavior and Society: Essays Honoring The Contributions of Ralph H. Turner.  Gerald Platt and Chad Gordon, editors.   Pp. 235-248. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.  

“Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry.”  1994.  American Journal of Sociology 97: 279-309.  With Wayne Baker.   

“Strategies for Managing Suppliers of Professional Services.”  1992.  California Management Review 33: 33-45.  With Wayne Baker.

“Organizational Cognition in a Jazz Ensemble: Rethinking Weick.”  1989.  Empirical Studies of the Arts 7: 57-77.  With John Voyeur.  

“Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers: Evidence From Hollywood.”  1987.  American Journal of Sociology 92: 879-909. 

Reprinted in Critical Studies in Economic Institutions.  Edited by Gernot Grabher.  Edward Algar Publishing. 2006.

Reprinted in Economic Sociology Studies.  Summit Publications, Index Summit Business  Communications.  Cambridge, MA. 1996-1998. 

“Building A Tenant's Protest Organization: An Ethnography.”  1984.  Urban Life 12: 445-465.  

“Credits and Craft Production:  Freelance Social Organization in the Hollywood Film Industry. 1983. Symbolic Interaction 6: 111-123.  Special Issue: Interaction and Social Organization.  Gary Allen Fine, editor.  

“Swimming With Sharks: Occupational Mandate and The Film Composer in Hollywood.”  1978. Qualitative Sociology 11: 99-129

“Time and Television News.”  1978.  Sociological Quarterly 19: 89-102.  With R. Gelles.

“Uneasy Home Coming” Stages in the Reentry Transition Among Vietnam Veterans.”  1977.  Urban Life 6: 303-328.  With D. McGaw. 

“Work Individuation Among Women Machine Operators.”  1977.  Sociology of Work and Occupations 4: 303-326.  With S. DiGiacomo.  

“Dilemmas in Commercial Work: Hollywood Film Composers and Their Clients.”  1976. Urban Life 5: 3-32.  

“Making Violence by Doing Work: Selves, Situations, and the World of Professional Hockey.”  1974.  Sociology of Work and Occupations 1: 288-312. 

  Reprinted in Social Problems in Athletics: Essays in the Sociology of Sport.  Edward H. Landers, editor.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press.  1976.  

“Coming of Age in Organizations: A Comparative Study of Career Contingencies and Adult Socialization.”  1974.  Sociology of Work and Occupations 1: 131-173.

Reprinted in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction.  C. Stone and H. Farberman,editors. 1984.  New York: John Wiley. 

Reprinted in Sport and Social Order: Handbook for Sport Sociology.  D. Ball and J.W.Loy, editors 1975.  Reading, Ma.: Addison Wesley.  

“Career Concerns and Mobility Motivations of Orchestra Musicians.”  1973.  Sociological Quarterly 14: 334-349. 

 Reprinted in The Culture of Work, Douglas Harper and Helen Lawson editors.  2004.  Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 

“Making Us Sound Bad: Performer Compliance and Interaction in the Symphony Orchestra.”  1973. In P. Stewart and M. Cantor.  Varieties of Work Experience.  Cambridge, Ma.: Schenkman.

“Orchestra Interaction: Features of Communications and Authority in an Artistic Organization.”  1973.  Sociological Quarterly 13: 147-157.  

Reprinted in Art and Society.  A.W. Foster and J.R. Blau. 1989.  Ithaca, NY: Suny Press. Reprinted in Performers and Performances: The Social Organization of Artistic Work.  J.B. Kamerman and R. Martorella. 1983.  New York: Praeger.  

“Hollywood Studio Musicians: Making It in the Los Angeles Film and Recording Industry.  1972.  In American Music. C. Nanry, editor.  New York: Transaction Books.
Robert R. Faulkner, Professor of Sociology at UMASS studies jazz culture, social organization, white-collar crime, organized crime, and ethnographic research. He is also a well-known trumpet player in the Western Massachusetts region and an esteemed author with several books published.