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Nick Crossley is professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is the author of, among others, Intersubjectivity: The fabric of social becoming (1996), The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (2001), Making Sense of Social Movements (2002) and Contesting psychiatry: Social movements in mental health (2006).In his last book Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: the Punk and Post-Punk Music Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975-1980 (2015), Crossley examines the birth of punk in London and its diffusion across England. Using social network analysis, he emphasises micro-mobilisation mechanisms that are behind the emergence of punk.Interview by Loïc Riom (may 2016).Before working on music worlds, you first conducted research on social movements and psychiatry. How did you start studying popular music and how did your former research object influence the way you approached the music worlds? I came to my work on music from a number of different angles. I’ve always been a big music fan (all kinds of music), ever since I discovered punk at about 10 years old. It’s always been important to my identity and lifestyle. When I first started studying sociology, before university, I was drawn to the work on subcultures because of this but when I got to university there wasn’t a course on subculture, or anything like it, and I started looking at other things. I did think about looking at music a few times after that but for a long time I couldn’t think of an angle. I wasn’t familiar with sociological work on music, at least not until I moved to Manchester University and met up with Pete Martin. I enjoyed reading his book[i] and agreed with most of it but I still couldn’t see an ‘in’ for myself and I was a little unsure if I wanted to analyse music as it was (and still is) my escape from work. Pete planted a seed though when he came to ask me something about social movements one day. I think he was doing something about the Hallé Orchestra and he was thinking about its formation and work as akin to a social movement, and telling me that there was no real difference between mobilisation of a social movement and mobilisation of a musical movement or world – hence his interest in social movement theory. That resonated with me.What really got me moving though was when I became more interested in social networks and their importance in relation to collective action. I found the work in that area, which is mostly written by social movement scholars, fascinating and very persuasive and I wanted to try out and develop the ideas for myself but it was really difficult because it’s hard to get good network data on social movements. At some point, perhaps with the subliminal influence of Pete, I started to think ‘well, why does it have to be social movements? Why not another form of collective action, like a musical movement (or ‘music world’ as I came to call them)?’ I’d been unhealthily obsessed with the details of punk as a kid, so I knew about some of the links between the likes of Bernard Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren, Siouxsie etc. and, originally for teaching purposes I think, I began constructing their network. It was very exciting. Every new source I consulted seemed to throw up further links that I hadn’t known about and the mystery of punk’s emergence –it had been a genuine mystery for me as a kid, how and why something so exciting, with all these weird and wonderful characters, could come about- became less and less mysterious (but no less exciting, fortunately). I felt like Sherlock Holmes and I also had a great excuse to start reading loads of music sociology and stuff about punk, not to mention filling in gaps in my record collection (‘I’ve got to, it’s research!’).Howard Becker’s work provided a key reference point in all of this for me. Again there are lots of reasons for this, including the fact that his book is extremely insightful and persuasive, and rooted in analytic traditions that I already subscribed to, but his insistence that art is collective action was central. That claim is the key to music sociology for me and it also facilitated my shift in focus. I’m not sure that he really intends a comparison with social movements. He certainly doesn’t suggest that, as far as I can remember, but for me it created an opening that allowed me to move from what I had been doing (social movements) to what I now wanted to do (music); one type of collective action to another.What do you think theories on social movements and music worlds can learn from each other?  There are lots of ways of approaching this – how long have we got??One thing that really jumped out at me when I began reading what people had had to say about the emergence of punk was the tendency to explain it as a response to social/political/economic crisis in the UK in the mid 70s. There was a crisis of course but this didn’t entirely square for me for two reasons. Firstly, it has been a mantra in the social movements literature since the early 70s that strains, grievances and crises do not cause social movement mobilisation or protest. Statistical analyses show no relationship between worsening social conditions and mobilisation, and inequality and deprivation are far more common than protest, such that the former cannot explain the latter. Charles Tilly expresses this somewhere by saying that a constant (e.g. deprivation, inequality, domination) cannot explain a variable (i.e. protest). We need to look elsewhere, and that is where networks, as one amongst a number of ‘micro-mobilisation structures’ come in. Insofar as we are interested in how new music worlds, or at least underground and grassroots music worlds, emerge, these reflections on micro-mobilisation (and there is a lot more there than I have drawn upon) are very important and could be very useful for music scholars.Of course the emergence of new worlds is one amongst a whole range of questions we might want to ask about them. In addition, we might want to know both about their structure and organisation at any one point in time and also their trajectory or ‘career’, as Herbert Blumer[ii] puts it. Why do some music worlds survive and others not? Why and how do some become mainstream? How are they reproduced through time? Social movement studies might help with some of these questions but some are more specific to music worlds.I should stress that some music worlds have more parallels with social movements than others. The social movements literature is useful where we are looking at grassroots and emergent music worlds. It may be useful in relation to the more established and/or commercial and mainstream end of the music worlds spectrum but I’m less sure about that. It’s a question for further empirical research.One more thing on the emergence of new worlds – music sociology has its own approach to the issue of how new music worlds emerge: Richard Peterson’s ‘Production of Culture’ perspective[iii]. To my mind Peterson’s approach resonates with work on ‘opportunity structures’ in the social movements literature; the idea that movements emerge when and where they do because new opportunities open up for their mobilisation and success. I think that this must be true but both perspectives tend to focus upon shifts in opportunities which are relatively rare and therefore do not explain the emergence of many music worlds (I found no evidence for any of the opportunity factors Peterson focuses upon in relation to punk). I also think that both perspectives focus upon social conditions which allow underground developments to become mainstream but they do not really explain how the underground developments get going in the first place, and of course there are other ways in which underground developments go mainstream – in the case of punk it was the Bill Grundy interview and more specifically the moral panic it triggered which catapulted punk from the margins to the mainstream. Having said that, Peterson’s work is crucial because it forces us to be mindful of the wider industry and societal context in which music worlds emerge.In addition to these issues, going back to the idea that punk was a response to crisis, because I had spent such a long time looking at political activists, who confront the problems they’re opposing in very direct and explicit ways, I was a bit hesitant to see punk per se as a protest or form of political activity. To be deliberately provocative, if you’re aggrieved at the state of the world it would be more obvious to join a political party or protest group than to buy and learn a musical instrument, form a group, write some songs and play them to half a dozen people in your local pub; or to rip your clothes and then stick them back together with safety pins, for that matter. Some punks were very political, of course, and I became interested in politics myself by way of punk (I used to listen carefully to Cr@ss and read the various booklets they produced, at first because they were funny but then second time round because they interested me and, at that time, caught my imagination). I am not questioning that. But, as I knew from experience and as my research further suggested to me, a lot of punks, particularly in the early days, weren’t political and were turned off by the politics of others. Punk became more political, for a higher proportion of punks, over time, particularly as social movements (on both the right and the left) recognised its mobilising and recruitment potential and sought to use and infiltrate it, but I’m not sure that political meanings were dominant at its inception (except perhaps for a few agitators, such as Jamie Reid and Bernard Rhodes). Its pioneers were interested in underground music and fashion but in creating an exciting music world they created a potent vehicle for political expression which the more political amongst them, as well as outsiders drawn in by this potential, could use.Music worlds and social movements might be thought of as circles in a Venn diagram; some musos have no interest in politics and some politicos have no interest in music but the circles often do overlap to some extent and those overlaps can be both very interesting and very important. As social movement scholars recognise, music is a very effective means of communicating, converting and recruiting. A music world is a potential political sphere, as we see time and again, from funk to punk, jazz to reggae, hip hop and grime. The power of music, in this respect, is something that social movement scholars must turn to music scholars to help them to explain. What we also learn from this though is the specificity of music. Music worlds may overlap with social movements and that is very important and interesting. But music worlds aren’t reducible to politics and that’s equally important. Music has its own form, allure etc.Furthermore, having said what I have, some social movements scholars operate with a very narrow (‘political science’) definition of ‘politics’ and ‘activism’ which work on music worlds may help to combat. Alberto Melluci’s work[iv] on new social movements was (amongst other things) an attempt, from within social movement studies to expand its definition of politics, and I’m always struck by how much he seems to have borrowed from the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) on subcultures. And the CCCS, at the end of the big collective paper in Resistance Through Rituals[v], make an interesting case that subcultures are a working class form of protest which can be compared with the more middle class format of the social movement. I am not entirely convinced of this, for a variety of reasons. However, in its defence, the culture of certain social movements can be quite alien and off-putting, and particular music worlds may well provide a more appealing home for some of the disaffected. Furthermore, it does seem to me that the appeal of underground and rebellious (in a broad sense) music worlds points to disaffection of a sort, even if it’s not exactly ‘political’ or even recognised as such by the actor. For example, Siouxsie was one of the pioneer punks who very strongly rejected the idea that punk was political (in her interview with Jon Savage in his England’s Dreaming Tapes[vi]) and yet her biography suggests that she had rejected mainstream culture from a relatively early age and was looking for something different, something which she found when she hooked up with fellow proto-punks. She enjoyed upsetting members of ‘straight society’ and seemingly rejected that society. This may not have been ‘big P Political’, and I expect that Siouxsie had no more time for politicos than she had for other ‘squares’ but there is some element of resistance there, which I find fascinating.David Riesman[vii] notes something very similar, back at the start of the 1950s, amongst his ‘hot jazz’ enthusiasts. He says that they couldn’t identify with mainstream culture and that’s why they turned to jazz. I suppose that some social scientists would reduce that to personality or a desire for recognition (‘look at me, I’m different’) but as both Riesman and the CCCS suggest, it may be a form of alienation which the individual responds to in a collective way by participating in an ‘alternative’ music world and in that sense it may have a political dimension. I think that the CCCS were wrong to interpret that reductively, in terms of class, and I’m not entirely happy with talking about it as protest (at least if we do not distinguish it from other, more obviously political forms of protest) but there is something there worthy of our attention, and the attention of social movement scholars.It’s also worth talking about the DIY element in some music worlds. DIY music worlds have a more obvious connection with social movements because of their grassroots nature and relative independence from corporate actors. Furthermore, the decision to go DIY probably can be read, in many cases, as a straightforwardly political decision – at least it can if participants are doing it because they oppose the power of the major music corporations. This points to a form of cultural politics which, again, the narrow definition of politics employed by some social movements scholars (admittedly much less so these days) can blind them to. For a long time social movement scholars were focused upon challenges to the state, and some definitions of social movements reflect that. The power of key corporate and industry players in relation to music is no less problematic, however, and DIY music is a very direct (not to forget often very exciting and creative) response to that. To my mind the circles of the Venn diagram are almost completely overlapping there. DIY music worlds are social movements.Your book Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion is partly based on your concept of the music world. Can you tell us a little bit about the idea behind it and its theoretical link with Howard Becker’s art world concept? I think that I probably came to Becker via Pete Martin’s Sounds and Society[viii] and his Music and the Sociological Gaze[ix] (Pete makes a lot of use of Becker). It immediately appealed to me. It is one of those rare books that both resonates with how you already perceive and experience things, both as a fan/participant and as an academic, and makes you see things differently. I’m not sure how he pulls that trick off but if you could bottle it … I can still remember first learning about punk and indeed about other music worlds that have excited me since. It’s like discovering a remote tribe somewhere, with its own ways of doing things, its heroes and villains, its places, the connections between everything and everybody. Becker captures that better than anybody else. Discovering and getting into a new form of music is like entering a new world. Of course it isn’t a remote tribe. It is very much connected to other, wider worlds, primarily through the other involvements of its participants and through the reliance of those involved on resources which to some extent flow in from outside, and must do so if a world is to survive. But Becker captures that too, particularly in the importance which attaches to resources and through his close ethnographic observations on the lives of musicians. He really shows how music is social activity, embedded in a wider social world (connecting with other forms of non-musical social activity), without ever losing sight of the fact that it is music and special because of that. Through Becker I began to see how you could think about music in a sociological way, actually engaging with the music itself (although admittedly I haven’t really done that yet) and in a way which respects the music as music.On the negative side I discovered Becker at a time when I was becoming disillusioned with the overly abstract nature of much sociology and the tendency to force empirical materials into pre-established theoretical boxes. He was and still is a great antidote to all of that. The Art Worlds[x] book is pitched at a very nice level; not absorbed in a very specific case study or even a specific art form but still very much engaged with the specificity of artistic activity. He offers tools for unpicking art and suggests questions which might help to open things up but there are no reductive models or pre-established boxes that have to be filled. Even the concept ‘world’ is really just a sensitising concept which helps you to get a grip on the activities of interest to you. There are also lots of quite subtle and persuasive answers to ‘big sociological questions’ in Art Worlds and its accompanying papers, although Becker doesn’t really frame them in that way, which I guess may obscure them from view, particularly for those who like their theory in high sounding and torturous prose, but they’re there.As I’ve already said, Becker’s conception of art as collective action was very important for me, both because it connected with my interest in social movements and because it brought agency to the fore, and so too was his insistence on the importance of networks. That brought structure to the fore (agents entangled in structures) and resonated with my interest in social networks. Beyond that, I found his discussions of places, resources and conventions all compelling and very useful. To my mind, as I’ve said, he offers a toolbox for analysing music or any other form of art as a form of social interactivity, without in anyway detracting from the fact that it is music or reducing it sociologically. Antoine Hennion[xi] seems to believe that Becker is guilty of the sociological reductionism that he (Hennion) wants to avoid but I just don’t see that. I think that Hennion attributes a reified notion of society or the social to Becker which Becker just doesn’t subscribe to. Read on his own terms Becker avoids all of that. Of course Becker’s aren’t the only tools that we need in the box. I have added others, drawing upon other writers, and there’s plenty more to do. But Becker is a great starting point.In my opinion one of the most significant contributions of the book is the idea of a critical network. Can you explain this a little further for our readers? One of my key claims in the book is that UK punk was created by a networked critical mass of proto-punks. By ‘critical mass’ I am trying to get at the idea that interesting music worlds emerge where there is a big enough pool of potential participants. The term ‘critical mass’ perhaps suggests more precision than I can give it. I’m not sure that there is single threshold for numbers of would-be participants at which musical collective action becomes possible (how many people are needed to some extent depends upon what those who are willing are prepared to do and put up with) and if there was a single threshold value I’m not sure how you would ever work out what it was. However, the basic idea is that bigger numbers (at least up to a point) are better because they generate the sense that something significant is happening and because making a music world requires hard work and the pooling and exchanging of a lot of resources which a smaller number of people simply may not have or be able to afford to give. The more people that are involved, the less each has to do and give for the same return (in terms of excitement and enjoyment), upping the incentive for involvement and thus making a music world more likely. This is why celebrated music worlds are often associated with big cities – would-be participants in a music world are often in a minority but in a big city, with a big population, even a small minority is often big enough to constitute a critical mass. I took this idea from social movement theory but since I started playing with it I’ve come across quite a few uses in relation to the arts, including music. It’s not without problems but it is useful and it captures a real phenomenon.It’s not sheer mass that matters, however. A mass can only give rise to a music world to the extent that they are connected in a relatively dense and compact network. There are many reasons for this and I should probably spare your readers the details but to be very brief, networks are important for: Coordination and communication. Participants in a music world must coordinate their activities (A gig requires that the band, audience and support personnel all turn up to the same place at the same time), which requires communication and thus networks. Resource mobilisation: in addition to information collective action requires a flow of resources; skills, technology, money, labour etc. must all find their way to the people who can make use of them. Again this happens by way of networks. Social Capital: networks encourage the emergence of trust, norms of cooperation and mutual support etc. and this facilitates actions (individual and collective) that would not otherwise be possible, allowing a world to form. Bands lend each other equipment and offer each other support slots, for example; likewise support personnel, who also sometimes go out on a limb for bands. Each benefits from the help of the others. Competition: but at the same time networks encourage competition between bands which is crucial because competition both encourages the hard work necessary to become good and it encourages artists to go out on a limb, be that bit more innovative. This keeps things interesting and creative, and helps to generate the new styles that worlds become know for. Collective effervescence, enforcement and diffusion: creativity comes from interaction. People bounce ideas off one another, respond and react to one another. It’s often difficult to say who came up with a particular idea because new ideas form across multiple, concatenated exchanges. When they do take shape, moreover, the network is important both for diffusing them, so everyone takes them on, and in some cases for creating a pressure to conform which encourages adoption. I came across some quite funny stories about tight trousers and short-hair in my work on punk. Some people could see the way the wind was blowing and voluntarily had their hair cut, ditching their flares at the same time, in order to be part of punk. The network was a reference group for them, in Robert Merton’s sense. Others, however, including Mick Jones of the Clash apparently, were very attached to their long hair and flares, and more or less had to be coerced to toe the line. Either way, the network is important because it both generates new styles and distributes them in a way that makes a world instantly recognisable, lending it identity. Recruitment; music world networks are embedded in participants’ other networks and participants recruit further participants from these other networks. People become involved in a music worlds because their friends already are.I have tried to give this idea of ‘networks’ some teeth by using the techniques and ideas of ‘social network analysis’. This also allows me to explore the structure of the networks involved, to compare them etc. And it has also allowed me to track the formation of the networks involved. This is central. Networks aren’t prime movers in social life. They help us to explain collective actions such as the birth of punk but they also have to be explained themselves.One criticism that has been addressed to the popular music studies is the tendency to reason in terms of musical genre, subculture or scene and by doing so drawing borders between things that might not be so different. Do you think your approach in terms of music worlds and network analysis can respond to some of these issues? I’ve been thinking about this recently. Not sure I have any answers, only rambles. I wonder if perhaps the question has a historical aspect. Boundaries seem less important these days. It’s important to be eclectic and cosmopolitan whereas, in the good old days, your allegiance to a particular type of music (and only that type) was subject to aggressive interrogation – think Trotskyist sect or Spanish Inquisition. And I think that there is a lot more fluidity than perhaps there used to be. I still hold to the fact, however, that you can’t have eclecticism and cosmopolitanism, you can’t have fusions, if you don’t have relatively distinct musical cultures to fuse and flit between. I also think that boundaries become more important the further you move away from the mainstream – I’ve done some research with Rachel Emms[xii] that sort of backs that up – it’s freely available at:http://mio.sagepub.com/content/9/2059799116630663.full.pdf+htmlI should flag up here, as well though, that I tend to think of actors as participating in a music world (such as punk) rather than being or not being a punk. This allows for fluidity. You can participate in both the punk world and the soul world in a way that you can’t necessarily be both a punk and a soul boy. It’s a matter of doing rather than being. However, participation draws our attention to the effort and other resources which participants expend, which may limit the number of worlds they can participate in. In some work on the folk singing world that I did with Fay Hield[xiii] we came across people who devoted so much of their time and effort to folk that it’s difficult to imagine that they had much left for anything else at all, let alone participation in another music world.A lot of my thinking about this has been methodological – how do you put boundaries around a music world in order to study it? Here’s a few thoughts. Firstly, participation in a music world is a multi-dimensional matter. It may involve the stylistic conventions (musical and sartorial) to which one adheres, one’s social networks, one’s identity and the labels that are applied to one etc. Secondly, each dimension is a continuum rather than a binary. You can be more or less central/marginal to a network, more or less adherent to a particular set of conventions etc. And you may score highly for one dimension (e.g. adherence to conventions) but not another (e.g. network centrality). Thirdly, consequently, participation is, to borrow an idea from Charles Ragin, a (very) ‘fuzzy set’[xiv]. Some people are definitely in a particular world. Some definitely are not. But many are in ‘to some extent’. This is thinking in progress and a lot more thinking is required!The other side to this is connection across worlds. Some people straddle them. I think that networks help us to think about this because in networks we commonly find clusters which are relatively cohesive and distinct but still connected to other clusters and not entirely separate. And we find clusters embedded within other clusters. I think that music worlds are like this.In the new project that I mention above, Rachel Emms and I looked at music festivals, linking them where one or more of the same artists played at them. We wanted to see whether we could find clusters corresponding to different worlds, and we did. We found fairly distinct jazz, metal and folk worlds (jazz was particularly distinct). All of the worlds were connected to one another, however, and there was a huge mainstream world which was much more eclectic. That’s as far as I’ve got so far but I am still thinking about these issues.In your book, you highlight the role of places in the networks creation process. With the on-going digitalization of our societies, do you think places are playing the same role as in the 70’s? That’s a good question. I’m very aware that things would be different now because of digitalisation but I guess we need more research to work out exactly how different and in what ways. I’ve seen interesting work (using network analysis) looking both at virtual music worlds, where artists share and discuss their work on-line, and also at the distributed nature of music production, with some contributors to a piece (including musicians) never actually meeting face-to-face or even working in the same studio. That must change things. Having said that, I find it difficult to imagine a music world in which live performance isn’t central and in which people (both artists and audiences) don’t want to gather to natter about and dance/mosh to their music, face-to-face, over a pint. For that reason I imagine that some places (venues and local hang outs) will remain central. I guess there may be some virtual-only worlds but (perhaps it’s my age) I can’t imagine them being very exciting. However, music’s places are under attack from other sides at the moment. I’m not sure of the situation outside of the UK but in the UK many of the smaller clubs are closing at an alarming rate (my PhD student, Rachel Emms, is a heavy metal promoter and is looking at this in relation to the metal circuit in a number of UK cities). It seems that new laws, dynamics of the property market and various other things are driving venue owners out of business (building on my earlier comments, about Peterson, we might theorise this as closure of opportunity structures for new music). I’m optimistic that music will remain important to people and that musos will find ways around these hurdles but I think that the impact will be pretty drastic if they don’t, precisely because place is so important. The growth in DIY worlds, with their various pop up and other unconventional venues is probably a (good) response to this.Coming with an urban sociologist background, I found your idea of critical network very interesting because it reminds me some ways of defining cities as node of dense networks between actors with very different backgrounds. How you thing the diversity of a city such as London contributed to the emergence of punk?   When you say diversity do you mean ethnic diversity? If so I’m not sure how important the diversity of London was to punk, except perhaps in relation to a small number of bands, such as the Clash, who were based in Ladbrook Grove, which was one of London’s more diverse areas, and who incorporated elements of reggae and other aspects of Jamaican culture into their music. Early punk, as far as I can tell, was, largely a white thing. There were exceptions and punks were exposed to reggae via Donn Letts’ DJ sets at the Roxy but it was only really when Rock Against Racism (RAR) got going (albeit fairly early in punk’s history but not initiated by punks) that black and white youths began mixing at gigs, and mixing their musical cultures and that wasn’t only in London. Indeed, Two Tone is a better example of the impact of diversity and its most diverse bands hailed from Coventry (the Specials and the Selecter) and Birmingham (the Beat).The combination of punk with reggae/ska was (and still is) fantastic and I suppose that such hybrids are much less likely to happen, or at least were much less likely to happen in the pre-digital days, when we were more dependent on face-to-face contact, outside of diverse cities. However, it sometimes takes a bit of an extra push, like RAR, to really bring diverse elements together. Music can provide that extra push (I’m thinking of the way in which punk in Norther Ireland brought Catholic and Protestant kids together) but sometimes it needs a push itself, something like RAR.Cities are important, however, because they have big, concentrated populations which means, all things being equal, that actors with minority tastes exist in big enough numbers to reach critical mass. There were no punk clubs or clothing shops in the small town that I grew up in, for example, and punk bands (apart from a few local ones) rarely played because there weren’t enough punks in the town to make such things feasible (Justin Sullivan, of New Model Army, played once in the mid 80s, with Joolz and the Rev Hammer. They were fantastic but there can’t have been more than about 30 of us there, including the performers and the bar staff). And of course musicians know that and migrate to the cities, amplifying the city effect. London has an added allure because that’s where major labels and the music press (whose staff are often allergic to travel) are based, increasing opportunities, but other UK cities have hosted major music worlds both before and after punk. Manchester and the towns around it were the epicentre of Northern Soul, for example, and the city had famous punk, post-punk and dance worlds too. Similarly, Liverpool spawned the Merseybeat and then well-known post-punk and dance worlds.Would you agree with the claim that in your book, in a certain way, you forget the question of why punk emerged to shift to describe how it did it? I think that in this case, like many others, ‘the how’ is ‘the why’. Separating ‘the how’ from ‘the why’, ends from means, tends to suggest a linear conception of social life and/or human action in which events are preceded by other events or by conditions which adequately explain them, one billiard ball hitting another, or in which the outcomes of an actor’s actions can be reduced back to an intention or plan which they had all along (or which belongs to History in some mysterious Hegelian manner). Those can be comforting thoughts, they lend order and meaning to the world, but I think that they are too simplistic. They fail to engage with the relational and processual dynamics of social life, with its unpredictability and, indeed, the emergent creativity/inventiveness that occasionally takes hold in social interaction (‘collective effervescence’, as Durkheim called it). They assume, incorrectly, that big effects must have big causes. Complexity science is challenging a lot of these ideas today but I think that philosophers (e.g. Dewey) and to some extent sociologists (e.g. Mead, to an extent Elias and even the later Durkheim in places) have had glimpses of it for a long time.How would you answer the why question, independently of the how? By looking for an ultimate cause or set of causes? What would that/they look like? I examined the most likely explanations in the book and none of them bear close scrutiny. At best they point to important contextual factors which were taken up by some (not all) punks and which had shaped the lives and experiences of some (not all) of them (and in different ways). They couldn’t in any way be said to explain punk.An alternative approach might be to examine the reasons that animated punk’s pioneers. To some extent I did that, at least where I could find interviews with them, but that didn’t lead to any clear ‘why?’ answers. Nobody set out to invent punk, at least not initially. Its formation was well under way before any of those involved realised that they were involved in something and, in the case of some (I’m thinking of Malcolm McLaren in particular) sought to steer and capitalise upon it (McLaren was more successful in capitalising upon it than in steering it). Furthermore, it seemed to have different meanings for different participants and different meanings for the same participant at different points in time (McLaren, for example, seems to have changed his mind about what it was about over the course of its brief evolution). There were some, such as Jamie Reid and Bernard Rhodes, who had political backgrounds and attached a political meaning, a political ‘vocabulary of motive’ to it (as parties of both the far-left and the far-right would later do), and they were influential enough to make their mark upon it, but they precisely attached that meaning to something which already existed, and other people attached very different meanings and vocabularies of motive. I remember being particularly struck by an interview with Debbi Wilson (aka Debbi Juvenile of the Bromley Contingent) in which she says that punk wasn’t really about going to Sex Pistols gigs for her (implying that it was for other people) but rather about ‘looning about’ and ‘camping it up’ with a group of transvestites on Park Lane. It wasn’t even about music for her, let alone the many more noble causes that we sociologists like to find at work in the world. That is perhaps an extreme example, and we shouldn’t let it detract us from the fact that many of punk’s pioneers were very passionate about music, but I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies, none of which pointed to ‘why?’ factors beyond the sheer intrinsic pleasure and excitement of participating in what was going on, and all of which seemed to suggest that, initially at least, punk ‘just happened’ as a consequence of its various participants meeting, inspiring and influencing one another in various ways.What drew most of them together in the first place was their shared love of various forms of music (some mainstream, such as Bowie and Roxy, but many more underground, such as the MC5, Stooges, New York Dolls and pub rock) and related fashions. These tastes attracted them to such focal places and events as McLaren’s and Vivien Westwood’s shop, pub rock gigs and (later) the Pistols’ early art school gigs. I guess you could say that these tastes indicate a disenchantment with mainstream culture and that this was the why of punk but, to return to my earlier observation about social movement theory, disenchantment doesn’t explain mobilisation because it is more or less ubiquitous and mobilisation isn’t.I suppose you could say that punk provided an answer to a range of problems that young people were experiencing in the mid 70s, from boredom, alienation and hopelessness to the pomposity of prog rock and the musical vacuum created when glam rock began to go off the boil, and that its appeal, both for its pioneers and the many young people who later became punks, lay largely in this fact. However, I’m not sure that it provided the same answer to all people (to reiterate, people saw different things in it and participated for different reasons) and more importantly I don’t believe we can claim that it came about, initially, in order to address those problems. It perhaps grew and enjoyed success, to some extent, because people found answers in it but that is a different thing. For that reason I’d be reluctant to offer up its answer status as the ‘why?’ of its emergence.[i] Peter J. Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).[ii] Herbert Blumer, “Collective Behavior,” New Outline of the Principles of Sociology, 1951, 166–222.[iii] Richard A. Peterson, “The Production of Culture A Prolegomenon,” American Behavioral Scientist 19, no. 6 (1976): 669–84.[iv] Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).[v] Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (New York: Holmes &#38; Meier, 1976).[vi] Jon Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes (London: Faber &#38; Faber, 2009).[vii] David Riesman, “Listening to Popular Music,” American Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1950): 359–71.[viii] Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music.[ix] Peter J. Martin, Music and the Sociological Gaze: Art Worlds and Cultural Production (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).[x] Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984).[xi] Antoine Hennion, The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).[xii] Nick Crossley and Rachel Emms, “Mapping the Musical Universe: A Blockmodel of UK Music Festivals, 2011–2013,” Methodological Innovations 9 (2016), doi:10.1177/2059799116630663.[xiii] Fay Hield and Nick Crossley, “Tastes, Ties and Social Space: Exploring Sheffield’s Folk Singing World,” in Social Networks and Music Worlds, ed. Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew, and Paul Widdop (London: Routledge, 2015), 189–216.[xiv] Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).Image: by consent from Nick Crossley