Peter Webb

University of the West of England, Sociology, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Mentions

173

Public Views

Dr. Peter Webb is a writer, lecturer and musician who specialises in research into popular and contemporary music, subcultures, globalisation, politics and social theory. He is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Webb previously worked within an independent record label from 1996 – 2002 as an artist and tour manager and is a published musician with three albums, various singles and remixes as Statik Sound System. He has worked with the physical theatre companies Blast Theory and Intimate Strangers and the film company Parallax Pictures. He is also the owner and Creative Director of the publishing company PC-Press that has published books on Test Dept. (2016) and Killing Joke (2018) and Massive Attack (coming in 2019).

less

Naim Kapucu

University of Central Florida

Bob Jessop

Lancaster University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Michael Orsini

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Ivan Katchanovski

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Luc Duerloo

University of Antwerp

Michaela Valente

Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma

Peter D. Thomas

Brunel University

Nicola Lupo

LUISS Guido Carli

Martin Papillon

Université de Montréal

InterestsView All (6)

Uploads

Papers by Peter Webb

Introduction: adventures in reality: why (punk) fanzines matter

Ripped, torn and cut, 2018

The introduction outlines the ways by which fanzines were integral to the development of punk-rel... more

The 2011 riots

http://www.democraticaudit.com, May 16, 2014

The rioting of 2011 started in London and spread to a number of other cities in the UK. Experts g... more The rioting of 2011 started in London and spread to a number of other cities in the UK. Experts gathered in Bristol recently to explore the links between popular music, civic unrest and communities, considering both the 2011 and unrest in the 1980s. In this post Peter Webb and Lucy Robinson, on behalf of the Subcultures Network, summarise the discussion and shares findings, showing how interpretations by the media and politicians fail to tell the real story of the riots

The milieu culture of punk: Beyond the scene – a guide to thinking and researching culture

British Youth Cultures and the Wider World

Britain and the World

7.“Utopian Punk”: The Concept of the Utopian in the Creative Practice of Björk “Utopian Punk”: The Concept of the Utopian in the Creative Practice of Björk (pp. 313-330)

“Utopian Punk”

Utopian Studies, 2010

... Ruth Levitas writes of this view as one where utopia is squeezed into interstitial spaces, a... more

Cambridge Companion to Music and Digital Culture

Utopian Punk": The Concept of the Utopian in the Creative Practice of Björk

Utopian Studies, 2010

... Ruth Levitas writes of this view as one where utopia is squeezed into interstitial spaces, a... more

Putting e-commerce in its place: reflections on the impact of the Internet on the cultural industries

‘Infected by the seed of postindustrial punk bohemia’: Nick Cave and the milieu of the 1980s underground

Popular Music History, 2009

Accounting for e-commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital

Economy and Society, 2005

This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representat... more This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

Download

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-War Britain

Contemporary British History, 2012

Otaku fever? The construction of enthusiasm and the co-production of markets

Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers annual conference, London, Sep 1, 2005

On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet

Media Culture & Society, Mar 1, 2005

This article examines a crisis of reproduction that began to afflict the music industry in the la... more This article examines a crisis of reproduction that began to afflict the music industry in the late 20th century. It considers the causes of the crisis and explores some of the ways in which the industry is being reformed in the face of the emergence of a new regime of socio-technical organization. The musical economy, at the time of writing, was dominated by four large corporations-AOL-Time Warner, Sony/BMG, Universal and EMI-that were responsible for 80 percent of global music sales and had significant interests across the media, entertainment and technology sectors. In the early 21st century, the music divisions of all these companies experienced a reversal of fortune, linked to falling sales and numerous misplaced investments. This marked a significant break with what, in retrospect, may subsequently be interpreted as a 'golden era' in the history of the music industry, during which it enjoyed about 15 years of steady growth in recorded music sales following the introduction of the compact disc (CDs) as the predominant format for the playback of recorded music (Figure 1). In 2001, global music industry sales fell by 5 percent, and then by over 9

Download

‘Infected by the seed of postindustrial punk bohemia’: Nick Cave and the milieu of the 1980s underground, 2008

This article uses the concepts of cultural milieu and music genre to explore the work of Nick Cav... more This article uses the concepts of cultural milieu and music genre to explore the work of Nick Cave in the 1980s and later. Milieu theory is derived from the work of phenomenologists Alfred Schutz and Jorg Durschmitt. The article analyses the transgressive milieu of Cave and such collaborators as Blixa Bargeld and Lydia Lunch and considers the way in which the music genres of punk, post-punk, gothic and industrial have been implicated in Nick Cave’s recorded output.

Download

Introduction: adventures in reality: why (punk) fanzines matter

Ripped, torn and cut, 2018

The introduction outlines the ways by which fanzines were integral to the development of punk-rel... more