Cooperative activity: The importance of audiences

This study of performances by three groups of musicians (of different genre) takes audiences into account and employs Couch's (1986) formulation of cooperation as the analytical framework. Couch and others using his formulation restricted their focus to the core cooperating group without attending to their audiences. Data for this study, however, showed that a lot of the musicians' behavior had no particular musical value but was directed toward the audiences instead. The authors examine these data and integrate audiences into Couch's formulation for cooperation. The authors will discuss the issues surrounding our core question: "How do cooperating groups of musicians integrate audiences into their thinking about cooperation and group performance?".