One of the most widely discussed societal impacts of Covid, mentioned on p.121 of the latest edition of my book, has been the shift from working at work to ‘working from home’, to the extent that the acronym WFH has entered everyday vocabulary. Many believe that, even as lockdowns and restrictions end, it may permanently change the way much work is organized. In line with the overall framework of my book, such changes can’t be separated from wider social and political issues.
An acrimonious discussion
Even during lockdowns and other restricted periods there was some acrimony in the WFH discussion. On the one hand, it was said with some justification that WFH was a luxury for those in certain kinds of white-collar and professional jobs leaving those in manual, retail or, most obviously, healthcare roles with much greater exposure to infection. On the other hand, and again with justification, it was clear that WFH was experienced very differently according to whether ‘home’ was a small urban apartment or a large house with a garden; and to whether it also doubled as a makeshift school or play group, and if so who took responsibility for that. In this way, inequalities of wealth, income and gender are inseparable from WFH.
Beyond those issues, WFH brought other features of work into a new focus. Some found it liberating in all kinds of ways – from ending the hassle of commuting and other work travel, to avoiding the strictures of office dress codes, to gaining greater control over when and how to work and, with that, a better work-life balance. Others (or even the same people at different times) missed the social interaction of the workplace, felt tyrannized or intimidated by working on-line, resented the costs, found it impossible to juggle the competing demands of working and living in one space, and were exposed to a much greater degree of on-line surveillance.
Back to work
It’s a discussion which has become even more highly charged as restrictions have eased. Many people have not wanted to return to the old ways, and want to continue WFH for all or part of the time. Many employers have accepted or even welcomed that, others have resisted or even, as at Elon Musk’s Tesla, refused to accommodate it.
This has become a politically high-profile issue in the UK because the government has been keen to make civil servants stop WFH, with Jacob Rees-Mogg – the Minister for government efficiency – being an especially strong advocate for this. Notoriously, he has even taken to leaving passive-aggressive notes on the desks of civil servants who are WFH, cajoling or shaming them to return to the office. One obvious aspect of this politicization is that it is part of a populist narrative in which WFH is depicted as a cushy perk for ‘the elite’, denied to ‘the people’, although doing so ignores, amongst other things, the fact that so much call centre work has been transferred to WFH.
Within this populist narrative, there is also a certain kind of managerial understanding whereby workers are seen as skivers, and need the discipline of being ‘at work’ in order to work. That, too, ignores the at best mixed evidence about whether WFH is less productive than working at work, as well as the fact that, wherever work is done, electronic surveillance is far more prominent in the modern workplace than personal overseeing. Indeed, images of Rees-Mogg’s work desk, bereft of any kind of computer, were widely mocked as indicative of his ante-diluvian understanding of this entire issue.
An (ex-)academic’s interest
The WFH debate is obviously of interest from an organization studies point of view, but it also interests me personally. The first UK lockdown started just as I handed in my resignation in order to take early retirement. I thus spent the last few months of my academic career working entirely from home, and have not experienced ‘going back normal’. But, like many academics, I have always worked from home when possible. This can, I suppose, be regarded as a perk or a privilege, but it arises from the nature of at least some academic work in that, apart from teaching and meetings, there’s really no need to be on university premises for a lot of the time. Things like teaching preparation and marking, for example, can easily be done at home, as can writing up research and many kinds of data analysis.
That varies by discipline, of course, because for engineers, experimental scientists and others much research work needs to take place in laboratories (for that matter, many humanities and social science academics need to do research in libraries, archives or, in the many various senses of the term, the field). It may perhaps also be affected by seniority, in that the more senior you are the more likely you are to need to attend meetings because you are more likely to have extensive managerial responsibilities.
Shirking, flexibility and productivity
At all events, overall, over the years, I probably worked at least as many days at home as I have ‘in the office’. That did not become more true over the years in that it is not particularly an artefact of new technologies, although they have also had an impact. It’s certainly the case that doing so always engendered a certain amount of resentment or misunderstanding from neighbours, friends and family who often assumed that WFH meant not working at all or, at least, that you are available for interruption in way that would not be the case when ‘at work’. That is clearly a version of the view that WFH is shirking.
It was a view shared by at least some university administrative and support staff, who did not have this flexibility and had to work normal office hours ‘in the office’, and I think did sometimes feel that academics were privileged and even lazy. And it has to be admitted that this was sometimes true. It’s also the case that over the years university senior managers have become more hostile to academics WFH, and have (increasingly successfully) sought to control and restrict it. Again, that is not entirely without justification in that some academics do use WFH as a way to avoid things they don’t like doing. There is also a certain irony in the extreme resistance of many, especially older, academics to losing exclusive work-space (i.e. single-occupancy offices) even though it quite often sits empty.
Against all that, in my experience the vast majority of academics are not in any sense shirkers, and used WFH responsibly and sensibly. Personally, I would say it made me more ‘productive’ and certainly more flexible, in that, it’s true, there might be days when I was ostensibly working from home but in fact doing something else, and sometimes somewhere else. But, invariably, that was far more than compensated for by working at home but outside of normal office hours.
If anything, my experience is that being flexible in practice meant working longer hours, precisely because ‘home’ was also a place of work and, in that sense, evenings and weekends don’t have the same separate status from work that they otherwise might do. Equally, I can recall periods in my career when I used to go into my university office at weekends to do certain kinds of work for which I needed what in those days were paper files, and by doing so could work uninterrupted in a way that I couldn’t when in the office during normal working hours.
WFH: a privilege?
I appreciated that flexibility, but I am not sure that it is quite right to regard it as a privilege. In one particular respect, and despite the strictures of some university managers against it, it arises partly from the need of universities to recruit in a rather specialised labour market. This, combined with the nature of academic salaries, the housing market, and the realities of dual-career families, means that in many parts of the country universities could not staff themselves without appointing people who live many miles, in some cases many hundreds of miles, away, and even in different countries. That is viable only because of an unwritten understanding (often in direct contradiction of what is in the written employment contract) that it is possible to WFH for a good proportion of the time.
That has had some good consequences for universities in terms of increasing the scale and diversity of the employment pool. I think it has also had some adverse impacts in terms of sustaining academic culture. For example, it has become much harder than when I started as an academic to get large attendances for departmental research seminars and the social events that often used to come after them. That’s partly because of increasing workloads, but I think it is also a consequence of a more geographically dispersed faculty.
Equally, although the erosion of the traditional notion of universities as ‘self-governing communities of scholars’ has mainly occurred for other reasons, I can’t help thinking that this geographical dispersal has been a contributing factor. Communities do need some degree of presence and, rather as with the issue of the social interactions of the workplace, these can’t be altogether technologically mediated.
Interpreting WFH
Aside from universities, for years, indeed decades, now, organizations and organizational theorists have been heralding – under all kinds of different labels – the rise of flexible work patterns in which the ‘when and where’ of work have been de-coupled, and the strict binary of work and non-work eroded (see p.84 of my book). The debates about that very much mirror the current ones about WFH. In brief, it can be regarded as giving people more choice and autonomy, whilst serendipitously making them more productive. Or it can be regarded as encroaching on, even absorbing, the non-work spaces and times of people’s lives in the relentless pursuit of productivity. It can be regarded as more controlling, or as less so; as supporting work-life balance or as eroding it.
That contestability of interpretation might, amongst other things, suggest that the ‘answer’ to the desirability of WFH does not inhere in WFH itself. Rather, it depends upon the specific contexts and ways in which WFH occurs. It’s not on the face of it clear why anyone would regard working in the putting-out system as desirable or privileged compared with working in the factory system, or vice versa. By the same token, whilst WFH may have revealed many kinds of inequalities it is not the cause of them and they will persist regardless of whether people return to the office or not. And the inequality with which WFH can be enmeshed is quite different to the question of whether or not it is a productive way of working.
To put it another way, my years as an academic were privileged to the extent that being an academic used to be, and to some extent still is, a relatively privileged occupation. But that would still have been true even if I hadn’t WFH, and had I not been allowed to do so I would have been no more, and probably rather less, productive an academic than was, in fact, the case.
What is wholly illegitimate is for populist politicians like Rees-Mogg, themselves highly privileged, hugely invested in the perpetuation of privilege, and with no intention at all reducing structural inequality, to use WFH as a weapon in the faux-egalitarian politics of populism.
Friday 3 June 2022
Sunday 27 March 2022
P&O and Priestley's prophecy
In successive editions of my book since the second and including the latest, fifth, one, I have included the firm P&O in a long list of examples of what were once British companies that became internationally owned (pp. 109-110 of this edition). This forms the starting point of my analysis of the new capitalism as it relates to organization studies.
P&O has been much in the news this week, following the brutal sacking by Zoom of almost 800 workers in order to replace them with cheaper foreign labour. In fact, in illustration of one of the arguments I make in the book, even to speak of “P&O” is a misnomer, because what was once a company of that name has been endlessly diced and sliced in different configurations, so that the entity that actually made the sackings was P&O Ferries. That is part of the P&O Group, the modern-day history of which is an exemplar of the ‘new capitalism’ business model.
For example, from the 1980s onwards it diversified from shipping into a wide array of other areas such as construction and property management. Then, from the start of this century, it divested itself of those activities until, in 2006, it was bought by Dubai Ports World (DP World), a company owned by the Dubai government. However, P&O Ferries was shortly afterwards transferred to Dubai World (DW), the parent company of DP World and also owned by the Dubai government, until being re-sold to DP World in 2019. Meanwhile, P&O Ferries’ actual vessels are registered under a wide variety of flags of convenience.
So, this, in very brief, is the story of one example of what globalization means for corporate ownership – and it leaves out much else, including the interactions between DW and DP World and corporate entities in the US, China and Australia. At the end of the chain, and very much subservient to it, is the workforce of P&O Ferries, including both those who have been sacked and those who are being hired at pittance wages to replace them.
P&O was once a British company, but similar developments have occurred all around the world, although successive UK governments have been especially relaxed about corporate sell-offs. Moreover, certainly compared with most EU countries (and this was the same even when it was part of the EU), UK employment law offers workers fewer protections from sackings of this sort. In any case, by its own admission P&O deliberately broke at least parts of this law – regarding consultation with trade unions – apparently because it judged the penalties for doing so to be outweighed by the benefits.
The consequence of businesses being owned and run in this way is to sever the links that can – at least in principle - otherwise exist between owners, communities, and employees. Even in the narrowest of business terms this is problematic. For why, when business owners are so manifestly uncommitted to them should workers feel or show any commitment to their businesses? Similarly, to the extent that such sackings damage ‘brand image’ amongst consumers there may be a business price to be paid.
But its implications go much deeper than that, and are bound up with the massive increases in inequality which are part and parcel of the new capitalism. Both literally and metaphorically the owners and senior managers of such firms inhabit a different world to the people who work for them.
Of course, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about traditional capitalism in this respect. Nineteenth century factory owners were arguably similarly detached from, and ruthless about their workforces. I recently re-watched a TV version of J.B. Priestley’s classic 1945 socialist play An Inspector Calls (for more on the play and its relationship to Priestley’s politics, see Alison Cullingford’s essay). Set in Edwardian England just before the First World War, it depicts a police inspector arriving at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy mill-owning family. He tells them that a young woman has been found dead, having killed herself in an especially horrible way, and in the course of the evening demonstrates how each of them had played a part in the events that led to her suicide.
Still at least, when prompted, members of the Birling family do recall the personal interactions they have had with the dead woman. No such connection exists between those who hold and dispose of the ‘human resources’ of companies like P&O and the real human beings on the receiving end of their spreadsheet-driven decisions. The geographical and social distance between them if not creates then at least exacerbates what philosophers from Aristotle to Levinas have identified as the problem of ‘moral distance’.
However, this does not undermine, so much as add new force to, the inspector’s prophetic closing words in Priestley’s play. With them, he enjoins the privileged family to remember that “we don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”
P&O has been much in the news this week, following the brutal sacking by Zoom of almost 800 workers in order to replace them with cheaper foreign labour. In fact, in illustration of one of the arguments I make in the book, even to speak of “P&O” is a misnomer, because what was once a company of that name has been endlessly diced and sliced in different configurations, so that the entity that actually made the sackings was P&O Ferries. That is part of the P&O Group, the modern-day history of which is an exemplar of the ‘new capitalism’ business model.
For example, from the 1980s onwards it diversified from shipping into a wide array of other areas such as construction and property management. Then, from the start of this century, it divested itself of those activities until, in 2006, it was bought by Dubai Ports World (DP World), a company owned by the Dubai government. However, P&O Ferries was shortly afterwards transferred to Dubai World (DW), the parent company of DP World and also owned by the Dubai government, until being re-sold to DP World in 2019. Meanwhile, P&O Ferries’ actual vessels are registered under a wide variety of flags of convenience.
So, this, in very brief, is the story of one example of what globalization means for corporate ownership – and it leaves out much else, including the interactions between DW and DP World and corporate entities in the US, China and Australia. At the end of the chain, and very much subservient to it, is the workforce of P&O Ferries, including both those who have been sacked and those who are being hired at pittance wages to replace them.
P&O was once a British company, but similar developments have occurred all around the world, although successive UK governments have been especially relaxed about corporate sell-offs. Moreover, certainly compared with most EU countries (and this was the same even when it was part of the EU), UK employment law offers workers fewer protections from sackings of this sort. In any case, by its own admission P&O deliberately broke at least parts of this law – regarding consultation with trade unions – apparently because it judged the penalties for doing so to be outweighed by the benefits.
The consequence of businesses being owned and run in this way is to sever the links that can – at least in principle - otherwise exist between owners, communities, and employees. Even in the narrowest of business terms this is problematic. For why, when business owners are so manifestly uncommitted to them should workers feel or show any commitment to their businesses? Similarly, to the extent that such sackings damage ‘brand image’ amongst consumers there may be a business price to be paid.
But its implications go much deeper than that, and are bound up with the massive increases in inequality which are part and parcel of the new capitalism. Both literally and metaphorically the owners and senior managers of such firms inhabit a different world to the people who work for them.
Of course, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about traditional capitalism in this respect. Nineteenth century factory owners were arguably similarly detached from, and ruthless about their workforces. I recently re-watched a TV version of J.B. Priestley’s classic 1945 socialist play An Inspector Calls (for more on the play and its relationship to Priestley’s politics, see Alison Cullingford’s essay). Set in Edwardian England just before the First World War, it depicts a police inspector arriving at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy mill-owning family. He tells them that a young woman has been found dead, having killed herself in an especially horrible way, and in the course of the evening demonstrates how each of them had played a part in the events that led to her suicide.
Still at least, when prompted, members of the Birling family do recall the personal interactions they have had with the dead woman. No such connection exists between those who hold and dispose of the ‘human resources’ of companies like P&O and the real human beings on the receiving end of their spreadsheet-driven decisions. The geographical and social distance between them if not creates then at least exacerbates what philosophers from Aristotle to Levinas have identified as the problem of ‘moral distance’.
However, this does not undermine, so much as add new force to, the inspector’s prophetic closing words in Priestley’s play. With them, he enjoins the privileged family to remember that “we don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”
Sunday 13 February 2022
Electric blues
Over eight years ago, in 2013, I wrote a post on this blog about the absurdity of a supposedly competitive market for electricity, and energy more generally. That absurdity was incipient in the privatization of gas and electricity industries in the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s. It has now interacted with a global energy crisis to create a major problem which, in turn, is contributing to a wider cost of living crisis.
It was an accident waiting to happen. As I wrote in 2013, the idea of ‘shopping around’ between energy providers was a farce because there was no competitive market in what had long been recognized as a natural monopoly. What had been created was, at best, an oligopoly of the six major providers and consumer choice was illusory, That mattered, because the underlying theory of privatization was that choice would lead to competition which would lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. Knock away the first link in this chain and the whole concept (even if it had held water in other ways) was destroyed.
Since then, although the big six always remained dominant, the illusion of choice was sustained by a regulatory change in 2014 which allowed the entry of a large number of new firms. These did indeed sometimes offer consumers cheaper prices, although the highly opaque nature of charging often made comparison hard, and in some cases the option of greener and more environmentally sustainable energy. In fact, I was one of those who did exactly that.
Another way in which the ‘market’ was supposedly made more competitive was by introducing an energy price cap in 2019 to try to prevent companies charging extortionate amounts on their default or standard tariffs to those customers who didn’t ‘shop around’. Again, the very need to do this was an indication that this was not, and could not be, a market in the way envisaged by neo-classical economics.
In the autumn of 2021 these two developments came together to create a disaster. For as wholesale energy prices rose globally the cap meant that companies couldn’t pass on all of these rises to consumers, and it emerged that many of the new entrants did not have the financial resources to survive. In some cases they had also had a policy of last-minute buying of wholesale energy which meant that they had less of a time buffer against price rises. In consequence over twenty of them went out of business, including Bulb, the seventh largest firm.
Since then, the price cap has been raised, by 12% last October, with a further 54% rise to come into effect in April, leading to dramatic increases in consumer bills: the average household energy bill will rise from £1277 to £1971 per year. For poorer households this is a disaster.
And what, now, of choice? First off, the customers of most of those firms that went bankrupt were transferred to one of the big companies, with no choice of which one. My own experience of being transferred to a big firm – ironically, the one I had left a few months before – was a nightmare in itself (and I’ve heard similar stories from others), with incorrect transfers of meter readings, and endless arguments about what money was owed.
Some of these problems arise from the more general way that, for years now these firms have ceased to actually use meter readers, and the bizarre use of constantly updated estimates of future usage so as to set direct debit payments, rather than simply paying for what you use, as you use it. I simply don’t understand the bills I receive any more. Added to all that is the perennial problem of call centres you can’t get through to, or get cut off from, or which say they will call back and don’t. And added to that is the new reality of everything being done online, the chatbots, the inexplicable rules and all the rest of the hideous inconvenience of the most mundane of transactions that are now the norm.
And then what about choice of tariffs? I, like almost everyone transferred, ended up on the standard or ‘deemed’ tariff i.e. the maximum price allowed under the cap. So are people who never changed tariff or did so under a time-limited deal that has now ended, or who move house are also on the standard tariff. There may be a few options to find a cheaper alternative, but they are extremely limited, and the illusion of choice that I wrote about in 2013 has now entirely disappeared. With it, there has gone the last vestige of pretence that this is a market in any meaningful sense of the term.
Indeed this whole saga shows how, as with many other core goods and services, it is politically impossible simply to ‘leave it to the market’. Even if not very effectively, the government and the regulator is under pressure to, at the very least, ensure that the lights stay on. Yet at the same time, since the industry remains privatized, consumers are ultimately paying for the dividends and bloated salaries, as well as the malign effects of financialization.
Restoring the UK industry to common ownership wouldn’t solve the many complex environmental and geo-political problems facing the production, distribution and consumption of energy, but it would at least end the farce and failure of the pretence that there is a market for consumers. There’s already been something like a de facto re-nationalisation of railways (£), and it’s well overdue for something similar to happen to the energy industry.
It was an accident waiting to happen. As I wrote in 2013, the idea of ‘shopping around’ between energy providers was a farce because there was no competitive market in what had long been recognized as a natural monopoly. What had been created was, at best, an oligopoly of the six major providers and consumer choice was illusory, That mattered, because the underlying theory of privatization was that choice would lead to competition which would lead to greater efficiency and lower costs. Knock away the first link in this chain and the whole concept (even if it had held water in other ways) was destroyed.
Since then, although the big six always remained dominant, the illusion of choice was sustained by a regulatory change in 2014 which allowed the entry of a large number of new firms. These did indeed sometimes offer consumers cheaper prices, although the highly opaque nature of charging often made comparison hard, and in some cases the option of greener and more environmentally sustainable energy. In fact, I was one of those who did exactly that.
Another way in which the ‘market’ was supposedly made more competitive was by introducing an energy price cap in 2019 to try to prevent companies charging extortionate amounts on their default or standard tariffs to those customers who didn’t ‘shop around’. Again, the very need to do this was an indication that this was not, and could not be, a market in the way envisaged by neo-classical economics.
In the autumn of 2021 these two developments came together to create a disaster. For as wholesale energy prices rose globally the cap meant that companies couldn’t pass on all of these rises to consumers, and it emerged that many of the new entrants did not have the financial resources to survive. In some cases they had also had a policy of last-minute buying of wholesale energy which meant that they had less of a time buffer against price rises. In consequence over twenty of them went out of business, including Bulb, the seventh largest firm.
Since then, the price cap has been raised, by 12% last October, with a further 54% rise to come into effect in April, leading to dramatic increases in consumer bills: the average household energy bill will rise from £1277 to £1971 per year. For poorer households this is a disaster.
And what, now, of choice? First off, the customers of most of those firms that went bankrupt were transferred to one of the big companies, with no choice of which one. My own experience of being transferred to a big firm – ironically, the one I had left a few months before – was a nightmare in itself (and I’ve heard similar stories from others), with incorrect transfers of meter readings, and endless arguments about what money was owed.
Some of these problems arise from the more general way that, for years now these firms have ceased to actually use meter readers, and the bizarre use of constantly updated estimates of future usage so as to set direct debit payments, rather than simply paying for what you use, as you use it. I simply don’t understand the bills I receive any more. Added to all that is the perennial problem of call centres you can’t get through to, or get cut off from, or which say they will call back and don’t. And added to that is the new reality of everything being done online, the chatbots, the inexplicable rules and all the rest of the hideous inconvenience of the most mundane of transactions that are now the norm.
And then what about choice of tariffs? I, like almost everyone transferred, ended up on the standard or ‘deemed’ tariff i.e. the maximum price allowed under the cap. So are people who never changed tariff or did so under a time-limited deal that has now ended, or who move house are also on the standard tariff. There may be a few options to find a cheaper alternative, but they are extremely limited, and the illusion of choice that I wrote about in 2013 has now entirely disappeared. With it, there has gone the last vestige of pretence that this is a market in any meaningful sense of the term.
Indeed this whole saga shows how, as with many other core goods and services, it is politically impossible simply to ‘leave it to the market’. Even if not very effectively, the government and the regulator is under pressure to, at the very least, ensure that the lights stay on. Yet at the same time, since the industry remains privatized, consumers are ultimately paying for the dividends and bloated salaries, as well as the malign effects of financialization.
Restoring the UK industry to common ownership wouldn’t solve the many complex environmental and geo-political problems facing the production, distribution and consumption of energy, but it would at least end the farce and failure of the pretence that there is a market for consumers. There’s already been something like a de facto re-nationalisation of railways (£), and it’s well overdue for something similar to happen to the energy industry.
Friday 16 April 2021
The Greensill scandal
The growing scandal in the UK over corporate lobbing of government – which has implicated the former Prime Minister David Cameron as well as a former civil servant – is a reminder of the uses of bureaucracy and the dangers of its abandonment. Max Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy is most closely associated with the State civil service, and many of its tenets can be seen in the traditional model of the British Civil Service which emerged from the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report (although in more complex ways than some of the received myths – see Greenaway, 2004 for details).
One feature of the Weberian ideal-type which nowadays seems rather quaint is that of the lifetime employment of bureaucrats, which links to the way that in the British system the civil service is a permanent one, existing independently of the government of the day. A virtue of such an approach is that it reduces the incidence of the ‘revolving door’ whereby someone might move between civil service and private sector employment. Of course, lifetime employment was never compulsory, so such moves have always occurred, but they were not the norm and, being rare, could more easily be regulated.
This revolving door (not just for civil servants but for government ministers) is at the heart of the present scandal, but it is much more widespread than that. The particular problem it presents is that the awarding of government contracts, or other favours such as, for example, laxer regulation or favourable planning decisions, is potentially corrupted.
Actually, one aspect of this particular scandal is not even a revolving door but a case in which, it appears, a senior civil servant was working simultaneously as an advisor to a now bankrupt finance company, Greensill Capital, of which he then became a Director after leaving the civil service. This seems to have happened not through oversight or concealment, but with official approval. It was not that the rules were flouted, but that they were followed.
It remains unclear how many similar instances of this there may be, but the more routine ‘revolving door’ cases have become far more common over recent decades because it has become an article of faith since at least the Thatcher governments that private sector expertise is needed to inject competence and dynamism into the supposedly archaic traditional civil service. This has even extended to the extensive use of management consultants not just to deliver policy but to contribute to the making of policy, and not just in the UK (Howlett & Migone, 2013).
At the same time, and for the same reason, the state has been reconfigured so as to be less the provider of public services and more the commissioner of those services from the private sector. This outsourcing, discussed extensively in my book, therefore offers particular opportunities for the award of government contracts, making the revolving door all the more problematic. Again, there are rules in place governing what former civil servants and government ministers may and may not do, but they are fairly lax. So it’s not necessarily a problem of rule-breaking but that the rules themselves are inadequate.
The issue here is not, or not necessarily, an overt corruption involving backhand payments in brown paper envelopes. It is more subtle, and more insidious, than that. It’s partly about conflicts of interest which, whether consciously or unconsciously, shape decisions. It is also about the way that personal networks and contacts – the ‘chumocracy’ – can be the basis for these decisions. So, all too easily, and again it may be both conscious and unconscious, nepotism and patronage creep in, and it flows both ways: ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’. This might be to do with individuals (for example, a civil servant anticipating future employment) or organizations (for example a consulting firm which is both advising government but also potentially benefitting from government decisions).
Whilst this isn’t new (and the origins of the Greensill scandal predate the current government) there are reasons to think that it may be more prevalent now. One is that the present Prime Minister has shown, in numerous ways, a cavalier disdain for established norms of conduct, and even for the law (for example in illegally suspending parliament in 2019). He is notoriously dishonest (Oborne, 2021) and exhibits a sense of privileged entitlement which seems to suggest that ‘rules are for the little people’. If, as the saying has it, ‘the fish rots from the head’ then an administration led by such a person may be expected to be tainted.
Related to that, this is a government that is especially resistant to dissent and scrutiny, as shown by its draconian approach to policing protests, hostility to the legal system (‘activist’ lawyers, judicial review) the civil service and 'woke' universities, excessive use of Executive powers (Henry VIII powers, Statutory Instruments), disdain for the ministerial code, resistance to accountability to both the media and parliament, and much more besides. This then becomes the context for an illegal lack of transparency in public procurement with associated accusations of cronyism, assisted by the crisis situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic which has been used to justify suspending standard rules for such procurement.
What is objectionable about all this isn’t simply the question of whether individuals and companies are lining their pockets – and often already over-filled pockets, at that. It is that they do so at public expense After all, the rationale for bringing private expertise into the civil service, and for outsourcing public services, is supposed to be that this will make more efficient use of public, or taxpayers’, money. Cronyism doesn’t as a matter of logical necessity preclude this – perhaps contracts awarded to cronies are undertaken superbly well – but nor does it require it. It makes it impossible to tell whether ‘value for money’ has been achieved.
Another way of looking at this is the way that the neo-liberal ideology of competitive markets as the most efficient allocator of resources has morphed into a ‘market managerialism’ in which bogus markets are created, with resource allocation being decided managerially by, in this case, politicians and civil servants. It is almost the worst of all worlds in taking the worst features of command economies and combining them with the worst features of capitalist economies.
It might be argued that the very fact that there is currently a scandal means that we shouldn’t worry too much. It shows that there is an accountability in operation. The difficulty with that idea is that we really have no way of knowing whether what has been identified is all that there is to be found, or whether it conceals a hidden iceberg. The only real way to be sure is through a system of formal rules. That entails far more than the often-proposed solution of ‘transparency’ and ‘disclosure’. It is not enough that conflicts of interest be ‘declared’, what matters is that, when declared, they are removed, most obviously by removing an individual from decision making.
That is no easy matter. Much of what is at issue here is extremely difficult to police – late night conversations between friends, for example – and probity requires moral norms as well as procedural rules. Perhaps a different way of putting this is to say that it is not necessarily easy to say where and when ‘decisions’ are made: the meeting room and the written minutes may not tell the whole, or even most, of the story.
So Weberian bureaucracy isn’t by any means the whole answer here. For that matter, we shouldn’t assume that the traditional civil service was free of chumocracy when, no doubt, the ‘old boy network’ was alive and kicking. Similarly, ministers and former ministers of bygone times were not paragons of unalloyed virtue.
But this doesn’t mean that cronyism and more or less overt corruption are simply facts of life. They flourish to a greater or lesser extent according to the particular rules and norms of political administration obtaining in particular places at particular times. Avoiding such problems is always a work in progress, sometimes going in the right direction, sometimes the reverse.
In Britain, at the present time, there is a sense of going in the wrong direction. As Rafael Behr, the Guardian columnist, argues, it is not country “riddled with corruption”, but there is “the stench of decay”. That may have its proximate cause in the particular character of the present Prime Minister and government. But they have been enabled by inheriting a state that had already been hollowed out, and a civil service that had been undermined, by the ‘private good, public bad’ ideology. That gave them a freedom of action that might otherwise been constrained. By the same token, with different ideologies and institutions that freedom of action could be curtailed.
The fifth edition of A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations will be published by SAGE in November 2021.
One feature of the Weberian ideal-type which nowadays seems rather quaint is that of the lifetime employment of bureaucrats, which links to the way that in the British system the civil service is a permanent one, existing independently of the government of the day. A virtue of such an approach is that it reduces the incidence of the ‘revolving door’ whereby someone might move between civil service and private sector employment. Of course, lifetime employment was never compulsory, so such moves have always occurred, but they were not the norm and, being rare, could more easily be regulated.
This revolving door (not just for civil servants but for government ministers) is at the heart of the present scandal, but it is much more widespread than that. The particular problem it presents is that the awarding of government contracts, or other favours such as, for example, laxer regulation or favourable planning decisions, is potentially corrupted.
Actually, one aspect of this particular scandal is not even a revolving door but a case in which, it appears, a senior civil servant was working simultaneously as an advisor to a now bankrupt finance company, Greensill Capital, of which he then became a Director after leaving the civil service. This seems to have happened not through oversight or concealment, but with official approval. It was not that the rules were flouted, but that they were followed.
It remains unclear how many similar instances of this there may be, but the more routine ‘revolving door’ cases have become far more common over recent decades because it has become an article of faith since at least the Thatcher governments that private sector expertise is needed to inject competence and dynamism into the supposedly archaic traditional civil service. This has even extended to the extensive use of management consultants not just to deliver policy but to contribute to the making of policy, and not just in the UK (Howlett & Migone, 2013).
At the same time, and for the same reason, the state has been reconfigured so as to be less the provider of public services and more the commissioner of those services from the private sector. This outsourcing, discussed extensively in my book, therefore offers particular opportunities for the award of government contracts, making the revolving door all the more problematic. Again, there are rules in place governing what former civil servants and government ministers may and may not do, but they are fairly lax. So it’s not necessarily a problem of rule-breaking but that the rules themselves are inadequate.
The issue here is not, or not necessarily, an overt corruption involving backhand payments in brown paper envelopes. It is more subtle, and more insidious, than that. It’s partly about conflicts of interest which, whether consciously or unconsciously, shape decisions. It is also about the way that personal networks and contacts – the ‘chumocracy’ – can be the basis for these decisions. So, all too easily, and again it may be both conscious and unconscious, nepotism and patronage creep in, and it flows both ways: ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’. This might be to do with individuals (for example, a civil servant anticipating future employment) or organizations (for example a consulting firm which is both advising government but also potentially benefitting from government decisions).
Whilst this isn’t new (and the origins of the Greensill scandal predate the current government) there are reasons to think that it may be more prevalent now. One is that the present Prime Minister has shown, in numerous ways, a cavalier disdain for established norms of conduct, and even for the law (for example in illegally suspending parliament in 2019). He is notoriously dishonest (Oborne, 2021) and exhibits a sense of privileged entitlement which seems to suggest that ‘rules are for the little people’. If, as the saying has it, ‘the fish rots from the head’ then an administration led by such a person may be expected to be tainted.
Related to that, this is a government that is especially resistant to dissent and scrutiny, as shown by its draconian approach to policing protests, hostility to the legal system (‘activist’ lawyers, judicial review) the civil service and 'woke' universities, excessive use of Executive powers (Henry VIII powers, Statutory Instruments), disdain for the ministerial code, resistance to accountability to both the media and parliament, and much more besides. This then becomes the context for an illegal lack of transparency in public procurement with associated accusations of cronyism, assisted by the crisis situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic which has been used to justify suspending standard rules for such procurement.
What is objectionable about all this isn’t simply the question of whether individuals and companies are lining their pockets – and often already over-filled pockets, at that. It is that they do so at public expense After all, the rationale for bringing private expertise into the civil service, and for outsourcing public services, is supposed to be that this will make more efficient use of public, or taxpayers’, money. Cronyism doesn’t as a matter of logical necessity preclude this – perhaps contracts awarded to cronies are undertaken superbly well – but nor does it require it. It makes it impossible to tell whether ‘value for money’ has been achieved.
Another way of looking at this is the way that the neo-liberal ideology of competitive markets as the most efficient allocator of resources has morphed into a ‘market managerialism’ in which bogus markets are created, with resource allocation being decided managerially by, in this case, politicians and civil servants. It is almost the worst of all worlds in taking the worst features of command economies and combining them with the worst features of capitalist economies.
It might be argued that the very fact that there is currently a scandal means that we shouldn’t worry too much. It shows that there is an accountability in operation. The difficulty with that idea is that we really have no way of knowing whether what has been identified is all that there is to be found, or whether it conceals a hidden iceberg. The only real way to be sure is through a system of formal rules. That entails far more than the often-proposed solution of ‘transparency’ and ‘disclosure’. It is not enough that conflicts of interest be ‘declared’, what matters is that, when declared, they are removed, most obviously by removing an individual from decision making.
That is no easy matter. Much of what is at issue here is extremely difficult to police – late night conversations between friends, for example – and probity requires moral norms as well as procedural rules. Perhaps a different way of putting this is to say that it is not necessarily easy to say where and when ‘decisions’ are made: the meeting room and the written minutes may not tell the whole, or even most, of the story.
So Weberian bureaucracy isn’t by any means the whole answer here. For that matter, we shouldn’t assume that the traditional civil service was free of chumocracy when, no doubt, the ‘old boy network’ was alive and kicking. Similarly, ministers and former ministers of bygone times were not paragons of unalloyed virtue.
But this doesn’t mean that cronyism and more or less overt corruption are simply facts of life. They flourish to a greater or lesser extent according to the particular rules and norms of political administration obtaining in particular places at particular times. Avoiding such problems is always a work in progress, sometimes going in the right direction, sometimes the reverse.
In Britain, at the present time, there is a sense of going in the wrong direction. As Rafael Behr, the Guardian columnist, argues, it is not country “riddled with corruption”, but there is “the stench of decay”. That may have its proximate cause in the particular character of the present Prime Minister and government. But they have been enabled by inheriting a state that had already been hollowed out, and a civil service that had been undermined, by the ‘private good, public bad’ ideology. That gave them a freedom of action that might otherwise been constrained. By the same token, with different ideologies and institutions that freedom of action could be curtailed.
The fifth edition of A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations will be published by SAGE in November 2021.
Sunday 28 June 2020
Steel stories
I’ve recently read two extraordinary and, I suppose, largely forgotten novels, both published in the early 1940s, and both three-generational sagas set mainly in the Pittsburgh steel industry from the 1870s to the 1930s. That setting will immediately pique the interest of students of organizations because of course it was here that Frederick Taylor developed the tenets of Scientific Management, in a context which I mention briefly in the book (p.33-35). The steel mills of Pittsburgh and surrounding towns might very well be regarded as the birthplace of many of the management techniques and organizational processes that dominated industrial capitalism and continue to have much purchase today.
The novels are The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport, originally published in 1942 (hereafter, Valley) and Out of this Furnace by Thomas Bell, originally published in 1941 (hereafter, Furnace). It is perhaps telling that both books were subsequently re-published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, attesting to their significance as historical records as much as works of fiction. Both were based to a degree on direct and indirect personal experience.
The authors
Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), born Marcia Glick, was for a time married to Russell Davenport Junior, whose father, Russell Davenport Senior was a senior manager at, first, Midvale Steel and, later Bethlehem Steel. Those names are again resonant within organization studies as they were the companies where Taylor worked and, indeed, Davenport and Taylor was close associates at Midvale, and Taylor was hired by Bethlehem on the recommendation of Davenport (Misa, 1999: 184). Apart from this family connection, Marcia Davenport had, during a previous marriage, lived in Pittsburgh and amassed documents and letters about its steel industry which were the basis of the book (these are now archived at the University of Pittsburgh).
Thomas Bell (1903-1961), born Adelbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, one of the Pittsburgh steel towns, was the grandson and son (on his mother’s side) and the son (on his father’s side) of Slovakian (more precisely Lemko and Rusyn) immigrants who worked in the steel and other industries in and around Pittsburgh. Bell himself worked as an apprentice in the steel industry before becoming a full-time writer. Furnace is a fictionalised account of three generations of his family.
The Valley of Decision
Valley tells the story of three generations of the Scott family, of Presbyterian Scottish ancestry, who own a small but successful steel mill in Pittsburgh, but the pivotal character is Mary Rafferty, who is from a working-class Irish Catholic family and in 1873 begins working life as a maid to the Scotts. Her brother, James, works in the Scott mill and is an organiser for the ‘Amalgamated’ (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Maker). Mary and Paul Scott, the son of William, the firm’s owner, fall in love and despite the class and religious differences his family support their engagement. However, the marriage is abandoned after James Rafferty murders William Scott in the course of a bitter strike.
Subsequently, in a long and convoluted drama, Mary ends up being Paul’s housekeeper and also begins to befriend the newly arrived Slovak immigrants. Disparagingly called ‘Hunkies’ (meaning Hungarians, though in fact most of them are not), they are kept out of the best jobs by the earlier generation of Irish immigrants and are regarded as almost sub-human by the mill owners. Mary’s particular friend is Julka, matriarch of the Hrdlicka family (in fact, partly Czech and partly Slovak: there is a brief reference to Czech disparagement of Slovaks).
In the third generation, Claire Scott marries Anton, the son of Julka (she has become an official in the newly independent Czechoslovakia). And, indeed, Pennsylvanian Czechs and Slovaks had played an important role in the achievement of this independence, which was declared by Tomas Masaryk – who became its first President in 1920 – in Philadelphia in 1918. His son, Jan, who was Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister from 1940 until his death in 1948, was Marcia Davenport’s lover and Anton appears to be based upon him. The later sections of the book are concerned in particular with rise of Nazism and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the case against US isolationism.
Throughout the long book, which has many sub-plots and characters, there are recurring themes of class (including fine gradations within the middle and upper classes) and ethnicity, and of violent capital-labour conflicts. There is also an ongoing story of attempts to keep the Scott mill as an independent family-owned and run firm in the face of massive consolidation within the steel industry, led by the magnate Andrew Carnegie, to form what eventually became the United States Steel Corporation. This gives rise to frequent family and boardroom conflicts over the decades (and a sub-theme is how the successive generations shift from being active entrepreneurs to remote stockholders). It could be regarded as showing the distinctions between early capitalism, very much informed by the Protestant Work Ethic à la Weber, and the development of monopoly and finance capitalism.
Out of this Furnace
If Valley focusses primarily on the steel industry owners and their interrelations with the Irish and, then, Slovak workers who labour in their mills, Furnace is centrally and solely concerned with the experience of Slovak workers and their families. As alluded to in Valley, but shown in minute detail in Furnace, this is a story of appalling hardship told through the central characters of the Kracha and Dobrejcak families. The first generation story centres on Djuro Kracha, the second on his daughter Mary and her husband Michael Dobrejcak, the third on their son Dobie.
These families, like the Hrdlickas, are emblematic of the massive flow of Slovak emigrants (and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe), fleeing poverty, persecution and compulsory military service under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some half a million Slovaks came to the US between 1880 and 1920, of whom about half came to Pennsylvania, mainly to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Bell regarded their treatment as a hidden and shameful part of American history, and their contribution to US industrial development as having been ignored. The Slovaks, largely from rural and agricultural backgrounds, arrived in the hope of a better life but experienced grindingly hard and very dangerous work (death and maiming are commonplace, and Michael is killed in an industrial accident) for pitiful wages.
They also face discrimination and cruel stereotyping from both mill owners and managers and from Irish workers, which keeps them in the very worst jobs and housing. Although not depicted in the book, Bell’s uncle was effectively murdered by Irish or possibly Scottish workers (there was also a major group of Welsh workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry, but they do not appear in either book). In short, a life of constant struggle is depicted – a struggle to survive and to create the basic elements of a decent life against almost insuperable barriers.
Shared themes
One of the central themes of Furnace, as in Valley but more strongly so, is the struggle of trade unions to organize and to improve working conditions and pay. In both books there are references to the 1892 Homestead strike – a pivotal defeat for American organized labour in the period - and in Furnace there are accounts of brutal strike-breaking activities during the failed 1919 Great Steel Strike and, again, the growing dominance of Carnegie’s big corporate conglomerate – though here seen from the perspective of the workforce rather than the owners of an independent firm.
In the third generation, through the character of Dobie, and with the Amalgamated giving way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) trade unionism finally achieves a degree of success and is certainly represented by Bell as the best and only hope for the workers to achieve a modicum of dignity. (In Valley, a SWOC activist in the 1930s refers disparagingly to the Amalgamated, James Rafferty’s union in the 1870s, as outmoded, just as, for Rafferty, the Sons of Vulcan union that was one of the Amalgamated’s precursors was ancient history).
Another very important theme in both books, but again more strongly in Furnace, is the pivotal role played by women in holding together Slovak families (and also, in Valley, Mary’s role in holding together the Scotts, but this is depicted more as a feature of her individual character than as a wider cultural characteristic). Often, they were brought over to America after their husbands or fiancés had established themselves in a job. They are depicted as only having had paid employment when unmarried and this seems also to be the case for the Irish women, and that work appears to have been mainly domestic service. Before her marriage, Mary Kracha has a job as a maid with a wealthy mill owning family just as Mary Rafferty’s working life began as a maid with the Scotts in Valley. In both cases the contrast of the opulent houses where they work is compared sharply with the squalor of their own homes.
Once married, with their husbands working backbreaking 12 hour mill shifts (when work was available), women faced the constant drudgery of housework in an environment made filthy by industrial pollution, the expectation of near annual childbirth, the common experience of early widowhood, and, frequently, their own early deaths (Mary Dobrejcak dies of TB as, in real life, had Bell’s father). Yet they maintained their families and frequently supplemented family incomes by taking in boarders – typically young male steel workers, since men outnumbered women greatly at least in the early period. The strong sense of community Bell depicts is partly down to the role of women but also because, in common with, but possibly to an even greater extent than, other immigrant groups the Slovakian migrants of this period lived in close proximity.
Whilst Valley contains many realistic depictions of the hardship of both Irish and Slovakian workers – and there are some oblique references to prostitution and drunkenness - it is to a degree a romantic melodrama and not a demanding read (it was, in fact, turned into a film with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson). Furnace is far more gritty and harrowing, and although it does depict the very tender love between Mary and Michael Dobrejcak that love is blighted by hardship and tragedy. Nor is it a romanticised picture in that some characters, especially Djuro Kracha, are shown to be cruel, sometimes violent, frequently drunk, and in some cases dishonest and manipulative.
Overall, despite the partial uplift of growing union success towards the end of the 1930s it is – and, based on the Afterword to the University of Pittsburgh edition, it’s clear that Bell intended it to be – a deeply painful account of lives deformed by poverty, injustice, and prejudice. In that, it speaks to the experience of so many immigrant groups both past and present. There is passing reference (in Furnace, but not Valley) to the experience of Black Americans, with “negroes” brought in, initially as strike breakers, and experiencing discrimination from Slovaks which, as Dobie observes, replicated some of the hostility Slovaks had themselves previously faced from Irish workers, just as the Irish had from the English settlers.
Relevance for Organization Studies
Together, apart from many other things, these two books fill out the point I make in the book about the role that ethnicity played in the development of Taylorism. Much of that was about discrimination and prejudice, epitomised by Taylor’s dehumanising and derogatory use of the “mentally sluggish” Bethlehem worker ‘Schmidt’ (actually Henry Noll, of Dutch descent) to illustrate the benefits of his system. Bill Cooke (2003) includes this example in his explanation of the continuities and inter-relationships of slavery, and the management of slaves, and modern management theory and practice – something that has been systematically excluded from established histories of management.
Arguably there were ways in which it broke some of these prejudices down. I note (p.35) how the Taylorist emphasis on managers hiring ‘scientifically’ on merit broke down the power of work gang leaders and even give the hypothetical example of Irish foremen discriminating against East European immigrants. I am not sure where I got the idea of that particular example from, but, amazingly, something almost identical features in one of the most dramatic scenes in Valley, when it emerges that a skilled Slovak worker – Charlie Hrdlicka, Julka’s husband - trained at the Skoda works, has been forced to do menial work because the Irish work gang leader will not hire “Hunkies”. Paul Scott immediately promotes him (and, when criticised by the Irish foreman, challenges him to strike with the reminder of what had happened at Homestead).
I suggest in my book that this is a version of the ‘ethic of impersonality’ which forms part of Paul du Gay’s defence of bureaucracy. Yet it can also be read as an example of one of the ways that Taylorism, in particular, formed part of a much more complex history of ‘race management’ (Roediger & Esch, 2012). On Roediger & Esch’s analysis this history (as Cooke also argues) reaches back to slavery, and also explains the racial segmentation of hierarchies such as that between the Irish and Slovak workers (or between white and Chinese workers in the construction of railroads), with Taylorism as a new, ‘integrationist’ but still racialised episode within this history.
It’s no longer a novel (no pun intended) proposition in organization studies that novels can be a source of great insight and ‘respectable’ evidence, and I find these two to be particularly so, for several reasons. Firstly, they provide a quite extraordinary amount of really detailed information about working practices and industrial relations in the steel industry in this period. Second, and perhaps relatedly, their structure and focus means that taken together they provide a multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-class set of perspectives on that industry and period.
Third, and I think most significant, is the way that these novels disclose a small but significant part of the hidden history of management and organizational theory. Within the textbooks, certainly, you would hardly discern what these theories are actually about or where they came from. I am quite sure that Taylorism would be far better taught and understood through reading novels such as these rather than through the sanitised, ahistoric, asocial, bloodless non-stories of most ‘Introductions to Organizational Behaviour’.
References
Bell, T. (1941) Out of this Furnace. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies’, Journal of Management Studies 40 (8): 1895-1918
Davenport, M. (1942) The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Misa, T. (1999) A Nation of Steel. The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Roediger, D. and Esch, E. (2012) The Production of Difference. Race and the Management of Labor in US History. New York: Oxford University Press.
The novels are The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport, originally published in 1942 (hereafter, Valley) and Out of this Furnace by Thomas Bell, originally published in 1941 (hereafter, Furnace). It is perhaps telling that both books were subsequently re-published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, attesting to their significance as historical records as much as works of fiction. Both were based to a degree on direct and indirect personal experience.
The authors
Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), born Marcia Glick, was for a time married to Russell Davenport Junior, whose father, Russell Davenport Senior was a senior manager at, first, Midvale Steel and, later Bethlehem Steel. Those names are again resonant within organization studies as they were the companies where Taylor worked and, indeed, Davenport and Taylor was close associates at Midvale, and Taylor was hired by Bethlehem on the recommendation of Davenport (Misa, 1999: 184). Apart from this family connection, Marcia Davenport had, during a previous marriage, lived in Pittsburgh and amassed documents and letters about its steel industry which were the basis of the book (these are now archived at the University of Pittsburgh).
Thomas Bell (1903-1961), born Adelbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, one of the Pittsburgh steel towns, was the grandson and son (on his mother’s side) and the son (on his father’s side) of Slovakian (more precisely Lemko and Rusyn) immigrants who worked in the steel and other industries in and around Pittsburgh. Bell himself worked as an apprentice in the steel industry before becoming a full-time writer. Furnace is a fictionalised account of three generations of his family.
The Valley of Decision
Valley tells the story of three generations of the Scott family, of Presbyterian Scottish ancestry, who own a small but successful steel mill in Pittsburgh, but the pivotal character is Mary Rafferty, who is from a working-class Irish Catholic family and in 1873 begins working life as a maid to the Scotts. Her brother, James, works in the Scott mill and is an organiser for the ‘Amalgamated’ (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Maker). Mary and Paul Scott, the son of William, the firm’s owner, fall in love and despite the class and religious differences his family support their engagement. However, the marriage is abandoned after James Rafferty murders William Scott in the course of a bitter strike.
Subsequently, in a long and convoluted drama, Mary ends up being Paul’s housekeeper and also begins to befriend the newly arrived Slovak immigrants. Disparagingly called ‘Hunkies’ (meaning Hungarians, though in fact most of them are not), they are kept out of the best jobs by the earlier generation of Irish immigrants and are regarded as almost sub-human by the mill owners. Mary’s particular friend is Julka, matriarch of the Hrdlicka family (in fact, partly Czech and partly Slovak: there is a brief reference to Czech disparagement of Slovaks).
In the third generation, Claire Scott marries Anton, the son of Julka (she has become an official in the newly independent Czechoslovakia). And, indeed, Pennsylvanian Czechs and Slovaks had played an important role in the achievement of this independence, which was declared by Tomas Masaryk – who became its first President in 1920 – in Philadelphia in 1918. His son, Jan, who was Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister from 1940 until his death in 1948, was Marcia Davenport’s lover and Anton appears to be based upon him. The later sections of the book are concerned in particular with rise of Nazism and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the case against US isolationism.
Throughout the long book, which has many sub-plots and characters, there are recurring themes of class (including fine gradations within the middle and upper classes) and ethnicity, and of violent capital-labour conflicts. There is also an ongoing story of attempts to keep the Scott mill as an independent family-owned and run firm in the face of massive consolidation within the steel industry, led by the magnate Andrew Carnegie, to form what eventually became the United States Steel Corporation. This gives rise to frequent family and boardroom conflicts over the decades (and a sub-theme is how the successive generations shift from being active entrepreneurs to remote stockholders). It could be regarded as showing the distinctions between early capitalism, very much informed by the Protestant Work Ethic à la Weber, and the development of monopoly and finance capitalism.
Out of this Furnace
If Valley focusses primarily on the steel industry owners and their interrelations with the Irish and, then, Slovak workers who labour in their mills, Furnace is centrally and solely concerned with the experience of Slovak workers and their families. As alluded to in Valley, but shown in minute detail in Furnace, this is a story of appalling hardship told through the central characters of the Kracha and Dobrejcak families. The first generation story centres on Djuro Kracha, the second on his daughter Mary and her husband Michael Dobrejcak, the third on their son Dobie.
These families, like the Hrdlickas, are emblematic of the massive flow of Slovak emigrants (and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe), fleeing poverty, persecution and compulsory military service under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some half a million Slovaks came to the US between 1880 and 1920, of whom about half came to Pennsylvania, mainly to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Bell regarded their treatment as a hidden and shameful part of American history, and their contribution to US industrial development as having been ignored. The Slovaks, largely from rural and agricultural backgrounds, arrived in the hope of a better life but experienced grindingly hard and very dangerous work (death and maiming are commonplace, and Michael is killed in an industrial accident) for pitiful wages.
They also face discrimination and cruel stereotyping from both mill owners and managers and from Irish workers, which keeps them in the very worst jobs and housing. Although not depicted in the book, Bell’s uncle was effectively murdered by Irish or possibly Scottish workers (there was also a major group of Welsh workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry, but they do not appear in either book). In short, a life of constant struggle is depicted – a struggle to survive and to create the basic elements of a decent life against almost insuperable barriers.
Shared themes
One of the central themes of Furnace, as in Valley but more strongly so, is the struggle of trade unions to organize and to improve working conditions and pay. In both books there are references to the 1892 Homestead strike – a pivotal defeat for American organized labour in the period - and in Furnace there are accounts of brutal strike-breaking activities during the failed 1919 Great Steel Strike and, again, the growing dominance of Carnegie’s big corporate conglomerate – though here seen from the perspective of the workforce rather than the owners of an independent firm.
In the third generation, through the character of Dobie, and with the Amalgamated giving way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) trade unionism finally achieves a degree of success and is certainly represented by Bell as the best and only hope for the workers to achieve a modicum of dignity. (In Valley, a SWOC activist in the 1930s refers disparagingly to the Amalgamated, James Rafferty’s union in the 1870s, as outmoded, just as, for Rafferty, the Sons of Vulcan union that was one of the Amalgamated’s precursors was ancient history).
Another very important theme in both books, but again more strongly in Furnace, is the pivotal role played by women in holding together Slovak families (and also, in Valley, Mary’s role in holding together the Scotts, but this is depicted more as a feature of her individual character than as a wider cultural characteristic). Often, they were brought over to America after their husbands or fiancés had established themselves in a job. They are depicted as only having had paid employment when unmarried and this seems also to be the case for the Irish women, and that work appears to have been mainly domestic service. Before her marriage, Mary Kracha has a job as a maid with a wealthy mill owning family just as Mary Rafferty’s working life began as a maid with the Scotts in Valley. In both cases the contrast of the opulent houses where they work is compared sharply with the squalor of their own homes.
Once married, with their husbands working backbreaking 12 hour mill shifts (when work was available), women faced the constant drudgery of housework in an environment made filthy by industrial pollution, the expectation of near annual childbirth, the common experience of early widowhood, and, frequently, their own early deaths (Mary Dobrejcak dies of TB as, in real life, had Bell’s father). Yet they maintained their families and frequently supplemented family incomes by taking in boarders – typically young male steel workers, since men outnumbered women greatly at least in the early period. The strong sense of community Bell depicts is partly down to the role of women but also because, in common with, but possibly to an even greater extent than, other immigrant groups the Slovakian migrants of this period lived in close proximity.
Whilst Valley contains many realistic depictions of the hardship of both Irish and Slovakian workers – and there are some oblique references to prostitution and drunkenness - it is to a degree a romantic melodrama and not a demanding read (it was, in fact, turned into a film with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson). Furnace is far more gritty and harrowing, and although it does depict the very tender love between Mary and Michael Dobrejcak that love is blighted by hardship and tragedy. Nor is it a romanticised picture in that some characters, especially Djuro Kracha, are shown to be cruel, sometimes violent, frequently drunk, and in some cases dishonest and manipulative.
Overall, despite the partial uplift of growing union success towards the end of the 1930s it is – and, based on the Afterword to the University of Pittsburgh edition, it’s clear that Bell intended it to be – a deeply painful account of lives deformed by poverty, injustice, and prejudice. In that, it speaks to the experience of so many immigrant groups both past and present. There is passing reference (in Furnace, but not Valley) to the experience of Black Americans, with “negroes” brought in, initially as strike breakers, and experiencing discrimination from Slovaks which, as Dobie observes, replicated some of the hostility Slovaks had themselves previously faced from Irish workers, just as the Irish had from the English settlers.
Relevance for Organization Studies
Together, apart from many other things, these two books fill out the point I make in the book about the role that ethnicity played in the development of Taylorism. Much of that was about discrimination and prejudice, epitomised by Taylor’s dehumanising and derogatory use of the “mentally sluggish” Bethlehem worker ‘Schmidt’ (actually Henry Noll, of Dutch descent) to illustrate the benefits of his system. Bill Cooke (2003) includes this example in his explanation of the continuities and inter-relationships of slavery, and the management of slaves, and modern management theory and practice – something that has been systematically excluded from established histories of management.
Arguably there were ways in which it broke some of these prejudices down. I note (p.35) how the Taylorist emphasis on managers hiring ‘scientifically’ on merit broke down the power of work gang leaders and even give the hypothetical example of Irish foremen discriminating against East European immigrants. I am not sure where I got the idea of that particular example from, but, amazingly, something almost identical features in one of the most dramatic scenes in Valley, when it emerges that a skilled Slovak worker – Charlie Hrdlicka, Julka’s husband - trained at the Skoda works, has been forced to do menial work because the Irish work gang leader will not hire “Hunkies”. Paul Scott immediately promotes him (and, when criticised by the Irish foreman, challenges him to strike with the reminder of what had happened at Homestead).
I suggest in my book that this is a version of the ‘ethic of impersonality’ which forms part of Paul du Gay’s defence of bureaucracy. Yet it can also be read as an example of one of the ways that Taylorism, in particular, formed part of a much more complex history of ‘race management’ (Roediger & Esch, 2012). On Roediger & Esch’s analysis this history (as Cooke also argues) reaches back to slavery, and also explains the racial segmentation of hierarchies such as that between the Irish and Slovak workers (or between white and Chinese workers in the construction of railroads), with Taylorism as a new, ‘integrationist’ but still racialised episode within this history.
It’s no longer a novel (no pun intended) proposition in organization studies that novels can be a source of great insight and ‘respectable’ evidence, and I find these two to be particularly so, for several reasons. Firstly, they provide a quite extraordinary amount of really detailed information about working practices and industrial relations in the steel industry in this period. Second, and perhaps relatedly, their structure and focus means that taken together they provide a multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-class set of perspectives on that industry and period.
Third, and I think most significant, is the way that these novels disclose a small but significant part of the hidden history of management and organizational theory. Within the textbooks, certainly, you would hardly discern what these theories are actually about or where they came from. I am quite sure that Taylorism would be far better taught and understood through reading novels such as these rather than through the sanitised, ahistoric, asocial, bloodless non-stories of most ‘Introductions to Organizational Behaviour’.
References
Bell, T. (1941) Out of this Furnace. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies’, Journal of Management Studies 40 (8): 1895-1918
Davenport, M. (1942) The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
Misa, T. (1999) A Nation of Steel. The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Roediger, D. and Esch, E. (2012) The Production of Difference. Race and the Management of Labor in US History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Saturday 11 April 2020
The coronavirus crisis
This blog has been sadly neglected in recent years, as all my blogging time and energy have been taken up with my Brexit Blog. But the current coronavirus crisis prompts me to return to it, because so much of what is happening in this crisis has an organizational dimension, and some of it relates directly to the themes of the book which this blog accompanies. In this post, I’ll discuss some of them, with the focus on what is happening in the UK but no doubt at least some of it has a wider relevance.
Overall, it’s possible to see many of the chickens of contemporary organization coming home to roost. This is most obvious in the National Health Service where spending as a percentage of GDP effectively flatlined between 2011 and 2019, and per capita is well below that of most other highly developed countries (e.g. France, Germany, Japan, Australia). Crucially, this is against the background of a rapidly ageing population and – as has also been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic – a social care system that was already in crisis and has been for at least half a decade (as discussed on this blog in May 2016).
The issues here go well beyond those of funding, though. They also relate to managerial apprehensions of the ‘efficient’ use of that funding. In the book (p. 142) I use the specific example of the NHS to discuss this, writing that “one way this has been done is to reduce spare capacity in the system. This in turn has the effect that unusual peaks in demand, such as a major incident or a flu epidemic, swamp the system … the question still remains: efficient for whom? Is spare capacity inefficient from the point of a view of a patient caught up in a demand peak?”
This seems almost prophetic now, as the NHS faces a desperate struggle to obtain the machinery and protective equipment needed to deal with coronavirus, whilst old people dying in care homes are not even included in the official coronavirus mortality statistics. Of course, it would be absurd to argue that any health system could permanently maintain all of the spare capacity needed to deal with so unprecedented crisis. But running a system for years without any spare capacity at all was always bound to lead to disaster.
Similarly, we are now seeing the consequences of the endless restructurings and in particular the dynamic of centralization-localization as the supposedly inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS is subjected to almost yearly reforms. It was such an analysis which led to the fragmentation of the NHS into Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), to break down the ‘monolith’ of the NHS. This was happening even as it was being reported that the problem with NHS procurement was lack of centralization, but under the dogma of ‘post-bureaucracy’ this was ignored (discussed on p. 87 of the book). Fast-forward to the coronavirus crisis and what do we fine? That very quietly the government has taken back central control of procurement from the CCGs to deal with it.
Nor is it only in health care that we see the consequences of the ill-judged managerial reforms and budget cuts of the last decade or more. I wrote on this blog in October 2016 about the crisis that was already underway in prisons. No surprise, then, that coronavirus is sweeping through them now, and there are calls for the early release of at least low-risk offenders and prisoners on remand.
Beyond public service issues, the coronavirus crisis has laid bare the inequalities and insecurities associated with the new capitalism and its associated ‘precariat’ (discussed on p. 118-120 of my book). The supposedly self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’ and zero hours workers of Uberfied business models are by the far the most economically vulnerable to the lockdown of the economy. The gap between this precariat and the salariat (like me) who have continued security as they work from home is more obvious than ever. It falls to government, at least partially, to bear the costs of this – in effect bailing out the employers who have for years benefitted from this ‘flexible’ workforce. As with the financial crisis, what we see is a privatization of profits and a socialization of costs and risks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands who had never expected to now turn to the welfare system and find that it is very far from the generous safety net they had imagined, let alone the scroungers’ paradise that the tabloid press had led them to believe (see also p.120 of book). This is not just a matter of a one-off crisis. Rather, it comes against the background of the middle-calls insecurity which has been underway for some time, and is intimately linked to the demise of middle management and the white-collar underclass that has characterized the new capitalist model (p.123 of book; see also this blog post from February 2015).
Intimately linked to precarious employment is the use of foodbanks (blog post from September 2016) and here, too, coronavirus has had an impact. On the one hand, they face mounting demand as people’s incomes dry up. On the other, staffing and donations are both impacted by the illness, and some foodbanks are having to close down just as they are most needed.
No doubt there are many more examples of how coronavirus is exposing underlying issues within the organization of public services, of work, and of society more generally. The key words are ‘exposing’ and ‘underlying’. In this post I have made frequent reference to what I wrote in my book or on this, accompanying, blog. The message is not meant to be a self-congratulatory ‘I told you so’. Rather, it is intended to show how so much of what is happening grows directly out of things we already knew, or which were already happening.
This is absolutely crucial for otherwise they would just be regarded as ‘crisis’ events and, as such, unusual or short-lived. This in turn would support the idea that once the crisis is over we can and should return to ‘business as usual’. To an extent, this is what happened after the financial crisis. Although many expected that it would lead to a wholesale re-evaluation of how – at the most generic level – we organize, that didn’t really happen. Instead, we saw what Colin Crouch aptly dubbed the strange non-death of neo-liberalism.
Perhaps this time things will be different. The neo-liberal or new capitalist model has been much more challenged by the coronavirus in that it has led to the mobilization of state resources in a way not seen since the Second World War. That ought, at least for a while, to put paid to the innumerable paeans to the superiority of the market for any and every political and economic question. It feels, at least at the moment, as if something quite fundamental has ruptured – although one should be wary in assuming that any such rupture will have predictable, let alone positive, effects. And even should they be positive, it is a tragedy that it will have taken the deaths of so many to demonstrate what was, in so many ways, already obvious.
Overall, it’s possible to see many of the chickens of contemporary organization coming home to roost. This is most obvious in the National Health Service where spending as a percentage of GDP effectively flatlined between 2011 and 2019, and per capita is well below that of most other highly developed countries (e.g. France, Germany, Japan, Australia). Crucially, this is against the background of a rapidly ageing population and – as has also been laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic – a social care system that was already in crisis and has been for at least half a decade (as discussed on this blog in May 2016).
The issues here go well beyond those of funding, though. They also relate to managerial apprehensions of the ‘efficient’ use of that funding. In the book (p. 142) I use the specific example of the NHS to discuss this, writing that “one way this has been done is to reduce spare capacity in the system. This in turn has the effect that unusual peaks in demand, such as a major incident or a flu epidemic, swamp the system … the question still remains: efficient for whom? Is spare capacity inefficient from the point of a view of a patient caught up in a demand peak?”
This seems almost prophetic now, as the NHS faces a desperate struggle to obtain the machinery and protective equipment needed to deal with coronavirus, whilst old people dying in care homes are not even included in the official coronavirus mortality statistics. Of course, it would be absurd to argue that any health system could permanently maintain all of the spare capacity needed to deal with so unprecedented crisis. But running a system for years without any spare capacity at all was always bound to lead to disaster.
Similarly, we are now seeing the consequences of the endless restructurings and in particular the dynamic of centralization-localization as the supposedly inefficient bureaucracy of the NHS is subjected to almost yearly reforms. It was such an analysis which led to the fragmentation of the NHS into Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), to break down the ‘monolith’ of the NHS. This was happening even as it was being reported that the problem with NHS procurement was lack of centralization, but under the dogma of ‘post-bureaucracy’ this was ignored (discussed on p. 87 of the book). Fast-forward to the coronavirus crisis and what do we fine? That very quietly the government has taken back central control of procurement from the CCGs to deal with it.
Nor is it only in health care that we see the consequences of the ill-judged managerial reforms and budget cuts of the last decade or more. I wrote on this blog in October 2016 about the crisis that was already underway in prisons. No surprise, then, that coronavirus is sweeping through them now, and there are calls for the early release of at least low-risk offenders and prisoners on remand.
Beyond public service issues, the coronavirus crisis has laid bare the inequalities and insecurities associated with the new capitalism and its associated ‘precariat’ (discussed on p. 118-120 of my book). The supposedly self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’ and zero hours workers of Uberfied business models are by the far the most economically vulnerable to the lockdown of the economy. The gap between this precariat and the salariat (like me) who have continued security as they work from home is more obvious than ever. It falls to government, at least partially, to bear the costs of this – in effect bailing out the employers who have for years benefitted from this ‘flexible’ workforce. As with the financial crisis, what we see is a privatization of profits and a socialization of costs and risks.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands who had never expected to now turn to the welfare system and find that it is very far from the generous safety net they had imagined, let alone the scroungers’ paradise that the tabloid press had led them to believe (see also p.120 of book). This is not just a matter of a one-off crisis. Rather, it comes against the background of the middle-calls insecurity which has been underway for some time, and is intimately linked to the demise of middle management and the white-collar underclass that has characterized the new capitalist model (p.123 of book; see also this blog post from February 2015).
Intimately linked to precarious employment is the use of foodbanks (blog post from September 2016) and here, too, coronavirus has had an impact. On the one hand, they face mounting demand as people’s incomes dry up. On the other, staffing and donations are both impacted by the illness, and some foodbanks are having to close down just as they are most needed.
No doubt there are many more examples of how coronavirus is exposing underlying issues within the organization of public services, of work, and of society more generally. The key words are ‘exposing’ and ‘underlying’. In this post I have made frequent reference to what I wrote in my book or on this, accompanying, blog. The message is not meant to be a self-congratulatory ‘I told you so’. Rather, it is intended to show how so much of what is happening grows directly out of things we already knew, or which were already happening.
This is absolutely crucial for otherwise they would just be regarded as ‘crisis’ events and, as such, unusual or short-lived. This in turn would support the idea that once the crisis is over we can and should return to ‘business as usual’. To an extent, this is what happened after the financial crisis. Although many expected that it would lead to a wholesale re-evaluation of how – at the most generic level – we organize, that didn’t really happen. Instead, we saw what Colin Crouch aptly dubbed the strange non-death of neo-liberalism.
Perhaps this time things will be different. The neo-liberal or new capitalist model has been much more challenged by the coronavirus in that it has led to the mobilization of state resources in a way not seen since the Second World War. That ought, at least for a while, to put paid to the innumerable paeans to the superiority of the market for any and every political and economic question. It feels, at least at the moment, as if something quite fundamental has ruptured – although one should be wary in assuming that any such rupture will have predictable, let alone positive, effects. And even should they be positive, it is a tragedy that it will have taken the deaths of so many to demonstrate what was, in so many ways, already obvious.
Thursday 2 May 2019
An undeveloping country?
A House
of Lords report this week has concluded that forensic science in
England and Wales is “in crisis” and “has now reached breaking point”. This
matters, hugely, because it is central to the effective functioning of the
criminal justice system and, hence, to the rule of law.
It’s a crisis which has been brewing for a while. I referred to it on this blog in January 2017, but it has been in the making since its privatization in 2012, and the introduction of market competition. The dangers were warned about at the time.
This is an important story in itself, but it’s indicative of a wider and all-encompassing crisis right across the provision of public services in the UK. Evidence of this can be found in relation to legal aid, prisons and young offenders’ institutions, the probation service (£), housing, the National Health Service, the railways, bus services, and schools. The list could go on and on, but just in relation to the last of them we now have schools where one day a week the lights are turned off to save money.
Scratch beneath the surface of any of these separate stories and you find, invariably, funding shortages but, equally invariably, failed reorganizations and, almost always, contracting-out to the private sector. It should not be thought that these are separate explanations, because what would in any case be hard-pressed services because of funding cuts are made more so by the money wasted on reorganization and contracting out. What little money there is gets wasted.
The ideological roots of what is happening lie in market-managerialism – that strange ensemble of the ‘classic’ neo-liberalism of privatisation and its country cousin of private sector disciplines in the public sector which morph, bizarrely, into precisely the ‘bureaucratic red tape’ that neo-liberalism was supposed to be averse to. As such, it has a 40 year history in the UK.
The effects are disparate and disjointed, so that it is easy to see each story in isolation, and because they have unfolded over a long time period it is easy to miss their cumulative effect. But there is a cumulative effect, and it is neatly captured by the concept of Britain being in a process of ‘undeveloping’, which has been analysed by researchers at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
Their argument is that the notion of a country as ‘developed’ mistakes a fluid process for a static category. Development in not a uni-directional process which, once achieved, is fixed. Rather, it is possible to ‘go back’. The SPERI argument is that Britain, having been the first nation to develop in the modern sense is now the first developed nation to be undeveloping – to be, if we think of development as linear – going backwards.
In support of that argument, the SPERI researchers cite a range of issues not all of which relate to the theme of public sector reorganization, although many do. Their analysis draws attention to the myriad of ways in which daily life in Britain seems to be getting worse, using macroeconomic indicators like productivity and measures like food bank use and road pothole incidence. Taken together, these make out a compelling case for their ‘undevelopment’ thesis.
Like all compelling ideas, it’s not new, though. The great economist J.K. Galbraith made a similar case in The Affluent Society (1958) where he introduced the notion of private affluence co-existing with public squalor. It’s a book that still speaks to our present situation. In a similar way, what might be seen as the counterpart of Galbraith’s macroeconomic analysis at the level of work, Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), is seeing a widely-acclaimed revival on the London stage. Its themes of insecurity and fantasy still speak – or speak anew – to the world of zero-hours contracts and fantasies of success.
It’s a crisis which has been brewing for a while. I referred to it on this blog in January 2017, but it has been in the making since its privatization in 2012, and the introduction of market competition. The dangers were warned about at the time.
This is an important story in itself, but it’s indicative of a wider and all-encompassing crisis right across the provision of public services in the UK. Evidence of this can be found in relation to legal aid, prisons and young offenders’ institutions, the probation service (£), housing, the National Health Service, the railways, bus services, and schools. The list could go on and on, but just in relation to the last of them we now have schools where one day a week the lights are turned off to save money.
Scratch beneath the surface of any of these separate stories and you find, invariably, funding shortages but, equally invariably, failed reorganizations and, almost always, contracting-out to the private sector. It should not be thought that these are separate explanations, because what would in any case be hard-pressed services because of funding cuts are made more so by the money wasted on reorganization and contracting out. What little money there is gets wasted.
The ideological roots of what is happening lie in market-managerialism – that strange ensemble of the ‘classic’ neo-liberalism of privatisation and its country cousin of private sector disciplines in the public sector which morph, bizarrely, into precisely the ‘bureaucratic red tape’ that neo-liberalism was supposed to be averse to. As such, it has a 40 year history in the UK.
The effects are disparate and disjointed, so that it is easy to see each story in isolation, and because they have unfolded over a long time period it is easy to miss their cumulative effect. But there is a cumulative effect, and it is neatly captured by the concept of Britain being in a process of ‘undeveloping’, which has been analysed by researchers at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
Their argument is that the notion of a country as ‘developed’ mistakes a fluid process for a static category. Development in not a uni-directional process which, once achieved, is fixed. Rather, it is possible to ‘go back’. The SPERI argument is that Britain, having been the first nation to develop in the modern sense is now the first developed nation to be undeveloping – to be, if we think of development as linear – going backwards.
In support of that argument, the SPERI researchers cite a range of issues not all of which relate to the theme of public sector reorganization, although many do. Their analysis draws attention to the myriad of ways in which daily life in Britain seems to be getting worse, using macroeconomic indicators like productivity and measures like food bank use and road pothole incidence. Taken together, these make out a compelling case for their ‘undevelopment’ thesis.
Like all compelling ideas, it’s not new, though. The great economist J.K. Galbraith made a similar case in The Affluent Society (1958) where he introduced the notion of private affluence co-existing with public squalor. It’s a book that still speaks to our present situation. In a similar way, what might be seen as the counterpart of Galbraith’s macroeconomic analysis at the level of work, Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), is seeing a widely-acclaimed revival on the London stage. Its themes of insecurity and fantasy still speak – or speak anew – to the world of zero-hours contracts and fantasies of success.
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