Manchester

Waking up today to the news of the despicable bomb attack in Manchester I felt, like all but a tiny few degenerates, a sense of sorrow and disgust which has grown throughout the day as the particular pathos of the killing of young people at a pop concert has emerged.

I don’t want to talk about the motivation for, or the ways of dealing with, such attacks, and in any case I am not qualified to do so. Instead I want to talk about Manchester, a city I know well and have a great love for because I was an undergraduate and, then, PhD student there between 1984 and 1992, something I talk about in my book. When I arrived, I knew almost nothing about it and found it quite alien, almost frightening. I had grown up in the far suburbs of South London and knew nothing about the North – I mean North London, let alone the North of England. Very soon I loved it.

What did I love? A kind of harsh but laid-back humour. A sense of by then fading but still visible industry. Grand redbrick Victorian buildings like the Refuge Assurance, alongside humble redbrick housing terraces, alongside the glorious neo-classical, Tuscan and Corinthian melange of the City Library, alongside the brutalism of the Mancunian Way. Still, a sense of swagger: ‘what Manchester thinks today, the world does tomorrow’ had been said in its nineteenth century heyday, but didn’t seem outlandish in the 1980s. The place associated with the discovery of the atom by Dalton and its splitting by Rutherford; the place where the fly shuttle that transformed the cotton industry was invented and the site of the Peterloo massacre; the place that gave name to the Manchester Doctrine of free trade that at the time was being re-invented as something called Thatcherism, but which was abuzz with anarchist, feminist and alternative bookshops and where the miners’ strike was the dominant issue of the day.

A cultural life where the Free Trade Hall hosted both the Halle Orchestra and The Smiths. Futuristic nightclubs in post-industrial settings, most famously the Hacienda (though I did not like that much), but also lineal descendants of the Palais de Danse like the Ritz, and virtual speakeasys like the PSV in Hulme. Sleek bars, the names of which I don’t now remember, alongside street locals like The Peveril on the Peak. The legacy of the great intellectual societies of nineteenth century Manchester, like the Natural History Society and Geological Society, still visible in the Manchester Museum, alongside the latest art house films in the Cornerhouse Cinema.

Multi-cultural, too, and that does not just mean races and religions although it does mean that. Most visible, I suppose, in Rusholme’s curry mile and in Chinatown, it was also a mingling – often uneasy, sometimes violent – of students and Mancunians. The curry mile itself overlaid on an earlier generation of Irish immigrants. Strange contrasts of, say, the prosperous, bourgeois food hall of Kendall’s department store, the freakish counter culture of, say, Affleck’s Palace, the packs of semi-savage dogs on, say, Claremont Road, the grand but fading parks like, say, Platt Fields; the exuberance of the emergent gay village cheek-by-jowl with the seediness of the well-established red light area around Chorlton Street coach station. Chorlton Street coach station, itself; the concrete monstrosity where you arrived in horror, yet which later became the place you met or left your boyfriend or girlfriend or just friend and so it became - more often than its architecture deserved - infused with joy, despair, indifference or relief.

It’s worth thinking about multi-culturalism today when some seek to blame that for what has happened. Because if this attack is motivated by anything other than the personal inadequacy of the perpetrator it will be the now familiar reasons of those who stand, like those who make the most intemperate responses to what they do, for a resentful, sullen, hate-filled and ultimately murderous mono-culturalism. It is the same ‘logic’ that animated those Islamists who have slaughtered in the bars of Paris and beaches in Tunisia, the ‘Christian conservative’ who committed mass murder in Norway or Jo Cox’s ‘Britain First’ killer in this country. They are all part of the same mono-cultural ideology and all draw support from and grow out of those who espouse that ideology.

As for Manchester, it has been the victim of a terrorist attack before, the IRA bombing of 1996. I had left the city by then, but I remember well a comment made on the news by a Mancunian at the time. I can’t recall the exact words but he said, laconically (referring to the Nazi bombings of Britain during the Second World War), something like: “Won’t bother us. We’ve been bombed by professionals, and that didn’t bother us overly”.

I don’t think there is necessarily a particular ‘Manchester’ spirit in that – people in Newcastle, Cardiff or Glasgow would probably respond much the same – but, still, I think that something like that is at work in Manchester today. It’s low-key, defiant and, like so much in Manchester, aware of and attentive to history. But I know that it will be of no comfort at all to those families who this evening are creased in mourning for someone who – perhaps young and excited about the concert they were about to go to – yesterday sat at the tea table but will never do so again.  

Update (24 May 2017): See Tony Walsh read his poem This is the Place at a vigil held on Albert Square on 23 May 2017. Stunning.

Books

In my previous post I mentioned the ‘mysteries’ of writing, and this week I have been reading a book about writing’s conjoined twin: reading. It is Daniel Gray’s Scribbles in the Margins. 50 Eternal Delights of Books (Bloomsbury, 2017) and it is a kind of homage to books and to reading. It actually says very little about particular books or authors and is much more concerned with the generic experience of reading, and such things as the smell and texture of books themselves. I suppose that any kind of reader will relate to this, but perhaps academics in particular, for whom reading is so central to their lives, will do so.

Throughout, I felt little pings of recognition with the emotions and experiences described as well as, occasionally, not being able to relate to it at all. So, for example, I identified very strongly with the first ‘chapter’ (they are really mini-essays) on the experience of finding handwritten dedications in old books. I had thought that taking pleasure in that was unique to me; apparently not, and that connection of one’s experience to that of others is in itself one of the joys of reading. On the other hand, I could not identify at all with ‘reading in a tent’, having neither done so nor wanted to. Re-reading an old favourite I could very strongly relate to, but wasn’t surprised to find discussed; the pleasure of the books you find in a holiday cottage was again something that resonated but which again I thought of as my own idiosyncrasy rather than being a shared pleasure.

I can’t recall a time when I didn’t read, and can’t, therefore, recall learning to read. I certainly learned before I went to school having been taught, I imagine, by one of my older sisters. One of my greatest childhood pleasures was to go to the local public library – so many of which have now disappeared or are under threat of closure – which in memory was vast, hushed, wooden but I suppose was really quite small. There’s a romance, it seems to me, in finding books in libraries and bookshops which is quite different to buying online, and certainly the physicality of a book is quite different to that of an e-reader. It has recently been reported that book sales are increasing and e-book sales declining, quite contrary to the expectations of a few years ago, so perhaps I am not alone in that.

In adult life I have published several books, including that on which this blog is based, and it has a particular pleasure which is not at all like publishing academic journal articles. That may be because I have not published nearly as many books as articles, so they have more novelty. It is also because, nowadays, journal articles appear on line long before they appear in print and, in fact, often I never even handle the paper journal itself. With books, by contrast, there is something quite special in receiving the first copies.

That pleasure is, indeed, to do with the physicality of the book: its look, its feel, its smell. The book of this blog has a particularly distinctive appearance because of its cover design, at least in the paperback version (the hardback is very dull, but hardly anyone buys that, anyway). When I was first shown the design for the first edition I thought how clever the designer (whose name I do not know) had been. It was a kind of pastiche of a student notebook and seemed to fit perfectly with the ‘ethos’ of the book (if there is such a thing).

Subsequent editions (and, now, the design of this blog) expanded on that theme, including picking up on one of the reader endorsements by featuring the rings of a coffee mug. I tried to persuade the publishers to also include some image of an overflowing ashtray, to (look away now, kids) reflect the prodigious cigarette consumption that had accompanied its writing. But, alas, that suggestion was rejected as inappropriate in this day and age. Never mind, my own copies, like most of my books, have ingested the tobacco smoke that they live in and have become suitably yellow and odorous – another of the delights of books that Daniel Gray identifies.

In On Being at Work (Routledge, 2013: 38), Nancy Harding describes being in a bookshop and picking up a book (by Judith Butler), reading the first paragraph and being enthralled, captivated and confused. Picking up Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in a bookshop, over thirty years ago, was like that for me. It’s chancy and contingent. Just like picking up a thriller or a romance, the purchase of an academic book is often to do with the feel and look, the back cover blurb, a few sentences read at random. Yet such encounters can be life-changing.

Social Science Bites ... on organization studies

Just a short post today, to draw attention to my podcast on Social Science Bites. Social Science Bites features interviews with leading social scientists and covers a wide array of topics and disciplines, but this is the first time that anyone from organization studies, or for that matter any management studies area, has been interviewed. The previous nearest to the field was the interview with the sociologist Michael Burawoy, talking about sociology and the workplace (it is well worth a listen). Burawoy, of course, has been very influential in organization studies, especially within the labour process tradition.

The interview with me is edited from a longer interview conducted by David Edmonds, which was great fun to do. It was quite broad in focus, trying to tackle the entirety of organization studies as a discipline, although with forays into some of the specific research projects I have done. Of course, I wouldn’t claim to be a spokesperson for organization studies in toto, but I hope I managed to convey something of its scope as well as indicating some of the more critical approaches to which my book is dedicated. I particularly like the inclusion in the final version of comments about the falsity of thinking that critical approaches to organization studies are political whereas mainstream approaches are apolitical.

Whilst I am blowing my own trumpet, I’ll also mention a book just out by Helen Sword, entitled Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard University Press, 2017) which features me as one example (although of course there is much more of interest in the book than that). Writing is a ubiquitous but in some ways mysterious part of academic life in that its consequences are overt and public but its processes hidden and private. Sword's book is fascinating in bringing those processes to light.

On the topic of writing, regular readers of this blog – and I know there are some – may have noticed that I am posting less frequently than in the past. This is because I am putting a lot of effort into my other blog, on the consequences of Brexit, and rapidly unfolding events make that a big task. I hope some readers of the blog find some interest in the other one and see, as I do, some connection between the underlying themes of both blogs.