Reflections on working from home

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.

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.

In praise of universities

This week the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a hard right free market think tank, produced a report entitled ‘Lackademia: why do academics lean left?’ It claims – and treats as a problem – that “left-liberals” are “over-represented” in British academia. The methodology used to establish the political views of academics was risible, being based on a self-selecting survey (what survey methodologists call a ‘voodoo poll’) and this and other flaws were pointed out by John Morgan in the Times Higher Education.

Even if the data were more robust, it is a bizarre notion that academics’ political views should be ‘representative’ of the general population and that, if they are not, they are, to use the report’s word “skewed”. Academics are not appointed for their political views, or to represent anyone under some kind of proportional representation system – and it would be disastrous if they were appointed in this way, rather than on the basis of their academic expertise. But the choice of the term ‘over-representation’ is deliberate, as signalled in the closing line of the full report – it tries to take the language of diversity (in relation to gender, class and ethnicity) in order to imply, although there is absolutely no evidence of this, that those on the political right are victims of discrimination so that whilst being qualified for academic posts they are excluded from them.

The word ‘victims’ is significant in understanding what is going on here, which is a species of the populist politics sweeping Western societies. That populism has at its heart a victim narrative in which the ‘liberal elite’ (sometimes the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’) has a fiendish power to do down the common sense of ‘the people’. It is a nonsensical reading of where power lies, since the intellectual apparatchiks of recent decades are more obviously the ASI and similar neo-liberal bodies than anyone else, but after the events of the last year no one can doubt its traction. Another part of the populist wave is its anti-intellectualism, with ‘experts’ being denounced and even compared to Nazis. So the ASI report channels that strand of populism, too.

The populist implications of the ASI report were quite apparent in the way it got picked up in the media. Especially grotesque was a spiteful piece by Tom Utley in, inevitably, the Daily Mail. It started with a long whine about having been put down by his ‘left-wing’ tutor at Cambridge (like so many of the populist Right – Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg - Utley is a product of ‘elite’ universities) some forty years ago.  The ‘put down’ was, in fact, a correction of his misunderstanding about the subject under discussion – as it happens John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ concept, discussed on p. 146 of my book - although Utley clearly doesn’t realise this and it apparently still rankles.

The rest of the article is a series of tendentious assertions (e.g. cherry picked examples of Oxbridge college heads) and smears (e.g. the ‘endless holidays’ of ‘dons’) exhibiting such a degree of intellectual dishonesty and disregard for evidence that one can at least agree that he was not very well-taught when at university. These are then explicitly linked to populist politics by pointing out that most academics opposed Brexit. That is hardly surprising: most people with a degree and even more with a higher degree did.

The irony is that British universities are extraordinarily successful in any terms they might be judged. They perform far better proportionate to either the size of the UK or the funding they receive than those of any other country in the world in terms of placement in world rankings, where the UK has 34 of the top 200 universities, and quality of research. They are intimately linked with medical and industrial innovation and the communication of culture. Moreover, they earn billions of pounds for the UK in student fee income (though this is under threat from government immigration policies). To jeopardise this in pursuit of ‘politically representative’ staffing would be, to coin a populist phrase, political correctness gone mad. Would we want, say, biologists, to be selected on the grounds of political representativeness rather than scientific ability? Is that the Lysenkoist dream of Tom Utley and the ASI? I fear that it might be.

But universities should be defended on wider grounds than this. To the extent that it is the case that they are bulwarks against populism then that is a good thing in itself. The hallmark of populism is what we are learning to call post-truth. The hallmark of universities is still that of a liberal Enlightenment commitment to truth, evidence and reason (that is so even when academics interrogate and critique the liberal Enlightenment). So it is small wonder that they are under attack from populists, and that is all the more reason to hold on tight to what they embody and represent.

Reviewing anger

In my book I write briefly (p.xiv) about the depressing nature of academic journal publication in organization studies, and have done so at more length in a post on this blog. In that post, written in 2014, I bemoaned the tendency for the anonymous reviewers of journal submissions to write reams of comments making demands of authors so excessive that whole books could not satisfy them.

Recently, though, I have noticed a different trend. I now find that papers I submit to journals come back with very brief comments. Occasionally, they are brief but positive. More often they are brief and not just negative but hostile, dismissive and, often absurd. For example, I recently had a damning review, endorsed by the editor, whose main complaint was that I had completely ignored a key piece of work in the field when in fact it was not just referenced but extensively quoted. Again in contrast to my experience a few years ago reviews are accompanied by an editorial letter that is curt and content-free apart, of course, from the message that the paper has been rejected. I should say that I am talking here about what are regarded within the UK and Europe (the US ranking of such things being different) “top journals” as defined by the ubiquitous Chartered Association of Business Schools’ (CABS) listing.

Anyone reading this who works in the field may be thinking that I am giving vent to sour grapes at having my papers rejected by journals. And of course I am. But there is more to it than that. I’ve been doing this job for a long time and so like anyone else I am used to papers being rejected. With the top journals’ overall rejection rates being in the order of 90% that is pretty much inevitable. So that is not the issue. What I see shifting is the manner of rejection.

That reviews are getting briefer is perhaps not surprising. I know, from the other side of the fence, how many requests to review I receive, and this activity is time-consuming to do thoroughly. Perhaps spending that time used to be seen as part of the communal reciprocity of being an academic, but with the time pressures now much-increased I can see why brevity might be becoming the norm.

What is more surprising, though, is how angry these reviews are. In recent weeks I’ve had reviews of papers which positively bark about, for example, there being ‘no contribution’. Several times there’s also been a sense of outrage at the impertinence of the paper under review for entering territory apparently regarded as ‘owned’ by the reviewer. It’s as if the reviewers feel insulted – and so insult the author.

Now, again, an obvious reaction would be to say that perhaps the problem is that my papers make no contribution and/or are amateurish forays into others’ fields. No wonder, then, that reviewers are angry. The problem with that diagnosis, though, is that the very same journals send me articles to review on the very same topics, on the basis that I have expertise in them. So whilst it is plausible that my own work has flaws that I am blind to – and I will happily own to that – it seems implausible that my critical faculties are so blinded that I can both be an expert reviewer of others’ work whilst myself producing work of such dire quality that angry dismissal is not only justified but positively demanded. And, if that is so, why do those same journals constantly send me papers to review?

So now let’s suppose another objection to what I am saying. Perhaps it is that I am sent papers to review on the basis of my expertise because in the past I did good work but I’ve now gone downhill and the papers I submit now are as risible as the referees say. But that can’t be true, either, because more often than not those same papers have gone on to be accepted by a different journal, with a different editor and different reviewers. Again, such discrepancies aren’t new – there’s always been a zone of judgment and ambiguity about what is a good paper – but they seem to me to be getting far more extreme, with a paper being as likely to be dismissed as worthless as lauded as excellent.

Based on conversations with other people I am pretty sure that the experiences I am describing are not unique to me. I am not entirely sure what the explanation is but I have a couple of ideas. One is that journal editors are not paying very much attention to their work and (despite the inevitable claim of having read the paper “very carefully”) are not exercising much editorial judgment; and bear in mind that ‘editor’ means, typically, one of a massive array of associate or assistant editors of varying ability and diligence. There are also, probably, cases of personal animosity: although submissions are anonymously reviewed it is often easy for reviewers to guess author identity (and vice versa) and, of course, handling editors know author identity anyway.

The other, more important, thing is that I think that reviewers have got angrier because as authors they have been on the receiving end of angry reviews. Which is chicken and which is egg is impossible to say, but there is surely a psychological logic in the idea that if your paper is trashed on spurious grounds you will look to trash those you review. That’s really the obverse of the point I made earlier about the incongruity of me being regarded as an expert reviewer and yet an incompetent author. It arises from that fact that all of us in the field are simultaneously authors, reviewers and, for that matter, editors.

All of this is annoying – infuriating, in fact – but it is worse than that. For me, the stakes are not very high. Deservingly or not I am reasonably well-established, securely employed, have no post I can be promoted to on research grounds, am not that far off retirement, and one way or another more than meet institutional systems of research evaluation. So a paper getting rejected in a spurious or unpleasant way is upsetting but doesn’t make any real practical difference to me. But many people, including many that I write with, are not in this happy position. For them, a publication in a “top journal” can make or break their careers, or can make huge differences to promotion chances or to salary levels.

Despite the huge power they wield there is no accountability whatsoever of journal editors and anonymous reviewers, and no possibility whatsoever of challenging their judgments. I believe that some authors do seek to challenge decisions, but I have always thought that this is a hiding to nothing and have never done so. Apart from being undignified, it’s not clear what it could achieve: if, for example, reviewers have trashed a paper and the editor has rejected it then unless an appeal yielded a whole new set of reviewers, which is highly unlikely, shifting an editor to allow a revise and resubmit is probably not going to lead to a better outcome. Pragmatically, it’s better to send the paper to another journal and hope for better luck with the editor and reviewers.

Be that as it may, it does not negate the fact that sloppy editing and angry reviewing is damaging to academic careers and – which may matter more to those who are not academics – to what gets published and therefore read. It’s a hidden scandal, and though a minor one in the general scheme of things no less important to its victims.

A story about leadership

The other day I came across the text of a short story which I submitted to a 2004 competition run by what was then the Times Higher Education Supplement on the theme of leadership in higher education. My submission didn’t win, but reading it again it made me chuckle, and despite some obvious anachronisms that I haven’t changed it still seems to me to say something about leadership in higher education, even twelve years on. So I thought it would be nice to let it see the light of day. Apologies for the small font size which for some reason I can't change ....

 

The Vision Thing

Something strange happened yesterday. Not that that is unusual, so perhaps it can’t be strange. And after all, as I’ve only been in the job for two weeks it’s to be expected that everything will be strange, so strangeness is normal. Stop. I have to remember that I am not an academic any more and these kinds of semantic musings are no longer my concern. Anyway, yesterday’s strange thing was an article in the local newspaper about me: ‘New Broom for Greshingham University’.

It’s not that I am unused to seeing my name in the newspapers, and more prestigious titles than the Greshingham Echo I may say. A few years ago, when I chaired the government watchdog on vegetable pesticides I was often in the national press. (‘Boffin’s Hot Potato’ was my favourite headline). No, what was strange was to see myself described as a ‘new broom’. For if there is one thing that I have learned since I started as Vice-Chancellor it is that I spend all my time fulfilling the commitments and carrying out the policies of my predecessor.

It’s fortunate that I inherited his PA, Judy, otherwise I really wouldn’t have a clue what to do. On the other hand, I have to confess that I am rather scared of Judy. This morning was a case in point. I arrived later than I had intended, having drunk more then I should at a dull dinner last night. Judy didn’t actually tell me off for my tardiness, but I had the sense that she would have liked to, and that once I have been longer in post she will have no hesitations about doing so. She pointed out that in ten minutes time I was due to chair a meeting of the university advisory board (a collection of self-important local business people, as it turned out) and then ran through the rest of my engagements before dropping the bombshell. Tomorrow I was to have the first of a series of open meetings with the staff at which I would discuss my vision and mission for the University.

“It’s been in the diary for months,” she countered, seeing my dismay. “Sir David always held these open meetings at the start of the year. He went on a leadership development course that said it was a good way to motivate the staff and ensure their buy-in to the strategic level objectives of the University.”

Sir David was my predecessor. See what I mean about the new broom fantasy?

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, cravenly rather than defiantly, for I have already learned that I am completely dependent upon Judy.

“Why don’t you use last year’s vision and mission?” she offered, and left me morosely sipping a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

It’s fair to say that I paid less attention than I ought to the advisory board meeting. What I wanted was advice on preparing my vision and mission, but that wasn’t on the agenda. Despite my readiness to be guided by Judy, something in me revolted at the idea of simply re-hashing the existing ones. Perhaps it was the new broom phrase. It was time to stamp my mark on Greshingham and tomorrow’s meeting would be an ideal place to start.

I told Judy my intention at lunchtime. I had the suspicion that she was doubtful, but this may just be my paranoia. In any case, I stood firm. I might not have been on a leadership course, but I’m certainly a leader – a natural leader, perhaps, so I don’t need to go on a course – and, equally naturally, I do have a strong vision of what the University should achieve. All that was needed was time to put pen to paper.

As luck would have it I had a couple of hours free that afternoon. According to the diary, I was due to meet the Head of Chemistry which Judy told me had been a regular fixture every term for the last four years because it was in a ‘turnaround’ situation. That meant, apparently, that it had scored poorly in the last RAE, been found wanting in its teaching quality and was so laggardly in meeting its access targets that my predecessor had singled it out for his special oversight. However, in an oversight of a different kind, it had gone unnoticed that, having failed to turnaround, the School had in fact been closed down and so the termly meeting was now redundant.

“As are the members of the School of Chemistry,” I quipped.

“They’ve been re-deployed, Vice-Chancellor,” she said stonily.

I don’t think I will try making jokes with Judy any more.

***

When I came to write down my vision I found, distressingly, that I don’t have one. I mean, I want us to do well, obviously. But this seems altogether too anaemic to warrant being called a vision. How about something more grandiose? To be a world-class university? That has a better ring, certainly. It’s difficult to take seriously, though. I haven’t met all my colleagues yet, but those I have seem to fall considerably short of world-class. Indeed, if we exclude the robotics team, it seems unlikely that the world would be perceptibly worse if Greshingham didn’t exist at all. Perhaps that is unfair to the Media Lab people, at least in their own estimation, although I freely concede that I am hazy about what goes on there. Attaching electrodes to journalists’ heads?

I realised that it was now half an hour since I had started, or rather failed to start. In desperation I turned to the pages of the THES to see how other universities position themselves. It seemed to depend on what kind of place they are. The newer universities stressed teaching (‘Luton – education that works’) whereas the older institutions put the accent on research (‘Southampton – at the cutting edge of innovation’). I certainly don’t want us to be thought of as an ex-poly, but then again we mustn’t come across as too ivory tower either. The best bet might be to emphasise teaching and research.

But were these things visions, anyhow? Would anyone imagine in their absence that the aim was education that didn’t work and research which didn’t bother with new discoveries? I thought of last week’s visit to the Philosophy Department and realised that some people might. Even so, I was sure that ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Berkshire’ couldn’t be considered a vision so much as a statement of fact. Surely a vision had to be aspirational: ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Wales’?

Perhaps I should start with the mission instead. But what was the difference between a vision and mission? I had to admit to myself that I had no idea. I could ask Judy, I supposed, but I wasn’t quite ready for that humiliation. Would the dictionary help? For each word there were various meanings, mostly irrelevant. Mission – ‘body sent by religious community to propagate its faith’, for example. On the other hand, was it so irrelevant? Perhaps this kind of outreach activity was exactly what was needed to deal with the access problem which was discussed at last week’s council meeting? Then again, was the university a religious community? Did it have a faith? And might it all smack of colonialism anyway (a bad thing)? As for vision – ‘thing or person seen a dream or trance’ didn’t really work. After all, I’d been sitting in a dream or trance for over an hour and hadn’t come up with anything.

On balance, the best definitions seemed to be ‘statesmanlike sagacity of planning’ for vision (I particularly liked the sound of that) and ‘task to be performed’ for mission. I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Still, it seemed like a thin line. If my vision was to be a world-class university, and despite my reservations this still appealed to me, then surely the mission was also to be a world-class university. The only difference so far as I could see (my vision, according to the first definition in the dictionary!) was that I had the vision and this then became other people’s mission. That seemed like a good idea, but would other people agree?

Irritatingly, just as I was making progress, the telephone rang. Judy told me that my daughter Simone was on the line and needed to talk to me urgently. Simone is a student, in her second year at one of the London colleges. I was worried that something was wrong but it soon emerged that all she wanted was to be picked up from the station that evening. Sometimes I think my family don’t realise how important I have become. I was about to tell her off for disturbing me at work with this triviality when it occurred to me that Simone is studying business management. Admittedly it was vaguely embarrassing to have to ask my own daughter about how to formulate the vision and mission of my university, but there’s no point in being too proud. And wasn’t this the sort of thing she would have learned about?

“Yeah, Dad,” she drawled contemptuously. “We did that in the first year.”

“So what should I say?” I asked, all pretence of superiority gone.

“Depends if you’re a lion, a wolf or a jackal,” she said. “Which are you?”

“Well, I’m not sure” I found myself giggling nervously. “What do you think?”

“Do you lead from the front, hunt on your own or stick with the pack?”

“I suppose a bit of all three,” I suggested.

“Hmm, a hybrid,” she said, disapprovingly. “Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference because whatever you are you have to look into your inner self and ask what you really want and then translate it into a story that can inspire people,” she said, before announcing that her train was entering a tunnel.

After the phone went dead, I tried to take her advice. I looked into my inner self. What was my real vision for the future? The only thing I could think of was getting a knighthood, like my predecessor. My mission? I suppose it boiled down to not making any truly awful mistakes in public. And they fitted together pretty well, because so long as I don’t completely screw up then I should finish with a knighthood. What was the other bit? Translate that into an inspirational story. It seemed good enough to me, but I couldn’t honestly think anyone else would be inspired by it. In fact, if I said this at tomorrow’s meeting then it might well count as making a truly awful mistake in public.

There was a knock on my door and Judy bustled in, reminding me that my next meeting was about to begin. There wasn’t any point in pretending any longer, but still I tried to save face.

“Judy,” I began, “I’ve decided that what we need is a period of continuity and stability. It’s called - um – the golden labrador approach to leadership. So I thought I’d stick for the time being with last year’s vision and mission. What were they again?”

“Greshingham aims to provide education that works and research at the cutting edge of innovation in the heart of the Midlands,” she intoned.

I’d been thinking along the right lines, obviously. Still I wasn’t willing to forget the new broom tag.

“Good,” I replied. “We’ll go with that, but add at the end ‘with world-class aspirations in selected areas’.”

I thought I had had the last word, but a moment later Judy returned and handed me a letter inviting me to attend a workshop entitled ‘Transforming Leaders in Higher Education’.

Was my life was about to change?

The fourth estate

There are many things I would like to write about today, from the latest Islamist atrocities in Brussels to the latest twists in the EU Referendum debate. But one dimension of these and, by definition, any news story is the reporting of news in general and the importance of journalistic freedom in particular.

I’m prompted to say this by the trial which began today, in secret, in Turkey of journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül. The case, which involves charges of espionage since the journalists reported on alleged Turkish state support for weapons shipments to Syria, has attracted widespread condemnation. It comes at a time of wider concerns about press freedom in Turkey, in part following the State takeover of Zaman, the country’s biggest newspaper, earlier this month.

Journalistic freedom is always a target for attack by authoritarian regimes, and there are numerous cases throughout history – Egypt’s action against three al-Jazeera journalists being a recent notorious example. That this is so reflects, precisely, why journalism is so important to a free society and why it is so important to defend it. The universally acclaimed recent film Spotlight, about the journalistic investigation of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, dramatizes this, as did now classic films like All the President’s Men or The Killing Fields.

The need for robust reporting and investigative journalism seems to me to be all the more important given the massive increase in information available because of the internet and social media – what Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks calls ‘the networked fourth estate’. In one way this seems to offer a powerful counter in its own right to political authoritarianism. In another way, it obscures because it enables anyone and everyone to put their message out – in blogs like this one, indeed – with no necessary regard for truth, verification or accuracy. Twitter storms both shape the news agenda and become news in their own right.

In this world, according to the Pew Research Center:

"Instead of gatekeepers, journalists now become referees. Acknowledging that our potential audience is flooded with unlimited information and no way of discerning what is of value, what is true, what is propaganda, we must construct our work to offer them the referee’s advice: this information has been checked and verified; this information has been found to be untrue; this is self-interested propaganda; this is being reported but we have yet to be able to verify the information."

Academics are also important in this process. I think it was C. Wright Mills who described sociology as ‘slow journalism’ but whoever it was I agree – as regards sociology and social science in general, including organization studies. Indeed this is why (returning to the general point) authoritarian regimes also persecute academics as they do journalists, but my point is more particularly that in the internet-enabled cacophony academics can also be ‘referees’. Indeed they are often used by the media in just that way, and it seems to me a more important social utility than the rather mechanical notion of ‘research impact’ currently in vogue. What I find striking and impressive is the way that every time a new news story breaks, there is an academic on hand with expertise in what just hours before might have been dismissed as esoteric self-indulgence or 'academic' in the pejorative sense.

Of course there are plenty of academics and journalists who use their positions in ways that neither live up to the heroic traditions of investigative crusade nor to the mundane traditions of careful facticity. And the notions of disinterested truth that underpin both are clearly somewhat threadbare; one hardly needs to read the laboured prose of postmodern philosophers to realise this. Even so many journalists and academics do, I think, seek to uphold their best traditions whilst being sensitive to their limitations.

On the other hand, just at the moment that good journalism is most needed it is being undermined by the economics of new technology and the voracious demands of 24-hour rolling news. It is very cheap to use what is at best citizen journalism and at worst twitter-fuelled populism to fill cavernous news space, and much journalism is now no more than a recycling of the PR material of firms and governments. By contrast, it is expensive to maintain a journalistic staff unless there is lot of cultural capital and state subsidy (e.g. the BBC) or a lot of cultural capital and a brand that can be ‘monetized’ (e.g. the Financial Times). Academics, too, face pressures, especially where universities are heavily dependent on private funding or just when they become so overwhelmed by other demands that their public information role gets marginalized.

Even so, our main concern should surely be the very direct, coercive ways in which authoritarian states seek to silence comment, and here I return to Turkey – a country, let’s not forget, that is a member of NATO and an aspirant member of the EU. Here, it is not just journalists who are being arrested and, in fact, killed. Just ten days ago, three mathematics academics were arrested for calling for an end to security operations against the Kurds (and a fourth, British computer scientist Chris Stephenson was arrested and then deported for protesting in their support) and stand accused of terrorism.

What lies outside of organization studies?

I received an interesting email about this blog the other day. As the sender did not post it publicly I won’t reveal his name but I suppose it was what used to be called a ‘green ink letter’ in that the language was a little intemperate and capital letters and exclamation remarks abounded (and I would just mention that this is not necessarily the most effective way to make one’s arguments). The main point he made was that most of what I write about on the blog is not organization studies but economics and politics and he was particularly exercised by my posts on British membership of the EU. Why, he asked, don’t I just stick to writing about what I know about, meaning organization studies?

The answer to that is important to my view of what organization studies is, or should be. Because I don’t recognize any real distinctions between organization studies and economics and politics or, for that matter, social science or social affairs or history (all of which I often write about), philosophy (though I rarely write about it) or literature (which occasionally I do). That’s actually one of the key messages of the book.

One reason for that is the fairly obvious one that organizations exist within an economic, political and social context so anything about that context is relevant to organizations. In Europe (and more widely), the EU is certainly an important part of that context and although my correspondent clearly disagreed with my views on the matter, the robustness of his email leads me to think that he very much agrees about that importance. Another reason is that the organization-context distinction (or, more often in organization theory, the organization-environment distinction) is a bogus one: they are mutually constitutive. As I argue in the book (p.93), somewhat counter-intuitively organizations are part of their own environment. And a third is that politics, economics and the social are themselves organized both in general and in terms of specific organizations (e.g. political parties). No one bats an eyelid if leadership researchers invoke examples of political leaders alongside business leaders – so why should it not be the same for organization studies in general?

All this suggests another, and I think genuinely interesting, question: does it mean that there is nothing that lies outside of organization studies? I am really not sure. Certainly there is little which lies outside organizations, in that all human life has a collective and therefore organized aspect. Even Robinson Crusoe, sometimes invoked in economic theory as an atomised individual, relied upon stuff that he had rescued from his shipwrecked boat, and both the boat and the stuff were there because of organization. And as soon as he met another (black) person he turned him into a slave – effecting an organization on the basis of how he had learned to organize. So maybe organization studies is about everything?

There are parallels in other subjects. Economics is actually a good example in that it often seeks to recast all human experience in terms of its own categories, and politics can claim that everything is in some sense political. In recent years I’ve noticed that geography has become ever more expansive in its scope, perhaps on the basis that everything, after all, occurs in space and in a place. Anything social must in some sense be amenable to sociological analysis. And does anything about human behaviour lie outside the ambit of psychology? I suppose that many facets of art and science lie outside of organization studies, and that it would be immensely and absurdly flattening to try to argue otherwise. Still, all facets of art and science are in some way organized, and in this regard organization studies has (or could have) something to say about them. Perhaps only aesthetic experience lies wholly outside organization studies?

Like many academics who work in organization studies my training was outside of the field. In fact, although the email correspondent suggested that I should stick to organization studies as that is what I know about, the reality is that I probably don’t have anything like the comprehensive knowledge of the subject that I might be assumed to have, and probably should have. In my case my training was primarily in political philosophy and to a lesser extent economics; for others in the field it was anthropology, psychology and sociology amongst other things. This is actually becoming less true, as the growth of organization studies means that younger academics are more often trained in the subject, and usually within business schools. I am inclined to think that this is change for the worse, although it may well be that they have a more thorough grounding in organization studies per se than do I and others of my generation.

Anyway, I don’t propose to limit myself to the conventional repertoire of organization studies, but I can see the danger that the more it is about everything the more it may be about nothing. Even so, what strikes me more, as regards this blog, is that it is actually rather repetitive in the things I write about. So my belated New Year resolution (with no promises that I will stick to it) is to try to extend my range a bit further. That will not please my correspondent, alas, but since his main complaint was about my “fascistic”, “Quisling”, “big business [loving]” and “liberal-left elitist” support for British membership of the EU I fear that I am unlikely to do so. And I am sure I will continue to post about British membership of the EU – in fact something about the extraordinary intellectual legerdemain (if this does not slightly flatter it) by which its supporters can simultaneously be cast as fascists, traitors, corporate lackeys, liberals and leftists would be well worth writing.

Reviewing organization studies

I have recently been doing a lot of reviewing for academic journals which is an increasingly depressing experience. Almost every paper I review has an entirely mechanistic and soul-destroying approach. A literature review is conducted to establish the current state of knowledge. But there is no real engagement with that literature, it is just carefully presented to establish some synthetic deficiency. Then there is a dense section on theory and the claim of some wonderful theoretical advance. There is a cautious and careful statement of methodology, stressing its technical aspect. Then some findings and a crafted statement of contribution.

Occasionally, there is some glaring inadequacy in these ritualistic moves that, as a reviewer, one can point out. Far more often, there’s not really anything wrong with it … except that it’s awful and pointless and boring. Those might be considered good grounds to recommend rejection but, bizarrely, that is not so. Sometimes I say something like that in my reviews but, when I do, it is invariably discounted (for those who don’t know the process, normally journal editors send reviewers a copy of their decision letter* along with the comment of all reviewers, so one can see what weight has been put upon one’s comment). In any case, I rarely state it so baldly since I understand very well the reason why authors write their papers that way. It’s not even that these papers are ‘bad’. They are just dead.

The reason why academic research in organization studies has got this way are multiple, but they have led to a situation where each and every journal paper is supposed to make a theoretical advance (even though there have only been a handful of such advances in the field in the last fifty years, say; and few of these have come from journal papers) and to be empirically robust (even though almost all of them are based either on statistical analysis of variables that are meaningless, or present as ‘thick description’ a few quotes from some interviews). The possibility that academic research might disclose something interesting and hitherto little known or not known at all about how people live is not so much forgotten as derided.

As an author, submitting papers to journals, I see this all the time. When I started this job, reviewers’ comments were confined to a brief statement of criticisms and suggestions. Now, I receive whole essays as reviews demanding of a 10,000 word article more than a series of books could reasonably be expected to deliver. And if I re-write and re-submit the paper – and sometimes, now, I just say that I won’t do so given the absurdity of the demands – it is meant to be accompanied by a response to reviewers running to as many pages as the paper itself, and grovelingly thanking the reviewers for the damage they have forced me to do. I say damage because although reviewer comments are occasionally helpful, more often they require endless detours, bolsterings and circumlocutions which strip out any clarity of argument. This is very obvious when you read journal papers because you can almost always see the joins as authors struggle to accommodate reviewers' comments, and is one of the reasons for their unreadability. ‘Ah, that’s just the game’, my colleagues tell me. Well, yes, indeed it is, and if we play it then we end up with precisely the boring and forgettable papers that are published.

Because that, really, is the point. All of this is supposedly about quality. By being so ‘rigorous’ it will ensure that each paper is of great merit. I know people who become almost orgasmic with glee when they get an acceptance letter from a top journal. People who don’t work in this field won’t understand this and may not believe it, but it is true. It is ridiculous of course. Even within the narrow terms of  professionalised debate it is ridiculous. The average citation of a paper in the organization studies field is less than five. But here is something interesting – and it is not meant to be as self-aggrandizing as it sounds. In my career I have published many papers in what are now called ‘top journals’ which would probably not begin to meet the criteria that those journals now apply. Yet very many of them are highly cited (I will spare you my Google Scholar i10-index) whereas the papers being published through this routinized, professionalised  journal process we now have disappear without trace.

Almost everything that happens every day in every country in the world is bound up with organizations. It is exciting, important and vibrant. But the academic study of organizations is not just dead but deadening. Organization studies might very well be called organizational necrophilia**.

 

*These editorial letters are themselves masterpieces in mediocrity ('I want you to satisfy all the reviewers' comments' - no sense that an editor might make a judgment on their validity or, even, acknowledge their incompatability) and sanctimony (the dominant trope being a lordly injunction to authors to consider this ‘a high risk rewrite’).


**Post-script: Since first posting this it has been nagging at me that it connects with something else, which I now remember is an excellent post on Yiannis Gabriel's blog, entitled Are any academic journals still alive?