Your money and your life

The still emerging scandal of the use of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica for political campaigning has numerous dimensions to it – political, technological, ethical and social. One particular aspect that I find interesting is the idea that users (may) have given their consent to the various ways their data is used by signing up for services. It has apparently long been a truism in the tech world that ‘if the product is free then you are the product’, and on that basis it is claimed that signing up for services is a matter of caveat emptor or ‘buyer beware’ - or should that, in this case, be ‘donor aware’ since the point seems to be that what we should beware of is not buying?

There seems an obvious difficulty with this: how can we make such judgments if we do not know what we are agreeing to? The answer, invariably, is that what is required is greater transparency. However, as Jana Costas and I wrote in our book on secrecy in organizations, using exactly the example of accessing on-line services, transparency is not what it appears to be:

“Indeed, one can even see how increased transparency also entails increased secrecy, as the very proliferation of information makes it easy to hide secrets which get overlooked in the overwhelming torrent of disclosure. For example, consider the ubiquitous ‘terms and conditions’ to which one signs up when using web-based services. These are so detailed and complex that few of us bother to read them, and fewer still will understand them. So we just check the box indicating agreement. If subsequently this causes problems the provider can quite legitimately say that nothing was kept secret and, indeed, that there had been the fullest transparency possible. Yet it is a transparency that obscures rather than reveals.” (Costas & Grey, 2016: 53)

In these circumstances, the idea of a choice being made seems deeply unrealistic. Of course, a ‘hardline’ response would be to say that if people cannot be bothered to read and understand the T&Cs then that is, precisely, their choice. After all, they could simply not sign up to Facebook. In fact, 2.2 billion people worldwide log in to it at least once month, which is getting close to a third of the global population. No one forces them to.

That is true and, personally, I have never had a Facebook account. But it’s increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to exist without signing up to anything at all. It isn’t as if it is just a matter of social media, it is also about the multitude of on-line services that people need to use in some cases including very basic things without which it is impossible to function, including state welfare. The space for an off-line life is becoming very small indeed (generating the new phenomenon of 'cyber insecurity'). No one can, realistically, ‘choose’ to opt out of the entirety of this, even if we have choice about using this or that platform. Nor is it the case (so far as I know) that any on-line provider of anything offers not to collect any data on its users, and that is the case as much for paid for products as for ‘free’ products. Indeed, just browsing websites requires agreement (assumed as given if we continue to browse) to the use of cookies.

Choice and informed decision making in this context are therefore highly precarious, if not meaningless. Apart from the general issue of take-it-or-leave it sign ups to T&Cs, my experience, at least, is that opting out of specific permissions for, for example, receiving marketing materials from companies are often breached. And I frequently receive marketing messages from companies I have never had any contact with which offer the option of unsubscribing – but only if I provide my email address. So I am expected to ‘choose’ to provide data in order to avoid messages that I have never chosen to receive in the first place. Beyond that, my computer and phone are constantly chuntering away doing things that I have no understanding of at all, and constantly nagging me to provide more information about myself (for example my geographical location). There are even cases of phones and other mobile devices continuing to harvest such data despite users having (supposedly) disabled its provision.

Some of these issues are not new in principle. Over 30 years ago I began work on my PhD which was concerned with financial services regulation. Some of the big issues at the time were (as they continue to be) whether people actually understood what they were signing up for when they took out, for example, a life insurance policy, pension, or mortgage. This was all about, in effect, terms and conditions and hidden costs. Associated with this was the question of the sales and marketing tactics used in the industry. And, indeed, in the intervening years we have seen ongoing scandals about the mis-selling of, for example, endowment mortgages and Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) – and, ironically, the subsequent scandals around the pressure selling of PPI compensation claims. The regulation of such matters was, again, primarily conceived of in terms of transparency of information in order to promote ‘informed choice’. Yet this in turn has generated a mass of information which only someone already highly knowledgeable is really in a position to evaluate.

However, the current situation of the mining of on-line data whilst similar in principle is far more extensive in scope. It is all-encompassing in the way that buying a financial product is not, reaching far more deeply into our lives – and also, as the Facebook scandal seems to suggest, into the lives of the people we interact with (that is, Facebook friends). There also seems to be something qualitatively different about the ‘if the product is free then you are the product’ mantra in that whereas it is pretty clear that what, say, a financial advisor is after – your money – what the data wranglers are after seems to be not just your money but your life. 

Reference

Costas, J. & Grey, C. (2016). Secrecy at Work. The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wells Fargo farrago

The unfolding scandal at US bank Wells Fargo, one of the most historic organizations in the USA, is an interesting illustration of the perils of managerial target-setting (see p. 30 of book). What seems to have happened is that sales staff were under such pressure to meet sales targets that they simply invented new bank and credit card accounts – and not just here and there: as many as two million bogus accounts were created.

But this story is also interesting in showing that such perverse incentives are not just an arcane matter of organizational theory. The scandal led to the company having to pay out on a $185 million lawsuit, and the resignation this week of its Chairman and CEO, John Stumpf. And it shows the weakness of corporate whistle blower legislation.

Target setting lies at the heart of many organizational failures and scandals in recent years, whether that be the British NHS or mortgage lenders’ payment protection policies. There is little sign that the lessons of these have been learned. A huge scandal in waiting is the UK deregulation of pensions, which allows people to draw down and spend or invest their pension pot on the advice of salespeople working, of course, to sales targets. Watch this space for what will undoubtedly result in the coming years: pensioners in poverty because they have blown their savings under the paradoxical dogma of 'choice'.

Targets encapsulate the core issue of formal and substantive rationality in organizations (pp. 21-25) because they prioritise the former over the latter. Formal rationality valorises target setting as a means of control; substantive rationality valorises ethical conduct. The irony is that the former is seen as hard-headed business logic whilst the latter is seen as fluffy ethical stuff but, as Wells Fargo shows, that is a false logic. Had Wells Fargo been more substantively rational, it would not face its current problems.

Painful choices

There is so much that is painful in the world right now – events in France, Germany and Turkey come particularly to mind – that there is no shortage of things I might write under this heading. I don’t think I have ever known so depressing a time, politically, in my life. But in this post I want to focus on the particular and personal pain that I have been experiencing: dental pain. And more specifically some organizational things around that pain.

In brief, last week I developed a toothache and went to the dentist who booked me in for some treatment. Over the weekend the pain became truly agonizing – I’ve had dental pain before but nothing remotely like this – to the extent that I had to contact the out of hours doctor for some non-prescription painkillers. This process itself was organizationally painful, involving no fewer than five telephone calls, each one acting as a kind of filter. Thus on the first call I was asked a checklist of questions clearly designed to either put up red flags (‘Pains in chest? Difficulty breathing?’) or to process me to the right person.

There’s nothing objectionable about that, although I could see it leading to many false positives and negatives, except perhaps the fact that each subsequent phone call entailed repeating my symptoms and needs (in summary: ‘I’m in agony, give me some super-strong painkillers right now’ which maybe could have been passed on). But what struck me was that when it came to prescribing medicine I was told about various different possibilities and the downsides – for example potential side-effects – of these. So I asked whether or not I should take the prescribed medicine, although frankly I was in so much pain that I would have done anything, whatever the risk, up to and including amateur surgery. And the response is what I want to write about, because it was to say that what mattered was that I had been ‘made aware of the risks and so could make an informed choice’.

It seems clear to me that this has nothing to do with my making an informed choice and everything to do with organizational self-protection. If things went wrong, I could hardly complain: I had been warned of the risks. But I had no way of assessing these risks or calibrating them against the benefits and so the choice did not in any way empower me; rather, it disempowered me in the event of any problem that subsequently emerged. It reminded me of a point made in my recent book on secrecy where we argue that the ‘full transparency’ of the terms and conditions we sign up to when making online purchases is actually a form of secrecy. The T&Cs are so lengthy and complex that no one reads them or could understand them if they did, yet in the event of a problem or dispute we can be told that we had been given full information and had agreed to it by ticking the acceptance box.

Anyway, I took my medicine and all went well in that the pain was somewhat lessened and I had no unpleasant side-effects (on the contrary, a rather pleasant wooziness) and I went to the dentist again. She told me that I had a choice between having root canal surgery or an extraction and talked me through the pros and cons. A choice again, then, and this time not I think one to do with organizational self-protection but reflecting current understandings of professionalism in healthcare and other spheres. I say current understandings because in the past the norm was for health professionals to simply tell you what to do. It was a more authoritarian, paternalistic approach in which the doctor (or dentist) knew best.

That has now given way to a more patient-centred and, I suppose, consumerist ethos in which clinician and patient together make treatment decisions. The trouble is that I really don’t want this, and don’t have any basis on which to make a choice – and it is a particularly bad time to try to make choices when one is in pain. I would actually rather be told what to do: my choice is not to choose, but that wasn’t an option. So the conversation became an exercise in me trying to detect and provoke signals from the dentist as to what she actually thought was the best course of action.

It may seem a stretch, but I think this links to the post-truth politics I discussed in my recent post The Sleep of Reason where ‘expert’ opinion is derided and we have a mixture of a consumerist market for ideas and an implication that how passionately a view is held is in some way an index of its truth. For some, this is a liberation from the tyranny of authority, but it goes hand in hand with a breakdown in trust and a devaluation of rationality. Perhaps this has had some good effects. The deference shown to experts in the past was not always healthy – for example, I can remember my late father always dressing in his best clothes when he had to visit his GP which seems extraordinary to me. On the other hand, the idea that a few minutes on google can enable us to talk on equal terms with our doctors is even more bizarre. In the face of pain, at least, I am a positivist and I want someone with knowledge of the evidence to tell me what to do about it.

Oh, and for anyone interested the decision was to have root canal surgery, starting this Friday. It was my choice, but I reserve the right to moan about it. Pain does not just make me a positivist, it also exacerbates, if that is possible, my propensity to grumpiness, gloom and outright bad temper.

Shades of grey

No, our topic today is not BDSM (and can I say in passing how peculiar it has been to, almost, share a name with Christian Grey, the protagonist of 50 Shades of Grey?). Instead, I am going to reflect on Allan Massie’s extraordinary novel quartet comprising Death in Bordeaux (2010), Dark Summer in Bordeaux (2012), Cold Winter in Bordeaux (2014) and End Games in Bordeaux (2015).

These novels, which feature Superintendent Lannes are only in the most superficial sense roman policiers. Rather, they are an account of life in wartime France, concerned with the dilemmas of collaboration, resistance and the various shades of grey between. More than this, they show the moral ambiguities of these very categories, told in particular through Lannes’ sons, one of whom joins the Free French forces whilst another joins the Vichy regime. Both do so for honourable reasons.

History is a strange arbiter of morality. In some ways, it enables us to look back and see moral choices as rather easy: for example between resisting and collaborating, even though, as Massie’s novels show, the choices at the time were more agonizing. Other times, what may have at the time been experienced as easy choices (the rightness of joining up in 1914, say) now seem much less clear cut.

Massie’s Bordeaux quartet is quite beautifully written in showing how perspectival moral choices can be, not just in terms of his sons’ choices but those in the world of prostitutes, both male and female, and other demi-monde characters as they negotiate and exist within a complex moral universe. But it is not a work of moral relativism. Within the appreciation of the dilemmas of choice there are clear parameters so that Advocate Labouche is consistently depicted as irredeemably evil, but not so much because of his collaboration as for his bullying and sexual depravity.

Taken together the ‘Bordeaux’ quartet is a fascinating exploration of a theme which continues to be hugely controversial in France to the present day, although not quite reaching the heights of his masterpiece on that same theme, A Question of Loyalties (1989).

It strikes me that the recognition of moral ambiguities is something common to the best writing in the genres of crime and espionage, both of which I read voraciously. In fact, it is what makes such writing more than simply ‘genre novels’. John Le Carré’s ‘Smiley’ (or ‘Karla’) trilogy is the classic and perhaps still unsurpassed example, but excellent contemporary contributions include Edward Wilson’s ‘Catesby’ series and Joseph Kanon’s recent Leaving Berlin (2015).

The latter works derive some of their emotional charge from the fact that they concern secrecy and secret organizations. As mentioned in my last post this is something that currently interests me, and one aspect of this is that novels like Wilson’s and Le Carré’s in particular show how secret organizations are very recognizably similar to any other organization. For example, the same power plays, divisional rivalries or petty rules are in evidence. Conversely, ‘ordinary’ organizations are replete with secrets of all sorts even if they are not ostensibly or overtly concerned with secrecy. In fact, in both cases, whatever secrets are normally at stake may become, just that, normal and hardly registered.

This normalization of secrecy also speaks to the theme of moral ambiguity. For example, when wrongdoing is covered up and subsequently comes to light we may wonder how those involved could have colluded with it – recent examples might include the LIBOR rate fixing scandal or even more controversially the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal at the BBC where ‘cultural factors’ inhibited the reporting of his heinous activities to managers. Perhaps one answer lies in the normalization of secrecy within particular organizational contexts.

That most certainly isn’t to let people who do wrong off the hook it’s just, as in Massie’s novels, to understand that people sometimes do bad things for good reasons (and, for that matter, good things for bad reasons) or for reasons that seem good at the time, or just without really thinking about the reasons. So whilst Savile, like Labouche in Massie’s novels and in similar ways, was unequivocally immoral, those around him who colluded in concealing his activities were operating in a moral grey zone, where good and evil are much more difficult to judge.

Lost in history

I am not going to write yet again about the EU Referendum today, or at least not directly, but rather about some reflections prompted by an article that appeared in The Guardian today by John Harris which was about the referendum but with a particular take. Harris, who is an invariably interesting journalist by the way, argues that many inclined to vote to leave the EU are reacting to having had huge and rapid social changes “imposed on them”. They should not, therefore, be patronizingly dismissed as “irrational, unhinged and gullible”.

Whether or not this is a valid reason for voting to leave the EU is an open question, and as I say not what I want to discuss here. Rather, it seems to me that the sentiment Harris is reporting is a variant of something I discuss and criticise at length in the book (especially pp. 88-92): the idea of a world in rapid, perhaps unprecedented, change which makes mandatory constant organizational change. It is one of the many ways in which organizations and politics are both connected and harmonic, something which is becoming a regular theme of this blog.

What strikes me most is how unchanging these claims are, and how they are both meaningful and meaningless. Harris is talking about the period since Britain joined the EU, so the forty or so years since 1973. But in 1973, which I can just about remember (I was 8), similar sentiments were expressed, and very vociferously too. The past, it seemed, was not just another country but, in the past, we had been another country. The memories of war, Empire, social cohesion and civility may have been refracted through the lens of nostalgia but they had their counterpart in more objective analyses of relative economic decline, shifting centres of geo-political power and changing social norms.

It was common then to hear adults talking about how ‘the country has gone to the dogs’, that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’ and, though I can’t recall hearing these exact words, that ‘I just want my country back’. Some of this, as with the present EU debate, was about immigration but, also as with the present EU debate, it was part of a more inchoate sense of unchosen changes. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this kind of sentiment was a big part of what lay*, a few years later, behind electoral support for Margaret Thatcher, including her remarks at the 1979 election campaign about British people feeling ‘swamped’ by immigration. And yet people now are wont to say that immigration ‘used to be ok’, even though their predecessors did not say anything like that at all.

So that sense of unchosen change isn’t new and perhaps this means that it is actually itself rather patronizing to uncritically accept it as an authentic, respectworthy sentiment. If anything it is just an unremarkable truism: 2016 is different to 1973, just as 1976 was different to 1933 in all kinds of ways, most of which were not ‘chosen’ and could not reasonably have been ‘asked’ about. Why would anyone expect otherwise? The issue seems to lie more in a sense that this change is going somewhere frightening or, perhaps most frightening of all, that it is going nowhere. It’s this fearful sense of being lost in history that I want to explore.

Fear of redundancy, fear of being left behind, fear of being judged unequal to the demands of change. That this fear is largely orchestrated through an invocation of hordes of Asians and Slavs – or, in more politically acceptable language, the challenge from the emerging economies of China, India and Eastern Europe; or the anodyne ‘global economic race’ – serves to underscore the perhaps not racist but certainly racialised tang of contemporary stories about Britishness. We may have no clear idea of what the future holds, but we are continually told that failure to change will mean that the future will occur elsewhere, in a faraway country of which we know little. There is therefore an easy translation from the ubiquitous experience of change in the workplace to a fear of foreign competition, and an easy translation from that to fear of foreigners in general and immigration and European integration in particular.

It is indeed quite remarkable that the bullishness about change in the organizational sphere has been so comprehensively unmatched in other areas. The most charitable interpretation of British involvement in the Iraq war is that it was animated by a desire to maintain the ‘special relationship’ and to influence US policy – a desire which was a continuation of British foreign policy since 1945 and which persists to the present day. New Labour’s attitude to the EU, initially relatively conciliatory, later became rather similar to that towards Old Labour: one of hectoring calls for modernization and change in the face of global competition. The Coalition government after 2010 was relatively muted on the EU because of the presence of pro-EU Liberal Democrats but the Conservative administration since 2015 is defined by degrees of hostility to the EU relations. (Interestingly, these two foreign policy areas are in conflict, since the US relation to the UK is refracted through the UK’s membership of the EU, as President Obama is beginning to make clear).

Back on the home front, immigration and asylum policies have also been animated by fear. There is no doubt that New Labour were more relaxed about multi-culturalism than was Thatcherism. And Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill’ conservatism has largely followed them in this, which in part explains the rise of UKIP (which was not just fed by the EU issue but the sense that Cameron is not a ‘real Conservative’ e.g. in terms of gay marriage legislation). Nevertheless, across all recent governments policy in these areas has been draconian and it is noteworthy that the case for tolerance has mainly been made in purely economic terms – the economic need for immigration – so that it is in effect inseparable from the mantra of change as an adjunct to global competitiveness. There is no real suggestion that immigration is related to either our past responsibilities as a colonial power or to our future possibilities as a cosmopolitan society. It’s just an economic presence, bereft of past or future.

It would be unfair to ascribe this culture of fear solely to the polity. It is also the case that any capacity to be positive about the future is limited by the rabidity of a press where it is not just the tabloids which are filled with blood-curdling stories of new causes for alarm. On Europe, immigration, asylum, crime, terrorism, paedophilia as well as health, climate change and, notoriously, house prices the media tell of a world to which a cringing fearfulness is a quite reasonable response. Yet it is not a fear of anything in particular, even if it attaches at moments to something specific. A combination of rolling news and limited attention spans means that each fear is registered, instantaneously forgotten and superseded by a new terror. What endures is not any specific anxiety but a generalised neurotic dread. But whilst fed by the media this climate has been able to flourish at least in part because it fills the vacuum created by the political failure to articulate any compelling future vision of ‘the good life’.

There is clearly a symmetry between the febrile atmosphere engendered by the daily kaleidoscope of media-fuelled panics and the managerialized politics and political managerialism in which ‘the only constant is change’. If we want an image of contemporary Britain it would be of a person running in terror away from an unseen yet omnipresent enemy, but running on a treadmill rather than a road. Standing at the side is a sadistic personal trainer in the form of politician, manager or journalist cajoling and bullying the runner to go faster, to redouble the effort to go nowhere on pain of being engulfed by the invisible demons which lie in wait for those who fail to keep up. The ‘global race’ has no finishing line. It is a journey with no beginning, no end and no purpose or meaning beyond its own self-fulfilling imperative to keep moving at any cost.

This is not, as is conventionally supposed, because we** are too wedded to the past but rather because we have too little sense of ourselves as located within the past-present-future continuum which more truly constitutes history. If, when I was a child, the problem was the weight of the past then for the coming generation it is the weightlessness of the future. When I was growing up, British identity was, unhappily and ultimately unsustainably, that of an old person stuck in the past with memories of a great empire, a heroic war, of glories lost. That is still discernible, but it is now much more akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Anyone who, as I have, has had the misfortune of witnessing this condition will know that what makes it so devastating is not simply that the sufferer recollects so little of the past and is often over-attached to those distant fragments which are flickeringly remembered. It is also that there is no conception of the future, and the present is just a fear-filled moment of transitory but ever recurring change. 

*Surprisingly from a present-day perspective it also in part lay behind the decision to join what was then the EEC in 1973. I can remember my highly Conservative – and conservative – primary school headmistress inventing a song about a ‘beautiful dream’ as part of a celebratory pageant of this event. I played – and I hope this will amuse anyone reading this who knows me – one of the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, then a slang term for Swiss bankers. Whether these gnomes were depicted positively or negatively in the pageant I unfortunately can’t recall.

**By ‘we’ I mean ‘we British’ but similar things may well be true in other countries. I think this is so in France, which I know quite well, and probably in the US and elsewhere. Indeed something like what I have said here seems to apply to US and is expressed by Donald Trump when, as in his now notorious ‘ban all Muslims’ speech he cried plaintively about the need to work out “what the hell is going on?”. Obnoxious as it was, it did express this sense of ‘historical lostness’ that I am trying to explore, and Trump’s popularity is surely a consequence of that sense.

Nothing works

One of the persistent themes in the book (which I am engaging with closely at the moment as I prepare the fourth edition) is to probe the meanings of efficiency to argue that these are often ethically deficient, and beyond that to say that it is not just that they are deficient and yet ‘work’, but that often they simply don’t work.

With that in mind, I have been thinking about a series of things which have happened in the last week or so. These include:

·       I arrived in good time at a train station. The ticket office was closed and two of the four machines were out of order, with long queues at the remaining ones. I missed my train. Soon after one of the ticket booths opened and the ticket seller told me that the company now only employed one seller because there were now machines, and so when she had her break the office was closed. When I finally got the train, there were no seats and it arrived 20 minutes late due to faulty signals.

·       I received payment for some work I did – last May. It has taken seven reminders to get paid.

·       I was due to pick my wife up from the airport. She texted me to say that boarding was two hours delayed, but the airport website still showed her arrival as being on schedule even after that scheduled time had passed. I phoned them (on a premium rate number), went through a long automated sequence, then was put on hold, then spoke to someone who told me the flight had landed. I pointed out that it had not even taken off yet, and that the flight he mentioned was the earlier one from the same destination. He hung up.

·       My phone line and hence broadband connection went down (this happens every couple of months). The usual horrible process of the automated phone call system to report it, and it was almost 24 hours until the fault was fixed.

·       I needed to contact HMRC (the UK tax office). This isn’t the usual horrible process of the automated phone call system. It’s far worse. Because it has a voice/word recognition system that doesn’t seem to recognize anything I say. I gave up.

·       I had arranged to have some ironing and dry cleaning picked up one afternoon (yes, I know, a first world problem if ever there was one). They don’t turn up so I call them – they say that they came in the morning when I was not in. And this, unlike the other examples, is a small, family-run firm.

I think that this was a fairly typical week. Now it could be said that I am ignoring the many other transactions and interactions I have had with organizations this week that have gone perfectly well. That is true (although I could add to my list of problems as well, although with fairly trivial examples). But even so I experience these transactions and interactions as a constant struggle. A struggle against inefficiency, against organizations just not being very well organized, but also a struggle against efficiency in that many of the problems (the ticket office closure, the automated phone systems) derive from company’s introducing what for them are efficient systems.

It might also be said that I am unusually tetchy or impatient with such problems. That may be true – it’s difficult for me to judge. But my sense is that I am not alone and certainly things like train overcrowding and delays, automated phone lines in general, and the HMRC phone line in particular are quite widely complained about. There seems to be some basic sense in which, across a wide range of transactions and interactions, organizations just don’t work very well.

It’s also the case, to reprise another of the book’s themes, that the notion of choice in all this is quite bogus. In most of the cases listed above I had no choice about using the company I did, even though with the exception of the HMRC they are private companies (albeit often formerly public utilities). And even in cases where similar problems are common like banks where I can choose a different bank (although not, realistically not to have a bank at all) I’m unlikely to find much difference between them.

It’s not just that these things are irritating - although they are – it’s that they transfer inefficiency to others. When my broadband connection isn’t working, there are many work tasks I can’t do; when my train is late, I miss a meeting (actually, I didn’t, because knowing that delays are highly likely I factor them in, but that still means that had I got the train I planned I would have wasted time hanging around due to being early). These things in turn mean that I may cause problems for other people. It’s not that I am wedded to some productivist notion of constant work – I quite enjoy, for example, the ‘wasted’ hour when I am early for a meeting, or the respite from emails when the broadband is down - but there is an irony in the fact that those who are create through their practices the unintended consequence of eroding its possibility.

Required reading

Over Christmas I have been reading Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Number 11. Like John Lanchester’s Capital, which I ‘reviewed’ on this blog, it can be read as a ‘state of the nation’ novel (Coe even makes a joke about this) and, via five interlocking sub-stories, it reprises some of the themes of his earlier books, especially What a Carve Up! and The Closed Circle. Overall, I would characterise these themes as being about the unwinding of the post-war welfare state and its accompanying collectivism, and the ongoing consequences of individualization, privatization and – a key one in Number 11 – monetization (in the sense of putting monetary value on things like education which might otherwise be regarded as valuable in themselves).

The title Number 11 carries several resonances: the address of Britain’s finance minister; the number of the circular bus route that a character rides so as to be warm without heating her home; the number of subterranean floors being dug below an uber-rich family’s London home to extend their already commodious residence. For it’s a satire – sometimes almost judderingly heavy-handed, other times almost painfully delicate – that often addresses some of the themes of this blog, especially those of inequality, tax avoidance, the pitfalls of choice, the politics of ‘austerity’ and, even, the perils of twitter.

The section that spoke most profoundly and personally to me is entitled ‘The Crystal Garden’ which tells of the doomed attempt of Roger, an Oxford academic of about my age, to track down a short film he had seen as a child:

“Roger was convinced … that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past … it wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like … in the sixties and seventies …. For Roger it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being weighed down by choice all the time … he loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted.” (Coe, 2015: 176)

It’s important to understand that this isn’t about nostalgia, or at least not just about nostalgia. It’s about a rupture that animates – in very different ways – the politics of both nationalists and socialists across, at least, Europe. In France, Les Trentes Glorieuses, Jean Fourastié’s term for the 1945-1975 period of economic growth and social security, captures the same sentiment that Coe expresses. This rupture is described in my book in terms of the shift in the 1970s to the new capitalism (pp. 104-120) and so, of course, present in the book I most heavily draw on in that section, Richard Sennett’s (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. And it’s no coincidence that at the heart of Roger’s memory was “waiting for his father to come home from work – from the same place he worked for forty years” (Coe, 2015: 176) because stable employment was at the heart of the economic and social security of those years. As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, the erosion of that security constitutes the most pressing political issue of the present time in Western societies, in ways well-captured (for all that it is startlingly inattentive to the ‘critical management’ literature that says much the same thing) by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism.

We can understand this in conventional political terms: the social democratic consensus of North and West Europe and, to an extent, the USA in the post-war decades was about the best economic and social arrangement that has so far existed (even if it did not always seem so at the time). But perhaps it is better understood without thinking in terms of economic or political theory. Bill Bryson’s humorous memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid expresses it well as regards the United States; David Lodge’s novel Nice Work captures the beginning of it in the UK, especially as regards academic life. And Coe’s book is the latest example of the powerful way that art and humour can illuminate social science.

In a somewhat related vein, another Christmas read was Douglas Board’s novel MBA. This is not nearly so well-written (but, to be fair, whereas Coe is a well-established professional novelist Board is a coaching and leadership consultant who has turned his hand to fiction) and it’s a fairly clumsy satire, if not farce, of business schools. Still, it does hit what are for me some familiar targets in terms of the corporatization and even corruption of the contemporary business school, including the hubris of high-flying deans (see Parker, 2014 for a real world example). And there are some acute insights along the way about, for example, the enmeshment of business schools and politicians in the marketization of the public sector that also get a look-in in Coe’s book. MBA certainly isn’t a great or even a good novel, but it’s the first that I know of that tackles the business school. I feel sure that this setting is ripe for the attention of a latter-day Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge campus novel.

Choice, by coincidence

The author and journalist Bill Bryson once wrote – I can’t track down the source - about how he was commissioned to write a newspaper article about amazing coincidences. Bereft of ideas, he found himself sitting at a colleague’s desk. Prominent on the desk was a large book – about amazing coincidences.

This came to my mind because of a sequence of events this week. In my last post on this blog I wrote about the limitations of choice as an over-riding principle. It’s a theme in the book, as well, where (e.g. p.75) I draw upon Barry Schwartz’s fantastic book The Paradox of Choice to talk about how choice in some strange way makes us less free, and can be burdensome and controlling.

A few days later, I went to have my hair cut (bear with me, this is going somewhere). For those who don’t know the ritual of the traditional English all-male barber’s shop it involves a usually awkward conversation about the weather, local traffic problems, and, especially, football. The latter has always been difficult for me, as I have no interest in football, but recently that has slightly changed since Crystal Palace, the team of my childhood home in Croydon, are now in the Premier League and out of nostalgia I have become (mildly) interested.

Anyway, that is by the way. Somehow, the conversation got on to the fact that the barber and his wife have taken to shopping at Aldi, a German-owned budget supermarket that has become increasingly popular in the UK. The reason they do so – and this is the interesting bit – is not because it is cheaper than the others but because there is far less choice. That, he said, made shopping much less hassle than going to the established supermarkets, such as Tesco where they used to shop.

Later that day, without seeking it out, I came across an article by Stuart Jeffries on the Guardian newspaper website, entitled ‘Why too much choice is stressing us out’, in which he reported that:

“Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco's shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 …”

And, what’s more, the article goes on to analyse this in terms of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice!

That same day I took a look at the excellent blog of my fellow, albeit rather more eminent, organization theorist Yiannis Gabriel where his latest post explained the background to the new edition The Unmanageable Consumer, a book which amongst many other things helps us to understand why consumers might not simply lap up the endless choices which marketeers assume everyone wants.

I have spent the last couple of days working on the revisions for what will be the fourth edition of my own book. It has been going well, so I am in an optimistic frame of mind. This leads me to think that, perhaps, the kinds of arguments I make are gaining traction. It surely cannot just be coincidence that all these things have happened this week? Alas, my wife has brought me down to earth by pointing out that coincidence is not what it seems. It is not even, as might be thought, the opposite of choice. Rather, it is the things that we choose to be interested in that gain our attention. It’s just such feminine realism that one goes to the men’s barber’s shop to escape, and only coincidentally for a haircut. Which reminds me, Crystal Palace are currently sixth in the Premier League.

Stuck with choice

I had a plan for today’s post, which was to go back through this blog to find where I had used various news stories to make a point and to revisit those stories asking: what happened next? As I began to do so, I found that it was a completely overwhelming task. Over the last three years I have written about under-employment, corporate tax avoidance, outsourcing, immigration and refugees, global supply chains, public sector reform, economic insecurity, pensions, corporate takeovers, air crashes, the NHS, the Greek crisis, the British establishment, the war in Ukraine, the Chinese economy and many, many other things.

So I have given up on that idea (for now) and instead will return to just a couple of things I’ve written about which are in the news again. In my post More on Power (November 2013) I wrote about the ludicrousness of consumer choice in the electricity ‘market’. Wind forward to today, and the price comparison sites that would supposedly enable such a choice are mired in scandal. In my post Pensions (March 2014) I wrote about the deregulation of personal pensions, a reform supposedly freeing up pensioners to make choices about their pension pots. Wind forward and we find that already scandals are emerging as pensioners are ripped-off or conned into making dangerous investments.

The fallacy that links both these cases (and another current story, that of the need to shop around for the best bank account) is that consumer choice is both efficient and morally impregnable. It is a logic in which corporations and consumer rights associations are complicit (see also my post on The Benefits of Work in July 2015). Choice isn’t an unqualified good.

Of course the neo-liberals are right when they point to the absence of choice as being one of the failings of State Communism. But that Cold War rhetoric doesn’t take us very far because the issue isn’t ‘no choice’ versus ‘unlimited choice’: there are degrees in between. Moreover, as these various examples show, choice in many markets is fairly meaningless. I sometimes think that market ideologues genuinely believe that ‘the market’ always and everywhere has the same form as wandering around fruit and veg stalls, looking at the quality and price of produce before buying. If so, it’s wholly unrealistic.

The reality across huge swathes of products – not just energy, pensions or bank accounts but also mobile phones, insurance or university courses – is nothing like the Economics 101 textbooks. It’s all but impossible to compare products and prices, and even if you did so once then within a few days or even minutes things would change again. Choice in these circumstances is meaningless, and the constant invocation of choice as a cardinal value is in fact an attempt to make as central the idea that we are all ‘choosers’. And the significance of that is not that it is a good thing to be a chooser, but that if choosers make the wrong choice – as some or many will - then they have only themselves to blame.

Writ large, this means that whatever happens to anyone, good or bad, is to their own credit or reflects their own fault. And so any social situation, no matter how unfair or wrong it may be, is not just unavoidable but, actually, right. This grotesque moral spoonerism is the ultimate consequence of the benign or even positive spin put upon choice.

In political philosophy, the most sophisticated expression of this valorization of choice as central is to be found in Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). It is a beautifully written and intellectually elegant book that I would recommend to anyone. At its heart (as regards choice) is the ‘Wilt Chamberlain example’ (Chamberlain being a famous basketball player). Nozick argues that if before Chamberlain plays a game everyone agrees that the distribution of income in society is fair (even, say, if it is equal); and if, then, everyone who pays to watch Chamberlain play does so as a free choice; and if, then, as a result Chamberlain has more money than everyone else; then that new unequal distribution of income must also be fair, as everyone has chosen it.

There are two flaws in this argument. One is that it is only Chamberlain and those who paid to see him who have consented to the new income distribution. What about everyone else? If consent is the key principle for fairness then how can it be fair when they haven't consented? The other is that if Chamberlain and everyone who paid to see him had known that his extra income was to be taxed at 100% and redistributed, and he had still chosen to play and they had still chosen to pay, then the resultant equal income distribution would also be fair, on the logic of choice.

So choice doesn’t work, even at the most sophisticated theoretical level, as a guarantor of fairness, and it doesn’t work at the demonstrable empirical level of how choice actually works in markets. Which doesn’t mean that it is of no importance if people don’t have choices. On the contrary, choice is vital for both economic and political well-being. It’s just that it is not the only thing that matters, or the thing that matters above all else. It's not a kind of trump card that beats every other aspect of human existence.

The benefits of work

The way that work is rewarded is central to organizations, and pay is only one part of it. Associated benefits such as pensions, maternity and paternity pay, and sick pay are also highly important. Sick pay in particular makes a huge difference to security and quality of life. I know this very well from personal experience. When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s my father was self-employed. He had no savings, six children, and a wife whose work – looking after these children – was not paid. If he was ill, as he sometimes was, or if for some other reason there was no work for him, as was often the case, we felt the consequences within a day or two: there was no food to eat.

So I was struck today by a news story that the British government are considering the idea that workers should fund their own sick pay by paying into an individual savings account. There are no details yet – it isn’t a policy announcement – but seems to be based on similar systems in the United States and in Singapore. It has also been explained in a paper by – predictably – the free market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). The idea seems to be not so much a savings account per se, but a combination of savings and private insurance policies.

The logic, if one can call it that, seems to be the same as that in the debate about NHS funding, which I discussed in a recent post. It is that state welfare is unaffordable and so must be replaced by private provision. That is nonsense because it still has to be paid for: if I can’t afford to pay the tax or national insurance to fund sick pay, how can I magically afford to pay an insurance premium to a private provider? Actually, as with health, the situation is worse than this. State-run insurance systems pool risk across the entire population, making them cheaper. Private insurance systems don’t just pool risk across a smaller population (the customers of the company) but are also inherently prone to sub-divide those populations. Thus, as we see most obviously with car insurance, companies segment their customers into risk groups and charge differentially accordingly – hence the very high premiums charged to young and old drivers. The commercial logic is obvious: those most likely to claim have to pay a higher premium. Translated to sick pay the logic is equally obvious: those most likely to need it have to pay more to insure against it. And, pretty quickly, they become uninsureable.

Perhaps the logic is that private providers will do the job better than a state system. This standard neo-liberal claim for private provision is, predictably, made in the ASI paper (as an aside, if the ASI ideologues read the writings of Adam Smith they might be less naïve). It founders on the now massive evidence of how in the personal finance sector in particular inefficiencies and rip-offs abound. Consider the massive mis-selling of private pensions, endowment mortgages and personal protection insurance (PPI), which have given rise to billions of pounds of compensation claims and huge heartache along the way, since compensation never really compensates and, often, arrives too late to do so at all as in the case of the Equitable Life pension scandal. Most of this arose from precisely the deregulation of financial services and of state provision of welfare. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if sick pay goes the same way there will be massive scandals a couple of decades down the track. And, if so, then as with PPI a second wave of scandals around scam sales of compensation services will emerge.

But suppose all that is too pessimistic, and a private market in sick pay insurance accounts did not fall prey to scandals and rip-offs. If so, then at best we would have yet another extension of the paradoxically controlling nature of choice, which I discuss in the book (p.75) drawing on the more extensive, and brilliant, discussion in Barry Schwartz’s (2004) book The Paradox of Choice. For, now, we will have to monitor, evaluate and switch between the providers of sick pay accounts alongside our same (unpaid) work choosing electricity, gas, water, phone, pension providers and so on. The extension of choice as an unquestioned good into every area of life re-constitutes us as perennial choosers. An image of, say, shopping around the market for the nicest or cheapest vegetables, becomes elevated to a cardinal and unique principle. Making the wrong choices means you only have yourself to blame, but the consequences will not just be a less than nice dinner; they will be destitution.

It is tempting to think that those advocating such measures are well-intentioned but naïve, over-attached to the theoretical nostrums of page one of the Economics 101 textbook. It is not so. They know exactly what they are about. As the ASI report that provides the intellectual ballast for this idea bleakly puts it:

“The new system must overturn any idea that society collectively is responsible for the future needs of its members; that future provision is for themselves to determine by their actions now.” (p.13)

Or, as Margaret Thatcher so chillingly put it as long ago as 1981: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul”.

 

Happy birthday?

So this blog is just about exactly one year old, reflecting the fact that the third edition is also a year old. It is ‘fairly interesting’ to look at the site statistics. So far there have been 3367 visits (390 in the last month), although there is no way of telling whether this represents a small number of people looking at it several times, or a larger number of less frequent visitors.  The most viewed post is the one about Thatcher’s death and legacy. The top 10 country breakdown is:

United Kingdom	1219
United States	647
Germany	148
Russia	133
Ireland	82
France	73
Ukraine	68
China	67
Norway	65
Australia	53

 

But what is more surprising is to see occasional visitors from far flung places: this week, Aruba.

Anyway, there has been another birthday this week, namely my own 49^th anniversary (or, as a colleague rather depressingly put it, I am now entering my 50^th year). I am becoming more and more grumpy as I get older – in fact, I realise that somewhere along the line I have turned into my father. My current pet hate is people walking around looking at their mobiles, requiring others to jump out of the way to avoid a collision.

Another peeve is more directly related to the book where, on p.131, I talk about the free labour that customers perform when dialling up call centres through automated telephone systems, sometimes even paying for the privilege. Something very similar is becoming more and more common in shops, where increasingly the checkouts are self-service. Thus we scan our goods, bag them and pay without the need for a checkout operator. This is presented as an extension of choice, but the choice is limited by the fact that there are fewer and fewer staffed tills with longer and longer queues as a result.

Yesterday I was standing in one such queue, with most of the self-service tills unused, a sign in itself that, as a matter of choice, many people, not just me, prefer not to use them. My particular dislike is the way that the recorded voice barks aggressively at you – for example ‘foreign item in bagging area’ or ‘item not scanned’ or ‘return to bagging area’, the last of which I don’t even understand.  I half expect to hear it say, like a bossy schoolteacher, ‘you’re only letting yourself down’ or ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed’.

As we queued, a member of the shop staff kept reminding us that we could use these tills and, like all good English people, we pretended we could not hear, or that the message was for someone else. But after being told this two or three times I muttered ‘I hate those things’. It obviously came out louder than I had intended, because suddenly everyone in the queue started pitching in and complaining about the fact that they had staff standing around telling us to go self-service, whilst all but one of the manual tills was closed.

Of course it was not the fault of the staff – they were simply doing what they had been told to do. But the sad thing about that is that eventually, perhaps, we will all be duly accultured to serve ourselves and the expectation of being served by a human being will become, to use the term that has been applied to smoking, ‘de-normalised’. All the manned tills will disappear (and, with them, even the chimera of ‘choice’). And almost all of the staff will be out a job as we become their replacements, labouring unpaid, belaboured for our faults by the pitiless shouts of the automatic overseer. It depresses me to think that we will probably not even notice or, worse, will celebrate it as a new found freedom.

Or perhaps we will be found to be such unsatisfactory workers that the recorded voice will tire of us and announce that we, too, have been sacked. Or perhaps bagged. Or perhaps, even, ‘returned to the bagging area’ for re-programming.