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.
Showing posts with label Contemporary workplace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contemporary workplace. Show all posts
Friday, 3 June 2022
Monday, 23 January 2017
Willing robots
I posted
recently about the growing possibilities for replacing human workers with
robots, but alongside that it’s possible to discern a growing
‘robotization’ of human workers. That thought was prompted by a
recent article by the excellent journalist John Harris about employee
monitoring. Harris discusses the soon to be released film The Circle based upon
a 2013
novel of the same name by Dave Eggers. I have not read it, but apparently
it depicts the dystopian world of a high-tech corporation where:
“… privacy and autonomy count for almost nothing. Under a veneer of feelgoodism, employees are complicit in their own constant monitoring and a system of endless appraisal by their peers, who feed into a system called Participation Rank – or PartiRank, for short.”
Harris goes on to discuss real life counterparts of this, including the ‘Humanyze’ system of ‘people analytics’ which tracks and records employee movements and interactions, biometric data and so on. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear of this, as back in February 2014 I wrote about the Hitachi Business Microscope which has very similar functions.
The theme of workplace surveillance has been very widely explored within organization studies for at least 25 years, especially under the influence of Foucauldian analysis, and I discuss it at some length in my book (pp. 72-77). Yet we should not dismiss it as ‘old hat’, not least because of the ever-advancing technological capacities to extend surveillance.
Alongside the technology, there seems to be a growing acceptance and normalization of its use, so that (as Foucault recognized of surveillance and disciplinary power in general) those subject to it welcome it rather than experience it as intrusive. As the Circle Corporation sloganizes: “Secrets are lies; sharing is caring; privacy is theft”.
The obligatory reference to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly seems necessary, but the ‘feelgoodism’ of contemporary surveillance is rather different to the austere, monochrome ambience of Orwell’s Oceania. It resonates more with Jacques Donzelot’s (1991) thought-provoking essay ‘Pleasure in Work’. Donzelot’s argument is that work was being re-imagined as a “means towards self-realization” (p. 251) as a reaction against the effects of the drive for productivity in the workplace.
Yet the contemporary harnessing of ‘feelgoodism’ is different in that it seeks to re-inscribe productivity into pleasure. That is to say, pleasure is not the antidote to techniques of enhancing productivity but is itself a technique to do so, what organizational theorist André Spicer calls ‘the cult of compulsory happiness’.
Harris concludes by saying that “what all this means is pretty obvious. On the way to being replaced by a robot, you will have to become one”, and I have some agreement with that. However, in co-opting pleasure for and securing subservience to productivity, the kind of robots we are suppose to become are oxymorons like the ‘willing slaves’ described by both Madeleine Bunting (2011) and Andrew Scott (1994). In being willing robots we are simultaneously robots and that one thing that robots cannot be – willing, in all senses of the word: cheerfully prepared and possessed of choice and purpose.
The centrality of productivity to contemporary economic discourse is pointed up by the consultation document on its industrial strategy released by the UK government today. The longstanding weakness of UK productivity by international standards is the central theme of this strategy and throughout the document it is linked to the need to work ‘not harder but smarter’ (p.13) and to new technologies, including robotics (p.63). Like everything else in British politics at the moment it is refracted through Brexit, so that the opening preface from the Prime Minister declares that the vote to leave the EU was also a vote to “change the way our country works forever” (p.3).
It strikes me as unlikely that those who voted for Brexit realised that they had also voted to be replaced by robots or themselves to become willing robots – after all, neither this nor, for that matter, industrial strategy were on the ballot paper - but if this turns out to be the case it underscores that the exercise of human will is less predictable than the operation of robots, so that the choices we make may lead to consequences we never envisaged.
“… privacy and autonomy count for almost nothing. Under a veneer of feelgoodism, employees are complicit in their own constant monitoring and a system of endless appraisal by their peers, who feed into a system called Participation Rank – or PartiRank, for short.”
Harris goes on to discuss real life counterparts of this, including the ‘Humanyze’ system of ‘people analytics’ which tracks and records employee movements and interactions, biometric data and so on. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear of this, as back in February 2014 I wrote about the Hitachi Business Microscope which has very similar functions.
The theme of workplace surveillance has been very widely explored within organization studies for at least 25 years, especially under the influence of Foucauldian analysis, and I discuss it at some length in my book (pp. 72-77). Yet we should not dismiss it as ‘old hat’, not least because of the ever-advancing technological capacities to extend surveillance.
Alongside the technology, there seems to be a growing acceptance and normalization of its use, so that (as Foucault recognized of surveillance and disciplinary power in general) those subject to it welcome it rather than experience it as intrusive. As the Circle Corporation sloganizes: “Secrets are lies; sharing is caring; privacy is theft”.
The obligatory reference to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly seems necessary, but the ‘feelgoodism’ of contemporary surveillance is rather different to the austere, monochrome ambience of Orwell’s Oceania. It resonates more with Jacques Donzelot’s (1991) thought-provoking essay ‘Pleasure in Work’. Donzelot’s argument is that work was being re-imagined as a “means towards self-realization” (p. 251) as a reaction against the effects of the drive for productivity in the workplace.
Yet the contemporary harnessing of ‘feelgoodism’ is different in that it seeks to re-inscribe productivity into pleasure. That is to say, pleasure is not the antidote to techniques of enhancing productivity but is itself a technique to do so, what organizational theorist André Spicer calls ‘the cult of compulsory happiness’.
Harris concludes by saying that “what all this means is pretty obvious. On the way to being replaced by a robot, you will have to become one”, and I have some agreement with that. However, in co-opting pleasure for and securing subservience to productivity, the kind of robots we are suppose to become are oxymorons like the ‘willing slaves’ described by both Madeleine Bunting (2011) and Andrew Scott (1994). In being willing robots we are simultaneously robots and that one thing that robots cannot be – willing, in all senses of the word: cheerfully prepared and possessed of choice and purpose.
The centrality of productivity to contemporary economic discourse is pointed up by the consultation document on its industrial strategy released by the UK government today. The longstanding weakness of UK productivity by international standards is the central theme of this strategy and throughout the document it is linked to the need to work ‘not harder but smarter’ (p.13) and to new technologies, including robotics (p.63). Like everything else in British politics at the moment it is refracted through Brexit, so that the opening preface from the Prime Minister declares that the vote to leave the EU was also a vote to “change the way our country works forever” (p.3).
It strikes me as unlikely that those who voted for Brexit realised that they had also voted to be replaced by robots or themselves to become willing robots – after all, neither this nor, for that matter, industrial strategy were on the ballot paper - but if this turns out to be the case it underscores that the exercise of human will is less predictable than the operation of robots, so that the choices we make may lead to consequences we never envisaged.
References
Bunting, M.
(2011) Willing Slaves: How the overwork
culture is ruining our lives. London: Harper Collins.
Donzelot, J.
(1991) ‘Pleasure in Work’ in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in governmentality,
pp 251-280. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Scott, A.
(1994) Willing Slaves? British workers
under human resource management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Friday, 28 October 2016
Uber good news
After my last
rather gloomy post, today there is some good news. I’ve posted elsewhere about
the rise of uberfication
and the gig economy, and also about how this links to supposed
‘self-employment’, which is really employment shorn of any protections. (I
do not write about this in the current edition of the book, but it will be
covered in the
fourth edition, which comes out next month).
Today, the company after which the phenomenon was named, taxi app firm Uber, was subject to a significant ruling by a UK employment tribunal. Specifically, Uber was told that it cannot treat its drivers as self-employed, and must pay them the national living wage and holiday pay, and possibly even pensions. The ruling (which is likely to be appealed against by Uber) will, if it stands, have significant implications for other companies operating the same or similar business models. As the lawyer representing the drivers who brought the case (with the support of the GMB union) said:
“This is a ground-breaking decision. It will impact not just on the thousands of Uber drivers working in this country, but on all workers in the so-called gig economy whose employers wrongly classify them as self-employed and deny them the rights to which they are entitled.”
This ruling comes at a significant time, politically. In both the EU Referendum (and for those interested in Brexit, do take a look at my Brexit blog tracing developments) and, even more, the US presidential race, the issue of how changing work practices erode security has been an issue. More widely, this connects with the political consequences of globalization and the hollowing out of middle class employment.
Of course, even on minimum wage and protection terms, employment remains a far cry from the post-war social democratic model of secure employment with a social welfare net. Even so, the ruling suggests that the direction of travel need not inevitably be downwards, and that globalization and technology are not forces of nature but may be corralled by politics and legislation. As I argue throughout my book, what happens in organizations is not pre-ordained but is an outcome of the choices we, collectively, make about how to live.
Today, the company after which the phenomenon was named, taxi app firm Uber, was subject to a significant ruling by a UK employment tribunal. Specifically, Uber was told that it cannot treat its drivers as self-employed, and must pay them the national living wage and holiday pay, and possibly even pensions. The ruling (which is likely to be appealed against by Uber) will, if it stands, have significant implications for other companies operating the same or similar business models. As the lawyer representing the drivers who brought the case (with the support of the GMB union) said:
“This is a ground-breaking decision. It will impact not just on the thousands of Uber drivers working in this country, but on all workers in the so-called gig economy whose employers wrongly classify them as self-employed and deny them the rights to which they are entitled.”
This ruling comes at a significant time, politically. In both the EU Referendum (and for those interested in Brexit, do take a look at my Brexit blog tracing developments) and, even more, the US presidential race, the issue of how changing work practices erode security has been an issue. More widely, this connects with the political consequences of globalization and the hollowing out of middle class employment.
Of course, even on minimum wage and protection terms, employment remains a far cry from the post-war social democratic model of secure employment with a social welfare net. Even so, the ruling suggests that the direction of travel need not inevitably be downwards, and that globalization and technology are not forces of nature but may be corralled by politics and legislation. As I argue throughout my book, what happens in organizations is not pre-ordained but is an outcome of the choices we, collectively, make about how to live.
Saturday, 11 June 2016
Rotten business
I’ve written
previously about the collapse of retailer BHS. This week, some of the
grisly details began to emerge, as a parliamentary select committee began
its investigations. Particularly striking was evidence given by former executives
about its owner Dominic Chappell. Chappell – a thrice bankrupt former racing
driver with no retail experience – bought BHS for £1 in in 2015. In the
hearing, former
finance consultant to BHS Michael Hitchcock called Chappell a Premier League
class liar with his fingers in the till whilst Darren Topp, the former CEO,
claimed that Chappell threatened
to kill him.
Next week, Sir
Philip Green, who, having
ransacked the business, sold it to Chappell is also due to appear before
parliament to answer questions about what happened to the pension fund. He is
facing pressure to make
good the fund’s £571M deficit and there are calls
for him to be stripped of his knighthood.
BHS is now
being wound down, with its 11,000 employees facing redundancy, because no buyer
could be found. Yet, according to Chappell, there was a willing buyer who was
dissuaded from the purchase by Green (something Green denies). This buyer was
Mike Ashley, who is now
to be called to give evidence about this.
By a strange
coincidence, Ashley – founder and owner of retailer Sports Direct – also
appeared before a parliamentary committee this week (despite attempts to avoid
doing so). Sports Direct stands accused of failing to pay staff the minimum
wage, and a litany of unpleasant practices with the effect that:
I suppose
there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that these cases are being
investigated by parliament, and the increased power and activism of select
committees is, I think, a positive development. And, of course, there are
plenty of good and responsible employers.
Yet these
two stories taken together seem to disclose something about the dire state of
management practices in some and perhaps many parts of British businesses
today, and about the, let’s say, unappealing characters who lead those
businesses. And it’s not just in Britain. Last month Oxfam
reported that chicken farm workers in the US were being denied toilet breaks
and forced to wear nappies. This won’t come as a surprise to readers of my
book, where (p.133) I give the example of a Californian factory in which
workers were told to urinate in their clothes rather than take toilet breaks.
Indeed, the poultry workers are rather humanely treated by comparison: at least
they are allowed nappies.
The foundational study in Labour Process
Analysis from which (to simplify) grew Critical Management Studies, was Harry
Braverman’s (1974) Labor and Monopoly
Capital of which the subtitle was
‘the degradation of work in the twentieth century’. Half a century on and we
seem to be seeing degradation at work
as the defining feature of the labour process; an all too literal labour
process when women give birth in toilets to avoid losing their jobs.
Sunday, 26 July 2015
Uberfication: an idea from the past
I learned a new and rather ugly word this week: uberfication.
It came up in a discussion of new patterns of work and employment and checking
on the internet I find that it is a term which has been in use for a year or so
now. It derives from the taxi firm Uber which has developed a model for taxi
hire in which customers use a mobile phone app to match their journey
requirements to the availability of an Uber driver. This has caused protests
from taxi drivers all over the world, most recently in Rio de Janeiro just yesterday,
because Uber drivers are exempt from the licensing and many of the regulations
of established taxi firms and drivers who are thus having their livelihoods
threatened.
Uberfication refers to the application of the same, or
similar, business model to a range of businesses and activities with many
websites referring to the uberfication of everything, examples ranging from dog
walking to doctors. Other terms for the same phenomenon are the ‘gig economy’,
the ‘on-demand economy’ or the ‘platform economy’ (the point being that a
platform such as Uber does not provide services but connects customer demand to
a supplier, who provides a service as if engaged to play a gig) or the more
cosy-sounding ‘micro-entrepreneurship’.
This business model has three defining features. The most
obvious is a technological one, the mobile phone app that enables the
connection between demand and supply to be made, including differential pricing
according to levels of demand and supply at the moment that the transaction is
agreed. The second is that it enables the avoidance of most or all of the
regulations that apply to conventional providers of the service. The third is
that those providing the service are not employees of any company but are
independent contractors or self-employed agents (or, if you prefer, ‘micro-entrepreneurs’).
Although the word is a new to me, the underlying idea is one
discussed at several places in my book and on this blog. The ‘flexibilization’
of work has been underway for some time now, leading increasingly to a ‘precariat’
(p.117 of book) whose work is insecure, often characterized by zero-hours contracts
and without much or anything in the way of fringe benefits such as pensions, sick
pay or maternity/paternity pay. Uberfication is an intensified form of this,
since the independent contractors have no employment rights at all: they are not
employed, so such rights are irrelevant.
Unsurprisingly uberfication is beginning to find its way onto the political agenda, at least in the United States. For the free market
right it is a splendid development, bypassing state regulation and ‘vested
interests’ and promoting an Ayn Rand type vision of autonomous self-determining
individuals, freely contracting with each other in a pure(ish) market (only
pure-ish because there is some evidence that prices are manipulated by controlling supply at times of peak demand). For the left, the concern is that
employment rights are eroded, insecurity increased and, for that matter, buying
power diminished (in other words, this isn’t an anti-capitalist point, it’s a
Keynesian point: if workers don’t have strong and secure earnings then where
does demand come from?).
One way of looking at this in organization theory terms is a
shift from ‘hierarchy’ to ‘market’. In brief, the idea here (associated with the economist Oliver Williamson but also, in a different way, the business
historian Alfred Chandler) is that there are different ways of co-ordinating human
activity, which come into play according to specific cost conditions, allied to
particular technological conditions. One way is via a market of individual contractors
(the invisible hand, as Adam Smith called it), the other is through internal
hierarchies within firms (the visible hand, as Chandler dubbed it in his book of that name). Following that account, uberfication substitutes market for
hierarchy. However, it should not be forgotten that the way that co-ordination
occurs does not just arise ‘naturally’ from cost and technology but depends on
the political decisions we make and the legal systems through which we enact
those decisions (hence the many legal challenges to Uber, most recently in Canada).
We can see this as a new technologically-mediated moment in
the long-term hollowing-out of the social contract that sustained at least
Western economies and societies in the post-1945 era which, along with erosions
of the welfare state, makes for an increasingly insecure existence as I have written about several times on this blog. But although the technology may be
new, the idea, and its consequences, are not: in very many ways it is reminiscent
of the ‘putting-out system’ of the early industrial period (and still to be
found in many parts of the world today). In this system subcontracting to
individuals and families working within their homes was a way of bypassing the
restrictions of the medieval guild system.
Of course the idealised image of uberfication is one in which
people have complete flexibility of work and complete control of their
destinies with no manager telling them what to do. And that may fine for some
people, especially when they are young and healthy. But as a general model of
employment it means low wages, no security and no protections. Stripped of its
technological glitz it means a life rather like that depicted in the long poem
written by Thomas Hood in 1843, The Song
of the Shirt, which is about the putting-out system in the garment trade.
The link to the full text is here, but just to quote the closing stanza:
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,--
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!--
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,--
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!--
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!
I began my last post with a reference to the saying that
history always repeats itself but never in the same way. Here, I will finish
with another aphorism, usually attributed (in a number of variants) to the
Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: those who don’t learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.
Saturday, 16 May 2015
Working assumptions
This post is inspired by Martin Vogel’s thought-provoking piece, on the excellent Vogel Wakefield counter-consultancy blog, where he
discusses the politics of organization. In particular, he points out how little
conversation there was during the British election of the changing nature of work,
the social purposes of business and similar themes. With economic debate (and not
just in Britain) dominated by the single theme of government fiscal deficit and
cultural debate by that of immigration, work – so central to most people’s
lives – barely got a look in.
True, there were some marginal references. Labour did seek to open up issues of lack of employment security, lack of quality jobs, and zero hours contracts. The Conservatives did talk at times about the number of jobs created in the British economy in recent years. Both parties talked occasionally about apprenticeships. But huge issues about under-employment, about the effect of technological change on white-collar employment, and about productivity (again, see Martin Vogel’s post for more on this) didn’t get mentioned at all. Moreover, nothing much was said on the many issues adjacent to or around work – for example the highly uncertain future of pensions and the exploding need to provide care for the elderly, much of which will be done as unpaid work, especially by women.
Perhaps it is the case that modern politics is incapable or unwilling to talk about such large and long-term issues. Indeed, it is not just in relation to work that big issues are neglected. In particular, no one in British politics seems willing to take a good look at Britain’s role in the world, something which has been ducked since, arguably, 1945. In fact, with the exception of the issue of EU membership, foreign policy of any sort did not figure in the election. And this is not just an issue for Britain. The mechanisms of international governance seem unable to gain any traction at all on a range of pressing problems from Ukraine, through to the dire and increasingly unstable situation right across the Middle East. The central structures of the UN, specifically the permanent membership of the Security Council, again reflect the world in 1945, not 2015.
One factor here – pertaining to work as much as to security – is the way that globalization, whilst largely created by the decisions of nation-states, has now undercut the purchase that nation-states have upon policy, leaving a political vacuum. From this viewpoint, what can national politicians say about, for example, job insecurity, pensions or de-skilling other than to see it in terms of the ineluctable effects of the global free market? The same could be said about things such as corporate tax avoidance which I posted about earlier this year. We just don’t have the political structures to deal with this situation, and very few people talking about how we might create them.
Yet there are some levers which national governments do have, especially around education and training, that might be pulled at least with respect to issues of employability and productivity. One reason why they do not get much discussed is, I suspect, the increasingly dysfunctional effects of media management. Political strategists seek simple, constantly repeated mantras to ‘frame the narrative’ – the fiscal deficit being the obvious example – which are by definition incapable of speaking of or to complex, inter-related problems. Add to this the almost inevitable short-termism of the electoral cycle and it is perhaps unsurprising that long-term problems get shelved for another day – witness the huge difficulties of developing a global approach to environmental sustainability.
Coming back to work, and thinking just from the standpoint of organization studies, I think that one striking and problematic feature of the subject is just how little it actually has to say about work. This is partly to do with the demise of what used to be called industrial sociology and the concomitant rise of studies that are more concerned with consumption and identity than production and the workplace. It probably also reflects the way that organization studies takes place almost entirely inside management and business schools, with more emphasis on management than on work per se. It certainly reflects the growing ‘theoreticism’ of the academic literature, with a disdain for ‘merely’ reporting what is actually happening in the workplace and an insistence that each academic paper should make a suppose ‘theoretical contribution’, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. As Barley & Kunda argued in 2001, there is a need to “bring work back in” to the discipline, but it is an argument that more than decade later shows little sign of being heeded.
In 1974, in a book probably better known in the United States than elsewhere, the writer and oral historian Studs Terkel published Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the title of which is self-explanatory. Its coverage ranged from farm workers to dentists, tennis players to nuns. It’s difficult to think of anything remotely like this book now, and certainly not anything by an organization studies academic. The neglect of work within political discourse may be an intractable problem but within the more limited terrain of organization studies may not be irredeemable. And who knows, perhaps the two might be linked. After all, an organization studies that educated students into the realities of contemporary working life might not only prepare them better for those realities but also encourage them to ask political questions about it.
True, there were some marginal references. Labour did seek to open up issues of lack of employment security, lack of quality jobs, and zero hours contracts. The Conservatives did talk at times about the number of jobs created in the British economy in recent years. Both parties talked occasionally about apprenticeships. But huge issues about under-employment, about the effect of technological change on white-collar employment, and about productivity (again, see Martin Vogel’s post for more on this) didn’t get mentioned at all. Moreover, nothing much was said on the many issues adjacent to or around work – for example the highly uncertain future of pensions and the exploding need to provide care for the elderly, much of which will be done as unpaid work, especially by women.
Perhaps it is the case that modern politics is incapable or unwilling to talk about such large and long-term issues. Indeed, it is not just in relation to work that big issues are neglected. In particular, no one in British politics seems willing to take a good look at Britain’s role in the world, something which has been ducked since, arguably, 1945. In fact, with the exception of the issue of EU membership, foreign policy of any sort did not figure in the election. And this is not just an issue for Britain. The mechanisms of international governance seem unable to gain any traction at all on a range of pressing problems from Ukraine, through to the dire and increasingly unstable situation right across the Middle East. The central structures of the UN, specifically the permanent membership of the Security Council, again reflect the world in 1945, not 2015.
One factor here – pertaining to work as much as to security – is the way that globalization, whilst largely created by the decisions of nation-states, has now undercut the purchase that nation-states have upon policy, leaving a political vacuum. From this viewpoint, what can national politicians say about, for example, job insecurity, pensions or de-skilling other than to see it in terms of the ineluctable effects of the global free market? The same could be said about things such as corporate tax avoidance which I posted about earlier this year. We just don’t have the political structures to deal with this situation, and very few people talking about how we might create them.
Yet there are some levers which national governments do have, especially around education and training, that might be pulled at least with respect to issues of employability and productivity. One reason why they do not get much discussed is, I suspect, the increasingly dysfunctional effects of media management. Political strategists seek simple, constantly repeated mantras to ‘frame the narrative’ – the fiscal deficit being the obvious example – which are by definition incapable of speaking of or to complex, inter-related problems. Add to this the almost inevitable short-termism of the electoral cycle and it is perhaps unsurprising that long-term problems get shelved for another day – witness the huge difficulties of developing a global approach to environmental sustainability.
Coming back to work, and thinking just from the standpoint of organization studies, I think that one striking and problematic feature of the subject is just how little it actually has to say about work. This is partly to do with the demise of what used to be called industrial sociology and the concomitant rise of studies that are more concerned with consumption and identity than production and the workplace. It probably also reflects the way that organization studies takes place almost entirely inside management and business schools, with more emphasis on management than on work per se. It certainly reflects the growing ‘theoreticism’ of the academic literature, with a disdain for ‘merely’ reporting what is actually happening in the workplace and an insistence that each academic paper should make a suppose ‘theoretical contribution’, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. As Barley & Kunda argued in 2001, there is a need to “bring work back in” to the discipline, but it is an argument that more than decade later shows little sign of being heeded.
In 1974, in a book probably better known in the United States than elsewhere, the writer and oral historian Studs Terkel published Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the title of which is self-explanatory. Its coverage ranged from farm workers to dentists, tennis players to nuns. It’s difficult to think of anything remotely like this book now, and certainly not anything by an organization studies academic. The neglect of work within political discourse may be an intractable problem but within the more limited terrain of organization studies may not be irredeemable. And who knows, perhaps the two might be linked. After all, an organization studies that educated students into the realities of contemporary working life might not only prepare them better for those realities but also encourage them to ask political questions about it.
References
Barley, S. and Kunda,
G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76-95.
Terkel, S. 1974. Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About
What They Do. New
York: Pantheon/Random House.Saturday, 25 April 2015
Antisocial media
I’m
taking a break from blogging about the election (about which there is not much
of interest to say at the moment anyway) to reflect on something which, whilst
not new, seems to be a growing phenomenon. It’s prompted by an experience
whilst waiting at a large train station in London the other day. Nearby, there
was an information stand at which sat a young woman in a smart uniform. Every
few minutes, a passenger would approach her with some query or other and each
time she would, after a moment, look up from her mobile phone, answer the
question, and then immediately go back to the phone. I watched for a while and
it seemed to me that she could hardly bear to look away from her phone for even
a few seconds.
I’ve
also noticed – again, it’s not an original observation, but recently it seems
to be one I make more frequently – how the students I teach seem to find it all
but impossible to go through a class, or for that matter a few minutes, without
looking at their phones. One thing that seems particularly strange about this
is that students invariably complain about the lack of class contact time,
especially since the introduction of tuition fees in English universities, and
yet in that time that they do have they absent themselves. There’s been quite a
bit of research which suggests that phone-addiction is becoming increasingly
common, including studies of students.
By
phone addiction, of course, we really mean addiction to the internet and social
media. It’s quite an alien world to me, and I’ve posted elsewhere about my views of twitter. I’ve never had a Facebook account – let alone Pinterest or
Instagram - and although I do use my phone for email and texting I regard it
primarily as just a phone. I don’t much like using it as the connection and
comfort never seem as good as a landline and, horror of horrors, I leave it
turned off for days at a time.
That’s
not, or not just, middle-aged Luddism. I do wonder what the effects of this
apparent addiction are. Some are all too obvious as when people walk through
busy streets, oblivious to everyone around them, glued to the phone. Indeed
there are increasing numbers of accidents as a result, as in this report about Tokyo, but I guess the same would be true in any large city. It’s also obvious
when you watch commuters using phones and tablets to play games. Recently, a British politician was criticised for playing the game Candy Crush during a
parliamentary committee. Less obvious effects include the report this week that
levels of myopia amongst children are rocketing because of the amount of time spent indoors at computers and mobile devices, and in China steps are being taken to prevent this. Or, to take another example, phone use whilst driving is an increasing cause of traffic accidents.
There
seems something infantile about all this; the inability to pay more than
momentary attention, the compulsive need to play. More than that, it seems as
if the social media addiction in particular comes at a great cost to social
interaction. In connecting us it also disconnects us from ‘real’ relationships,
as many commentators have noted. It is also – connecting with the example I
began with – being reported that workplace productivity is being damaged by the obsessive need to connect, with one recent survey identifying it as the main cause of timewasting at work.
I
realise that this sounds puritanical, and perhaps it is – perhaps, though,
there are some virtues in puritanism? And of course there are downsides to all
forms of human interaction, whether virtual or real. But it does seem to me
problematic that increasingly we are unable to live in the present and the
here-and-now. I’ll close with another recent observation, of a couple sitting
at a restaurant table each engaging not with each other but with their phones.
Or perhaps not, for it came into my head that for all I knew they were actually
connecting with each other via their
phones in preference to talking. It seemed not just possible but ineffably sad.
Friday, 17 October 2014
Immigration matters
I
have written several times on this blog about immigration, because it is so
intimately linked to organizational life in many countries. In the UK, almost
all workplaces now contain a wide mix of nationalities, especially from the rest
of the EU. But of course immigration is deeply unpopular, and has fed the
growth in support for UKIP in the UK, and many other anti-immigration parties
across Europe.
This
puts mainstream politicians in a very difficult situation in a democracy. Some
voters are anti-immigration for reasons that are out and out racist, but not
all anti-immigration sentiment is racist (although it does not follow, as some
claim, that none of it is). Instead,
it arises from concerns about jobs and wages, and about space and public services.
Yet as regards EU migration, which is what animates current debate in the UK,
the number of immigrants into the UK is about the same as that out of the UK –
around 2 million people. So in the absence of free movement within the EU, the
UK population would be about the same, meaning no difference in terms of space.
And in terms of public services, it probably reduces usage because immigrants
to the UK tend to be healthy, working-age people whilst many emigrants from the
UK are elderly retirees.
So
far as jobs and wages are concerned, the effect of immigration is limited.
There is not a fixed pool of jobs in an economy (this is the ‘lump of labour fallacy’) and, empirically, the effect on wages is negligible, and such effect
as there is mainly attributable to illegal employment practices. Moreover, the idea that immigrants claim benefits is a myth: immigrants overall pay more in
than they take out of the benefits system. So too is the idea of ‘health tourism’ – that immigrants come to the UK in order to access free medical
treatment. It’s notable that the fears and myths about immigration are always
most strongly held in places where immigration is low. Thus the UKIP vote is
much lower in, for example, London, than it is in rural parts of Yorkshire
But
it is almost impossible for politicians to counter these various fallacies and
myths, even when they know that that is what they are. At the same time, any
well-informed politician will know that economies such as the UK’s need more, not less, immigration because of their ageing demographic. The consequences of that demographic are accepted
by people when it comes to policy on health or on pensions, yet not when it
comes to immigration and employment. An anti-immigration policy would spell disaster for the UK and many other old industrial democracies.
So
no responsible politician could advocate draconian limits to immigration; yet
no sensible politician can ignore the extent of anti-immigration sentiment
amongst voters. It is this disjuncture which feeds the populism of UKIP and
similar parties. Populism may be popular, but it entails pandering to people by
giving superficially appealing and easy solutions which are in fact detrimental
to those same people.
Saturday, 28 December 2013
1914 and 2014
There is
beginning to be a large amount of media attention given to the approaching
centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This led me over the
Christmas holidays to re-read Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth where she recounts her experience as a volunteer
nurse in that war, during which her fiancé, her beloved brother, and many of
her friends were killed. One of the striking things in her account is how readily
those men went to their fates. Indeed not just readily but happily, relishing
their chance to serve. A hundred years ago, in Britain and many other places,
it was self-evident that the verities of Church, Nation and Empire were immutable.
Now that seems, to most of us, not just misguided and wrong, but silly and
absurd – and deadly. It is hard, now, to see the First World War as anything
but a pointless slaughter.
That’s not so surprising. In the past they thought their realities solid. Now we see that they were not. So what, then, of those things that we ourselves take as being solid reality? Isn’t one lesson of history to be sceptical about these? It may seem bathetic to shift from talking of war and death to talking about work organizations, but death is present in these, too, sometimes literally as I wrote about in my post on suicide. An excellent new book by Nancy Harding – On Being at Work – talks about how “organizations … murder the selves that might have been” (p.175), meaning that they seek to make us into “zombie-machines” who are less than human, negating our potentials. If that sounds bleak, then read Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s recent book Dead Man Working for a real New Year boost. What both of these books have in common is an understanding of the way that even – no, not even, especially – the kind of humanized, fun workplaces of modern capitalism suck the life out of us by demanding not just our labour but the commitment of our very selves. Something similar, though less nihilistically expressed, is present in the discussion in my book of the post-bureaucratic workplace.
That’s not so surprising. In the past they thought their realities solid. Now we see that they were not. So what, then, of those things that we ourselves take as being solid reality? Isn’t one lesson of history to be sceptical about these? It may seem bathetic to shift from talking of war and death to talking about work organizations, but death is present in these, too, sometimes literally as I wrote about in my post on suicide. An excellent new book by Nancy Harding – On Being at Work – talks about how “organizations … murder the selves that might have been” (p.175), meaning that they seek to make us into “zombie-machines” who are less than human, negating our potentials. If that sounds bleak, then read Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s recent book Dead Man Working for a real New Year boost. What both of these books have in common is an understanding of the way that even – no, not even, especially – the kind of humanized, fun workplaces of modern capitalism suck the life out of us by demanding not just our labour but the commitment of our very selves. Something similar, though less nihilistically expressed, is present in the discussion in my book of the post-bureaucratic workplace.
What’s the
link with 1914? It’s two-fold. Firstly, in both cases there is a willing
embrace of the sacrificing our literal or metaphorical lives. In the workplaces
described by Harding and by Cederström and Fleming the tragedy is not that we
are forced to be zombies, it is that we accept and welcome it, just like Vera
Brittain’s contemporaries accepted and welcomed their assigned fate. Secondly,
this is orchestrated through a set of supposedly immutable verities – in the
case of the contemporary workplace these might include ideas of the necessity
of a ‘global competitive race’, of the implacable reality of ‘the market’, and that ‘change is the only constant’ and so on.
But if we
can accept that the solid realities of the past were not what they seemed, then
we must accept that the same applies to the solid realities of the present. We do not need to wait for historians to pass
judgment.
Happy New
Year!
Friday, 6 December 2013
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:
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 49th anniversary (or, as a colleague rather depressingly put it, I am now entering my 50th 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.
United Kingdom
|
1219
|
United States
|
647
|
Germany
|
148
|
Russia
|
133
|
Ireland
|
82
|
France
|
73
|
Ukraine
|
68
|
China
|
67
|
Norway
|
65
|
Australia
|
53
|
Anyway, there has been another birthday this week, namely my own 49th anniversary (or, as a colleague rather depressingly put it, I am now entering my 50th 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.
Friday, 26 July 2013
The History of Office Life
Media coverage of organizational issues is not great. Yes, every news bulletin gives the obligatory reading of the day's exchange rate and stock index level, and big corporate events and scandals get a look in. But there is very little about daily work life, even though this is, arguably, a matter of greater public interest. Even rarer is an interest in organizations from an historical perspective.
So we should be grateful for the new BBC Radio 4 series, The History of Office Life, presented by FT journalist Lucy Kellaway. Broadcast in ten episodes of 15 minutes each, starting last Monday, it perhaps struggles to cover so broad a subject in such a compressed format. Still, two hours of national broadcasting time is not to be sniffed at, and each episode contains within it a few gems. See here for a review of the first week's episodes.
And I will declare an interest: the next episode, on the rise of management, to be broadcast on Monday 29th July at 13.45 UK time features me as does the episode on recent trends in office life, to be broadcast on Friday 2nd August at 13.45 UK time. What I will say I have little idea, as it will be a few moments edited from a long interview. So this is not a recommendation ...
So we should be grateful for the new BBC Radio 4 series, The History of Office Life, presented by FT journalist Lucy Kellaway. Broadcast in ten episodes of 15 minutes each, starting last Monday, it perhaps struggles to cover so broad a subject in such a compressed format. Still, two hours of national broadcasting time is not to be sniffed at, and each episode contains within it a few gems. See here for a review of the first week's episodes.
And I will declare an interest: the next episode, on the rise of management, to be broadcast on Monday 29th July at 13.45 UK time features me as does the episode on recent trends in office life, to be broadcast on Friday 2nd August at 13.45 UK time. What I will say I have little idea, as it will be a few moments edited from a long interview. So this is not a recommendation ...
Friday, 28 June 2013
The New Barons
It seems as if almost daily the malign consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) that has informed public sector reform in many countries for the last 30 years are being exposed. In the UK, one recent high profile example is the Francis report into the failings of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust which can be read as an indictment of the kind of ‘tick box’ procedural managerialism inaugurated by NPM. But NPM, with its proceduralism, audits and managerial controls has increasingly morphed into something else, a more post-bureaucratic understanding of public management. Here, the emphasis is less on procedures and audits and more on freeing inspirational leaders to innovate and enact ‘radical change’.
Of course these things are linked. NPM always had several meanings, including the relentless praise of ‘enterprise’ in public services. Post-bureaucracy is a similarly flexible term, and the two fit together in all sorts of ways, as this article by Leslie Budd of the Open University explains. Still, the post-bureaucratic accent of contemporary public management has a certain distinctiveness in part as a reaction to what was, ironically, the explosion of ‘red tape’ associated with the supposedly anti-bureaucratic NPM.
I talk at length about post-bureaucracy in the book, especially in chapter 4, and a recent case has called to mind one of the points made there. I suggest (p. 86) that the embrace of post-bureaucracy carries with it huge risks because, freed of all those irritating rules and procedures it is just as likely that managers will act with recklessness and little or nothing will curtail them. In fact, I might have gone further, and pointed out that corruption and fraud, as well as recklessness, are made more likely in such situations, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues.
The case that reminded me of this was that of the head teacher of an ‘academy school’ in the UK who has resigned following multiple accusations of financial impropriety, including allegations about the way she employed family members. The allegations are particularly interesting if we consider how Weberian bureaucracy is in part to do with the avoidance of nepotism, of corruption and, indeed, the links between the two. This was a head teacher who had been lionized by successive politicians as the epitome of what the new style public servants should be: dynamic, innovative leaders.
Now the allegations are just that – there have been no criminal proceedings – but they fit into a wider sense of a managerial or leadership cadre in both the private and public sectors which is out of control, treating their organizations as their own individual fiefdoms rather than things for which they have a duty of stewardship. I have myself seen such behaviour, for it is as prevalent in universities as anywhere else.
The danger is that such episodes are seen as a series of individual scandals or, if put together, a sign of some inevitable decline in moral standards and the probity of public life feeding what is beginning to be seen as a crisis of trust in leadership. But they are neither: they are systemically linked by a particular approach, or set of approaches, to the management of organizations. It is in part, at least in origin, a consequence of the new capitalism I discuss in the book, of the neo-liberal revolution that has literally or metaphorically marketised so many areas of economic and social life. But it is more complex than that, and is more linked to the ideas about ‘neo-mercantilism’ I talked about in my post of January 9 2013. For what we have is a new managerial class which has little to do with the ‘market’ in any recognizable sense and is closer to a kind of baronial oligarchy in which there is little organizational constraint on how its members may act. In these circumstances, the only constraints become the extra-organizational ones of the law, at which point they become publically known scandals. But their origin is not some mysterious, and still less inevitable, decline in moral virtue. It lies in the dismantling of organizational controls under the chimerical doctrine of post-bureaucratisation.
Of course these things are linked. NPM always had several meanings, including the relentless praise of ‘enterprise’ in public services. Post-bureaucracy is a similarly flexible term, and the two fit together in all sorts of ways, as this article by Leslie Budd of the Open University explains. Still, the post-bureaucratic accent of contemporary public management has a certain distinctiveness in part as a reaction to what was, ironically, the explosion of ‘red tape’ associated with the supposedly anti-bureaucratic NPM.
I talk at length about post-bureaucracy in the book, especially in chapter 4, and a recent case has called to mind one of the points made there. I suggest (p. 86) that the embrace of post-bureaucracy carries with it huge risks because, freed of all those irritating rules and procedures it is just as likely that managers will act with recklessness and little or nothing will curtail them. In fact, I might have gone further, and pointed out that corruption and fraud, as well as recklessness, are made more likely in such situations, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues.
The case that reminded me of this was that of the head teacher of an ‘academy school’ in the UK who has resigned following multiple accusations of financial impropriety, including allegations about the way she employed family members. The allegations are particularly interesting if we consider how Weberian bureaucracy is in part to do with the avoidance of nepotism, of corruption and, indeed, the links between the two. This was a head teacher who had been lionized by successive politicians as the epitome of what the new style public servants should be: dynamic, innovative leaders.
Now the allegations are just that – there have been no criminal proceedings – but they fit into a wider sense of a managerial or leadership cadre in both the private and public sectors which is out of control, treating their organizations as their own individual fiefdoms rather than things for which they have a duty of stewardship. I have myself seen such behaviour, for it is as prevalent in universities as anywhere else.
The danger is that such episodes are seen as a series of individual scandals or, if put together, a sign of some inevitable decline in moral standards and the probity of public life feeding what is beginning to be seen as a crisis of trust in leadership. But they are neither: they are systemically linked by a particular approach, or set of approaches, to the management of organizations. It is in part, at least in origin, a consequence of the new capitalism I discuss in the book, of the neo-liberal revolution that has literally or metaphorically marketised so many areas of economic and social life. But it is more complex than that, and is more linked to the ideas about ‘neo-mercantilism’ I talked about in my post of January 9 2013. For what we have is a new managerial class which has little to do with the ‘market’ in any recognizable sense and is closer to a kind of baronial oligarchy in which there is little organizational constraint on how its members may act. In these circumstances, the only constraints become the extra-organizational ones of the law, at which point they become publically known scandals. But their origin is not some mysterious, and still less inevitable, decline in moral virtue. It lies in the dismantling of organizational controls under the chimerical doctrine of post-bureaucratisation.
Friday, 1 February 2013
A maximum wage?
The Chief Executive of Barclays Bank UK has announced today that he will waive his annual bonus, which could have been worth as much as £2.75M. He will not suffer huge hardship, as his basic salary amounts to £1.1M. What are we supposed to make of this? Should he be applauded for his forbearance? Or should we, as I believe, ask why it might be imagined that he was entitled to this extraodinary sum in the first place? In the book I document the way that the gap between average wages and top pay has grown massively over recent decades, and actually use the example of Barclays Bank (p.116) where the ratio between average pay and top pay grew from 14.5 to 75 between 1979 and 2011.
I don't have any problem with the existence of pay differentials, and I don't have any doubt that the job of CEOs of big companies such as Barclays is a difficult and demanding one. But I don't believe that any job, and any level of skill, is so great as to be worth so much more than someone else's job and skill. There are only so many hours in the day and only so much ability that any one person can have. Let's also clear out of the way two common arguments. It is not the case that these stratospheric payments are a reward for performance because as, again, I document in the book (p.123) executive pay has increased even as share price has fallen. Nor is what is at stake here simply the operation of a free market for talent: these payments are fixed by remuneration committees staffed by a merry-go-round of the same people who receive such exorbitant rewards.
Does anyone actually believe that in the period that senior executive pay has shot so far away from average wages the competence, performance and scarcity of those executives has increased? Was, say, Barclays, so much better run in 2011 than it was in 1979? No. As I said in my previous post on this blog, in a different context, this has been an outbreak of dumb luck not an upsurge of collective talent. Would these companies be so much worse run by someone paid, say, a miserly £500,000? And, in any case, irrespective of what they deserve, how much money does anyone actually need? Meanwhile, some 80% of the world's population subsists on $10 a day or less.
This is not the 'politics of envy' to use a rather hackneyed trope of those who defend such gross inequalities. And, given the relatively small number of people who earn these kinds of sums, it is not that reducing their rewards would enable any great increase in the wealth of others. No, the issue is about the terrible damage done to organizations and to society as a whole by such inequality, which tears apart the social fabric by so polarising life's experiences and chances both now and for generations to come. Actually the politics of envy is more in evidence in the repeated claims that those on welfare are living it up at taxpayers' expense, another socially divisive development. In the book (p.118) I quote official UK government statistics showing that benefit fraud in 2010 totalled £22M. In 2009, the world's top hedge fund manager earned £2.5billion.
In many countries now, including the US and the UK, there is a minimum wage. We need to adopt proposals that have been around for a while now for a maximum wage, too, fixing a maximum ratio between the lowest and the highest paid. Like all radical ideas, such as the debt jubilee, this looks impossible from within the prism of conventional wisdom and of course such proposals are greeted with critical scrutiny as if the arrangements that we actually have have arisen because they were first proposed then scrutinised and then adopted. In any case conventional wisdom has failed. The world we became accustomed to over the last few decades is manifestly broken. It won't be fixed by a few CEOs waiving their bonuses.
I don't have any problem with the existence of pay differentials, and I don't have any doubt that the job of CEOs of big companies such as Barclays is a difficult and demanding one. But I don't believe that any job, and any level of skill, is so great as to be worth so much more than someone else's job and skill. There are only so many hours in the day and only so much ability that any one person can have. Let's also clear out of the way two common arguments. It is not the case that these stratospheric payments are a reward for performance because as, again, I document in the book (p.123) executive pay has increased even as share price has fallen. Nor is what is at stake here simply the operation of a free market for talent: these payments are fixed by remuneration committees staffed by a merry-go-round of the same people who receive such exorbitant rewards.
Does anyone actually believe that in the period that senior executive pay has shot so far away from average wages the competence, performance and scarcity of those executives has increased? Was, say, Barclays, so much better run in 2011 than it was in 1979? No. As I said in my previous post on this blog, in a different context, this has been an outbreak of dumb luck not an upsurge of collective talent. Would these companies be so much worse run by someone paid, say, a miserly £500,000? And, in any case, irrespective of what they deserve, how much money does anyone actually need? Meanwhile, some 80% of the world's population subsists on $10 a day or less.
This is not the 'politics of envy' to use a rather hackneyed trope of those who defend such gross inequalities. And, given the relatively small number of people who earn these kinds of sums, it is not that reducing their rewards would enable any great increase in the wealth of others. No, the issue is about the terrible damage done to organizations and to society as a whole by such inequality, which tears apart the social fabric by so polarising life's experiences and chances both now and for generations to come. Actually the politics of envy is more in evidence in the repeated claims that those on welfare are living it up at taxpayers' expense, another socially divisive development. In the book (p.118) I quote official UK government statistics showing that benefit fraud in 2010 totalled £22M. In 2009, the world's top hedge fund manager earned £2.5billion.
In many countries now, including the US and the UK, there is a minimum wage. We need to adopt proposals that have been around for a while now for a maximum wage, too, fixing a maximum ratio between the lowest and the highest paid. Like all radical ideas, such as the debt jubilee, this looks impossible from within the prism of conventional wisdom and of course such proposals are greeted with critical scrutiny as if the arrangements that we actually have have arisen because they were first proposed then scrutinised and then adopted. In any case conventional wisdom has failed. The world we became accustomed to over the last few decades is manifestly broken. It won't be fixed by a few CEOs waiving their bonuses.
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