French elections: the new politics in its starkest form

In June 2014 I wrote a post on this blog suggesting that a new political landscape was emerging in which the primary cleavage was between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’. These were the terms coined in the context of organizational sociology by Alvin Gouldner. Adapted to the wider context cosmopolitans are educated and skilled, comfortable with different cultures, relaxed about immigration and liberal about sexuality and gender, travel widely and have a global frame of reference. Locals are poorly educated, uncomfortable with cultural difference, hostile to immigration and illiberal about sexuality and gender, travel little and have a national frame of reference. There is also often an overlay of age and regional distinctions, with cosmopolitans likely to be younger and more urban, and locals older and more rural or provincial.

Since successful predictions are rare in social science I want to take some credit for that one, especially as it has now become almost a cliché, albeit usually expressed in terms of ‘establishment and populists’, ‘globalists and nativists’ or ‘open and closed’ distinctions. At all events, in the three years since I wrote that post there have been many examples – most obviously the Trump election and the Brexit vote – but also in Turkey, Poland and Hungary. The point is not, though, that localism is triumphant; it is that the global-local axis is what defines the terms of contestation. In other cases – the Dutch and Austrian elections, for example, or, as I have written about before, the Rumanian anti-corruption protests - it has been the cosmopolitans who have held sway.

In France right now we see the most stark face-off between cosmopolitans and locals, which is perhaps fitting given that it was in France that the old right-left axis had its origins (supposedly in the seating in the 1789 National Assembly, with supporters of the King on the right side and those of the revolution on the left). So the second round of the presidential election will pit Marine Le Pen, the epitome of localism, against Emmanuel Macron, an equally paradigmatic cosmopolitan. And here another boast of prediction: I have been saying since last October that Macron would win the presidency, which now seems highly likely to be proved true. That said, I suspect that there is something else in play apart from cosmopolitanism and localism. Perhaps because of the boredom and search for novelty engendered by social media there is a premium placed on new faces. From that point of view Le Pen has just been around for too long to be able to play the ‘outsider’ card.

That aside, I have been thinking a lot recently about what this new politics means for critical management studies (CMS), especially in the UK. On the one hand, much has been oppositional to globalization. On the other hand, it aligns on most criteria with cosmopolitanism. In that sense it is on the same side as not just mainstream management studies but also with big business and finance. Perhaps, just as British CMS grew out of the market-managerialist politics of the 1990s and early 2000s, it will be swept away by the localist populism of today. Those localists typically lump together the corporate elite and the liberal intellectual elite, within which CMS undoubtedly sits. Perhaps they are right to do so.

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:

“There had been 110 ambulance call-outs to his main warehouse site in just over three years as workers suffered chest pains, stroke, injury, and five births or miscarriages – including one woman delivering her baby in the toilet – such was the fear, according to the union, of losing your job if you took time off … [with] allegations made that the time staff spent queuing to be partly strip-searched by security guards before leaving the factory had driven wages below the legal national minimum wage per hour, or that female workers were sometimes asked for sexual favours in return for longer hours.”

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.

Talking Turkey

Almost all news stories in the UK at the moment seem to have some relationship to, or are filtered through, the EU Referendum debate. I don’t want to use this blog simply to talk about that debate but for those who may be interested I will start this post with some links to various things I have written on other sites on the topic (some are syndicated re-issues of the same pieces).

So on the New Europeans site there are four articles (and do look at the rest of this excellent site); two pieces on The Conversation (again, there’s loads on this site worth looking at) both of which are listed on the House of Commons Library Referendum Research Briefing; another on the Wake Up Europe site; another on the EU Movement site; and another on the Reasons2Remain site. Finally, there is also the transcript and audio of a radio broadcast I took part in on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Rear Vision programme. Oh, and a short letter in the Financial Times (pay walled link but free access to up to a monthly limit). I’m also giving numerous talks in town and village halls on the kinds of issues covered in these posts but of course I can’t give links for these.

Anyway, on to today’s related topic, the news this week that the EU Commission has conditionally agreed to Turkey having visa-free access to the Schengen area. The anti-EU press and campaign to leave the EU spun this in predictably, but depressingly, dishonest ways, speaking of the EU ‘opening the door to 79 million Turks’. What such formulations imply (and get taken to mean) is a mix of downright lies, confusions and paranoia: that Turks will now have the same free movement rights as EU citizens (they won’t; the deal will apply to short term visits); that this will apply to the UK (it won’t; the UK isn’t in the Schengen area); that the entire population would move wholesale to the EU and the UK if it could (a nonsense, both obviously and as was shown when exactly the same claims were made about Bulgaria and Rumania when those countries gained free movement rights).

The wider issue is that this is part of a deal under which Turkey will control the flow of refugees into the EU, and more particularly Greece by taking back all such refugees with an equivalent number then being taken directly from the Turkey by the EU. That deal is controversial, not for the ludicrous reasons given above but because the UN has pointed out that it may be illegal and other bodies that it may be immoral. Yet one has to recognize that, shabby as it may be, it is primarily a response to the claims (not least from anti-EU groups in Britain) that the EU has failed to deal with the so-called migration crisis (more correctly, the refugee crisis).

One of the reasons this deal is, indeed, shabby is because Turkey has recently become markedly more authoritarian and repressive, as I have written about elsewhere on this blog and as events just this week underscore, events which may yet scupper the EU deal. In fact, if the EU is to be criticised, the real criticism is that in the years that Turkey was reforming and improving its human rights record its desire to join the EU was discouraged, contributing to the downward path it has since followed. Especially in the light of what has since happened in Syria, this now looks like a major strategic blunder by the EU. Even so, the relentless hostility to Turkey’s membership by Eurosceptics and worse in many EU countries since it applied to join (as long ago as 1987!) bears much of the blame for this.

Why does any of this matter for organization studies? One reason is the general point that I always make about the inseparability of politics and organizations. The EU is the biggest single economic entity in the world, after all. Another, narrower, reason is that Turkey has an organization studies community of some significance and within that a fragile critical management studies community. This is discussed by Beyza Oba and Mehmet Gençer in their chapter (‘The Ghost in the System: Critical Management Studies in Turkey’) in the recent book I co-edited (Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents). It may be too grandiose, or alternatively too Eurocentric, but one reading of CMS is as the promulgation of the critical strand of European Enlightenment thought within the imperialist, or anyway dominant, strand of that thought.

I think that is a defensible reading. It’s well-established that there is a direct line of thought from Kant to Weber from whom there is an indirect line to Foucault; and a less direct line, via Hegel, to Marx from whom there is a direct line to the Frankfurt School. And although it is less well-established there is, I increasingly think, a direct line from the Descartes-Spinoza bifurcation of Enlightenment thought to the bifurcation between modernist and postmodernist thought; dogmatic and sceptical rationality; positivism and constructivism.

Whatever the truth of that, it is an obvious political reality that Turkey now stands at the pivot between the EU and not just Syria but the wider Middle-East tragedy; and perhaps between Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. What happens there matters enormously. It therefore becomes important to approach Turkey not, to finish where I began, through the narrow prism of the EU Referendum but as a conflicted boundary across which we – we Europeans, and more narrowly we students of organizations – must reach to support progressive, liberal and critical movements and people in Turkey.

All about me

Rather shamelessly, my post today is to promote two books of mine that are about to come out. The first is a collection edited with Isabelle Huault, Véronique Perret and Laurent Taskin entitled Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents. Published by Routledge on March 18 (but already available electronically) the idea is a simple one. Critical Management Studies (CMS) is largely dominated by Anglophone writings from Anglo-Scandinavian authors, but it has to some extent been picked up globally. So how does CMS play out in different locales and different linguistic communities?

Part of the issue here is one of travel and translation of ideas; another part is about how CMS perhaps ironically recreates the patterns of domination within ‘mainstream’ management studies. We wanted to capture this in a way that recognized some sense of a ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ but also to problematize that distinction by showing how, for example, CMS may be more fragile in, say, the UK than might be thought and also might be quite radically inflected in, say, Brazil. So there is more going on than a hegemonic centre ‘making’ CMS and a passive margin ‘taking’ CMS (although some of that may be going on, as well).

In a way it’s just a first attempt at a global ‘survey’ of CMS – a first attempt because there are large parts of the world that are not covered, either because there is not much CMS going on, or because we couldn’t find an author to write about it. The countries or regions that are covered are: Australia/New Zealand, Benelux, Canada, China, France, Germanic, Israel, Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, South America, Turkey, UK, USA.

The other book is entirely different. Written with Jana Costas and published by Stanford University Press on 30 March it is called Secrecy at Work. The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. It’s not in any but the broadest sense a CMS book. Rather it aspires to be a contribution to organizational sociology and theory on a big scale. We argue that secrecy should be added to the standard repertoire of the study of organizations because it is part of the standard repertoire of organizational life. We try to capture the whole gamut of ways that this is so, from trade secrets and restricted access laboratories through to whispered gossip in workplace corridors.

And more than that we try to show how such things create literal and metaphorical architectures of in groups and out groups. Secrecy is an incredibly powerful thing, creating a sense of exclusivity and specialness, but also sometimes a burden amongst those who possess secrets. Meanwhile imaginations, both beneficent and malign, abound amongst those on the outside about what goes on behind closed doors.

So this is, in intent at least, an ambitious book but of course it remains to be seen what others will make of it. Early omens are good. Yiannis Gabriel of Bath University has said that it “sheds brilliant light on an area of organizational life that has … been systematically excluded from organizational theory”. Amanda Sinclair at Melbourne University calls it a “brilliant analysis” whilst Steven Lukes of New York University found it to be “a pioneering, highly readable study; full of insights”. However it ends up being received it’s a book I’m proud of.

Since this post is irretrievably egotistical I will just mention that the manuscript of the fourth edition of ‘A very short etc.’ that is the basis of this blog has now gone to the publisher and should be out at the end of this year or the beginning of next.