Ageing badly

There is plenty of public discussion of the complex issues involved in being a parent, but far less about having parents. What I mean is the issues arising for people in middle-age having to care for and cope with their ageing parents. Those issues are made more complex by the way that families tend now to be dispersed geographically and the much longer live spans that are now common. The consequence is the necessity of engaging with the organization of care for the elderly. In the UK, at least, that organization is woefully inadequate and in crisis.

Longer live expectancy is both a consequence of medical care and a cause of the need for medical care. This in turn requires increased health expenditure, but in 2015 the UK health expenditure as a percentage of GDP was 8.5%: lower than Greece, lower than most west European countries, and far lower than the US. Against this, it has to be recognized that the UK system is far more efficient than others in translating expenditure into health outcomes. Maybe more important, though, is that increases in UK health expenditure don’t match increased costs (healthcare cost inflation is much higher than general price inflation) and increased demand (driven primarily by ageing).

But healthcare is only one part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the organization of ageing. Most health expenditure arises in the last two years of life; whether that life ends at 70 or 90. No, the real issue is the organization of care, and this is in complete crisis. Whereas it used to be provided mainly by local authorities, now there is a hybrid system of private care homes part-funded by local authorities. Budget cutbacks mean that the part-funding is increasingly inadequate; whilst the crazy financial engineering of some private home owners like the collapsed Southern Cross (discussed on p.115 of the book) exacerbates the problem.

The two aspects of health care and care homes are closely related. Both emergency and routine care departments of hospitals can’t discharge elderly patients because there is nowhere for them to go, especially if they are ‘unprofitable’ from a care home perspective. On the other hand, as a report this week highlights, in other cases the elderly are being discharged back to their own homes when they are incapable of coping, with horrific consequences.

All of this is absolutely to do with failures in the way that we organize. The privatized, often private equity firm-owned care home system is simply absurd, and passes on its inefficiencies to the public sector NHS. But beyond that is the obvious absurdity of dividing health and social care at all. There has been much talk of overcoming it, and some areas in England have made progress in doing so but overall the separation remains stubbornly in place.

As is often – perhaps always – the case, the issues relate to both organizations in the institutional sense (the structures of, in this case, health and social care) and to ideational organization (the construction of ‘health’ and ‘care’ as categories). Underlying the latter is perhaps also the more profound division of the public and private realms, so that health care is something that happens in the public domain of the hospital ward and social care something that happens in the private domain of the home (even if the home is an institutional ‘care home’). This in turn means that much suffering remains hidden (‘at home’) and experienced by both the elderly and their families as a ‘private’ problem, and possibly a stigma.

The psychology of this is undoubtedly very complex, since the relations between (adult, ageing) children and (aged) parents has the capacity to engender guilt, frustration, anger, fear and much else besides. Psychology has been much concerned with the relationships of children and parents in infancy, but perhaps much less so (at least, that’s my impression) with those in adulthood. The dynamics of the latter are surely taking new forms as extended old age and associated dependency become the norm rather than the exception.

In 1911 in the UK life expectancy was 51 years; by 2013 it was 81 years. In 1911 there were 107 people in Britain aged 100 or over; in 2013 there were 13,780. A similar pattern can be found across the developed world. Organizationally, and emotionally, we have not really caught up with these profound demographic changes.

Death

Our topic today is, cheerily enough, death. It’s prompted by this week’s biggest global news story, the death of David Bowie. One of the consequences of the contemporary media is that within a few hours almost all that could conceivably be said about any big event is said within a few hours, rendering the most obvious thoughts we might have clichés before we have had time to think them. One such cliché is that for people of my age, give or take ten years, Bowie provided ‘the soundtrack to our lives’. And so indeed he did for me. I fell in love for the first time to the accompaniment of Life on Mars; rebelled (sort of, anyway) to the backdrop of Rebel, Rebel; was angst-ridden to the tune of Rock’n’Roll Suicide; uplifted by Heroes; thrilled by Ashes to Ashes; and fell in love again with China Girl in the background.

I mention in the book that I grew up in Croydon and, in Croydon in those days, we claimed Bowie as a local hero (he actually grew up in nearby Bromley), admittedly not having anyone much else in pop culture to lay claim to (Captain Sensible of The Damned and Kirsty MacColl being the other main possibilities). What’s more to the point is that pop music, which can be and can mean many things, can sometimes be a poetry of ‘sound and vision’, speaking both directly and ambiguously to one’s own life and to the human condition. For me this was true of Bowie but also Morrissey and Elvis Costello (whose autobiography I am currently reading) – all notable lyricists as well as musicians.

The other immediately stated but also true cliché about Bowie’s death was that he made that death into art, especially in the extraordinary song and video Lazarus. Extraordinary, that is, in its depiction of a bandaged, emaciated figure struggling on his (death)bed and straining to get words down on paper before dying. Bowie was a kind of poster-boy for what sociologists call reflexive modernity – constantly and knowingly giving an account of his own life – and providing what both Victorian aesthetes and postmodernists might recognize as an aesthetics of the self.

That this should include a knowing and aesthetically careful depiction of death is particularly extraordinary because of the way that death is so comprehensively written-out of contemporary culture. There’s an idea – implicit, anyway – that death is a kind of embarrassing and certainly best-avoided topic. Possibly – if one is sufficiently careful in terms of diet, exercise, not smoking, not drinking – avoidable; perhaps in any case something for which a cure might one day be found, and in the meantime better not thought about.

Organization studies does not have a great deal to say about death (at least that is my impression; I haven’t undertaken the dreaded literature review required by academic journals). It could do: after all, funeral parlours and cancer wards are organizations, but I’m not aware of too many cases studies of them. The German organizational psychologist Burkard Sievers (1990) wrote a thought-provoking essay on this, arguing that “collectively, we have displaced death from experience” (p.132) and he referred to the great sociologist, Norbert Elias (1985) to claim that “death, like the dead body, has to be isolated and hygienically hidden” (Sievers, 1990: 132).

From that perspective, Bowie’s Lazarus rips open the stage curtain to show death, or at least, a representation of death because that is (and must be) what it means to make death into art. In another post I wrote about the death of Tony Benn, who said something very powerful and moving about his wife, Caroline, who pre-deceased him: “she taught me how to live and she taught me how to die, and you can’t ask more from anyone than that”. Bowie did something like that.

A final thought. When I was a teenager and first listened to Bowie there was a boy in my class at school called Simon. Now, he is a Buddhist scholar known as Vishvapani who often speaks on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, and did so last Wednesday taking Bowie’s death as his theme. He said that “the most basic fact of our lives is that nothing endures”. That is of course true and for Buddhists the implication is to become less self-absorbed. For those of us who are not Buddhists the issue might be the more egotistical one of what we leave behind. That is unpredictable, for sure. A chance conversation might ripple through the ages; a magnificent book languish unread. For myself, I like the idea that at some point in the future someone might come across something I have written in a dusty corner of the library (if libraries still exist) and find it of passing interest.

References

Elias, N. (1985) The Loneliness of the Dying. Oxford: Blackwell

Sievers, D. (1990) ‘The Diabolization of Death: Some thoughts on the obsolescence of mortality in organization theory and practice’, in Hassard, J. & Pym, D. (eds) The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations, pp 125-136. London: Routledge.

Intended consequences

In the book, I make much use of the concept of ‘unintended consequences’ – the way that, in particular, rational-legal rules give rise to effects that were not only different to those intended but run directly counter to what was intended. My last post on the VW emissions scandal provided a current example.

But sometimes the situation is more complex, and I return here to the case of regulations around smoking, about which I have written in another post on this blog, and, with Jo Brewis, also written an academic paper (Brewis & Grey,2008). The latest development is that today a law has come in to force banning smoking in cars when a person less than 18 years old is present in the car. It’s by no means an objectionable law, in and of itself, because who would want to claim that smoking in a car with children is in any way a good thing?

What is interesting about this law, though, is that it is manifestly doomed to failure. Police representatives have already said that it is unenforceable, partly due to lack of resources but also because of detection problems. For example, electronic cigarettes are not included in the legislation so a police patrol would not easily be able to tell whether an offence was being committed, nor is it easy to know the age of passengers from a patrol car. Moreover, the legislation allows 17 year olds to smoke in cars if the passengers are 18, allows smoking in convertibles with the hood down, and allows smoking in caravans and motorhomes, even if children are present, so long as the vehicle are not at that point moving.

We might, then, assume that the intended consequence is to stop smoking in cars with children and that the unintended consequence is it not working. But in fact the situation is more complex. The long-term aim of anti-smoking activists is the eradication of all smoking, but they approach this goal stealthily because smoking is such a strongly culturally embedded practice. From that perspective, the failure of this latest legislation will be desirable, because when it fails it will justify a new law banning all smoking in all vehicles in all circumstances.

Social science research is sometimes criticised for lacking the predictive power of natural science, so here I will make a prediction. Within, say, five years (and I would expect less rather than more) a total smoking ban in cars will be in force. And as soon as it is, or even, possibly, before there will be lobbying for a ban on smoking in houses where children are present. Once again few will object, because no one could really mount a case that it would be good to allow it. So a law will follow, which will of course be even more unenforceable than that against smoking in cars with children. From which will ‘logically’ follow that all smoking by anyone in any house will be banned.

By that point, the situation as regards public spaces (e.g. bars) and private spaces (e.g. homes) will be identical: smoking in both is banned. So what happens then? Well, look at what is happening around the regulations on public spaces. At first, it was just indoors. Now, it is increasingly in parks and on beaches which are public spaces but outdoors, including outside pub doorways. The rationale for this is not that others might inhale the fumes, but that those (especially children) seeing it might think that smoking was ‘normal’. So, once there is a ban on smoking inside homes, it will get extended to smoking outside home, for example in gardens. In other words, as each new rule ‘fails’, that failure provides the rationale for a new rule. It is in this sense that failure is an intended consequence of regulation since it paves the way for successfully extending regulation.

With smoking now very much a minority activity in the UK and many other countries, few will shed a tear about any of this (and it’s not my intention that anyone should: I just want to provide an interesting illustration of a particular phenomenon around unintended consequences). But it’s worth reflecting that with the campaign to reduce smoking now being acknowledged as the gold-standard of public health campaigns, the same tactics are being applied to another deeply culturally embedded practice (as smoking was a generation ago), namely alcohol consumption.

As with smoking, the initial restrictions have been around advertising. Then (rather like the 1970s campaign that smokers should choose cigarettes with filters and leave long stubs) there has been the definition of safe drinking limits, which turn out to have been ‘plucked out of air’. Now, as happened with smoking, some campaigners say that there is no safe limit for alcohol, and although that is not mainstream in the way that it is for smoking it is accepted to be true for pregnant women. Meanwhile, just as there used to be a differentiation of ‘light’ or ‘social’ smokers from the hardcore we have a similar differentiation of social and ‘binge’ drinkers, with a binge drinker being someone drinking more than 3 pints of beer. The key move in anti-smoking discourse was to establish the notion of passive or secondary smoking, and the same shift has been mooted by former UK Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, who is also responsible for the Orwellian declaration of aiming for the complete denormalization of smoking.

So here’s another prediction – as smoking fades away, restrictions on alcohol will increase along with restrictions on sugar and ever more demonization of obesity. Each restriction will give rise to failures which far from being unintended will have been designed to fail, in order to justify further restrictions. But the law of unintended consequences will still hold, and indeed it is already very clear that this is so. Because the more that unhealthy practices, such as smoking, drinking and over-eating are reduced, the more we see the degradations of dementia, of old age blighted by complex and intractable multiple illnesses, of obscure cancers that were rarely known before.

Moreover, since taxes on smoking are, massively, a net contributor to the NHS (and the same is true for alcohol) the less we smoke the more difficult it will be to fund the healthcare for the longer lives we will indubitably – for, of course, the anti-smoking campaigners are quite right to point to its dangers – be living. But that, too, is not really an example of an unintended consequence since, as Jo Brewis and I argued in our article, the real motivation of the anti-smoking movement is not public health, but the imposition of a morality about smoking that long precedes, and proceeds quite independently of, any scientific or medical rationality. They simply reproduce, in modern language, King James I's (1604) Counterblaste to Tobacco:

Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the markes and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

 

Follow the money

I don’t often write about universities on this blog, because to do so seems too inward-looking. But current developments underway in UK universities should be of real public concern. I’m referring in particular to a massive shift towards requiring academics to generate substantial amounts of grant income to fund their research. To understand why that matters, it’s necessary to understand a little bit about how research funding works in the UK (more precisely I should say England in terms of what follows, although there is considerable similarity in the rest of the UK). There are two main routes. One is the government funding distributed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) on the basis of the quality of research undertaken (hence it is called QR funding), with this quality being assessed by the Research Excellence Framework(REF), the latest results of which are due next week. The other route is research grant income (RGI) which may come from a variety of industrial, charitable and government sources, with the UK’s research councils (RCUK) being the most important as regards the latter.

With respect to QR funding, this is driven mainly by assessments of the quality of publications (but also by the wider impact of these and some other factors). Academics undertake QR funded research as part of their contractual duties and are not tied to any particular projects. RGI funding, by contrast, is based on bids to support particular projects. QR funding therefore offers considerable freedom of research focus, but it is not a ‘free for all’ since the REF assessment is stringent and, indeed, a source of much complaint from academics.

In recent months, many British universities have been imposing massive pressure on academics to increase RGI and in some cases have set very harsh targets on individuals to secure such funding, under threat of redundancy. Three cases in particular have attracted some publicity: those of King’s College London, Warwick University and Imperial. The latter example has a particularly tragic twist with the suicide of a Professor of Toxicology, apparently linked to the demands for RGI generation placed upon him, recalling other cases of suicide in organizations discussed in a previous post.

These issues relate to many others discussed on this blog and in my book, especially the general impact of the New Public Management and the ways that this has given licence to capricious managerial privilege and, for that matter, bullying. How this relates to universities are brilliantly explored by in a 2012 article by Yiannis Gabriel and, with respect to business schools, in a 2013 article by Martin Parker. But I want to focus on some more narrow issues here.

One is just about the financial rationale of what is happening. Suppose we want to be very ‘hard-headed’ and say something like “well, of course, research must pay its way: it’s high time these academics learnt to live in the real world”. Apart from any other problems with such a view, it neglects the fact of QR funding. Academics who publish work judged to be excellent by the REF generate income for their universities via HEFCE. Why, then, insist that only RGI money matters?

The other is even more important. Funding research via RGI requires that the funder be persuaded in advance of the research that it is worthwhile. That presents several very important issues, both practical and political. On the former - it’s very well-known that the value of research is often only apparent many years after it has been conducted. The computer applications of pure maths are obvious examples. On the latter – research that seems controversial or unfashionable will be a poor prospect for deliberative funding decisions. The two are linked, since it is almost inevitable that grant and project based funding decisions will be small-c conservative: they are based upon existing knowledge and understanding.

This has a particular significance when it comes to the funding of critically-oriented research about organizations and management. For all that academics may complain about REF, it has allowed such research to flourish to the extent – and it is a considerable extent – that it has generated publications deemed to be of high quality and hence generating QR funding. An approach based on RGI offers a much less propitious environment for at least two reasons. One is that the very fractured and fractious state of the field makes it hard to get consensus from referees on grant applications. Another is that, to the extent that RGI requires identifiable end users, critical research, whose ‘users’ are typically civil society at large, is likely to struggle.

Of course we are not in that situation yet, and that is one of the strangest aspects of this story. For it is not that QR funding has dried up. True, there have been for quite some time persistent calls that all government university research funding should be channelled through RCUK. But that is not yet the case. It is tempting, then, to read the preoccupation of university managers with individual RGI records as a matter of managerial control for its own sake, rather than financial exigency. If so, academics who have for so long complained about REF may find themselves in the ironic position of defending it in the face of the emerging landscape RGI targets.

That in turn should be a real worry beyond academia. I suppose it is just about possible to imagine at least applied scientific and medical research being funded by industry and research councils, and some humanities and social science research being funded by charities and research councils. But even in these cases much of value will be lost. It’s very difficult, though, to imagine that much in the way of critical organizational research will get funded, which means that one of the core areas of human existence will mainly get researched uncritically. If in doubt, look at the RCUK web page entitled ‘Research and Business: A Productive Partnership’ telling us that “the Research Councils are a source of ideas, knowledge, expertise, skills and research infrastructure for your business”. No mention of the public good there, you may notice, for all that the funds come from each and every UK taxpayer.

On Twitter

New technologies always throw up new vocabularies. Recently, we have learned the term ‘twitter storm’ to denote a surge of typically acrimonious comment on the twitter social media site. We also now have ‘trolls’, and this is an interesting example of how the new language has become old enough to mutate. A few years back a troll was someone who posted deliberately provocative comments on internet forums in order to garner a reaction – the implication being that the poster did not really think these things. Increasingly, though, a troll is understood to be someone posting offensive, abusive or threatening remarks, with no suggestion that this is done purely for effect.

Of course trolls tweet and tweeters troll, and we have seen the effects this can have this week with the apparent suicide of Brenda Leyland. She had been tweeting abusive messages to the family of Madeleine McCann, the child who disappeared on a family holiday in Portugal seven years ago. The dead woman had been confronted by a journalist a few days before her death. This in turn led to the journalist becoming the subject of a vitriolic twitter campaign. And recently twitter trolls who made rape and death threats against feminist campaigners were jailed.

Meanwhile, in the fallout from the sacking of cricketer Kevin Pietersen – which I posted about a while back - continued when he published his autobiography this week. Much of the controversy concerns tweets that he sent, and a bogus twitter account set up by his then team mates in his name which reduced him to tears. His former team mates immediately took to twitter to give their reactions.

Twitter is not, of course, just the domain of trolls and celebrities. In September 2013 some 200 million users worldwide sent 400 million tweets per day. It has become a near-compulsory conduit for political and corporate leaders. Really quite important statements are released on twitter by, for example, British Prime Minister David Cameron, as they are by Barack Obama. No self-respecting Chief Executive fails to tweet, nor any corporate PR department. And twitter can also provide a vehicle for whistle blowers, trade unions and activists.

We should not however conclude that this is just a neutral technology that may be used for any and every purpose. It is a very particular medium with very particular rules, most notably the 140 character rule. In this way it has a very particular effect: it is a vehicle for simplification. Much has been made of the issue of anonymity and the way this encourages ‘trolls’ to behave in ways that they might not otherwise do. But it makes all who use it behave in ways they would not otherwise do, by stripping out all nuance. The two are linked: for the trolls, ethical sensitivity is flattened out; for the ‘responsible tweeters’ complexity is flattened out.

This is not an elitist lament for ‘dumbing down’. Twitter and other social media are not egalitarian, despite the claims of starry-eyed internet libertarians. They give the illusion of a voice for everyone, but their very ubiquity means that no voice is heard. Sure, anyone can open a twitter account or a facebook page or set up a blog, but that does not mean that the old structures of power have disappeared. Would you be reading this blog if it were not for my book and its publisher? Would that book have been published if I did not hold a university position? There is no democratization in social media, but there is a very powerful illusion of it. Everyone has a voice, so no one can be heard.

So when several friends and colleagues have suggested that I should start to tweet, not least to publicize this blog, I haven’t been keen. When I ask to see how they use twitter I am always amazed that they see a value in it. To me it just seems meaningless. I can’t imagine gaining anything from ‘following’ them, even though they are people who I like or whose work interests me. So by the same token I can’t imagine that anything could be gained by me tweeting.

Perhaps you will think that I am just a Luddite. But that is a convenient term to imply a blanket rejection of new technology normally used by those uncritically accepting new technology. I prefer to think that the Emperor has no clothes and that twitter stands as testimony to a shallow populism dressed up as democratic participation and an egotism dressed up as open communication. It seems to me to have several very unpleasant effects and no redeeming qualities at all. It is not just another medium of communication, neutral in itself, it entails an emotional, political and intellectual infantilisation of communication.

That, I think, is the image we should have of tweeting: an endlessly, insatiably egocentric infant spewing out its thoughts and feelings at the instant they occur. The trolls are not so much a side-effect as an exemplification of this: far from being an anomaly they define the ideal-type of the tweeter. But unlike infants they claim a right, albeit one detached from any kind of defensible ethics or politics. As Brenda Leyland said when confronted about her tweets: “I’m entitled to do that”. That is not to revile her. A few days later she was dead, caught in desperation between the infantilised, simplified world of 140 character tweets and the adult world where words, politics and ethics are more complex.

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.

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!

Suicide and organizations

I’ve come across two thought-provoking articles today, and the thoughts they provoked were not pleasant. One is a piece in The Guardian by Seamus Milne about the growth of ‘zero-hours contracts’ in the UK. With such contracts, workers are on standby to work, but with no guarantee of any actual work, and therefore payment, eventuating. In many cases, the contract forbids the person from working for anyone else either. Hailed by neo-liberals as an example of ‘flexible employment’, it is clear that all the flexibility is on the part of the worker. The consequent insecurity is obvious – no guaranteed income from week to week for a start, no pension or fringe benefits, no prospect of buying a home, difficult to sustain a family – in short, the full weight of the new insecurity I wrote about here a couple of months ago. And, although Milne does not make this connection, increasingly, there is little or no safety net, with recent clampdowns on benefits for the disabled in particular leading to a spate of suicides and an even greater upsurge in suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, as I noted in my book (p.117), suicide rates in Greece have risen alarmingly since 2009 (and the rise has continued since I wrote that)  and there can be little doubt that the cause of this is the social and psychological dislocation caused by the economic crisis.

Suicidal desperation is at the heart of Jenny Chan’s recently published paper entitled ‘A Suicide Survivor: The Life of a Chinese Worker’ in New Technology, Work and Employment. Unusually for an academic article, this is a powerfully written paper and it recounts the life of a Chinese worker who attempted suicide, apparently a growing trend.  We often here of the rise of the knowledge economy and new organizational forms which stress creativity and freedom, but the hidden heart of this economy is what Chan describes as “a production model apparently based on classic Taylorism” (p.88). The intense discipline of life on the line of an outsourcing company producing Apple's i-phones is described in chilling detail, culminating thus: “The accumulated effects of endless assembly line toil, punishing work schedules, harsh factory discipline, a friendless dormitory and, rejection from managers and administrators, compounded by the company’s failure to provide her with income, and then her inability to make contact with friends and family, were the immediate circumstances of her attempted suicide. Her testimony reveals how she was overwhelmed, ‘I was so desperate that my mind went blank’. At 8 a.m. on March 17, Yu jumped from the fourth floor of her dormitory building in despair. After 12 days in a coma, she awoke to find that her body had become half paralysed. She is now confined to a bed or a wheelchair” (p. 91). It is not just in harsh factory conditions that work-related suicides are found. For example, in 2008 and 2009 there was a wave of suicides amongst employees of France Telecom, with many leaving notes blaming work pressures in an organization undergoing massive restructuring.

Suicide is undoubtedly the most powerful and extreme act of the powerless and desperate, a complex response to, and creator, of trauma and its causes are equally complex, and varied. One part of its power is to make it almost undiscussable and, certainly, one should never draw glib conclusions from and about suicides. But, equally, as Salford University academics Jo Milner and Ian Cummins note (and give links to further research on), the links between suicide levels and social and economic conditions are well-established, and have been since at least the publication of Emile Durkheim’s  1897 book, Suicide. So it would certainly be glib to consign suicide to the realms of individual psychology. If we have global economic systems and associated organizational systems of work and welfare which engender suicide then we (including and perhaps especially those of us whose profession is the study of organizations) should not be shy of saying so. Terms like flexibility, welfare reform, global supply chain efficiency and organizational restructuring sound neutral and unexceptionable. What lies behind them may be horror.

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.