Catastrophe

So post-truth politics won the day and in a grotesque act of national self-harm Britain has voted to leave the EU. Within hours reality began to bite back as the warnings of the much-derided experts started to become true. Stock markets around the world were in free fall, the pound crashed through the floor, and companies began to announce plans to move jobs and investment out. All through the campaign leavers braggingly talked of how Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy. Not any more it isn’t. Within just a day it has become the sixth largest. Again as warned, Scotland made the first moves towards what will undoubtedly be independence, and Northern Ireland might well follow or in any case faces turmoil. Calls to shift the British border back from Calais began. The Prime Minister resigned but not with immediate effect and so a complete political paralysis now exists, and there are rumours that senior civil servants are likely to resign en masse because they know that what they are going to be expected to deliver is completely impractical. This is just day one of what will be years of uncertainty and chaos.

Reality bit in other ways, too. Before the sun had set leading Brexiters disowned the claims that there would be £350M a week more spent on the NHS, and that there would be reductions in immigration. So that was two of the three central planks of their campaign discarded. And what of the third, ‘taking back control’? As had again been said all along, it immediately emerged that the Brexiters have not a single idea about what it is that is now going to happen, when, or how. Having with anarchistic, reckless glee booted down the central pillars of decades of foreign and economic policy they had literally nothing – nothing - to say other than that a ‘glorious future’ beckoned. Suddenly, having won their prize they do not even want to begin the process of leaving and seem amazed and outraged that the rest of the EU is saying that they need to do so. Out is out.

There are no good outcomes for England now. The best that can be hoped for might be some kind of Norwegian-style arrangement, although it is by no means clear that this will be available. Even if it were it would be very tricky, politically, although there would be a parliamentary majority for it, because it would mean free movement of people. But as the effects of Brexit get clearer, and the lies of the leave campaign are exposed, there are already signs that some who voted to leave are regretting it (‘Regrexit’ is the word du jour) and if opinion polls bore that out in large numbers it’s just about conceivable that such an arrangement could be agreed without a further referendum. It would just about honour the letter of the vote to leave the EU and frankly since the leavers refused to spell out what leave meant they would just have to accept that. But it would lead to decades of claims of ‘betrayal’ and ‘we did not know what we voted for’.

Whatever happens, the economic consequences are going to be dire for years to come. Anyone thinking that it represents a triumph of working-class solidarity over global neo-liberalism is in for a very nasty shock indeed when jobs start to haemorrhage and public finances and services collapse. A very chilling lesson in reality is about to administered and although it won’t only be those who voted leave who suffer it is likely to impact them the worst.  But the real catastrophe is a cultural one. It is a massive defeat for Britain as a place of tolerance, cosmopolitanism and openness; a victory for every sort of prejudice, for sullen and bitter anti-intellectualism, for resentful small-mindedness. Huge rifts between classes, generations and regions have been opened and they aren’t going to be healed any time soon. My European friends living here are shocked and scared, whilst friends abroad look on in bemusement and horror at what has happened.

As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.

Turkeys and Christmas

Before the virtual ink had dried on my last post, the campaign for the UK to leave the EU produced their biggest and, so far, most pernicious, lie with the launch of a poster stating: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. The idea – signalled in the population figure – is to whip up fears of Turkish – meaning Muslim – immigration to the UK.

The lie is that Turkey is not joining the EU. They applied to do so in 1987 but negotiations did not start until 2005. Joining requires the opening and closing of 35 ‘chapters’ or areas of agreement, of which so far only 15 have been opened and just one closed. Turkey is nowhere near to joining the EU and in any case its joining could be vetoed by any member state and almost certainly would be. In some ways it is further than ever from joining because of its deteriorating human rights and democracy record. And, for that matter, Turkey itself is far less interested in EU membership than in the past: its longstanding failure to join has led it to reposition itself strategically away from Europe and towards being a middle-eastern regional power.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Turkey or its EU negotiations, but the expert opinion is clear, as in this recent summary:

“To infer that Turkey may one day soon join the EU is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the political and procedural realities of the EU and of its enlargement process. Turkish membership of the EU is at best a distant prospect.”

Reading – as, sadly, I do – many internet discussion forums about the EU Referendum it was interesting and depressing to see how the lie that ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ was defended. One line was to say – mendaciously – that the recent deal by ‘Germany’ to give Turks visa-free access to the Schengen zone meant that they had ‘free movement rights’. It doesn’t (three month visa-free travel is not the same as free movement) and, anyway, the deal may not go ahead because it is not ‘Germany’ that decides but the democratically elected EU Parliament which is blocking or at least modifying the deal which, for that matter, Turkey may not accept. And even if this were to happen then, of course, it would not mean that Turkish membership of the EU was any closer.

Another line of defence was downright peculiar. It was that ‘joining’ is the present continuous tense and therefore the poster was true since Turkey was ‘in the process’ of joining. This kind of sophistry gives sophistry a bad name. If I say that ‘I am joining the campaign to leave the EU’ any reasonable person would think that means that it is going to happen, not that I am in a process that might or might not end in the future in me becoming a member of the campaign.

The wider context for this anti-immigrant sentiment associated with a supposedly anti-elitist movement is the well-worn theme of how the consequences of economic crisis play out. It never has a happy ending, not least for the ‘ordinary, salt of the earth folk’ that the anti-elite elitists play for fools in the way that the Brexit advocates are currently trying to do. For their goal is not to help, sustain and support ‘ordinary people’ in the face of global capitalism, but to expose them to the most extreme form of unregulated global capitalism. Those who fall for it are voting, like the proverbial Turkeys, for Christmas.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

The expression “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics” has never been definitively attributed but it has become a political cliché. And in some ways an unfair one, since it is a way of discrediting any and every statistic. Even so, there are some statistics which are palpably lies, and the campaign for Britain to leave the EU is replete with them.

The most egregious lie is the statistic used as the headline claim of the Leave campaign (appearing on the side of the campaign ‘battle bus’ and on all its leaflets and web sites) that “the EU costs us £350 million a week”.  This has been debunked numerous times, not least by the Office for National Statistics. It arises from the fact that in 2014, the last year for which full figures are available, the UK gross contribution to the EU was £18.8 billion. Divided by 52 this gives the figure of £350M per week. But stated as a cost to the UK it is a lie. Why?

Because it is the gross contribution. The net contribution is reduced by the UK’s budget rebate, which in 2014 was £4.4 billion, and payments received back in grants to for example agriculture and science funding which in 2014 were £6 billion. So the net contribution in 2014 was £8.4 billion – less than half what is claimed. And there is also the lie that this is what the UK pays ‘each year’. In fact, the figure varies each year and 2014 was the second highest contribution on record. Nor is the figure rising – the 2015 predicted out turn is lower than 2014.

In the face of this (although they have never acknowledged the fact that this was an unusually high year) the Leave campaign have made two defences. First, they say, that is the amount that we actually hand over, so it is what the EU costs, even if we get some back. That is a crazy logic in itself, of course. It is like saying that if I go into a shop and buy something priced at £5 and give a £10 note and get £5 change, then my visit to the shop has cost me £10. But it isn’t even true in this crazy sense: the rebate part is never even handed over.

Their second defence is that it is justified to quote the gross figure because, outside the EU, all this would be available to spend on what the UK wanted, whereas the £6 billion that comes back has to be spent on what the EU determines. The problem with that, though, is that Brexit campaigners have, whenever challenged that leaving would reduce UK agricultural subsidies or science funding, said that these payments would continue to be made by the UK government, and some have even said they would be increased. So if that is true, then only the net figure would be available to the UK.

But let’s look at that. First, it assumes that nothing else whatsoever changes in the economy on Brexit, which no analyst, even pro-Brexit, thinks. Second, it neglects how that contribution benefits the UK by, for example, boosting the economies of less developed members of the EU which in turn leads to demand for UK exports. Third, in 2014 it was about 1% of UK government expenditure anyway – almost a rounding error in the public accounts. And, fourth, the impact of the rebate (negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1984) is that the UK is exempt from the general rule of contributing 1% of GDP. The consequence is that in every single year the UK is the lowest contributing EU member as a percentage of GDP.

The zombie statistic of £350M a week refuses to die, no matter how often it is discredited, but it is not the only offender. This week, the Leave campaign produced what became a widely reported statistic supposedly showing that UK exports to the EU had dropped by over 18% in the last decade. The idea was to try to counter the argument that the single market is important to the UK economy. Buried in what they said was that this didn’t take account of exchange rate fluctuations between the pound and the Euro, which sounds rather boring and technical. But of course it is crucial. If a UK firm sells a good for £1 and the exchange rate is £1=2Euros and next month sells the same good at £1=1.5Euros then the value of exports has fallen by 25% - in Euros – but not at all in sterling. And in the period 2006-2016 the £-Euro exchange rate has fluctuated considerably.  So I checked and - surprise, surprise – the value of UK exports to the EU actually rose in sterling over the last decade. And that was a decade no doubt carefully chosen to encompass the global financial crisis – if one took the 20 years from 1996 the growth would be larger.

These two examples are taken from many that could be chosen, and this week several more were pulled apart by InFacts. The other headline lie, apart from the budget contribution, is that 65% of UK law is made in the EU when in fact is 13%. Of course in all political debates statistics are bandied about, and they are often dodgy, and the Remain campaign are surely guilty of cherry picking statistics to suit their cause. But that is not the same as lying and what I find extraordinary about the Leave campaign is not that they present figures that support their case, which would be one thing, but that every statistic I have seen them produce has been palpably – often absurdly – dishonest. Maybe I am biased – but if you think so watch Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings being questioned by the Treasury Committee about the £350M a week claim, and judge for yourself.

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.

Buyer's remorse

This post in many ways follows on from the previous one and indeed a series of posts recently where I have circled around issues of nostalgia and populism. These issues seem to me to be at the core of current politics, and central to understanding contemporary organizations within that politics.

Yesterday, the Mail columnist Peter Hitchens wrote an extraordinary and I think noteworthy opinion piece. Hitchens, for those who don’t know him, has for many years been a provocative right-wing journalist. Younger brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, he is by no means predictable in his views and although I mainly find them objectionable he can’t be dismissed in the way that one might, say, dismiss those of right-wing controversialists like Richard Littlejohn or Katie Hopkins who also write for the Mail.

In his piece, Hitchens laments having fallen for the free market politics of the Thatcher era, which he now sees as a "con that ruined Britain". In particular he bemoans the consequences of privatization, deindustrialization and globalization remarking, to quote just one sentence:

“How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.”

Similarly, Hitchens remarks on the loss of secure employment and stable communities that accompany this transformation.

Well, it’s rather late in the day for him to be expressing buyer’s remorse. After all, it’s not as if the consequences of the policies he endorsed were not warned of. But I am struck by how close his views now seem to some of those expressed in my own book, for example:

“One of the many organizational consequences of all this [neo-liberalism] is to break the connection between businesses, places and communities” (p. 105)

But after listing a wide array of formerly British brands now sold off or disappeared, I go on to say that this is not a nostalgic, nationalist lament; whereas I think that that is exactly what Hitchens offers. What he seems to hanker for is the world of his 1950s childhood, with the apparent certainties it contained (but which, perhaps, only seem so in the way that childhood at any period does).

What I think is significant about this is the way it derives from a fissure that was always present in Thatcherism between nationalist traditionalism and free market globalism. They are necessarily contradictory because free markets inevitably corrode social traditionalism whilst, of course, globalism inevitably corrodes nationalism. Both Thatcher and Regan managed to hold this contradiction together for a while, but its consequences are now glaringly apparent.

They are apparent in the EU Referendum debate, about which I have already written plenty on this blog, but especially in the current wave of support for Donald Trump in the US. This has been described as a kind of cry of agony of the traditional US working and middle classes, for whom the security of the post-war consensus has been eviscerated. And what is so important to understand is that this comes in large part from the same segment of the population that, like Hitchens, so enthusiastically supported Reagan (and, in the UK, Thatcher) to pursue precisely the policies the consequences of which they now lament.

So what we are now seeing is the long-term consequences of the incoherence of the neo-liberal political narrative (i.e. not simply of neo-liberal economics) and it is almost bound to turn nasty as the nationalist and traditionalist strand of that narrative becomes dominant. Remorseful buyers want their money back but, alas, it has already been spent and so remorse turns to anger, but an anger misdirected at foreigners, immigrants, refugees, the disabled and so on. True it also blames ‘elites’, but in an incoherent and contradictory way, shown not least by taking as its champion a figure such as Trump who so obviously belongs to an elite, by any reckoning.

Of course in both the US and the UK (and elsewhere) there is a left-wing version of this which is more coherent in its analysis and more progressive in its solutions, but likely in both cases to struggle to achieve electoral success (though I may be proved wrong about that). Indeed, in the European context, it is this which makes the EU so important, as a regional, rather than nationalist or globalist, response to a situation which whilst certainly implicated in neo-liberalism also offers some potentials for social democracy. These potentials, which the recently launched Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (Diem25) seeks to realise, offer some kind of hopeful response to the calamitous unwinding of the neo-liberal experiment.

At all events, Hitchens’ dream of a lost and mythical England is not the right response, any more than is Trump’s sloganizing about making America great again. At best these can lead only to another fit of buyer’s remorse in which their supporters suffer the further disillusionment their inevitable failure would bring. To what extremes would they then turn?

Lost in history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battling for Britain

I had intended to write a post about Owen Hatherley’s stimulating recent book The Ministry of Nostalgia, and then thought I wanted to write something about today’s EU summit where Britain is negotiating terms prior to a Referendum on continued membership. But it occurred to me that the two are in many ways linked.

Hatherley’s book picks up on something which I have also noticed and commented on in this blog, namely the grotesque historical spoonerism in which wartime and post-war austerity is invoked to justify swingeing public budget cuts. What was originally about shared suffering in order to build collective goods becomes the cover for their dismemberment. Hatherley analyses this “austerity nostalgia” at length, orchestrated in particular through the motif of the now ubiquitous ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan. Originally devised (although not in fact used) as wartime propaganda, it now indexes a certain sort of British – or English – self-identity of stoical suffering.

Whilst most obviously consonant with the political projects of the right – and I will return to this – Hatherley deploys a most intriguing argument about how it fits in with a certain kind of leftist nostalgia which, whilst he has some sympathy with it, he finds to be ultimately impotent. That chimed with me because it is a nostalgia that I am prone to, as I wrote in my post about Jonathan Coe’s novelistic treatment of the same kind of thinking. And amongst the wide range of examples – many of them to do with architecture – that Hatherley deploys I was interested to see that one was Ken Loach’s film 1945, which I also posted about on this blog, even linking it to the perversity of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ motif! There’s also critical (but again sympathetic) mention of one of my favourite recent(ish) books, historian Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, as a key statement of leftist nostalgia. So, in short, Hatherley’s book both spoke to but also challenged many of the things I believe and am interested in. I am still digesting what to make of it and may well post about this in due course.

But this book also re-enforces my sense of what lies beneath the EU Referendum. For “austerity nostalgia” and its associated tropes seems very much to inform David Cameron’s avowed intention to ‘battle for Britain’ in his EU re-negotiation. The very fact of using such language is surely designed to underline its primary purpose: to persuade the undecided or only vaguely interested to vote to stay in. It is not that the things under negotiation are of any great significance – they are as irrelevant to those implacably opposed to EU membership as to those, such as myself, who are broadly supportive. But the language speaks to the softer edges of opposition, the hard core of which is animated by the still potent idea of Britain ‘standing alone’ during the war, and which seems still to dream of a world something like that of (an imagination of) early post-war Britain. It speaks to a sullen, resentful sensibility, sometimes vicious, other times sentimental. Local, not cosmopolitan. Pathetic (in its literal sense) but not always necessarily ignoble.

In a more practical vein, though, the re-negotiation shows the incoherence of the Brexit case in at least two ways. One is that the persistent complaint of those making that case is that the EU is ruled by diktat from Brussels, with no democracy. Yet when it emerged that even if Brussels agreed to the terms, they would be subject to ratification by the democratically elected European Parliament there was outrage. The other is that the terms of the re-negotiation were seen as hopelessly limited and yet even these had been ‘watered down’ as the protracted negotiation progressed. Yet it is an article of faith amongst Brexiters that on leaving the UK will be able to quickly negotiate with exactly the same counterparties a full-spectrum free trade deal on the most generous of terms.

Those two things seem to spell out the twin poles of the Brexit version of nostalgia. On the one hand, the idea of Britain being hamstrung; on the other of Britain being overweaningly powerful. A battle of Britain speaks well to this, since 1940 was the moment at which Britain was both at its weakest and strongest. But how long are we to live in the long shadow of that summer, now 75 years ago? In my book (Grey, 2012) about Bletchley Park (the wartime codebreaking centre) I write about how ‘the war’ was an omnipresent part of my childhood in the 1970s, since it had been the defining experience of my parents and teachers. One might have thought that this would have diminished in the subsequent years, but it has not. Hathaway notes how it is now the experience of our grandparents that gets referenced in austerity nostalgia. Certainly the TV channels remain full of wartime films and documentaries. I am not sure that any other country in the world is still so preoccupied with the war, unless it is Putin’s Russia which, by the way, would more than any other country be the benefactor of Brexit.

In this sense, though, one can certainly see the present situation as a battle for Britain in a rather different sense. The decision about whether to remain in the EU is in some ways a decision about what Britain is to be and how it is to think about itself. A Brexit would re-enforce the remark made in 1963 by American Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. That indeed is very evident in the historical and geo-political absurdity of the idea championed by many Brexiters of creating a politics and trade bloc based on the Commonwealth. And it would very forcibly bring home to British people quite how much the world has changed since 1940 since in a muted way the US, Indian and Chinese administrations have made it clear that Britain is only of interest as a partner to the extent that it is an EU member. Plus Britain itself would surely not survive Brexit, since Scotland, for sure, would become independent.

So this is the link between Hatherley’s perceptive book and the EU Referendum negotiations going on even as I write: is Britain, or England in fact, to be locked into a nostalgic fantasy of keeping calm and carrying on? Or will it embrace the undoubted imperfections of the EU and acknowledge the geo-political realpolitik of the present? This is about unquantifiable feelings, images and sensibilities but it will in the end come down to some quite precise, quite narrowly-ranged, numbers between 60-40 for in and 60-40 for out. The 20% difference between those two outcomes represents the undecided or shiftable vote that Cameron’s otherwise meaningless renegotiation is designed to appeal to. His gamble is that they can be persuaded to keep calm and carry on with EU membership and if he is right he will win the vote. The argument? Well, that has still to be faced up to, let alone won.

References

Grey, C. (2012). Decoding Organization. Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Judt, T. (2011). Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin

Hatherley, O. (2016). The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso.

What lies outside of organization studies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sovereignty and Brexit

As a UK Referendum on EU membership gets closer, much is being made by those urging exit of the idea of national sovereignty. Indeed for some Brexiters this is the defining issue. What they mean by sovereignty seems to be that a country can make its own laws and act independently of all other countries.

Whether such a situation ever obtained is highly questionable; but it certainly hasn’t obtained for the UK or any other country in recent times. Like other countries the UK is bound into a web of multiple sovereignty-sharing arrangements regarding trade, defence and security via a multiplicity of bodies including the UN, the WTO, NATO and, yes, the EU. Indeed it is ironic that many Brexiters parade the idea that the UK on Brexit could ‘reclaim’ its seat on the WTO as a triumph of sovereignty (by which they mean that whilst remaining a WTO member the UK has since 1973 been represented in trade talks by the combined EU delegation). It’s an irony because the WTO has over 160 members and yet the Brexiters argue that within the 28 strong EU the UK ‘has no say’.

A similar irony is present in the Brexiters’ idea that the UK could lead a new Commonwealth trade bloc. Apart from the fact that there is no appetite in the Commonwealth for such a bloc, its 53 members are highly unlikely (for obvious historical reasons) to want to be lead by Britain! And if sovereignty is the issue, what could matter more than who can direct people in war? Yet Brexiters are quite relaxed about – and mostly in favour of – pooling sovereignty in NATO, which entails British troops being led by foreign generals.

Going back to trade, it’s notable that right-wing Brexiters have no problem with the idea that international ‘markets’ dictate what governments can do, and see no problem of sovereignty in that. Meanwhile, left-wing Brexiters point to the secretive EU-US negotiations to impose the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the UK, but are oblivious to the fact that even more sovereignty-violating deals are struck by ‘sovereign’ states outside of the EU, as the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) shows. In parenthesis, TPP, which includes as six of its twelve members Commonwealth countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand), also shows how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of a Commonwealth free trade zone. In further parenthesis, TPP is an example of the regional platform trade deals (the EU being another) which have emerged because of the failure of the WTO to enact a global deal, showing how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of the WTO as the arena for trade deals.

Brexiters habitually advance their sovereignty argument in terms of a claim that a large percentage of UK laws are made in the EU. The percentage given varies, sometimes being quoted as 80% but in recent months 65% has been the typical claim. The true figure is 8-14%. Then there is another, and very potent, line of Brexit sovereignty argument: that the EU interferes in the UK by imposing human rights judgments upon it. But neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the European Court of Human Rights are EU bodies. The UK was signed up to them (and in the case of the Convention largely created it) before it ever joined the EU and would be a party to them even if it left the EU.

Then, of course, there is the issue of immigration. Surely it must be a matter of sovereignty that a country can decide who enters and leaves its borders? As regards the Brexit debate several different things have been conflated. One issue, of course pressing at this time, is that of refugees and asylum seekers. But the rules governing that are not EU rules but those of the UN’s 1951 Convention. Moreover, since the UK does not belong to the Schengen Agreement and is exempt from the EU refugee-sharing agreement, it is in any case not directly affected by the crisis. Indeed, were Brexit to occur, the only consequences for borders would be to move the UK border from France to the UK and to require a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, both of which would have devastating consequences, firstly for border control and secondly for the still fragile Northern Ireland peace process.

But Brexiters’ arguments about sovereignty and immigration are also concerned with free movement of EU citizens, not just refugees and asylum seekers. Here, they point out that the UK has no choice but to accept immigrants from the rest of the EU. And they are quite right. That is part and parcel of the single market, which the neo-liberals amongst them want. For you can’t have a single European market without free movement of people any more than you could have a single market in the UK whilst having border controls between, say, Cornwall and Devon or Lancashire and Yorkshire. Left-wing opponents of the EU should welcome this, because it means that the international mobility of capital is matched, within the EU, by labour mobility. Why should workers have to stay where they are, beholden to globally free-wheeling companies to give them jobs?

And in any case, when it comes to free movement within the EU, British people do it quite as much as anyone else, and the numbers of EU citizens living in the UK is about the same as the number of UK citizens living in the rest of the EU. In round numbers its about 2M people in both directions. Many of these British immigrants fail to learn the local language, 'take' jobs from locals, push up property prices, and put pressure on local health systems.

In short, the sovereignty argument of the Brexiters is completely flawed, but actually it is worse than flawed. The globalization of economics and markets has created a political vacuum in terms of the democratic political regulation of capital, and it is that which has created the real crisis of sovereignty. The solution – and let's be clear, it's the only solution – is democratic transnational governance structures. And the only such structure in the world today, imperfect as it surely is, is the EU.

Corridors of power

For what will probably be my final post of the year I return, as no doubt I will many times next year, when it is likely to be held, to the UK Referendum on EU membership. For those interested in the global economic context of organizations, but also in the way that decision making happens in both politics and organizations, the current ‘renegotiation’ is fascinating.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is seeking to renegotiate the terms of UK membership so as to be able to recommend to the British people that they vote to remain in the EU. The terms he is seeking, even if achieved, will not in any way change the minds of those in his own party and beyond who are implacably opposed to EU membership. And although I disagree with their opposition, they are absolutely right to see the renegotiation as a charade. Even if it succeeds, it will not in any substantive way change the terms of membership. So what is it about?

The answer is that it will enable Cameron to say to his party and voters that a deal has been struck that they can support. The more there seem to be huge difficulties and conflicts over getting the deal, the better it will be in terms of making that case. This is widely understood within the political class, the media and informed observers. So the only way that it can be successful is by its appeal to those undecided and/or only mildly anti-EU voters not following events closely and who only tune in during the run-up to the referendum (currently widely expected to be held in June 2016). They will hear that there has been a fundamental change and – if things go to plan – will vote to stay in.

Since I am strongly in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU I hope this works. But it is a risky and in many ways unsatisfactory strategy. It’s risky for two reasons. First, if Cameron doesn’t get even the limited deal he is seeking it won’t have much credibility. Second, it’s by no means guaranteed that those voters it is designed to appeal to will hear this message, rather than that of the campaign to exit. But it’s unsatisfactory because it repeats the errors of the past in failing to make a positive case for EU membership, and just trying to bamboozle a semi-detached electorate into making a half-hearted choice.

Outside of the government, the embryonic campaigns are both, to varying degrees, in trouble. Neither is as yet a single organization (although that will change when the Electoral Commission identify and fund the campaign groups). The ‘in’ campaign is dominated by Lord Rose’s (former head of Marks and Spencer) rather dull, accounting approach, stressing the benefits of membership for businesses, although something more sparky and populist is offered by Alan Johnson’s leadership of the Labour Party’s campaign. And the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, remains at best lukewarm on British membership, a major danger for the ‘in’ campaign. Meanwhile the ‘out’ campaign is openly wracked by conflict between rival groups, a key issue being the extent to which Nigel Farage, the populist but divisive anti-immigration leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) will figure. Just today, UKIP’s only MP suggested that Farage should stand down as his party’s leader.

As readers of this blog will know, I was recently in Paris and whilst there had several conversations with people who expressed bemusement at the fact that this debate was even happening in Britain, and certainty that the outcome would be a vote to stay in. I am not sure that this is true, or at least that the vote will be decisive enough to prevent the question to continue to be raised. Opinion polls suggest that the result will be very close, although there is an interesting divide between internet polls (suggesting a close result) and telephone polls (suggesting an easy win for the stay in campaign). This may reflect the fact that the anti-EU movement (at least as regards UKIP) has a very well-organized online presence, and that views within the general population are rather different. It also seems likely that, unsurprisingly, the answer depends on how the question is asked.

Leaving aside the EU issue, I’m struck by how much of this has parallels with how decisions get made in organizations. Often there is a small group of highly involved and committed people on different sides of the argument, and a larger group of more or less uninterested or ambivalent people. Similar techniques are used of taking decisions and discussions to various forums and then bringing them to other bodies to make a final decision, with all the detail having been decided elsewhere. It is a perennially fascinating process about which much has been written in the organization studies literature. But, to bang on about another of my hobby horses, nowhere more insightfully than in the novels of C.P. Snow such as his 1964 masterpiece Corridors of Power.

As I said earlier, I will for sure be returning to these issues in 2016. In the meantime, a very Happy Christmas and New Year to all those reading this blog.

Bitter chocolate

At one point in the book on which this blog is based, I discuss the chocolate firm Cadbury’s as an example of how the ‘new capitalism’ works:

“This was a firm with a history dating back to the nineteenth century and marked by a strong interest in worker welfare. In 2009 a hostile takeover bid from Kraft, a giant US food corporation, was rejected but subsequently, in 2010, a deal was agreed. The deal generated an estimated £240 million in fees for the investment banks and advisers involved. One especially controversial aspect is that Cadbury’s had had plans to close its factory in Somerset and move production to Poland, but Kraft undertook that this would not happen if they took over. However, after the takeover the factory was closed in favour of the Polish location, and amongst the hundreds laid off were families who had worked for Cadbury’s for decades. So here a workplace rooted in a history and a community was eviscerated. Is this just ‘the way things are’? No, because such situations arise from particular regulatory regimes and, as the former chairman of Cadbury’s has argued, the UK regulation of overseas takeovers is especially lax.” (p.106)

My point here was about the fracturing of links between organizational ownership, communities and places. But this connects with another issue, also mentioned briefly in the book (p.118) but more extensively on this blog, namely corporate taxation. For it has now emerged, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Cadbury’s under its new owner Mondelez International, a spin-off of Kraft, paid no UK corporation tax last year. This was not because it was unprofitable (Cadbury’s made £96.5M profit in 2014) but because it used a complex, albeit perfectly legal, device to avoid paying the tax. Briefly, the tax liability was avoided using interest payments on an unsecured debt, listed as a bond on the Channel Islands’ stock exchange, which were then offset against the profits made leading to a zero corporation tax liability.

The use of tax avoidance techniques such as these is widespread. Facebook, Starbucks and Amazon are amongst high profile cases and the recently announced 'reverse takeover' of Pfizer by Allergan is another variant. Here Pfizer – the bigger firm – is formally being taken over by the smaller one, allowing it to headquarter the new entity in the lower corporate tax regime, in this case the Republic of Ireland; so-called tax inversion. These techniques link to the wider issue of organizations and localities because they reflect the freedom of companies to locate globally and the absence of any legal or for that matter normative commitment to any particular country or community.

The problem here is not – or not simply – one of abstract morality. It is that corporate tax avoidance leads to the erosion of the tax base. It is remarkable that with so many countries pursuing policies of fiscal balance there is so much more attention paid to government spending than to government revenues. Yet what the OECD refers to as Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) has become a major problem, especially in the developing world leading to a set of proposals for reform being presented to the G20 last October. The OECD initiative, and that of the EU, may in time have an impact (although in the case of the EU proposals they have, depressingly, been rejected by the UK). However, it is equally likely that corporations and their advisers will find new ways to circumvent these rules, and in any case I am not clear that they would have any traction in cases such as Cadbury’s. One problem here is that both national, and these new transnational, rules are immensely complex and it is that very complexity which gives rise to new loopholes.

Apart from legal and regulatory changes to the tax system, the only other game currently in town is consumer action and boycotts. There is some evidence that these can be effective, with Starbucks responding to a UK boycott threat by moving its headquarters to London in 2014, although it has been questioned whether this really made much difference to tax revenues. In any case, such an approach is only ever going to be applied to a few high profile cases. How many consumers will, or could, apply pressure to all the corporates involved in tax avoidance? It’s difficult to imagine many users of Viagra boycotting its maker, Pfizer, to protest against the abstruse-sounding tactic of reverse takeover to facilitate tax inversion!

Whether through changing tax laws or exerting consumer pressure, both these approaches suffer from the fact that they are after the fact attempts to address problems arising from the fracture of ownership and places, especially countries. Thus I continue to think, as implied in the extract from my book that I quoted earlier, that the more important issue is the regulation of international mergers and acquisitions. We can’t put the genie of globalization back in the bottle but there are pragmatic and eminently workable ‘glocalized’ approaches to organization.

It is already the case that takeover rules in Germany, say, are far tougher than in the UK. One consequence of this is the strength of the Mittelstand – medium-sized, often family-owned, businesses – that are the bedrock of German manufacturing and exports. These are firms which are plainly local, and maintain a strong link between ownership, community and employment. Yet this is not an ‘anti-globalization’ argument for the Mittelstand is most certainly global in its clientele. A combination rather like Cadbury’s, in fact, in the days before it was taken over.