Steel stories

I’ve recently read two extraordinary and, I suppose, largely forgotten novels, both published in the early 1940s, and both three-generational sagas set mainly in the Pittsburgh steel industry from the 1870s to the 1930s. That setting will immediately pique the interest of students of organizations because of course it was here that Frederick Taylor developed the tenets of Scientific Management, in a context which I mention briefly in the book (p.33-35). The steel mills of Pittsburgh and surrounding towns might very well be regarded as the birthplace of many of the management techniques and organizational processes that dominated industrial capitalism and continue to have much purchase today.

The novels are The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport, originally published in 1942 (hereafter, Valley) and Out of this Furnace by Thomas Bell, originally published in 1941 (hereafter, Furnace). It is perhaps telling that both books were subsequently re-published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, attesting to their significance as historical records as much as works of fiction. Both were based to a degree on direct and indirect personal experience.

The authors

Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), born Marcia Glick, was for a time married to Russell Davenport Junior, whose father, Russell Davenport Senior was a senior manager at, first, Midvale Steel and, later Bethlehem Steel. Those names are again resonant within organization studies as they were the companies where Taylor worked and, indeed, Davenport and Taylor was close associates at Midvale, and Taylor was hired by Bethlehem on the recommendation of Davenport (Misa, 1999: 184). Apart from this family connection, Marcia Davenport had, during a previous marriage, lived in Pittsburgh and amassed documents and letters about its steel industry which were the basis of the book (these are now archived at the University of Pittsburgh).

Thomas Bell (1903-1961), born Adelbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, one of the Pittsburgh steel towns, was the grandson and son (on his mother’s side) and the son (on his father’s side) of Slovakian (more precisely Lemko and Rusyn) immigrants who worked in the steel and other industries in and around Pittsburgh. Bell himself worked as an apprentice in the steel industry before becoming a full-time writer. Furnace is a fictionalised account of three generations of his family.

The Valley of Decision

Valley tells the story of three generations of the Scott family, of Presbyterian Scottish ancestry, who own a small but successful steel mill in Pittsburgh, but the pivotal character is Mary Rafferty, who is from a working-class Irish Catholic family and in 1873 begins working life as a maid to the Scotts. Her brother, James, works in the Scott mill and is an organiser for the ‘Amalgamated’ (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Maker). Mary and Paul Scott, the son of William, the firm’s owner, fall in love and despite the class and religious differences his family support their engagement. However, the marriage is abandoned after James Rafferty murders William Scott in the course of a bitter strike.

Subsequently, in a long and convoluted drama, Mary ends up being Paul’s housekeeper and also begins to befriend the newly arrived Slovak immigrants. Disparagingly called ‘Hunkies’ (meaning Hungarians, though in fact most of them are not), they are kept out of the best jobs by the earlier generation of Irish immigrants and are regarded as almost sub-human by the mill owners. Mary’s particular friend is Julka, matriarch of the Hrdlicka family (in fact, partly Czech and partly Slovak: there is a brief reference to Czech disparagement of Slovaks).

In the third generation, Claire Scott marries Anton, the son of Julka (she has become an official in the newly independent Czechoslovakia). And, indeed, Pennsylvanian Czechs and Slovaks had played an important role in the achievement of this independence, which was declared by Tomas Masaryk – who became its first President in 1920 – in Philadelphia in 1918. His son, Jan, who was Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister from 1940 until his death in 1948, was Marcia Davenport’s lover and Anton appears to be based upon him. The later sections of the book are concerned in particular with rise of Nazism and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the case against US isolationism.

Throughout the long book, which has many sub-plots and characters, there are recurring themes of class (including fine gradations within the middle and upper classes) and ethnicity, and of violent capital-labour conflicts. There is also an ongoing story of attempts to keep the Scott mill as an independent family-owned and run firm in the face of massive consolidation within the steel industry, led by the magnate Andrew Carnegie, to form what eventually became the United States Steel Corporation. This gives rise to frequent family and boardroom conflicts over the decades (and a sub-theme is how the successive generations shift from being active entrepreneurs to remote stockholders). It could be regarded as showing the distinctions between early capitalism, very much informed by the Protestant Work Ethic à la Weber, and the development of monopoly and finance capitalism.

Out of this Furnace

If Valley focusses primarily on the steel industry owners and their interrelations with the Irish and, then, Slovak workers who labour in their mills, Furnace is centrally and solely concerned with the experience of Slovak workers and their families. As alluded to in Valley, but shown in minute detail in Furnace, this is a story of appalling hardship told through the central characters of the Kracha and Dobrejcak families. The first generation story centres on Djuro Kracha, the second on his daughter Mary and her husband Michael Dobrejcak, the third on their son Dobie.

These families, like the Hrdlickas, are emblematic of the massive flow of  Slovak emigrants (and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe), fleeing poverty, persecution and compulsory military service under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some half a million Slovaks came to the US between 1880 and 1920, of whom about half came to Pennsylvania, mainly to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Bell regarded their treatment as a hidden and shameful part of American history, and their contribution to US industrial development as having been ignored. The Slovaks, largely from rural and agricultural backgrounds, arrived in the hope of a better life but experienced grindingly hard and very dangerous work (death and maiming are commonplace, and Michael is killed in an industrial accident) for pitiful wages.

They also face discrimination and cruel stereotyping from both mill owners and managers and from Irish workers, which keeps them in the very worst jobs and housing. Although not depicted in the book, Bell’s uncle was effectively murdered by Irish or possibly Scottish workers (there was also a major group of Welsh workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry, but they do not appear in either book). In short, a life of constant struggle is depicted – a struggle to survive and to create the basic elements of a decent life against almost insuperable barriers.

Shared themes

One of the central themes of Furnace, as in Valley but more strongly so, is the struggle of trade unions to organize and to improve working conditions and pay. In both books there are references to the 1892 Homestead strike – a pivotal defeat for American organized labour in the period - and in Furnace there are accounts of brutal strike-breaking activities during the failed 1919 Great Steel Strike and, again, the growing dominance of Carnegie’s big corporate conglomerate – though here seen from the perspective of the workforce rather than the owners of an independent firm.

In the third generation, through the character of Dobie, and with the Amalgamated giving way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) trade unionism finally achieves a degree of success and is certainly represented by Bell as the best and only hope for the workers to achieve a modicum of dignity. (In Valley, a SWOC activist in the 1930s refers disparagingly to the Amalgamated, James Rafferty’s union in the 1870s, as outmoded, just as, for Rafferty, the Sons of Vulcan union that was one of the Amalgamated’s precursors was ancient history).

Another very important theme in both books, but again more strongly in Furnace, is the pivotal role played by women in holding together Slovak families (and also, in Valley, Mary’s role in holding together the Scotts, but this is depicted more as a feature of her individual character than as a wider cultural characteristic). Often, they were brought over to America after their husbands or fiancés had established themselves in a job. They are depicted as only having had paid employment when unmarried and this seems also to be the case for the Irish women, and that work appears to have been mainly domestic service. Before her marriage, Mary Kracha has a job as a maid with a wealthy mill owning family just as Mary Rafferty’s working life began as a maid with the Scotts in Valley. In both cases the contrast of the opulent houses where they work is compared sharply with the squalor of their own homes.

Once married, with their husbands working backbreaking 12 hour mill shifts (when work was available), women faced the constant drudgery of housework in an environment made filthy by industrial pollution, the expectation of near annual childbirth, the common experience of early widowhood, and, frequently, their own early deaths (Mary Dobrejcak dies of TB as, in real life, had Bell’s father). Yet they maintained their families and frequently supplemented family incomes by taking in boarders – typically young male steel workers, since men outnumbered women greatly at least in the early period. The strong sense of community Bell depicts is partly down to the role of women but also because, in common with, but possibly to an even greater extent than, other immigrant groups the Slovakian migrants of this period lived in close proximity.

Whilst Valley contains many realistic depictions of the hardship of both Irish and Slovakian workers – and there are some oblique references to prostitution and drunkenness - it is to a degree a romantic melodrama and not a demanding read (it was, in fact, turned into a film with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson). Furnace is far more gritty and harrowing, and although it does depict the very tender love between Mary and Michael Dobrejcak that love is blighted by hardship and tragedy. Nor is it a romanticised picture in that some characters, especially Djuro Kracha, are shown to be cruel, sometimes violent, frequently drunk, and in some cases dishonest and manipulative.

Overall, despite the partial uplift of growing union success towards the end of the 1930s it is – and, based on the Afterword to the University of Pittsburgh edition, it’s clear that Bell intended it to be – a deeply painful account of lives deformed by poverty, injustice, and prejudice. In that, it speaks to the experience of so many immigrant groups both past and present. There is passing reference (in Furnace, but not Valley) to the experience of Black Americans, with “negroes” brought in, initially as strike breakers, and experiencing discrimination from Slovaks which, as Dobie observes, replicated some of the hostility Slovaks had themselves previously faced from Irish workers, just as the Irish had from the English settlers.

Relevance for Organization Studies

Together, apart from many other things, these two books fill out the point I make in the book about the role that ethnicity played in the development of Taylorism. Much of that was about discrimination and prejudice, epitomised by Taylor’s dehumanising and derogatory use of the “mentally sluggish” Bethlehem worker ‘Schmidt’ (actually Henry Noll, of Dutch descent) to illustrate the benefits of his system. Bill Cooke (2003) includes this example in his explanation of the continuities and inter-relationships of slavery, and the management of slaves, and modern management theory and practice – something that has been systematically excluded from established histories of management.

Arguably there were ways in which it broke some of these prejudices down. I note (p.35) how the Taylorist emphasis on managers hiring ‘scientifically’ on merit broke down the power of work gang leaders and even give the hypothetical example of Irish foremen discriminating against East European immigrants. I am not sure where I got the idea of that particular example from, but, amazingly, something almost identical features in one of the most dramatic scenes in Valley, when it emerges that a skilled Slovak worker – Charlie Hrdlicka, Julka’s husband -  trained at the Skoda works, has been forced to do menial work because the Irish work gang leader will not hire “Hunkies”. Paul Scott immediately promotes him (and, when criticised by the Irish foreman, challenges him to strike with the reminder of what had happened at Homestead).

I suggest in my book that this is a version of the ‘ethic of impersonality’ which forms part of Paul du Gay’s defence of bureaucracy. Yet it can also be read as an example of one of the ways that Taylorism, in particular, formed part of a much more complex history of ‘race management’ (Roediger & Esch, 2012). On Roediger & Esch’s analysis this history (as Cooke also argues) reaches back to slavery, and also explains the racial segmentation of hierarchies such as that between the Irish and Slovak workers (or between white and Chinese workers in the construction of railroads), with Taylorism as a new, ‘integrationist’ but still racialised episode within this history.

It’s no longer a novel (no pun intended) proposition in organization studies that novels can be a source of great insight and ‘respectable’ evidence, and I find these two to be particularly so, for several reasons. Firstly, they provide a quite extraordinary amount of really detailed information about working practices and industrial relations in the steel industry in this period. Second, and perhaps relatedly, their structure and focus means that taken together they provide a multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-class set of perspectives on that industry and period.

Third, and I think most significant, is the way that these novels disclose a small but significant part of the hidden history of management and organizational theory. Within the textbooks, certainly, you would hardly discern what these theories are actually about or where they came from. I am quite sure that Taylorism would be far better taught and understood through reading novels such as these rather than through the sanitised, ahistoric, asocial, bloodless non-stories of most ‘Introductions to Organizational Behaviour’.

References

Bell, T. (1941) Out of this Furnace. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies’, Journal of Management Studies 40 (8): 1895-1918

Davenport, M. (1942) The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

Misa, T. (1999) A Nation of Steel. The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Roediger, D. and Esch, E. (2012) The Production of Difference. Race and the Management of Labor in US History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Holiday reading

I’m just back from holiday and, like many people, holidays are a chance to catch up on reading – meaning reading novels, that is, as opposed to reading organization studies. But for me that distinction is a rather false one. Perhaps it is a reflection of my inability to let go of work, but I often find much in fiction that is informative about organizational life, as I have posted about in the past.

Anyway, the pick of the crop this summer was Peter Hanington’s A Dying Breed (2016), a murky story of murder and politics set in Afghanistan with a BBC journalist as the hero. Since Hanington himself is a BBC journalist who worked in Afghanistan, it has the ring of authenticity. Organizationally, it is the depictions of the BBC – and in particular the flagship Radio 4 Today news programme - that are of particular interest. Plenty of corporate backbiting is on display, along with acerbic, thinly-veiled and distinctly unflattering portraits of some well-known journalists.

Also plausibly authentic are the ‘Liz Carlyle’ novels of Stella Rimington – former head of MI5 – the latest being Breaking Cover (2016), my next holiday read. The setting here is the ‘new Cold War’ of UK-Russian relationships, along with the post-Snowden controversy over data protection. The same setting also provides the plot for A Divided Spy (2016) the latest ‘Thomas Kell’ novel in ex-MI6 officer Charles Cumming’s series, which I also read.

Almost all writers of espionage get compared with John Le Carré (also ex-MI6), and Hanington, Rimington and Cumming are all blessed, or cursed, with this. There is really no comparison, though. Cumming is more like Frederick Forsyth in his heyday (not a bad accolade, of course), and none of them approaches the multi-layered complexity – including the organizational complexity – of Le Carré’s Smiley novels. Only Edward Wilson, in his ‘Catesby’ series, comes close to that in my opinion, and alas there has been no new addition to that series this year. Wilson also has a relevant background, having served with distinction with the US special forces in Vietnam.

Le Carré aside, I don’t suppose that anyone would regard these authors as great writers. Having inside knowledge doesn’t in itself make for good writing, and with the exception of Wilson the books I’ve mentioned suffer in varying degrees from clichéd characters and clunky plots. That isn’t to be snooty as they are all perfectly good popular novels and, for me, perfect holiday reads; and in any case I certainly couldn’t do better! My point is that what the authors’ insider knowledge delivers isn’t necessarily literary merit but contextual, and specifically organizational, plausibility.

That quality of having ‘been there’ is generally lacking in the organization studies literature. Ethnographies alone display it, but ethnographies are time-consuming and increasingly rare because of the time pressures of academic research. Nor does it readily yield a string of journal publications. Almost all qualitative research now is interview-based, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but rarely gives the reader that sense of understanding a hitherto unknown world that ethnography – and fiction – can deliver.

Nevertheless, careful research and a dash of imagination can have the same effect. An example is another of my holiday reads, Alan Furst’s A Hero in France (2016). Furst is also an ex-journalist but the historical settings (usually Europe during or just before the Second World War) are necessarily researched rather than experienced. The research is sometimes too obtrusive, it must be admitted, but in this latest book that is not so, and there is a strong sense – almost a smell – of occupied Paris. Organizationally, though, this story of the French Resistance is very different to that of the BBC or of intelligence agencies. For how do you organize in secret?

And here I return from holiday to work, as this is the theme of my chapter, with Jana Costas, on ‘invisible organizations’ in A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies edited by Barbara Czarniawska and published just two days ago.

Steel yourself

There are two big news stories in the UK today. One is the closure of the Port Talbot steelworks, following a decision by its Indian owners, Tata, and due mainly to the flood of cheaper Chinese steel into the UK and other markets. The other is the death of the veteran comedian Ronnie Corbett.

They could hardly be more different stories, but I think they are in a certain way linked. The closure of Port Talbot is expressive of the consequences of neo-liberal privatization and globalization. British Steel was privatised in 1988, one of a wave of privatizations under the second Thatcher government, and was subsequently merged with the Dutch group Corus, taken over by Tata in 2007. In recent months the influx of cheaper Chinese steel (a consequence of the slowdown in China) has rendered Port Talbot’s steel uncompetitive.

The fallout of that has exposed many ironies. Some insist that steel must continue to be produced in the UK because of its strategic importance to the defence industry. Here, as in Thatcherism, the tensions of free market and nationalist ideology are evident. Others, arguing for Brexit, complain that the EU has not prevented Chinese steel-dumping. The irony here is that those same people routinely argue against EU ‘meddling’ and yet are now bemoaning the lack of it. A further irony is that the lack of EU action derives from being blocked by the UK government, yet Brexiters say that they are in favour of decisions being made by the UK government, and that the UK has no influence on EU policy. A further irony – or, really, a re-run of the first - is that most Brexiters are free market liberals and yet in their desire to trash the EU they bemoan its lack of protectionism.

What, then, of the death of Ronnie Corbett (a resident of my home town, Croydon, by the way)? Well, the connection for me is that Corbett’s popularity was greatest in the heyday of 1970s broadcasting when he appeared in The Two Ronnies which routinely had audiences of 20 million people. That collective experience was all of a piece with the pre-neo-liberal world of nationalization and of the limited choice (of, in this case, TV channels) to which neo-liberals so vehemently object.

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about Jonathan Coe’s novels and in particular about his sense of nostalgia, quoting the passage in his 2015 novel Number 11:

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

In an earlier (2001) novel, The Rotters’ Club, the central character Benjamin Trotter reflects on watching The Morecombe and Wise Show, which, like The Two Ronnies, attracted mass audiences in the 1970s. I don’t have the book to hand, but the gist of the passage was about Benjamin’s awareness that all over the country millions of people were watching the same show, and that he was part of a collective experience as he sat watching it with his family. Indeed I can remember myself how discussing these kind of shows the day after was the common, shared experience in schools and, I imagine, workplaces in the 1970s.

So what I am suggesting is that there was a relationship between a variety of forms of commonality at that time, ranging from shared ownership of industry to shared cultural experience. Some of that was, surely, nostalgic even at the time: shows like Morecombe and Wise and The Two Ronnies were the lineal and in some cases literal descendants of the music hall and seaside pier traditions of Victorian Britain.

If the two stories are connected, then so are the responses. A significant segment of the Brexit vote (and especially the older demographic from which it derives much of its support) is nostalgic for the days of British economic dominance but also for those shared cultural experiences and, probably, even the peculiarly British tradition of the music hall. I actually share some aspects of that nostalgia but I also recognize that it is not enough. And in particular, I can see that its sentimentality makes easy fodder for a Brexit campaign led not by those who want to protect Britain from the forces of globalization and neo-liberalism but by those whose most fervent dream is for their greater and more untrammelled application. In that dream, any number of workers and strategically important industries will be sacrificed; and as for The Two Ronnies well those who want it can subscribe to a pay-to-view channel or buy the DVD, right?

A story about leadership

The other day I came across the text of a short story which I submitted to a 2004 competition run by what was then the Times Higher Education Supplement on the theme of leadership in higher education. My submission didn’t win, but reading it again it made me chuckle, and despite some obvious anachronisms that I haven’t changed it still seems to me to say something about leadership in higher education, even twelve years on. So I thought it would be nice to let it see the light of day. Apologies for the small font size which for some reason I can't change ....

 

The Vision Thing

Something strange happened yesterday. Not that that is unusual, so perhaps it can’t be strange. And after all, as I’ve only been in the job for two weeks it’s to be expected that everything will be strange, so strangeness is normal. Stop. I have to remember that I am not an academic any more and these kinds of semantic musings are no longer my concern. Anyway, yesterday’s strange thing was an article in the local newspaper about me: ‘New Broom for Greshingham University’.

It’s not that I am unused to seeing my name in the newspapers, and more prestigious titles than the Greshingham Echo I may say. A few years ago, when I chaired the government watchdog on vegetable pesticides I was often in the national press. (‘Boffin’s Hot Potato’ was my favourite headline). No, what was strange was to see myself described as a ‘new broom’. For if there is one thing that I have learned since I started as Vice-Chancellor it is that I spend all my time fulfilling the commitments and carrying out the policies of my predecessor.

It’s fortunate that I inherited his PA, Judy, otherwise I really wouldn’t have a clue what to do. On the other hand, I have to confess that I am rather scared of Judy. This morning was a case in point. I arrived later than I had intended, having drunk more then I should at a dull dinner last night. Judy didn’t actually tell me off for my tardiness, but I had the sense that she would have liked to, and that once I have been longer in post she will have no hesitations about doing so. She pointed out that in ten minutes time I was due to chair a meeting of the university advisory board (a collection of self-important local business people, as it turned out) and then ran through the rest of my engagements before dropping the bombshell. Tomorrow I was to have the first of a series of open meetings with the staff at which I would discuss my vision and mission for the University.

“It’s been in the diary for months,” she countered, seeing my dismay. “Sir David always held these open meetings at the start of the year. He went on a leadership development course that said it was a good way to motivate the staff and ensure their buy-in to the strategic level objectives of the University.”

Sir David was my predecessor. See what I mean about the new broom fantasy?

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, cravenly rather than defiantly, for I have already learned that I am completely dependent upon Judy.

“Why don’t you use last year’s vision and mission?” she offered, and left me morosely sipping a glass of Alka-Seltzer.

It’s fair to say that I paid less attention than I ought to the advisory board meeting. What I wanted was advice on preparing my vision and mission, but that wasn’t on the agenda. Despite my readiness to be guided by Judy, something in me revolted at the idea of simply re-hashing the existing ones. Perhaps it was the new broom phrase. It was time to stamp my mark on Greshingham and tomorrow’s meeting would be an ideal place to start.

I told Judy my intention at lunchtime. I had the suspicion that she was doubtful, but this may just be my paranoia. In any case, I stood firm. I might not have been on a leadership course, but I’m certainly a leader – a natural leader, perhaps, so I don’t need to go on a course – and, equally naturally, I do have a strong vision of what the University should achieve. All that was needed was time to put pen to paper.

As luck would have it I had a couple of hours free that afternoon. According to the diary, I was due to meet the Head of Chemistry which Judy told me had been a regular fixture every term for the last four years because it was in a ‘turnaround’ situation. That meant, apparently, that it had scored poorly in the last RAE, been found wanting in its teaching quality and was so laggardly in meeting its access targets that my predecessor had singled it out for his special oversight. However, in an oversight of a different kind, it had gone unnoticed that, having failed to turnaround, the School had in fact been closed down and so the termly meeting was now redundant.

“As are the members of the School of Chemistry,” I quipped.

“They’ve been re-deployed, Vice-Chancellor,” she said stonily.

I don’t think I will try making jokes with Judy any more.

***

When I came to write down my vision I found, distressingly, that I don’t have one. I mean, I want us to do well, obviously. But this seems altogether too anaemic to warrant being called a vision. How about something more grandiose? To be a world-class university? That has a better ring, certainly. It’s difficult to take seriously, though. I haven’t met all my colleagues yet, but those I have seem to fall considerably short of world-class. Indeed, if we exclude the robotics team, it seems unlikely that the world would be perceptibly worse if Greshingham didn’t exist at all. Perhaps that is unfair to the Media Lab people, at least in their own estimation, although I freely concede that I am hazy about what goes on there. Attaching electrodes to journalists’ heads?

I realised that it was now half an hour since I had started, or rather failed to start. In desperation I turned to the pages of the THES to see how other universities position themselves. It seemed to depend on what kind of place they are. The newer universities stressed teaching (‘Luton – education that works’) whereas the older institutions put the accent on research (‘Southampton – at the cutting edge of innovation’). I certainly don’t want us to be thought of as an ex-poly, but then again we mustn’t come across as too ivory tower either. The best bet might be to emphasise teaching and research.

But were these things visions, anyhow? Would anyone imagine in their absence that the aim was education that didn’t work and research which didn’t bother with new discoveries? I thought of last week’s visit to the Philosophy Department and realised that some people might. Even so, I was sure that ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Berkshire’ couldn’t be considered a vision so much as a statement of fact. Surely a vision had to be aspirational: ‘Thames Valley – in the heart of Wales’?

Perhaps I should start with the mission instead. But what was the difference between a vision and mission? I had to admit to myself that I had no idea. I could ask Judy, I supposed, but I wasn’t quite ready for that humiliation. Would the dictionary help? For each word there were various meanings, mostly irrelevant. Mission – ‘body sent by religious community to propagate its faith’, for example. On the other hand, was it so irrelevant? Perhaps this kind of outreach activity was exactly what was needed to deal with the access problem which was discussed at last week’s council meeting? Then again, was the university a religious community? Did it have a faith? And might it all smack of colonialism anyway (a bad thing)? As for vision – ‘thing or person seen a dream or trance’ didn’t really work. After all, I’d been sitting in a dream or trance for over an hour and hadn’t come up with anything.

On balance, the best definitions seemed to be ‘statesmanlike sagacity of planning’ for vision (I particularly liked the sound of that) and ‘task to be performed’ for mission. I felt I was getting somewhere at last. Still, it seemed like a thin line. If my vision was to be a world-class university, and despite my reservations this still appealed to me, then surely the mission was also to be a world-class university. The only difference so far as I could see (my vision, according to the first definition in the dictionary!) was that I had the vision and this then became other people’s mission. That seemed like a good idea, but would other people agree?

Irritatingly, just as I was making progress, the telephone rang. Judy told me that my daughter Simone was on the line and needed to talk to me urgently. Simone is a student, in her second year at one of the London colleges. I was worried that something was wrong but it soon emerged that all she wanted was to be picked up from the station that evening. Sometimes I think my family don’t realise how important I have become. I was about to tell her off for disturbing me at work with this triviality when it occurred to me that Simone is studying business management. Admittedly it was vaguely embarrassing to have to ask my own daughter about how to formulate the vision and mission of my university, but there’s no point in being too proud. And wasn’t this the sort of thing she would have learned about?

“Yeah, Dad,” she drawled contemptuously. “We did that in the first year.”

“So what should I say?” I asked, all pretence of superiority gone.

“Depends if you’re a lion, a wolf or a jackal,” she said. “Which are you?”

“Well, I’m not sure” I found myself giggling nervously. “What do you think?”

“Do you lead from the front, hunt on your own or stick with the pack?”

“I suppose a bit of all three,” I suggested.

“Hmm, a hybrid,” she said, disapprovingly. “Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference because whatever you are you have to look into your inner self and ask what you really want and then translate it into a story that can inspire people,” she said, before announcing that her train was entering a tunnel.

After the phone went dead, I tried to take her advice. I looked into my inner self. What was my real vision for the future? The only thing I could think of was getting a knighthood, like my predecessor. My mission? I suppose it boiled down to not making any truly awful mistakes in public. And they fitted together pretty well, because so long as I don’t completely screw up then I should finish with a knighthood. What was the other bit? Translate that into an inspirational story. It seemed good enough to me, but I couldn’t honestly think anyone else would be inspired by it. In fact, if I said this at tomorrow’s meeting then it might well count as making a truly awful mistake in public.

There was a knock on my door and Judy bustled in, reminding me that my next meeting was about to begin. There wasn’t any point in pretending any longer, but still I tried to save face.

“Judy,” I began, “I’ve decided that what we need is a period of continuity and stability. It’s called - um – the golden labrador approach to leadership. So I thought I’d stick for the time being with last year’s vision and mission. What were they again?”

“Greshingham aims to provide education that works and research at the cutting edge of innovation in the heart of the Midlands,” she intoned.

I’d been thinking along the right lines, obviously. Still I wasn’t willing to forget the new broom tag.

“Good,” I replied. “We’ll go with that, but add at the end ‘with world-class aspirations in selected areas’.”

I thought I had had the last word, but a moment later Judy returned and handed me a letter inviting me to attend a workshop entitled ‘Transforming Leaders in Higher Education’.

Was my life was about to change?

Shades of grey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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