P&O and Priestley's prophecy

In successive editions of my book since the second and including the latest, fifth, one, I have included the firm P&O in a long list of examples of what were once British companies that became internationally owned (pp. 109-110 of this edition). This forms the starting point of my analysis of the new capitalism as it relates to organization studies.

P&O has been much in the news this week, following the brutal sacking by Zoom of almost 800 workers in order to replace them with cheaper foreign labour. In fact, in illustration of one of the arguments I make in the book, even to speak of “P&O” is a misnomer, because what was once a company of that name has been endlessly diced and sliced in different configurations, so that the entity that actually made the sackings was P&O Ferries. That is part of the P&O Group, the modern-day history of which is an exemplar of the ‘new capitalism’ business model.

For example, from the 1980s onwards it diversified from shipping into a wide array of other areas such as construction and property management. Then, from the start of this century, it divested itself of those activities until, in 2006, it was bought by Dubai Ports World (DP World), a company owned by the Dubai government. However, P&O Ferries was shortly afterwards transferred to Dubai World (DW), the parent company of DP World and also owned by the Dubai government, until being re-sold to DP World in 2019. Meanwhile, P&O Ferries’ actual vessels are registered under a wide variety of flags of convenience.

So, this, in very brief, is the story of one example of what globalization means for corporate ownership – and it leaves out much else, including the interactions between DW and DP World and corporate entities in the US, China and Australia. At the end of the chain, and very much subservient to it, is the workforce of P&O Ferries, including both those who have been sacked and those who are being hired at pittance wages to replace them.

P&O was once a British company, but similar developments have occurred all around the world, although successive UK governments have been especially relaxed about corporate sell-offs. Moreover, certainly compared with most EU countries (and this was the same even when it was part of the EU), UK employment law offers workers fewer protections from sackings of this sort. In any case, by its own admission P&O deliberately broke at least parts of this law – regarding consultation with trade unions – apparently because it judged the penalties for doing so to be outweighed by the benefits.

The consequence of businesses being owned and run in this way is to sever the links that can – at least in principle - otherwise exist between owners, communities, and employees. Even in the narrowest of business terms this is problematic. For why, when business owners are so manifestly uncommitted to them should workers feel or show any commitment to their businesses? Similarly, to the extent that such sackings damage ‘brand image’ amongst consumers there may be a business price to be paid.

But its implications go much deeper than that, and are bound up with the massive increases in inequality which are part and parcel of the new capitalism. Both literally and metaphorically the owners and senior managers of such firms inhabit a different world to the people who work for them.

Of course, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about traditional capitalism in this respect. Nineteenth century factory owners were arguably similarly detached from, and ruthless about their workforces. I recently re-watched a TV version of J.B. Priestley’s classic 1945 socialist play An Inspector Calls (for more on the play and its relationship to Priestley’s politics, see Alison Cullingford’s essay). Set in Edwardian England just before the First World War, it depicts a police inspector arriving at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy mill-owning family. He tells them that a young woman has been found dead, having killed herself in an especially horrible way, and in the course of the evening demonstrates how each of them had played a part in the events that led to her suicide.

Still at least, when prompted, members of the Birling family do recall the personal interactions they have had with the dead woman. No such connection exists between those who hold and dispose of the ‘human resources’ of companies like P&O and the real human beings on the receiving end of their spreadsheet-driven decisions. The geographical and social distance between them if not creates then at least exacerbates what philosophers from Aristotle to Levinas have identified as the problem of ‘moral distance’.

However, this does not undermine, so much as add new force to, the inspector’s prophetic closing words in Priestley’s play. With them, he enjoins the privileged family to remember that “we don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”

New times?

This blog, at least, is now living in new times since regular readers will have seen that there has been a complete revamp of the site design, to reflect the new edition of my book. As well as the new imagery to match the fourth edition cover there are new sidebars showing followers (and do click on the follow button if you would like to), numbers of readers, a listing of the most read posts, a new search facility, a cloud of post labels and enhanced buttons at the end of each post to share on social media. Plus, there is now a new title: a fairly interesting and completely free blog about organizations.

On a rather grander scale, there seems to be an emerging consensus that we are living in new times, with 2016 having marked the end of the hegemony of global free market ideology – what I call the new capitalism in my book – that has held sway since the 1970s. Beyond, but associated with, that are notions from commentators on the left and on the right of a post-liberal era, a post-truth era, an age of anger  or an age of populism.

This analysis, born largely of the votes for Trump and Brexit, is tempting, and it’s one which to some extent I share. But I think there is a need for caution, too. In my book I discuss (pp. 93-95) reasons for scepticism about claims of the new era of globalization, and there are similar reasons for scepticism about its demise.

In relation to Trump’s victory I’ve pointed to the fact that he received support from many who were by no means the losers from globalization, and also to the continuity of many of his policies with those of the traditional free market right. That has subsequently been underscored by many of his appointments at least four of whom are alumni of investment bank Goldman Sachs, the high priests of the globalist order. Is this really a rupture with the elite establishment or with the neo-liberal hegemony? Similarly, if the Brexit vote was a rejection of globalization then the news hasn’t reached Brexiter ministers like Liam Fox who take it to be an endorsement of “the glorious joys of free trade”.

Perhaps what is in prospect is a sell-out of the voters and, for sure, it is clear that those who voted Trump or Brexit in anticipation of an end to globalization and free market economics are in for a very nasty shock. But I think that what is more to the point is that the votes in question had enormously mixed motivations, and they cannot be read as the neat story that commentators are developing as the new political truth.

In relation to Brexit, I have read or heard in conversation all kinds of reasons for voting to leave the EU. These have included a belief that heavy industry would return (which is closest to the anti-globalization narrative); hostility to immigration (which might in part be seen as part of anti-globalization sentiment, but which certainly pre-dates the neo-liberal period) including non-EU immigration (which would not be affected by the vote); a desire to give the government a good kicking; the idea that it would be interesting to see what happened; the belief that the remain side would win anyway so it was just a protest vote; the hope that it would mean more money for the NHS (presumably based on the Leave campaign’s headline slogan); the sense that ‘things aren’t going to well’ so it’s time for a change; the belief it was a vote against ‘austerity economics’ and so on and so on.

I don’t necessarily mean by this that those who voted leave had any worse reasons for doing so than those who voted remain (for example, I heard one remain voter explaining that he did so in the (erroneous) belief that that English football teams would not be able to play in Europe if we left the EU). The point is rather that the heterogeneous motivations to vote leave do not give licence to a homogenized analysis and explanation of the outcome of the vote.

To put it another way, both the Trump and the Brexit votes were very close; and in the US case, Trump actually lost the popular vote. So the outcomes could easily have been completely different, and if Clinton had narrowly won, and Remain had won 52-48 instead of the other way around, then commentators would be oh-so-wisely saying ‘when it came to it, people voted for the status quo’. Yet the politics and sociology of the vote would have been virtually identical: a few percentage points the other way. In those circumstances, we would be saying ‘nothing has changed’; as it is, we are saying ‘everything has changed’.

Those few percentage points matter hugely, of course, in terms of practicalities. Trump’s election and Brexit will have major consequences in the US, the UK, and around the world. But those consequences flow not from a seismic shift in society but from the way that a whole agglomeration of voting decisions can in certain voting systems have an effect. We mistake effect for cause if we imagine that the outcome of those particular and peculiar voting systems has a single meaning that adds up to the proposition that we are suddenly living in new times.

History does have patterns, which stand out sharp and clear, almost as banalities, in long retrospect; close up and immediate ascriptions of historical change are – almost inevitably – mistaken. Perhaps we should not be too impatient for meaning. The actress Carrie Fisher who died today aged 60 provided the quote that I used to introduce the chapter on contemporary capitalism in the second edition of my book: “instant gratification takes too long”. We may or may not be living in ‘new times’: time will tell.

Happy New Year.

What will Trump's victory mean?

I wrote in my last post about the possibility of Donald Trump being elected. Now that it has happened, I want to share some preliminary thoughts about what it means. Of course, much is unknown. Trump is an unpredictable character anyway, and in any case all politicians find that their freedom of action is more curtailed than either they or their electors expect.

In my book I frame much of the analysis of contemporary organizations in terms of ‘the new capitalism’, meaning the neo-liberalized, globalizing form of capitalism that has been dominant since the 1970s, especially in the US and the UK. I also (nevertheless) record scepticism about ‘epochalism’ (p.104), but with that caveat it is at least possible that we are witnessing a significant shift away from the new capitalism.

What is distinctive about Trump, as the Guardian journalist Martin Kettle wrote today, is that he is both socially and economically illiberal. That, Kettle argues, has not been true of recent US presidents: they have been illiberal in one or other meaning, or in neither, but not in both.

Trump’s social illiberalism is what made his campaign so controversial and divisive. But it is his economic illiberalism that is truly remarkable amongst, especially, Republicans. He appears to be hostile to the global free trade system that defined the new capitalism. He has promised to reverse the offshoring of US jobs, to punish US companies that relocate abroad and to impose high tariffs on, especially, Chinese imports. It seems highly likely that he will abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the TTIP negotiations with the EU, and if not scrap then comprehensively re-negotiate NAFTA.

These policies, which I have described as nationalist populism, are, like many forms of nationalist populism, similar to left-wing economic programmes. Equally, Trump’s ambitions to create jobs through national infrastructure projects are akin to neo-Keynesian economics (although likely to be funded by foreign investors rather than state investment and so in that sense understandable as a form of privatization, and somewhat at odds with Trump's 'America First' rhetoric).

These are potentially profound shifts, then, but as a counter to epochal thinking, it should be recalled that other parts of his economic agenda, most notably (probably) holding down the minimum wage, cutting corporation and other taxes and financial deregulation, are part of the familiar repertoire of the political right. Moreover, Trump’s calling card that he can run the country as if it were a business and his embrace and embodiment of macho leadership also suggest continuity rather than abandonment of many aspects of new capitalism.

If aspects of Trump’s rejection of economic liberalism have a leftist tinge to them, it’s important to recognize that their nationalism means that they do not offer any general relief from the consequences of globalization. It is in fact questionable whether they can even deliver this for the people of the US. Globalization may simply be too far advanced for that to be possible: it is highly unlikely that the American rust belt will be re-industrialised. At all events, Trump’s nationalism (like Brexit) marks a retreat from the multi-lateral, global governance that offers to best hope of taming and regulating global capitalism, with climate change agreement the most likely early casualty.

Trump is also likely to reverse Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ policy. That is apparent in relation to the points mentioned above about TPP and tariffs against China, but also to the likelihood of his administration taking a relaxed view about Chinese sovereignty claims in the South China Sea and agnosticism on the issue of Taiwan. This links with the wider foreign policy aspect of Trump’s presidency, which appears to entail significant withdrawal from global leadership. Some of that leadership has, of course, been highly damaging and other parts of it ineffective. Nevertheless, Trump’s apparent admiration for Vladimir Putin (it’s no coincidence that the Russian Parliament applauded the result: Trump’s election, like Brexit, represent major foreign policy boosts for Russia) and lukewarm support for NATO could be highly de-stabilising for, especially, the Baltic States and the Balkans. This could have potentially devastating consequences, both for those regions and for the wider world, making anything and everything else that Trump’s presidency may mean completely trivial.

Going back to economic issues, I’ve depicted Trump’s election, like Brexit, as triumphs for nationalist populism. But they also represent a huge threat for it. Nationalist populism operates primarily as a vehicle of protest against the establishment. But when it is victorious it itself becomes the establishment and has to take responsibility for the policies it espouses. So what happens if (and, in my view, when) those policies fail? One possibility is that its supporters realise the error of their ways and return to liberalism and social democracy. Another, far more likely, outcome is that those supporters conclude that their leaders have been thwarted by the establishment or, even, that they have betrayed them. The reaction will be to turn even more harshly against perceived enemies: immigrants, liberals, democracy itself. And to seek and support even more extreme leaders. Many people around the world are scared about what Trump’s success means: the greater fear is what his failure will mean.

Trumping rationality

This week will see the outcome of the US Presidential election, with the possibility of the victory of Donald Trump. If this occurs it will have profound consequences not just for the USA but for the world. It is hardly worth me adding to the many voices that view the prospect of a bombastic, ignorant, vicious narcissist in the White House with alarm.

But whether or not he is elected, Trump’s popularity has a significance as part of the wider rise of a nationalist populism (very evident in Brexit Britain) which can be read as the illegitimate offspring of four decades of neo-liberal globalization. Those decades, as I argue in chapter five of my book, are both the condition and consequence of much contemporary organizational practice. A key theme of nationalist populism is an angry backlash against the loss of secure employment and against immigration, both of which can be ascribed to globalization.

Hence Trump rails against NAFTA, just as Brexiters rail against the EU. At the same time, the very evident crisis of neo-liberalism that has been ongoing since 2008 has not only born down hard on employment and public spending but also opened up a profound sense of injustice and inequality. Allied with this is the idea that powerful elites – corporate, financial, political and intellectual – are profiting at the expense of and unaccountable to the people.

Something like this has become a fairly standard analysis of nationalist populism from the liberal-left (and elements of the right as well), and it clearly captures something of what is going on. However, I feel increasingly unpersuaded by it, for several reasons. Not least because under the guise of understanding, it exhibits a kind of patronizing liberal guilt: ‘those poor little people, left behind by neo-liberal globalization, of course they are angry’. That patronizes because it absolves nationalist populists from responsibility for their choices and actions. There is no reason why their reaction has to be one of vicious denigration of immigrants, for example. Nor is there any reason why it should lead to making choices which will not improve, but worsen, the lot of the left behind.

The liberal-left are often associated – by nationalist populists especially, as it happens – with ‘political correctness’, but there is a new political correctness associated with nationalist populism in which it is unsayable to call out stupidity. Because to do so is just another sign of elitism. We are ‘the people’, and you cannot question the ‘will of the people’ or you are ‘the enemy of the people’. But we are all people, and we are all equally capable of stupidity, and all equally challengeable as to the basis of what we do and think. There are not special rules for those people who proclaim themselves, and only themselves, as ‘the people’.

Nor does it make much sense to think that nationalist populism is confined to those left behind by globalization. In the US (and the UK) it seems as if something like half the electorate is willing to vote for nationalist populism. So many of them are well to do and by no means ‘left behind’ (for some fascinating data on this, see this report showing that Trump’s supporters are actually better off than most Americans). Equally, the other half of the population can hardly be described as ‘the elite’ – or if it can, that’s a hell of a big elite. And in both the US and the UK the populist leaders are themselves very obviously members of the elite, Donald Trump being an obvious example with his inherited wealth and massive business empire.

Beyond all that, nationalist populism long precedes neo-liberal globalization. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate in the 1964 Presidential contest, with whom Trump is often compared is an obvious example. So is McCarthyism, perhaps the most shameful element of Twentieth century US history. Both these comparators relate to the period of post-war US prosperity and progress whose loss is supposed to account for the nationalist populism of Trump. Going further back we can see in the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh very similar political positions. In the UK, it can be seen in Powellism and Thatcherism.

So nationalist populism has long been with us, and whatever the failings of neo-liberal globalization we should not hesitate to say that it is the wrong answer, even if to the right question. But that proposition runs into trouble for a reason which is perhaps new. The philosophical underpinnings of right and wrong answers have been substantially battered by the intellectual climate of postmodernism that is more or less coterminous with neo-liberalism. That is to say, the critique of rationality that has dominated recent decades of intellectual debate has found an unhappy partner in the ‘post-truth’ politics of nationalist populism. So evidence, expertise and rational debate can themselves be dismissed as just another way that ‘the elite’ tries to put one over on ‘the people’. It is a rich and bitter irony that the rarefied intellectual salons of 1970s Paris are being channelled to the American Rust Belt and the former mining towns of Britain. The more bitter since those Parisian salons were also where the Enlightenment was in some part born, and which had so profound a part in the formation and constitution of the United States.

A new landscape?

Within less than a fortnight some of the consequences of Brexit are becoming clear. What was dismissed as ‘project fear’ turns out to have been true. The pound has collapsed, the FTSE-250 has collapsed, foreign investment has collapsed, the UK is facing breakup and the political system has broken down. These aren’t just short-term things and they will reverberate for years to come. A country that a week ago seemed like a bastion of stability now seems a scary and unstable place. The leaders of the leave campaign have mainly disappeared and those that are left don’t know what to do. Someone said to me the other day that the issue is not that the remainers are ‘bad losers’ but that the leavers are ‘bad winners’: at their moment of victory they regret it and exit.

The UK media are hardly reporting the big strategic and economic issues and are obsessing about the Westminster politics of who will lead the political parties. That matters, a bit, but does not begin to speak to the political and economic meltdown that is happening. For that, you have to go to the foreign press. And there is also a cultural meltdown, most obvious in the rise of racist abuse and attacks. This has been widely reported but to personalise it a friend of mine, out shopping in the afternoon, was punched in the face for having a foreign accent; a Chinese student I know was spat at and told to pack her bags. Welcome to post-Brexit England.

I’ve written before about how the divide now is between cosmopolitans and locals, and Tony Blair – of whom I have plenty of criticisms, but few can doubt his sensibility to events – has said something similar, arguing that the political cleavage is no longer left versus right but open versus closed. So the shape of twentieth century politics, based on capital versus labour, no longer makes sense and nor do the party structures that mirrored it.

We need, fast, a political realignment around this. What we currently have is a situation where the locals (or closed) have defeated the cosmopolitans (or open) but the irony is that the former look to the latter to deliver what they have voted for. It’s striking that about the only person in the UK showing any sort of leadership now is Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. And who is he? A technocratic expert, and an immigrant to boot!

This new politics certainly makes for some strange bedfellows, especially between the internationalist left and the global free-market right; but this is the landscape that we are now going to have to work within. It makes a nonsense of the politics of most of my lifetime, and I am still adjusting to it. I talked to a friend of mine the other day, a lifelong working class socialist, who said that he wanted the working class who voted Brexit to suffer unemployment and punitive public service cuts so as to teach them the error of their decision. That seems incredibly harsh but he said the alternative is to infantilise those voters by saying that they did not know what they were voting for. We shouldn’t patronise them, and so we have to say that they have to accept the consequences of their choice.

I kind of understand that argument and at all events I see a very strange situation having opened up in which the people expected to sort out this mess are those in business, the civil service, civil society or even academia who largely did not vote for it and who were derided as the experts and the elite. Where are the leaders of populist insurgency? Nowhere to be seen. So their insurgency is to be put into practice by the very people they have rejected. I’m not sure that there has ever been a situation quite like that in modern history.

We are very, very far from seeing the dust settle on the Brexit vote, but I think that the dynamics I have described here define where the dust will settle. And, if so, that has an import far wider than Brexit as it seems to define what the politics of post-globalization will look like. This isn’t a matter of merely British interest. For one thing, when such a big economy makes such a bizarre decision it has global effects. But, beyond that, it could be said that Britain led the industrial revolution, led the neo-liberal post-industrial revolution and is now leading this post-globalization, post-truth, revolution.

I don’t pretend to have a complete handle on this, and these are just preliminary thoughts, written during a crisis which is both personal and political. In a few months they may seem naïve or just misguided; and the one thing which social science should teach us is to be wary of prediction. Even so, I think that what has happened here these last few days and what it will mean over the next few years is something fundamental which will change all our lives.

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?

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?

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.

Trading places

This week, the Indian Prime Minister visited the UK just a couple of weeks after the Chinese President did the same. Both were sumptuously hosted, but the main events were trade deals. In between the two visits, though much less reported, the UK-Brazil Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) met in London.

This in itself tells us something about the global world economy. Whilst of the BRICs Russia’s relations with the UK remain frosty, for complex political reasons, the other three countries in this admittedly artificial bloc are being actively wooed by the Britain and many other countries.

This gives, in part at least, the lie to the repeated claim by those who want Britain to exit it that EU membership precludes the signing of trade deals. In part, because it is of course true that the UK cannot negotiate deals with third parties that would give EU single market access. But that should be good news for Eurosceptics since, were it possible, it would also be possible for any member state to do the same and thereby commit the UK to trade deals it had had no input into.

And these deals also reveal something else. They are predicated in large part upon UK membership of the EU. The Chinese President – in a highly unusual intervention – made it clear during his visit that his country saw trade relations with the UK in terms of the EU, and urged against Brexit. The Indian PM was entirely unambiguous in saying that he saw the UK as India’s “entry point into the EU”.

The Brexiters’ idea that outside the EU there would be a queue of countries lining up to sign preferential trade deals is quite clearly nonsense, as the US have made clear. And any notion that the Commonwealth would be the locus of a new trade bloc is equally preposterous. Australia and Canada have made that clear and the fact that India’s visit to the UK came after visiting 28 other countries speaks volumes. This isn't any longer the world of Imperial Preference.

What did interest both China’s and India’s leaders was something quite different to trading with the UK post-Brexit. Both were concerned about the restrictions put upon visas to visit, work and study in the UK. All these – like the Brexit debate – have got caught up in the British panic about immigration, which is doing real damage, both economic and cultural, to the UK. International students are increasingly turning their backs on British universities as a result. But Brexit also matters to British universities, and this week they came out and said that it would be a catastrophe.

The over-arching debate in all this is not simply about Brexit, it’s about a realistic understanding of what the world is, and the UK’s place within it. These recent events underscore, like it or not, the realpolitik of that place. And it certainly isn't where Brexiters think it to be.

Crisis? What crisis?

The flow of people across Europe, mainly fleeing war in Syria, is the biggest news story across the continent. Sometimes the focus is on arrivals in Greece, other times points of transit in Macedonia or Hungary. In the UK much attention is given to the people gathered at Calais, trying to get to Britain, although the numbers here are much smaller than those in many other places.

Invariably, this is described as a crisis. But I think that is misleading in two ways. First, it implies that it is a temporary phenomenon that will soon be over. That is highly unlikely, although the end of summer may well temporarily reduce the numbers of people making the dangerous sea crossings to Europe. Second, it implies that what is happening suddenly arose from nowhere. That is highly misleading. It is a situation that has been developing over several years, mainly as a result of war, instability, poverty and repression in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The ‘crisis’ motif is also rather offensive in that it suggests that it is the countries of Europe that are suffering: yet if there is a crisis, then those experiencing it are surely the people whose lives have been destroyed, setting them on horrendous journeys of desperation?

Beyond the way that what is happening now has a past and a future that makes the idea of a crisis moment implausible is something else which is more directly relevant to the themes of the book and to the study of organizations and management more generally. It is the nature and meaning of globalization. Every student of management, and for that matter every citizen and voter, has been told for decades that we live in an increasingly globalized and inter-connected world. But that almost always references the globalization of organizations, markets and trade. Moreover, it has a sanitized, upbeat sense of a world of opportunity. Yet global inter-connectedness applies no less to people, and can have a reality which is more about squalid suffering than the breathless, bloodless nostrums of corporate strategy documents.

Confronted with these people and this reality it seems that many in Europe recoil in horror. In many countries, including the UK, that is exacerbated by years of highly negative and stigmatic depictions of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. So whereas in the UK (as I point out on pp. 106-7) the globalization of ownership has been treated as a matter of no importance, the globalization of people is a very different matter.

There’s little point reprising all the familiar and fallacious responses that have always been made to immigration (except when we do it – then we are ‘expats’): that ‘we are full up’, that it will cause unemployment or housing shortages, that it will damage cultural cohesion. However, I do want to discuss an increasingly vociferous comment about the current situation that I have noticed, which is that those who think that refugees should be allowed to settle should personally offer to house them, otherwise they are hypocrites.

This seems a very peculiar logic. By extension it would mean that those who want a health service should turn their houses into operating theatres, those who want schools should hold classes in their living rooms, those who want electricity should have power stations in their back gardens or even dig the coal to fuel them. Or perhaps more pertinently that those who don’t want to admit refugees should be obliged to go and tell them why and to man the barricades to keep them out.

I am not a psychologist, but I think there is a psychological logic to this illogic. Precisely because when people, rather than ownership, move around the globe it acquires a human face, and the response therefore takes a human form. That can sometimes call forth an empathetic response. But it can also fuel a bitter anger against those making such a response, which is what fuels the ‘hypocrisy’ charge. This I think is a psychological defence against the witnessing of suffering: to say that those who insist on acknowledging that suffering are to blame.

Beyond that, there is a tendency – visible, too, in debates about poverty, unemployment and welfare – to blame the victims. In the case of refugees this takes the form of saying things such as that they should have sought asylum in the country of first entry (a dubious legal argument, and in any case a wholly unrealistic one), or that they seem to be young, healthy males who should not have abandoned their families and countries (this latter seems especially perverse – it is always those who can undertake migration who do so). Here I think the psychology derives from the terrifying fear that any of us could be poor, unemployed, ill or, in this case, displaced by war. By configuring such fates as individual failings (laziness, dishonesty, cowardice, avarice) those doing so can indulge the fantasy that it would never happen to them, since they are made of sterner and better stuff.

So these illogical responses are driven by fear and, in a certain way, a sensitivity to suffering. Yet we should not feel too much sympathy. Those fears may be psychologically real, but they hardly equate to the material reality of being bombed out of one’s home, having one’s life ripped up, and being left with no alternative but to embark on an arduous, dangerous journey into the unknown. That’s a crisis.

Oxi and No

So Greece has voted 'Oxi'. The consequences are unclear, but the reaction so far from Germany, in particular, does not make my hope of a write-off and reconstruction very likely (I heard an interview on BBC radio this morning, that unfortunately I cannot track down to link to, in which a politician from Angela Merkel's party voiced this very forcefully). It is worth just pausing to reflect how extraordinary this is. If a major bank gets into difficulties through imprudent lending then it is deemed ‘too big to fail’ and is bailed out, as we saw several times during the financial crisis, although its sub-prime borrowers are left in debt. But when a state gets into difficulties through imprudent borrowing and its counterpart of imprudent lending, then bailout is deemed impossible. Or, to come at it from a different angle, lenders lend money on the basis that there is always a risk that it won’t be returned, and this is priced into the interest rate. So why, when a borrower cannot repay, is it deemed unacceptable for the debt to be written off? The general rule seems to be that under no circumstances can the lender lose out and under no circumstances can the borrower be let off the hook. So where's the risk, and the justification for the risk being priced in? Actually, the situation as regards Greece is even worse: not only can it not be forgiven but also it must be obliged to follow policies that will make it even less able to repay its loans.

But in this post I want to focus on the response on this end of the continent to events in Greece. They have been profoundly depressing. First, it has been seen as validating ‘austerity’* policies: 'look what happens if you don’t balance the books!'. The fact that it has been the pursuit of such policies in Greece since 2010 that has turned a crisis into a drama is completely forgotten. For that matter, the significant differences between Greece and Britain (principally, that Britain can print its own money and that its debt is completely differently structured) are never mentioned. By the way, we see today just how extreme austerity policies in the UK have now become, with it being reported that terminally ill benefits claimants are being questioned by welfare officials as to when they expect to die.

Second, and far more bizarre, is the spectacle of the anti-EU political Right lining up to cheer far-Left Syrizia, as in articles by veteran Tory Europhobe John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, presumably on the usually dubious principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. What they miss (or presumably don’t care about) is that Syrizia, and the Greeks who voted 'oxi’ in yesterday’s referendum, are rejecting the rule of global financial elites and the ideology of neo-liberalism. Yet what the British Europhobes have in mind in exiting the EU is an even more intensive embrace of these.

Redwood and Farage make as their prime argument that the Greek crisis reveals the gap between democratic nation-states and an undemocratic and overbearing EU and Eurozone (EZ). What this neglects is that the lack of EU democracy (which is indeed a serious problem) is a consequence of the fact that Europhobes like them in the UK and elsewhere have always refused to countenance a democratic European polity, deriding it as a federal ‘super-state’. The consequence is precisely the lack of democracy they now bemoan and, moreover, the fact that the entire basis of the Eurozone crisis is (as both Right and Left agree) that it is a monetary union without a fiscal union. And why is there no fiscal union? Because that, too, would require the European polity to which Europhobes are implacably imposed.

I expect that the attempt to tie together the Greek crisis with the case for Brexit will intensify, especially if Greece were to end up leaving the EZ or even the EU. For some voters it will be as simple as feeling that given the turmoil in Greece, Brits should pull up the drawbridge (as if, somehow, the rest of the world would then disappear). But for political leaders to encourage that by making false connections is deplorable. There are precedents, of course, such as the way that the French vote against the EU Constitution in 2005 was hailed by British Europhobes as supporting their view when, in fact, it was in large part a vote against a more neo-liberal EU.

The present case is even more clear. The Greek ‘Oxi’ in their referendum was a rejection of neo-liberalism and a vote for a more fraternal, collective EU project. A British ‘No’ in the forthcoming referendum would be a rejection of a fraternal, collective EU project for a more intensive neo-liberalism. 'Oxi' and 'No' do not mean the same thing.


A minor footnote. Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned today as Greece’s Finance Minister, is, so far as I know, the only politician of any note to have an academic publication in the organization studies literature:

Varoufakis, Y. (2008), ‘Game Theory: Can it Unify the Social Sciences?’, Organization Studies 29, (8-9): 1255-1277.

For an analysis of the role that Varoufakis’ knowledge of game theory may have played in the negotiations, see this article by the always interesting journalist and blogger Neil Clark. The answer, by the way, to the question in the title of Varoufakis' article is both 'oxi' and 'no' (and 'nein' and 'non') - but that is another story.

* I put 'austerity' in scare quotes because it is not just a euphemism but an objectionable one, invoking as it does the collective sacrifices of the post-war austerity that laid the basis for the NHS and the welfare state in support of a drive to erase the last vestiges of the post-war collective project.

Working assumptions

This post is inspired by Martin Vogel’s thought-provoking piece, on the excellent Vogel Wakefield counter-consultancy blog, where he discusses the politics of organization. In particular, he points out how little conversation there was during the British election of the changing nature of work, the social purposes of business and similar themes. With economic debate (and not just in Britain) dominated by the single theme of government fiscal deficit and cultural debate by that of immigration, work – so central to most people’s lives – barely got a look in.

True, there were some marginal references. Labour did seek to open up issues of lack of employment security, lack of quality jobs, and zero hours contracts. The Conservatives did talk at times about the number of jobs created in the British economy in recent years. Both parties talked occasionally about apprenticeships. But huge issues about under-employment, about the effect of technological change on white-collar employment, and about productivity (again, see Martin Vogel’s post for more on this) didn’t get mentioned at all. Moreover, nothing much was said on the many issues adjacent to or around work – for example the highly uncertain future of pensions and the exploding need to provide care for the elderly, much of which will be done as unpaid work, especially by women.

Perhaps it is the case that modern politics is incapable or unwilling to talk about such large and long-term issues. Indeed, it is not just in relation to work that big issues are neglected. In particular, no one in British politics seems willing to take a good look at Britain’s role in the world, something which has been ducked since, arguably, 1945. In fact, with the exception of the issue of EU membership, foreign policy of any sort did not figure in the election. And this is not just an issue for Britain. The mechanisms of international governance seem unable to gain any traction at all on a range of pressing problems from Ukraine, through to the dire and increasingly unstable situation right across the Middle East. The central structures of the UN, specifically the permanent membership of the Security Council, again reflect the world in 1945, not 2015.

One factor here – pertaining to work as much as to security – is the way that globalization, whilst largely created by the decisions of nation-states, has now undercut the purchase that nation-states have upon policy, leaving a political vacuum. From this viewpoint, what can national politicians say about, for example, job insecurity, pensions or de-skilling other than to see it in terms of the ineluctable effects of the global free market? The same could be said about things such as corporate tax avoidance which I posted about earlier this year. We just don’t have the political structures to deal with this situation, and very few people talking about how we might create them.

Yet there are some levers which national governments do have, especially around education and training, that might be pulled at least with respect to issues of employability and productivity. One reason why they do not get much discussed is, I suspect, the increasingly dysfunctional effects of media management. Political strategists seek simple, constantly repeated mantras to ‘frame the narrative’ – the fiscal deficit being the obvious example – which are by definition incapable of speaking of or to complex, inter-related problems. Add to this the almost inevitable short-termism of the electoral cycle and it is perhaps unsurprising that long-term problems get shelved for another day – witness the huge difficulties of developing a global approach to environmental sustainability.

Coming back to work, and thinking just from the standpoint of organization studies, I think that one striking and problematic feature of the subject is just how little it actually has to say about work. This is partly to do with the demise of what used to be called industrial sociology and the concomitant rise of studies that are more concerned with consumption and identity than production and the workplace. It probably also reflects the way that organization studies takes place almost entirely inside management and business schools, with more emphasis on management than on work per se. It certainly reflects the growing ‘theoreticism’ of the academic literature, with a disdain for ‘merely’ reporting what is actually happening in the workplace and an insistence that each academic paper should make a suppose ‘theoretical contribution’, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. As Barley & Kunda argued in 2001, there is a need to “bring work back in” to the discipline, but it is an argument that more than decade later shows little sign of being heeded.

In 1974, in a book probably better known in the United States than elsewhere, the writer and oral historian Studs Terkel published Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the title of which is self-explanatory. Its coverage ranged from farm workers to dentists, tennis players to nuns. It’s difficult to think of anything remotely like this book now, and certainly not anything by an organization studies academic. The neglect of work within political discourse may be an intractable problem but within the more limited terrain of organization studies may not be irredeemable. And who knows, perhaps the two might be linked. After all, an organization studies that educated students into the realities of contemporary working life might not only prepare them better for those realities but also encourage them to ask political questions about it.

 

References

Barley, S. and Kunda, G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76-95.

Terkel, S. 1974. Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon/Random House.