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.

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.

Rise of the robots

The de-skilling thesis associated with Harry Braverman’s classic work of labour process analysis, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) is a staple of organizational sociology (see p.36 of my book). I suppose, though, that it has come to be seen as rather dated in part, perhaps, because its Marxist framework was deemed obsolete when the Berlin Wall fell and the ‘end of history’ was proclaimed. Well, history has turned out not to be over and the triumph of globalised free-market capitalism that seemed to be the only game in town in the last three decades now faces challenge in all directions.

Equally, the de-skilling thesis, rooted in the analysis of Taylorism, came to seem outdated in the supposed shiny new world of knowledge work, empowerment, the war for talent and post-bureaucracy. And, in parallel, labour process analysis within organizational sociology got shunted to the side lines by glitzy postmodernism and the plethora of weird and wonderful theories that came in its wake, so that even work itself seemed to become marginal to organizational sociology and, in fact, to sociology itself.

All this millennialism is now itself coming to seem very dated. In particular, public debate is beginning to recognize that there are very profound and far-reaching transformations of work occurring due to a new wave of technological change associated with robotics and expert systems. These now have a greater capacity than ever before to replace both human manual labour but also professional and knowledge work. It is this replacement of labour with cheaper, more productive, more predictable and more controllable machines which, of course, was at the heart of Braverman’s de-skilling thesis.

Thus, for example, earlier this year it was reported that Foxconn, which supplies Apple and Samsung, had replaced 60,000 of its workers with robots; and last week Capita, the outsourcing firm, announced its intention to replace 2000 of its staff with robots. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England – who is increasingly showing himself to be more thoughtful and effective than the politicians who are supposed to provide society’s leadership – made a major speech last week predicting the automation of 15 million jobs in the UK. For OECD countries as a whole 57% of jobs are predicted to be automated by 2020, reaching far into occupations previously thought to be immune to automation, because of the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

One way of approaching this issue is by reference to an early critique of Braverman’s de-skilling thesis, namely Andrew Friedman’s Industry and Labour (1977). The argument, to put it in its simplest form, was that what Braverman saw as a single, linear trend was not that, because it applied only to peripheral, low-skill, perhaps non-unionised, workers. Core workers, by contrast, retained responsible autonomy by virtue of their skills and bargaining power. From that perspective, we could say that the combination of the erosion of trade unionism and, crucially, the new technological possibilities of robotics and AI mean that the 'core' is now very rapidly decomposing. Thus the scope for de-skilling is much extended and Braverman's de-skilling thesis has a new lease of life.

If this is correct, the consequences are very far-reaching. The hollowing out of the middle-class and the deindustrialization of the developed world have already had significant political effects, most obviously in the election of Donald Trump. Continued automation can only accelerate this and, crucially, it renders ineffective the protectionist ‘America First’ solution Trump proposes. For that proposal is predicated on the idea that the flight of US jobs to cheaper labour countries like China can be reversed. But the threat of automation is not the replacement of expensive labour with cheap labour, but of labour with machines. Thus Chinese jobs are just as vulnerable as American jobs – more so, in fact, with some 77% of Chinese jobs thought to be at risk by 2020.

If this wholesale transformation of work occurs, it will very soon present massive political challenges and the need for completely new forms of social organization. At the moment, work is central to economic activity. If that ceases to be so, what happens to those whose work is no longer needed. That has moral and social implications: are they just to rot and die? But it also has economic implications: who will buy the products of robots if no one has an income from work? In this context, the movement for a citizens’ income, also known as a Universal Basic Income (UBI), paid unconditionally to every member of society is likely to become central to political discussion. In fact, after writing this post I learned that, just today, Prince Edward Island, a Province of Canada, has decided to trial a UBI scheme and, also today, the BBC has launched a UBI information resource.

So I sense that we are at the cusp of something important, and something which shows, moreover, the deep interconnections between work, organizations and politics which are so central to the kind of analysis I urge in my book. If so it is vital that the political decisions needed are made quickly: if they do not match or even anticipate what is happening in work organizations the consequences could be catastrophic, with mass unemployment on a scale never before seen.

References

Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Friedman, A. (1977) Industry and Labour. Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

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.

Lost in history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hooked on classics

Organization studies has a peculiar relationship with history, including its own history. On the one hand, it routinely invokes woefully inadequate claims about history (new eras, unprecedented developments and so on). On the other hand, it makes ludicrous claims about its own history - the narrative of scientific management giving way to human relations theory (discussed in the book) being an obvious example. On the third hand, it ignores and is ignorant of history, so that many a supposedly cutting-edge research paper simply replicates, without any awareness of so doing, things that have been known for decades.

These failures are not, at least as regards the first and second cases, necessarily meaningless. They reflect, in part anyway, the ideological operations of organization studies as a handmaiden of managerialism, suggesting, in the first case, that there is an underlying logic that justifies managerialism and, in the second case, that managerialism is part of a specifically progressive logic. In other words, what is by scholarly standards bad history is not simply understandable in terms of bad scholarship.

But what about the third case? Here I think that there at least four factors in play. One is that those conducting research in organization studies (myself included) are often not trained in that discipline, but in something else, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, or, as in my case, politics. Thus there is less sense of a socialization into a canon than might be the case. That is changing, as more people come through an organization studies training, but that may not make much difference because of the other factors. These are, first, that the notion of a ‘classical canon’ is anathema to the postmodern sensibility that has been influential in recent organization studies, at least in Europe. Second, that because most organization studies takes place in business schools, which are typically culturally in thrall to the new, classic studies are easily dismissed as old hat. And, third, because the pressure to publish supposedly novel contributions – especially ‘theoretical’ contributions – disinclines researchers to seek out or admit to the classical roots of their discipline.

Yet against that background, I have a sense that things are beginning to change. Consider, for example, John Hassard’s (2012) superb analysis of the Hawthorne Studies, adding significant historical flesh to the point in my book (p.41) about the continuities and interconnections between ‘scientific management’ and ‘human relations’. Or Ellen O’Connor’s (2011) re-appropriation of the lost foundations of management and organization studies.

This optimistic sense has been provoked by two things over the last week or so. One was attending a seminar by Paul du Gay where he presented his (2015) paper ‘Organization (Theory) as a Way of Life’, which not only makes out the case for re-considering ‘classical organization theory’, but also mounts a robust challenge to the metaphysical theoreticism of recent organization studies. The other was learning of an initiative by a group of doctoral students in organization studies to read and discuss classic texts. The podcasts of these discussions on the Talking about Organizations website are enthralling and sophisticated dissections of (so far) the writings of Taylor, Fayol and Maslow.

Although, of course, I would not compare my own work with that of those mentioned here, I do see it as having some affinity with what they are doing. I, too, am dismayed by theoreticism and am also seeking to re-connect with classical writings and traditions in organization studies, both in my book on the organization of Bletchley Park (Grey, 2012) and my forthcoming book on secrecy (Costas and Grey, 2016).

I am sure that many other writers, not referenced here, are trying to do something similar. I certainly hope so because although I don’t suppose the first two ways that organization studies relates to history are redeemable, the third surely is.

 References

Costas, J. & Grey, C. (2016) Secrecy at Work. The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Du Gay, P. (2015) ‘Organization (Theory) as a Way of Life’, Journal of Cultural Economy 8 (4): 399-417.

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

Hassard J. (2012) 'Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric Research in its Social, Political and Historical Context', Human Relations 65 (11): 1431-1461. 

O’Connor, E. (2011) Creating New Knowledge in Management. Appropriating the Field’s Lost Foundations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Uberfication: an idea from the past

I learned a new and rather ugly word this week: uberfication. It came up in a discussion of new patterns of work and employment and checking on the internet I find that it is a term which has been in use for a year or so now. It derives from the taxi firm Uber which has developed a model for taxi hire in which customers use a mobile phone app to match their journey requirements to the availability of an Uber driver. This has caused protests from taxi drivers all over the world, most recently in Rio de Janeiro just yesterday, because Uber drivers are exempt from the licensing and many of the regulations of established taxi firms and drivers who are thus having their livelihoods threatened.

Uberfication refers to the application of the same, or similar, business model to a range of businesses and activities with many websites referring to the uberfication of everything, examples ranging from dog walking to doctors. Other terms for the same phenomenon are the ‘gig economy’, the ‘on-demand economy’ or the ‘platform economy’ (the point being that a platform such as Uber does not provide services but connects customer demand to a supplier, who provides a service as if engaged to play a gig) or the more cosy-sounding ‘micro-entrepreneurship’.

This business model has three defining features. The most obvious is a technological one, the mobile phone app that enables the connection between demand and supply to be made, including differential pricing according to levels of demand and supply at the moment that the transaction is agreed. The second is that it enables the avoidance of most or all of the regulations that apply to conventional providers of the service. The third is that those providing the service are not employees of any company but are independent contractors or self-employed agents (or, if you prefer, ‘micro-entrepreneurs’).

Although the word is a new to me, the underlying idea is one discussed at several places in my book and on this blog. The ‘flexibilization’ of work has been underway for some time now, leading increasingly to a ‘precariat’ (p.117 of book) whose work is insecure, often characterized by zero-hours contracts and without much or anything in the way of fringe benefits such as pensions, sick pay or maternity/paternity pay. Uberfication is an intensified form of this, since the independent contractors have no employment rights at all: they are not employed, so such rights are irrelevant.

Unsurprisingly uberfication is beginning to find its way onto the political agenda, at least in the United States. For the free market right it is a splendid development, bypassing state regulation and ‘vested interests’ and promoting an Ayn Rand type vision of autonomous self-determining individuals, freely contracting with each other in a pure(ish) market (only pure-ish because there is some evidence that prices are manipulated by controlling supply at times of peak demand). For the left, the concern is that employment rights are eroded, insecurity increased and, for that matter, buying power diminished (in other words, this isn’t an anti-capitalist point, it’s a Keynesian point: if workers don’t have strong and secure earnings then where does demand come from?).

One way of looking at this in organization theory terms is a shift from ‘hierarchy’ to ‘market’. In brief, the idea here (associated with the economist Oliver Williamson but also, in a different way, the business historian Alfred Chandler) is that there are different ways of co-ordinating human activity, which come into play according to specific cost conditions, allied to particular technological conditions. One way is via a market of individual contractors (the invisible hand, as Adam Smith called it), the other is through internal hierarchies within firms (the visible hand, as Chandler dubbed it in his book of that name). Following that account, uberfication substitutes market for hierarchy. However, it should not be forgotten that the way that co-ordination occurs does not just arise ‘naturally’ from cost and technology but depends on the political decisions we make and the legal systems through which we enact those decisions (hence the many legal challenges to Uber, most recently in Canada).

We can see this as a new technologically-mediated moment in the long-term hollowing-out of the social contract that sustained at least Western economies and societies in the post-1945 era which, along with erosions of the welfare state, makes for an increasingly insecure existence as I have written about several times on this blog. But although the technology may be new, the idea, and its consequences, are not: in very many ways it is reminiscent of the ‘putting-out system’ of the early industrial period (and still to be found in many parts of the world today). In this system subcontracting to individuals and families working within their homes was a way of bypassing the restrictions of the medieval guild system.

Of course the idealised image of uberfication is one in which people have complete flexibility of work and complete control of their destinies with no manager telling them what to do. And that may fine for some people, especially when they are young and healthy. But as a general model of employment it means low wages, no security and no protections. Stripped of its technological glitz it means a life rather like that depicted in the long poem written by Thomas Hood in 1843, The Song of the Shirt, which is about the putting-out system in the garment trade. The link to the full text is here, but just to quote the closing stanza:

Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,--
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!--
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!

I began my last post with a reference to the saying that history always repeats itself but never in the same way. Here, I will finish with another aphorism, usually attributed (in a number of variants) to the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Lessons of history

History repeats itself, but never in the same way. I’ve been thinking about this saying (for which I can’t find a definitive source) as the British Labour Party has been tying itself into knots over whether to oppose the government’s welfare cuts. On one side of the argument is the proposition that the cuts are wrong and unnecessary. On the other that Labour lost the last election and should accept the prevailing, or anyway government, view that ‘hard choices’ must be made to balance the budget.

The historical resonance is with the early 1930s and the formation of the National Government or coalition of the Labour leadership, the Tories and the Liberals, which split the Labour Party at the time. For sure, this is not a repeat of that but in recent years very similar notions have swirled around. The formation of a Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2010 in the ‘national interest’ echoed the 1931 National Government, and the current debate has a similar flavour – some idea that a ‘responsible’ Labour Party must accept the terms of the Tories. And, as at that time, the axes of the debate are those of balancing the government budget and the concomitant need for spending, especially welfare cuts. It was the call to cut unemployment benefit by 20% that broke the Labour government in 1931. Moreover, the popular narrative that Labour had been responsible for the 1929 financial crisis (aka the Wall Street Crash) mirrors the narrative that holds Labour responsible for the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

So although not precisely the same, there is a great similarity between British politics now and then. I don’t know whether that is comforting or not. In one way, it is depressing to see the same pre-Keynesian nonsense about balanced budgets being trotted out all these decades after his work in exactly the same way as it was before, and not just in Britain but in relation to Greece and other countries. There are no certainties in economics but we do in broad terms know that Keynes was right, which is why even the IMF have indicated that the EU plan for Greece won’t work (and we might also look to Keynes’ assessment of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to see why the entire approach to Greece is storing up disaster).

In another way, the parallel is encouraging, at least in the parochial context of the British Labour Party. For it does show that even from a deeply unpopular and unpromising trough it is possible to recover. In 1931, Labour lost 225 seats and was reduced to a rump of 52, a far worse result than in 2015. But 14 years later they won a landslide majority and created the welfare state that, even now, shapes the British polity. Of course I know that in the intervening years there was the small matter of the Second World War but as business leaders and textbooks never tire of telling us, we live in times of unparalleled change – so who knows what the situation may be in 2029.

At the very least what history might teach us, imperfect teacher though it is, is that change happens not through the ‘realistic’ acceptance of the supposedly immutable truths of the present time but through a radical re-imagination of those truths. In Britain, that happened perhaps three times in the twentieth century: the Liberal landslide of 1906, the Labour landslide of 1945 and the Tory landslide of 1979. There was a fourth, botched, possibility in the 1997 Labour landslide of 1997. That possibility remains, pregnant, to be grabbed until it is forced upon us. As will happen not (I hope) because of world war but by the accumulated misery of unfilled roads; moribund emergency services, closed libraries, courts and nurseries; delayed operations or even the suicides engendered by welfare cuts.

The core of this is the democratic politics is about both representation and persuasion. It is not enough for Labour (or any other democratic political party) to represent the views of some or many people; it must also seek to change those views, through persuasion. That means believing in something and fighting for it; and if that belief is rejected then fighting again. In the end, that is how change happens.

Strivers and scroungers

In this post, I want to pick up on an oblique point in my previous one. I mentioned there how a very potent political trope is to draw a distinction between scroungers and strivers. Scroungers, here, are those who do not work and rely on welfare benefits. Strivers are those who are in work and, by implication, are seeking to better themselves through work. I was reminded of this not just in writing my post on Greece but also, today, by an announcement by the British government that inheritance tax liability is to be reduced. It’s the justification that is relevant here, because it was couched in the argument that “hard-working families” who had saved to buy a home and improve it should be able to pass the fruits on to their children rather than to the tax collector.

This term – “hard-working families” – has become a cliché in the political lexicon. It’s a strange expression in and of itself. What is a hard-working family? One in which every family member (and how extensive does it have to be?) works hard? Are single people who work hard part of it? Should the idle rich be taxed more? What about those who go to work every day but slack off?

In relation to inheritance tax it seems especially strange. The new policy is aimed primarily at those whose houses have become very valuable, and in the UK housing market, especially in London, they have indeed become very valuable. But this has nothing to do with work, or saving, or home improvements. All you have to do is sit there and it happens. Recently it was reported that in many parts of Sothern England house price inflation earns homeowners more than they receive in wages. So there’s no particular virtue, and certainly no hard work, or even any work at all, involved in accruing an inheritance based on home ownership to pass on. Moreover, what of the recipients of this inheritance? Manifestly, they have not put in any hard work at all. So why, if hard work is the cardinal value, should they receive anything?

The counterpart, of course, is an equally incoherent – and very longstanding - narrative of the deserving and undeserving poor. Indeed, in the same package as the inheritance tax changes are further restrictions on welfare articulated through exactly the same distinction. Ironically, many of those who will suffer as a result are, indeed, hard-working families in receipt of tax credits to top up low wages. Nothing new there, either: the Speenhamland system of the early 19^th Century was similarly a subsidy for low wages, as the Poor Law Report of 1834 demonstrated.

And those most poignantly affected by welfare changes are the disabled. Here, again, a narrative of the deserving and undeserving is in play, with endless stories about fraudulent claims from the ‘bad back brigade’ accompanying sentimental and self-congratulatory statements of sympathy for the ‘genuinely’ disabled, which seems to mean those who are so self-evidently handicapped that even the most stony-hearted cannot deny it. Or perhaps not, since in some cases people who cannot walk, talk or feed themselves are being called to the job centre. At all events, plans to shift disabled people on to jobseekers allowance suggest a belief that they are ‘shirkers’ and not ‘strivers’. Yet when it comes to migration, the narrative reverses. Here, the problem is the strivers – the economic migrants – pretending to be asylum seekers, or in other words ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. These strivers are to be rounded up into detention centres and deported pronto. Whereas, in a long-remembered phrase, unemployed workers should get 'on their bike' and look for work, an idea espoused by the government as recently as 2011, those who get on the boat (and risk their lives) to do so are the most dangerous of scroungers.  

There is no logic in any of this, unless it is the logic of spite and division. Which is not to say that work – whether ‘hard’ or not – is unimportant. On the contrary, work is massively important both economically and in terms of self-worth and identity. But work bestows or enables value and identity; it does not express it, nor does it disclose any fundamental morality. The idea that it does is deeply rooted, though, enabling the idea that poverty and suffering reflect individual moral failure rather than systemic inequality or just dumb luck. Over a hundred years ago, the founding figure of organization studies, Max Weber, wrote one of the most important books about modern society, a book that influenced me deeply - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It still has much - all too much - to say about the contemporary world.

C.P. Snow and the drama of administration

Some years, in fact almost two decades, ago I wrote an academic paper about what the novels of C.P Snow could tell us about management and organizations (Grey, 1996). Little-cited and presumably little-read, it has sunk without trace but I was thinking about it again because I have just come across an old (and largely excellent) TV adaptation of his novels and have been watching the DVD.

Snow is nowadays an almost forgotten novelist, but in the 1950s and 1960s was both popular and widely admired, even being tipped for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is most remembered now for his 1959 lecture on The Two Cultures of arts and science, and the gap between them; a lecture savagely attacked by the now perhaps even more obscure but then gargantuan figure F.R. Leavis. Actually I find this rather uninteresting, whereas his almost entirely forgotten 1961 Harvard lectures on Science and Government are fascinating. Anyway his main novelistic achievement was the eleven volume Strangers and Brothers series, and it is the adaptation of this that I have been watching. Over three million words long, Snow's is one of the most remarkable roman-fleuve ever produced in the English language, standing alongside his hero's Trollope's Barchester novels and his contemporary Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time sequence.

Snow (1905-1980) started life as a physicist but subsequently became a senior civil servant, involved amongst other things in the British atomic bomb project, and later a government minister for technology in the 1960s. All of this and more gets fictionalised in the novel sequence. I have read, and re-read, his novels since I was in my teens and I suspect that part of the reason for my interest in organizations stems from this. I was thrilled when researching a book on Bletchley Park to discover that Snow had been involved in recruiting some of its staff.

The novels are at least in part about the drama of administration, with an emphasis on decisions made within closed groups – sometimes a Cambridge College, as in perhaps his best novel The Masters, other times government – and the meetings, negotiations and small-p political manoeuvring that surrounds them. He coined the phrase, and used it as the title of one his novels, ‘corridors of power’ which has now entered the language and which sums up this theme of his work.

It may seem odd to call this a drama. After all, administration conjures up anything other than a dramatic image. Yet Snow shows how within the mundane transactions of organizational life, drama may be found. And this is not just about personal interactions. Always in Snow there is a mixture of the personal and the big-P Political: for example the Cold War in Corridors of Power (about an attempt to pursue a policy of British nuclear disarmament) and The New Men (about the development of the British atomic bomb in and after the Second World War).

There are many aspects of the novels which are of interest in terms of organizations, especially the treatment of small, powerful groups, which I explored in that 1996 article. Perhaps especially interesting is his repeated view that policy and strategy arise not from the grand designs of leaders but from what he called – using a physics metaphor – the Brownian motion of a myriad of minor decisions. That is a useful corrective to the current lionization of leadership and a validation of close attention to the detailed processes of organizational life.

The context of Snow’s novels is rather dated and specific – they depict a slice of English (not even British) life in the mid-20^th century which is now rather obscure. Even so, my own experiences both in Cambridge, when I worked there, and in Whitehall, where I have sometimes had peripheral involvement, suggest that perhaps not so much has changed, at least in England. And beyond that many of his insights, particularly into small-group interactions, transcend time and place.

I don’t suppose that Snow was a great novelist, and he will probably never reclaim his former status as a popular novelist and public intellectual. Nevertheless, anyone wanting to understand either English society in the mid-20^th century or, more pertinently to this blog, the more-or-less timeless nature of organizational power-play could do no better than to read Snow’s novels.

 

References

Grey, C. (1996) ‘C.P. Snow’s Fictional Sociology of Management and Organizations’, Organization 3, 1: 61-83.

For an introduction to Snow’s novels, see:

Tredell, N. (2012) C.P. Snow. The Dynamics of Hope. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

For what is still the best analytical account of Snow and his novels see:

Ramanathan, S. (1978) The Novels of C.P. Snow. London: Macmillan.

Surprisingly, there has been no proper biography of Snow, but his brother’s memoir is worth reading:

Snow, P. (1982) Stranger and Brother. A Portrait of C.P Snow. London: Macmillan.