Your money and your life

The still emerging scandal of the use of Facebook users’ data by Cambridge Analytica for political campaigning has numerous dimensions to it – political, technological, ethical and social. One particular aspect that I find interesting is the idea that users (may) have given their consent to the various ways their data is used by signing up for services. It has apparently long been a truism in the tech world that ‘if the product is free then you are the product’, and on that basis it is claimed that signing up for services is a matter of caveat emptor or ‘buyer beware’ - or should that, in this case, be ‘donor aware’ since the point seems to be that what we should beware of is not buying?

There seems an obvious difficulty with this: how can we make such judgments if we do not know what we are agreeing to? The answer, invariably, is that what is required is greater transparency. However, as Jana Costas and I wrote in our book on secrecy in organizations, using exactly the example of accessing on-line services, transparency is not what it appears to be:

“Indeed, one can even see how increased transparency also entails increased secrecy, as the very proliferation of information makes it easy to hide secrets which get overlooked in the overwhelming torrent of disclosure. For example, consider the ubiquitous ‘terms and conditions’ to which one signs up when using web-based services. These are so detailed and complex that few of us bother to read them, and fewer still will understand them. So we just check the box indicating agreement. If subsequently this causes problems the provider can quite legitimately say that nothing was kept secret and, indeed, that there had been the fullest transparency possible. Yet it is a transparency that obscures rather than reveals.” (Costas & Grey, 2016: 53)

In these circumstances, the idea of a choice being made seems deeply unrealistic. Of course, a ‘hardline’ response would be to say that if people cannot be bothered to read and understand the T&Cs then that is, precisely, their choice. After all, they could simply not sign up to Facebook. In fact, 2.2 billion people worldwide log in to it at least once month, which is getting close to a third of the global population. No one forces them to.

That is true and, personally, I have never had a Facebook account. But it’s increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to exist without signing up to anything at all. It isn’t as if it is just a matter of social media, it is also about the multitude of on-line services that people need to use in some cases including very basic things without which it is impossible to function, including state welfare. The space for an off-line life is becoming very small indeed (generating the new phenomenon of 'cyber insecurity'). No one can, realistically, ‘choose’ to opt out of the entirety of this, even if we have choice about using this or that platform. Nor is it the case (so far as I know) that any on-line provider of anything offers not to collect any data on its users, and that is the case as much for paid for products as for ‘free’ products. Indeed, just browsing websites requires agreement (assumed as given if we continue to browse) to the use of cookies.

Choice and informed decision making in this context are therefore highly precarious, if not meaningless. Apart from the general issue of take-it-or-leave it sign ups to T&Cs, my experience, at least, is that opting out of specific permissions for, for example, receiving marketing materials from companies are often breached. And I frequently receive marketing messages from companies I have never had any contact with which offer the option of unsubscribing – but only if I provide my email address. So I am expected to ‘choose’ to provide data in order to avoid messages that I have never chosen to receive in the first place. Beyond that, my computer and phone are constantly chuntering away doing things that I have no understanding of at all, and constantly nagging me to provide more information about myself (for example my geographical location). There are even cases of phones and other mobile devices continuing to harvest such data despite users having (supposedly) disabled its provision.

Some of these issues are not new in principle. Over 30 years ago I began work on my PhD which was concerned with financial services regulation. Some of the big issues at the time were (as they continue to be) whether people actually understood what they were signing up for when they took out, for example, a life insurance policy, pension, or mortgage. This was all about, in effect, terms and conditions and hidden costs. Associated with this was the question of the sales and marketing tactics used in the industry. And, indeed, in the intervening years we have seen ongoing scandals about the mis-selling of, for example, endowment mortgages and Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) – and, ironically, the subsequent scandals around the pressure selling of PPI compensation claims. The regulation of such matters was, again, primarily conceived of in terms of transparency of information in order to promote ‘informed choice’. Yet this in turn has generated a mass of information which only someone already highly knowledgeable is really in a position to evaluate.

However, the current situation of the mining of on-line data whilst similar in principle is far more extensive in scope. It is all-encompassing in the way that buying a financial product is not, reaching far more deeply into our lives – and also, as the Facebook scandal seems to suggest, into the lives of the people we interact with (that is, Facebook friends). There also seems to be something qualitatively different about the ‘if the product is free then you are the product’ mantra in that whereas it is pretty clear that what, say, a financial advisor is after – your money – what the data wranglers are after seems to be not just your money but your life. 

Reference

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

Holiday reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All about me

Rather shamelessly, my post today is to promote two books of mine that are about to come out. The first is a collection edited with Isabelle Huault, Véronique Perret and Laurent Taskin entitled Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents. Published by Routledge on March 18 (but already available electronically) the idea is a simple one. Critical Management Studies (CMS) is largely dominated by Anglophone writings from Anglo-Scandinavian authors, but it has to some extent been picked up globally. So how does CMS play out in different locales and different linguistic communities?

Part of the issue here is one of travel and translation of ideas; another part is about how CMS perhaps ironically recreates the patterns of domination within ‘mainstream’ management studies. We wanted to capture this in a way that recognized some sense of a ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ but also to problematize that distinction by showing how, for example, CMS may be more fragile in, say, the UK than might be thought and also might be quite radically inflected in, say, Brazil. So there is more going on than a hegemonic centre ‘making’ CMS and a passive margin ‘taking’ CMS (although some of that may be going on, as well).

In a way it’s just a first attempt at a global ‘survey’ of CMS – a first attempt because there are large parts of the world that are not covered, either because there is not much CMS going on, or because we couldn’t find an author to write about it. The countries or regions that are covered are: Australia/New Zealand, Benelux, Canada, China, France, Germanic, Israel, Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, South America, Turkey, UK, USA.

The other book is entirely different. Written with Jana Costas and published by Stanford University Press on 30 March it is called Secrecy at Work. The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life. It’s not in any but the broadest sense a CMS book. Rather it aspires to be a contribution to organizational sociology and theory on a big scale. We argue that secrecy should be added to the standard repertoire of the study of organizations because it is part of the standard repertoire of organizational life. We try to capture the whole gamut of ways that this is so, from trade secrets and restricted access laboratories through to whispered gossip in workplace corridors.

And more than that we try to show how such things create literal and metaphorical architectures of in groups and out groups. Secrecy is an incredibly powerful thing, creating a sense of exclusivity and specialness, but also sometimes a burden amongst those who possess secrets. Meanwhile imaginations, both beneficent and malign, abound amongst those on the outside about what goes on behind closed doors.

So this is, in intent at least, an ambitious book but of course it remains to be seen what others will make of it. Early omens are good. Yiannis Gabriel of Bath University has said that it “sheds brilliant light on an area of organizational life that has … been systematically excluded from organizational theory”. Amanda Sinclair at Melbourne University calls it a “brilliant analysis” whilst Steven Lukes of New York University found it to be “a pioneering, highly readable study; full of insights”. However it ends up being received it’s a book I’m proud of.

Since this post is irretrievably egotistical I will just mention that the manuscript of the fourth edition of ‘A very short etc.’ that is the basis of this blog has now gone to the publisher and should be out at the end of this year or the beginning of next.