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.

Required reading

Over Christmas I have been reading Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Number 11. Like John Lanchester’s Capital, which I ‘reviewed’ on this blog, it can be read as a ‘state of the nation’ novel (Coe even makes a joke about this) and, via five interlocking sub-stories, it reprises some of the themes of his earlier books, especially What a Carve Up! and The Closed Circle. Overall, I would characterise these themes as being about the unwinding of the post-war welfare state and its accompanying collectivism, and the ongoing consequences of individualization, privatization and – a key one in Number 11 – monetization (in the sense of putting monetary value on things like education which might otherwise be regarded as valuable in themselves).

The title Number 11 carries several resonances: the address of Britain’s finance minister; the number of the circular bus route that a character rides so as to be warm without heating her home; the number of subterranean floors being dug below an uber-rich family’s London home to extend their already commodious residence. For it’s a satire – sometimes almost judderingly heavy-handed, other times almost painfully delicate – that often addresses some of the themes of this blog, especially those of inequality, tax avoidance, the pitfalls of choice, the politics of ‘austerity’ and, even, the perils of twitter.

The section that spoke most profoundly and personally to me is entitled ‘The Crystal Garden’ which tells of the doomed attempt of Roger, an Oxford academic of about my age, to track down a short film he had seen as a child:

“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)

It’s important to understand that this isn’t about nostalgia, or at least not just about nostalgia. It’s about a rupture that animates – in very different ways – the politics of both nationalists and socialists across, at least, Europe. In France, Les Trentes Glorieuses, Jean Fourastié’s term for the 1945-1975 period of economic growth and social security, captures the same sentiment that Coe expresses. This rupture is described in my book in terms of the shift in the 1970s to the new capitalism (pp. 104-120) and so, of course, present in the book I most heavily draw on in that section, Richard Sennett’s (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. And it’s no coincidence that at the heart of Roger’s memory was “waiting for his father to come home from work – from the same place he worked for forty years” (Coe, 2015: 176) because stable employment was at the heart of the economic and social security of those years. As I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog, the erosion of that security constitutes the most pressing political issue of the present time in Western societies, in ways well-captured (for all that it is startlingly inattentive to the ‘critical management’ literature that says much the same thing) by Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism.

We can understand this in conventional political terms: the social democratic consensus of North and West Europe and, to an extent, the USA in the post-war decades was about the best economic and social arrangement that has so far existed (even if it did not always seem so at the time). But perhaps it is better understood without thinking in terms of economic or political theory. Bill Bryson’s humorous memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid expresses it well as regards the United States; David Lodge’s novel Nice Work captures the beginning of it in the UK, especially as regards academic life. And Coe’s book is the latest example of the powerful way that art and humour can illuminate social science.

In a somewhat related vein, another Christmas read was Douglas Board’s novel MBA. This is not nearly so well-written (but, to be fair, whereas Coe is a well-established professional novelist Board is a coaching and leadership consultant who has turned his hand to fiction) and it’s a fairly clumsy satire, if not farce, of business schools. Still, it does hit what are for me some familiar targets in terms of the corporatization and even corruption of the contemporary business school, including the hubris of high-flying deans (see Parker, 2014 for a real world example). And there are some acute insights along the way about, for example, the enmeshment of business schools and politicians in the marketization of the public sector that also get a look-in in Coe’s book. MBA certainly isn’t a great or even a good novel, but it’s the first that I know of that tackles the business school. I feel sure that this setting is ripe for the attention of a latter-day Malcolm Bradbury or David Lodge campus novel.

The joy of escapism

In the hope of lightening the mood compared with my previous post, and indeed with the increasing darkness of the current news agenda, today I offer something completely different. At the risk of slight personal embarrassment I want to share with readers of this blog some things I have written for a very different blog, namely the World of Blyton. This is one of a number of sites devoted to the life and work of the British children’s author Enid Blyton.

Although sometimes derided for her writing skills and criticised for her sexist, racist and classist descriptions, Blyton was the best-selling children’s author of the twentieth century and is still the all-time eighth best-selling writer of fiction. Anyway, I’m not particularly concerned to try to defend or attack her reputation. For me, it’s mainly just that I read her books as a child and so they retain a cosy and comforting feel. In this way they are indeed an antidote to and escape from current events. For that matter, I find a certain magic in re-reading many other authors I read as a child. And, more generally, I think that re-reading is underrated. I routinely re-read novels (less so non-fiction) and gain much from it. Occasionally, with really special books, I re-read them immediately I finish them, a recent example being Allan Massie’s stunning moral meditation A Question of Loyalties. Some novels, such as those of C.P. Snow, I have read perhaps a couple of hundred times without tiring of them.

Anyway, back to Blyton. On my World Of Blyton contributor page you will find some eleven posts written between 2014 and 2015. Most are book reviews, one explains why I love re-reading her work, one is about how reading her books in translation has helped me learn French and one – my favourite – is a silly joke that I can’t begin to summarise here.

Is there any connection to organization studies? Well, yes there is. Some years ago I wrote a book chapter (Grey, 1998) about the ways that organization is represented in traditional children’s literature. I focussed on three series of books: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. It has sunk almost without trace, but the argument was that such books are an aspect in socializing children into how the organizational world works. In the case of the Famous Five series, I suggested that it offered a template of the patriarchal group.

I think that there is some mileage in that argument, but the truth, of course, is that I wrote the chapter as a way of writing about some books that I loved, just as I did for Snow's novels (Grey, 1996), academic journals being more forgiving in those days. I also love, and occasionally re-read, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, of which in 1961 Evelyn Waugh said: “Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in”.

That sentiment captures my own feeling about Wodehouse, and Blyton and all the others. Escapist it may be, but from time to time as the guns fire and the bombs explode a little escapism is nothing to be ashamed of.

References

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

Grey, C. (1998) ‘Child’s Play: Representations of Organization in Children’s Literature’ in Hassard, J. & Holliday, R. (eds) Organization/Representation: Work and Organizations in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 131-148

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.

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.

Murderous certainty

I can’t claim that there is much of connection between this post and the themes of my book, with which this blog is supposed to be concerned, but at the moment I can’t think of much else except the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Like almost everyone else I am shocked and revolted by it. Above and beyond the shock and revulsion that would accompany any such event, what is particularly disgusting is that it was an attack on free expression, which is central to democracy and to a free society.

Over Christmas, I read Lamentation, the latest of C.J. Sansom’s excellent ‘Shardlake’ series, set in England under Henry VIII in a period of massive religious conflict. The book, which is soundly based in historical fact (Sansom started life as an historian), opens with a graphic account of the burning at the stake of Anne Askew for heresy. Prior to this she had been grotesquely tortured. I mention this because the vicious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants (and shades within these two camps) in Europe at this time seems to me to parallel those between Sunni and Shia Muslims and between radical Islamism and secular society at the present time. And it reminds us that the post-Enlightenment freedoms of which Charlie Hebdo can be seen to be an heir were won against a background every bit as bloody as today’s conflicts.

Those freedoms are, for sure, of a complex sort. We don’t allow untrammelled freedom of expression – for example in terms of hate speech or incitement to violence. Indeed, although I haven’t seen it remarked on in the media at all, Charlie Hebdo has an interesting history in this regard. It was re-named this way when it re-launched following its banning by the French State for satirising reactions to the death of former President Charles de Gaulle.

Inevitably, in the aftermath, there has been a mass of comment. Many have called for Muslims to condemn the attack, failing to recognize that just about every Muslim spokesperson has done so. Somehow, there is a sense that no matter how much the majority of peaceful and law-abiding Muslims may condemn, it is never enough to satisfy the demands.  In the context of Europe-wide anti-Muslim sentiment, such as the German Pinstripe movement, that is dangerous. It is also hypocritical.  When Anders Breivik massacred  77 people in Norway in 2011, calling himself a Christian and citing several mainstream journalists who had criticised ‘multi-culturalism’, there was no comparable call for every Christian or every opponent of multi-culturalism to make public statements of this sort. In fact much comment at the time was semi-apologist, saying that his actions, whilst reprehensible, showed the dangers of multi-culturalism.

The same voices are being heard now, suggesting that the Charlie Hebdo outrage is somehow linked to multi-culturalism. This rather neglects the fact that the killers and the radical Islamist ideology they represent is the most resolutely mono-culturalist that can be imagined. Like the dogmatists of Europe’s religious conflicts they insist that there is only one truth, one law, one way of behaving, one way of worshipping. To that end they have massacred not just cartoonists in Paris but schoolchildren in Pakistan, amongst many other abominations.

We need to see Breivik and his apologists and Islamist terrorists and their apologists as two sides of the same coin. Like those who burnt heretics they insist on one truth and one culture. They are filled with a murderous certainty. Now, more than ever, it is important to defend the virtues of plurality and tolerance; of relativism rather than absolutism. To counterpose certainty not with another certainty, but with doubt.  No one ever killed another person on the principle that ‘it depends how you look at things’ or 'there are two sides to every story'.

Whatever debates, comments and events follow the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is important to remember its victims:

Stephane Charbonnier, 48

Jean Cabut, 68

Georges Wolinski, 80

Bernard Velhac, 58

Bernard Maris, 68

Phillipe Honore, 73

Mustapha Ourad

Elsa Cayat

Michel Renaud

Frederic Boisseau, 42

Ahmed Merabat

Franck Brinsolaro

Murdered in Paris, Wednesday January 7^th 2015.

Reflections on power

I have been re-reading George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which I refer to in the book (pp.71-2). This I think is a particularly incisive fictionalization of organization, more particularly totalitarian political organization, and I suppose that no novel, except perhaps Kafka’s The Trial, has so insinuated itself into popular consciousness of ‘organization theory’.

The theme of totalitarianism is a tantalising one when thinking about organizations, because such arrangements seem to represent ‘limit cases’ – both exaggerating but also illustrating ‘normal’ organizations. But this understanding seems flawed if we take Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust (discussed in the book, p.23) seriously. For this implies not that totalitarianism or, more specifically, the organization of the holocaust was an anomaly but that it was an expression of a pre-existing and omnipresent tendency within modernity. Bauman’s analysis seeks to draw a continuity between modern and ‘holocaustic’ modes of the social, and, within that, modern and holocaustic modes of, specifically, organization are central. For the capacity to organize genocide industrially seems to be central to Bauman’s thesis that the Holocaust was a modern phenomenon. Specifically, it represented the ultimate triumph of instrumental rationality – the deployment of morally blind means towards horrific ends. So we can say that for organization theorists, the organization of the Holocaust should not represent a ‘limit case’ or a perversion but rather a crucial moment in the elaboration of organization.

But considering totalitarianism in terms of instrumental rationality, as Bauman’s thesis might urge us to do, is inadequate because of the particular theorisation of power which it embodies. Within instrumentalism, power has a particular meaning – as a means achieve ends. However totalitarianism entails something even worse. Theorisations of power have traditionally specified either where power comes from or what power leads to. The idea that power comes from somewhere is most manifest in the well known bedrock of organization theory: French and Raven’s bases of power. So power comes from possession of certain resources or capacities (coercion, reward, position, knowledge, personality/charisma), and there are numerous articulations of basically the same idea. The idea that power goes somewhere is present in all the various ways that power is linked to interests. Here power is used to serve some purpose – the pursuit of interests (sectoral, class, gender etc). In another variation, an interest-based theory of power might see it as flowing from interests as well as being directed towards the furtherance of interests.

What is different about totalitarian/Orwellian notions of power? This is the crucial point. Here, power is conceived of as neither coming from nor aimed towards anything other than itself. In other words, power is an end in itself. In Nineteen Eight-Four:

“Power is not a means, it is an end … the object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” (Orwell, 1949:  264)

And this was prescient if we consider Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s extraordinary analysis* of ‘moral life in the concentration camps’, which I urge you to read if you have not done so, where he says that:

“The aim of power is power; the enjoyment it offers is not of the material sort” (Todorov, 2000: 184)

Now, if we regard totalitarianism as a limit case, then this is not of general interest. But if as Bauman suggests it is an immanent, rather than an atypical, case then it is of huge interest. I think that this is so, and one way it is revealed is in the motivation of the archetypal chief executive or political leader:

Q: What motivates you?

A: I love the feeling that I can make a difference

Is this not the everyday equivalent of the totalitarian case: the point of power is (the sensation of) power itself? This sensation of power is only realizable if another feels and experiences your power, whether through happiness and pleasure or, as in the concentration camps, through pain and suffering. Clearly this contains the familiar irony (described most elaborately in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic) that the powerful are dependent upon others for their power. Revealingly, Todorov reports that the most vicious treatment was meted out to those who did not quickly enough show submission. This suggests that the full sensation of power is only possible where resistance is both met and overcome. He also remarks that this desire for power seems insatiable in that it was endlessly repeated with new entrants to the camps. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien makes a similar point when torturing Winston Smith – both that the same scene will endlessly be played out and that the image of the future is ‘a boot stamping on the human face forever’. There is no end to power in two senses: it has no purpose and it’s work is never finished.

The poet W. H. Auden wrote, in his 1939 Epitaph on a Tyrant, as follows:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

It is a damning indictment of those who use power, instrumentally, in pursuit of an ideal. But it is also a terrible reminder of the narcissism of power; of what happens when power has no object but itself: and when he cried the little children died.

 

*Todorov, T. (2000). Facing the Extreme. Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. London: Phoenix.

Under the microscope

Issues of privacy are a hot topic at the moment, mainly in terms of the way that governments and corporations may access and our data. The debate there is about the privacy of citizens and consumers - but what about employees? In the book (p.73) I talk about surveillance in the workplace and remark that after initial enthusiasm for the use of Foucault's discussion of the Panoptic prison in organization studies, more recently authors have been rather sniffy and dismissive of it. In particular, it is seen as too totalizing, too inattentive to resistance.


What, then, to make of Hitachi's new Business Microscope device? This allows employees' movements to be tracked - something that has long existed in 'smart buildings' - but also monitors who they speak to, for how long and how 'energetically', how close they stand to each other, how much they contribute in meetings and many other things as well. The rationale, of course, is greater productivity and efficiency plus the obligatory humanistic nod to checking on employees' health and well-being.


The notion of privacy has less traction here than in the debates about consumers and citizens, for in what sense does privacy, or the right to privacy, exist at work? When at work, what part of us is not the legitimate purview of management? It was long ago ceded that organizations could legitimately manage our motivations and emotions, so why should anything be off limits? If you are at work, doesn't your employer have the right to know what you are doing and feeling?


Indeed, there is a fashionable school of thought that says that privacy was a passing historical moment, sandwiched between traditional pre-industrialism and technological high capitalism; an interlude of sentimental humanism. I understand and feel attracted to that argument in that I also think that what constitutes personhood (and, thence, privacy) is historically variable (and, again, argue that in the book, pp. 46-51). But it is a bit too glib, as well. Privacy may be a specific historical construct but it continues to have much purchase. Indeed, the current controversies about privacy would hardly be 'controversial' were this not so.


From this perspective, privacy can serve as the basis of resistance - that is, we resist by trying to hold private to ourselves certain thoughts and feelings in the face of surveillance. George Orwell's 1984 is an obligatory reference here: even the omniscient Big Brother engendered resistance from Winston Smith as he sought to guard his thoughts and his love affair from the telescreens. I'm not sure that this is a comforting, though, given Winston's fate and, more prosaically, the way that in organizations such resistances typically act as the spur for further and more intense surveillance.


But what if the most effective resistance lay not in trying to close ourselves to surveillance but in being more fully open than our surveyors can bear? What if we insisted on our right not to privacy but to 'tell all' - to speak of the truths, mundane and dramatic, of our lives?  To say to those who demand that we bring our 'whole selves' to work: 'very well, then, here it is, warts and all'? So, for example, in meetings we would blurt out what, presumably, most of us often feel: that we are bored, preoccupied by domestic worries, or afflicted by sciatica or whatever it might be. To disclose not less but more than the 'Business Microscope' can discern? If surveillance is not to be thought of as a one way street, how might it work to overwhelm those who want to know everything by letting them know, precisely, that? To make it inefficient to be known?

1914 and 2014

There is beginning to be a large amount of media attention given to the approaching centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This led me over the Christmas holidays to re-read Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth where she recounts her experience as a volunteer nurse in that war, during which her fiancé, her beloved brother, and many of her friends were killed. One of the striking things in her account is how readily those men went to their fates. Indeed not just readily but happily, relishing their chance to serve. A hundred years ago, in Britain and many other places, it was self-evident that the verities of Church, Nation and Empire were immutable. Now that seems, to most of us, not just misguided and wrong, but silly and absurd – and deadly. It is hard, now, to see the First World War as anything but a pointless slaughter.

That’s not so surprising. In the past they thought their realities solid. Now we see that they were not. So what, then, of those things that we ourselves take as being solid reality? Isn’t one lesson of history to be sceptical about these? It may seem bathetic to shift from talking of war and death to talking about work organizations, but death is present in these, too, sometimes literally as I wrote about in my post on suicide. An excellent new book by Nancy Harding – On Being at Work – talks about how “organizations … murder the selves that might have been” (p.175), meaning that they seek to make us into “zombie-machines” who are less than human, negating our potentials. If that sounds bleak, then read Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s recent book Dead Man Working for a real New Year boost. What both of these books have in common is an understanding of the way that even – no, not even, especially – the kind of humanized, fun workplaces of modern capitalism suck the life out of us by demanding not just our labour but the commitment of our very selves. Something similar, though less nihilistically expressed, is present in the discussion in my book of the post-bureaucratic workplace.

What’s the link with 1914? It’s two-fold. Firstly, in both cases there is a willing embrace of the sacrificing our literal or metaphorical lives. In the workplaces described by Harding and by Cederström and Fleming the tragedy is not that we are forced to be zombies, it is that we accept and welcome it, just like Vera Brittain’s contemporaries accepted and welcomed their assigned fate. Secondly, this is orchestrated through a set of supposedly immutable verities – in the case of the contemporary workplace these might include ideas of the necessity of a ‘global competitive race’, of the implacable reality of ‘the market’, and that ‘change is the only constant’ and so on.

But if we can accept that the solid realities of the past were not what they seemed, then we must accept that the same applies to the solid realities of the present.  We do not need to wait for historians to pass judgment.

Happy New Year!

Capital

I have just finished reading John Lanchester’s novel Capital. Lanchester is also the author of one of the best non-technical account of the financial crisis, Whoops, which I draw on in my book and list in the suggested reading. But he is first and foremost a novelist and his debut novel, The Debt to Pleasure, is one of my favourite books. That is a subtle, delicate meditation on art, cookery and murder; but Capital is more like an essay in sociology. It tells the story of the inhabitants of a London street and the people who work there during the period of the financial crash. The street reflects a common story in London, with property prices having risen to dizzying levels during the neo-liberal era, so that its inhabitants range from the elderly poor, relics of an earlier era, to City bankers and Premier league footballers. Amongst them work a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny, a Zimbawean asylum-seeker parking attendant and a Pakistani family of shopkeepers, reflecting the globalised nature of a city like (and perhaps in particular) London. I suppose that listed in this way the characters sound a little clichéd, and there’s some truth in that, but Lanchester’s narrative is sufficiently skilled to make most of them, at least, feel like real people rather than cardboard cutouts.

This is a big, sprawling novel and it brings to mind some others with similar ambitions. It is a bit less raucous than Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a book which still captures brilliantly the social effects of the New Capitalism. It could perhaps be compared to Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December, although I found it better written. But more than anything else it reminded me of an almost forgotten novel, Norman Collins’ London Belongs to Me (1945). Collins’ book is based on the various occupants of a single house rather than a street, but it shares with Capital a sense of a wide variety of people at a time of transition, namely the period immediately preceding the Second World War.

Like all novels, Capital is open to a variety of interpretations and some obvious ones concern the nature of wealth and inequality. But for me the key motif is that of chance. It is chance that makes those who own the street’s houses into millionaires, chance that determines the outcome of an asylum hearing, an arrest for suspected terrorism, a football injury, the success of an arranged marriage or a date with a stranger, the loss of a job, the growth of a tumour. The inhabitants of the street are brought together by chance, and their lives are also affected by chance.

Much current political discourse stresses not chance but worth. Thus we are invited to think that the unemployed, the poor, asylum seekers and so on suffer by reason of some personal or moral taint: they are lazy, scrounging or bogus. On the other hand, the secure and rich are depicted as being virtuous, prudent and worthy. In the The Bonfire of the Vanities there is a nice line about how when bond traders started to make massive amounts of money in the 1970s they attributed it to the belated recognition of collective talent rather than to an outbreak of dumb luck. That our various fates turn on a knife-edge of luck – where and when we were born, the flukes of our genes and so on – is less appealing. And of course this is all of a piece with neo-liberalism with its emphasis on individual effort and its refusal to consider the social context and formation of individuals. But it is also something with a psychological appeal: if only we can believe that our lives reflect our virtues then we can insure ourselves psychologically against the vagaries of chance. I’m not a bad person, so nothing bad can happen to me.  It’s a kind of secularised version of the idea, analysed in Max Weber’s seminal book The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that wealth is a sign of being pre-destined for heaven. Appealing as it may be, it is nonsense: life’s chances are distributed, sometimes randomly, often politically, but not morally.

A friend of mine once said to me that The Bonfire of the Vanities was not a great novel but it was a good book. I think the same is true of Capital. It's probably not great literature, but, like a much older realist novel, it discloses something about 'the way we live now'.