Romania's protests

A remarkable victory appears to have been won by anti-corruption demonstrators in Romania. The largest street protests – involving a reported half a million people, that in a country with a total population of 20 million - since the fall of Ceausescu have forced the government to abandon a policy to decriminalise corruption by public officials if the sums involved are less than US$ 48,500. By way of context, average GDP per capita in Romania is about US$ 9,500 (2015 figure, a record high). This policy, derived from a government decree, rather than from parliament, would have had the effect not just of stopping investigations of corruption below the specified level but also releasing from prison thousands of officials already found guilty of such corruption.

Corruption in Romania, as in many other countries, has a long and complex history, and it long predates both the communist and post-communist eras. However, in recent times there have been significant attempts through the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) to tackle the problem, resulting in hundreds of prosecutions and convictions, including that of former Prime Minister Adrian Năstase. Even so, Transparency International’s corruption index rates Romania 57 out of 176 countries (Denmark and New Zealand are joint first in the list, Somalia is at the bottom), making it one of the most corrupt countries in the EU. Unsurprisingly, then, the EU Commission was also strongly opposed to the proposed decree.

Corruption is not just a crime like any other. As its name suggests, it corrodes, deforms and ultimately destroys the moral and legal fabric of civilized society, whether within politics or business organizations (see Burke & Cooper, 2009). Within organization studies, the foundational work of Max Weber shows how one of the distinctive advantages of the rational-legal bureaucracy is to both render illegitimate and to monitor and control corruption. This, indeed, is one of the ethically distinctive features of such bureaucracies (see du Gay, 2000). The Romanian protestors are absolutely right to see corruption as a foundational, fundamental issue.

At a time when so much is happening in the world that seems to be beyond our control, it is heartening to see that peaceful protest can influence political decisions. People can, still, make a difference. In particular, the success of these protests gives hope to the beleaguered cosmopolitans in what I have described elsewhere as the new politics of cosmopolitans and locals. In the UK, with Brexit, the US, with Trump, and in many other countries such as France, Germany and Hungary populist localism is in the ascendant. But the Romanian protests can be understood as a revolt of the cosmopolitans. According to Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Professor of Democracy Studies at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the former leader of Romania’s anticorruption Coalition for a Clean Parliament: “… the people of deep, poor, dependent Romania nevertheless returned the families of their corrupt patron politicians to parliament, as they hope for more redistributive policies in return. In contrast, the crowds in the big cities are made of English-speaking Romanians working in multinationals and NGOs”.

The conjunction of cosmopolitan Romanians and the EU Commission is a reminder that, whatever populist rhetoric suggests, these are not some out of touch establishment bent on doing down the people. On the contrary, populist localism benefits not the poor and marginalised but corrupt political elites (in the genuine sense of the term). The most important guarantor of universal well-being is the rule of law, which is why the independent judiciary are under such attack in Brexit Britain and in Trump’s America for insisting that governments remain within the law. The successful demand by the Romanian protestors that their officials must be subject to the rule of law is a remarkable and timely inspiration to countries around the world and, especially, to the cosmopolitans currently at the lash end of populist localism.

References

Burke, R.J. & Cooper, C.L. (eds.) Research Companion to Corruption in Organizations. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009.

Du Gay, P. In Praise of Bureaucracy. Weber, Organization and Ethics. London: Sage, 2000.

Willing robots

I posted recently about the growing possibilities for replacing human workers with robots, but alongside that it’s possible to discern a growing ‘robotization’ of human workers. That thought was prompted by a recent article by the excellent journalist John Harris about employee monitoring. Harris discusses the soon to be released film The Circle based upon a 2013 novel of the same name by Dave Eggers. I have not read it, but apparently it depicts the dystopian world of a high-tech corporation where:

“… privacy and autonomy count for almost nothing. Under a veneer of feelgoodism, employees are complicit in their own constant monitoring and a system of endless appraisal by their peers, who feed into a system called Participation Rank – or PartiRank, for short.”

Harris goes on to discuss real life counterparts of this, including the ‘Humanyze’ system of ‘people analytics’ which tracks and records employee movements and interactions, biometric data and so on. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear of this, as back in February 2014 I wrote about the Hitachi Business Microscope which has very similar functions.

The theme of workplace surveillance has been very widely explored within organization studies for at least 25 years, especially under the influence of Foucauldian analysis, and I discuss it at some length in my book (pp. 72-77). Yet we should not dismiss it as ‘old hat’, not least because of the ever-advancing technological capacities to extend surveillance.

Alongside the technology, there seems to be a growing acceptance and normalization of its use, so that (as Foucault recognized of surveillance and disciplinary power in general) those subject to it welcome it rather than experience it as intrusive. As the Circle Corporation sloganizes: “Secrets are lies; sharing is caring; privacy is theft”.

The obligatory reference to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly seems necessary, but the ‘feelgoodism’ of contemporary surveillance is rather different to the austere, monochrome ambience of Orwell’s Oceania. It resonates more with Jacques Donzelot’s (1991) thought-provoking essay ‘Pleasure in Work’. Donzelot’s argument is that work was being re-imagined as a “means towards self-realization” (p. 251) as a reaction against the effects of the drive for productivity in the workplace.

Yet the contemporary harnessing of ‘feelgoodism’ is different in that it seeks to re-inscribe productivity into pleasure. That is to say, pleasure is not the antidote to techniques of enhancing productivity but is itself a technique to do so, what organizational theorist André Spicer calls ‘the cult of compulsory happiness’.

Harris concludes by saying that “what all this means is pretty obvious. On the way to being replaced by a robot, you will have to become one”, and I have some agreement with that. However, in co-opting pleasure for and securing subservience to productivity, the kind of robots we are suppose to become are oxymorons like the ‘willing slaves’ described by both Madeleine Bunting (2011) and Andrew Scott (1994). In being willing robots we are simultaneously robots and that one thing that robots cannot be – willing, in all senses of the word: cheerfully prepared and possessed of choice and purpose.

The centrality of productivity to contemporary economic discourse is pointed up by the consultation document on its industrial strategy released by the UK government today. The longstanding weakness of UK productivity by international standards is the central theme of this strategy and throughout the document it is linked to the need to work ‘not harder but smarter’ (p.13) and to new technologies, including robotics (p.63). Like everything else in British politics at the moment it is refracted through Brexit, so that the opening preface from the Prime Minister declares that the vote to leave the EU was also a vote to “change the way our country works forever” (p.3).

It strikes me as unlikely that those who voted for Brexit realised that they had also voted to be replaced by robots or themselves to become willing robots – after all, neither this nor, for that matter, industrial strategy were on the ballot paper - but if this turns out to be the case it underscores that the exercise of human will is less predictable than the operation of robots, so that the choices we make may lead to consequences we never envisaged.

References

Bunting, M. (2011) Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruining our lives. London: Harper Collins.

Donzelot, J. (1991) ‘Pleasure in Work’ in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in governmentality, pp 251-280. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Scott, A. (1994) Willing Slaves? British workers under human resource management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Reflections on failure

It has become a truism of at least some parts of the research literature on leadership that to focus on successful leaders is to neglect the importance of the other side of leadership, namely followership (see Uhl-Bien et al, 2014 for a summary). Less discussed, so far as I know, is the other side of success, namely failure.

This thought was prompted by the US Presidential election result, where much attention has focussed on Trump’s success but less on Clinton’s failure. What does it feel like to fail, especially when coming so close to success? A clue may be in Hillary Clinton’s exhausted-looking appearance since the election and her statement that since her defeat that there have been times when “she never wanted to leave the house again”.

It is generally the case that when leaders – whether in politics or business – fail they disappear from public view. They don’t want to be seen and we, apparently, do not wish to see them (perhaps especially if we were their followers, as if their shame has become ours). And whatever prior success they may have had, their names become forever associated with, and their lives defined by, the failure with which their careers ended.

I suppose there are some exceptions to this. Leadership theory seems always sooner or later (usually sooner) to mention Churchill, and he is an example of someone who came back from failure and isolation to lead wartime Britain. Or, to take another stock icon, this time from business, Steve Jobs having been forced out of Apple in 1985 came back in 1997 to successfully lead the company again. But such cases are rare, I think. In general, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

The stigma of failure is profound. There are many books about successful leaders, very few about those who fail even though these might yield more valuable insights. Or, if the maxim that “all political careers end in failure” is true then perhaps success and failure are not the opposites that one might suppose. But the issue is wider than that of leaders. In the US Presidential election (as with Brexit) much was made of how the result reflected the vote of those who had lost out from and been left behind by globalization. I’ve written elsewhere about my scepticism of this explanation, but acknowledged that it is partially true. And to the extent that it is true, it must partly be to do with the anger induced by failure.

For to have ‘lost out’ and ‘been left behind’ is surely a deeply hurtful experience. In the US, where the ideology that anyone can be a success ('from the log cabin to the White House') is especially strong, being a loser is galling. In a more general way, the idea that was at the core of the western liberal post-war settlement that if you ‘worked hard and did the right thing’ security and success were available makes it humiliating if you have done these things and yet find yourself a failure. All of this becomes even more humiliating if, every hour of the day, you see media images of the rich and successful, and adverts for a lifestyle that you can never have.

Of course there is no automatic association between failure and humiliation. But when winners take all, and are lauded as they do so, and failure is absolute and stigmatic it is very likely also to be humiliating. Humiliation is a complex and powerful emotion, which may provoke hatred of oneself and/or of others, anger and violence in both inter-personal (Walker & Knauer, 2011) and political (Fattah & Fierke, 2009) relations. One way it may be assuaged is, indeed, a matter of leadership. As Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ had it, both triumph and disaster are imposters. The etymological twin of humiliation is humility. Perhaps if the successful exhibited more humility, failure would be less humiliating?
 

References

Fattah, K., & Fierke, K. M. (2009), ‘A clash of emotions: The politics of humiliation and political violence in the Middle East’, European Journal of International Relations, 15, 1: 67-93.

Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014), ‘Followership theory: A review and research agenda’, The Leadership Quarterly 25, 1: 83-104.

Walker, J., & Knauer, V. (2011), ‘Humiliation, self-esteem and violence’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 22, 5: 724-741.

Flying too high?

In my book I talk a lot about issues around bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy, and make the point (p.86) that for all that post-bureaucracy arguably allows freedom and innovation it necessarily entails additional risks when the checks and procedures of bureaucracy are done away with.

The British education system has been a particular site for the application of the idea that the shackles of bureaucracy should be thrown off and head teachers – or school leaders as they are more likely to be called within post-bureaucratic discourse – given freedom from rules. Indeed ‘academy schools’ and ‘free schools’ – exempt from the national curriculum and from local authority control – have been a flagship policy since 2010. It is therefore unsurprising that schools have become vulnerable to malpractice. If you strip away controls it does not make malpractice inevitable, but it increases the likelihood that it will occur.

In a post on this blog back in June 2013 I drew attention to the case of a head teacher who was at that time accused of (and in 2014 admitted) misconduct in the form of abuse of funds. This case was significant because she had hitherto been lauded as an outstanding head teacher, headed an academy school, and was widely praised by politicians including Tony Blair.

I'm returning to this theme following the news that on 30 September another free school head, again the subject of Prime Ministerial praise (this time from David Cameron), has been jailed for fraud, along with two other staff members. I wondered if there was a pattern in this and I think there is. An internet search of ‘head teacher fraud’ throws up an enormous number of cases. Some of them do not result in criminal trials (being rather professional malpractice cases), and some which go to trial do not result in convictions – but even in these cases there is evidence of lax accounting and monitoring. Not all of the cases are about money – many seem to be about employing family members who should not have been employed, the kind of nepotism that Weberian bureaucracy stamps out. Many of the cases involve academy and free schools.

It’s important to keep monitoring such cases because the effects of public policy are long term, and it is therefore easy to view them as isolated events rather than systemic changes. There is of course a need for caution here. I do not know whether fraud and malpractice amongst head teachers is more frequent than before schools were given more freedom from central and local government and control. I don’t recall there being so many cases in the past, but that is only an impression. Moreover, the fact that many of the schools involved are free schools or academy schools might just reflect the fact that so many schools now have this status. Nevertheless, the recurring theme in many of the cases is the way that the head teachers involved were able to treat their schools and budgets as personal possessions rather than acting as public custodians, and that I think does reflect the lack of the ‘ethics of due process’ that Paul du Gay (2000) argues are the hallmark of bureaucracy (see p.24-25 of the book).

But I wonder if there is not something else, related but slightly different, going on here. In the specific cases referenced above the head teachers involved had been regarded as exemplary and had attracted high level praise, awards and adulation. In another case, an “inspirational super head” knighted for his services to education (though subsequently stripped of his award) admitted false accounting and in 2013 received a suspended prison sentence.

Is it possible that somehow these things are linked? That those who are lauded are somehow given licence by themselves and by others to behave as they wish, to be above and beyond the normal rules? That is to say, the issue is not just the suspension of bureaucratic, organizational rules of conduct but a kind of Icarus complex (these are related, since, in Weberian terms, the erosion of rational-legal authority and the rise of charismatic authority are linked). Immune, apparently, from the earth-bound constraints, these high-flying leaders - super heads, no less! - fly too close to the sun and crash. I haven’t mentioned the names of the individuals in these cases because, if that analysis is right, the fault lies not so much, or not simply, with those individuals as with those of us who adulate them.

Reference

Du Gay, P. (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy. London: Sage.

Airport blues

I must admit that I do not like air travel and avoid it as much as I can. It’s not the flying – I quite like that, apart from the fact that you can no longer smoke – but all the things around it in terms of airports. Nevertheless, airports are quite fascinating organizationally, as many studies attest (e.g. Knox et al., 2008). They are on the one hand enormous, chaotic, global confluences of highly disparate people and, on the other hand (or maybe the hands are linked), highly regimented local spaces in which people are managed as flows or throughputs.

Because I avoid it I am not a great expert on it, but having just flown (from London Heathrow to Copenhagen) I have been thinking about the experience. None of these thoughts is particularly original, of course. The first of them is, indeed, how managed the process is. You are shepherded through a series of stages from entry to seat. But, contrary to that, it is a strangely unpredictable process. For different airports seem to have completely different rules – for example, sometimes at security you must take your belt off, sometimes your shoes, sometimes both, sometimes neither.

As well as being unpredictable, there is a strange mixture of clarity and lack of clarity. So, along with the regimentation, there are inaudible and, for that matter, incomprehensible boarding announcements. For example, ticketing is now so complex that as you board the plane there are announcements for a multiplicity of different categories of passenger who may, or may not, go through the gate. Perhaps if I were a ‘frequent flyer’ I would understand it, but that in itself suggests that within the global democracy of air travel there are insiders and outsiders.

One way that this is manifest takes us back from the boarding gate to the check in. When I first flew, that meant going to a desk and talking to a person. Now it is a self-serve terminal, and even that seems like the option of those too technologically lame to have responded to the emails and texts inviting you to check in electronically. And at hand for the doubly lame is a uniformed assistant to deal with the hopeless old crocks like me who can’t scan their passport correctly. It all reminded me of something so different as to be an almost laughable comparison to make: going to church and not being sure about when to stand, sit or kneel, or when to make the appropriate gestures.

I’m certainly not alone in my confusion. At the automated passport controls (which, to boast, I managed effortlessly) there were numerous people who got stuck in the booth, either unable to face the camera in the right way or unable to scan their passports in the required manner. As a result, the line through the manned booths moved much faster than through the automated ones, whereas presumably the opposite was intended.

Between check in, security, boarding and passport control there is of course the bulk of the airport, and that would best be described not as an airport but as a shopping mall. The nature of that has also changed in the course of what might, at a stretch, be called my flying career. It used to be about buying duty free goods, but at least within the EU, and at least as long as the UK is within the EU, that function has disappeared. For me, now, all it means is the headaching stench – so much worse than the smoking that is now forbidden – of multiple, promiscuously mixed, perfumes.

All in all, a dispiriting experience. Perhaps its strangest features are the occasional hark back to what is sometimes called ‘the golden age of flying’, meaning, I suppose, the twenty or so years after the Second World War when passenger air travel got going but before mass tourism started. The uniformed staff greeting you on board, for example. When did that last happen to you on a bus, which is what a plane effectively is, when stripped of its trappings?

Reference

Knox, H., O'Doherty, D., Vurdubakis, T., & Westrup, C. (2008). ‘Enacting airports: Space, movement and modes of ordering’, Organization 15, 6: 869-888.

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.

Rotten business

I’ve written previously about the collapse of retailer BHS. This week, some of the grisly details began to emerge, as a parliamentary select committee began its investigations. Particularly striking was evidence given by former executives about its owner Dominic Chappell. Chappell – a thrice bankrupt former racing driver with no retail experience – bought BHS for £1 in in 2015. In the hearing, former finance consultant to BHS Michael Hitchcock called Chappell a Premier League class liar with his fingers in the till whilst Darren Topp, the former CEO, claimed that Chappell threatened to kill him.

Next week, Sir Philip Green, who, having ransacked the business, sold it to Chappell is also due to appear before parliament to answer questions about what happened to the pension fund. He is facing pressure to make good the fund’s £571M deficit and there are calls for him to be stripped of his knighthood.

BHS is now being wound down, with its 11,000 employees facing redundancy, because no buyer could be found. Yet, according to Chappell, there was a willing buyer who was dissuaded from the purchase by Green (something Green denies). This buyer was Mike Ashley, who is now to be called to give evidence about this.

By a strange coincidence, Ashley – founder and owner of retailer Sports Direct – also appeared before a parliamentary committee this week (despite attempts to avoid doing so). Sports Direct stands accused of failing to pay staff the minimum wage, and a litany of unpleasant practices with the effect that:

“There had been 110 ambulance call-outs to his main warehouse site in just over three years as workers suffered chest pains, stroke, injury, and five births or miscarriages – including one woman delivering her baby in the toilet – such was the fear, according to the union, of losing your job if you took time off … [with] allegations made that the time staff spent queuing to be partly strip-searched by security guards before leaving the factory had driven wages below the legal national minimum wage per hour, or that female workers were sometimes asked for sexual favours in return for longer hours.”

I suppose there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that these cases are being investigated by parliament, and the increased power and activism of select committees is, I think, a positive development. And, of course, there are plenty of good and responsible employers.

Yet these two stories taken together seem to disclose something about the dire state of management practices in some and perhaps many parts of British businesses today, and about the, let’s say, unappealing characters who lead those businesses. And it’s not just in Britain. Last month Oxfam reported that chicken farm workers in the US were being denied toilet breaks and forced to wear nappies. This won’t come as a surprise to readers of my book, where (p.133) I give the example of a Californian factory in which workers were told to urinate in their clothes rather than take toilet breaks. Indeed, the poultry workers are rather humanely treated by comparison: at least they are allowed nappies.

The foundational study in Labour Process Analysis from which (to simplify) grew Critical Management Studies, was Harry Braverman’s (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital of which the subtitle was ‘the degradation of work in the twentieth century’. Half a century on and we seem to be seeing degradation at work as the defining feature of the labour process; an all too literal labour process when women give birth in toilets to avoid losing their jobs.

Talking Turkey

Almost all news stories in the UK at the moment seem to have some relationship to, or are filtered through, the EU Referendum debate. I don’t want to use this blog simply to talk about that debate but for those who may be interested I will start this post with some links to various things I have written on other sites on the topic (some are syndicated re-issues of the same pieces).

So on the New Europeans site there are four articles (and do look at the rest of this excellent site); two pieces on The Conversation (again, there’s loads on this site worth looking at) both of which are listed on the House of Commons Library Referendum Research Briefing; another on the Wake Up Europe site; another on the EU Movement site; and another on the Reasons2Remain site. Finally, there is also the transcript and audio of a radio broadcast I took part in on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Rear Vision programme. Oh, and a short letter in the Financial Times (pay walled link but free access to up to a monthly limit). I’m also giving numerous talks in town and village halls on the kinds of issues covered in these posts but of course I can’t give links for these.

Anyway, on to today’s related topic, the news this week that the EU Commission has conditionally agreed to Turkey having visa-free access to the Schengen area. The anti-EU press and campaign to leave the EU spun this in predictably, but depressingly, dishonest ways, speaking of the EU ‘opening the door to 79 million Turks’. What such formulations imply (and get taken to mean) is a mix of downright lies, confusions and paranoia: that Turks will now have the same free movement rights as EU citizens (they won’t; the deal will apply to short term visits); that this will apply to the UK (it won’t; the UK isn’t in the Schengen area); that the entire population would move wholesale to the EU and the UK if it could (a nonsense, both obviously and as was shown when exactly the same claims were made about Bulgaria and Rumania when those countries gained free movement rights).

The wider issue is that this is part of a deal under which Turkey will control the flow of refugees into the EU, and more particularly Greece by taking back all such refugees with an equivalent number then being taken directly from the Turkey by the EU. That deal is controversial, not for the ludicrous reasons given above but because the UN has pointed out that it may be illegal and other bodies that it may be immoral. Yet one has to recognize that, shabby as it may be, it is primarily a response to the claims (not least from anti-EU groups in Britain) that the EU has failed to deal with the so-called migration crisis (more correctly, the refugee crisis).

One of the reasons this deal is, indeed, shabby is because Turkey has recently become markedly more authoritarian and repressive, as I have written about elsewhere on this blog and as events just this week underscore, events which may yet scupper the EU deal. In fact, if the EU is to be criticised, the real criticism is that in the years that Turkey was reforming and improving its human rights record its desire to join the EU was discouraged, contributing to the downward path it has since followed. Especially in the light of what has since happened in Syria, this now looks like a major strategic blunder by the EU. Even so, the relentless hostility to Turkey’s membership by Eurosceptics and worse in many EU countries since it applied to join (as long ago as 1987!) bears much of the blame for this.

Why does any of this matter for organization studies? One reason is the general point that I always make about the inseparability of politics and organizations. The EU is the biggest single economic entity in the world, after all. Another, narrower, reason is that Turkey has an organization studies community of some significance and within that a fragile critical management studies community. This is discussed by Beyza Oba and Mehmet Gençer in their chapter (‘The Ghost in the System: Critical Management Studies in Turkey’) in the recent book I co-edited (Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents). It may be too grandiose, or alternatively too Eurocentric, but one reading of CMS is as the promulgation of the critical strand of European Enlightenment thought within the imperialist, or anyway dominant, strand of that thought.

I think that is a defensible reading. It’s well-established that there is a direct line of thought from Kant to Weber from whom there is an indirect line to Foucault; and a less direct line, via Hegel, to Marx from whom there is a direct line to the Frankfurt School. And although it is less well-established there is, I increasingly think, a direct line from the Descartes-Spinoza bifurcation of Enlightenment thought to the bifurcation between modernist and postmodernist thought; dogmatic and sceptical rationality; positivism and constructivism.

Whatever the truth of that, it is an obvious political reality that Turkey now stands at the pivot between the EU and not just Syria but the wider Middle-East tragedy; and perhaps between Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. What happens there matters enormously. It therefore becomes important to approach Turkey not, to finish where I began, through the narrow prism of the EU Referendum but as a conflicted boundary across which we – we Europeans, and more narrowly we students of organizations – must reach to support progressive, liberal and critical movements and people in Turkey.

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.

Despair and hope for organization studies

The book which this blog accompanies is in part a reaction to my despair about the state of organization studies. In other posts I have bemoaned the lack of historical awareness within the subject and also the poverty of its academic journals. In that latter post I suggested that one problem with the journals is their invariable, and ludicrous, demand that each paper should make a ‘theoretical contribution’ whilst on the other hand caring little about disclosing anything interesting or new about how people actually live and work in organizations. I pointed out that this is something particularly associated with the ‘top journals’, publication within which is increasingly and slavishly lionized. And there are two aspects to this: the rigid hierarchy of journal rankings, and the downgrading of books.

But there are signs of hope. I mentioned elsewhere my sense that there is a renewed interest and appreciation of the rich history of organization studies. And now Steve Barley, one of the most influential academics in the field, has written a superb essay (a word I will come back to) in the sixtieth anniversary issue of no less than Administrative Science Quarterly. I don’t agree with all that he says, or all of the way that he says it: in particular I think he tends to over-value the idea of ‘incremental contribution’ and worries incorrectly that a desire for ‘novelty and surprise’ comes ‘dangerously close to admitting’ that organization studies is one of the humanities. Apart from anything else, I don’t think this would be either dangerous or an admission; and in fact I don’t think that the distinction of humanities and social science is a sustainable one. Still, most of his core concerns are very similar to my own.

Barley raises the straitjacket of journal rankings and the tyranny of the demand for theoretical novelty. In that regard he makes the interesting point that whereas he used to find that journal reviewers would pick up on issues of methodology and empirical validity, now they rarely do. That’s not, for Barley (or for me), a lament for positivism but a concern that only theoretical novelty matters. And that’s not, for me (or I think Barley) because of a disdain for theory but a concern about ‘theoreticism’.

By way of illustration of this point, I am struck by own experience of submitting papers (about a study I did of the organization of Bletchley Park) to journals that were not in organization studies but in intelligence studies. What I found was that reviewers’ comments in that field focused almost exclusively on challenging the empirical claims that I made. Admittedly that has its own problems – intelligence studies appears to be somewhat inattentive to theoretical debates within social science. Perhaps this sounds as if nothing will satisfy me: focus on theory and I complain about theoreticism, focus on empirics and get accused of empiricism. But what I want from empirical papers is that they be theoretically informed, and from theory papers that they be (at least potentially) empirically meaningful.

Another of Barley’s points is the desirability of book-length studies, combining theory and empirics, and that such studies have in fact been generally more influential in the field than have journal papers. He even identifies as exemplars the work of authors like Blau, Gouldner and Dalton who I have also cited in this regard. Yet books have become a devalued currency within institutional assessment and career systems and research monographs, which is what Barley is talking about, are increasingly shunned by publishing houses outside of the established university presses. Thinking again of my Bletchley Park work, the main ‘output’ (as UK REF-speak has it) was a monograph, precisely because I wanted to have what Barley calls the ‘space and freedom’ to present detailed empirical material and theoretical arguments. Not coincidentally, it was published by Cambridge University Press which continues to commission such works.

Books and journal papers are not the only forms of academic writing and one form that has long-interested me is the essay. So I was delighted to see Yiannis Gabriel, like Barley a highly distinguished and influential organization studies academic, sing the praises of this form, at almost at the same time as Barley’s – yes – essay appeared. Writing in the Journal of Management Studies, Gabriel’s own essay coincides with that journal’s launch of its ‘JMS-Says’ essay format. He sees essays as individual, idiosyncratic, experimental and sometimes influential provocations to thought and debate. I agree and, again speaking of my own work, some of my favorite publications (and possibly the only ones that have made much impact on others) have been essays. In a way, the book of this blog – although longer than is usual in the genre – is pretty much an essay.

Whilst essays may be idiosyncratic and experimental this does not mean that ‘anything goes’ or that it is an undisciplined or easy format, as Gabriel points out. Indeed, I would say that it is a hard form to master, requiring rhetorical skill and a capacity to provide a ‘between the lines’ understanding of its author’s knowledge and its audience’s sensibilities. Essays are not, or not simply, polemics – although the polemic is itself a difficult to write and under-rated genre by the way. There is now, at least in business schools, what might appositely be called a thriving industry in how to craft papers for ‘top journals’, with its own gurus, master classes and formulae. But it is difficult – and if not difficult then depressing – to envisage such an industry growing up around essays which are, at their best anyway, impervious to codification.

There are very powerful forces working against the arguments that Steve Barley, Yiannis Gabriel and – at a much lower level in the reputational pecking order – I are making. I don’t see hardcore business school deans recognizing them any time soon. But that these arguments are gaining a higher profile does give me, despite what I will admit is my temperamental pessimism, some cause to hope that organization studies might become – well, let’s not get carried away – a bit better than it is now.

 

References

Barley, S. (2016) ‘60^th Anniversary Essay: Ruminations on How We Became a Mystery House and How We Might Get Out’, Administrative Science Quarterly 61 (1): 1-8.

Gabriel, Y. (2016) ‘The Essay as an Endangered Species: Should we Care?’, Journal of Management Studies DOI: 10.1111/joms.12176 [By the way, a minor hobby horse, but how exactly are we meant to reference these ‘early online’ papers?]

Death

Our topic today is, cheerily enough, death. It’s prompted by this week’s biggest global news story, the death of David Bowie. One of the consequences of the contemporary media is that within a few hours almost all that could conceivably be said about any big event is said within a few hours, rendering the most obvious thoughts we might have clichés before we have had time to think them. One such cliché is that for people of my age, give or take ten years, Bowie provided ‘the soundtrack to our lives’. And so indeed he did for me. I fell in love for the first time to the accompaniment of Life on Mars; rebelled (sort of, anyway) to the backdrop of Rebel, Rebel; was angst-ridden to the tune of Rock’n’Roll Suicide; uplifted by Heroes; thrilled by Ashes to Ashes; and fell in love again with China Girl in the background.

I mention in the book that I grew up in Croydon and, in Croydon in those days, we claimed Bowie as a local hero (he actually grew up in nearby Bromley), admittedly not having anyone much else in pop culture to lay claim to (Captain Sensible of The Damned and Kirsty MacColl being the other main possibilities). What’s more to the point is that pop music, which can be and can mean many things, can sometimes be a poetry of ‘sound and vision’, speaking both directly and ambiguously to one’s own life and to the human condition. For me this was true of Bowie but also Morrissey and Elvis Costello (whose autobiography I am currently reading) – all notable lyricists as well as musicians.

The other immediately stated but also true cliché about Bowie’s death was that he made that death into art, especially in the extraordinary song and video Lazarus. Extraordinary, that is, in its depiction of a bandaged, emaciated figure struggling on his (death)bed and straining to get words down on paper before dying. Bowie was a kind of poster-boy for what sociologists call reflexive modernity – constantly and knowingly giving an account of his own life – and providing what both Victorian aesthetes and postmodernists might recognize as an aesthetics of the self.

That this should include a knowing and aesthetically careful depiction of death is particularly extraordinary because of the way that death is so comprehensively written-out of contemporary culture. There’s an idea – implicit, anyway – that death is a kind of embarrassing and certainly best-avoided topic. Possibly – if one is sufficiently careful in terms of diet, exercise, not smoking, not drinking – avoidable; perhaps in any case something for which a cure might one day be found, and in the meantime better not thought about.

Organization studies does not have a great deal to say about death (at least that is my impression; I haven’t undertaken the dreaded literature review required by academic journals). It could do: after all, funeral parlours and cancer wards are organizations, but I’m not aware of too many cases studies of them. The German organizational psychologist Burkard Sievers (1990) wrote a thought-provoking essay on this, arguing that “collectively, we have displaced death from experience” (p.132) and he referred to the great sociologist, Norbert Elias (1985) to claim that “death, like the dead body, has to be isolated and hygienically hidden” (Sievers, 1990: 132).

From that perspective, Bowie’s Lazarus rips open the stage curtain to show death, or at least, a representation of death because that is (and must be) what it means to make death into art. In another post I wrote about the death of Tony Benn, who said something very powerful and moving about his wife, Caroline, who pre-deceased him: “she taught me how to live and she taught me how to die, and you can’t ask more from anyone than that”. Bowie did something like that.

A final thought. When I was a teenager and first listened to Bowie there was a boy in my class at school called Simon. Now, he is a Buddhist scholar known as Vishvapani who often speaks on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, and did so last Wednesday taking Bowie’s death as his theme. He said that “the most basic fact of our lives is that nothing endures”. That is of course true and for Buddhists the implication is to become less self-absorbed. For those of us who are not Buddhists the issue might be the more egotistical one of what we leave behind. That is unpredictable, for sure. A chance conversation might ripple through the ages; a magnificent book languish unread. For myself, I like the idea that at some point in the future someone might come across something I have written in a dusty corner of the library (if libraries still exist) and find it of passing interest.

References

Elias, N. (1985) The Loneliness of the Dying. Oxford: Blackwell

Sievers, D. (1990) ‘The Diabolization of Death: Some thoughts on the obsolescence of mortality in organization theory and practice’, in Hassard, J. & Pym, D. (eds) The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations, pp 125-136. London: Routledge.

Everyone needs a Willie

The phrase ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’ was uttered by Margaret Thatcher, apparently without realising the double entendre it contained. It was a reference to her sometime deputy as Conservative Prime Minister, William Whitelaw. Whitelaw’s significance to Thatcher lay in the fact that he provided a point of connection between her and the wider Conservative Party, especially during the early years of her leadership in the late 1970s and early 80s. For it is easy to forget that during those years Thatcher was engaged in remaking her party, in a process that was by no means unopposed from within, away from its traditional, pragmatist and patrician form and into a much more ideologically-motivated neo-liberal entity.

This did not happen all at once, by any means, and the presence in her first cabinet in particular of ‘Tory wets’ (the more traditional, centrist, one nation Conservatives) are a testament to this fact. Not only was there an ideological battle here but also Thatcher, both in her class background and her gender, did not fit the established image of a Tory leader. Willie Whitelaw’s significance lay in being both doggedly loyal to his boss but also being trusted by the wider party, since he was very much from its traditional mould (public school, Cambridge, ex-army). He was thus able to be a conduit between traditional and new Tory parties.

In the 1990s, a very similar role was undertaken within Tony Blair’s New Labour party by John Prescott, who also became Deputy Prime Minister. Here again a party was being re-made towards a more neo-liberal posture, but this time against a traditional backdrop defined in terms of socialism, or at least social democracy, and trade unionism. That constituency was alien to Blair’s ideology and his personal background (public school, Oxford, ex-lawyer) but one that Prescott, a working-class former trade union official, was steeped in. Like Whitelaw he formed a key conduit between traditional and new Labour parties.

I have been recalling these two because of the current situation within the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is seeking to re-shape Labour away from Blairism and also, like Thatcher and Blair, has a persona that only appeals to some sections of his party. In some ways his situation is more complicated than Thatcher’s or Blair’s in that he differs from both the new right of his party (too left-wing) and from the old left (too liberal and metropolitan). At all events he faces opposition and mistrust from, at least, its MPs, very few of whom wanted him to become their leader (his support base being, rather, amongst party members). One reason that task is proving so hard, I would suggest, is that there appears to be no one willing and able to act in the kind of conduit role that Whitelaw and Prescott fulfilled; someone trusted by the parliamentary rank-and-file and willing to use that trust in support of the new leadership.

If anything, Corbyn seems more inclined to seek to surround himself with those who agree with him, with this week’s sackings of shadow cabinet members for ‘disloyalty’. That is always a temptation for any leader but it carries with it enormous dangers. In the long run it leads to isolation from dissenting opinions (something that played a part in the downfall of both Thatcher and Blair, and probably of many business leaders) and hence the well-worn problem of ‘group think’, and that of cultism*. But in the short-run it hamstrings the necessary process in any form of politics, including organizational politics, to build what are inevitably forms of coalition. It seems related in some way to the well-known – within critical organization theory, at least - limitations of seeing leadership in terms of individuals: precisely because leadership involves coalition building it also requires a broader set of appeals than are likely to be provided by a single person. Corbyn needs urgently to find his Whitelaw or Prescott or even, given his particular situation of being neither Old nor New Labour, a couple of them.

* For an excellent analysis of cultism in leadership, and indeed of the dangers and difficulties of leadership including the over-focus on the individual, see Dennis Tourish’s The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2013).