Working assumptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

Antisocial media

I’m taking a break from blogging about the election (about which there is not much of interest to say at the moment anyway) to reflect on something which, whilst not new, seems to be a growing phenomenon. It’s prompted by an experience whilst waiting at a large train station in London the other day. Nearby, there was an information stand at which sat a young woman in a smart uniform. Every few minutes, a passenger would approach her with some query or other and each time she would, after a moment, look up from her mobile phone, answer the question, and then immediately go back to the phone. I watched for a while and it seemed to me that she could hardly bear to look away from her phone for even a few seconds.

I’ve also noticed – again, it’s not an original observation, but recently it seems to be one I make more frequently – how the students I teach seem to find it all but impossible to go through a class, or for that matter a few minutes, without looking at their phones. One thing that seems particularly strange about this is that students invariably complain about the lack of class contact time, especially since the introduction of tuition fees in English universities, and yet in that time that they do have they absent themselves. There’s been quite a bit of research which suggests that phone-addiction is becoming increasingly common, including studies of students.

By phone addiction, of course, we really mean addiction to the internet and social media. It’s quite an alien world to me, and I’ve posted elsewhere about my views of twitter. I’ve never had a Facebook account – let alone Pinterest or Instagram - and although I do use my phone for email and texting I regard it primarily as just a phone. I don’t much like using it as the connection and comfort never seem as good as a landline and, horror of horrors, I leave it turned off for days at a time.

That’s not, or not just, middle-aged Luddism. I do wonder what the effects of this apparent addiction are. Some are all too obvious as when people walk through busy streets, oblivious to everyone around them, glued to the phone. Indeed there are increasing numbers of accidents as a result, as in this report about Tokyo, but I guess the same would be true in any large city. It’s also obvious when you watch commuters using phones and tablets to play games. Recently, a British politician was criticised for playing the game Candy Crush during a parliamentary committee. Less obvious effects include the report this week that levels of myopia amongst children are rocketing because of the amount of time spent indoors at computers and mobile devices, and in China steps are being taken to prevent this. Or, to take another example, phone use whilst driving is an increasing cause of traffic accidents.

There seems something infantile about all this; the inability to pay more than momentary attention, the compulsive need to play. More than that, it seems as if the social media addiction in particular comes at a great cost to social interaction. In connecting us it also disconnects us from ‘real’ relationships, as many commentators have noted. It is also – connecting with the example I began with – being reported that workplace productivity is being damaged by the obsessive need to connect, with one recent survey identifying it as the main cause of timewasting at work.

I realise that this sounds puritanical, and perhaps it is – perhaps, though, there are some virtues in puritanism? And of course there are downsides to all forms of human interaction, whether virtual or real. But it does seem to me problematic that increasingly we are unable to live in the present and the here-and-now. I’ll close with another recent observation, of a couple sitting at a restaurant table each engaging not with each other but with their phones. Or perhaps not, for it came into my head that for all I knew they were actually connecting with each other via their phones in preference to talking. It seemed not just possible but ineffably sad.

Norman Geras (1943-2013)

I recently learned of the death of Norman Geras, whose obituary is here.

Norman was a pivotal influence on me, intellectually and politically. In the book (pp. 11-12) I mention how as an undergraduate at Manchester University in the 1980s I switched from studying Economics to studying Political Philosophy. Norman taught me 'Modern Political Philosophy' and introduced me to the works of Marx and Weber amongst other authors. He subsequently encouraged me to do a PhD and at that time we had many conversations and arguments.

He was a big man in all senses of the word: physically imposing, intellectually forceful. But he was incredibly generous to me - generous with his time, generous in relation to my naivety - and he taught me, both in classes and outside, both in content and approach, much that I still live with. It is no exaggeration to say that, had it not been for him, I would never have become an academic; there would have been no book for this blog; and so no blog of this book.

I am sure that for him the encounters we had were entirely ephemeral, but for me they were formative. These kind of things are the invisible part of academic careers and of teaching, but they are so important. Unmeasured by quality assurance systems, unknown in performance evaluations, these are the invisible 'gift relationships' of teaching.

When I knew him, Norman was one of the most important and original thinkers about Marx and Marxists. His books on Marx and Human Nature and on Rosa Luxemburg remain classics. In more recent years he became associated with the Euston Manifesto group with which I vehemently disagreed. But I will never forget or cease to be grateful for what he taught and gave me - freely but preciously - when I was his student, why, over 25 years ago now.

Marxism today

The biggest news story in the UK this week has been the row over the publication by the Daily Mail newspaper of a vitriolic attack on the father of Ed Miliband, the leader of the British Labour party. Ralph Miliband, who died in 1994, was an eminent Marxist political theorist. Indeed I remember having to study his classic book – The State in a Capitalist Society – in detail when I was an undergraduate student of politics. Ralph Miliband was a Jewish refugee who fled to Britain to escape the Nazis, and subsequently served in the Royal Navy. Thus one of the most controversial aspects of the Mail’s article was that it ran under the headline ‘The Man who Hated Britain’ – this based on a decontextualized and misinterpreted quotation from his diary, written when he was seventeen years old. The article has been roundly criticised not just by Ed Miliband and his party, but by many senior figures on the political Right, and appears to be unpopular with the public, including Mail readers, as well. In particular, the idea that Ralph Miliband ‘hated Britain’, despite having served in its armed forces, was particularly controversial.

But apart from the issue of patriotism, the Mail’s attack, written in intemperate language, was premised on the idea that because Ralph Miliband had been a Marxist he was therefore an apologist for Stalinist Communism and that his son had inherited these ideas. That Ralph Miliband had been a harsh critic of Stalinism was ignored; as was the fact that his son manifestly embraces none of the politics of Marxism, still less of the Soviet Union.  It was in this sense an attempt to smear Ed Miliband as a left-wing extremist, an almost laughable proposition. However, the spiteful nastiness of the terms used makes it to my mind not laughable but quite disgusting.

There is much that could be, and has been, said about this episode, but one question it provoked in me was how much traction do accusations of Marxism have these days anyway? The piece read like something from the Cold War era, when western politicians and journalists conjured up frequent ‘reds under the beds’ scare stories. But it is almost a quarter of a century since the Berlin Wall fell and, in Britain certainly, there is little if any organized far Left movement. But by the same token, I wonder what, for students in particular, it can mean when they come across Marxist ideas in their studies?

In organization studies, as in social science more generally, there is a sizeable literature which is Marxist or, at least, influenced by or reacting to Marxism. This is most obviously so in Labour Process Analysis and within some forms of Critical Theory. Concepts such as alienation, labour power, surplus value and so on derive from Marxism and have a particular place within organization studies because they pertain directly to the workplace. I could imagine some students thinking that this is just outmoded old nonsense that we don’t need to bother with, but if so then I think that is wrong.

First of all, it’s not really the case that social science theories get superseded by newer, better theories – although it is surely true that fashions change so that Marxism, and many other theories, are currently much less fashionable than in the past. But secondly, and perhaps relatedly, the impact of Marxism on social science has been so deep that it is very difficult to understand many other approaches without understanding the implicit and explicit relationships that they have with Marxism. Perhaps a partial analogy would be with the study of English literature or the history of art where it is hard to understand many novels and paintings without having a good working knowledge of the Bible. From that point of view, though, the issue isn’t one of ‘belief’ – to have scriptural knowledge does not imply or require being a Christian.

That analogy certainly helps to avoid the most egregious error – exhibited by the Daily Mail – that Marxist analysis is inseparable from Stalinist practice. One can certainly use concepts from Marxism without having a commitment to Marxist politics and, moreover, just as there are almost endless ways of being a Christian so too are there endless ways of being a Marxist – Stalinism being perhaps the least defensible as many Marxists, including Ralph Miliband, have argued.  That is not to say that there are no political implications of Marxist analysis of organizations or that they shouldn’t be discussed. But the point I would make is that there are political implications of any form of organizational analysis – indeed probably the central message of the book is that this is so, and that the main problem of mainstream organizational analysis is to ignore this. For example, when organizations are studied via the lens of neo-classical economic conceptions of efficiency this is by no means politically neutral. For that matter, organization studies makes plentiful use of Weberian analysis (which again takes many forms) yet this hardly requires that we sign up to Max Weber’s politics (which moved from nationalism to social democracy, and were both influential and not without controversy as Joshua Derman's recent book discusses).  In this sense, Marxism is not a special case.

So I hope that I am right that, for younger people at least, the capacity of the Mail’s assault on Ralph Miliband founders on the obsolescence of its Cold War logic. But by the same token, I hope that the welcome demise of the Soviet Union does not lead those same people to conclude that the Marxist analysis of organizations has nothing of interest or importance to say to them.