What will Trump's victory mean?

I wrote in my last post about the possibility of Donald Trump being elected. Now that it has happened, I want to share some preliminary thoughts about what it means. Of course, much is unknown. Trump is an unpredictable character anyway, and in any case all politicians find that their freedom of action is more curtailed than either they or their electors expect.

In my book I frame much of the analysis of contemporary organizations in terms of ‘the new capitalism’, meaning the neo-liberalized, globalizing form of capitalism that has been dominant since the 1970s, especially in the US and the UK. I also (nevertheless) record scepticism about ‘epochalism’ (p.104), but with that caveat it is at least possible that we are witnessing a significant shift away from the new capitalism.

What is distinctive about Trump, as the Guardian journalist Martin Kettle wrote today, is that he is both socially and economically illiberal. That, Kettle argues, has not been true of recent US presidents: they have been illiberal in one or other meaning, or in neither, but not in both.

Trump’s social illiberalism is what made his campaign so controversial and divisive. But it is his economic illiberalism that is truly remarkable amongst, especially, Republicans. He appears to be hostile to the global free trade system that defined the new capitalism. He has promised to reverse the offshoring of US jobs, to punish US companies that relocate abroad and to impose high tariffs on, especially, Chinese imports. It seems highly likely that he will abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the TTIP negotiations with the EU, and if not scrap then comprehensively re-negotiate NAFTA.

These policies, which I have described as nationalist populism, are, like many forms of nationalist populism, similar to left-wing economic programmes. Equally, Trump’s ambitions to create jobs through national infrastructure projects are akin to neo-Keynesian economics (although likely to be funded by foreign investors rather than state investment and so in that sense understandable as a form of privatization, and somewhat at odds with Trump's 'America First' rhetoric).

These are potentially profound shifts, then, but as a counter to epochal thinking, it should be recalled that other parts of his economic agenda, most notably (probably) holding down the minimum wage, cutting corporation and other taxes and financial deregulation, are part of the familiar repertoire of the political right. Moreover, Trump’s calling card that he can run the country as if it were a business and his embrace and embodiment of macho leadership also suggest continuity rather than abandonment of many aspects of new capitalism.

If aspects of Trump’s rejection of economic liberalism have a leftist tinge to them, it’s important to recognize that their nationalism means that they do not offer any general relief from the consequences of globalization. It is in fact questionable whether they can even deliver this for the people of the US. Globalization may simply be too far advanced for that to be possible: it is highly unlikely that the American rust belt will be re-industrialised. At all events, Trump’s nationalism (like Brexit) marks a retreat from the multi-lateral, global governance that offers to best hope of taming and regulating global capitalism, with climate change agreement the most likely early casualty.

Trump is also likely to reverse Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ policy. That is apparent in relation to the points mentioned above about TPP and tariffs against China, but also to the likelihood of his administration taking a relaxed view about Chinese sovereignty claims in the South China Sea and agnosticism on the issue of Taiwan. This links with the wider foreign policy aspect of Trump’s presidency, which appears to entail significant withdrawal from global leadership. Some of that leadership has, of course, been highly damaging and other parts of it ineffective. Nevertheless, Trump’s apparent admiration for Vladimir Putin (it’s no coincidence that the Russian Parliament applauded the result: Trump’s election, like Brexit, represent major foreign policy boosts for Russia) and lukewarm support for NATO could be highly de-stabilising for, especially, the Baltic States and the Balkans. This could have potentially devastating consequences, both for those regions and for the wider world, making anything and everything else that Trump’s presidency may mean completely trivial.

Going back to economic issues, I’ve depicted Trump’s election, like Brexit, as triumphs for nationalist populism. But they also represent a huge threat for it. Nationalist populism operates primarily as a vehicle of protest against the establishment. But when it is victorious it itself becomes the establishment and has to take responsibility for the policies it espouses. So what happens if (and, in my view, when) those policies fail? One possibility is that its supporters realise the error of their ways and return to liberalism and social democracy. Another, far more likely, outcome is that those supporters conclude that their leaders have been thwarted by the establishment or, even, that they have betrayed them. The reaction will be to turn even more harshly against perceived enemies: immigrants, liberals, democracy itself. And to seek and support even more extreme leaders. Many people around the world are scared about what Trump’s success means: the greater fear is what his failure will mean.

Battling for Britain

I had intended to write a post about Owen Hatherley’s stimulating recent book The Ministry of Nostalgia, and then thought I wanted to write something about today’s EU summit where Britain is negotiating terms prior to a Referendum on continued membership. But it occurred to me that the two are in many ways linked.

Hatherley’s book picks up on something which I have also noticed and commented on in this blog, namely the grotesque historical spoonerism in which wartime and post-war austerity is invoked to justify swingeing public budget cuts. What was originally about shared suffering in order to build collective goods becomes the cover for their dismemberment. Hatherley analyses this “austerity nostalgia” at length, orchestrated in particular through the motif of the now ubiquitous ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan. Originally devised (although not in fact used) as wartime propaganda, it now indexes a certain sort of British – or English – self-identity of stoical suffering.

Whilst most obviously consonant with the political projects of the right – and I will return to this – Hatherley deploys a most intriguing argument about how it fits in with a certain kind of leftist nostalgia which, whilst he has some sympathy with it, he finds to be ultimately impotent. That chimed with me because it is a nostalgia that I am prone to, as I wrote in my post about Jonathan Coe’s novelistic treatment of the same kind of thinking. And amongst the wide range of examples – many of them to do with architecture – that Hatherley deploys I was interested to see that one was Ken Loach’s film 1945, which I also posted about on this blog, even linking it to the perversity of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ motif! There’s also critical (but again sympathetic) mention of one of my favourite recent(ish) books, historian Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, as a key statement of leftist nostalgia. So, in short, Hatherley’s book both spoke to but also challenged many of the things I believe and am interested in. I am still digesting what to make of it and may well post about this in due course.

But this book also re-enforces my sense of what lies beneath the EU Referendum. For “austerity nostalgia” and its associated tropes seems very much to inform David Cameron’s avowed intention to ‘battle for Britain’ in his EU re-negotiation. The very fact of using such language is surely designed to underline its primary purpose: to persuade the undecided or only vaguely interested to vote to stay in. It is not that the things under negotiation are of any great significance – they are as irrelevant to those implacably opposed to EU membership as to those, such as myself, who are broadly supportive. But the language speaks to the softer edges of opposition, the hard core of which is animated by the still potent idea of Britain ‘standing alone’ during the war, and which seems still to dream of a world something like that of (an imagination of) early post-war Britain. It speaks to a sullen, resentful sensibility, sometimes vicious, other times sentimental. Local, not cosmopolitan. Pathetic (in its literal sense) but not always necessarily ignoble.

In a more practical vein, though, the re-negotiation shows the incoherence of the Brexit case in at least two ways. One is that the persistent complaint of those making that case is that the EU is ruled by diktat from Brussels, with no democracy. Yet when it emerged that even if Brussels agreed to the terms, they would be subject to ratification by the democratically elected European Parliament there was outrage. The other is that the terms of the re-negotiation were seen as hopelessly limited and yet even these had been ‘watered down’ as the protracted negotiation progressed. Yet it is an article of faith amongst Brexiters that on leaving the UK will be able to quickly negotiate with exactly the same counterparties a full-spectrum free trade deal on the most generous of terms.

Those two things seem to spell out the twin poles of the Brexit version of nostalgia. On the one hand, the idea of Britain being hamstrung; on the other of Britain being overweaningly powerful. A battle of Britain speaks well to this, since 1940 was the moment at which Britain was both at its weakest and strongest. But how long are we to live in the long shadow of that summer, now 75 years ago? In my book (Grey, 2012) about Bletchley Park (the wartime codebreaking centre) I write about how ‘the war’ was an omnipresent part of my childhood in the 1970s, since it had been the defining experience of my parents and teachers. One might have thought that this would have diminished in the subsequent years, but it has not. Hathaway notes how it is now the experience of our grandparents that gets referenced in austerity nostalgia. Certainly the TV channels remain full of wartime films and documentaries. I am not sure that any other country in the world is still so preoccupied with the war, unless it is Putin’s Russia which, by the way, would more than any other country be the benefactor of Brexit.

In this sense, though, one can certainly see the present situation as a battle for Britain in a rather different sense. The decision about whether to remain in the EU is in some ways a decision about what Britain is to be and how it is to think about itself. A Brexit would re-enforce the remark made in 1963 by American Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. That indeed is very evident in the historical and geo-political absurdity of the idea championed by many Brexiters of creating a politics and trade bloc based on the Commonwealth. And it would very forcibly bring home to British people quite how much the world has changed since 1940 since in a muted way the US, Indian and Chinese administrations have made it clear that Britain is only of interest as a partner to the extent that it is an EU member. Plus Britain itself would surely not survive Brexit, since Scotland, for sure, would become independent.

So this is the link between Hatherley’s perceptive book and the EU Referendum negotiations going on even as I write: is Britain, or England in fact, to be locked into a nostalgic fantasy of keeping calm and carrying on? Or will it embrace the undoubted imperfections of the EU and acknowledge the geo-political realpolitik of the present? This is about unquantifiable feelings, images and sensibilities but it will in the end come down to some quite precise, quite narrowly-ranged, numbers between 60-40 for in and 60-40 for out. The 20% difference between those two outcomes represents the undecided or shiftable vote that Cameron’s otherwise meaningless renegotiation is designed to appeal to. His gamble is that they can be persuaded to keep calm and carry on with EU membership and if he is right he will win the vote. The argument? Well, that has still to be faced up to, let alone won.

References

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

Judt, T. (2011). Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin

Hatherley, O. (2016). The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso.

Managing terror

Probably the biggest international event at the moment is the rise of the so-called Islamic State (IS), which has taken over large chunks of Iraq and Syria and is enacting widespread horror including the filmed beheading of American and British hostages, as well as brutal, wholesale massacres of the local population accompanied by torture, crucifixion and rape.

It has become commonplace to talk of such Islamist terrorists as being a throwback to the Middle Ages, and in fact the British Prime Minister today referred to IS in just those terms. But as the political philosopher John Gray explained in his 2003 book Al Qaeda and what it means to be Modern this is a serious misnomer. Whilst the barbarism of such groups may recall Mediaeval religious fanaticism, Gray argues that they are both a product of global modernity and make extensive use of the products of that modernity: their reliance on social media being one example of the latter.

I recalled this today as I read a quite astounding and chilling article in Le Nouvel Observateur entitled “Etat islamique: le bilan comptable des massacres” [Islamic State: the balance sheet of killing – my translation]. The article reports that IS is making use of many of the techniques of corporate management – annual reports, balance sheets, marketing strategies and so on – and indeed publishes an account of its activities and resources.

It is tempting to conclude from this that management is simply a set of techniques, neutral in themselves, that may be used for good or evil purposes, and there is some truth in this. But it also suggests that despite its espoused rejection of ‘Western modernity’, IS sees the need to legitimate itself and to express itself via the deployment of those techniques (that is to say, they are not simply neutral techniques, but have a political significance). In fact, more generally, the proclamation of itself as a ‘State’, with territorial holdings and ambitions, shows that IS has a desire or need to embrace Modern forms of rule.

If that is so, then it also creates new vulnerabilities. In one very obvious way this is true: by becoming an identifiable group in an identifiable space, IS is much easier to attack militarily than would otherwise be the case. The organizational theorist Charles Perrow, in his book The Next Catastrophe, argues that the key way that the risk of terrorism can be reduced is to disperse strategic hubs (power plants, airports etc.). But this cuts both ways: if terrorists concentrate themselves spatially then they become more vulnerable as well. It is potentially easier to deal with Islamist fanatics if they locate themselves in a war zone than if they lurk undetected within wider society.

This applies not just to territorial vulnerability, but to organizational vulnerability. It was often said of Al Qaeda (e.g. Marc Sageman’s 2008 book Leaderless Jihad) that it derived strength from being a dispersed network and an organizing principle, rather than being a terrorist organization in the conventional sense like, say, the IRA. If, as AQ morphs into IS, that is now being supplanted by a more orthodox command-and-control organization that suggests that it may be vulnerable to all of the problems and failures that management and organization in more familiar corporate settings are prey to; problems and failures that have been so exhaustively documented by ‘critical management studies’ (CMS). It might be that disrupting the financial and managerial systems that they have adopted could be a more potent weapon against IS than air strikes. It might even be that the insights of CMS could have a role in countering the threat of IS now that they have configured themselves as not just a ‘State’ but as what Le Nouvel Observateur calls “Etat Islamique Inc.”.

Tragedy in the organizational village

It is difficult not to be affected by the disaster of the Malaysian airliner the crashed, apparently having been shot down, in Eastern Ukraine. That is true emotionally – when contemplating how the death of so many can come out of, literally, the clear blue sky – but also in a basic factual sense: almost all of us are affected in some way. The victims came from at least 11 different nations, the vast majority Dutch. I just heard a news report saying that the investigation would involve amongst others Malaysia, since it was their airline, the United States, since the aircraft was built by Boeing, and the UK, since the engines were built by Rolls-Royce.

This begins to point to the huge array of organizations in some way involved in this single event. They include national governments, of course, as well as international bodies like the EU and the UN, but also airport authorities at Schiphol and Kuala Lumpur, Eurocontrol and a multiplicity of other agencies which manage air space – the International Civil Aviation Authority, the European Civil Aviation Conference and the European Aviation Safety Agency being just some. Then there are the news agencies reporting on it, the many bodies providing commentary to the media upon it, and the social media organizations like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook where, as with any contemporary event, there is a mass of comment and reporting.

And then we come to the victims, who as well as being individuals and family members were intimately involved in organizations of all sorts. Many were going to a conference in Australia on AIDS and so were members of multiple medical and advocacy organizations, including the former President of the International AIDS Society. It’s being reported that several others were employees of Shell Oil. Some were students and on the news today I heard representatives of their universities and sports clubs commenting on their loss.

Ever since the term ‘the global village’ was coined (or, anyway, popularized) in1962 by the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan it has been a cliché. And, like most clichés, it captures a truth. Perhaps the truth is not so much one of the personal interconnections of a village but of organizational connections. I wrote in a recent post about ‘cosmopolitans and locals’, but perhaps that has become an inadequate distinction. Something like 300 million people pass annually through Europe’s five busiest airports. Whether they are globe-trotting executives or 10-day holidaymakers they may all have felt a chill when learning of the MH17 crash. Through the dense webs of organizational connections we are all becoming both global and local. Where is the global and local when a fan of provincial British football club who has been to every one of its games since 1973 dies on a Malaysian aircraft, built in the United States, over Ukraine, on his way from Holland to New Zealand?

Cosmopolitans and locals

The recent European Parliament elections yielded some striking results, with nationalistic and far Right parties doing especially well, notably in the UK, France and Denmark. In Greece, it was the far Left that did best, but here, too, the theme was one of hostility to the EU. Some of the commentary about this has been rather hyperbolic, forgetting that the turnout in these elections was usually quite low. In the UK, the anti-EU Party UKIP topped the poll, but given the turnout this meant that less than 9% of eligible adults voted for them. Since this was at the most propitious time – an EU election, rather than a national election – and after a great deal of publicity this does suggest that pretty much anyone minded to ever vote for UKIP did so now. Thus overall support is not huge.

But, still, the results mean something and I think that that they are mainly understandable as an inchoate response to neo-liberalism. It is noteworthy that both UKIP in the UK and, especially, the FN in France articulated programmes which were in many respects leftist, for example in terms of the protection of public services and, even, nationalization. They positioned themselves as critical of big business elites, established political elites and dominant metropolitan elites.

There is nothing very new about this. Far right parties have always sought this kind of populist appeal, and have been able to gain some working class support and, more especially, support from those on the fringes of working and middle classes – Poujadism in France being a relatively benign example, National Socialism in Germany a much more toxic one (it bears saying that neither UKIP nor even the more extreme FN, for all that they have elements of racism, can be considered to be comparable to the Nazis).

It is not difficult to debunk this positioning. UKIP, for example, is at heart a party of the Thatcherite Right, and (although its policies are not always very clear) is hostile to employee rights and the NHS. But that isn’t really the point. The policies are less important than the tone and the idea that, somehow, these parties stand against elites of all sorts and speak for ‘ordinary people’. That may be – in my view is – completely untrue, but why is it so appealing at the moment?

The answer lies in the way that globalization, of which the EU is a prime example, has eroded democracy and made political accountability virtually impossible. Immigration becomes the focus for this because it is by far the most visible consequence. Yet it would be absurd to respond to globalization simply by limiting immigration, and certainly to do so in the name of anti-elitism. All such a move would do would be to ensure that corporations could move around the world at will, but workers would have to stay in one place and take whatever employment was given to them. To be consistent, an anti-elitist politics would have to limit capital mobility as well as labour mobility, but there is no suggestion, least of all from UKIP, of wanting to do this – it is really only the Greens who have a consistent position on this.

What has opened up, then, is a new political configuration in which the internationalist Left and the globalizing Right have come to share some common viewpoints, in opposition to traditionalist elements of both Left and Right. That is why opposition to the UK immigration cap on non-EU migrants, and to the idea of British exit from the EU, can be found as much amongst City of London financiers as bien-pensant Hoxton hipsters. And complaints about immigration and a desire to leave the EU can be found as much from harrumphing Home Counties Colonels who were traditionally Tories as benefit claimants in North England towns that were the traditional Labour territory.

A good way of describing this cleavage is to adapt the terms coined by the organizational sociologist Alvin Gouldner in 1957 – cosmopolitans and locals. Adapted to this context cosmopolitans are educated and skilled, comfortable with different cultures, travel widely and have a global frame of reference. Few of them will have voted UKIP or FN. Locals are poorly educated, travel little, feel uncomfortable with difference and have a national frame of reference. Many of them will have voted UKIP or FN. What economic globalization, unaccompanied by democratic political globalization, has done is to exacerbate and deepen the polarization between these two groups in ways which have hitherto had little political representation because political parties traditionally cleave on class lines rather than on the global-local axis.

The best way for locals and globals alike to co-exist is to create a more internationalised democratic polity. The locals because it is the only way that their voice can effectively be heard; the globals because it is the only way to make their views legitimate. And all of us, because given that there is no prospect of global capitalism being re-nationalised we need political structures to regulate and control it. The irony is that, as regards the EU elections, what the revolt of the locals is most likely to achieve is less not more international governance and more not less marginalization of local concerns.

Today is the 70^th Anniversary of the D-Day landings, one of the major contributors to the defeat of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe. Out of that defeat grew the remarkable, and at the time quite unpredictable, thing which has become the EU. Imperfect as it is, it still represents the best chance for people in Europe to modify the twin evils of nationalist intolerance of globalism and corporate indifference to localism.

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.

History matters

No sooner had I posted some thoughts about the First World War than Michael Gove, the British Education Secretary, popped up with his own. In an article in the right-wing British newspaper the Daily Mail (see my recent post to understand where this paper is coming from) he denounced “Left-wing academics” for “belittling true British heroes”. Instead, he offered his own interpretation of it as “a just war” because “the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified”. Of course this kind of simplistic analysis wouldn’t even pass muster in a high school project, and unfortunately for Gove his opposite number, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt happens to be a professional historian by background, and issued a sharp rejoinder. Even more unfortunately, Gove chose to position his arguments against one of the most popular British comedy shows - Blackadder Goes Forth, set in, and satirizing, WW1 - and has also been attacked today by one of its most popular actors.

The way that we remember history is not, in any case, likely to be much affected by the pronouncements of politicians – collective memory simply doesn’t work that way. But the fact that politicians might seek to fight over historical interpretation tells us how important those interpretations are. There’s a line in George Orwell’s novel 1984 to the effect that ‘he who controls the past controls the future’ and it is this that is at stake. Gove’s jingoistic rant is not primarily about the past, it’s about trying to advance a present day agenda. Most directly, it’s a coded way of talking about Germany and the EU; more diffusely about trying to resurrect the pieties of nationalism. In other words, history matters – not just, or even primarily, because of the past but because, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur elegantly put it ‘cultures recreate themselves by telling stories about their own past’.

In a very minor way that was brought home to me the other day when I was watching a documentary about the BBC music show ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1979. I was watching it because this was the music of my teenage years, but embedded throughout the programme was a narrative about how trade unions were a destructive, reprehensible force. In a general way, the music of the year was set against images of strikes and the election of Thatcher; in a specific way the BBC was depicted as engaging in restrictive, fuddy-duddy practices because of union controls. Of course this wasn’t a programme ‘about’ political history, it was a programme about pop music ‘in the past’. But embedded in it was, precisely, a political history.

Management and organization studies has a very similar relationship with history. On the one hand, it is the most ahistoric of disciplines. There is very little in the way of detailed scholarship on the history of management and organizations or on managerial and organizational thought (it’s true that there is a research sub-genre of business history, but it is not very connected to either the mainstream of the discipline, nor very present in the teaching curriculum). Students tend to be very impatient of case studies that are not of the moment. In this they have wiling accomplices in their teachers, who, as Paul Adler argues in his introduction to an indispensable Handbook have disconnected themselves from classic thought in the field. That is even reflected in the referencing patterns of journal articles. On the other hand, almost everything written about management and organizations is replete with history, albeit of the crudest and most unexamined sort. It is full of what I refer to in the book as “cartoon concepts” (p.104), especially as regards bureaucracy (old, discredited) and post-bureaucracy (new, shiny), but also in terms of its naïve story of an unfolding enlightenment from scientific management (old, nasty) to human relations (new, nice).

This kind of implicit, unexamined history serves – like Gove’s newspaper article – to pursue a particular agenda, primarily that current organizational developments are both inevitable and right. On the other hand, the neglect of history serves to pursue another agenda, primarily that organizations are completely decontextualized and unrelated to the world around them. Almost everything about the historiography of management and organization studies is unsatisfactory either in commission or omission. It remains the great unexplored territory of the subject. At least when someone like Gove pontificates about history it can be seen and understood that this matters for what we do now and in the future. In organization studies that has still to be seen and understood.

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!

Dealing with disaster

The catastrophe of the Philippines typhoon has, like all disasters in the media age, been played out on our TV screens nightly*. That it is a natural catastrophe sharpens and simplifies our moral sense of it, perhaps because unlike those associated with war, such as in Syria, it is more easily understood as something where we can take sides. That is, we can readily empathise with, and side with, those who have had their lives destroyed because the causes of that destruction seem random and so there is no fault attached to them. Of course that is also true of the refugees from the war in Syria but the war itself is something that seems for many of us morally ambiguous and complex, and its solutions intractable. A natural disaster invites an emotionally and morally more simple response. Around the edges (climate change, governmental response) there is a politics, but its core seems to be, to use that peculiarly quaint term from insurance policies, an ‘Act of God’.

I happen to have a Philippino neighbour, who was much moved by the fact that the British people have this week donated some £33M** to the relief effort and that the British government have sent military resources to assist it. Thinking about this I was struck by something. When a major catastrophe strikes, the assistance is delivered bureaucratically and via command-and-control organizations. The UK relief effort was co-ordinated by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the very name of which straightforwardly speaks its purpose and bespeaks of a kind of bureaucratic traditionalism (a ‘committee’ no less, not even a task force), whilst the military response is delivered by the most traditional of hierarchies.

What is notably absent in such situations is any recourse to networked organizations, values and vision workshops, key performance indicators, quality assurance mechanisms, charismatic leadership or anything else from the sorry lexicon of contemporary managerialism. When something serious happens, we simply don’t need or want these things. But if this is so, perhaps we don’t need or want them at all?

In the same way that natural catastrophes clarify our emotional and moral priorities, perhaps they also serve to clarify our organizational ones?


* I notice that this week there has been a Philippino reader of this blog. Good wishes to you.
** By contrast the first two days of the DEC Appeal for Syria raised £3.4M and has to date raised £23M.

The Spirit of 45

In a previous post I made reference to Ken Loach’s latest film, The Spirit of 45, without, I must admit, having seen it, only having read some reviews. Loach is an important and, in the UK, a rare film director, committed to socialism and to socialist art. Land and Freedom, his 1995 depiction of the Spanish Civil War, is, I think, one of the most significant political films of recent decades. It recounts the utopian promise of the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War, which combined internationalism and gender equality with economic collectivism. And it recounts the betrayal of this dream by Stalinist Communism leading to the eventual victory of Fascism. In many ways the defeat of the POUM marked a terminal point in the history - to date, at least - of a certain strand of non-statist left-wing theory and practice. It was a political tragedy, the effects of which are still playing out in Europe and beyond. But the film is also a moving love story. That love is most evident in the complex relationship between the central, narrating, character, Dave Carr, a working class Liverpudlian who has come to Spain to fight fascism, and Blanca, a Spanish fighter in the POUM. Loach depicts the tenderness and ferocity of their love skilfully and movingly. But there is also a love, no less profound for not being sexual, between the various members of the POUM unit.

The complexities of love – in this case that between brothers – and its intersection with politics can also be found in another of Loach’s greatest films, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). The setting for this harrowing film is the struggle for Irish independence and the subsequent splintering of the movement. As in Land and Freedom there is at the heart of the film a struggle between idealism and compromise articulated through human relationships. These two films form just part of Loach’s prodigious output over the last 50 years – a remarkable body of work.

So I came to The Spirit of 1945 with very high – maybe too high – expectations and ended up feeling a bit disappointed. Politically, I agree with pretty much everything Loach is trying to say. The Labour reconstruction of post-war Britain with its emphasis on socialism, the common good and policies of nationalisation and public welfare provision – and this in the face of far more difficult economic circumstances than now -  is, absolutely, an inspirational model for the present time. But I thought that the connections and lessons between that time and now were too weakly drawn.

For me, the problem was the rushed attempt to explain what Thatcherism had done. It’s not that Loach is wrong about this but it made the film less hard-hitting (and especially, perhaps, for those watching it for whom the Thatcher era is itself an historical memory) than if there had been more direct comparisons with today. It would have been better to go from 1945-51 to today. For example, on nationalised electricity, some explicit comparison with the nonsense of ‘customer choice’ now – requiring endless calls to call centres to ‘achieve’ a best rate that promptly becomes anything but. Or, on railways, focussing not just on the accidents that followed privatization but on the massive rises in fares and of public subsidies to the private companies (far greater than nationalised  British Rail ever received) that are happening right now. There were occasional moments (e.g. the brief discussion of contracting out of hospital cleaning) where this was achieved, but in general I felt that the ‘now and then’ linkage could have been much sharper. In some ways, I felt the whole thing would have worked better as a Loach drama than as a documentary, for example depicting a family in 1945 and the grandchildren of the same family now.

I also disliked the very traditional and I think sentimental emphasis on the idea that what is needed (and will come) is just for the working class to realise its strength (in Marxist terms, to move from being a ‘class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself’), and the accompanying idea that the problem with Labour is that it has become too middle class. On the one hand, the 1945 administration (its leader, Clement Attlee, being a good example) were often middle-class. On the other hand, in Britain (and elsewhere) now, it is the middle class who are being systematically destroyed by ‘austerity’ economics and politics. I don’t think that positioning things in terms of working vs middle class is true either to ‘the spirit of 45’, which was about a sense of a national collective project, or to the current crisis which (as the film suggests) requires a national collective project in opposition to and defiance of a global elite: that is the real division, not that between what are after all – to put it in Marxist terms - just segments of those who have nothing but their labour to sell.

With all those criticisms made, this is a rare and valuable film. Just to see the way that in 1945 socialism was quite openly and unapologetically spoken of, at a time when the present British Labour Party is scared to even mention the word, or to articulate any policy that is a cigarette-paper away from the neo-liberal consensus is refreshing. By coincidence (I think) I have also recently been re-reading Denis Healey’s autobiography The Time of My Life (1989). Healey, whose career culminated in being Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1970s, would be considered to be on the right of the Labour Party at that time although by today's standards his brand of moderate social democracy seems radical so far has the political ground shifted since then. His political career started with an unsuccessful attempt to become a Labour MP in 1945, and his views – like those of a whole generation of politicians of both Left and Right – had been formed by the experience of Fascism and the Second World War (Healey himself was a beach master at the Anzio Landings in 1944). His account both of the 1945 election and of the political consensus it formed very much echoes Loach's film: the determination that the sacrifice of the war would provide the foundations for a better society. The experience of war provided both a moral case for such a society but also pointed to the tools of collective endeavour and central planning that would deliver it.

In that context, it’s instructive to make the comparison between that age of austerity and our own. In the post-1945 period austerity – symbolised by the rationing that continued until 1953 – meant collective sacrifice in order to build the collective good. What it means now is collective (albeit unequal) sacrifice in order to sell off the common good – via the final privatizations of what remains of the collective health and welfare provision of the post-war period. Invoking the language of austerity in order to pervert its original meaning is both clever and disgusting. I’m struck by the way that the wartime slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ has in the last few years become ubiquitous in Britain and yet, somehow, its meaning has changed from collective stoicism to dumb acquiescence, a kind of resigned acceptance that, to use that iconic Thatcherite phrase, there is no alternative.

Loach’s The Spirit of 45 has the merit of reminding us that there was, and there still is, an alternative.