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!

Happy birthday?

So this blog is just about exactly one year old, reflecting the fact that the third edition is also a year old. It is ‘fairly interesting’ to look at the site statistics. So far there have been 3367 visits (390 in the last month), although there is no way of telling whether this represents a small number of people looking at it several times, or a larger number of less frequent visitors.  The most viewed post is the one about Thatcher’s death and legacy. The top 10 country breakdown is:

United Kingdom	1219
United States	647
Germany	148
Russia	133
Ireland	82
France	73
Ukraine	68
China	67
Norway	65
Australia	53

 

But what is more surprising is to see occasional visitors from far flung places: this week, Aruba.

Anyway, there has been another birthday this week, namely my own 49^th anniversary (or, as a colleague rather depressingly put it, I am now entering my 50^th year). I am becoming more and more grumpy as I get older – in fact, I realise that somewhere along the line I have turned into my father. My current pet hate is people walking around looking at their mobiles, requiring others to jump out of the way to avoid a collision.

Another peeve is more directly related to the book where, on p.131, I talk about the free labour that customers perform when dialling up call centres through automated telephone systems, sometimes even paying for the privilege. Something very similar is becoming more and more common in shops, where increasingly the checkouts are self-service. Thus we scan our goods, bag them and pay without the need for a checkout operator. This is presented as an extension of choice, but the choice is limited by the fact that there are fewer and fewer staffed tills with longer and longer queues as a result.

Yesterday I was standing in one such queue, with most of the self-service tills unused, a sign in itself that, as a matter of choice, many people, not just me, prefer not to use them. My particular dislike is the way that the recorded voice barks aggressively at you – for example ‘foreign item in bagging area’ or ‘item not scanned’ or ‘return to bagging area’, the last of which I don’t even understand.  I half expect to hear it say, like a bossy schoolteacher, ‘you’re only letting yourself down’ or ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed’.

As we queued, a member of the shop staff kept reminding us that we could use these tills and, like all good English people, we pretended we could not hear, or that the message was for someone else. But after being told this two or three times I muttered ‘I hate those things’. It obviously came out louder than I had intended, because suddenly everyone in the queue started pitching in and complaining about the fact that they had staff standing around telling us to go self-service, whilst all but one of the manual tills was closed.

Of course it was not the fault of the staff – they were simply doing what they had been told to do. But the sad thing about that is that eventually, perhaps, we will all be duly accultured to serve ourselves and the expectation of being served by a human being will become, to use the term that has been applied to smoking, ‘de-normalised’. All the manned tills will disappear (and, with them, even the chimera of ‘choice’). And almost all of the staff will be out a job as we become their replacements, labouring unpaid, belaboured for our faults by the pitiless shouts of the automatic overseer. It depresses me to think that we will probably not even notice or, worse, will celebrate it as a new found freedom.

Or perhaps we will be found to be such unsatisfactory workers that the recorded voice will tire of us and announce that we, too, have been sacked. Or perhaps bagged. Or perhaps, even, ‘returned to the bagging area’ for re-programming.

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.

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.

More on power

This issue of how to organize electricity generation and supply is a pressing and controversial one across the globe, from Turkey to Nigeria to India to the USA, and it is at the top of the political agenda in the UK, where the cost of electricity is a hot issue. I heard the government’s energy minister, Ed Davey, interviewed the other day and he was talking about all sorts of complicated measures he had in mind to make the energy market work, including a state-funded network of advisors, state rebates for the most vulnerable and so on. And of course his central idea is about switching between providers - but that is absurd because the big energy companies offer more or less the same prices and because what is the best deal when you sign up will, possibly within a few hours, be a poor deal - and yet typically you are locked into it. Or, if not, then you have to engage in constant market scanning and switching. This is an aspect of the paradox of choice, discussed in the book (p.75).

All these absurd gyrations arise from the refusal to acknowledge a basic truth - electricity supply is a textbook natural monopoly and, as such, the most efficient way to run it is through state provision. That refusal exists as much in the opposition Labour Party, which has proposed a price freeze, as in the government.  It's pointless to blame the electricity companies - the scope they have to compete in the way that, say, supermarkets do is virtually nil, even if they were minded to (and why should they be - as Adam Smith observed long ago, markets do not work on the basis of charity or, as we might nowadays say, social responsibility and we should not expect them to). That comparison is an instructive one: no one thinks that to make the supermarkets be competitive we have to have community advisors, rebates for the poor, complicated rules about switching, statutory requirements to offer the best deal and a government regulator because (whatever one thinks of supermarkets) all that consumers have to do if they are not satisfied is do their next shop somewhere else. With many caveats it more or less works as a market.

This week, the big six electricity suppliers were called to the British parliament, accused of price fixing, because they all more or less simultaneously announce more or less similar price rises. Their defence was that their price rises were because almost all their costs – the wholesale electricity price and taxes – are beyond their control. But if we turn that round, it also means that they cannot compete on price. So what else might they compete on? In most markets it would be product quality and product innovation, but that too is impossible: electricity is just electricity, so there is no way of offering ‘really good electricity’. For the same reason, they can’t even compete on brand image: no one would think there was something especially worthwhile about electricity from, say, E-On as opposed to EDF, would they?

So electricity (like other utilities such as gas and water) simply does not and cannot a function as a competitive market. By pretending otherwise we have to bear all the costs of an entirely ineffective regulatory system in order to pay both in supply and - as mentioned in my previous post - in generation often state owned companies of other countries to deliver the chimerical benefits of privatization and competition.

Thus, to use an over-used phrase, there is a huge elephant in the room that no mainstream British politician will talk about: the whole thing needs to be re-nationalised. And, curiously, given politicians unwillingness to talk about it, this is supported by 69% of the British electorate.

Power at any cost

It was announced today that a new nuclear energy plant is to be built in Britain, a development described by the government as ‘historic’. Well, it is historic but perhaps not in ways that give any great cause for celebration. It is the first time that a nuclear power station has been built in Britain not by the government but by private investors, principally state-owned companies in China and France. It is an extraordinary irony that the privatization of British electricity generation – on the basis of the supposed virtues of the private sector – has ended up with paying overseas public companies to do what used to be done by the British state. It is nevertheless underwritten by the British state: there is no risk for the investors both in the specific sense that they are guaranteed a future revenue stream set at twice the level of present prices and in the more diffuse sense that, ultimately, the state will be responsible for ensuring power supplies come what may.

The deal resembles the PFI deals extensively used for public investment in Britain and elsewhere over recent decades. In these, present private investment is paid for by guaranteed long-term future expensive payments from the public purse. Notionally risk is transferred from the state but that is indeed notional since, when public services are at stake, the risk ends up back with the government, as happened for example with the London Underground. PFI has been widely criticised for its poor value.

It is difficult to overstate the folly of these kinds of deals, and not just financially. Thinking about energy in particular (but also transport, healthcare etc.) the idea that key, strategic, services can so casually be handed over by governments is breath taking. With PFI it could be understood as an infatuation with the private sector in line with neo-liberal ideology. But in the case of the new power station there is not even that explanation. Instead, it actually shows the bankruptcy – literally – of that ideology, because it shows that the shrivelled neo-liberal state has no option other than to bribe the state-owned companies of other countries to do what it no longer has the skills or the capital to do itself – whatever the cost.

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.