Scottish inter-dependence

The referendum on Scottish independence is, obviously, the biggest news story in Scotland at the moment, but also in the UK, and it is important for the whole of Europe as well. Like most people I assumed until recently that, in line with the opinion polls, the outcome would be a clear vote against independence. Now, again according to the opinion polls, the vote will be very close.

The debate about the vote is inextricably bound up with economics and business. Issues such as whether an independent Scotland would be able to use the pound, and if so how substantive would independence be; whether businesses would re-locate away from Scotland; whether businesses would price goods differently; what would be the future of the oil industry have all been endlessly discussed.

For out and out nationalists, it hardly matters: and independent nation trumps all other considerations. But this throws into sharp relief what meaning attaches to ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ today? The interconnectedness of the global economy, and the associated institutions such as the EU, IMF, World Bank, UN and so on make it difficult to sustain a narrative of national self-determination.

Yet self-determination clearly has purchase. In contrast to the often apathetic view of politics in the UK and elsewhere, the referendum has galvanized an enormous political energy in Scotland, with 97% of the population registered to vote, and turnout predicted to be between 80 and 90%. People care because this vote matters.

The main reason why it matters is because Scottish public opinion is to some degree to the left of UK politics as a whole. It remains a Labour Party heartland, but it is not neo-liberal New Labour that it supports, it is the social democratic ‘Old Labour’ Party of trade unions, workers’ rights and welfare. The New Labour project was predicated on the idea that its traditional vote would have nowhere to go except Labour, which could therefore tailor itself to floating voters in marginal English constituencies and if it got those votes and added them to the captive heartlands a majority could be secured. This is exactly what brought Tony Blair three election victories.

So what is happening now is that traditional Labour voters in Scotland are switching to independence on the basis that a UK Labour government will never reflect their views, whereas an independent Scotland could become governed by a Labour government that did not accept the neo-liberal position of New Labour. That is not entirely unrealistic – in contrast to the aspirations of those Old Labour voters in England who are switching to the Thatcherite UKIP for the same reason but with absolutely no realism at all. If I lived in Scotland, I’d be tempted to do the same. But I hope that the Scots do not vote for independence because the consequences for the Left in England will probably be calamitous: the end of the Labour Party and a permanent neo-liberal majority, although it’s also true that the shock waves of Scottish independence might re-configure English politics in unforeseeable ways.

New Labour took the Labour Party into a cul-de-sac, with the most likely consequence being no Labour at all. In retrospect it looks completely unnecessary: by the time of the 1997 election any alternative to the Tories would have been voted in. But its short–term electoral success gave it justification. The consequence has been to eviscerate social democracy in the UK, an outcome which would be cemented by Scottish independence. That is not just a matter of parochial concern, since, without Scotland, the UK is far more likely to leave the EU, and what happens in the EU has inevitable, if unpredictable, repercussions outside Europe, as, for example, the people of the Ukraine can testify.

What this suggests is the global connectedness is a two-way street. Nationalist appeals to sovereignty may be increasingly meaningless because of global connectedness, but global connectedness means that nationalist sentiment can have effects well beyond national borders. The only people to have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum are those currently living in Scotland; the effects of what they decide will have consequences around the world.

Insanely hot

Some years ago, a senior person at a university where I then worked told me how he had met the then boss of Tesco, a supermarket chain that was at the time the doyen of British business. Breathlessly, he enthused about how each year they made 3% efficiency gains. That’s what we should be doing in universities, he declared. Do more with less!

I was reminded of this conversation because l came across a quote where, faced with declining performance, a subsequent Chief Executive of Tesco acknowledged that it had been “running too hot for two long”. What this means in ordinary language is that they did not have enough people to staff the tills and stack the shelves and, as a result, they are now taking on 8000 new staff. To put it another way – those efficiency savings turned out to be anything but efficient, and the business is now paying the price.

It is a pattern which can be seen repeatedly across both private and public sector organizations, reflecting the contested nature of what efficiency means, which is a major theme of my book (e.g. pp. 130-132). In the public sector, what often happens is that ‘efficiency’ means reducing costs in one budget only to find that they re-appear in another. To take just one of literally countless examples:

“A government deal with Applied Language Solutions (ALS) was supposed to cut £18m off the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) bill for court translation services in England and Wales- around 23 per cent of the budget. But what was intended as a cost-cutting measure will cost the government thousands of pounds every day in delays and adjournments” (Channel 4 News, 2012).

It seems such an obvious point, evidenced by so many cases that one might have thought that the lesson would have been learned. But whilst on holiday last week I caught a TV show (I don’t recall the details, so can’t link to it) in which a panel of business leaders discussed the challenges facing the global economy. And what did they have to say? Well, it won’t be a surprise. That businesses in a globally competitive world had to become leaner, fitter and ever more efficient. In short, that they had to ‘run hotter’.

There is a quote usually, although possibly wrongly, attributed to Albert Einstein to the effect that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It is a lesson our business leaders have yet to learn.

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?

Which 'establishment'?

Britain is engulfed in another scandal of the ‘political establishment’, this time relating to allegations of a cover up of allegations of child abuse amongst politicians and possibly others, predominantly in the 1980s. This comes in the wake of other scandals about child abuse in institutions such as the BBC, the Church and, going back to politicians, those about fraudulent expenses claims that emerged in 2009.

It is clearly right that these matters are scandalous and that they should be investigated. At the same time, the way in which they are being configured is misleading and potentially dangerous. It feeds into a kind of anti-politics agenda, much in evidence on the political right, that the whole of the polity is irredeemably tainted (thus, a poll shows that UKIP voters are by far the most likely to think that the inquiry into the cover up allegations will not deal with it properly). Apart from the obvious fact that there is no reason to think that any and every politician has been engaged in these crimes, it poses an equally obvious question: if political representatives are to be treated as uniformly morally corrupt, who should wield political power? It is very easy to see how against a background of indiscriminate assumptions of guilt a kind of populist, anti-establishment ‘strong man’ could become an attractive proposition. Since ‘they’ are all as bad as each other, where would be the harm?

One answer to that lies precisely in the fact that these scandals have emerged and are being investigated. It may be slow, imperfect and in all kinds of ways unsatisfactory but, still, it would be unlikely to happen but for the many checks and balances, and the plural voices, of democratic and civil society. Cynically ascribing corruption to the political system in general may sound sophisticated and worldly, but in fact it is the opposite: it is naïve about the likely alternatives to, and inattentive to the sophistication of, that political system.

There is another problem, too. The way that this is being presented as being about the ‘establishment’ – meaning politicians, police, civil servants, clergy, media and so on - is a highly misleading and in many respects outdated way of understanding what ‘the establishment’ is and where power lies. It is the global elite and transnational corporations who are the true establishment, and they lie far beyond public inquiries or, even, the law. It is easy to whip up populist sentiment against what are, certainly, local elites but in doing so the rather harder targets are equally easily ignored. For that matter, the many interconnections between these local and global elites – for example the relationship between former politicians and civil servants and the outsourcing firms who receive government contracts – are also ignored.

I hope that no one reading this will think that I am arguing that present and past child abuse scandals should not be investigated and the perpetrators, or those who protected them, brought to justice. I am not.  But in doing so we should keep a sense of proportion about what it means for the viability of democratic political institutions and an awareness that beyond the easily-identifiable traditional elite lie a new elite whose names are rarely in the newspapers and whose actions are rarely scrutinised.

Reviewing organization studies

I have recently been doing a lot of reviewing for academic journals which is an increasingly depressing experience. Almost every paper I review has an entirely mechanistic and soul-destroying approach. A literature review is conducted to establish the current state of knowledge. But there is no real engagement with that literature, it is just carefully presented to establish some synthetic deficiency. Then there is a dense section on theory and the claim of some wonderful theoretical advance. There is a cautious and careful statement of methodology, stressing its technical aspect. Then some findings and a crafted statement of contribution.

Occasionally, there is some glaring inadequacy in these ritualistic moves that, as a reviewer, one can point out. Far more often, there’s not really anything wrong with it … except that it’s awful and pointless and boring. Those might be considered good grounds to recommend rejection but, bizarrely, that is not so. Sometimes I say something like that in my reviews but, when I do, it is invariably discounted (for those who don’t know the process, normally journal editors send reviewers a copy of their decision letter* along with the comment of all reviewers, so one can see what weight has been put upon one’s comment). In any case, I rarely state it so baldly since I understand very well the reason why authors write their papers that way. It’s not even that these papers are ‘bad’. They are just dead.

The reason why academic research in organization studies has got this way are multiple, but they have led to a situation where each and every journal paper is supposed to make a theoretical advance (even though there have only been a handful of such advances in the field in the last fifty years, say; and few of these have come from journal papers) and to be empirically robust (even though almost all of them are based either on statistical analysis of variables that are meaningless, or present as ‘thick description’ a few quotes from some interviews). The possibility that academic research might disclose something interesting and hitherto little known or not known at all about how people live is not so much forgotten as derided.

As an author, submitting papers to journals, I see this all the time. When I started this job, reviewers’ comments were confined to a brief statement of criticisms and suggestions. Now, I receive whole essays as reviews demanding of a 10,000 word article more than a series of books could reasonably be expected to deliver. And if I re-write and re-submit the paper – and sometimes, now, I just say that I won’t do so given the absurdity of the demands – it is meant to be accompanied by a response to reviewers running to as many pages as the paper itself, and grovelingly thanking the reviewers for the damage they have forced me to do. I say damage because although reviewer comments are occasionally helpful, more often they require endless detours, bolsterings and circumlocutions which strip out any clarity of argument. This is very obvious when you read journal papers because you can almost always see the joins as authors struggle to accommodate reviewers' comments, and is one of the reasons for their unreadability. ‘Ah, that’s just the game’, my colleagues tell me. Well, yes, indeed it is, and if we play it then we end up with precisely the boring and forgettable papers that are published.

Because that, really, is the point. All of this is supposedly about quality. By being so ‘rigorous’ it will ensure that each paper is of great merit. I know people who become almost orgasmic with glee when they get an acceptance letter from a top journal. People who don’t work in this field won’t understand this and may not believe it, but it is true. It is ridiculous of course. Even within the narrow terms of  professionalised debate it is ridiculous. The average citation of a paper in the organization studies field is less than five. But here is something interesting – and it is not meant to be as self-aggrandizing as it sounds. In my career I have published many papers in what are now called ‘top journals’ which would probably not begin to meet the criteria that those journals now apply. Yet very many of them are highly cited (I will spare you my Google Scholar i10-index) whereas the papers being published through this routinized, professionalised  journal process we now have disappear without trace.

Almost everything that happens every day in every country in the world is bound up with organizations. It is exciting, important and vibrant. But the academic study of organizations is not just dead but deadening. Organization studies might very well be called organizational necrophilia**.

 

*These editorial letters are themselves masterpieces in mediocrity ('I want you to satisfy all the reviewers' comments' - no sense that an editor might make a judgment on their validity or, even, acknowledge their incompatability) and sanctimony (the dominant trope being a lordly injunction to authors to consider this ‘a high risk rewrite’).


**Post-script: Since first posting this it has been nagging at me that it connects with something else, which I now remember is an excellent post on Yiannis Gabriel's blog, entitled Are any academic journals still alive?

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.

The playthings of our leaders

There is a big political row about the US drug company Pfizer’s bid to buy its British rival AstraZeneca. It is interesting that it is a row because for at least three decades it has been claimed in Britain, at least, that ownership does not matter and, as I discuss on pp. 106-7 of the book, there has been a wholesale sell-off of what were once British companies (other countries, including the US, have been somewhat more wary of seeing ownership drift offshore). We have thus had the bizarre disjuncture in political discourse of constantly bemoaning the relatively limited international mobility of labour – immigration – whilst cheerfully accepting the complete mobility of capital. The Pfizer bid has suddenly galvanized an understanding that ownership does matter, because (in this example) there is very little reason to think that Pfizer will care much about nurturing the UK’s science and R&D base, which are widely seen as vital to the national economy.

There is an added poignancy to the situation of AstraZeneca, because it arises out of the case, discussed in the book (p.110) of ICI as a classic example of the disastrous ‘financialised’ organization model of the new capitalism. An excellent article by Aditya Chakrabortty this week tells the story:

“AstraZeneca was originally the corporate child of ICI, which was once Britain's largest manufacturer of everything from paints to betablockers. Then came one of Thatcher's favourite wheeler-dealers, Jim Hanson, who, in 1991, put in a bid to take over the conglomerate and break it up. That approach got bogged down in scandal – but ICI's executives did what Hanson wanted anyway and smashed up the company. The drugs arm was sold to the Swedes, the pesticides division flogged to the Swiss, the dyes part to the Dutch and the adhesives and electronics materials finally parcelled out to the Germans”.

Whether the Pfizer bid will spark a belated recognition of the importance of ownership remains to be seen but, in a sense it is too late for, as Chakrabortty points out, in the meantime the British manufacturing and research base has been eviscerated.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the neo-liberal wasteland, I noticed this week that the former head teacher I discussed in my post The New Barons last June has been banned for teaching from life because of her fraudulent activities. As I said in my original post, this arose because of the idea that ‘leaders’ should be set free from bureaucratic constraints but such freedom carries grave risks, as Steve Richard’s article on this fiasco also explains.

It’s been nagging at me today that there is something that links these two stories. Most obviously, both are outgrowths of neo-liberalism as applied to, respectively, industrial policy and public sector management. But beyond – or perhaps related – to that is the way that both arise from the separation of power and responsibility. Our companies (and with them our jobs), our schools (and with them our children’s education) seem in some way not to figure as real or important. Instead, they are the plaything of our leaders. So whereas neo-liberalism purports to empower the customer or consumer in fact it does no such thing: it enacts, enshrines and endorses the power of elites.