Work and food

There has been a huge – 20% - rise in the number of workers in the UK on Zero Hours Contracts (ZHCs) in the last year, bringing the total to about 900,000. It’s telling that in the third edition of my book, published in 2012 but mainly written in 2011 I did not mention ZHCs, which at that time were much less common and there were perhaps only 200,000 workers on them in the UK. That is remedied in the fourth edition that will be out later this year, of course, but even that will not take account of this latest surge.

Lauded as offering ‘flexibility’ for individuals, ZHCs are all about flexibility for organizations: there are no guaranteed hours, it is labour on demand. And although in the public mind they are associated with low-skill jobs like cleaning and catering, they are also common in professional occupations such as teaching and airline pilots.

It’s become obligatory to say that ZHCs suit some people, but to foreground that is to de-emphasise that in most cases they do not, and are a source of miserable insecurity (for some experiences see here and here). But recently published research shows that they are also bad from a business point of view, in terms of contributing to the long-term productivity problem of UK business (Rubery, Keizer & Grimshaw, 2016).

The worst kinds of ZHCs – so-called exclusive ZHCs, which prevent workers taking employment with other employers – have been banned in the UK. And, under great political pressure, retailer Sports Direct (where over 90% of staff are on ZHCs) has announced this week that it will give its employees (but not agency staff) a choice between a ZHC and a guaranteed hours contract. But ZHCs are illegal in New Zealand and (with some complexity of definition) in many European countries.

Whilst ZHCs have received a lot of media and political attention, what is perhaps even more significant is the rise in self-employment. This connotes an image of small entrepreneurs and sturdy self-reliance of the sort lauded by free market ideologues. In fact, it is largely to do with companies employing people as independent contractors – often, people who were hitherto employees of the same companies they now contact to – and the rise of the gig, or uber, economy. There are perhaps 5 million people in the UK who are self-employed.

I know from personal experience what the insecurity of self-employment means because my father, after he left the army, was a self-employed driving instructor during my childhood. That encompassed periods when anything from illness to a heavy snowfall to the petrol shortages during the 1973 oil crisis, and in those periods he had no income and no savings and the consequence was that our family had – almost literally - no food. But what I remember more from those times than the lack of food is the pervasive worry that tomorrow there would be no food at all. Nowadays, I’m insulated from such insecurity but when I contribute to the local foodbank it’s because I remember what it means. In the UK currently there are a million people a year who use foodbanks, although this is probably an underestimate. One of the key drivers is reported to be ‘insecure work arrangements’ including ZHCs.

Launch of the Brexit blog

Readers of this blog will be aware that I have posted many times about the EU, especially in the run-up to the Referendum. This remains a topic of passionate interest to me, the more so now that Britain has decided to leave the EU. However, it is only indirectly related to the themes of the book to which this blog is devoted.

So I have today launched a new blog devoted entirely to the consequences of Brexit – entitled the Brexit Blog - and those interested can find it here.

Holiday reading

I’m just back from holiday and, like many people, holidays are a chance to catch up on reading – meaning reading novels, that is, as opposed to reading organization studies. But for me that distinction is a rather false one. Perhaps it is a reflection of my inability to let go of work, but I often find much in fiction that is informative about organizational life, as I have posted about in the past.

Anyway, the pick of the crop this summer was Peter Hanington’s A Dying Breed (2016), a murky story of murder and politics set in Afghanistan with a BBC journalist as the hero. Since Hanington himself is a BBC journalist who worked in Afghanistan, it has the ring of authenticity. Organizationally, it is the depictions of the BBC – and in particular the flagship Radio 4 Today news programme - that are of particular interest. Plenty of corporate backbiting is on display, along with acerbic, thinly-veiled and distinctly unflattering portraits of some well-known journalists.

Also plausibly authentic are the ‘Liz Carlyle’ novels of Stella Rimington – former head of MI5 – the latest being Breaking Cover (2016), my next holiday read. The setting here is the ‘new Cold War’ of UK-Russian relationships, along with the post-Snowden controversy over data protection. The same setting also provides the plot for A Divided Spy (2016) the latest ‘Thomas Kell’ novel in ex-MI6 officer Charles Cumming’s series, which I also read.

Almost all writers of espionage get compared with John Le Carré (also ex-MI6), and Hanington, Rimington and Cumming are all blessed, or cursed, with this. There is really no comparison, though. Cumming is more like Frederick Forsyth in his heyday (not a bad accolade, of course), and none of them approaches the multi-layered complexity – including the organizational complexity – of Le Carré’s Smiley novels. Only Edward Wilson, in his ‘Catesby’ series, comes close to that in my opinion, and alas there has been no new addition to that series this year. Wilson also has a relevant background, having served with distinction with the US special forces in Vietnam.

Le Carré aside, I don’t suppose that anyone would regard these authors as great writers. Having inside knowledge doesn’t in itself make for good writing, and with the exception of Wilson the books I’ve mentioned suffer in varying degrees from clichéd characters and clunky plots. That isn’t to be snooty as they are all perfectly good popular novels and, for me, perfect holiday reads; and in any case I certainly couldn’t do better! My point is that what the authors’ insider knowledge delivers isn’t necessarily literary merit but contextual, and specifically organizational, plausibility.

That quality of having ‘been there’ is generally lacking in the organization studies literature. Ethnographies alone display it, but ethnographies are time-consuming and increasingly rare because of the time pressures of academic research. Nor does it readily yield a string of journal publications. Almost all qualitative research now is interview-based, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but rarely gives the reader that sense of understanding a hitherto unknown world that ethnography – and fiction – can deliver.

Nevertheless, careful research and a dash of imagination can have the same effect. An example is another of my holiday reads, Alan Furst’s A Hero in France (2016). Furst is also an ex-journalist but the historical settings (usually Europe during or just before the Second World War) are necessarily researched rather than experienced. The research is sometimes too obtrusive, it must be admitted, but in this latest book that is not so, and there is a strong sense – almost a smell – of occupied Paris. Organizationally, though, this story of the French Resistance is very different to that of the BBC or of intelligence agencies. For how do you organize in secret?

And here I return from holiday to work, as this is the theme of my chapter, with Jana Costas, on ‘invisible organizations’ in A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies edited by Barbara Czarniawska and published just two days ago.

Pulling teeth

Many thanks to those readers of this blog who have written to me commiserating with the dental problems I talked about in my last post. Treatment is still ongoing.

But it seems that I am lucky in having a dentist who offered me the choice of root canal treatment rather than an extraction. Because it is reported today that many dentists now extract teeth unnecessarily as they receive the same amount from the NHS as for more lengthy and expensive treatments such as root canal surgery. NHS dentists are paid per ‘unit of dental activity’ and both extraction and root canal surgery constitute three units of dental activity. But since an extraction takes on average half the time of root canal surgery, there is an incentive to extract.

Here we have a very precise illustration of the perverse effects of targets, discussed on p.33-34 of the book, and the nature of bureaucratic dysfunctionalism. Like so much else that I write about in the book, the issue is not just one of the technicalities of organizational systems. Rather, dentistry in the UK has fallen apart for ideological reasons. Unlike other NHS services, it is no longer free at the point of use and quite hefty charges have to be paid. Indeed in many parts of the UK it is impossible to get access to an NHS dentist at all.

The roots (hah!) of this go back to the 2006 dental contract, the high watermark of New Labour infatuation with quasi-market and managerial solutions to the provision of public goods. In the intervening period there have been numerous complaints and reports, but nothing much has changed so that in March 2016 the British Dental Association (BDA) said:

​“The 2006 dental contract is not fit for purpose. It rewards dentists for hitting government targets for treatment and repair, not for improving their patients’ oral health. It was meant to improve access to NHS dentistry and put prevention at the heart of the service, but it has failed on its own terms. It has deskilled and demoralized the profession, and received criticism from patient groups, government, the Health Select Committee and the Chief Dental Officers for England and Wales.”

It’s important to understand that behind the bloodless formulation of being ‘not fit for purpose’ lie real people and real suffering. The consequence is self-dentistry, meaning, to be blunt, people extracting their own teeth with pliers. This in one of the richest countries in the world.

Painful choices

There is so much that is painful in the world right now – events in France, Germany and Turkey come particularly to mind – that there is no shortage of things I might write under this heading. I don’t think I have ever known so depressing a time, politically, in my life. But in this post I want to focus on the particular and personal pain that I have been experiencing: dental pain. And more specifically some organizational things around that pain.

In brief, last week I developed a toothache and went to the dentist who booked me in for some treatment. Over the weekend the pain became truly agonizing – I’ve had dental pain before but nothing remotely like this – to the extent that I had to contact the out of hours doctor for some non-prescription painkillers. This process itself was organizationally painful, involving no fewer than five telephone calls, each one acting as a kind of filter. Thus on the first call I was asked a checklist of questions clearly designed to either put up red flags (‘Pains in chest? Difficulty breathing?’) or to process me to the right person.

There’s nothing objectionable about that, although I could see it leading to many false positives and negatives, except perhaps the fact that each subsequent phone call entailed repeating my symptoms and needs (in summary: ‘I’m in agony, give me some super-strong painkillers right now’ which maybe could have been passed on). But what struck me was that when it came to prescribing medicine I was told about various different possibilities and the downsides – for example potential side-effects – of these. So I asked whether or not I should take the prescribed medicine, although frankly I was in so much pain that I would have done anything, whatever the risk, up to and including amateur surgery. And the response is what I want to write about, because it was to say that what mattered was that I had been ‘made aware of the risks and so could make an informed choice’.

It seems clear to me that this has nothing to do with my making an informed choice and everything to do with organizational self-protection. If things went wrong, I could hardly complain: I had been warned of the risks. But I had no way of assessing these risks or calibrating them against the benefits and so the choice did not in any way empower me; rather, it disempowered me in the event of any problem that subsequently emerged. It reminded me of a point made in my recent book on secrecy where we argue that the ‘full transparency’ of the terms and conditions we sign up to when making online purchases is actually a form of secrecy. The T&Cs are so lengthy and complex that no one reads them or could understand them if they did, yet in the event of a problem or dispute we can be told that we had been given full information and had agreed to it by ticking the acceptance box.

Anyway, I took my medicine and all went well in that the pain was somewhat lessened and I had no unpleasant side-effects (on the contrary, a rather pleasant wooziness) and I went to the dentist again. She told me that I had a choice between having root canal surgery or an extraction and talked me through the pros and cons. A choice again, then, and this time not I think one to do with organizational self-protection but reflecting current understandings of professionalism in healthcare and other spheres. I say current understandings because in the past the norm was for health professionals to simply tell you what to do. It was a more authoritarian, paternalistic approach in which the doctor (or dentist) knew best.

That has now given way to a more patient-centred and, I suppose, consumerist ethos in which clinician and patient together make treatment decisions. The trouble is that I really don’t want this, and don’t have any basis on which to make a choice – and it is a particularly bad time to try to make choices when one is in pain. I would actually rather be told what to do: my choice is not to choose, but that wasn’t an option. So the conversation became an exercise in me trying to detect and provoke signals from the dentist as to what she actually thought was the best course of action.

It may seem a stretch, but I think this links to the post-truth politics I discussed in my recent post The Sleep of Reason where ‘expert’ opinion is derided and we have a mixture of a consumerist market for ideas and an implication that how passionately a view is held is in some way an index of its truth. For some, this is a liberation from the tyranny of authority, but it goes hand in hand with a breakdown in trust and a devaluation of rationality. Perhaps this has had some good effects. The deference shown to experts in the past was not always healthy – for example, I can remember my late father always dressing in his best clothes when he had to visit his GP which seems extraordinary to me. On the other hand, the idea that a few minutes on google can enable us to talk on equal terms with our doctors is even more bizarre. In the face of pain, at least, I am a positivist and I want someone with knowledge of the evidence to tell me what to do about it.

Oh, and for anyone interested the decision was to have root canal surgery, starting this Friday. It was my choice, but I reserve the right to moan about it. Pain does not just make me a positivist, it also exacerbates, if that is possible, my propensity to grumpiness, gloom and outright bad temper.

Goodnight, John-Boy

In a complete shift from recent posts, I am writing today to mark the death in March this year (but which I have only just heard about) of Earl Hamner Junior, aged 92. He was the creator of the TV series The Waltons and the original of its central character John-Boy Walton. The series was in turn based on Hamner’s 1961 novel Spencer’s Mountain and depicts a large, rural American family struggling to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Work, lack of work, debt, insecurity and poverty are the backdrop to the story.

The Waltons is an interesting show at lots of levels. In one way, it can be seen as a reactionary paean to family values as exemplified by George Bush Senior’s speech in 1992 in which he said “we need a nation closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons”. But I think it represents something more than, or anyway only overlapping with, that. Sure it seems like a story of hardworking, self-reliant, god-fearing folk of the sort that might resonate with the American Bible belt. However, read another way it is a story of communitarian values and liberal tolerance. On either account it has a strong moral dimension.

That it can be read in these two ways is reminiscent of the way that Woodie Guthrie’s folk song This Land is Your Land (written in 1940) has been received and used. Guthrie himself was formed by his experience of the Great Depression and the song expresses this and is emblematic of his radical left-wing politics. Its revival in the 1960s by Bob Dylan and others reflects these politics. Yet it was later taken up by Republicans as a patriotic, traditionalist anthem.

Despite its cosy image, The Waltons was quite bold in tackling issues about racial prejudice, female emancipation, environmentalism, pacifism and the trauma of war – all controversial and current themes in the 1970s when it was aired. I’m not trying to say that it was some kind of radical social commentary, of course. And it was schmaltzy, soapy and sentimental, for sure. But it wasn’t just that.

It can now be seen through at least three different lenses. As a story about the 1930s, as a story about the 1930s seen from the 1970s, and as a story about the 1930s seen from the 1970s as seen from today. Plus there is perhaps yet another lens which is that of the UK rather than US. After all, my memory of it is watching it in the UK in the 1970s, shown at 8.10 on a Tuesday evening if my memory serves me well. I’ve written elsewhere about how at that time popular TV shows were a kind of cultural glue in that the small number of channels meant that they were a shared experience.

The show ran from 1972 to 1981 and overlapped with the next big American soap that also was a hit in the UK and elsewhere. That was Dallas (which ran from 1978 to 1991). The focus again was the a family in the American south but this time a family riven by internal feuds and characterised by huge wealth rather than grinding poverty. Somehow this seems to capture the shift, on both sides of the Atlantic, from a post-war consensus formed in part as a reaction to the pre-war depression to the neo-liberal revolution of Reagan and Thatcher. The Waltons was a kind of reminder of where that consensus had come from; Dallas a harbinger of the harsher casino capitalism that replaced it.

I said that this post marked a complete shift from recent posts but perhaps not entirely. Viewed now, at a time when there is populist backlash against that casino capitalism and the globalization that accompanied it, The Waltons might be seen to resonate with this. Hard times are back for the white working class. But the Walton family were depicted as resolutely Democrat in their politics, supports of the Roosevelt New Deal and notably open-minded and tolerant on racial matters, and some episodes directly repudiate anti-immigrant prejudice. In this way it reminds us that there is no necessary connection between being poor and disadvantaged and being intolerant and close-minded.

 

A new landscape?

Within less than a fortnight some of the consequences of Brexit are becoming clear. What was dismissed as ‘project fear’ turns out to have been true. The pound has collapsed, the FTSE-250 has collapsed, foreign investment has collapsed, the UK is facing breakup and the political system has broken down. These aren’t just short-term things and they will reverberate for years to come. A country that a week ago seemed like a bastion of stability now seems a scary and unstable place. The leaders of the leave campaign have mainly disappeared and those that are left don’t know what to do. Someone said to me the other day that the issue is not that the remainers are ‘bad losers’ but that the leavers are ‘bad winners’: at their moment of victory they regret it and exit.

The UK media are hardly reporting the big strategic and economic issues and are obsessing about the Westminster politics of who will lead the political parties. That matters, a bit, but does not begin to speak to the political and economic meltdown that is happening. For that, you have to go to the foreign press. And there is also a cultural meltdown, most obvious in the rise of racist abuse and attacks. This has been widely reported but to personalise it a friend of mine, out shopping in the afternoon, was punched in the face for having a foreign accent; a Chinese student I know was spat at and told to pack her bags. Welcome to post-Brexit England.

I’ve written before about how the divide now is between cosmopolitans and locals, and Tony Blair – of whom I have plenty of criticisms, but few can doubt his sensibility to events – has said something similar, arguing that the political cleavage is no longer left versus right but open versus closed. So the shape of twentieth century politics, based on capital versus labour, no longer makes sense and nor do the party structures that mirrored it.

We need, fast, a political realignment around this. What we currently have is a situation where the locals (or closed) have defeated the cosmopolitans (or open) but the irony is that the former look to the latter to deliver what they have voted for. It’s striking that about the only person in the UK showing any sort of leadership now is Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. And who is he? A technocratic expert, and an immigrant to boot!

This new politics certainly makes for some strange bedfellows, especially between the internationalist left and the global free-market right; but this is the landscape that we are now going to have to work within. It makes a nonsense of the politics of most of my lifetime, and I am still adjusting to it. I talked to a friend of mine the other day, a lifelong working class socialist, who said that he wanted the working class who voted Brexit to suffer unemployment and punitive public service cuts so as to teach them the error of their decision. That seems incredibly harsh but he said the alternative is to infantilise those voters by saying that they did not know what they were voting for. We shouldn’t patronise them, and so we have to say that they have to accept the consequences of their choice.

I kind of understand that argument and at all events I see a very strange situation having opened up in which the people expected to sort out this mess are those in business, the civil service, civil society or even academia who largely did not vote for it and who were derided as the experts and the elite. Where are the leaders of populist insurgency? Nowhere to be seen. So their insurgency is to be put into practice by the very people they have rejected. I’m not sure that there has ever been a situation quite like that in modern history.

We are very, very far from seeing the dust settle on the Brexit vote, but I think that the dynamics I have described here define where the dust will settle. And, if so, that has an import far wider than Brexit as it seems to define what the politics of post-globalization will look like. This isn’t a matter of merely British interest. For one thing, when such a big economy makes such a bizarre decision it has global effects. But, beyond that, it could be said that Britain led the industrial revolution, led the neo-liberal post-industrial revolution and is now leading this post-globalization, post-truth, revolution.

I don’t pretend to have a complete handle on this, and these are just preliminary thoughts, written during a crisis which is both personal and political. In a few months they may seem naïve or just misguided; and the one thing which social science should teach us is to be wary of prediction. Even so, I think that what has happened here these last few days and what it will mean over the next few years is something fundamental which will change all our lives.