Media coverage of organizational issues is not great. Yes, every news bulletin gives the obligatory reading of the day's exchange rate and stock index level, and big corporate events and scandals get a look in. But there is very little about daily work life, even though this is, arguably, a matter of greater public interest. Even rarer is an interest in organizations from an historical perspective.
So we should be grateful for the new BBC Radio 4 series, The History of Office Life, presented by FT journalist Lucy Kellaway. Broadcast in ten episodes of 15 minutes each, starting last Monday, it perhaps struggles to cover so broad a subject in such a compressed format. Still, two hours of national broadcasting time is not to be sniffed at, and each episode contains within it a few gems. See here for a review of the first week's episodes.
And I will declare an interest: the next episode, on the rise of management, to be broadcast on Monday 29th July at 13.45 UK time features me as does the episode on recent trends in office life, to be broadcast on Friday 2nd August at 13.45 UK time. What I will say I have little idea, as it will be a few moments edited from a long interview. So this is not a recommendation ...
Friday, 26 July 2013
Thursday, 25 July 2013
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.
Friday, 28 June 2013
The New Barons
It seems as if almost daily the malign consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) that has informed public sector reform in many countries for the last 30 years are being exposed. In the UK, one recent high profile example is the Francis report into the failings of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust which can be read as an indictment of the kind of ‘tick box’ procedural managerialism inaugurated by NPM. But NPM, with its proceduralism, audits and managerial controls has increasingly morphed into something else, a more post-bureaucratic understanding of public management. Here, the emphasis is less on procedures and audits and more on freeing inspirational leaders to innovate and enact ‘radical change’.
Of course these things are linked. NPM always had several meanings, including the relentless praise of ‘enterprise’ in public services. Post-bureaucracy is a similarly flexible term, and the two fit together in all sorts of ways, as this article by Leslie Budd of the Open University explains. Still, the post-bureaucratic accent of contemporary public management has a certain distinctiveness in part as a reaction to what was, ironically, the explosion of ‘red tape’ associated with the supposedly anti-bureaucratic NPM.
I talk at length about post-bureaucracy in the book, especially in chapter 4, and a recent case has called to mind one of the points made there. I suggest (p. 86) that the embrace of post-bureaucracy carries with it huge risks because, freed of all those irritating rules and procedures it is just as likely that managers will act with recklessness and little or nothing will curtail them. In fact, I might have gone further, and pointed out that corruption and fraud, as well as recklessness, are made more likely in such situations, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues.
The case that reminded me of this was that of the head teacher of an ‘academy school’ in the UK who has resigned following multiple accusations of financial impropriety, including allegations about the way she employed family members. The allegations are particularly interesting if we consider how Weberian bureaucracy is in part to do with the avoidance of nepotism, of corruption and, indeed, the links between the two. This was a head teacher who had been lionized by successive politicians as the epitome of what the new style public servants should be: dynamic, innovative leaders.
Now the allegations are just that – there have been no criminal proceedings – but they fit into a wider sense of a managerial or leadership cadre in both the private and public sectors which is out of control, treating their organizations as their own individual fiefdoms rather than things for which they have a duty of stewardship. I have myself seen such behaviour, for it is as prevalent in universities as anywhere else.
The danger is that such episodes are seen as a series of individual scandals or, if put together, a sign of some inevitable decline in moral standards and the probity of public life feeding what is beginning to be seen as a crisis of trust in leadership. But they are neither: they are systemically linked by a particular approach, or set of approaches, to the management of organizations. It is in part, at least in origin, a consequence of the new capitalism I discuss in the book, of the neo-liberal revolution that has literally or metaphorically marketised so many areas of economic and social life. But it is more complex than that, and is more linked to the ideas about ‘neo-mercantilism’ I talked about in my post of January 9 2013. For what we have is a new managerial class which has little to do with the ‘market’ in any recognizable sense and is closer to a kind of baronial oligarchy in which there is little organizational constraint on how its members may act. In these circumstances, the only constraints become the extra-organizational ones of the law, at which point they become publically known scandals. But their origin is not some mysterious, and still less inevitable, decline in moral virtue. It lies in the dismantling of organizational controls under the chimerical doctrine of post-bureaucratisation.
Of course these things are linked. NPM always had several meanings, including the relentless praise of ‘enterprise’ in public services. Post-bureaucracy is a similarly flexible term, and the two fit together in all sorts of ways, as this article by Leslie Budd of the Open University explains. Still, the post-bureaucratic accent of contemporary public management has a certain distinctiveness in part as a reaction to what was, ironically, the explosion of ‘red tape’ associated with the supposedly anti-bureaucratic NPM.
I talk at length about post-bureaucracy in the book, especially in chapter 4, and a recent case has called to mind one of the points made there. I suggest (p. 86) that the embrace of post-bureaucracy carries with it huge risks because, freed of all those irritating rules and procedures it is just as likely that managers will act with recklessness and little or nothing will curtail them. In fact, I might have gone further, and pointed out that corruption and fraud, as well as recklessness, are made more likely in such situations, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang argues.
The case that reminded me of this was that of the head teacher of an ‘academy school’ in the UK who has resigned following multiple accusations of financial impropriety, including allegations about the way she employed family members. The allegations are particularly interesting if we consider how Weberian bureaucracy is in part to do with the avoidance of nepotism, of corruption and, indeed, the links between the two. This was a head teacher who had been lionized by successive politicians as the epitome of what the new style public servants should be: dynamic, innovative leaders.
Now the allegations are just that – there have been no criminal proceedings – but they fit into a wider sense of a managerial or leadership cadre in both the private and public sectors which is out of control, treating their organizations as their own individual fiefdoms rather than things for which they have a duty of stewardship. I have myself seen such behaviour, for it is as prevalent in universities as anywhere else.
The danger is that such episodes are seen as a series of individual scandals or, if put together, a sign of some inevitable decline in moral standards and the probity of public life feeding what is beginning to be seen as a crisis of trust in leadership. But they are neither: they are systemically linked by a particular approach, or set of approaches, to the management of organizations. It is in part, at least in origin, a consequence of the new capitalism I discuss in the book, of the neo-liberal revolution that has literally or metaphorically marketised so many areas of economic and social life. But it is more complex than that, and is more linked to the ideas about ‘neo-mercantilism’ I talked about in my post of January 9 2013. For what we have is a new managerial class which has little to do with the ‘market’ in any recognizable sense and is closer to a kind of baronial oligarchy in which there is little organizational constraint on how its members may act. In these circumstances, the only constraints become the extra-organizational ones of the law, at which point they become publically known scandals. But their origin is not some mysterious, and still less inevitable, decline in moral virtue. It lies in the dismantling of organizational controls under the chimerical doctrine of post-bureaucratisation.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Our new insecurity
Last week I was interviewed for a new ten-part BBC Radio 4 series about the changing nature of office life (I don’t have a link for this, but the first part will be broadcast on 22nd July at 13.45 GMT+1). One of the questions I was asked was about the famous 1950s book The Organization Man by W.H. Whyte. It was a book which spawned a phrase – ‘organization man’ – and which was a kind of nostalgic lament for a time before corporate hierarchies, a lament for individualism.
But, as I said in the interview, from a present day perspective 1950s organization man is something about which we might now feel nostalgic. The basic deal of the post-war settlement was one of security. In exchange for a perhaps rather stultifying work life, organization man was offered lifetime employment in a company rooted in his community and which provided a pension and a place in the world. It was the workplace equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting.
The consequences of lost security were born home on me this week by two things, one personal, the other impersonal. Personally, I talked to a friend in Denmark who had lost his management job and feared for what would happen to him and his family now. Yes, that is in Denmark, one of the homelands of the social democratic settlement – but he was scared. Impersonally, I saw the report from the UK Institute of Fiscal Studies which showed how real living standards in the UK have fallen dramatically in the last five years, since the financial crisis.
What is going on in Europe is an extraordinary experiment of a sort that has never occurred before, and work organizations are at its heart. The historic compromise between capital, labour and the state is being eviscerated. The most obvious effects of that are on the unskilled working class, the disabled and the unemployable, with their benefits being drastically cut. But what is now emerging is that what were hitherto the secure middle class are also seeing huge reductions in their economic position and their security. Moreover, the previous expectation that their children would be better off than them is being confounded.
This is the inevitable consequence of globalized neo-liberalism, which ultimately levels down wages and conditions of employment to the lowest possible level. Although in Europe its electoral support was predicated upon the votes of the middle-class, its agenda was always about the interests of a tiny handful of individuals and corporations. There’s nothing new about societies being run for and by small elites, of course. But this is the first time in human history where a settled middle-class, underpinned by a welfare state, is being so drastically damaged (except, perhaps, for the 1920s German inflation – and we know where that led – and, anyway, there was no comparable welfare state). There's an excellent article on this. These are people who vote, who pay taxes, who support mainstream political parties, and who have an expectation that ‘the system’ will take care of them.
The consequences are tragic for individuals, but very interesting for political commentators. Europe in the 20th Century responded to Communism by differentiating the potentially revolutionary working class from the incorporated middle-class. The working class now have nowhere to go, and certainly nowhere revolutionary. The middle-class are being disincorporated – first by corporations, now by the State. The fallout from this will determine how we in Europe live in the coming decades.
It won't be pretty.
But, as I said in the interview, from a present day perspective 1950s organization man is something about which we might now feel nostalgic. The basic deal of the post-war settlement was one of security. In exchange for a perhaps rather stultifying work life, organization man was offered lifetime employment in a company rooted in his community and which provided a pension and a place in the world. It was the workplace equivalent of a Norman Rockwell painting.
The consequences of lost security were born home on me this week by two things, one personal, the other impersonal. Personally, I talked to a friend in Denmark who had lost his management job and feared for what would happen to him and his family now. Yes, that is in Denmark, one of the homelands of the social democratic settlement – but he was scared. Impersonally, I saw the report from the UK Institute of Fiscal Studies which showed how real living standards in the UK have fallen dramatically in the last five years, since the financial crisis.
What is going on in Europe is an extraordinary experiment of a sort that has never occurred before, and work organizations are at its heart. The historic compromise between capital, labour and the state is being eviscerated. The most obvious effects of that are on the unskilled working class, the disabled and the unemployable, with their benefits being drastically cut. But what is now emerging is that what were hitherto the secure middle class are also seeing huge reductions in their economic position and their security. Moreover, the previous expectation that their children would be better off than them is being confounded.
This is the inevitable consequence of globalized neo-liberalism, which ultimately levels down wages and conditions of employment to the lowest possible level. Although in Europe its electoral support was predicated upon the votes of the middle-class, its agenda was always about the interests of a tiny handful of individuals and corporations. There’s nothing new about societies being run for and by small elites, of course. But this is the first time in human history where a settled middle-class, underpinned by a welfare state, is being so drastically damaged (except, perhaps, for the 1920s German inflation – and we know where that led – and, anyway, there was no comparable welfare state). There's an excellent article on this. These are people who vote, who pay taxes, who support mainstream political parties, and who have an expectation that ‘the system’ will take care of them.
The consequences are tragic for individuals, but very interesting for political commentators. Europe in the 20th Century responded to Communism by differentiating the potentially revolutionary working class from the incorporated middle-class. The working class now have nowhere to go, and certainly nowhere revolutionary. The middle-class are being disincorporated – first by corporations, now by the State. The fallout from this will determine how we in Europe live in the coming decades.
It won't be pretty.
Friday, 12 April 2013
Thatcher then and now
As I discuss in the book (pp.108-109), it’s impossible to understand contemporary organizations without knowing something about neo-liberalism and, within the history of neo-liberalism Margaret Thatcher and the UK governments in the 1980s occupy a pivotal place. So it is not surprising that Thatcher’s death this week has provoked a massive debate and attracted attention not just in the UK but around the world.
In the few days since her death, so much has been written about her legacy that it seems almost pointless to say more. The leitmotif of the coverage has been to highlight has she was and still is a ‘divisive’ figure, yet even that statement has proved divisive, with Thatcher’s supporters saying that to describe her in this way is to denigrate her. The Right seems to want to claim Thatcher as a kind of national icon and hero, but for many British people she will never be that, and attempts to pretend otherwise are nakedly ideological.
For me, as for many, Thatcher was a hate-figure in the 1980s and, at the time, I would have imagined that when she died I would be celebrating in the way that some in Britain have. In the event, I don’t feel like doing so and I think this is because it is really Thatcherism which I loathe and that is far from being dead. In retrospect, as with all political phenomena, the role of individuals looks smaller than it did at the time. Thatcher rode a particular tide that developed from the 1970s and which occurred not just in the UK. She may have inflected it in particular ways, she may have symbolised it, but she did not create it and, had she never been born, I suspect that similar things would have happened under someone else’s leadership. That said, even now I feel sickened by the recollection of her description of striking miners and trade unionists in general as “the enemy within”, a term connoting those who sympathised with and collaborated with the Nazis.
What is clear is that in the UK and elsewhere we continue to live with the effects of Thatcherism. The British Left has never recovered from it and continues, at least in the Labour Party, to accept the broad terms of her analysis of the primacy of markets, in particular. The ‘New’ in New Labour meant exactly this, and the New Labour governments of 1997-2010 enthusiastically followed through on her analysis with the wide scale subcontracting of public services to private providers, a process not continuing under the Coalition government.
More broadly, it is now clear that the global financial crisis and consequent economic crisis since 2007 is rooted in the policy decisions of the 1980s and here the Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets was of huge significance not just for the UK but for the world. Whilst the political right is justified in saying that Thatcherism was transformational, what they do not yet recognize is that it failed. It failed in more particular ways, too. Thatcher’s vision of the future was rooted in her ideas about the past, seeking a return to what she called the ‘Victorian Values’ of thrift, hard work and enterprise. It was a highly romanticised and partial view of Victorianism, of course, but the irony is that what she actually created, particularly through financial deregulation, was the opposite. The economy she left was predicated upon massive indebtedness as a credit-fuelled, hedonistic consumer boom ran out of control.
In some basic way, Thatcher failed to understand how capitalist economies actually work, and especially the role of the state within them. Both de-industrialization and industrial renewal requite state management and investment. That could have been achieved in Britain in the 1980s when massive North Sea oil revenues could have been used to manage a transition from the old industries to the new. Instead, they were squandered on tax cuts and paying for the mass unemployment that Thatcherism created. Her belief – still held by current Tories – that the private sector would spontaneously regenerate the economy proved quite illusory. That is not surprising as, outside of the pages of an introductory economics textbook, the state and private capital are symbiotic. Thatcher simply saw the state as parasitic. That, coupled with her messianic hatred of trade unionism, laid waste to large parts of Britain outside the South-East of England.
Beyond its economic legacy, Thatcherism did a pervasive damage to almost all forms of collective solidarity, both as an idea and in terms of institutions. Although part of the ideological narrative of Thatcherism was and is that it rescued a failing country from its 1970s decline, there is actually plenty of evidence that Britain was more prosperous, more cohesive and happier then than now. Moreover, as Ken Loach’s recent film The Spirit of 45 suggests, Thatcherism eviscerated much of the collective solidarity than re-built post-war Britain.
Anyway, it would be possible to write endlessly on this. And that is perhaps the most important point: all of this still matters, because it is about what is happening now, not just or even mainly about what happened then. Next week there will be a huge ceremonial funeral, ostensibly carrying a message that Thatcher was a great national figure who stands above ideology. But the final irony would be to imagine that the funeral of this most ideologically motivated figure is, or could be, anything but ideological. The funeral will be part of the political right’s ongoing attempt to insist that, in one of Thatcher’s most famous phrases, ‘there is no alternative’. She, and they, are wrong.
In the few days since her death, so much has been written about her legacy that it seems almost pointless to say more. The leitmotif of the coverage has been to highlight has she was and still is a ‘divisive’ figure, yet even that statement has proved divisive, with Thatcher’s supporters saying that to describe her in this way is to denigrate her. The Right seems to want to claim Thatcher as a kind of national icon and hero, but for many British people she will never be that, and attempts to pretend otherwise are nakedly ideological.
For me, as for many, Thatcher was a hate-figure in the 1980s and, at the time, I would have imagined that when she died I would be celebrating in the way that some in Britain have. In the event, I don’t feel like doing so and I think this is because it is really Thatcherism which I loathe and that is far from being dead. In retrospect, as with all political phenomena, the role of individuals looks smaller than it did at the time. Thatcher rode a particular tide that developed from the 1970s and which occurred not just in the UK. She may have inflected it in particular ways, she may have symbolised it, but she did not create it and, had she never been born, I suspect that similar things would have happened under someone else’s leadership. That said, even now I feel sickened by the recollection of her description of striking miners and trade unionists in general as “the enemy within”, a term connoting those who sympathised with and collaborated with the Nazis.
What is clear is that in the UK and elsewhere we continue to live with the effects of Thatcherism. The British Left has never recovered from it and continues, at least in the Labour Party, to accept the broad terms of her analysis of the primacy of markets, in particular. The ‘New’ in New Labour meant exactly this, and the New Labour governments of 1997-2010 enthusiastically followed through on her analysis with the wide scale subcontracting of public services to private providers, a process not continuing under the Coalition government.
More broadly, it is now clear that the global financial crisis and consequent economic crisis since 2007 is rooted in the policy decisions of the 1980s and here the Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets was of huge significance not just for the UK but for the world. Whilst the political right is justified in saying that Thatcherism was transformational, what they do not yet recognize is that it failed. It failed in more particular ways, too. Thatcher’s vision of the future was rooted in her ideas about the past, seeking a return to what she called the ‘Victorian Values’ of thrift, hard work and enterprise. It was a highly romanticised and partial view of Victorianism, of course, but the irony is that what she actually created, particularly through financial deregulation, was the opposite. The economy she left was predicated upon massive indebtedness as a credit-fuelled, hedonistic consumer boom ran out of control.
In some basic way, Thatcher failed to understand how capitalist economies actually work, and especially the role of the state within them. Both de-industrialization and industrial renewal requite state management and investment. That could have been achieved in Britain in the 1980s when massive North Sea oil revenues could have been used to manage a transition from the old industries to the new. Instead, they were squandered on tax cuts and paying for the mass unemployment that Thatcherism created. Her belief – still held by current Tories – that the private sector would spontaneously regenerate the economy proved quite illusory. That is not surprising as, outside of the pages of an introductory economics textbook, the state and private capital are symbiotic. Thatcher simply saw the state as parasitic. That, coupled with her messianic hatred of trade unionism, laid waste to large parts of Britain outside the South-East of England.
Beyond its economic legacy, Thatcherism did a pervasive damage to almost all forms of collective solidarity, both as an idea and in terms of institutions. Although part of the ideological narrative of Thatcherism was and is that it rescued a failing country from its 1970s decline, there is actually plenty of evidence that Britain was more prosperous, more cohesive and happier then than now. Moreover, as Ken Loach’s recent film The Spirit of 45 suggests, Thatcherism eviscerated much of the collective solidarity than re-built post-war Britain.
Anyway, it would be possible to write endlessly on this. And that is perhaps the most important point: all of this still matters, because it is about what is happening now, not just or even mainly about what happened then. Next week there will be a huge ceremonial funeral, ostensibly carrying a message that Thatcher was a great national figure who stands above ideology. But the final irony would be to imagine that the funeral of this most ideologically motivated figure is, or could be, anything but ideological. The funeral will be part of the political right’s ongoing attempt to insist that, in one of Thatcher’s most famous phrases, ‘there is no alternative’. She, and they, are wrong.
Thursday, 28 March 2013
Thinking about immigration
A comment on my last post – yay, a comment! thank you! – reminds me that I was going to come back to the issue of immigration. It’s a good time to do so from a UK perspective as David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has just made a speech promising to ‘get tough’ on immigration. That is of no great interest in itself since it’s timing is mainly motivated by the rise of the anti-immigration, anti-EU UKIP Party, whilst its content is mainly a re-assertion of existing policy (e.g. restrictions on immigrants’ access to benefits) or a response to virtually non-existent problems (e.g. ‘health tourism’). Its wider significance is that, unsurprisingly in a time of what is, in effect, if not in formal definition, a global economic depression anti-immigration sentiment has risen. In the UK this is still relatively benign compared with, say, Greece, where the growth of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party has seen increasing levels of violence against immigrants.
It’s worth recalling why this topic is relevant to the study of organizations and the answer, of course, is that most migration is connected with movements of labour. It is hardly surprising, then, that the business community is, generally, in favour of immigration either as a way of increasing the pool of labour from which it can choose skilled workers or as a way of depressing wages (although the effects of immigration of wage rates is not clear cut). In this way it leads to schisms in both the traditional right and the traditional left. For the right, it opens up the contradiction between social traditionalism and free-market economics. For the left, the contradiction between internationalism and the protection of national working-class constituencies. Thus, in the UK, the Conservative policy of an immigration cap has been vociferously criticised by the City of London. On the other hand, the previous Labour government policy of not restricting immigration from new East European entrants to the EU became an issue in the last election, symbolised by the ‘bigot gate’ controversy.
In some ways, there is nothing new in all this. Although it is often said by opponents of immigration that it used to be fine but has now become ‘uncontrolled’ and is having adverse consequences for employment, social cohesion, housing, overcrowding and so on, I can recall in the 1970s exactly the same kinds of arguments being made. In other words, in precisely the period that is now seen as a time of immigration not being a problem it was, in fact, constituted as a problem. The lesson, I think, is that – leaving aside the out and out racists – problems of one sort (e.g. lack of housing) are ascribed to something else: immigration. In fact, there is no more reason why population growth by immigration causes any more problems that population growth by indigenous fertility. What would actually be a serious problem for Western countries, given historically declining fertility rates and an ageing population, would be a lack of immigration.
What is bizarre is that a much more obvious source of complaint would be the migration of capital, both in the sense of the globalized ownership of what were hitherto national or even regional companies; and the propensity of such companies to shift production and employment around the globe. For example, in the UK, it has just been announced that Sea and Air Rescue (one of whose employees is no less than Prince William, the heir to the British throne) is to be sub-contracted to a US company. Unlike labour migration, capital migration has had very definite effects upon the employment prospects of Europeans and yet is commonly regarded as a simply ‘natural’ event, rather than an outcome of policy. Any criticism of that policy is derided as protectionism. By contrast, immigration is commonly regarded as the ‘unnatural’ consequence of policy decisions and defence of those decisions is derided as being ‘elitist’, even treasonous.
The failure of mainstream politics is not, then, one of not ‘listening’ to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the population: it is of failing to spell out the meaning and consequences of the globalization that they champion – the Right through dishonesty, the Left through cowardice. Into the space they have left is inserted a populism which is at best platitudinous and at worst violent.
It’s worth recalling why this topic is relevant to the study of organizations and the answer, of course, is that most migration is connected with movements of labour. It is hardly surprising, then, that the business community is, generally, in favour of immigration either as a way of increasing the pool of labour from which it can choose skilled workers or as a way of depressing wages (although the effects of immigration of wage rates is not clear cut). In this way it leads to schisms in both the traditional right and the traditional left. For the right, it opens up the contradiction between social traditionalism and free-market economics. For the left, the contradiction between internationalism and the protection of national working-class constituencies. Thus, in the UK, the Conservative policy of an immigration cap has been vociferously criticised by the City of London. On the other hand, the previous Labour government policy of not restricting immigration from new East European entrants to the EU became an issue in the last election, symbolised by the ‘bigot gate’ controversy.
In some ways, there is nothing new in all this. Although it is often said by opponents of immigration that it used to be fine but has now become ‘uncontrolled’ and is having adverse consequences for employment, social cohesion, housing, overcrowding and so on, I can recall in the 1970s exactly the same kinds of arguments being made. In other words, in precisely the period that is now seen as a time of immigration not being a problem it was, in fact, constituted as a problem. The lesson, I think, is that – leaving aside the out and out racists – problems of one sort (e.g. lack of housing) are ascribed to something else: immigration. In fact, there is no more reason why population growth by immigration causes any more problems that population growth by indigenous fertility. What would actually be a serious problem for Western countries, given historically declining fertility rates and an ageing population, would be a lack of immigration.
What is bizarre is that a much more obvious source of complaint would be the migration of capital, both in the sense of the globalized ownership of what were hitherto national or even regional companies; and the propensity of such companies to shift production and employment around the globe. For example, in the UK, it has just been announced that Sea and Air Rescue (one of whose employees is no less than Prince William, the heir to the British throne) is to be sub-contracted to a US company. Unlike labour migration, capital migration has had very definite effects upon the employment prospects of Europeans and yet is commonly regarded as a simply ‘natural’ event, rather than an outcome of policy. Any criticism of that policy is derided as protectionism. By contrast, immigration is commonly regarded as the ‘unnatural’ consequence of policy decisions and defence of those decisions is derided as being ‘elitist’, even treasonous.
The failure of mainstream politics is not, then, one of not ‘listening’ to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the population: it is of failing to spell out the meaning and consequences of the globalization that they champion – the Right through dishonesty, the Left through cowardice. Into the space they have left is inserted a populism which is at best platitudinous and at worst violent.
Monday, 18 February 2013
Talking about immigration
It has become an established meme of the political right that 'we are not allowed to discuss immigration' but of course nothing could be further from the truth. The papers are filled daily with their thoughts on the subject, and in the most unpleasant of terms. Actually, what is virtually undiscussed in not the international mobility of labour but that of capital (as discussed in the book, pp 106-107). Somehow there seems to be the idea that the latter is 'just' inevitable globalization and that it can proceed without any movements of population, which are deemed to be a 'problem'.
I will post in more detail about this soon, but for now I wanted to share a thought-provoking article written by James Koranyi, a brilliant young historian at Durham University, who is an expert on the cultural history of Eastern and South-eastern Europe, in which he discusses the longstanding British historical fascination with and and fear of Romania, in particular (and linking with the horsemeat scandal, discussed in my last post).
To see an example of what he means by the demonization of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants, have a look at this recent piece in the Daily Mail. Look particularly at the pictures, which, frankly, reminded me of the cartoons in Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda leaflet.
Also worth reading is this piece in today's Guardian newspaper, looking at contrasting attitudes to Indian and Romanian immigration.
As I say, more to follow - but I was struck by the coincidence of timing of these three pieces, so wanted to share them whilst they are still fresh.
I will post in more detail about this soon, but for now I wanted to share a thought-provoking article written by James Koranyi, a brilliant young historian at Durham University, who is an expert on the cultural history of Eastern and South-eastern Europe, in which he discusses the longstanding British historical fascination with and and fear of Romania, in particular (and linking with the horsemeat scandal, discussed in my last post).
To see an example of what he means by the demonization of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants, have a look at this recent piece in the Daily Mail. Look particularly at the pictures, which, frankly, reminded me of the cartoons in Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda leaflet.
Also worth reading is this piece in today's Guardian newspaper, looking at contrasting attitudes to Indian and Romanian immigration.
As I say, more to follow - but I was struck by the coincidence of timing of these three pieces, so wanted to share them whilst they are still fresh.
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