I’ve come across two thought-provoking articles today, and the thoughts they provoked were not pleasant. One is a piece in The Guardian by Seamus Milne about the growth of ‘zero-hours contracts’ in the UK. With such contracts, workers are on standby to work, but with no guarantee of any actual work, and therefore payment, eventuating. In many cases, the contract forbids the person from working for anyone else either. Hailed by neo-liberals as an example of ‘flexible employment’, it is clear that all the flexibility is on the part of the worker. The consequent insecurity is obvious – no guaranteed income from week to week for a start, no pension or fringe benefits, no prospect of buying a home, difficult to sustain a family – in short, the full weight of the new insecurity I wrote about here a couple of months ago. And, although Milne does not make this connection, increasingly, there is little or no safety net, with recent clampdowns on benefits for the disabled in particular leading to a spate of suicides and an even greater upsurge in suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, as I noted in my book (p.117), suicide rates in Greece have risen alarmingly since 2009 (and the rise has continued since I wrote that) and there can be little doubt that the cause of this is the social and psychological dislocation caused by the economic crisis.
Suicidal desperation is at the heart of Jenny Chan’s recently published paper entitled ‘A Suicide Survivor: The Life of a Chinese Worker’ in New Technology, Work and Employment. Unusually for an academic article, this is a powerfully written paper and it recounts the life of a Chinese worker who attempted suicide, apparently a growing trend. We often here of the rise of the knowledge economy and new organizational forms which stress creativity and freedom, but the hidden heart of this economy is what Chan describes as “a production model apparently based on classic Taylorism” (p.88). The intense discipline of life on the line of an outsourcing company producing Apple's i-phones is described in chilling detail, culminating thus: “The accumulated effects of endless assembly line toil, punishing work schedules, harsh factory discipline, a friendless dormitory and, rejection from managers and administrators, compounded by the company’s failure to provide her with income, and then her inability to make contact with friends and family, were the immediate circumstances of her attempted suicide. Her testimony reveals how she was overwhelmed, ‘I was so desperate that my mind went blank’. At 8 a.m. on March 17, Yu jumped from the fourth floor of her dormitory building in despair. After 12 days in a coma, she awoke to find that her body had become half paralysed. She is now confined to a bed or a wheelchair” (p. 91). It is not just in harsh factory conditions that work-related suicides are found. For example, in 2008 and 2009 there was a wave of suicides amongst employees of France Telecom, with many leaving notes blaming work pressures in an organization undergoing massive restructuring.
Suicide is undoubtedly the most powerful and extreme act of the powerless and desperate, a complex response to, and creator, of trauma and its causes are equally complex, and varied. One part of its power is to make it almost undiscussable and, certainly, one should never draw glib conclusions from and about suicides. But, equally, as Salford University academics Jo Milner and Ian Cummins note (and give links to further research on), the links between suicide levels and social and economic conditions are well-established, and have been since at least the publication of Emile Durkheim’s 1897 book, Suicide. So it would certainly be glib to consign suicide to the realms of individual psychology. If we have global economic systems and associated organizational systems of work and welfare which engender suicide then we (including and perhaps especially those of us whose profession is the study of organizations) should not be shy of saying so. Terms like flexibility, welfare reform, global supply chain efficiency and organizational restructuring sound neutral and unexceptionable. What lies behind them may be horror.
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Friday, 2 August 2013
Not smoking
In 2008 I published an article, with Jo Brewis, about workplace bans on smoking. It’s an interesting organizational issue. If the proverbial Martian visited a workplace in, say, 1980 and again today, one of the most noticeable things would be how cigarette smoke had disappeared between the two visits (and how smokers’ huddles outside the workplace had appeared). Smoking bans are also an organizational issue in that they are justified in terms of protecting workers from ‘passive smoking’ – so that although most public debate has been about the effects on leisure places like bars, the rationale is that these leisure places are in fact the work places of bar staff.
In our article, we suggested that the modern scientific and medical discourses of anti-smoking (i.e. that it is bad for smokers’ health and, supposedly, for non-smokers) were better understood as an inflection of a much more longstanding moral discourse about smoking and smokers: that ‘smoking is bad’ and ‘smoking is bad for your health’ were interlinked in complex ways. Historically, moral disdain for smoking long predates issues of health (see Ian Gately's book for detail). To give just a couple of examples: Murad the Cruel , ruler of the Ottoman Empire 1623-1640, had at least 25,000 suspected smokers put to death, whilst at about the same time in Persia those caught selling tobacco had molten lead poured down their throats; and in the 1920s employees of the Ford Motor Company were subjected to night time raids on their homes to check whether they were smoking – if so they had their wages docked or in some cases were sacked. Nor are smoking bans new: some German, Italian and American States had them in the mid-19th Century. The more contemporary hatred of smoking stems in part from its equation with death at a time of secularism. Given widespread acceptance that there is no afterlife, there seems to be a kind of fantasy that if only one does the right things, then death can be abolished at least for long enough until a cure is found. Smokers are an affront to this fantasy, and that is why no condemnation is strong enough for their presumption.
Five years on, this is more obvious than ever. Anti-smoking activists are seeking to expunge all references to, and images of, smoking, in ways that we predicted in the article. Because although at the time the avowed aim was simply a workplace ban, as Jo and I said in our article this coded a much more expansive ambition, which the UK’s former Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson revealed in 2007 to be the “complete de-normalization of smoking”. Of course the dangers of smoking are not in dispute. Those of secondary or passive smoking are rather more contentious, even though forming the basis of the smoking bans. But now anti-smoking activists condemn third hand smoking – the supposed dangers of smelling the clothes of someone who has recently smoked; and even fourth hand smoking – the idea that contact with a non-smoker who has had contact with a smoker is dangerous. At the same time, these activists have successfully pushed for images of cigarettes in films and cartoons to be expunged and for cigarette packets to be hidden from public view, with the current battle line being over plain packaging. The aim of these latter moves, ostensibly, is to discourage young people from taking up smoking even though the most basic knowledge of teenage psychology tells us that making something so taboo that it must be hidden away is to make it more attractive. But of course that justification is just, so to speak, a smokescreen. The real aim is to make smoking, which is perfectly legal in almost all countries in the world, well, de-normalized. The ultimate goal, presumably, is to make it illegal – a strategy which has, of course, worked very well with other drugs!
All this has now taken a remarkable new twist. In the wake of the smoking bans in many countries, more and more people have taken to ‘vaping’ – using electronic or e-cigarettes, which deliver a nicotine hit to their user but emit only harmless water vapour. One might expect anti-smoking activists to approve – these devices, after all, reduce cigarette usage. In fact, they object most vehemently. Which led to an interesting experience I had last week. Standing on my local First Capital Connect (FCC) train station platform I heard the now familiar announcement that smoking was forbidden. This, by the way, is on open-air platforms which are not, under UK legislation, obliged to ban smoking since they are not 'enclosed public places'. But let’s forget that lost battle and focus on the less familiar part of the announcement, which continued by saying that this included the use of electronic cigarettes. Intrigued, I checked the FCC website and it emerged that this ban on e-cigarettes had been introduced on 30th May 2013 “because they can unsettle other passengers and cause people to think that smoking real cigarettes is allowed”. It is difficult to imagine how e-cigarettes could ‘unsettle’ anyone. One wonders how many sensitive souls have complained to FCC, or if anyone has actually been duped by others’ use of e-cigarettes. In fact I wrote them an email asking, but their reply just repeated their policy without answering these questions.
In any case, it is an interesting principle that ‘unsettling behaviour’ should be banned, and we might wonder what its legal basis is. The answer may be alarming. In a statement FCC explained “that a bylaw, dealing with ‘unacceptable behaviour’, allowed it to ban the devices. The legislation states: ‘No person shall molest or wilfully interfere with the comfort or convenience of any person on the railway’”. I am sure that we can all think of things – mobile phone use, say, or i-pad gaming - that fall into this category rather more readily than e-cigarettes (indeed, the toilets on most FCC trains I have travelled on seem hardly conducive to 'comfort and convenience'). As a matter of fact, has even one person’s ‘comfort or convenience’ been interfered with by e-cigarettes? I also asked them that when I emailed them, but there was no answer.
The second part of FCC’s justification is that the British Medical Association wants e-cigarettes to be included in the smoking ban . This is a different issue, to do with whether they are harmful to those using them, as opposed to whether those seeing their use might be “unsettled”. It is a live debate and the clamour of the anti-smoking lobby to ban or regulate e-cigarettes is gathering pace. Thus, France is planning to ban their use in public, but not in private which is strange if the reason is supposed to be that they are dangerous to their users. But, at the moment, there is no such ban in place in the UK and it seems odd that FCC would introduce such a ban on its premises on the basis of the position of a particular lobbying group. Odd, indeed, that FCC should seek to concern itself with the still-disputed health effects of its customers’ habits. For, remember, no one, including FCC, is suggesting that e-cigarettes harm anyone else: ostensibly, the only question is whether they may harm their users, for which there is no evidence, as yet anyway. So what next? Will FCC require its customers to conform to other BMA campaigns, on diet and exercise for example?
Smokers still constitute at least 20% of the UK adult population (and, by the way, they contribute about four times in tax what they additionally cost the National Health Service). Perhaps a million UK adults use e-cigarettes. They, too, are amongst the customers of FCC. So what is going on? The key issue here is the idea that e-cigarettes might be “unsettling”: we have gone from a ban on cigarettes to a ban on things that ‘look like’ cigarettes, reflecting precisely the way that the anti-smoking movement has moved far away from anything remotely to do with science or rationality. Smoking at work is now banned but so too is not-smoking not at work, and this enforced not by government legislation but by the whimsical diktat of a commercial organization.
In our article, we suggested that the modern scientific and medical discourses of anti-smoking (i.e. that it is bad for smokers’ health and, supposedly, for non-smokers) were better understood as an inflection of a much more longstanding moral discourse about smoking and smokers: that ‘smoking is bad’ and ‘smoking is bad for your health’ were interlinked in complex ways. Historically, moral disdain for smoking long predates issues of health (see Ian Gately's book for detail). To give just a couple of examples: Murad the Cruel , ruler of the Ottoman Empire 1623-1640, had at least 25,000 suspected smokers put to death, whilst at about the same time in Persia those caught selling tobacco had molten lead poured down their throats; and in the 1920s employees of the Ford Motor Company were subjected to night time raids on their homes to check whether they were smoking – if so they had their wages docked or in some cases were sacked. Nor are smoking bans new: some German, Italian and American States had them in the mid-19th Century. The more contemporary hatred of smoking stems in part from its equation with death at a time of secularism. Given widespread acceptance that there is no afterlife, there seems to be a kind of fantasy that if only one does the right things, then death can be abolished at least for long enough until a cure is found. Smokers are an affront to this fantasy, and that is why no condemnation is strong enough for their presumption.
Five years on, this is more obvious than ever. Anti-smoking activists are seeking to expunge all references to, and images of, smoking, in ways that we predicted in the article. Because although at the time the avowed aim was simply a workplace ban, as Jo and I said in our article this coded a much more expansive ambition, which the UK’s former Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson revealed in 2007 to be the “complete de-normalization of smoking”. Of course the dangers of smoking are not in dispute. Those of secondary or passive smoking are rather more contentious, even though forming the basis of the smoking bans. But now anti-smoking activists condemn third hand smoking – the supposed dangers of smelling the clothes of someone who has recently smoked; and even fourth hand smoking – the idea that contact with a non-smoker who has had contact with a smoker is dangerous. At the same time, these activists have successfully pushed for images of cigarettes in films and cartoons to be expunged and for cigarette packets to be hidden from public view, with the current battle line being over plain packaging. The aim of these latter moves, ostensibly, is to discourage young people from taking up smoking even though the most basic knowledge of teenage psychology tells us that making something so taboo that it must be hidden away is to make it more attractive. But of course that justification is just, so to speak, a smokescreen. The real aim is to make smoking, which is perfectly legal in almost all countries in the world, well, de-normalized. The ultimate goal, presumably, is to make it illegal – a strategy which has, of course, worked very well with other drugs!
All this has now taken a remarkable new twist. In the wake of the smoking bans in many countries, more and more people have taken to ‘vaping’ – using electronic or e-cigarettes, which deliver a nicotine hit to their user but emit only harmless water vapour. One might expect anti-smoking activists to approve – these devices, after all, reduce cigarette usage. In fact, they object most vehemently. Which led to an interesting experience I had last week. Standing on my local First Capital Connect (FCC) train station platform I heard the now familiar announcement that smoking was forbidden. This, by the way, is on open-air platforms which are not, under UK legislation, obliged to ban smoking since they are not 'enclosed public places'. But let’s forget that lost battle and focus on the less familiar part of the announcement, which continued by saying that this included the use of electronic cigarettes. Intrigued, I checked the FCC website and it emerged that this ban on e-cigarettes had been introduced on 30th May 2013 “because they can unsettle other passengers and cause people to think that smoking real cigarettes is allowed”. It is difficult to imagine how e-cigarettes could ‘unsettle’ anyone. One wonders how many sensitive souls have complained to FCC, or if anyone has actually been duped by others’ use of e-cigarettes. In fact I wrote them an email asking, but their reply just repeated their policy without answering these questions.
In any case, it is an interesting principle that ‘unsettling behaviour’ should be banned, and we might wonder what its legal basis is. The answer may be alarming. In a statement FCC explained “that a bylaw, dealing with ‘unacceptable behaviour’, allowed it to ban the devices. The legislation states: ‘No person shall molest or wilfully interfere with the comfort or convenience of any person on the railway’”. I am sure that we can all think of things – mobile phone use, say, or i-pad gaming - that fall into this category rather more readily than e-cigarettes (indeed, the toilets on most FCC trains I have travelled on seem hardly conducive to 'comfort and convenience'). As a matter of fact, has even one person’s ‘comfort or convenience’ been interfered with by e-cigarettes? I also asked them that when I emailed them, but there was no answer.
The second part of FCC’s justification is that the British Medical Association wants e-cigarettes to be included in the smoking ban . This is a different issue, to do with whether they are harmful to those using them, as opposed to whether those seeing their use might be “unsettled”. It is a live debate and the clamour of the anti-smoking lobby to ban or regulate e-cigarettes is gathering pace. Thus, France is planning to ban their use in public, but not in private which is strange if the reason is supposed to be that they are dangerous to their users. But, at the moment, there is no such ban in place in the UK and it seems odd that FCC would introduce such a ban on its premises on the basis of the position of a particular lobbying group. Odd, indeed, that FCC should seek to concern itself with the still-disputed health effects of its customers’ habits. For, remember, no one, including FCC, is suggesting that e-cigarettes harm anyone else: ostensibly, the only question is whether they may harm their users, for which there is no evidence, as yet anyway. So what next? Will FCC require its customers to conform to other BMA campaigns, on diet and exercise for example?
Smokers still constitute at least 20% of the UK adult population (and, by the way, they contribute about four times in tax what they additionally cost the National Health Service). Perhaps a million UK adults use e-cigarettes. They, too, are amongst the customers of FCC. So what is going on? The key issue here is the idea that e-cigarettes might be “unsettling”: we have gone from a ban on cigarettes to a ban on things that ‘look like’ cigarettes, reflecting precisely the way that the anti-smoking movement has moved far away from anything remotely to do with science or rationality. Smoking at work is now banned but so too is not-smoking not at work, and this enforced not by government legislation but by the whimsical diktat of a commercial organization.
Friday, 26 July 2013
The History of Office Life
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 ...
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 ...
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)