Pensions

The subject of pensions does not excite great interest. It seems boring, technical and remote. But a pension is a key aspect of work, being a form of deferred wage. Of the many inequalities opening up between young and old, access to a reasonable pension is one of the most important. Public policy in this area is quite complicated, and very long-term: decisions made now have their impact decades into the future.

This week, the British Government have decided that those in money purchase schemes will in future be free to spend their pension pots as they like, rather than having to buy annuities. There is some sense in this. An annuity means that you pay a lump sum to an insurance company in return for a lifetime of payments (but you lose the lump sum). Returns are quite low, and the crucial issue is how long you live after retiring: if it is a long time, it is not a bad deal. In a sense it is a kind of insurance product, with pooled risk meaning that those who live a long time are balanced out by those who do not. But annuities are not great value in general because the companies providing them take so much of the investment.

So this reform is being greeted as giving greater choice because the pensioner may do as s/he wishes with the pension pot. S/he might blow it on luxuries or invest it soberly for old age. What is interesting about this is that these money purchase schemes developed when, in the 1980s, the State Earnings related Pensions Scheme (SERPS) was wound down in the name of – consumer choice. Both then and now ‘choice’ is seen as the value that trumps all others.

Yet at the same time, final salary schemes are depicted as an elite ‘gold plated’ advantage, available only to public sector workers and senior executives in the private sector. Why don’t ordinary workers in the private sector have them (as they used to)? Well, because those workers decided (or were seduced into deciding) that it was better to have individual choice rather than unionised negotiations of pension rights.

Choice has been valorised in neo-liberalism as the prime – maybe the only – thing that matters. But that is nonsense, and pension provision shows it to be nonsense. The best way of organizing pensions is via collectivization of risk (in this case, longevity risk). The consequence of not seeing this is the generational gap that has opened up between those who under the ‘old settlement’ have decent pensions and under the ‘new settlement’ do not.

The temptation is to see the old benefitting at the expense of the young. But this is nonsense. It is not that the old prosper at the expense of the young but that the collapse of collective provision in the last few decades has effected a massive transfer from ordinary people to the global elite. Of course that elite would love to pit grandparents and parents against children and grandchildren. But the reason why a 20 year old today has no prospect of a decent pension is not because Aunt Nellie has a few thousand a year from her pension scheme. It is because there has been a wholesale transfer of power and wealth – by virtue of the seductive rhetoric of individual choice.

Tony Benn (1925-2014)

Tony Benn, the veteran British socialist has died, aged 88. Like Margaret Thatcher, whose death last year I wrote about in another post, he was one of the figures who defined the politics of my youth, although of course he was far less successful and influential than her. As Benn got older he morphed from his status in the right-wing press as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’ to being considered a national treasure, in a way that Thatcher never did. That was to cease to take him seriously, but it explains why, whereas her death provoked very polarised reactions his got a more eulogistic response. Thus his death has produced a lot of, to me slightly nauseating, comment from the right about how they didn’t agree with him but respected him. In some ways, it would be more respectful for those who disagreed with him to denounce him, as happened with Thatcher.

Benn was an interesting figure for many reasons. One is that he represented a version of the left – the far left, if you like – which grew not out of Marxism but a kind of Christian socialism (it is not clear that Benn, himself, was a Christian, but he grew up in and was influenced by it and seems to have been diffusely religious). His memoir, Dare to be a Daniel (2004), in its very title as well as its content reflected this. In a strange kind of way he embodied some of the ‘Victorian values’ that Thatcher herself professed to admire: hard work, dedication to duty, moral commitment, independence of mind. But, really, the tradition of Christianity he exemplified was that of the diggers and levellers and those various strands of radical Christianity described in Christopher Rowland’s (1988) book of that name. It is a tradition quite different to the kind of conformist moralism that Thatcher evoked and sought to enact.

Another reason for interest is that he had a very strong sense of history. His diaries and memoir are saturated with an understanding of, in particular, the history of the British Labour Party, its achievements and limitations (of which – to link my two points - he remarked that it had never been a socialist party but had always contained some socialists, just as the Church of England had always contained some Christians). Again, this developed out of his childhood, growing up in a family embedded in the Labour Party. He was one of a literally dying breed of politicians who was formed by the experience of the Second World War (his elder brother was killed in it, and Benn himself served in the RAF), and by the socialism of the post-war Attlee government. As I wrote in my ‘review’ of the Ken Loach film The Spirit of ’45, the experience of war provided both a moral case for a better society but also pointed to the tools of collective endeavour and central planning that would deliver it.

These are very much organizational issues, of course, and relevant to the choices that still face us. Benn stood for a form of collective endeavour that was different (by being collective) to neo-liberalism and (by being non-marxist) to communism. And his engagement with radical Christianity is in some ways reminiscent of the kind of liberation theology that finds an echo in Critical Management Studies’ interest in emancipation. Oh, and we should also note that he was an heroic smoker - the 1993 'Pipe Smoker of the Year', no less. 

Leading to disaster

Today's post is prompted by the news that Euan Sutherland, the Chief Executive of the Co-op Group, has resigned after just 10 months in the post, saying that the Group was ‘ungovernable’. This appeared to be a reference to the unwillingness of the group to accept the more ‘commercial’ approach he advocated. Much attention has focussed on the fact that Mr Sutherland was paid £3.7M a year, more than twice that of his predecessor. To me what is more interesting (though no doubt related) is the fact that his background was in commercial retailing, his previous post having been as head of B&Q, a large DIY chain.

The roots of the Co-op group are in the co-operative movement and ultimately go back to the 1844 Rochdale Pioneers, so it was animated by a different set of concerns than those of pure commercialism. It emerged from a Victorian tradition of working class self-help that also created mutual building societies and friendly societies, as well as mechanics’ institutes and similar institutions. Most of these have now ceased to exist or changed unrecognizably in form. The fate of mutual building societies is especially poignant: as I noted on p.119 of my book, all those which de-mutualised following deregulation in the 1980s have since failed to survive as independent entities or even to survive at all, most notoriously in the case of Northern Rock which was at the centre of the British end of the 2008 financial crisis. They were done for by precisely the adoption of a conventional commercial approach.

It seems as if there was an obvious mismatch between the Co-op and its now ex-CEO but his appointment reflected one of the central tenets of managerialism (or, perhaps, ‘leaderism’): that management and leadership are generic skills applicable in any and every setting. The same kind of idea informs the recent appointment of the ex-boss of Marks & Spencer to review and advise on management in the NHS.

What is bizarre is that leadership theory since at least the 1970s has recognized what common sense might also suggest: that the effectiveness of leadership is intimately related to and contingent upon ‘situation’ or context. We wouldn’t expect a successful military leader to run an advertising agency well, or vice versa. More recently, it has been suggested that what matters is the complex relationship between leadership and followership. But, somehow, it is imagined by the supposedly hard-headed that leaders from one kind of organization can be transplanted seamlessly into a completely different setting and flourish. The inadequacies of that belief are well-illustrated by the Co-op debacle. 

Drowning in dogma

Britain has recently experienced extensive flooding, especially in the South of the country and, as with many other things I have discussed on the blog – most recently cricket – this has political and organizational dimensions. Politically, one big debate has been about whether the flooding is linked to climate change and if so whether climate change is man-made. Organizationally, a big debate has been about whether the Environment Agency has done enough to prevent or alleviate flooding.

The Environment Agency might itself be a case study of the manifold failures of the New Public Management that I have written about before. Created in 1995 it replaced various expert bodies deemed to be ‘inefficient’, and, when the floods started, was in the process of a radical downsizing to make it more ‘efficient’ still.

But I want to concentrate on a sideshoot of this debate, namely the way it reveals something about how markets and states inter-relate. It is notable how – in a similar way to my post on the Philippines disaster – when a crisis occurs there is no talk of market solutions. There have been no entrepreneurs touring flood-ravaged areas competing to offer sandbags at the cheapest price! No, it is to the State that people look. But beyond this, the business costs of flooding – for example in terms of lost sales when shops are flooded out – underscore how the market depends upon state provision of infrastructure.

That however, is the minimum. More extensively, it is abundantly clear that the state is vital not just for the basic needs of business but is the key driver of innovation. Mariana Mazzucato’s excellent recent book The Entrepreneurial State documents this in detail, and it well worth a read. It completely demolishes the neo-liberal idea that for commercial innovation to flourish the State has to get out of the way. The opposite is true.

Neo-liberalism both as an economic doctrine and a public management approach is daily falsified by mounting evidence of its failure – although it is rare for the instances of this failure to be connected together. Yet it continues, zombie-like, to hold sway (see pp 124-25 of the book), as Colin Crouch’s book, The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism, analyses.

The worst-flooded areas are Southern rural communities and affluent commuter towns, so it’s a fair bet that many of those affected will have been precisely those voters who most enthusiastically support the small State. That’s not meant to imply a lack of sympathy, just the recognition of a growing irony. For it has been the electoral supporters of neo-liberalism who have increasingly suffered its effects. Not just in terms of inadequate flood management caused by New Public Management, but in terms of the job security, job quality and pension rights that an ‘entrepreneurial State’ brings and a neo-liberal State eviscerates.

Under the microscope

Issues of privacy are a hot topic at the moment, mainly in terms of the way that governments and corporations may access and our data. The debate there is about the privacy of citizens and consumers - but what about employees? In the book (p.73) I talk about surveillance in the workplace and remark that after initial enthusiasm for the use of Foucault's discussion of the Panoptic prison in organization studies, more recently authors have been rather sniffy and dismissive of it. In particular, it is seen as too totalizing, too inattentive to resistance.


What, then, to make of Hitachi's new Business Microscope device? This allows employees' movements to be tracked - something that has long existed in 'smart buildings' - but also monitors who they speak to, for how long and how 'energetically', how close they stand to each other, how much they contribute in meetings and many other things as well. The rationale, of course, is greater productivity and efficiency plus the obligatory humanistic nod to checking on employees' health and well-being.


The notion of privacy has less traction here than in the debates about consumers and citizens, for in what sense does privacy, or the right to privacy, exist at work? When at work, what part of us is not the legitimate purview of management? It was long ago ceded that organizations could legitimately manage our motivations and emotions, so why should anything be off limits? If you are at work, doesn't your employer have the right to know what you are doing and feeling?


Indeed, there is a fashionable school of thought that says that privacy was a passing historical moment, sandwiched between traditional pre-industrialism and technological high capitalism; an interlude of sentimental humanism. I understand and feel attracted to that argument in that I also think that what constitutes personhood (and, thence, privacy) is historically variable (and, again, argue that in the book, pp. 46-51). But it is a bit too glib, as well. Privacy may be a specific historical construct but it continues to have much purchase. Indeed, the current controversies about privacy would hardly be 'controversial' were this not so.


From this perspective, privacy can serve as the basis of resistance - that is, we resist by trying to hold private to ourselves certain thoughts and feelings in the face of surveillance. George Orwell's 1984 is an obligatory reference here: even the omniscient Big Brother engendered resistance from Winston Smith as he sought to guard his thoughts and his love affair from the telescreens. I'm not sure that this is a comforting, though, given Winston's fate and, more prosaically, the way that in organizations such resistances typically act as the spur for further and more intense surveillance.


But what if the most effective resistance lay not in trying to close ourselves to surveillance but in being more fully open than our surveyors can bear? What if we insisted on our right not to privacy but to 'tell all' - to speak of the truths, mundane and dramatic, of our lives?  To say to those who demand that we bring our 'whole selves' to work: 'very well, then, here it is, warts and all'? So, for example, in meetings we would blurt out what, presumably, most of us often feel: that we are bored, preoccupied by domestic worries, or afflicted by sciatica or whatever it might be. To disclose not less but more than the 'Business Microscope' can discern? If surveillance is not to be thought of as a one way street, how might it work to overwhelm those who want to know everything by letting them know, precisely, that? To make it inefficient to be known?

Down, under

[I apologise to readers in non-cricket playing countries, or those who have no interest in cricket: this post will be largely incomprehensible to you. And apologies to all for the strangely large gaps between paragraphs, which for some reason I just cannot reduce].


So the England cricket team have been defeated in the Ashes. Well, not just defeated but humiliatingly eviscerated, despite having been the favourites to win at the start of the series. It was not just that they lost, it was that they scarcely even competed. I used to be a passionate follower of English cricket. Sitting literally at my father’s knee in the 1960s and 70s I learned the game from the BBC TV coverage, and subsequently played quite a bit, albeit not very well (and, more than any other sport I think, cricket is hard to appreciate fully if you haven’t played it). It’s difficult to recreate those days. We had a black and white television and so although my father must have known that cricket was played on green grass, in white flannels, with coloured caps (not, in those days, helmets), I had no such knowledge, and it was quite a revelation when our first colour television arrived in 1975. But even without colour pictures I was enthralled as we watched together; him explaining first the cruder, then the finer, points; to be supplemented by our playing sessions in the back garden.


And how I remember the first test match – the first cricket match for that matter – I ever saw in person, again with my father, in the long, hot summer of 1976 when the West Indies thrashed England. It was the series that began with Tony Greig, the white South African-born England captain, declaring that he would make the tourists ‘grovel’. That word, from someone of his background during the Apartheid era, spoken about a black team, had a horrible political resonance (although that is not to say that this was Greig’s intention). So too did the power of the West Indies side for its substantial Afro-Caribbean fan base in post-colonial Britain, as documented in the 2010 film Fire in Babylon. It was cricket, but it was politics in a big way.


The match we saw was the final test at The Oval, the day that in scorching sunlight Viv Richards scored most of his magisterial 291, but that was a culmination of a summer that had marked a kind of shift from old to new cricket. The old cricket was represented by the – literally old – English batsmen facing the West Indian pace attack. John Edrich, 39, and Brian Close, an unbelievable 45, being peppered by Michael ‘whispering death’ Holding’s bouncers in the Old Trafford test being the symbolic example. It was like seeing the changing of an age. At the end of the Oval test, West Indies took the series 3-0 but that scoreline flattered England who had been comprehensively destroyed by a far superior side. In another symbolic moment, Tony Greig went on hands and knees and ‘grovelled’ in front of the Oval crowd.


It’s hard now to remember how amateurish English cricket was in the 1970s. I suppose that one minor index is the way that each Sunday during the season the team would be announced for the next test. We – my father and I – would see it during the tea interval of the John Player League tournament on the BBC. Even that is archaic – sport sponsored by a tobacco firm; county cricket matches on the BBC for hours on end. But, anyway, the team was in no way predictable. There were in those days no central contracts; a likely lad would receive the summons on Sunday and play for England in the test match on the following Thursday (in those days, test matches always started on a Thursday, running for five days to the end of Tuesday because Sunday was a ‘rest day’). This was often a moment of excitement for me because my particular heroes – Graham Roope and Pat Pocock come to mind – were never regular picks, but from time to time got the call up. So it was fun, but although in those days there was less of a gap between county and international standards, it didn’t begin to meet the exigencies of what cricket had become.


Post-1976 things began to change, especially after the development of Kerry Packer’s rebel World Series Cricket in 1977 (in which Tony Greig was a pivotal figure), although I must admit that at the time I adhered to my father’s considerable disapproval of this rupture in the traditional order. At all events, through the 1980s and 1990s England had some real, albeit fluctuating, success, ‘Botham’s Ashes’ in 1981 being a particularly memorable landmark. Even so, reading David Gower’s recent autobiography it is striking how haphazard and unprofessional the organization of the team was in that period. This continued to be the case at least until the creation of the English Cricket Board in 1997and the MacLaurin reforms which introduced, amongst other things, central contracts. The benefits were soon felt and the turning point was symbolised by England’s series victory over the by now much weaker West Indies side in 2000, secured at The Oval test, which I myself attended, 24 years after the 1976 rout and 31 years since England had recorded a series win over West Indies.


Since then, England have been a competitive and often very successful side, at times the best in the world. Perhaps the great high point was the extraordinary, heart-stopping, chest-heaving, Ashes series win in 2005 when I, along with, it seemed, the whole country was riveted (we will not dwell on the re-match in the Australian season). How sadly ironic that, with national success and interest at its height, this was the moment that the free-to-air TV rights were sold off, never to return. Since then, I have never watched a test match on television and ceased to follow it closely. There will be far fewer English children from now on who have the experience that I had, watching and learning with my father.


What is the organizational significance of this walk down cricketing memory lane? Apart from simple self-indulgence it is that much that I have recounted in this very brief history pertains to the organization of cricket in general and the England team in particular. And the withering defeat that England have just suffered is largely being discussed in organizational terms. That is, it is not that the players have suddenly ceased to be technically competent but that issues such as leadership, or the complacency bred by success affecting motivation, or even the protection offered by central contracts are being held responsible. As one influential commentator has noted, the problem is 'over-professionalism'. 


I certainly do not think that a return to the ‘amateurish’ days before central contracts will serve us well. But it does seem to me that in recent years English cricket has been gripped by a kind of soulless managerialism. When players, captain or manager are interviewed, they will couch their comments in stilted, bloodless terms: putting the ball in the right areas, executing our game plan, winning the percentages and so on. What seems to be missing is a sense that these are not ends in themselves, but means towards playing good or even great cricket. God forbid that we should adopt the debased argot of reality TV shows, with ubiquitous statements of how ‘passionate’ we are. But the difference between Australia and England in the latest Ashes does seem to show how the Australians were fired by something more than the mechanics of team management. I have no idea how to create or harness such a feeling and perhaps that is the point: the most important things in cricket may be precisely those things that cannot be controlled or managed. If so, there is also a wider lesson for, as all cricket fans know, cricket is not just a game but a microcosm of life itself.

History matters

No sooner had I posted some thoughts about the First World War than Michael Gove, the British Education Secretary, popped up with his own. In an article in the right-wing British newspaper the Daily Mail (see my recent post to understand where this paper is coming from) he denounced “Left-wing academics” for “belittling true British heroes”. Instead, he offered his own interpretation of it as “a just war” because “the ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified”. Of course this kind of simplistic analysis wouldn’t even pass muster in a high school project, and unfortunately for Gove his opposite number, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt happens to be a professional historian by background, and issued a sharp rejoinder. Even more unfortunately, Gove chose to position his arguments against one of the most popular British comedy shows - Blackadder Goes Forth, set in, and satirizing, WW1 - and has also been attacked today by one of its most popular actors.

The way that we remember history is not, in any case, likely to be much affected by the pronouncements of politicians – collective memory simply doesn’t work that way. But the fact that politicians might seek to fight over historical interpretation tells us how important those interpretations are. There’s a line in George Orwell’s novel 1984 to the effect that ‘he who controls the past controls the future’ and it is this that is at stake. Gove’s jingoistic rant is not primarily about the past, it’s about trying to advance a present day agenda. Most directly, it’s a coded way of talking about Germany and the EU; more diffusely about trying to resurrect the pieties of nationalism. In other words, history matters – not just, or even primarily, because of the past but because, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur elegantly put it ‘cultures recreate themselves by telling stories about their own past’.

In a very minor way that was brought home to me the other day when I was watching a documentary about the BBC music show ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1979. I was watching it because this was the music of my teenage years, but embedded throughout the programme was a narrative about how trade unions were a destructive, reprehensible force. In a general way, the music of the year was set against images of strikes and the election of Thatcher; in a specific way the BBC was depicted as engaging in restrictive, fuddy-duddy practices because of union controls. Of course this wasn’t a programme ‘about’ political history, it was a programme about pop music ‘in the past’. But embedded in it was, precisely, a political history.

Management and organization studies has a very similar relationship with history. On the one hand, it is the most ahistoric of disciplines. There is very little in the way of detailed scholarship on the history of management and organizations or on managerial and organizational thought (it’s true that there is a research sub-genre of business history, but it is not very connected to either the mainstream of the discipline, nor very present in the teaching curriculum). Students tend to be very impatient of case studies that are not of the moment. In this they have wiling accomplices in their teachers, who, as Paul Adler argues in his introduction to an indispensable Handbook have disconnected themselves from classic thought in the field. That is even reflected in the referencing patterns of journal articles. On the other hand, almost everything written about management and organizations is replete with history, albeit of the crudest and most unexamined sort. It is full of what I refer to in the book as “cartoon concepts” (p.104), especially as regards bureaucracy (old, discredited) and post-bureaucracy (new, shiny), but also in terms of its naïve story of an unfolding enlightenment from scientific management (old, nasty) to human relations (new, nice).

This kind of implicit, unexamined history serves – like Gove’s newspaper article – to pursue a particular agenda, primarily that current organizational developments are both inevitable and right. On the other hand, the neglect of history serves to pursue another agenda, primarily that organizations are completely decontextualized and unrelated to the world around them. Almost everything about the historiography of management and organization studies is unsatisfactory either in commission or omission. It remains the great unexplored territory of the subject. At least when someone like Gove pontificates about history it can be seen and understood that this matters for what we do now and in the future. In organization studies that has still to be seen and understood.