The last couple of weeks have seen much waffling about organisational culture. Following the Francis report on the Mid Staffordshire Trust, all and sundry were calling for a change in the culture of the NHS. This week we've had further calls for a change in the culture of banks, following the LIBOR rate-fixing fallout. What unites these two is the assumption that culture is the product of leadership, hence the focus on the suitability of David Nicholson and quibbles about Stephen Hester's bonus. Today we've seen the Health Secretary simultaneously claim that compassion cannot be "commanded from on high either by regulators or politicians" while using the example of "failing schools" to advocate "super-heads". This is the classic neoliberal mix of independence from the state and all power to the CEO. Liberty and autocracy.
Some of the fashion for cultural change stems from the popular confusion of culture with operating practice, such as the failure to distinguish between a value and an operating procedure ("care" is a value, while changing patients soiled sheets is an operating procedure). There is also a confusion between culture and power - the belief that culture is a manifestation of authority. Thus a "strong" culture is assumed to reflect a well-led organisation. This in turn reflects the belief in the efficacy of leaders, able to make an organisation turn on a sixpence and improve results overnight, which has long been the ideological cover for executive looting.
The turn to culture as the panacea for the NHS's problems follows on from the failure of targets (i.e. scientific management), which were placed centre-stage by New Labour as a managerialist substitute for prices when they decided to retain the internal market. Just as prices can be rigged (see LIBOR), so targets can be corrupted and lead to undesirable consequences (see Mid Staffs). The lamentation over culture, which is an even more complex and recalcitrant area than process management, looks like desperation and may mark the last hurrah for the NHS before the privatisation of core services. Similarly, the plea for a change in the culture of banks looks like an acceptance that the regulatory environment is inadequate and likely to remain so.
Actually existing culture, in the sense of shared values and normative behaviour, arises organically over long periods of time. Revolutions are possible, but only insofar as they legitimise values or behaviours that have been latent. You can no more change an organisation's culture quickly than you can change an individual's personality. Given the stratification and hierarchy of most organisations, there is rarely a single culture, certainly not in organisations of the scale of the NHS or a global bank. Instead, there tend to be multiple, overlapping subcultures. At the lowest levels, an organisation's culture is indistinguishable from that of the wider society. Among temporary staff, the organisation's culture usually extends no further than a logo on a building pass.
The further up the hierarchy you go, the more the culture is consciously independent of both the organisation and society, adhering to the values and norms of professional bodies or industry disciplines. Ironically, affiliation to an external culture is often strongest among those whose day job involves managing the organisation's culture (or at least curating its artefacts). The acme of this is the global culture of the executive class, which is highly conformist and pathologically averse to acknowledging cultural plurality (as distinct from "diversity", which is just CSR wibble). The paradox of culture is that top-down design and deployment inevitably bathes all organisations in the same weak solution, flavoured by business school nostrums and HR anodynes.
Starting in the 1930s, there was a vogue for forward-thinking organisations to bring in sociologists to analyse and report on the inhouse culture. This became formalised as "industrial sociology" by the 1960s, the analysis of large and complex organisations, with a focus on the informal mediation of hierarchies and the use of tacit knowledge (i.e. getting the job done while ignoring your manager). The underlying paradigm was anthropological. This was the "social" dimension of management that complemented the "scientific" dimension, focusing on processes, that ran from Taylorism through Japanese post-war practice to BPR. As the last of these was increasingly used to provide both method and cover for the dismemberment of Fordist businesses in the face of globalisation, the practice of organisational culture shifted from a reflective analysis of "is" to an assertive imposition of "to be". This also resulted in the practitioners of organisational culture being increasingly drawn from the ranks of business consultancy and training, rather than the social sciences. A "cultural change manager" today is likely to be a HR functionary.
The history of this evolution can be seen in the current interpretative division between culture as an attribute (something an organisation has - i.e. an asset) and culture as a metaphor (a way of describing the totality of the organisation). The former view sees culture in instrumental terms as something that can be manipulated or even imported wholesale. The latter view sees culture as a medium by which the fundamental nature of the organisation is revealed, with no assumption that it can necessarily be changed. As you might suspect, the "attribute" school of thought privileges leadership and the purchase of culture (in the form of change management). Though the "metaphor" school has its roots in industrial sociology, it's as likely to be found today among consultancies pitching to undertake "cultural audits". Culture has become just another commodity.
Culture is partly a caricature, as it is selective in what it celebrates and publicly exhibits, but stereotypes are an effective shorthand for norms while symbols can be powerful tools for reinforcing values. We all know what is meant by the call for the NHS to "bring back matron" or for bankers to be more like Captain Mainwaring. The popularity of the film Boiler Room among City traders before the 2008 crash, and the current popularity of NHS nostalgia like Call the Midwife, are telling in their different ways. The NHS and banks share a common characteristic in that their culture is heavily influenced by their corporate structure. In other words (and taking a "metaphor" approach), the culture reflects the organisation. In brief, you can only radically change the culture if you fundamentally change the structure of the organisation.
The NHS has struggled to evolve from the industrial paradigm of 1948. The half-way house of the internal market was doomed to fail because the NHS was, and essentially still is, a command economy. Paradoxically, the centralisation of the NHS leaves it vulnerable to repeated government initiatives for top-down change. A more diffuse and locally-accountable structure would limit this, though that would mean acknowledging a plurality of cultures. Instead of parachuting in bullying CEOs, the NHS would benefit from bottom-up change. In other words, democracy. This has long been the elephant in the room, both in terms of healthcare workers and patients. Workplace democracy is unattractive to professional bodies, such as the BMA and RCN, that command subculture allegiance, while patient democracy is unattractive to health managers who fear that it is incompatible with rationing and would lead to an explosion in costs. The tragedy of the NHS is that these vested interests may ultimately accept privatisation as a lesser evil. Assuming services were broken down into many separate contracts (as the private providers wish), this would fragment the NHS into multiple cultures. Ironically, this would reinforce the subcultural allegiance of professionals to their external bodies, which would obviously remain monopolies.
Banking remains unstable because it combines antipathetic elements: the high street bank, which many customers still think of as closer to a para-state utility than a retailer, and high finance. The growth of financial services (such as credit cards and mortgages) led, via the deregulation of the City (and the importation of US banking practices) in the 80s, to the merger of high street and investment banking. The former got infected by upselling and commission schemes, the latter got access to very large deposits that could be leveraged for trading. The banks may now be insisting that they've mended their ways, but this is like an alcoholic insisting that the best way for him to stay sober is to carry a full hip-flask. The temptation will always be there. There is no secret that cultural change in UK banking would best be effected by fully splitting retail and investment, but equally there is no doubt that this would severely disadvantage the City unless other countries did likewise, hence the flimsy ringfence. Ultimately, a City that is "less proud" may be the only chance we have of rebalancing the UK economy, but there are too many vested interests to believe it will happen unless forced upon us.
The calls for cultural change in both the NHS and UK banking are misguided. If you want to change the culture, you must change the structure of the organisation: democratise the NHS and split retail and investment banking. The idea that cultural change is dependent on strong leadership indicates a complete failure to understand what culture really is.
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Sunday, 10 February 2013
Lincoln and the Hats
Watching Lincoln reminds us that all government is driven by the exchange of favours, and that hats used to be a lot more important than they are today. In his attempt to get the 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed in the House of Representatives, this icon of probity is obliged to buy the votes of various congressmen through the promise of government jobs controlling the collection of taxes or monopolies such as Federal post offices. The modern fashion for conspiracy and political scandal (sex and drugs but strangely little rock and roll), which distracts us from the institutional nature of corruption, means that we easily forget how much government has always been (and continues to be) about rents and the privatisation of tax revenues.
The film is being lauded as one of Spielberg's finest, though I think it is too reverential to be remembered for its direction. What sticks in the mind is the quality of the lighting. In a film of muted tones, the washed-out greys, blues and browns reflect the drained and exhausted state of the nation. The use of windows to illuminate interiors, and moonlight exteriors, is quite striking and makes the sodium glow of the theatre in the last act all the more artificial (this is where Spielberg makes his one real joke, as it turns out to be a different theatre to the one where John Wilkes Booth is making an appearance). Unfortunately, Spielberg gives in to raw emotion in the rather trite coda that shows Lincoln on his death-bed bathed in a golden glow as the famous words "Now he belongs to the ages" are intoned. Though Lincoln went out with a bang, the film ends with a whimper.
Structurally, the inherently dull story of the reading and passage of a piece of legislation is broken up by three recurring tropes. The most obvious punctuation is the President's regular disputes with his wife over the sacrifice of his family to public office. Despite Sally Field's adroit negotiation of the emotional scale, this is just the melodrama of a soap opera with pretensions to Greek tragedy. The second trope is Lincoln's fondness for an anecdote at crucial moments. This is both an opportunity to leaven the film with humour and to show the human side of Lincoln as his listeners increasingly balk at the prospect of another slow-bowled "joke". Daniel Day-Lewis is at his most convincing in these scenes. Overall, his mannered style suits a film that is essentially rhetoric from start to finish (the opening scene is a toe-curling barbershop quartet rendition of the Gettysburg Address).
The key trope, which provides the backbone of the story, is the petitioning of interested parties for Presidential favour and the use of public office to secure votes: the buying and selling of power. This is initially played for laughs, around the vexed issue of an obscure toll-booth, as an example of the selfishness and lack of principle of the ordinary voter (there is contemporary edge in the satire of fiscal hypocrisy: we want the benefit, but we don't want to pay the price). It evolves through the cynical comedy of vote-buying, though this is played with greater concern for the modern proprieties of discretion and deniability than would have occurred at the time. However, it does reflect the transactional nature of politics (this is the West Wing strand). In one scene a Lincoln fixer, played by a sybaritic James Spader, blithely ratchets up the size of the role as the biddable congressmen gets cold feet.
The trope reaches its ultimate form in the negotiations with the Confederate representatives over the ending of the war, where Lincoln's strategy of making the abolition of slavery a fait accompli is shown to be the decisive argument for stopping the slaughter. Historians would quibble that Lincoln's strategy was more about maintaining the unity of the Union side and heading off demands for a more radical post-war settlement (particularly in terms of land ownership), rather than pursuing a point of principle, but you can see the yearning here for the assumed modern incarnation of Lincoln, i.e. Barack Obama (another former Senator of Illinois), to show some balls.
The three tropes display an ascending class hierarchy. We start with the petty concerns of the common people, move on to the deal-making of the professional classes and vested interests, and finally reach the strategic negotiations of society's great powers. For all Lincoln and Grant's formal insistence that the "rebs" aren't an equal nation, this is clearly a negotiation between antipathetic but peer economies: the established plantocracy of the South and the industrial plutocracy of the North (the wardrobe and cigars of Secretary of State Seward, played by David Strathairn, are highly suggestive, echoing Brunel and global trade).
The conscience of the film is the Radical leader, Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones as if auditioning for Mount Rushmore (the film's best performance). He believes in votes for women and blacks, not just emancipation, but curbs his ambitions in the interest of compromise (an Obama theme). His final scene sees him exhausted but contentedly in bed with his part-black housekeeper as she reads the text of the amendment. The key motif of this scene is Stevens' removal of his cumbersome wig, to become fully himself, which echoes Lincoln's regular doffing of his stovepipe hat (one time to retrieve a speech) and Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee's doffing of hats at the signing of the surrender. The variety of military hats, from kepi to slouch, is a testament to the thoroughness of the production, but the real message is that it's time to take them off, to stop dressing up and killing each other.
Inevitably, the last scene with Lincoln alive sees him putting on his hat before setting off to the theatre, while characteristically forgetting his gloves. Glovelessness is a symbol of democracy: the willingness to touch skin rather than interpose a leather barrier. The stovepipe hat is a symbol, a weighty and ridiculous symbol, of duty and thus fate. Lincoln's first memorable words in the film concern his unruly hair. The comment on its curliness is meant to emphasise his common humanity with the two black soldiers he is speaking to (presumably none of them used product), but the really telling movement, which you only realise later, is the doffing of the hat. The hats are gone from modern politics, but the privatisation of tax revenues, not to mention straightforward buying of favours, remains. If you want to get ahead, get a sinecure.
The film is being lauded as one of Spielberg's finest, though I think it is too reverential to be remembered for its direction. What sticks in the mind is the quality of the lighting. In a film of muted tones, the washed-out greys, blues and browns reflect the drained and exhausted state of the nation. The use of windows to illuminate interiors, and moonlight exteriors, is quite striking and makes the sodium glow of the theatre in the last act all the more artificial (this is where Spielberg makes his one real joke, as it turns out to be a different theatre to the one where John Wilkes Booth is making an appearance). Unfortunately, Spielberg gives in to raw emotion in the rather trite coda that shows Lincoln on his death-bed bathed in a golden glow as the famous words "Now he belongs to the ages" are intoned. Though Lincoln went out with a bang, the film ends with a whimper.
Structurally, the inherently dull story of the reading and passage of a piece of legislation is broken up by three recurring tropes. The most obvious punctuation is the President's regular disputes with his wife over the sacrifice of his family to public office. Despite Sally Field's adroit negotiation of the emotional scale, this is just the melodrama of a soap opera with pretensions to Greek tragedy. The second trope is Lincoln's fondness for an anecdote at crucial moments. This is both an opportunity to leaven the film with humour and to show the human side of Lincoln as his listeners increasingly balk at the prospect of another slow-bowled "joke". Daniel Day-Lewis is at his most convincing in these scenes. Overall, his mannered style suits a film that is essentially rhetoric from start to finish (the opening scene is a toe-curling barbershop quartet rendition of the Gettysburg Address).
The key trope, which provides the backbone of the story, is the petitioning of interested parties for Presidential favour and the use of public office to secure votes: the buying and selling of power. This is initially played for laughs, around the vexed issue of an obscure toll-booth, as an example of the selfishness and lack of principle of the ordinary voter (there is contemporary edge in the satire of fiscal hypocrisy: we want the benefit, but we don't want to pay the price). It evolves through the cynical comedy of vote-buying, though this is played with greater concern for the modern proprieties of discretion and deniability than would have occurred at the time. However, it does reflect the transactional nature of politics (this is the West Wing strand). In one scene a Lincoln fixer, played by a sybaritic James Spader, blithely ratchets up the size of the role as the biddable congressmen gets cold feet.
The trope reaches its ultimate form in the negotiations with the Confederate representatives over the ending of the war, where Lincoln's strategy of making the abolition of slavery a fait accompli is shown to be the decisive argument for stopping the slaughter. Historians would quibble that Lincoln's strategy was more about maintaining the unity of the Union side and heading off demands for a more radical post-war settlement (particularly in terms of land ownership), rather than pursuing a point of principle, but you can see the yearning here for the assumed modern incarnation of Lincoln, i.e. Barack Obama (another former Senator of Illinois), to show some balls.
The three tropes display an ascending class hierarchy. We start with the petty concerns of the common people, move on to the deal-making of the professional classes and vested interests, and finally reach the strategic negotiations of society's great powers. For all Lincoln and Grant's formal insistence that the "rebs" aren't an equal nation, this is clearly a negotiation between antipathetic but peer economies: the established plantocracy of the South and the industrial plutocracy of the North (the wardrobe and cigars of Secretary of State Seward, played by David Strathairn, are highly suggestive, echoing Brunel and global trade).
The conscience of the film is the Radical leader, Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones as if auditioning for Mount Rushmore (the film's best performance). He believes in votes for women and blacks, not just emancipation, but curbs his ambitions in the interest of compromise (an Obama theme). His final scene sees him exhausted but contentedly in bed with his part-black housekeeper as she reads the text of the amendment. The key motif of this scene is Stevens' removal of his cumbersome wig, to become fully himself, which echoes Lincoln's regular doffing of his stovepipe hat (one time to retrieve a speech) and Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee's doffing of hats at the signing of the surrender. The variety of military hats, from kepi to slouch, is a testament to the thoroughness of the production, but the real message is that it's time to take them off, to stop dressing up and killing each other.
Inevitably, the last scene with Lincoln alive sees him putting on his hat before setting off to the theatre, while characteristically forgetting his gloves. Glovelessness is a symbol of democracy: the willingness to touch skin rather than interpose a leather barrier. The stovepipe hat is a symbol, a weighty and ridiculous symbol, of duty and thus fate. Lincoln's first memorable words in the film concern his unruly hair. The comment on its curliness is meant to emphasise his common humanity with the two black soldiers he is speaking to (presumably none of them used product), but the really telling movement, which you only realise later, is the doffing of the hat. The hats are gone from modern politics, but the privatisation of tax revenues, not to mention straightforward buying of favours, remains. If you want to get ahead, get a sinecure.
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Digging up the Bones
Hard on the heels of the disinterment of Richard III we had the sight of Michael Gove rattling the bones of Antonio Gramsci and Jade Goody this week. The juxtaposition of an early twentieth century Italian Marxist and a reality TV star is meant to catch the attention of the media, something both engaged with closely in their different ways. The Education Secretary cited them as the twin inspirations of his radical-traditionalist policies in a speech entitled "The Progressive Betrayal". This was the usual evidence-lite diatribe against the strawman of progressive education, topped off with the claim that Labour is conspiring to keep the proles stupid and pliable, presumably by insisting they learn about Martin Luther King rather than the achievements of the British Empire.
Goody and Gramsci are deployed here as icons, not as real people. What do Jade Goody and Antonio Gramsci have in common? Well, one spent a long time locked up under the watchful eye of Big Brother, while the other had her own brand of perfume. If you think that's a poor joke, Gove's message that these apparent opposites, chav icon and bien pensant pinup, shared a belief that "traditional" education is best for the lower orders is even worse. The choice of icons is intended to wind up middle-class lefties who, Gove believes, look down on Goody as vulgar and look up to Gramsci as a secular saint. In Gove's mind, "progressive teaching" and "lefty" are synonymous. He naturally ignores the role of previous Tory education secretaries, such as Thatcher and Baker, in the development of modern educational practice.
Gove paints Goody as a victim not of her pathological craving for fame, or the exploitative nature of modern media, but of progressive education. He cites her ignorance of the location of Cambridge and Rio de Janeiro as "not her fault but the education system's". It's not often you hear a Tory dismiss personal agency and insist the system is wholly to blame. Unless he thinks a conspiracy of teachers denied her access to an atlas for a decade, you have to suspect some portion of responsibility should rest with Goody herself. He claims that "there was no doubt that Jade was intelligent. She exploited the notoriety she had earned to make herself a ubiquitous television and magazine presence, earning huge sums in the process and becoming in due course far wealthier than most of her detractors". This is cobblers, as well as a crude attempt to equate wealth with virtue. The brains behind the monetisation of her fame was Max Clifford. Gove's establishment of her credentials serves a predictable purpose: "Jade knew that the most precious thing she could bequeath her children was not money but knowledge ... she used her money to send them to the most traditional, academically demanding prep school she could find". Strangely, her respect for knowledge ("the most precious thing") did not stimulate her curiosity about geography or cause her to sign up for an adult education class. If anything, Goody's investment reveals a pragmatic understanding of education as a positional good. You buy it as a means to an end, not because you appreciate it as an end in itself. Ironically, Goody lifts the veil.
Gove's use of Gramsci is both mischievous and anachronistic. The Italian's views have to be seen in the context of his times (he was jailed by Mussolini in 1926 and died in 1937). As Gove notes, the Fascists were interested in "progressive" practices in education, but this was part of their conscious rejection of the traditional enlightenment curriculum which they saw as being complicit in the degeneracy of democracy. Fascism was reactionary in intent but revolutionary in practice. The "national revolution" in education allowed for the rejection of whole chunks of the established canon, notably anything tainted by free-thinking or socialism or (in Germany) Jewishness. He may be a democrat, but there is a whiff of the totalising and prescriptive in Gove's approach to the curriculum. It is also necessary to understand that Gramsci saw liberal bourgeois education in early 20th century Italy as historically progressive relative to working class education (which he referred to as "medieval").
Gramsci was the developer of the idea of cultural hegemony, i.e. class rule by means other than physical force or economic coercion, though the origin of the idea lies with Marx's observation that "the ruling ideas in any society are always the ideas of the ruling class". Hegemony operates through cultural institutions such as education, organised religion, the press and entertainment. It involves the articulation of values and mores that reinforce the dominance of the ruling class (e.g. equating wealth with virtue). Education is crucial both as a particular medium and as a paradigm for all cultural media (consider how "serious" TV tends towards the form of the lecture or demonstration, or newspaper editorials the form of the essay). As Gramsci said: "every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relationship". In other words, it seeks to persuade and indoctrinate.
If education is hegemonic, then the education system of the last 50 years (Gove sees the rot setting in with the Plowden report of 1967) has presumably been biased to maintain certain interests. Gove casts this in terms of an antagonism between Labour and the progressive educationalists on one side and working class kids on the other: "Labour, under their current leadership, want to be the Downton Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into – they should be happy to be recognised for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves". This is a hard claim to make stick when you consider the historic expansion of post-16 education numbers under the last Labour government, a trend now thrown into reverse by the abolition of EMA and the introduction of prohibitive tuition fees. The most significant feature of the UK system, the division into private and public sectors, is the one that Gove fails to address beyond promoting the private option as a proxy for excellence (while snarkily highlighting the "choice" of private schools made by various self-identifying lefties for their own kids).
Gove references Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes to show "the appetite for intellectual improvement that existed among working people". He fails to note that autodidacts (and institutions like the Workers' Education Association) were examples of the DIY reaction to the poverty of education when most working class children were condemned to elementary schools. The relative decline in this culture of self-improvement after WW2 was not the result of nasty lefty teachers convincing working class kids to accept their lot, but the consequence of first the Butler Act and then comprehensive education providing access to knowledge and a path to further education (supported by full grants), with the Open University providing a backstop for mature students.
Gove's push for traditional subjects and teaching methods for all is expressed in consciously radical language, such as "the government's liberation theology". This could just be dismissed as an example of the arch style that arose after Vince Cable labelled the Tories "Maoist" a while back, but there is truth in the claim that some elements (with Gove to the fore) really are ideological true-believers and are consciously revolutionary in style and practice. He says: "I think the things we need to protect and enhance ... are all better protected if we make them as universal as possible". This is clearly about making an educational ideology universal, i.e. hegemonic, it's not about democratising education and ensuring that every state school has the material advantages of Eton. But the real significance is the totalising ambition. Gove is not just seeking to impose a Tory curriculum, or to open education to the market, he is engaged in a cultural revolution that aims to colonise the aspirational working class with middle class values. A continuation of Thatcherism by other means, with the Kings James Bible instead of a little red book.
Like Gove, Gramsci had little sympathy for the idea that the working class have a distinct culture worth valuing, dismissing it as a pre-industrial relic overlaid with false consciousness (i.e. the product of a cultural hegemony that encouraged the masses to know their place). He believed that a true proletarian culture had to be created in order to achieve class consciousness and thereby revolution. It is for this reason that the paradox of Gramsci arises: why would a Marxist revolutionary advance traditional forms of education? Quite simply, he saw the traditional curriculum as a tool for exercising power and felt that workers should seize it and put it to their own use. This is expropriation, not the exaltation of tradition. The same instrumental view can be seen in the educational practices of communist regimes in the twentieth century. The USSR was hardly known for its "progressive" methods, beyond dropping RE and doubling science.
The real irony of all this is that, despite Gove's attempted triangulation, he and Gramsci have far more in common with each other than either does with Goody. Not because they're both swots, but because of a shared mistrust of variety and the organic. The popular lauding of Goody as "bubbly", "guileless" and "natural" was a recognition that she represented a chaotic force, temporarily tamed. Without that sense of fragility and danger, she would have been dismissed as a gobby fool. Gove's pedantry, his precise diction, and his relentlessly polite manner while delivering snide propaganda, all serve to give the impression of a fastidious man. But his ideological perfectionisim leads to avoidable mistakes, such as the school building programme fiasco and this week's EBC reverse. A paradox of revolution since Robespierre is that it's often the fastidious who contrive to unleash chaos.
Goody and Gramsci are deployed here as icons, not as real people. What do Jade Goody and Antonio Gramsci have in common? Well, one spent a long time locked up under the watchful eye of Big Brother, while the other had her own brand of perfume. If you think that's a poor joke, Gove's message that these apparent opposites, chav icon and bien pensant pinup, shared a belief that "traditional" education is best for the lower orders is even worse. The choice of icons is intended to wind up middle-class lefties who, Gove believes, look down on Goody as vulgar and look up to Gramsci as a secular saint. In Gove's mind, "progressive teaching" and "lefty" are synonymous. He naturally ignores the role of previous Tory education secretaries, such as Thatcher and Baker, in the development of modern educational practice.
Gove paints Goody as a victim not of her pathological craving for fame, or the exploitative nature of modern media, but of progressive education. He cites her ignorance of the location of Cambridge and Rio de Janeiro as "not her fault but the education system's". It's not often you hear a Tory dismiss personal agency and insist the system is wholly to blame. Unless he thinks a conspiracy of teachers denied her access to an atlas for a decade, you have to suspect some portion of responsibility should rest with Goody herself. He claims that "there was no doubt that Jade was intelligent. She exploited the notoriety she had earned to make herself a ubiquitous television and magazine presence, earning huge sums in the process and becoming in due course far wealthier than most of her detractors". This is cobblers, as well as a crude attempt to equate wealth with virtue. The brains behind the monetisation of her fame was Max Clifford. Gove's establishment of her credentials serves a predictable purpose: "Jade knew that the most precious thing she could bequeath her children was not money but knowledge ... she used her money to send them to the most traditional, academically demanding prep school she could find". Strangely, her respect for knowledge ("the most precious thing") did not stimulate her curiosity about geography or cause her to sign up for an adult education class. If anything, Goody's investment reveals a pragmatic understanding of education as a positional good. You buy it as a means to an end, not because you appreciate it as an end in itself. Ironically, Goody lifts the veil.
Gove's use of Gramsci is both mischievous and anachronistic. The Italian's views have to be seen in the context of his times (he was jailed by Mussolini in 1926 and died in 1937). As Gove notes, the Fascists were interested in "progressive" practices in education, but this was part of their conscious rejection of the traditional enlightenment curriculum which they saw as being complicit in the degeneracy of democracy. Fascism was reactionary in intent but revolutionary in practice. The "national revolution" in education allowed for the rejection of whole chunks of the established canon, notably anything tainted by free-thinking or socialism or (in Germany) Jewishness. He may be a democrat, but there is a whiff of the totalising and prescriptive in Gove's approach to the curriculum. It is also necessary to understand that Gramsci saw liberal bourgeois education in early 20th century Italy as historically progressive relative to working class education (which he referred to as "medieval").
Gramsci was the developer of the idea of cultural hegemony, i.e. class rule by means other than physical force or economic coercion, though the origin of the idea lies with Marx's observation that "the ruling ideas in any society are always the ideas of the ruling class". Hegemony operates through cultural institutions such as education, organised religion, the press and entertainment. It involves the articulation of values and mores that reinforce the dominance of the ruling class (e.g. equating wealth with virtue). Education is crucial both as a particular medium and as a paradigm for all cultural media (consider how "serious" TV tends towards the form of the lecture or demonstration, or newspaper editorials the form of the essay). As Gramsci said: "every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relationship". In other words, it seeks to persuade and indoctrinate.
If education is hegemonic, then the education system of the last 50 years (Gove sees the rot setting in with the Plowden report of 1967) has presumably been biased to maintain certain interests. Gove casts this in terms of an antagonism between Labour and the progressive educationalists on one side and working class kids on the other: "Labour, under their current leadership, want to be the Downton Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into – they should be happy to be recognised for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves". This is a hard claim to make stick when you consider the historic expansion of post-16 education numbers under the last Labour government, a trend now thrown into reverse by the abolition of EMA and the introduction of prohibitive tuition fees. The most significant feature of the UK system, the division into private and public sectors, is the one that Gove fails to address beyond promoting the private option as a proxy for excellence (while snarkily highlighting the "choice" of private schools made by various self-identifying lefties for their own kids).
Gove references Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes to show "the appetite for intellectual improvement that existed among working people". He fails to note that autodidacts (and institutions like the Workers' Education Association) were examples of the DIY reaction to the poverty of education when most working class children were condemned to elementary schools. The relative decline in this culture of self-improvement after WW2 was not the result of nasty lefty teachers convincing working class kids to accept their lot, but the consequence of first the Butler Act and then comprehensive education providing access to knowledge and a path to further education (supported by full grants), with the Open University providing a backstop for mature students.
Gove's push for traditional subjects and teaching methods for all is expressed in consciously radical language, such as "the government's liberation theology". This could just be dismissed as an example of the arch style that arose after Vince Cable labelled the Tories "Maoist" a while back, but there is truth in the claim that some elements (with Gove to the fore) really are ideological true-believers and are consciously revolutionary in style and practice. He says: "I think the things we need to protect and enhance ... are all better protected if we make them as universal as possible". This is clearly about making an educational ideology universal, i.e. hegemonic, it's not about democratising education and ensuring that every state school has the material advantages of Eton. But the real significance is the totalising ambition. Gove is not just seeking to impose a Tory curriculum, or to open education to the market, he is engaged in a cultural revolution that aims to colonise the aspirational working class with middle class values. A continuation of Thatcherism by other means, with the Kings James Bible instead of a little red book.
Like Gove, Gramsci had little sympathy for the idea that the working class have a distinct culture worth valuing, dismissing it as a pre-industrial relic overlaid with false consciousness (i.e. the product of a cultural hegemony that encouraged the masses to know their place). He believed that a true proletarian culture had to be created in order to achieve class consciousness and thereby revolution. It is for this reason that the paradox of Gramsci arises: why would a Marxist revolutionary advance traditional forms of education? Quite simply, he saw the traditional curriculum as a tool for exercising power and felt that workers should seize it and put it to their own use. This is expropriation, not the exaltation of tradition. The same instrumental view can be seen in the educational practices of communist regimes in the twentieth century. The USSR was hardly known for its "progressive" methods, beyond dropping RE and doubling science.
The real irony of all this is that, despite Gove's attempted triangulation, he and Gramsci have far more in common with each other than either does with Goody. Not because they're both swots, but because of a shared mistrust of variety and the organic. The popular lauding of Goody as "bubbly", "guileless" and "natural" was a recognition that she represented a chaotic force, temporarily tamed. Without that sense of fragility and danger, she would have been dismissed as a gobby fool. Gove's pedantry, his precise diction, and his relentlessly polite manner while delivering snide propaganda, all serve to give the impression of a fastidious man. But his ideological perfectionisim leads to avoidable mistakes, such as the school building programme fiasco and this week's EBC reverse. A paradox of revolution since Robespierre is that it's often the fastidious who contrive to unleash chaos.
Monday, 4 February 2013
Shoegazing and the Cloud
I have been trying, off and on since yesterday, to download the new My Bloody Valentine album (mbv) but their card payment interface appears to be banjaxed and I refuse to sign up to PayPal. You can only download it from the band's own website, which is one in the eye for tax-dodgers like Amazon but a bit pointless if it doesn't actual work. I've even emailed their support address, but given they've taken 22 years to deliver this follow-up to Loveless, I'm not expecting a swift reply. Fortunately, they've also stuck the lot up on YouTube. I highly recommend "only tomorrow", "new you" and "in another way".
The experience has not just reminded me that the Internet doesn't always work, dammit, but also that we (or at least I) remain wedded to the joys of owning stuff. Even though I can quite happily stream it online I want the download and am seriously considering buying the vinyl when it appears in a few weeks (it's an analogue recording, so this is not just vinyl collector's completitis). This reminded me of Steve Wozniak's rant a few months ago about the dangers of cloud computing. Wozniak, if you didn't know, was the original engineering brains behind Apple who was marginalised because he wasn't as pretty or as psychopathic as his partner, Steve Jobs (think Chewbacca to Han Solo, only shorter). According to The Woz, "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things".
With the recent demise of HMV, it's hard to argue with the proposition implicit in Wozniak's plea: in the future we will have access to much more, but we will own much less. For most people in the developed world, the twentieth century can be characterised in terms of increasing property ownership. I don't just mean in the narrow sense of owning a house, but in the wider sense of acquiring more and more goods and chattels, from furniture to toys, from cars to CDs. While the rich obviously maintained a monopoly on certain types of property, the material prosperity of capitalism, the sheer profusion of commodities, meant that our lives were increasingly organised around the making, buying and using of stuff.
Since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, which coincided with the peak in UK property ownership, this process has taken a new direction. It's not in-yer-face obvious, as we are surrounded by a lifetime's collection of books, videos, DVDs and CDs, but the future is clearly the "weightlessness" of content on demand. Even the historic growth of user devices is misleading, both because commodity deflation means they account for proportionately less of our expenditure and because there is a limit to the number of dedicated devices we can practically use (we probably peaked with e-readers). Though Apple are obviously keen on high-margin devices, and pitch them as status symbols, the general trend is towards commoditisation and disposability. The commercial model of mobile phones, and the quickening pace of obsolescence, means that we're increasingly open to the idea that we acquire our devices as part of a contract for service access and content. We're renting more, and this applies to cultural products as much as homes. Just as the growth of buy-to-let means that property ownership is concentrating, so cloud computing is leading to a concentration of massive providers such as Amazon, Google and Apple.
There are two paradoxes here. The first is that openness and choice may be leading to homogenisation and oligopoly. The second is that the demands of cloud interoperability and the environmental costs of data centres may lead to the minimisation of data and the maximisation of access - e.g. a single copy of an MP3 file (allowing for backups and mirrors) that is accessible to everyone. This is the optimal rent model: the greatest revenue from the smallest asset.
The "move to the cloud" is central to business too. For some years now, the concept of IT as a utility has been pushed both as a desirable goal ("you don't have to think about it") and a practical service delivery model ("just plug in"). In fact, cloud computing bears little resemblance to a utility. Despite the contrived appearance of multiple providers in a free market, most public utilities are physical monopolies at the sharp end: one electricity cable, one water mains, one sewer etc. The characteristics of a utility are those of a natural monopoly. Unlike utilities, IT cloud services are neither consistent nor easily substituted between providers. Salesforce.com and Google Apps are not interchangeable. The utility trope is primarily a sales pitch, but it is also subtly ideological in that it hints at semi-official status (every accounts payable function knows you pay the utility bills first). There is also the semi-conscious derogation of "hard" IT, i.e. the equating of infrastructure roles with utility workers, which leads to the perception that cloud computing facilitates a shift from blue to white-collar jobs in IT (there is little expectation of net job reductions and some belief that the aggregate impact is an increase in roles).
The real commonality between a utility and the cloud is that the service cost includes an element of rent (in the economist's sense - i.e. a royalty). Despite the loud claims made by utility companies about their investment in infrastructure and labour (water pipes and engineers), the gross profit of a utility such as water is largely rent (the exploitation of a natural resource) rather than the surplus value of labour. Though the cloud may provide access to differentiated applications, which are ultimately the product of labour, in practice a large part of the fee you are paying is rent (hence pricing tends towards per-user rather than per-transaction models). The very opaqueness and indeterminacy of the cloud (notice it's "the" not "a") makes this difficult to see, though you get a hint of the role that rent plays in modern capitalism in the cross-charging of IP royalties by multinationals, such as Amazon.
Cloud computing consolidates capital with the cloud service providers. This not only gives rise to economies of scale for them, it also means that the businesses that use the cloud are increasingly capital light. This is good insofar as it lowers the cost of business entry and avoids the need for periodic loans or share issues to raise capital, but it also reduces the scope for internal productivity gains (e.g. by upgrading equipment) and makes process innovation dependent on onerous supplier management (this is a feature of outsourcing generally and not just cloud computing). In effect, we're seeing the centralisation of capital in fewer hands. This does not mean that cloud-using businesses are less profitable, but that profits are more likely to be recycled as bonuses and share buybacks rather than capital investment. This is the nature of the "weightless economy". The weight doesn't disappear, it simply moves to one end of the corporate spectrum.
It's early days, but the trend this century appears to be towards an economy in which the elite owns an even more disproportionate share of property than today while the majority of the population pays rent to make use of it. We will have access to more stuff, so we will feel materially richer than we did in the twentieth century, but we will own less of it. One by-product of this shift from property to rent will be the need to continue earning longer or face greater relative poverty in old age, when you typically seek to rely more on assets built up over your working life. The extending of the retirement age may prove to be about more than just a shortfall in pension contributions.
The experience has not just reminded me that the Internet doesn't always work, dammit, but also that we (or at least I) remain wedded to the joys of owning stuff. Even though I can quite happily stream it online I want the download and am seriously considering buying the vinyl when it appears in a few weeks (it's an analogue recording, so this is not just vinyl collector's completitis). This reminded me of Steve Wozniak's rant a few months ago about the dangers of cloud computing. Wozniak, if you didn't know, was the original engineering brains behind Apple who was marginalised because he wasn't as pretty or as psychopathic as his partner, Steve Jobs (think Chewbacca to Han Solo, only shorter). According to The Woz, "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away. I want to feel that I own things".
With the recent demise of HMV, it's hard to argue with the proposition implicit in Wozniak's plea: in the future we will have access to much more, but we will own much less. For most people in the developed world, the twentieth century can be characterised in terms of increasing property ownership. I don't just mean in the narrow sense of owning a house, but in the wider sense of acquiring more and more goods and chattels, from furniture to toys, from cars to CDs. While the rich obviously maintained a monopoly on certain types of property, the material prosperity of capitalism, the sheer profusion of commodities, meant that our lives were increasingly organised around the making, buying and using of stuff.
Since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, which coincided with the peak in UK property ownership, this process has taken a new direction. It's not in-yer-face obvious, as we are surrounded by a lifetime's collection of books, videos, DVDs and CDs, but the future is clearly the "weightlessness" of content on demand. Even the historic growth of user devices is misleading, both because commodity deflation means they account for proportionately less of our expenditure and because there is a limit to the number of dedicated devices we can practically use (we probably peaked with e-readers). Though Apple are obviously keen on high-margin devices, and pitch them as status symbols, the general trend is towards commoditisation and disposability. The commercial model of mobile phones, and the quickening pace of obsolescence, means that we're increasingly open to the idea that we acquire our devices as part of a contract for service access and content. We're renting more, and this applies to cultural products as much as homes. Just as the growth of buy-to-let means that property ownership is concentrating, so cloud computing is leading to a concentration of massive providers such as Amazon, Google and Apple.
There are two paradoxes here. The first is that openness and choice may be leading to homogenisation and oligopoly. The second is that the demands of cloud interoperability and the environmental costs of data centres may lead to the minimisation of data and the maximisation of access - e.g. a single copy of an MP3 file (allowing for backups and mirrors) that is accessible to everyone. This is the optimal rent model: the greatest revenue from the smallest asset.
The "move to the cloud" is central to business too. For some years now, the concept of IT as a utility has been pushed both as a desirable goal ("you don't have to think about it") and a practical service delivery model ("just plug in"). In fact, cloud computing bears little resemblance to a utility. Despite the contrived appearance of multiple providers in a free market, most public utilities are physical monopolies at the sharp end: one electricity cable, one water mains, one sewer etc. The characteristics of a utility are those of a natural monopoly. Unlike utilities, IT cloud services are neither consistent nor easily substituted between providers. Salesforce.com and Google Apps are not interchangeable. The utility trope is primarily a sales pitch, but it is also subtly ideological in that it hints at semi-official status (every accounts payable function knows you pay the utility bills first). There is also the semi-conscious derogation of "hard" IT, i.e. the equating of infrastructure roles with utility workers, which leads to the perception that cloud computing facilitates a shift from blue to white-collar jobs in IT (there is little expectation of net job reductions and some belief that the aggregate impact is an increase in roles).
The real commonality between a utility and the cloud is that the service cost includes an element of rent (in the economist's sense - i.e. a royalty). Despite the loud claims made by utility companies about their investment in infrastructure and labour (water pipes and engineers), the gross profit of a utility such as water is largely rent (the exploitation of a natural resource) rather than the surplus value of labour. Though the cloud may provide access to differentiated applications, which are ultimately the product of labour, in practice a large part of the fee you are paying is rent (hence pricing tends towards per-user rather than per-transaction models). The very opaqueness and indeterminacy of the cloud (notice it's "the" not "a") makes this difficult to see, though you get a hint of the role that rent plays in modern capitalism in the cross-charging of IP royalties by multinationals, such as Amazon.
Cloud computing consolidates capital with the cloud service providers. This not only gives rise to economies of scale for them, it also means that the businesses that use the cloud are increasingly capital light. This is good insofar as it lowers the cost of business entry and avoids the need for periodic loans or share issues to raise capital, but it also reduces the scope for internal productivity gains (e.g. by upgrading equipment) and makes process innovation dependent on onerous supplier management (this is a feature of outsourcing generally and not just cloud computing). In effect, we're seeing the centralisation of capital in fewer hands. This does not mean that cloud-using businesses are less profitable, but that profits are more likely to be recycled as bonuses and share buybacks rather than capital investment. This is the nature of the "weightless economy". The weight doesn't disappear, it simply moves to one end of the corporate spectrum.
It's early days, but the trend this century appears to be towards an economy in which the elite owns an even more disproportionate share of property than today while the majority of the population pays rent to make use of it. We will have access to more stuff, so we will feel materially richer than we did in the twentieth century, but we will own less of it. One by-product of this shift from property to rent will be the need to continue earning longer or face greater relative poverty in old age, when you typically seek to rely more on assets built up over your working life. The extending of the retirement age may prove to be about more than just a shortfall in pension contributions.
Friday, 1 February 2013
Weaselly Pop
David Hepworth recently asked: "When did pop become the dominant culture?" This begs the question by assuming that "pop" is a historically specific development that has displaced an earlier form. Presumably he means the musical styles that first came to prominence between the end of the Chatterley ban and you know what. The word dominant implies hegemony, the idea that pop is now the cultural orthodoxy, not merely the form that shifts the most units. As becomes clear in his piece, pop has expanded beyond music to encompass other forms as well: "Pop is now culture's default position. It's unimaginable that a new arts
programme or supplement could be launched today without an interview with Damon
Albarn or a think piece about Scandinavian detectives. It wasn't always like
this." Indeed. Once upon a time we'd have had interviews with Charles Dickens, banging on about his latest release, or some smartarse like George Orwell trying to decode the social meaning of seaside postcards.
Hepworth seems strangely oblivious to the class dimension of culture (Albarn and Scandi crime are middle class identifiers) even as he quotes the claim by Liz Forgan, outgoing chair of The Arts Council, that politicians prefer to be seen at rock festivals rather than the opera in order to avoid the charge of elitism. This is just self-serving propaganda by someone whose job it was to persuade politicians to spend more money on opera. The cultural products that are dominant (in the sense of most visible) in a capitalist society are always going to be the ones where the largest amount of money can be made through their production and exchange. Opera is a luxury item: low volume, high price. In a world where exclusivity (aka "excellence") is seen as the antithesis of "dumbing down", you can bet there are plenty of politicians happy to be associated with it. Pop may be dominant in terms of sales, but it is not hegemonic in terms of culture.
When Hepworth draws a distinction between "serious" and "pop" he is guilty of categorising culture into rigid and competing blocs. This leads to the trope of conflict: "About fifteen years ago I realised there had been a war between serious culture and pop culture. It had ended and Pop had won. Clearly. Trouble is I have no memory of that war taking place." Such categorisation inevitably reflects existing social divisions, hence the ready identification of culture and class. Snobbery, masked as aesthetic judgement, is not far behind (consider how Miranda is indulged by TV critics while Mrs. Brown's Boys is sneered at). Hepworth's bemusement is the perspective of a former editor of Smash Hits realising that the counter culture of his youth is the mainstream of his middle age.
The artificiality of these boundaries is highlighted by the way that certain cultural products cross them. Thus football, which was once a working class identifier, is now seen (and criticised) as increasingly middle class. In practice, most mass spectator sports have always been cross-class. Just as some brickies have always loved Beethoven, so doctors and lawyers have watched Arsenal since the Plumstead days. What has changed is the media treatment, from the demonisation of football fans as representatives of the violent labouring class to the idolisation of them as a vanishing tribe being priced out of the game. The Liverpool fans who unveiled a banner at the Emirates this week, querying whether football was still a working class sport, were complicit in this sentimentalisation. They are entirely right to question the price of a ticket, but to imply that football is categorically working class is weaselly.
David Hepworth's fundamental error is to assume that there is a definable entity called "pop", with clear boundaries and characteristics, and that this is mutually exclusive to "serious culture". In reality, there is stuff that sells. All the rest is ideology.
Hepworth seems strangely oblivious to the class dimension of culture (Albarn and Scandi crime are middle class identifiers) even as he quotes the claim by Liz Forgan, outgoing chair of The Arts Council, that politicians prefer to be seen at rock festivals rather than the opera in order to avoid the charge of elitism. This is just self-serving propaganda by someone whose job it was to persuade politicians to spend more money on opera. The cultural products that are dominant (in the sense of most visible) in a capitalist society are always going to be the ones where the largest amount of money can be made through their production and exchange. Opera is a luxury item: low volume, high price. In a world where exclusivity (aka "excellence") is seen as the antithesis of "dumbing down", you can bet there are plenty of politicians happy to be associated with it. Pop may be dominant in terms of sales, but it is not hegemonic in terms of culture.
When Hepworth draws a distinction between "serious" and "pop" he is guilty of categorising culture into rigid and competing blocs. This leads to the trope of conflict: "About fifteen years ago I realised there had been a war between serious culture and pop culture. It had ended and Pop had won. Clearly. Trouble is I have no memory of that war taking place." Such categorisation inevitably reflects existing social divisions, hence the ready identification of culture and class. Snobbery, masked as aesthetic judgement, is not far behind (consider how Miranda is indulged by TV critics while Mrs. Brown's Boys is sneered at). Hepworth's bemusement is the perspective of a former editor of Smash Hits realising that the counter culture of his youth is the mainstream of his middle age.
The artificiality of these boundaries is highlighted by the way that certain cultural products cross them. Thus football, which was once a working class identifier, is now seen (and criticised) as increasingly middle class. In practice, most mass spectator sports have always been cross-class. Just as some brickies have always loved Beethoven, so doctors and lawyers have watched Arsenal since the Plumstead days. What has changed is the media treatment, from the demonisation of football fans as representatives of the violent labouring class to the idolisation of them as a vanishing tribe being priced out of the game. The Liverpool fans who unveiled a banner at the Emirates this week, querying whether football was still a working class sport, were complicit in this sentimentalisation. They are entirely right to question the price of a ticket, but to imply that football is categorically working class is weaselly.
David Hepworth's fundamental error is to assume that there is a definable entity called "pop", with clear boundaries and characteristics, and that this is mutually exclusive to "serious culture". In reality, there is stuff that sells. All the rest is ideology.
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