Tag Archives: thinking allowed

Economics students rebel…

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EconomicsHome

I tweeted this story a couple of days ago.

Then I heard about the revolting students of Economics from the University of Manchester , who have accused their lecturers of blinkered adherence to the very economics that got us in the trouble that we are in. So much so that they started a group called The Post-Crash Economics Society;

We are The Post-Crash Economics Society and we are a group of economics students at The University of Manchester who believe that the content of the economics syllabus and the way it is taught could and should be seriously rethought.

We were inspired to start this society when we heard about a Bank of England Conference called ‘Are Economics Graduates Fit for Purpose?’ At this event leading economists from the public and private sphere came together to discuss whether economics undergraduates were being taught the right things in the light of the 2008 Financial Crisis. This chimed with some of our frustrations about the economics we were learning and so we decided to set up a society that would through doing research, organising events and running workshops seek to bring this discussion to Manchester. That was at the start of the 2012/13 academic year.

As of today we have a fully-fledged society, a book club, an incredibly successful launch event led by world class economists, many student and academic supporters, a petition that is constantly gaining signatures, links with a national network of economic societies and organisation and even more passion and determination to change the current state of economic education!

Where do we find the new economic thinking then? What alternatives are there to the Neo-Liberal hegemony that grips our political an economic establishments so firmly that anything else seems to lack ‘common sense’?

Today Radio 4’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ programme carried an extended discussion about Neo-liberal economics, defined interestingly NOT as a kind of super conservative laissez faire free market thing, but rather as a hyper interventionist big government approach that promotes a certain kind of economic policy (aggressive venture capitalism) to the exclusion of all others. Impose a certain kind of market society, because the market can process information much better than individual human beings. Any problems with markets can be fixed by the evolution of new markets.

There was an interesting discussion led by Robert Sidelski, who described John Maynard Keynes prophecy that by now we should all be working a 15 hour working week, as individual wealth would have increased 8 fold (Written back in the 1030s.) Living standards have indeed gone up but we remain caught in wage slaving. There have been endless improvement in productivity, but we never seem to have enough.  Sidelski called this ‘insatiability’, which has been unleashed as never before by capitalism.

Why?

Is this about greed, and the almost total lack of moral controls on this? Sidelski suggested that greed has become the lodestone of our culture. All other standards yield to the need to make money.

He also suggested that society gets richer, relative wants become more important than absolute needs– so the real issue is how we consume relative to others- leading to us all comparing what we have relative to what others have constantly, a madness that is stoked and fed by advertising.

Is there any economic alternative to this? Marx would say this is unsustainable delusion, and it is very hard to argue that he was wrong. It is not as though this wealth brings happiness or satisfaction!

Everything has been reduced to gadgets- leisure has been commoditised by gadgets. Leisure is not easily seperated from consumption. We seek to make time (particualarly holidays) SPECIAL by increasing consumption and gadgetisation, not seeing them as about activity unyoked from purpose.

Sidelski quoted Keynes from 1930, reflecting on the possibility of people set free from all this consumption and pursuit of money;

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue-that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

From Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

Do you think the Post-Crash Economics Society are looking for this kind of economic theorising?

I hope so, and may their voices become louder…

Bully…

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There was an interesting discussion on Radio 4’s ‘Thinking Allowed’ yesterday about workplace bullying.

I am now a few months out of my last workplace, and have spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of the working environment and the power given/taken to a certain kind of manager. It was a corrosive and damaging place to be and although I am a big boy and ought to be able to stand on my own two feet, at times it brought be to my knees. Social work is hard enough when you consider the nature of the tasks and the limitations of resources without adding in bullying as well.

When you are in the middle of it all, it is hard not to focus on particular individuals as the cause of all this. The dark shadow cast by certain people over everything is hard to escape- the thundering threatening e-mail, the meeting in which people are casually destroyed, the deliberate provocation and lack of co-operation. The relish that seemed to be exhibited at any kind of conflict.

There was a time when a new manager arrived who had a reputation to make. His career path was firmly upwards and woe betide anyone who got in the way. He had a new broom and wielded it like a scythe (to mix a deliberate metaphor.) Part of this meant categorising everything from the old regime as ‘bad’- and to be got rid of. Unfortunately, I was the only surviving middle manager from a previous ‘re organisation’ (which in the public sector is another word for a cull) so I was for it. There was no attempt to discuss with me some kind of plan of action, or lay out goals and action plans. No attempt was made to understand my strengths, or to make use of my considerable ‘organisational memories’.

What began was a campaign of alienation. I was called in for Performance Development Reviews and accused of all sorts of things that made no sense to me. I started collecting e-mails that seemed so unreasonable and even abusive that I thought I may need to use them as evidence later. It felt as if all the hard work I had put in to building an integrated mental health service had no value, and was being systematically sneered at, and then dismantled.

I stopped sleeping. I developed terrible cluster headaches. It became incredibly hard to maintain motivation, and all around me I saw people retreating into trenches and keeping their heads down. I contemplated just handing in my resignation and in a desperate moment, confided in a much older wiser manager who was doing some locum work with the council. He told me “Chris, don’t be so bloody stupid. What you need to do is to go and see (…..) and tell him that you have thought long and hard about the situation, and realise you have a lot to learn, and that you want to hear any advice he has to give about how to improve performance, and to provide the sort of management required. If you do this, you then have six months to get out intact, and protect your mortgage and your family.” 

I more or less did this, and things settled down. Years later, I was told almost casually by the manager who had put me under such pressure that I had made considerable improvements- and that he had initially thought that I was not able to do this, so had tried to get rid of me.

Perhaps I had improved- but I do not think so. I think my development, if there was any, was more about managing my interface with the higher management. I did this by expecting no support, by trying to focus on the important stuff and to protect my staff from some of the huge pressure coming down. I think I also became more valuable, as a lot of the hand picked new management team did not adapt well, and many left soon after joining the council, sometimes leaving chaos in their wake.

Back to ‘Thinking Allowed’ however. They were interested in the sociological aspect of bullying, not the psychological one; so rather than focussing on individual processes, the focus was more on the sorts of environments that breed this kind of behaviour. What sort of organisations might make it more or less likely? What organisations are high risk? Sociologists Ralph Fevre and Amanda Robinson claimed that organisations which are well versed in modern management practices may create a culture in which bullying, harassment and stress thrive.

Unsurprisingly Fevre and Robinson found that organisations that were overly focussed on abstract performance and production targets to the exclusion of the particular human needs of staff will certainly be high risk of bullying behaviours developing.

They looked at different kinds of bullying- ranging from psychological through to actual physical violence, and found that even people who have been subjected to violence tended to focus on one thing as the most damaging- the fact that their workplace placed no value in the work they were doing, or their contribution to the organisation. This certainly resonated with me- the social work department I worked for seemed to operate in an environment where the soft detail of caring social work had no currency whatsoever. Rather everything was reduced to narrow performance stats, which placed pressure on people to constantly cover their backs.

When I think about my time under this kind of stress, I find myself feeling a little ill- but I have to acknowledge that this is not just about particular individuals- it is a systemic thing. It grows in the margins of an organisation being squeezed to death by inspections, scandals, enquiries, financial crises, staffing shortages. There will always be people who are able to exploit these situations for their own personal gain, but the real problem is the nature of the environment.

What then might change round such an environment? Some of it I think has to be about a change in management style- a rediscovery of a value base, and the value of individuals. The place I worked had all the right language, but somehow totally missed the mark on this stuff. For the sake of those who work there, I hope that things have changed. There is evidence that new managers are trying to achieve this, so good luck to them.

As for me, I feel like I am still in recovery. I am expecting to need to go back into the social work/health care world, at least as a part time worker, in the new year. This still makes me feel a little queasy, but I hope that this will continue to abate. Some scars will remain…

Jim Crow and the ‘Coon songs’…

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I listened to a discussion on Thinking Allowed on radio 4 today about the role of comedy in racism, and anti-racism. It reminded me again of something close to home.

I have written previously about this rock, known as ‘Jim Crow’ which is across the road from where I live-

 

Photo by Scott Adams- http://www.flickr.com/photos/10021898@N02/797575782/in/photostream

The history of the rock is the subject of much debate- some of my friends who are local to Dunoon feel protective of it as a local landmark- it has been decorated in this way for well over 100 years, and is one of those local features that people remember, and celebrate, from childhood.

It has been suggested that the rock was so named after a garage owned by Jim Crow in the vicinity, although I know someone who has done some research in the public records and can find no sign of such a business, or of a person with that name.

In my earlier post, I pointed out the link with a tradition that emerged in another place- the ‘Minstrel shows’ of 19th Century America, in which ‘Jim Crow’ was a negative caricature of  a black man. The words ‘Jim Crow’ became an insult that was used alongside other offensive words like ‘Nigger’ and ‘Coon’. It also became a catch-all phrase for a set of segregation laws adopted by states across the USA that were oppressive and amounted to state sponsored rascism- the Jim Crow Laws.

The question remains however as to why a rock came to be decorated in this way in a sleepy little seaside town on the West Coast of Scotland?

I think the answer lies in the incredible popularity of the minstrel shows, and the wave of songs and dances that captured popular imagination at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries. Quite why this form of entertainment became so popular is difficult for us to understand from a post modern perspective. It was carried along by a new beat and verve brought by ragtime music and cakewalk rhythms but perhaps also by a rather more sinister human characteristic- the need to look down upon, or even demonise the other.

‘Coon songs‘ sung either by black performers, or more often, white men with black painted faces, were incredibly popular. Some of these songs sold millions of copies of sheet music all over the world.

The Coon songs were performed in popular shows wherever entertainment was required- particularly in mass holiday destinations- like 19th Century Dunoon, at the height of the age of steamers on the Clyde. According to an entry on Wikipedia, this is what they were all about-

Coon songs’ defining characteristic, however, was their caricature of African Americans. In keeping with the older minstrel image of blacks, coon songs often featured “watermelon- and chicken-loving rural buffoon[s].”[14] However, “blacks began to appear as not only ignorant and indolent, but also devoid of honesty or personal honor, given to drunkenness and gambling, utterly without ambition, sensuous, libidinous, even lascivious.”[14] Blacks were portrayed as making money through gambling, theft, and hustling, rather than working to earn a living,[14] as in the Nathan Bivins song “Gimme Ma Money”:

Last night I did go to a big Crap game,
How dem coons did gamble wuz a sin and a shame…
I’m gambling for my Sadie,
Cause she’s my lady,
I’m a hustling coon, … dat’s just what I am.[15]

Towards the end of the era of Coon songs, it seems that people began to object to the racism at the heart of the formulae. There is also some evidence that black performers began to subvert the songs by turning some of the humour back at the white listeners. Laurie Taylor, as part of the discussion on the radio today placed these songs in a longer line of black comedy, including Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, who use humour to confront their audience with the narrow stereotypes they might otherwise regard as acceptable. However, there also appears to be a danger in this form of activism, as in some ways it gives permission to air these views.

There was also an interesting point about how certain popular performers can be seen  ‘exceptions’ to a more wider prejudicial view. In this way, they confirm the stereotype as much as they confront it.

Richard Pryor stopped making jokes using the word ‘Nigger’- here he is (WARNING– as ever, his language is a bit fruity.)

Back to the rock.

I had previously suggested that I would like to see it redecorated.

I certainly would still like to see more local knowledge of the tradition that this rock comes from, as I think we always need to learn the lessons of history, lest we repeat the mistakes again.

Lest we find a new section of the population to demonise.