Politics, power, belief and evidence

There have been a number of examples this week in the UK which demonstrate the complex social processes that surround the use and interpretation  of evidence and how it influences political decision-making, belief, values and  human behaviour. Evidence gets taken up in interactions between people who then use it in their struggles over ideology and power, morality and ethical choices. These struggles can also evoke strong feelings of shame and anger.

Inspection and other forms of control

I was working with some teachers in a school the other day when the conversation turned to inspection and evidence. The new UK school inspection regime is based much more clearly on teachers’ and managers’ assessments of how they think they are doing – they have to fill in what is called a SEF, or self-evaluation form – which is then offered to incoming inspectors as the primary basis for their inspection. According to the Department for Education, evidence has to be rigorous, has to be written down and has to demonstrate ‘impact’. The inspectors then judge not just the quality of teaching and learning in school, but also the quality of the SEF. The idea is that the inspection becomes an assessment of teachers’ ability to assess themselves in the given form of the SEF.

Since I have taken a long-term interest in encouraging reflection and reflexivity in the posts in this blog , I was interested to note my own resistance not to the idea of self-evaluation but to the way it was being put forward and the ideology of relentless improvement and scrutiny that it implies.

Strategic Planning: it’s not about the document

I recently undertook some work with someone whose job it was to support her senior management team put together the organisation’s next ten year strategic plan. This had resulted from an 18 month planning process which I had joined at various points along the way, having been invited to attend some of the workshops and join in the conversation. I was quite surprised to have been invited because when this colleague had originally asked me for support I had argued that I probably was not the best person to do so since I had conceptual difficulties with strategic planning, particularly 10 year plans. Nonetheless, I had been invited along partly because of my critical attitude and the grist that I might provide for such an activity. I found this a very open minded approach and was encouraged to join in.

Management, professionalism and ethics

In a previous post we drew attention to the work of the scholar Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School who put forward the idea that the teaching of management had been corrupted and diverted by a particularly narrow view of the role of managers promoted by the Chicago monetarists. Instead of managers seeing themselves as members of a professional discipline, Khurana argued, they had become ‘hired hands’, rentable by shareholders looking to maximise their investment. As the fortunes of managers became more closely tied into the fortunes of shareholders, so they were able to abandon their commitment to a broader set of stakeholders, to their own discipline, in order to pursue  self-interest.

Khurana has recently supported an initiative by a group of graduating MBAs at HBS who wanted to sign up to the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath. In swearing the oath the graduating managers would agree to ’serve the greater good’, to ‘act with utmost integrity’ and to guard against ‘decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions, but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.’ The Economist magazine which covered the story indulged in some of the sniggering that they accused other critics of giving in to. Who were these graduates from an elite institution who were just preparing themselves for high-flying jobs in blue chip institutions to lecture to anyone else, and aren’t we all motivated by greed and self interest?

The difficulty of working with difference

Much contemporary management practice revolves around ideas of consensus, alignment and agreement. So, we are expected in organisations to ’share values’, to agree to the vision and mission, and in some developmental organisations to ‘be the change we want to see’, after Gandhi. We are to become saints like Martin Luther King or perhaps Mandela. The overwhelming mood is positive and successful.

One way of understanding this is as an injunction to leave our ‘bad self’ at the door and only to be ‘constructive’ at work, where constructive is taken to mean not causing any ripples. When conflict does arise it should be managed. Of course, there isn’t much that can’t be managed these days: time management, diversity management, anger management and more recently talent management.

An alternative way of understanding how change comes about in organisations, rather than through the planned, rational interventions of calculating managers working with staff who are good and agree not to disagree is through the exploration of difference. However it is important not to take this up as another positive and naive inducement – “let’s encourage diversity and difference!”, as though this is an easy thing to do which can only bring about good. I have been working with a group recently where the exploration of difference has proved painful, disruptive and dangerous. Because co-participants have refused to have their differences ‘managed’ it has caused consternation and bewilderment amongst all those concerned and has begun to affect others in the programme too.

What would it mean seriously to work with difference in ways that avoid the usual dualist solutions (good difference and bad difference, constructive and destructive), or the appeal to holism, where somehow we are obliged to synthesise a new ‘whole’?

The limits to Obama’s leadership: idealisation, hope and habitus

An article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper by journalist Gary Younge considered president Obama’s leadership and discussed what he thinks it is and is not possible for him to achieve in his current circumstances. In doing so Younge demonstrates very similar ideas about leadership  to the ones we have been developing on this blog.

Firstly he notices the tendency for people to idealize or, conversely to demonize Obama, and to attribute his success entirely to his individual capabilities. Saviour or devil, many of Younge’s interlocutors seem to think it is just down to Barack Obama, an essence which is intrinsic to him. Younge criticises the ‘great man’ theory of leadership with its obsession with the individual psychological habits of a particular person, rather than understanding them as being the product of their context, history and society, which have both potential and limits. Similarly, in previous posts we have noted the ways in which leaders become the repositories of people’s worst and best hopes and fears. this is partly due to the dominance of a particular theory of leadership which attributed extraordinarily visionary and motivational powers to leaders, who were thought to be distinct from ‘mere’  managers.

How to manage in times of cuts

I was talking with a group of managers in the public service  about what it means to lead in situations where resources become very tight which seems to bring out the worst in senior managers and politicians.  There may be an expectation that  everyone will be asked to ‘do more’  for the money they are being paid. Managers may be asked to manage across additional services in ways which begin to compromise the safety of the people for whom the services are being provided. Reflective, thoughtful discussion in which there is an attempt to try out different scenarios in an atmosphere of trust with colleagues is not always possible.

Power, politics and social networking

I was talking with a group of information professionals about how participants in online communities communicate and wondered what the sociologist Norbert Elias would have made of the phenomenon. Elias was particularly interested in the power relationships between people and in groups. We were discussing the similarities and differences between living in a village and being part of  virtual communities like, say, Facebook. What are the power dynamics in online communities and how will they come to shape the way we interrelate?

As far as villages are concerned, Elias and Scotson carried out a study of  Winston Parva, a fictional name for a real village in Leicestershire, UK where there were three distinct communities. There were rich professionals  living in big houses, a poorer, established community and an equivalent ‘outsider’ community in terms of class who had  more recently moved in from slums  demolished in London. The established community aspired to being more like the group of professionals and richer residents, and in doing so were keen to distinguish themselves from the recent immigrants. They talked themselves up, creating what Elias and Scotson called a heroic ‘we’ identity, at the same time as denigrating the incomers, or outsiders. They did so by means of gossip and stereotyping ascribing to the whole ‘outsider’ community characteristics of a small minority of more troublesome community members. What interested Elias was the dynamic of inclusion and exclusion that this set up, and the way in which, over time, the outsiders began to talk of themselves in  self-denigrating ways. They had come to believe the derogatory things that were said of them, and to think of themselves as being ‘lesser’. Established communities are likely to try and police their own community members so that they do not undermine the social distinction which is being made between one community  and another, and are likely to be just as hostile to ‘treacherous’ same community members as they are to outsiders. The dynamic of inclusion and exclusion is one which people have to work hard at to maintain.

Grounds for emergence or radical uncertainty?

I was working with a group the other day who had come together to discuss how important it was to undertake projects and research that were more open-ended. In other words, if one is being genuinely innovative or experimental it is not possible to specify in advance where a project might lead, or what research might discover. There was much amusement that many funding application processes oblige project proposers to specify in advance that they will be innovative and how they will be, which to many was a contradiction in terms. If you can specify the innovation in advance then maybe it’s not so innovative. The discussion turned on how we could persuade people who funded such work that the importance of experimentation was in not necessarily knowing what you would find – not all research is about testing a hypothesis. Sometimes it is necessary to undertake projects to work out what the hypothesis could be.

We decided that partly we were dealing with risk, and then on further reflection we decided that we were working with uncertainty. So risk is something that we already know might be a problem and we would take steps to mitigate it. This is what we have insurance policies for. Uncertainty takes us into Donald Rumsfeld’s fourth realm of ‘unknown unknowns’: we don’t know what our project or our research will lead us to discover since we don’t know what we don’t know (to put alongside the things that we do know we don’t know, which might comprise some of the reasons we want to undertake research in the first place).

Management as hedgehog thinking

I was invited by a small organisation which had been involved for over a year in human rights advocacy work to join them for an away-day where they wanted to reflect on their practice and think about what to do next. With very few resources they had achieved a lot. They had encouraged a number of disparate organisations to work together, had hosted conferences and workshops, had set up meetings between colleagues in developing countries coming from the developing South to speak directly to decision-makers in embassies and in UN meetings, and had developed a credible news service on the particular set of interests that concerned them. They were working in an intensely political environment and needed to respond quickly and authoritatively. The particular issue they were concerned with was vigorously contested, and their ability to take action was based on the strength of the relationships they could form with others, on the recognition of their legitimacy but in a context where events could shift the potential for action very quickly and very dramatically.

The organisation which had invited me was at the point where a number of new funding organisations had recognised their achievements and wanted to fund their work. The employees and trustees thought it was time to reassess, and perhaps to make their working relationships more formal particularly if they were to accept new funding. The business department at a local university had offered them a couple of MBA students to work with them to develop a business plan and together they had worked out a draft which was offered to the meeting as something to discuss. The students worked hard on it and did their best to produce something that would be useful for this organisation, but what was interesting to me was the assumptions that had informed their thinking, which, since they had not yet graduated, were expressed in quite raw form.