Institutional frailty, West Bromwich Albion and a glass box
Tonight on Moral Maze we are discussing institutions and their declining authority. Part of the background is, of course, the Savile affair and it will be difficult not to anticipate the atmosphere at Broadcasting House with a certain voyeuristic frisson. But, while Savile presents an extreme example, the loss of authority and confidence in institutions is a much wider phenomenon.
Indeed, the decline in hierarchical authority, which provides the normative skeleton of institutions, was a major theme of my annual lecture. In this I suggested that the capacity to tackle tough problems in society had been sapped by the decline of two of three sources of power – hierarchy and solidarity – and the consequent over extension of the third – individualism. The question for tonight is whether this sapping of institutional authority should be seen primarily as the consequence of the failings of those institutions, and therefore in essence a necessary and progressive process, or as evidence of a baleful loss of deference to authority and respect for tradition in a society readily willing to tear down things of value but much less able to build new ones.
This opens up a question that was implicit but unanswered in both my annual lecture and the theories which informed it. Has individualism become predominant because of extrinsic factors which have led the decline of institutions and solidarities, or is it individualism itself which is responsible for that decline? The structure of this conundrum can be illustrated through a footballing metaphor; can Manchester City’s defeat of West Brom on Saturday most usefully be understood in terms of the former’s strengths, the latter’s weaknesses or the interaction between the two? As this suggests, there is a real and important distinction here, but rarely a clear conceptual dichotomy.
Ultimately, I plump slightly more for the extrinsic drivers explanation for institutional frailty than the triumph of individualism, although I do think the same forces are implicated in both processes. Technological progress, increasing affluence and rising levels of education have created a world which is more complex, fast moving and in which people have higher expectations and are more querulous. In this world the slow and unreliable way in which information tends to travel up and across, and decisions down and across, institutions has often meant their responses to the outside world have often been ill judged or flat footed. Not only have institutions becomes less effective but it has meant that inherent organisational dilemmas have become harder to handle: dilemmas such as innovation versus risk, short term results versus long term capacity, internal ideas of fairness versus external perceptions of appropriateness.
Institutions are not to blame for the factors making life more uncomfortable but they are often to blame for the choice many have then made. Instead of understanding these changes, owning them as challenges and opportunities and publicly airing the dilemmas which then emerge and the way the institution intends to resolve them, leaders have too often merely intensified or adapted the old forms of control. The classic example here is Westminster politics where the response to 24 hour news and a more critical public is not to embark on the difficult but noble task of achieving a richer and deeper public engagement but instead to try to impose rigid communication hierarchies. The wonderful tragi-comedy of ‘The thick of it’ is in essence all about people trying counter-productively to exert ever more control in a world where control of that kind is ultimately doomed.
Instead, institutions need a different mind-set. Put simply they need to see themselves as operating in a glass box in which most of what they do and most of why they do it is visible to everyone. The response to a problem of inauthenticity is not an authenticity communication strategy, it is to act authentically (and when this is difficult – as it often is – to be open about it and as far as possible invite colleagues, partners, customers and other stakeholders into exploring and resolving the dilemmas).
Healthy institutions are vital to a healthy society. They are concentrations of accumulated and current human energy which protect us from the overbearing power of the central state and the market. Institutions will not thrive through self-pity and self-indulgence but through self-awareness and a much deeper idea of accountability.
Comments
10 Comments on Institutional frailty, West Bromwich Albion and a glass box
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Sam Earle on
Wed, 24th Oct 2012 2:16 pm
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Matthew Mezey on
Wed, 24th Oct 2012 5:34 pm
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Ian Christie on
Wed, 24th Oct 2012 5:42 pm
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Robert Burns on
Wed, 24th Oct 2012 6:40 pm
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Zio Bastone on
Fri, 26th Oct 2012 12:16 pm
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A.G.Fairbairn on
Sun, 28th Oct 2012 8:33 pm
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Robert Burns on
Mon, 29th Oct 2012 7:08 am
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Robert Burns on
Mon, 29th Oct 2012 8:42 pm
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Zio Bastone on
Tue, 30th Oct 2012 11:11 am
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Robert Burns on
Tue, 30th Oct 2012 5:28 pm
Very though provoking. I agree about institutional accountability and honesty…but the glass house thing is in a sense undermined by the Savile case itself -given it turns out that it seems at some level there was an intra-and inter-institutional acknowledgement not to acknowledge.
Maybe to solve this issue, it requires addressing why there is a culture of dishonesty. I think that one of the issues is that that institutions can become a bit too ‘in-groupy’; the group’s ideology is clung to at all costs. Maybe there’s a need for institutions to be more fluid…perhaps akin to what Cultural Theory calls the ‘hermit’ category.
My slight suspicion is that organisations don’t really change until we start to really dig into our own individual role in creating the problems we see ‘out there’.
Highlighting a ‘culture of dishonesty’ or inauthentic organisations doesn’t necessarily bring that any closer, though can clearly help.
Things like Chris Argyris’ Left Hand Column case exercise are a way that people can wake up to their own role, rather than taking the easy route of pointing everywhere but at oneself. I think that in this Argyris approach you look at a troubling or difficult conversation you’ve had and write out what was said by both parties.
Then you write out – in a left column – what you were thinking or feeling, but didn’t actually say. Slowly the hidden motivations, unconscious frames, competing commitments etc might begin to reveal themselves…!
Not that I’ve actually tried it, though I – and a few RSA staff – have tried Robert Kegan’s ‘Immunity to Change’ exercise, which perhaps begins to do something somewhat similar.
Matthew
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Thanks for this, Matthew.
I agree with this. ‘Individualism’ exists, but it’s not an organised force, rather the expression in attitudes and behaviour of greater economic autonomy rooted in growth in wealth, education and access to media. More important is the weakening of established institutions because of greater exposure of incompetence, wrong-doing, historical fallibility etc, and of competition between elites. Deference was doomed the moment we had universal suffrage and mass affluence, and the lid was only kept on for as long as it was because of the enormous accretion of state power in World War 2 and the militarisation of society that demanded. When the discipline was relaxed, as it had to be, in the 1960s, institutions steadily lost inherited and assumed authority and began to struggle. There is a quite brilliant vignette on all this in Peter Hitchens’s very good book The Rage Against God: the early chapters are a memoir of growing up in the 50s and 60s and seeing through the moth-eaten facades of all the institutions he’d been educated to trust in and obey.
The trouble is that we can’t do without some trust, obedience, deference to deserved and trustworthy authority, etc. We have not managed to work out how to generate all these while sustaining the critical stance that seems inherent in democracy and mass media cultures. At the moment there is a particularly toxic and enervating blend of widespread cynicism, mistrust of professionals, and 24-hour ‘monitory democracy’ via media, as John Keane put it in his book The Life and Death of Democracy. What makes it toxic, as you say, is the blundering response of many big institutions. But there is also little sense among neoliberal politicians and commercial media elites that the big public institutions are there to be a respected and healthy part of everyone’s lives. A pervasive cynicism is combined with a resentful feeling that all we can do is sneer and occasionally join in a scapegoating frenzy, which makes us feel better about being subordinate to lumbering institutions we don’t respect or like but can’t avoid, all the way from the social services to the NHS to the BBC.
Actually, the BBC and NHS remain very well-liked and trusted, much more so than political and private sector media institutions. The big problem is the way in which mass private media – US cable news is a case in point – have not acquired any sense of social responsibility and accountability and respect for objectivity, or been regulated to encourage such ethos. They are motivated to subvert every establishment but their own, the oligopoly market and its political supporters.
As for the best way for institutions to defend themselves, your recommendations are spot-on.
Matthew and Sam,
it might be worth considering the possibilities:
(a) we are programmed to believe that ‘democracy’ pervades everthing that touches on the public domain, when in fact the ‘democracy’ is a superficial veneer on an autocratic frame
so that
(b) when the public question what and why an institution does something that invites criticism those who speak for it retreat into silence, evasion or lies.
For many people looking out from institutions they do not see themselves as being bound by any manner of obligation to answer criticism other than to the layer of authority above them.
I would go so far as to say that many of them look upon public criticism and talk of ‘authenticiity’ as a bizarre impertinence.
This attitude runs very deep and strong, so don’t hold your breath for real change any time soon.
Sit down and think about this.
Not very happy with this. Surely a primary purpose of Douglas’ original grid (ie vertical or y axis) and group (ie horizontal or x axis) classification was to define conceptually how people can respond collectively to risk. Using my terms rather than hers, rule based and heuristic behaviours work in different ways. And the individual and the group are decisive in different ways. So four stable, workable types of society according to whether or not choice is perceived as prescribed (by God, genetics, leaders or society) and whether or not the individual is comparatively independent of the group. However the closer you get to zero (on either axis or on both) the more you and/or the society to which you belong will be unable to deal with threats. (One thing I disagree with, even though Douglas described individual thought as ‘social thought writ small’, is privileging individuals over individuation, but that’s for another day.)
In these terms the moral of the BBC and Mr Savile appears to be that whereas the latter was highly individualistic and heuristic, the former proved to be close to indecision on both axes, hence tolerance of Mr Savile, as it continues to be. West Yorkshire police on the other hand appear to have been highly group based and rule based internally with respect to Hillsborough, hence the failure of officers to react, but highly group based and either rule based or heuristic (depending on whether dissenting individuals were oppressed or unquestioning or whether most were willing accomplices) with respect to the subsequent cover up. And of course individualistic with respect to Society as a whole.
Assessing whether confidence in institutions has or has not declined requires adequate longitudinal data which we almost certainly do not have. (I suspect the picture is quite mixed: NHS up, the banking system down since 1983 for example.) You also need some kind of framework. Over what period? (Crime, which presumably tells us something about underlying social attitudes, was largely static between the early 1900s and the early 1950s. Thereafter it’s been rising. However, the steep rise and subsequent steep decline during the 1990s appears to have been a blip within a longer term trend.) And who and what are we observing? The British or does it go wider than that? Parliament is an institution. So are the press. British Rail was an institution, but what has replaced it somehow isn’t. And is the European Parliament an institution? Or Facebook? Or Google? Or ‘the markets’? Or ‘international law’?
Finally, whatever the observations, the leap from correlation to causality is a tricky one to make. Even accepting that institutional authority has declined and that an ‘unhealthy’ individualism (as opposed to, say, self expression) has sprung up, as indeed I probably would, the most likely explanation seems to me that indecisive middle ground (brought about partly by the failure of ’68, partly by the ending of grand narratives and partly by the evisceration of existing social institutions by neoliberalism) and not the ‘individualism’ of grid group / cultural theory, which you see as destabilising. and which Douglas, I think, saw as stable.
The more I look at this issue the more I realize that I and (I assume) the majority of the population are continually being misled. My “faith” in any of the Great and The Good in the United Kingdom to tell the public the truth and to endeavour in the public’s best interests is at a new low, although the issue is decades old. Never before have I felt like I’m at sea in a full blown assault on truth in public life.
This is not the rank and file of the British population whose morals have become nonexistent; this is not the benefit claimants filling in forms dishonestly; this is systematic theft, greed, misdirection and incompetence at every level of the companies and institutions we look to set us an example, the so called “GREAT AND THE GOOD” who run this country on our behalf. This corruption is endemic in the top levels of our society and the British Public are nearly always the victims as the theft is of taxpayer trust, money, and jobs and beware the misdirection from the political party central office’s via the media that would have you believe it’s all the fault of Immigrants,Trade Unions, Football Supporters, Job Seekers, People on Benefits, Muslims, the EU, the common man and woman and anyone else they can demonize!
We need an answer to this, as quite clearly the sanctions that are applied to the miscreants, be they individuals, the civil service, corporations or those that govern aren’t working. We need to act fast before we have a “Great and The Good” that is out of control and the British Public sense that nothing can be done. The first indication of this will be election voter turnouts lower than the 50%.
Who can we trust in our corporate and Government dealings, never has caveat emptor been more appropriate in the United Kingdom than now, and does the Government, national and local really have our best interests at heart, do they really work for us? Are they really public servants or are they all in it for what they can get? – money and power. Personally I think the latter but then I have no faith. If I may misquote,
“IT ONLY TAKES GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING FOR EVIL TO PREVAIL”.
Zio,
your post was a little difficult to follow. But there are a few points I would like to pick up on.
Firstly, who is this “we” that you are referring to?
Secondly, I am very sceptical of attempts to ‘mathematise’ human behaviour in the way that is so commonly observed on this blog.
Thirdly, you refer to the Jimmy Saville ‘scandal’.
The only scandal I’m observing is the apparently unmediated acceptance of the allegations being made. There has been a complete breakdown of objectivity.
Let’s consider the following points:
(a) Some of these allegations date back over 30 years and are likely to prove intrinsically unprovable
(b) Thousands of people passed through the Jimmy Saville Machine, but just a small percentage are alleging ‘abuse’.
Thinking about what other celebrities have gone through it is worth considering that these allegations may be a sick attempt to participate in his fame and celebrity.
And just take a look at his most outspoken critics.
The opening comments by Michael Buerk on a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze were a disgrace and owed their expression to class attitudes acting as a place holder for the missing factual content of these allegations.
A.G,
you are right in much of what you say, but don’t hold your breath for any change that you might regard as being for the better.
A problem I have constantly encountered is that the owner of this blog and most of the contributors are in chronic denial on the point that there is no more potential for sustainable ‘upward social mobility’.
The class system passed down to the present day is a product of empire and the industrial revolution.
Both of those historical processes have run their course and imploded.
The institutions spawned by empire and the industrial revolution now have no, or a significantly reduced, real foundations.
Nothing has been created to provide new foundations for the obsolete class system left over from empire and the industrial revolution.
The short-sighted tactics used to cover up this fact have created a political black hole that has reduced public capacity to trust below critical mass.
In such circumstances political parties, the state apparatus and economic corporations can never mobilise sufficient public support to reverse the downward trend.
We’re done, the important players in the coming century won’t include the UK, the EU or the USA because those who should have known better have pawned the future for a lie today.
@ Robert Burns
I agree that much of the language used about Mr Savile has been prejudicial. (Was it Michael Buerk who said that he had ‘no discernible talent’, as though talentlessness and depravity went together?) However, my own point was just that if plausible current assumptions are correct (‘the moral of the BBC and Mr Savile appears to be…’) then the BBC could be seen as having been incapacitated by the fact that no one worldview prevailed. Then as now.
Whilst there has indeed been a neoliberal kulturkampf against established hierarchies (ie ‘institutions’) over 30 plus years I’m very far from convinced (a) that any of the various versions and derivations of grid group / cultural theory, certainly not when used scientistically as a quasi managerial tool in a way that ‘removes the inquiry from the dust and turmoil of politics’ (Mary Douglas: Implicit Meanings, 1975) can ever adequately describe what’s been going on or, still less, provide solutions or (b) that any solution can ever be value neutral. (We probably agree on both these points.) Nazi Germany, for example, was both hierarchical and fatalistic. But it also involved fundamental changes in how Bourdieu’s various forms of capital were distributed. So would change managing German society in favour of more egalitarianism and more individualism really have cut the mustard? I don’t think so.
And in any case, quite aside from the fact that these versions and derivations have become rather precisely part of the very problem (a depoliticised sense of risk) that Mary Douglas tried to address when she reversed the direction of the anthroplogical ‘gaze’, there are particular aporias in considering how hegemony and consensus interrelate and how stability and instability are defined.
Simply put, a situation in which no one view prevails is frozen, ie stable in an unhelpful way. So what is ‘good’ instability (in which all ‘three sources of social power’, or four, are included and contend) and what is the ‘good’ hegemony that should either succeed that instability or be immanent within it? One can’t really answer these questions by appeals to systemic transcendence or without an a priori sense of what is ‘right’. And therein lies the difficulty.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered your ‘mathematical’ question, but I’ve tried. As to my use of ‘we’, all pronouns are fissiparous, mine particularly. So I wouldn’t pay too much attention.
Zio,
points taken.
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