Author Archive for William Davies

…as I say, not as I do

Published
by
William Davies
on August 18, 2008
in British politics
. 0 Comments

This summer has seen the rise of an interesting new political trend: politicians talking about problems they either can’t or won’t do anything about. This has seeped into both social and economic issues, thanks to the perceived crisis in both. The credit crunch, escalating energy prices, the values of young people, eating habits, lads mags and so much else are now fair game for politicians seeking to assert their authority. The Conservative Party has been particularly adventurous in naming the various sources of Britain’s malaise, scarcely any of which are possible objects of policy intervention. This all represents a new spin on ‘libertarian paternalism‘, but rather than nudging people to change their behaviour for the better, this rhetorical version simply points out how nice it would be if they did.

In the past, there would have been two reasons for caution in such areas. Firstly, there would have been a fear of over-promising and under-delivering. By bringing an issue into the bounds of political debate, a politician risks getting saddled with responsibility for it. If it is something that cannot be acted upon, such as Nuts magazine or the cost of food, then it would be best not to comment. Associated with this, as far as moral issues were concerned, was the danger of hypocrisy, should a Party’s own conduct be found wanting as occurred around the time of John Major’s ‘back to basics’ rhetoric. This fear of a disconnect between language and action seems to have abated recently. Perhaps the trick is to find problems that are so far outside of the limits of policy, that nobody could possibly expect a government solution.

Secondly, there would have been the contrasting fear of under-promising and over-delivering. If, for instance, a socialist or French politician murmurred about the inequities of the free market, then this might be the thin end of a statist wedge leading to protectionism and subsidy. Even today, suspending market mechanisms is not quite in the realm of what politicians can’t do, but it is certainly in the realm of what they won’t do. In Britain in 2008, it is only because we have complete faith in the neo-liberal, non-interventionist virtues of our leaders that they are permitted to join in the whinge about Wall Street and prices.

Over the course of 2008, it’s become apparent that we now expect something rather odd from our leaders. We want to know that, a la Clinton, they feel our pain. But were they to initiate real action, we might well start to feel rather uneasy. If Michael Gove were to do something about Nuts and Zoo, this would make us as morally anxious as it would economically were Alastair Darling were to really do something about the credit crunch.

For readers of Michel Foucault, and his British followers in particular, this represents an interesting inversion of what is meant by liberalism. For Foucault, the liberal state speaks the language of freedom, but employs covert disciplinary interventions to make this freedom manageable. Westminster politics currently does the reverse. We allow our leaders to speak the language of discipline and state action, but only because we are safe in the knowledge that they could scarcely begin to deal with our misdemeanours and problems, even if they wanted to.

Grin and bear it

Published
by
William Davies
on June 20, 2008
in British politics
. 3 Comments

There are two simple errors that people have been making about bureaucracies for over a century. The first is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human autonomy, and this is a bad thing. The second is that they are so successful in governing people’s behaviour, that they entirely oust any scope for human failure, and this is a good thing. Lets call these, respectively, the romantic error and the policy error.

If the Tories are serious in their quest for a ‘post-bureaucratic state‘, then they look set to make both errors at the same time. Let me guess - this ‘post-bureaucratic state’ will restore the autonomy of public sector professionals, but without risking any additional human failure? No wonder they’re known as the ’stupid party’.

Elsewhere, The Guardian reports that nurses will be assessed on their smile and affection output, as a means of delivering better value to customers of the NHS (sic). Plucked from a much larger policy package and stuck on the front page, the implication is that this is the new frontier in the drift towards a cold, routinised society. Now that even smiles are measured, what spontaneity is left? This must be what Max Weber intended when he wrote “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness”.

Between the romantic error and the policy error lies a truth that is surely obvious to anyone who has ever worked in a large hierachical organisation: bureaucracies can change behaviour, but they can not determine it. A rule will govern, but never completely. One lesson to take from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is that no rule can tell you how it should be obeyed. Or to put it in H L A Hart’s terms, any law is also dependent on the ‘rule of recognition’, a necessarily unwritten rule that the law be viewed as law.

The same is true of bureaucratic rules. The measurement of smiles will obviously not make nurses any happier. It probably won’t even make them smile more. But it will change behaviour, primarily to produce an economy of smiling, such that smiles start to be treated as part of the currency of nursing. The smiles that are produced might be made more public or more obvious. They will no doubt be summoned more frequently if there is the suspicion of auditting. Perhaps they will even become tradable in some way, and different categories of smile will develop, such that a ‘grin’ becomes neglected in favour of the full ‘beam’ that has more chance of penetrating the dosed-up patient’s gaze. It would be as wrong to claim that the nurses have been enslaved as it would be to say that their frostiness has been erradicated. Between the romantic error and the policy error lies the truth, namely that the nurse is free to find his or her own means of satisfying the auditor, then getting on with nursing.

This is being performed up and down the country. Successful academics now recognise that target-setting in higher education is not something that could feasibly be done ‘correctly’ or can realistically be abandoned, but offers a set of rules within which each individual must find space for themselves. Between romantic despair and policy sincerity, ironic professional engagement is the most honest way of dealing with an audit.

What the Tories are misunderstanding, therefore, is that ‘actually existing’ bureaucracies are already post-bureaucratic (at least in the sense the Tories intend). Only the person who spends his or her life in Whitehall surrounded by documents could have so much respect and distaste for bureaucracy as the Tories. As things actually take place, public services have always been a jumble of rules, judgements, successes and failures. Of course it’s more attractive to stress the judgements and the successes than the rules and the failures - and to call this ‘post-bureaucratic’ - but the overall mix will remain exactly the same as it was when Weber was writing.

On the probability of not dying

Published
by
William Davies
on May 29, 2008
in British politics, Economics, Health and medicine and In the news
. 1 Comment

If in doubt, the Old Left would nationalise or regulate. If in doubt the New Right would privatise or deregulate. And if in doubt, the soupy left-right blend that now unites us has its own default option: quantify and publish.

Today The Guardian reports that the government is preparing to publish the death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals in England. Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty with a promise to publish New York-style ‘crime maps’, detailing the areas of London that suffer from the worst crime.

The practice of tabulating and comparing ‘outputs’ has been growing in policy for a number of years now. The production of rankings is always the highlight of the World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness Report, in which nations around the world are placed on a chart from the most competitive to the least. And New Labour has been infamous for its league tables, especially in education. The hope in such cases has been to create incentives to alter managerial strategy or try harder. Revealing a country to be the 35th most competitive in the world is meant to be a wake-up call for them to do better (unless it’s France), as well as to give businesses an indication of where not to invest.

This policy trick is now being performed for the benefit of individual citizens, thanks to two developments. Continue reading ‘On the probability of not dying’

The irrelevance of toff-bashing

Published
by
William Davies
on May 14, 2008
in Arts and culture and British politics
. 3 Comments

The government is hoping that the electorate will reject the Conservative party on the basis that they are a bunch of toffs. But it is not at all obvious that the British hold their traditional elites in all that much disdain. The question, I suspect, is how we interpret the cultural politics of the 1990s.

In terms of cultural sociology, John Major’s period in office was arguably the most interesting in Britain since the 1970s. It was circa 1990-97 that working class identity went from being a source of political and economic antagonism, to becoming a form of cultural capital that could be exported and plundered for profit. Britpop, Lad culture, football and a re-remembering of Britain’s 1960s as a mod decade (working class) rather than a hippy one (middle class) enabled Britain to reinvent class as a cultural division—and therefore a more fluid one—rather than an economic one.

There was a sunny six-year period (between the launch of Loaded magazine and the emergence of the word ‘chav’ ) in which men with shaved heads and trainers suddenly appeared appealing to the liberal middle class, comfortingly local yet foreign at the same time. When Jarvis Cocker muttered in 1995 “take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass” he no doubt inadvertently spoke for many middle class men as well. To this day, the number of people bracketed as ‘working class’ by sociologists is falling, while the number identifying as such is rising.

While this was going on, John Major’s government looked like an old guard who’d had their day. The disappearance of an antagonistic working class surely reduced many voters’ psychological attachment to elderly men in pin-striped suits, just as the end of the cold war meant that Americans were less inclined to have a protective father (i.e. Republican) in the White House.

But we have to be wary of granting these cultural phenomena too much political weight or historical permanence. Would things really have been any different if the Tories had removed their ties or talked football? Moreover, once class becomes understood in cultural terms as opposed to economic ones, no class is ever doomed to the historical dustbin, but can wax and wane over the years. Some variant of toff culture can quite easily make a comeback, if only due to the vagaries of fashion.

Staffed by wonks, New Labour retains a more economic notion of class than most of the British electorate, and is acutely conscious of the contrasting backgrounds of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet. The former believe in meritocracy because they see themselves as examples of it, while painting the Camerons as examples of aristocracy. But how much does that distinction resonate with the British public? Aristocrats are no richer than meritocrats in 2008, in fact the reverse is often the case (as John Hutton has crudely celebrated). There is nothing intrinsically more ‘normal’ about Ed Balls spending his youth poring over economics books than Cameron quaffing expensive wine. To claim otherwise is the narcissism of small differences. If Britain has anything like Australia’s ‘tall poppy syndrome’, it may even be more hostile to social climbers (that is, meritocrats) than to lucky hedonists (aristocrats). If the latter confess to being a bit lazy but up for a bit of fun, then they may already be speaking the same language as many voters. Just ask George W Bush.

What is most galling about New Labour’s attack on toffs is that it trivialises and pastiches the sense of economic injustice that many on the Left have expressed, but which the government has steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Fierce inequalities in capital ownership (underpinned by the housing boom), in educational attainment, and even in health are suddenly being obscured by the suggestion that Eton College is the biggest threat to social justice today. The strategy is unlikely to succeed, and doesn’t deserve to.

Making it up

Published
by
William Davies
on April 25, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

I had gone for over two years without regularly attending an office, but it took a mere six weeks for office culture to ensnare my grammar all over again. During a phone call earlier this week, I was horrified to discover the following words coming out of my mouth: “so we just need to confirm up a few things.” Confirm up? UP?? A cold sweat ensued. Shaken, I mumbled some hasty apologies and said I’d call back later.

What was the “up” doing in this sentence? Sitting there at the back end of a verb, it’s as embarrassing and unnecessary as the spoiler on the boot of a Ford Escort. During my life as a PhD student, I regularly get asked if I’m “writing up” yet, to which I grumpily reply that I am about to “start writing” or have “some writing to do.” I never expected to find myself scattering “ups” in this way.

But lest we forget: “please park up over there”, “time to finish up now please”, “I’m now heading up this organisation”, “here’s the membership application to get you joined up”, “we’ll firm up the details” and so on. Of course there are also more legitimate “ups” in circulation - “cashing up”, “adding up”, “washing up”, “sweeping up”, “clearing up”… funny how there are so many which relate to cleanliness. Which may be precisely the point. The metaphor that arises when “up” crops up is of leaves being efficiently swept into a pile, put into bags, then disposed of. A PhD needs “writing up”, only because one assumes that it is a hellish mess of ideas and research that has become scattered over time, and needs gathering, ordering and disposing of.

The flipside of the sweeping metaphor, however, is that the job is never really done. Sweeping leaves is actually a fairly pointless exercise, in the broader scheme of things, as the leaves will always come back. “I’ve swept the leaves” has a Beckettian ring to it, a sense of its own futility. Work has been done, but without constituting a job being done. By comparison, “I’ve swept up the leaves” represents a minor triumph. Some semblance of finality has been achieved, momentarily ignoring the eventual defeat that the sweeper will suffer at the hands of the leaves.

So it is with office work. Offices suffer from too many intransitive verbs - we talk, meet, work, sit - and not enough full stops. A veneer of completion has to be introduced periodically, for fear that time will otherwise just pass and pass. When is something actually “confirmed”? Difficult to say. Far easier to think that it might instead be “confirmed up” once and for all, only for the next act of confirmation to begin and end. And with that, I’ll shut up.

The honesty of trains

Published
by
William Davies
on April 16, 2008
in Arts and culture and Science and technology
. 0 Comments

We are falling in love with trains all over the place at the moment. As this piece by Stephen Bayley in sunday’s Observer correctly observed, “What a horrible, inhuman, artless culture air travel has become… Trains have never been more popular and as the allure of air travel turns into ordure, they will likely become more popular still.” The new St Pancras station is the most commonly cited cause for this new exuberance, but I have a hunch that the East London Line extension is going to attain a faintly iconic status within a few years. New and stylish bridges are cropping up amongst the flats and warehouses of Hackney and Shoreditch, and the route will be enjoyably tortuous, especially as it does a U-Turn over Hoxton. A railway at this height above street level is reminiscent of the Chicago ‘L’, offering that same perspective on the urban landscape that is neither birds-eye nor pedestrian-eye.

(I used to be a trainspotter. If you don’t believe me, I can tell you that in 1987 there was only one Class 40 operating in Britain, and I, err, spotted it. Just thought I’d get that out of my system.)

Technology always involves recreating the relationship between freedom and constraint. New freedoms involve new types of constraints. We don’t expect to be able to do anything with technology, but it helps if the technology speaks honestly to us. This honesty is central to modernism: modernists offer transparency, and with it, humanity. Like a maths student, modernist technology shows its workings, so that even if the final answer is wrong, we can sympathise. Postmodern architecture later abandoned this commitment to the facts.

We love trains because they display this honesty, while so much technology elsewhere has become deceitful and mysterious. The East London Line bridges have not been designed to make us buy anything, or to alter the image of East London, or as some pastiche of a previous era. They have been designed to carry trains and withstand the impact of tall lorries. There aren’t many artifacts in our society that are quite that frank.

Airports are places where we are entirely victimised by technology - spied upon, x-rayed, shunted around. The relationship between us and the machines is entirely asymmetrical. The technology we carry around with us, and now depend upon, carries secrets and obeys invisible internal rules. When these digital machines break, nobody shows any interest as to why, and a replacement is simply dropped in its place. Most of all, twenty-first century technology is designed to encourage us to spend money. The one part of an airport where we are permitted any agency is the shopping lounge, while Apple products seem designed to commit suicide approximately two years after their date of purchase. Save for public-spirited geeks who resist innovations such as Phorm, most people are blissfully ignorant of how their consumer habits are monitored and manipulated by digital technology.

There is something about a new railway that resists the logic of capital, and with it certain deceits. When I worked on a review of the Tube PFI back in 2000, it was explained to us that the stunning Jubilee Line extension couldn’t have been built through PFI, because the time horizons involved would escape the calculations of private sector accountants. The Fosters-designed Canary Wharf station was built to exist indefinitely, because nobody was obliged - nor able - to model its future statistically.

Disposable, flexible, personalised, deceitful rail travel makes no sense. This isn’t kitsch fifties nostalgia; it’s simply a set of technological and financial facts of how to help people move around.

Hegelian consumer policy

Published
by
William Davies
on March 8, 2008
in British politics, Economics and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

Various arms of government are tentatively beginning to ask what they can learn from behavioural economics. There seem to be two principle reasons for this. Firstly, there are various policies that aren’t quite achieving what is hoped of them because individuals aren’t responding to the incentives as neo-classical economics states they will. Then there are the various problems that government is lumped with - obesity being the most prominent one right now - which arise because of people taking ‘irrational’ decisions in the marketplace. Behavioural economics promises to integrate empirical psychology into the analysis of decision-making, though in doing so, threatens to make human behaviour impossible to model (as of course it actually is).

What is fascinating about this learning process is how ambivalent it is. Policy-makers want to learn useful lessons from behavioural economics, but not to learn sufficient lessons that the neo-classical edifice is fatally damaged. I was struck by this recently, when I came across this interesting paper by the National Consumer Council and the Better Regulation Executive, ‘Warning: Too Much Information Can Harm’ [pdf]. Page 24 contains the following proposal:

In many markets, government’s aim in providing regulated information is to inform consumers about their choices without steering them to any particular choice. By contrast, the work carried out by economists and psychologists suggests it is impossible to provide information or frame choice in an entirely neutral way… Attempts to render the information neutral can be counter-productive if they sterilise the information to the point in which it is no longer of relevance to the consumer.

Buried in here is a paradox: it turns out that treating people as rational utility-maximisers does not enable them to take rational, utility-maximising decisions. Instead, this report appears to be suggesting, government should recognise that they can only take a rational, utility-maximising decision if they are offered some help. All options are equal, but some are more equal than others. Continue reading ‘Hegelian consumer policy’

How to build policies for X-Factor Britain

Published
by
William Davies
on February 16, 2008
in British politics and In the news
. 3 Comments

We now know that Gordon Brown wants a meritocratic Britain modeled upon the X-Factor. Hidden talent should be teased out, supported and celebrated, while the talentless should be publicly humiliated by a millionaire with a perma-tan in a skin-tight black t-shirt. Maybe not the second bit.

Brown will therefore be as alarmed as anyone by last week’s research from the Sutton Trust showing that low income students are being put off attending university by fear of debt. Residual bitterness towards Blair may even be stirred up, as the question of how to fund higher education was the cause of one of their earliest high profile policy disputes. It was later claimed that Blair didn’t even know if Brownites would support the government policy until the vote itself took place.

This research makes hugely depressing reading for anyone who believed in the New Labour project. If it was a regressive policy that privileged the rich (the sort that Alastair Darling is now tossing out on a regular basis) that would have been only mildly depressing. But it was a policy formed in the early optimistic years of New Labour, and it was designed specifically to be redistributive. The fact that it has entrenched some class divisions is therefore especially worrying.

To re-cap: the argument about university funding came down to a dispute between those arguing for a graduate tax (Brownites) and those arguing for top-up fees, but with fees being waived for a large proportion of low income students (Blairites). As the New Statesman and other leftwing voices consistently argued, the Blairite option was the more progressive one, because it meant that middle class students were now having to pay for the added advantages that their education gave them, whereas low income students were having this advantage paid for by the tax payer. By contrast, the graduate tax would have simply meant that all students were paying equally.

The problem, it now turns out, is that low-income students don’t adequately realise that this is how it works. In Brown’s language, charging Cathedral choristers for entry to the X-Factor has scared off the nation’s hidden singing talent.

The immediate response will be to make greater effort to communicate the workings of the policy (and inform teachers about Oxbridge access at the same time). But will anyone think to ask what this all reveals about our policy-making process? Why is it that when a policy results in the opposite outcome from the desired one, blame is implicitly placed upon the ‘users’ of the service not the designers? Modern policy-making, built on rational choice psychological assumptions, repeatedly confronts the problem of individuals not behaving as the economic models say they should. This is then followed by the up-hill battle of educating them to the point where they do start to behave in a properly rational fashion. As with the tax credits saga, communication of policy must now be considered one of the biggest headaches of public policy-making.

Does it have to be this way? Policies that are grounded in ideology, as the creation of the NHS or Tory tax-cuts were, do not face this problem. It is distinct to a culture of rational choice, evidence-based policy-making. The question is whether there is a middle ground between the two. Brown may wistfully reflect that the graduate tax was precisely that - a policy that would be carefully designed with individual incentives and fiscal imperatives in mind, but which would also be reflective of a political principle. Top-up fees were empirically more progressive, but lacked a clarity of principle. It is not enough for experts to know that things are fair, in politics they have to seem fair as well. The fault lay with the designers (arguably for being too clever, too expert) not with the public.

At the moment it is only possible to get a hunch for what principle-and-evidence-based policy would look like, and even harder to imagine what expert and bureaucratic structures would be needed to produce it. But it might be something to aim for, if the government wants to stop facing the sorts of disappointments contained in the Sutton Trust report.

When is a smile not a smile?

Published
by
William Davies
on January 30, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Despite my underlying fear that much anthropology is simply bad poetry (”And then this happened; and then this happened; and then someone did this; and then I wondered whether…”) I occasionally find myself wishing I could draw on its analytical tools and insight better. Yesterday I was struck by one of our society’s most bizarre forms of micro-social exchange. I can’t say whether it is distinctly British or middle class (although it feels both), only that it needs unravelling.

I was sitting at a table in the British Library cafe reading a book (one of the nice alcove tables that everybody wants; I’ve almost witnessed Ballardian riots over who gets to sit at them) and somebody wandered over with a tray of food, and proceeded to sit at my table. On this occasion, I was high-minded enough to let it pass without violence. Once they’d sat down, I deliberately looked up from my book, they deliberately looked up from their tray, and we exchanged that specific form of rigid smile that has as little to do with smiling as possible. The eyes remain emotionless, but the corners of the mouth are raised mechanically, as if doing a split-second impression of the Joker in Batman. It is not a facial expression as such, but a transmitter of a chunk of information (them: “I’m just going to sit here and have my lunch”; me: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to deck you”).

Erving Goffman would refer to this as an act of re-framing or “keying.” You take some primary mode of interaction—unabridged happiness spilling over into a smile—draw a line around it, and then use it within some entirely foreign and more complex situation. Both parties know that this smile isn’t actually a smile, just as people having a play-fight both know that they’re not actually trying to hurt each other. It’s a mask that is used knowingly as a mask, and in case there is a risk of this being misunderstood, the eyes become almost excessively stern, just to confirm that there is no emotion at stake. If this smile needs to convey one thing above all else, it is (to paraphrase Rene Magritte) “this is not a smile.” (Note that this is not the same smile used when someone has held a door open for you. That smile, often accompanied by “thank you,” involves smiley eyes, and conveys genuine pleasure that the world contains people who hold doors open.)

Of all the human acts to re-frame and empty out, a smile! The first piece of specifically human communication between parent and child, re-framed as a tool for strangers to avoid talking to each other! It’s like buying a beautiful piece of sculpture and using it as a doorstop. There are so many other ways for strangers to acknowledge one another. So next time you try and share an alcove table in the British Library cafe, if the guy gets up without smiling and offers you a high-five, that’ll be me.

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