I wanted to write about two recent encounters that I had with “organization” because both were interesting enough to give me a kind of wide-eyed pause- as though “organization” itself had dropped its trousers and flashed me- leaving me blinking and confused, not entirely sure what I had just seen. There was a sense of absurdity to them both like things were not quite real and people were performing roles in a sketch show like A Bit of Fry and Laurie, or some sort of satirical comedy like Yes Minister or The Thick of it.

 

Exploring the perversity of bureaucracy

X is a letting agent in Canterbury who I rented from over the last year. During my tenancy, the company was bought out/merged (I am not sure which) with another letting agent Y. Observing both organizations over that time, I watched as what can only be described as the abject dysfunction of bureaucracy became a key feature of my encounters with them.

Let me try to illustrate. The following seems like a basic consideration for organizational design. In the lettings ‘industry’, clients have highly idiosyncratic problems. Different properties have different layouts, different white goods, landlords and tenants can all have different personalities, competencies, and tolerance for failure etc. etc.. It seems obvious to me that such a set of demands necessitates the kind of structure where agents are a) assigned to particular properties so that they can develop a relationship with tenants/landlords and b) empowered to make decisions and take care of problems within the predetermined remit of an office. This is fairly basic “Introduction to Management” level thinking about organization (I know, because I teach Introduction to Management).

However, if this basic approach of accounting for the unique contingencies of an organizational context, was the case at Y/X it was not clear to me. Instead, what I saw was the creation of clear bureaucratic offices (a person in charge of “maintenance”, a person in charge of handling moving out, another in charge of overseeing lettings and viewings etc.). Offices, as understood via Weber, are not a source of dysfunction, but their proliferation to the point of excess is. The most simple way that this manifested was never being sure of who I was supposed to be speaking to and often discovering that the person who I was speaking to lived in another town. That is to say, there was a lack of clarity of role, who had responsibility or who was accountable for a given concern that I, a tenant might have. As an example, on the same day, I had cause to speak to three different employees. The first regarding my arrangements for moving out, the second (at the Margate office) regarding an outstanding maintenance issue that they forgot that they had not yet resolved, and the third (from the Canterbury office) who called me because they saw that the maintenance issue had not been resolved and wanted to ask about it!

Perhaps I am guilty of over-simplification; everyone “knows how” to fix an organization from the outside when they don’t have to deal with the messy nuance of the particulars of organization. It was, however, exceedingly easy to forget this while on hold or being bounced around between people who weren’t familiar with me or my case. Moving home is stressful for anyone but it was interesting for me to reflect on how a lack of organization, or a failure of organization could make it a more stressful process – one that could have been easily alleviated by having a single point of contact in the organization.

 

Cultivating good neoliberal subjects

Kent Business School is a great place to work. I say that honestly and not as a prefatory statement for what I am about to say. It’s a low stress environment that deals with a great body of students. However, at a recent teaching event, I was interested enough in the discourse that was being used to keep a running tally of various “buzzwords” that kept coming up.

Learning experience- |

Student experience- |||||

Engaged/engagement- ||||||||

Independent learning- ||

Student as consumer- |

Employability- |

Gamify/gamification- ||

Each of these might be the subject of their own write up and speak to a broader concern with the marketization of the university. The organization of the university, it’s willingness to prostrate itself before the alter of “employability”, “skills development” and “enhancing the student experience” seemed to me to be on display and I could not avert my eyes. I think that the effects of this discourse struck brutally home when a member of the university’s professional staff came out to introduce the 7 Kent Graduate Attributes.

• Confidence
• Creativity and Innovation
• Critical Reflection
• Global/Cultural Awareness
• Integrity and Accountability
• Intellectual Curiosity
• Resilience

I could not help but reflect that this fine example of “business bullshit” was someone’s job. Someone spent their time coming up with this: words that mean nothing and are read by no one. They are discussed to be sure, extensively so by the school’s management or recruiters and they are seen, on posters, websites etc. as various forms of propaganda  but I do not think that they are never really understood or thought about in a meaningful way. Otherwise critical considerations of what building “confidence” might mean to an arrogant student who has been handed everything throughout his life, or “intellectual curiosity” leading one to question what “creativity” is and how one might measure it. Indeed, any critical reflection would lead Business School students to laugh at the idea that organizations can be be “accountable”. I began to anxiously look forward to the start of the teaching term so that I could help my student to develop the critical thinking skills necessary to “critically reflect” on these attributes, their purpose and why they have come about.

In aggregate the entirety of the Welcome Week activities became an exercise in counting buzzwords and being amazed by transparent corporate “Newspeak” exercises like the re-branding of “Reading Week” as “Enhancement Week”. I do often wonder whether my colleagues throughout the university are really the “innocent dupes” that they seem to be, taken in by a failed neoliberal ideology that suggests that even our smallest actions, all of our behaviours, need to be performatively geared towards being better workers so that an organization will want to hire us, or whether they perform this role cynically aware that what they do an say is problematic but unable to effect change.

All of this speaks invariably to the way in which the neoliberal subject is conceptualized as a site of “work”, the career as a project of the self. Indeed, in 1994 Grey was already charting what we are seeing now, that we self-manage and self-discipline in order to conform to the normative and disciplinary expectations of career. I continue to be troubled by being complicit in this and not doing more to undermine it.