EGOS 2018 is over. The conference was held in Tallinn, Estonia and I had a great time exploring the city while taking my usual absurd pictures with a tiny stuffed wolf called, Penumbra.

During the conference, I followed the stream titled Ethnography: Surprises, Stories, Speaking Out and wanted to chronicle a few thoughts on the presentations while they were still fresh in my memory.

How short can fieldwork be?

There have been several reflections that ask questions of the now intractable myth of Malinowskian fieldwork as this lengthy and labyrinthine project of extensive, immobile and detail focused study. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography or even ethnographic work that tracks organization across different sites and spaces has done much to challenge some of the presuppositions around what ethnography is “supposed to be”. However, quite often (at EGOS and elsewhere) I find myself viewing presentations on work that describes itself as “ethnographic” where the fieldwork is based upon a few interviews conducted on site or a few days at a site. I have perhaps no grounds to challenge other people’s attempt to experiment or test the limits of ethnography but I find myself wondering whether we are able to generate the depth of insight necessary for work to meaningfully understand the dynamics of a site, to become attuned to its mores, to be sensitive to its practices, or to be able to trace its conceptual lines and unique forms of thought. I also struggle with the idea that my scepticism towards the projects in which these colleagues are involved is a form of disciplinary conservativism on my part – some form of desire to keep things controlled, predictable, and as expected.

On encroaching positivism and the possibility of surprise

During the stream I watched with no small degree of concern as a colleague presented a piece of ethnographic work that had some undeniably positivistic undertones to its design – there was talk of “theory building” and “theory testing” and a conclusion of a similar type to “men demonstrate behaviour X more than women”. My concern was primarily ideological and relates to what I mentioned earlier regarding disciplinary conservativism. I have trouble finding grounds to say that “this is not ethnography” and pontificate that it should be about exploration, understanding the lives of interlocutors or the site where they live – a confrontation with an Other that represents an analytical, metaphysical, and existential shock that confronts oneself and the academy with radical alterity. The best I can do is to appeal to authority and quote someone like Judith Oakley saying “anthropology is also an artistic and creative engagement, not scientific mimicry.” What Oakley sketches is the fundamental uncertainty about the outcomes and activities of fieldwork; one never knows what might happen. But who am I to say that ethnography cannot be about theory testing and design – that this experiment must be abandoned. I also reflected on the fact that I might be jealous because, while a journal like Organization Science will never publish the kind of Deleuze-inspired ethnographic work that I want to write, it might very well publish this attempt to make ethnography more “scientific”.

At the end of the colleague’s presentation, I made an intervention on the order of asking whether they thought that this method of theorizing beforehand and then testing precluded the possibility of “surprise” (reflecting not only on the conference theme but my supervisor’s invocation that good ethnography means opening yourself up to be surprised by the field) but I’m not sure that this was something that they were able to work with.

On silences

One of the themes that emerged from the panels was “silence”, the things that we do not say or speak about that emerge in the course of ethnographic work. This related to questions of whether ethnography should be necessarily activist, particularly when it deals with the stories of exploited, at risk or suffering groups are well established.

One paper presented at the stream clearly dealt with a sensitive subject that was quite personally important to the presenter. Their paper explicitly listed the ambition of advocating and making salient the very important cause that the author had first-hand experience of and on which they were now reporting. The paper, however, stopped short in its theorization around the work of Marquis de Sade because it wanted to (very understandably) present the people upon whose behalf it sought to advocate in a positive light. I couldn’t help but reflect on the choice that this colleague was confronted with, to either focus on their advocacy to give voice to those who were suffering or to develop a theoretical position – via Deleuze or Bataille- which might suggest that desire could become so perverse and distorted by social coding that their interlocutors could be said to desire their suffering. As I made a comment which suggested the latter, I wondered if I should have kept silent because the colleague was likely aware of this struggle between theorizing and advocating and if pressed would, unlike me, probably choose the latter.

The question of when to intervene or inject question or commentary is one that I think that I obsess over. I try to keep to a rule at conferences that I won’t say anything unless: a) I think that it will help the discussion
b) I think that the presenter will be able to meaningfully use/work with the question and c) I can do it without talking about my own research.
I’ve evolved this rule-set over years of watching with embarrassment as other conference attendees fail to adhere to them. We’ve all been in a room where someone derails an interesting conversation to ask their own narrow question, where someone tries to shame a presenter with a difficult question, or where an older professor goes on about their own work until the whole room forgets what the presentation was about. I sometimes reflect that this silence makes me guilty of not sufficiently advocating for my own expertise and whether facing silence after a presentation would be worse than breaking one of the above guidelines. I kept thinking about this colleagues paper for some time, wondering how I would write it and if in so doing, I might be complicit in trying to silence those who the presenter was trying to speak for.

Andrea Gibson is perhaps my favourite human being.

On some days I think that I’d like to loudly confess my love and beg Andrea to live with me forever. Friends and colleagues may well balk at such a statement, not only because of my general misanthropic demeanour, but because Andrea Gibson’s affecting, queer, and emotional poetry represents a neat antithesis to my stoic, detached, and cerebral public persona.

But Andrea’s work is so mesmerizing as to be worth memorizing. Occasionally, with a full heart, I will replay the poem Ashes in my mind, walking through the spaces where it lives and falling in love with it and its author all over again. There is so much feel, so much body, so much light and life, so much hurt, so much feel, so much poetry in everything that Andrea writes that for a long time I have felt that it could only ever be cheapened by analysis. I say that as someone who lets nothing slip by unanalyzed; Andrea Gibson’s work is better if you try to open yourself up to feeling it.

In this regard, whenever I encounter reviews of Andrea’s work I often find them to be either merely observational or a poor reflection of something that Andrea does better than poet that I know: affect.

Thinking about affect, perhaps we do not have to let the work pass by unanalyzed but rather we need to invoke the necessity of developing a different kind of sense to analyze it. I’ve always loved this quote from Felicity Coleman on how Deleuze considers affect:

Watch me: affection is the intensity of colour in a sunset on a dry and cold autumn evening. Kiss me: affect is that indescribable moment before the registration of the audible, visual, and tactile transformations produced in reaction to a certain situation, event, or thing. Run away from me: affected are the bodies of spectres when their space is disturbed. In all these situations, affect is an independent thing; sometimes described in terms of the expression of an emotion or physiological effect, but according to Deleuze, the affect is a transitory thought or thing that occurs prior to an idea or perception. Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact.

What changes when bodies collide… I saw Andrea perform in Manchester this month and can certainly say that my heart left with bruises from a quite brutal crash. Thinking in terms of affect,  (as an aside, “to impress the mind or move the feelings of” might number among my favourite definitions), renders thinking available to the dense cacophony of emotion and feeling in each of Andrea’s poems.

As a challenge to any readers I might suggest the following: listen to these three poems:

I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out  (Text)

Angels of the get through (Text)

Radio (Text)

A page from “Take me with you” showing the opening lines of the poem “Orlando”

Pay attention neither to what is said, nor to the captivating array of imagery and partial-objects which constitute these poems, and instead try to feel your way into the affective spaces that the poems are carving out. Those heavy-hearted feelings that come before you can think through what they are about. I picked those three at random but all are entwined with the theme of a pedagogy of love: of self, of a friend, of a partner. This is perhaps too cerebral a version of the analysis. To think in terms of affect is simply to be rendered open by the lightness and weight of what is being said, thus rendering a life vulnerable to the possibility of compassion; of suffering with someone else.

Andrea’s work batters down the well-practiced apathy of everyday life and joyously invites the listener to suffer with them (recall the etymology of compassion), to smile, laugh, hope, dream, and weep with them. This audacious act of compassion is a collision of bodies of a kind, words used as weapons, catapulted against the walls of stoic detachment and disengagement.

But, there are cynical and critical voices who live in my head. As such, I sometimes find myself thinking that even this preoccupation with affect is limited, following from some comments by Claire Colebrook on the subject of affect:

There is nothing radical per se about affect, but the thought of affect–the power of philosophy or true thinking to pass beyond affects and images to the thought of differential imaging, the thought of life in its power to differ–is desire, and is always and necessarily radical. The power of art not just to present this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or “affectuality”–or that there is affect–is ethical: not a judgment upon life so much as an affirmation of life.

Art- not as the presentation of liberatory affect- but as an affirmation of life. Even if Andrea’s affect(ing) writing can’t save us, the affirmation of life doesn’t seem like such a bad consolation prize. We all need that sometimes.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to Andrea’s new book being released in November.

It’s exam season again and that means that I’ve been obsessing over marking again. While there is a broader conversation to be had about the intensification of academic work and the long hours culture that entirely obfuscates any notion of a “work-life balance” and the way that an obsessive climate of measurement (and consequently marking) contributes this, my preoccupation has most often been on the psychological complexity of marking and my reflexive questioning of myself and my own agenda while marking rather than on the stress placed on me by, say being told by the University that I must mark 130 papers in 5 days.

In one of the few essays within our discipline to even consider the problem of marking (and one of my favourite essays of his) Damian O’Doherty reflects on the “Impossibility of Marking” and the complex of psychic forces that intervene in and direct the process of marking exam papers. These often conflicting desires include general expectations over standards, the lecturer’s desire to be seen as a ‘good lecturer’ and the student’s desire to be seen as a good student, the performance of identifying students by a particular grade etc. Indeed, O’Doherty importantly unpacks that marking is not just an arbitrary grading system but a system of identity construction, a branding. Students are labelled as ‘first class’ or ‘average’ which constructs, threatens and reinforces various identity politics, prompting anxiety, uncertainty and general panic among both markers and the marked.

O’Doherty stops short of a full catalogue of experiences in his short essay and I wanted to add a listing of my own experiences of the complexity of marking as an append to his text:

1. A student has not quite answered the question but has followed my advice to think ‘critically’ and ‘ethically’ about the topic of performance appraisals. I give them a higher mark than I should both because I am glad that they followed my advice and because I am afraid that my instruction has been insufficient to help them appreciate how to think critically about a question.

2. I spot the essay of a notably brilliant student by the handwriting and syntax. It is undeniably better than the majority of their peers but it does not seem to merit a first. I cannot tell if I think that it does not deserve a first because I expected further excellence from this particular student (based on my conversations with them, their previous assignments, conduct in seminars, attendance etc.) or because it actually does not meet some supposed ‘objective’ standard of quality. I give them the first.

3. I notice that I am far more generous in my grading than my colleagues. Where another would give a 25 for a thoroughly insubstantial answer, I am tempted by a 38, the idea being that I am already failing this paper and see no point in tanking their average with a very low grade. I do not know if this means that the integrity of my marking is compromised or if it is because I am more sympathetic and less willing to pretend to be “objective”. A situation comes up in the Board of Examiners meeting where a student fails all of their modules except mine, passing with a 43. I try not to make eye contact with the chair of the Board, just in case she decides to ask if I’m sure about that grade or why mine is the only module that this student passed.

4. A student gives an answer which seems average: noting points briefly without fully developing them, lacking substantive analysis, lacking a real awareness of the literature etc. I am, however, sorely tempted to give them a first because I recognize whole passages of text as quotations of things that I said over the course of the term. I feel vaguely flattered that a student has put time and effort into memorizing things that I said but I am concerned that there is no understanding of that quotation and furthermore that if an internal or external examiner got their hands on this paper they wouldn’t see what I was rewarding. I decide to go with a low 2:1 but would feel guilty about it later.

5. I find myself marking the paper of a student who does not speak English as a first language. Their writing is bad enough that I have trouble understanding a) what they’re trying to argue and b) whether they’ve understood key content from the course. I wonder whether my willingness to give this essay is a Third is because of my own fairly conservative attitudes towards English and its use and consequentially whether I have somehow been indoctrinated by some manner of anti-immigrant discourse that convinces me to more harshly judge the paper. I also reflect that the “official marking criteria” state that one of the criteria by which I should judge the quality of a paper is its “Presentation” (which includes grammar and punctuation) and I wonder whether if conforming to this makes me complicit in a system that at once seeks to attract International Students because of the money that they bring, while also vilifying them in the press. I give the paper a Third but later will feel anxious about the exploitation of the hopes and dreams of students from the global south.

6. While marking I keep a spreadsheet of averages and numbers of papers in different ranges. I notice that the number of firsts is getting a bit high and wonder about whether I should be more strict and “willing to see 2:1’s” in order not to raise any faculty or external examiner suspicions. I dismiss this as foolish and resolve to try to consider each paper on its own merits. The next paper that I mark is one that I can clearly identify as being “on the borderline” (either a 72 or a 68 because of the University’s categorical marking system). I decide upon a 68 but later will be bothered by the question of whether or not I decided that because it’s what the student deserves or because I wanted to keep my averages in line.

There are perhaps many more that I could add to this list and readers may well have their own. The moments of doubt, uncertainty, and self-questioning that all examiners go through aren’t considered or discussed because we have to maintain the pretence of “academic expertise” so that students will trust or otherwise accept their given marks. This is the reality to which O’Doherty alludes when the notes that consistency can vary wildly among different markers. No amount of training addresses or assuages this because it functions as a manifestation of the chaotic and confused nature of the human condition. In an era of automation, how dare we have human concerns?

Over the last few months, much of my time has been taken up by convening a module at the University of Kent. CB681: “Managing Human Resources in Contemporary Organizations” is in many respects a generalist course that seeks to introduce students to thinking about HRM in a very broad sense in order to lay the groundwork for a number of final year undergraduate modules as well as the Msc HRM which is taught by my department. It’s the first time that I was made fully and solely responsible for a course. While I greatly enjoyed the experience of the course there are a few things that I continue to reflect upon while I wait for the final exam scripts to come in. I’ve decided to pen them here in the hopes that I might develop them into a more substantive paper at some point. I use the second person as a way of addressing the text to a reader (perhaps my future self) who does not quite remember what it’s like to convene a module as an early-career researcher, still technically in the limbo between PhD and a permanent lectureship.

Compassion

Most research currently indicates that both students and staff in the contemporary university are increasingly suffering with various forms of mental illness (depression, anxiety disorders, chronic stress, workaholism, burnout etc.). Whether this is because we are better at spotting the signs of mental illness, more willing to pathologize the highs and lows that constitute human life, less able to cope with highs and lows because of the various currents of modernity or because something about our current socio-historical moment (precarious work, debt, normalized intensity of work etc.) which produces the symptoms of mental illness, is a consideration beyond you. Regardless, you find yourself often confronted with students who are struggling to manage, to continue to live and do the basic tasks of studying at a university. Students missing presentations, lectures and seminars because of their struggles with depression or anxiety has become a common part of your job.

You find yourself reflecting on the word “compassion”; not just a form of empathy or sympathy, compassion literally means “to suffer with”. While your are sensitive to the idea of co-opting someone else’s struggles and are aware that you can’t feel their sorrows for them, you do feel a profound sense of misery over the plights of your students and often find yourself in situations where you think that you are more sensitive to the ways in which academic action (through setting tests/creating a culture of continuous assessment, ambiguity in the teaching method etc.) can often be complicit in heightening stress and anxiety in the student body. Perhaps you are simply younger and less jaded than your colleagues and soon enough the crushing reality of the UK Higher Education system will strip you of this. Perhaps, your position within CMS and engagement with critiques of neoliberalism have made it so that you are more aware of the sundry effects of late-capitalism. Perhaps what is needed is not prescription and pathology but an existential education, one which, to borrow from Robert Solomon’s excellent introduction to the subject, can cultivate:

“an attitude that recognizes the unresolvable confusion of the human world, yet resists the all-too-human temptation to resolve the confusion by grasping toward whatever appears or can be made to appear firm or familiar […] the existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing  a confused world that he cannot accept” (Solomon, 1987: 238)

You start thinking about ways to worm an existential agenda into your teaching/discussions with students, while staying on the right side of expectations in terms of the correct conduct of a lecturer and with deference to the practice of referring students to university support services.

Capitulation

The first examination that you sat at university was for a course called “People and Organizations” taught by John Hassard. It’s format was simple enough: answer two essay questions in two hours. It was the kind of thing that you’d done before at A-Levels. However, because you’d never lived in a temperate climate before, you didn’t really understand being cold. You walked the 15 minutes from your apartment to the exam hall in the middle of January in nothing more than a T-shirt and a thin hoodie. You were perhaps an hour early and would be shivering by the time they let you into an unheated exam hall to sit the test. Even though you attended every lecture, and understood the material (indeed, four years later you would find yourself guest lecturing on that course), panic exacerbated by the cold rendered you largely unable to produce even one coherent essay. You received a 43 for the module- the lowest grade that you’d receive during your entire tenure in higher education.

Even now, this mortifying experience remains in the back of your mind. You oppose tests for a number of reasons, and will openly say that they are pedagogically bankrupt. They create unnecessary stress for the students because of the spectre of the unknown that accompanies them; they are tests of recall and memory rather than tests of understanding, research and reasoning. They offer limited opportunities for skills development/feedback because essay papers are seldom returned. Most importantly, they are unsuited to your pedagogical style which always emphasizes critical thinking rather than memorization. You often say to students: “I don’t care if you remember what I say, I want to see that you can think like I do about organizations”. For these reasons you prefer essays to exams, finding them to be better opportunities for the demonstration of the kinds of skills that you care to examine.

When you begin your new job, you inherit a course that uses not one but two examinations as modes of assessment. Finding this to be highly problematic you go to your Head of Department and ask how you would go about changing these to something more suitable. You are cordially informed that because you are only taking the course temporarily and because of the time of the year, you would not be able to change the mode of assessment. Rather than protesting and standing by your principles, you capitulate and do as you’re told. While you rationalize that you don’t have the institutional power to refuse to participate in a system of assessment which you do not agree with, when you find yourself having to put students through an exam you will feel guilty about not having done more to stand by what you believed. As you invigilate the first of the tests, you want a student’s leg jittering nervously and remember being in the January cold.

Complicity

i.

At some point during your PhD, you notice the emergence of a perverse new language throughout the Business School. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be speaking about “transferrable skills development” and “employability”. You would hear colleagues berating students with sentences that began “when you go into the world of work…” as a way of making them do what they’re supposed to. When you first hear it you find it repellant. It seemed abhorrent to you that supposedly critical scholars could be so casually complicit in the neoliberal discourses that they should seek to critique of undermine. You remember a passage from a paper by Thompson and Cook:

“Disciplinary institutions such as schools, which have traditionally functioned as places of enclosure, affecting normalisation as individualisation and marked surfaces (bodies, classrooms, knowledges), are adopting corporate and free-market ideology.”

There are no ends to the colonizing logic of capitalism, everything must be rendered as a commodity- labour, ideas, behaviours, resistance- a perpetual and eternal obsession over the purchase encounter.

Two months into convening you first module, you use exactly this rhetoric of “When you go into the world of work…” to chide students for complaining about a 0900 seminar because you were distracted and couldn’t think of anything else to say at the time. Later that week, you use the phrase, “this is something that employers are looking for…” to convince a reluctant student that it’s important to develop their critical thinking skills. It is only when leaving both classrooms that you realize what you said. You feel a curious contempt for yourself both times. The truly insidious nature of “business bullshit” is how easy it is to reproduce it.

ii.

“This is the most interesting module I’ve taken at university and I wanted to speak to you about pursuing a career in HRM” they say. Somehow a student has conflated your promptings to consider the moral, social and ecological sustainability of the dominant paradigms of HRM to be an indication that this is what HRM practice is like. It is clear from conversation with them that they believe HRM to be an organizational arm of “social justice” or ethical concern. You don’t know how to tell them that the appeal of this course is very different from the appeal of a well-paying job in Human Resources where one’s actions can be dressed up in the rhetoric of “helping people do their best”. You panic while sitting in your own office because you aren’t sure how to describe to this student that the reason that you were so insistent upon weekly “critical considerations” of HRM’s role in the modern corporation was precisely because it is so often complicit in underpaying workers, ignoring realities of stress and overwork, perpetuating the gender pay gap and other forms of discrimination, outsourcing to find cheaper solutions, layoffs as organizational strategy, suppressing unions, and controlling rather than empowering employee voice etc. etc.. You decide to say nothing and hope that your provocations can lead to this student being some kind of agent of change in whatever workplace they end up in and not either a victim or another stooge (you are not sure which would be worse) in what Thompson called “disconnected capitalism”. You are, however, too cynical to be so hopeful.

Critique

Critical Management Studies is arguably a part of the “mainstream” of HRM. Given how difficult it has proven for you to find a job and explain to interview panels what CMS is and why it matters, you are very surprised to see critical scholars and their perspectives in mainstream textbooks like Bratton and Gold (2017). Tony Watson’s work is discussed, as it Delbridge and Keenoy’s interest in critical HRM; mentions of Barbara Townley and Karen Legge are everywhere and the more critical aspects of David Guest’s project make an appearance. Perhaps Bratton and Gold are more to the left than you think. Perhaps you simply expected to find no critique and are overestimating the ubiquity of what little you seen. Perhaps you are simply unfamiliar with the intellectual territory but you have yet to see a discussion of supply-side economics or a course on “transformational leadership” be punctuated with a discussion of the exploitation of precarious workers or the identity politics of leadership; CMS does not appear to be as take up elsewhere.

While this might encouragingly mean that the conversation around HRM is becoming more socially progressive  (in one sense perhaps the discipline’s “Overton window” is shifting Left), you still find this troubling because of the ways in which HRM conceptualizes itself as a pro-business function in the organization; never truly an advocate for worker interests. You worry that, rather than subverting this pro-business, “profit-at-any-costs” agenda, you are complicit in a system that teaches the language of critical thinking, to be deployed by students who will go on to work in the contemporary corporation and use that same language to better exploit and manipulate workers. You remember Kane Faucher’s paper McDeleuze: What’s More Rhizomal than the Big Mac? and reflect on the inevitability of attempts at critique or resistance being co-opted in order to further profit maximization.

While you find a certain joy in the legitimacy of recommending critical readings out of the course textbook, you continue to be concerned rather than hopeful about the consequences.

A few weeks ago, I greatly enjoyed seeing that Andre Spicer had published a new book titled simply “Business Bullshit”. There are no words to express how much I love the succinctness and poignancy of that title. If I might crudely summarize, Spicer’s argument is that the world of business is populated by a perverse repertoire of vacuous “Newspeak” that not only wastes organizational time and resources but (here I elaborate) presents us with a peculiar discourse that bars us from understanding organizational processes.

While it is not lost on me that critical management studies may indeed be said to have its own vocabulary of “bulllshit” which may well include a term like “discourse” (which is perhaps why Spicer largely avoids it), I have recently had frequent recourse to think about discourse because of a lecture that I recently gave on the topic. In it I cite the good work of Norman Fairclough on critical discourse analysis or a mode of study

“which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between a) discursive practices, events and texts, and b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony.” (Fairclough, 1993: 135)

I had cause to reflect on this recently as I attended an induction event for new staff at Kent Business School. Certain terms began to stand out to me as they were repeatedly used: “innovative”, “research narrative”, and  “student voice” all used in a quasi-branding/marketing sense to speak to how KBS might distinguish itself from other schools either in the next REF, to potential people seeking consultancy services, or as a centre for “teaching excellence”. I found it interesting to reflect on Spicer’s descriptions of “bullshit” as divorced from “reality” and indeed, the reality of academic workaholism, the increasing precarity of academic work (temporary and short term contracts) and the marketization of the university  seemed far removed from the cheerful presentations given by colleagues and support staff.

It should go without saying that I have enormous respect for my colleagues and by no means seek to imply that their complicity in this discourse is the product of intellectual underdevelopment or moral bankruptcy. The clawing logic of neoliberalism and its effects are worth tracing, especially here at the university.

I found myself thinking about a particularly interesting passage where Spicer says “the great task of the business bullshit spotter is simply to stay awake”; to resist the urge to gloss-over corporate nonsense and to reject the desire to be lulled into a sense of security about corporate misbehaviour. Put another way, the task is to keep analyzing the discourse that advertises the university as “student-centric” or providing skills for “employability” in order to understand the relationships of power and the social inequalities that they produce/rely upon.

I enjoyed Spicer’s book and so might one day write a more substantive and meaningful review of it than this passing mention, but for the moment it has become part of a heightened and growing suspicion of the language around me in the contemporary business school.

PS: It is with great joy that I recently discovered that “Business Bullshit” has its own twitter page. Enjoy.

Who owns your local shopping centre and why should you care?

Earlier this month, property giant Hammerson announced plans to acquire Intu in a £3.4bn deal. Unless you’re an investor in or an employee of either of these companies, however, you probably didn’t hear about it.

Millions of us have spent many hours in retail spaces over the last month getting ready for our annual consumerist festivities; summoning the real three “wise men” of the holiday season: debt, stress and anxiety. Indeed, despite the ever increasing popularity of online retailing, shopping centres across Britain report incredible foot traffic at this time of year. However, most of us do not notice the shopping centre’s branding, the corporate infrastructure that facilitates something as simple as having all of our favourite shops in one climate controlled, well-lit and comfortable space.

When Manchester’s Trafford Centre was sold by the Peel Group to Capital Shopping Centres (which would later rebrand itself as Intu Properties) in January 2011 for a reported £1.6 billion, for example, visitors noticed little more than cosmetic changes to staff uniforms, signage etc.. For the most part, things seemed to stay the same, with the Trafford Centre evoking the same timeless, unchanging facade that it will always have portrayed allowing most to go on with their shopping unencumbered.

However, shopping centres are more than just retail spaces. Many of them serve as places of collective gathering, home to community groups like mall walkers who do not visit for the purpose of purchasing, but instead function as support structures for kindly retirees and upbeat suburban housewives. Shopping centres are sites of political protest over the killing of unarmed African American men by police, spaces where animal rights debates are brought to the fore of public consciousness, and unfortunately, places where we live out the worst effects of terrorist or social violence (real or simulated).  Researchers from Stockholm University have even found them to be sites of resistance to urban planning initiatives that seek to organized the homeless out of built-up areas.

Shopping centres, it seems, play an increasingly central role in our social and civic lives. It is worth remembering, however, that unlike the town squares of the past which they seek to emulate, shopping centres are not public spaces, even if they look that way. All of the importance that we attach to the shopping centre as a site of collective meeting, protest, gathering and civic conversation, a polis, becomes problematic once we remember that a private corporation controls who has and does not have access, who can and cannot afford to shop there. In this sense, shopping centres reflect broader social inequalities, income gaps, racial and gender biases etc. that our society struggles under the weight of.

It is thus that we return to reflect on the Hammerson  buyout which brings with it, as all mergers of this kind do, increased power through the elimination of competition and thus an increased ability for agenda setting, shaping of behavioural and disciplinary norms, exclusion of fringe groups, naturalization of particular brands, shopping behaviours and communal mores etc. It is worth remembering thereby that shopping centres control most everything within their walls, from smell to sound, from light to temperature, all in order to elicit particular responses  from shoppers.

In the context of what many are calling “the death of the British High Street”, however, consolidation is perhaps one of the reasons that shopping centres are surviving the current period while across Britain, storefronts in local shopping districts sit empty. Over a year on, there are still huge outlets vacated by the collapse of BHS that have yet to be filled. Small towns across the country are witnessing the realities of urban decay as only large chain stores can hold up against escalating rents and falls in foot-traffic.

It would seem then, that merging and consolidating- the agglomeration of corporate power- would be the order of the day for firms and retail spaces that wish to survive, but we, as a public, should be increasingly wary of who is in charge of the spaces that we frequent, what they do with them and how they shape our behaviour.

Over the last few years, the spectre of deportation or some other form of expulsion from the UK has hung over my head. On most days it is unnoticable, a sword of Damocles that over time gathers dust and becomes a banality. On other days, however, this mundane aspect of my life gathers terrifying reality when a change in the wind makes it wobble, or when the passage of time begins its inevitable wearing away of the thin thread that holds the sword off my head.

For example, though on most days I do not think about it, I ended a meeting last year by telling my Scout Troop that I did not know if I would be here beyond April 2017 as without a job that was the expiry date on my Tier 4 visa and whether they loved me or not, I could not stay beyond that.

Today, in the process of applying for a new visa with the UKBA/UKVI for the fifth time in the last decade, I had cause to reflect on the sundry trials and terrors of the one-sided negotiation of the terms of my life with this government agency. Core among my thoughts is simply how little appears to be known about this particular institution or the process of applying for a visa. Wherever popular pundits like Nigel Farage appear on television campaigning for Brexit or defending the bigotry-turned-policy of Donald Trump’s “muslim ban”, the rhetoric of “taking back control” appears. While the obvious answer for this discourse is that we as a society overestimate the numbers and impact of outsiders precisely because of how conspicuous being an outsider makes them, one also has to wonder whether a significant part of the population of the UK simply have no idea what kind of “controls” there are on the country’s borders.

Furthermore, while the news regularly bears out stories of the UK’s increasing xenophobia and generally unwelcoming disposition towards foreigners, the stories do not usually detail the legislative changes that reinforce and react to this, enabling and empowering the ostracization and stigmatization of foreign nationals.

There is a long history of this (particular for people from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds), which I do not know enough about to speak authoritatively on, nor do I wish to co-opt that particular struggle. Rather, I wanted to give some general reflections on the process, of interacting with this organization.

Tightening Controls

The first time I applied for a visa was in 2008. In order to get a visa to study in the UK,  I had to already have a place at a UK University. To get a place at The University of Manchester, I needed to get at least AAB on my A levels. Obtaining these grades was, no easy feat, even for someone from a good school and a middle-class background. The agents at the embassy screened my application for inconsistencies,  checked to make made sure that I had no affiliations to any terrorist organizations, took my biometric data and that I had sufficient funds/funding to pay for my studies (so that there was no risk of me becoming a burden to the Crown). It is worth noting here that sufficient funds means cover for Room and Board as well as tuition fees which, as an international student were £12,900 at the time (fees for some programs are now nearing £20,000 for international students). Already we’re beginning to identify major obstacles to entry, even before I have left my home country, including academic skill and access to funds.

Since that time, immigration rules have increasing tightened, making it more difficult for a student like I was to enter the UK and stay for any significant time. In 2011 the Conservative government removed post study work rights for international students, meaning that after spending three years completing an undergraduate degree or one year completing a masters degree, students would be required to return to their country of origin and could not- as they were previously allowed, take time to seek employment in the UK. PhD students, under what is referred to as the Doctoral Extension Scheme (for which a new visa application had to be completed), were allowed to spend a year in the UK after the completion of their studies in order to develop relevant job skills.

Further crackdowns and reforms came as the result of a 2014 Panorama investigation which may have embarrassed then head of the Home Office, Theresa May into hastening reforms to the visa system including the founding of the UKVI and dissolving of the UKBA, a change that have brought review of existing rules, with each modification making access and staying with access more difficult.

To wit, as of November 2017 I have applied for four visas, pumped over a hundred thousand pounds of tuition fees into UK universities in order to complete three different degrees  and sent thousands of pounds to the UKBA/UKVI (current Tier 4 visa fees are £335 and Tier 2 is £677). I have no criminal record and indeed, spend so much time sitting alone in a room and reading that I do not know what crime I could be accused of (barring book piracy). I consider the UK my home and have not visited Trinidad since 2009. However, in order to complete the rest of the employment contract that the University of Kent, I need to apply for a Tier 2 visa and receive further “leave to remain”.

In order to qualify for this Tier 2 visa, one of the few avenues for workers to enter the UK, I have to:

• Have an offer of a job from a “valid sponsor”- As an aside, the notion of “sponsorship” here is interesting. The UKVI has effectively deputized my university/employer to monitor my attendance or absence, under threat that if they do not do so, they will not be able to grant visas to their staff/students. As a doctoral candidate, this meant that once per quarter I had to appear at the PGR offices and sign a form to say that I was present. Under my Tier 2 visa, I have to report any absences and receive a monthly email reminding me to do so.
• Show that I either have enough money to support myself until my first paycheck or that my employer will support me
• Show that I earn an appropriate salary (the value of which continues to rise, excluding “high demand professions”, but currently sits at £30,000 after rising from £25,000 earlier this year).

There are other criteria attached to the role, including the fact that a job has to be advertised for a certain period (a “resident labour market test”) as well as interesting catch 22’s like, for non-PhD jobs, if a British national applies for a job and meets the minimum criteria then, even if a migrant is more qualified, the job must be given to the British national. But needless to say, these are not easy criteria to meet. The overwhelming majority of organizations will not be “valid sponsors” and, furthermore, the salary qualifications disqualify the vast majority of jobs in Britain.

Kafka’s Dreaming: The DES

The Tier 2 process that I am currently staring down, however, has not proved even remotely as painful as that of applying for the Doctoral Extension Scheme. The DES is ostensibly designed to ensure that Britain isn’t immediately ejecting highly skilled and educated professionals and academics after they finish their studies. It is a small indication that at a governmental level somebody understands the importance of academic collaboration for innovation and scholarship. However, I learnt that only a small percentage ever apply for it and the reason isn’t difficult to understand.

For reasons that no one could explain to me, I had to have an “end date” for my PhD before beginning the DES process.  In order to get an end date,  I have to notify my department that I want to submit my thesis post-viva (I have to notify them before a deadline that they give me) following which they will open an “Electronic Submission Window”. I will then have a fixed period of time to upload my thesis. The final date on the “Electronic Submission Window” is my course end date and once the window is created various administrators communicate and put this on a Confirmation of Acceptance (CAS) letter, necessary for completing the DES application.

I then use the CAS to fill out a Tier 4 application (which involves filling out forms, being screened by the UKVI,  paying more fees- as an aside, perhaps as a way to fund the privatization of the NHS, as of 2015 immigrants have to pay a health surcharge in addition to any application fees–  having my picture and fingerprints scanned at a Post Office- for which more fees must be paid etc.) and submit that application after it has been checked by a school administrator. I must then submit my thesis before the Electronic Submission Window closes.

I can say conclusively that there were chapters of my thesis which are easier to understand than that particular Kafka-esque nightmare.

This, to me, is a system under control and with controls that are getting tighter;  perfectly reflecting the increasingly insular and nationalistic public mood. The message that all of this conveys to the hopeful Trinidadian teenager is simple: “You are not welcome here”- it does not matter if you are indeed the venerable “best and brightest”- do not come.

Hope and Evil

It is worth noting that there is some hope within this dizzying miasma of bureaucratic navigation. In 2012 when my first visa expired, Cardiff University, where I was doing my MA at the time, offered some comprehensive assistance and helped to make the whole process relatively pain-free. I remember doing everything by mail through their administrative offices, which an assigned advisor helping me throughout the process. In applying for my Tier 2, the University of Kent is among a small group of employers that offer to pay for the cost of the visa; a very generous gesture. More broadly, we’ve seen some of the lies around immigration figures recently unmasked and there may be increasing pressure to exclude students from net migration targets. Indeed, many others have recounted more painful journeys than mine so I should perhaps be grateful that my confusion and anxiety were not worse, that I did not have a marriage or dependents or urgent travel needs to complicate matters.

However, in speaking of the summary trial of Adolf Eichmann, noted scholar Hannah Arendt writes of the “banality of evil”; the idea that, reading beyond Arendt’s purpose, the worst horrors of the last hundred years of human existence were not carried out by monsters, by deranged murderers, by hateful and contemptible creatures devoid of the moral concern and compassion that we all too often recognize in other humans- rather, they were carried out by people following rules, bureaucrats and servants of the law and order of the times. It is here worth considering that Eichmann’s actions were legal by the letter of German law at the time.

Thus we perhaps arrive at the point that I have been trying to get to, as an organizational scholar I am interested in the ways in which organizational policy reflects and produces a given national discourse. Here the UKVI can be understood conservatively to at once adopt policies that tighten immigration control and thereby provide institutional legitimation for the vilification of foreign nationals. A logic of “if so much is being done to control them and either keep them in check or keep them out, surely they must be as bad as we think and more should be done.”

None of this is to direct resentment at the UKVI or indeed to challenge the limits of the sovereignty of the UK’s government and right thereby to police its borders. Rather, it is to consider the implications of an organization’s policies on a collective conversation or national mood. I cannot help but reflect on this as I fill out my visa application. How many people in the UK right now live under the shadow of the threat of deportation, wanting stability, wanting to be with their families, wanting a life in the UK and are kept at bay by bureaucrats empowered by xenophobic policies.

As part of my new Lectureship at Kent, I’ve been volunteered to mark a number of placement reports that undergraduate students write upon returning from a year in industry. Divided into sections like “Linking Theory to Practice” and “Reflections on Learning”, these reports are meant to ease students back into academic life after a year of working in corporations large and small, from large investment firms and famous automotive manufacturers to small start-ups and cafes. There are a number of things that I find to be troubling about these reports; number of things which have lingered with me after submitting my marks for moderation. I have boiled these down into concerns regarding the quality of scholarship and concern for the students themselves.

Regarding Scholarship: The first thing that I noted was that none of the projects offered up any kind of critical insight into the rhetorics of the modern corporation. I’ve written on this very blog about the fact that I felt like teaching students to think critically was not only an important “transferable skill” but a moral necessity of my job; a responsibility to curtail future financial crises, stop the usage of child-labour employing sweatshops, prevent environmental pollution, and in aggregate convince future managers that the crass exploitation of people and natural resources in order to create shareholder value was not only unethical and manifestly immoral but anathema to their civic and professional responsibilities. It is precisely this that made me find these reports so appalling. None could call into question a statement like “People are our greatest asset” or “we care about the environment”. None seemed able to reflect upon the fact that material on corporate websites should be treated as marketing propaganda and not a legitimate academic source. All blithely accepted the culture management regimes of the organizations that they were in and I am not sure if it is worse to believe that they didn’t but were too scared to represent their cynicism in an academic context.

Many of the projects were barely “academic” at all. Many were little more than “case-studies” for basic textbook concepts cribbed from Huczynski and Buchanan and the like (I note Clegg et al, is becoming more popular). Not only was there very little engagement with journal articles but there is no sign of any reflexivity, merely “I read about motivation in the textbook = I was motivated on the job to achieve my self-actualization needs.” While this should remind us of one of the well known problems of management research- that those we study all too often are aware of the tools that we might pursue to study them with- as I read a student’s account of how they learned about Peter Drucker’s “management by objectives” framework while at the organization that they were studying, and how they would proceed to use that same “theory” to understand the organization, I recognize that “theory” here is a sacrosanct artefact which is applied to the experience- either of life in the corporation or the same as viewed academically- and as such is beyond challenge, existing only to be applied. No aptitude for the exercise of critical judgement appears to have been cultivated.

In aggregate, this makes the reports read less like an affront to academic and scholastic values and more like a condemnation of the human condition. A compendium of excerpts from the diary entries could easily be called Excerpts from a Servile Mind or in the case of the one student who, through a typical undergraduate lack of research, said “Throughout its long history, Bosch has always been a company that has placed corporate social responsibility above all else.” Holocaust Denial and How to Profit from it: Corporate servitude on the road to genocide

Concern for the students: At some point, however, my despair at what I was reading turned to genuine upset and concern for the persons penning these narratives. While I could critique, in many cases, their lack of academic rigour or their research shortcoming; I found my analytical gaze frequently stymied by the harrowing personal reflections that often made up a part of the report. Students reflecting on stress during a merger, depressive episodes that made them feel “unmotivated to work”, anxiety over having to seek out a new placement midway through the year, instances of genuine pity and empathy in the face of an Other (having to change a customer large fees), indications of burnout and trauma etc. All of which are always legitimated and explained away as “part of the job”. I was reading recently about the horrors of the American occupation of Japan after WWII and was struck by the usage of the phrase: shikata ga nai or “it cannot be helped”. E.g. the bombing of Nagasaki was regrettable but it was a war and it could not be helped.” I see the same legitimation of suffering on a micro-level (and consequently with much less death) in these students. This normalization of a miserable organizational reality concerns me because I can foresee the awful futures that this legitimation produces.

Many diaries, also read like the most depressing diaries of a Kafka-esque bureaucrat, something cut out of the movie Brazil for being too bleak or some more subversive version of Orwell’s 1984 where instead of following Winston’s rebellion, we follow someone who is entirely indoctrinated into and unquestioning of party ideology: chronicling frustrations with traffic on the commute, which supermarket they frequent to buy lunch, what meetings they attended and what their role in these were, what procedures they learned about and when, which programs they learned to use and which colleagues they “got on with”: there was no sign of a human, a thinking and sentient person in many of them, merely an automaton going through the motions of an in-corporated life. I here invoke “incorporated” to reflect a complete colonization of self, a terrifying and complete capture of thought by the corporate apparatus that effaces the action of the capture so that students perceive their work as “critical” because it can contrast, say, two different models of culture. I felt an enormous swell of pity for these students when I realized this.

In sum, marking these assignments was an exceptionally edifying experience that I wanted to make note of. It reminds me of the importance of what I do.

As of the 18th September 2017 I am no longer unemployed and stuck in a post-PhD hole. Instead, I am a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour/HRM at the University of Kent. While I’m still job insecure because I don’t know what I’m going to do next year when my contract ends, and somewhat petrified that I have to convene my first  module on managing contemporary HRM, I have a post at a University which is more than I expected to have a month ago.

Canterbury is an absolutely beautiful city that I’m still exploring and aside from my overly letigious landlord and a few HR hiccups, I’m relatively happy and settling in. I do however have to note something that happened in my first departmental meeting. At one point the former department head did a count of the number of three and four star papers in the room to assess whether the department was meeting university targets. While it was a mundane gesture in the context of the conversation (one about university targets and advertising the excellent research done by the department) to me it seemed to shift the atmosphere of the room from collegial to administrative and gave the entire meeting an uncomfortable tone that seemed slow to pass.

I thought that I understood the importance of publishing but really had no concept of how gripping “4* fever” was. I don’t think that I appreciated that it was a complex collective and personal identity project and not just a managerialist control measure (i.e., a loved torture and not an administrative box to tick). That is, that one might feel personal and collective pride for publishing in a 4* outlet and intense shame for having not done so (or not done so enough). I wonder if Hugh Willmott appreciated the full extent to which the publication becomes a fetish-object when he wrote about journal fetishism and its dangers? That is, that the 4* publication itself becomes an object imbued with supernatural and almost mystical powers (to save a job, to secure a pay rise, to gain departmental leverage) as well as being one associated with obsession and eroticized preoccupation- more 4*’s can save us.*

What most concerns me is what this does to my own publication aspirations. I still find myself drawn to journals which rank at either 2* or below or do not appear on the CABS list at all and concerned that these outlets seem increasingly less attractive. I find myself anxious that I do not have any 4* publications and thus I find myself troubled by both the immorality of the cultivation of that anxiety and the hypocrisy of capitulation as I try to pressure my co-author to get a paper into Organization Studies as soon as possible.

*I do wish to note for the record that my new department is far from publication obsessed and indeed, has been nothing but welcoming and supportive of me and my research.