A Lecturer's Story

New Website

2011-01-31T12:04:00.000-08:00

Hello! I've closed down this site and moved all my materials, posts and blog here.

All the best

Joe

Internet, democracy, absence and justice

2010-02-06T04:39:00.000-08:00

I came across a story recently which brings together a number of interesting themes to a good end: Fifth Pillar are an NGO which, tired of corrupt Indian officials screwing the poor, have printed a Zero Rupee note, which the victims can hand over to official seeking bribes. The idea has been a massive success with hundreds of stories of shamed officials panicking in the face of a 'formal' sanction.

On one level, it's a nice story of how a relatively simple idea can challenge the powerful in favour of the poor. On another level it's an unusual twist on the symbolic power of money. When academics talk of monetary symbolism, they are usually focused on the institutionalised trust that is necessary for a monetary system to work. In this case, the note is symbolic of the protests against corruption and the sanctions that may come with them. Its materiality and its liminal position is destabilising to those who thought it was something entirely different.

Containing China

2009-11-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

Given Obama's cosying up to the nation that the US is in hock to, I thought you might like to see the difference between China's Google search engine and our own:

Best not get too cosy eh?

Courtesty of Dizzy.

Roy Bhaskar

2009-11-25T15:30:00.002-08:00

For the last few days I have been in Nottingham University to listen to Roy Bhaskar, the founder of Critical (or Transcendental) Realism and one of the world's most leading philosophers. Fortunately, the organiser of the workshop is a good friend of mine and I was able to have dinner and several chats with Roy.

Ranging from the completely anecdotal to the philosophical, here are a few insights into the workshop, Roy and Critical Realism:

1. Roy is one of the nicest, happiest and most generous people I have ever encountered. Despite having recently had his foot sawn off, being confined to a wheelchair and being buffeted by aggressive questions from professors who are either jealous or in comprehensive of his work, and various other burdens which I won't go into, the man appears to genuinely value every idea or person he meets.

2. Critical realism is not very critical, at least not in the critical theory sense, in that it doesn't really have a strong normative persuasion. This does not put it at a disadvantage to most ontologies as, unless one prioritises value above existence (e.g. Pilsig's work) the IS doesn't become the OUGHT. Bhaskar might disagree on this point but he didn't seem to put up a robost defence.

3. Critical Realism is a new project and, as such, contains a number of flaws, but the basic realist structure it proposes (shared by some other forms of realism) provides the best explanatory power and the most accurate ontology I have encountered.

4. Given the obvious weakness in their positions, most post-structuralists are retreating from their discourse is everything / nothing outside the text position. However, in my opinion, unless they accept a realist ontology (which is entirely compatible with ideas of discourse) it is impossible to adequately explain choice, resistance and change.

5. Bhaskar is a VERY nice man. Did I say that already?

Research Design

2009-11-25T15:29:00.001-08:00

This piece from the Big Four Blog, which purports to be showing what a marvellous, resiliant lot entrepreneurs are, is typical of the flawed research evident in much management literature.

The intention of the piece, to paint E&Y with the magic paint that is 'entrepreneurialism' is nonsense upon stilts. A fact which may have been hinted at by the early statement that:

"Entrepreneurs are hardy folks. Undeterred by current circumstances....".

Which flies in the face of all evidence that minor things like, say, unavailable credit, cuts in consumer spending and buyers hammering their suppliers, hit SMEs and start-ups disproportionally.

On top of the general twittery of the article direction, it is evident on further reading that the 'evidence' has been taken, not from balance sheets, VAT returns or VC analysts but by, ahem, asking entrepreneurs questions like:

'are you pursuing growth opportunities?'

'do you wish to implement technology for higher business efficiency?' etc...

Note that these are aspirational, rather than actual. It's like asking Gordon Brown 'do you wish you were popular?'. The answer has little to do with the reality.

The Amtrak Zephyr

2009-08-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

As we have 51 hours on the train I thought I’d write you all a short letter telling you about the Amtrak Zephyr that we’re riding from Chicago to San Francisco.

The first thing to know about the Zephyr is that it’s big. Big and Shiny. Each of the 30 odd carriages are double-decker, about 16 foot high, with cabins, showers, toilets and ‘viewing galleries’ on both floors. On the outside, all the carriages are a polished chrome, which gives the whole thing a 1950s feel before you even get on. We’re in a (very) little roomette: about 6 foot by 4, dominated by a big rectangular window in which the post-Chicago mid-west is flickering by. The room is only big enough for two seats which, at night, are folded down to make a bed.

The second thing to know about the Zephyr is that our room attendant is called Tom, or "TAAAM!!", a tall black guy with a thick, southern, SHOUTING accent that I thought was a creation of 80s American sitcoms. As with most Americans we’ve met, he’s a ball of enthusiastic, positive energy that meets you with wide-eyes and a big smile. We’re only half an hour in and he’s already told us all about himself, the other passengers and the train.

Many of the Americans we’ve met have all had this boundless, innocent enthusiasm for life, which makes them shout things like “AWESOME, THAT IS JUST TOO GOOD!!” when booking a train ticket. This should be tiresome, but it’s not. It’s a welcome relief and, for the most part, seems genuine, and a welcome response to British cynicism.

This frontier spirit that has bred a nation of entrepreneurs is infectious and you find yourself chipping in a quiet “yeah!” and nervously glancing around should there be any cynical English looking at you. Leaving a music festival in Chicago the crowd of 'yoofs' who were surging out of the gates, spontaneously began chanting “USA! USA!”: whilst it was a scary sight, it was hard not to join in. Maybe this is what Tony Blair felt when the war drums sounded.

The third thing to know about the Zephyr is that the food is free. This is, obviously, the most important thing.

********

We’re about one hour into the journey and we’re trekking at about 60mph through the ‘bread basket’ of America, where single fields of corn stretch as far as the eye can see, and small planes, spraying the crops, swoop dangerously low to the ground.. From inside this dark blue cabin, the light is sometimes broken as impossibly large cargo trains loaded with coal, tanks and large silver things zip by in the opposite direction.

True to O’Mahoney form, Mary and I have filled our cabin with food that we picked up this morning from a M&S-like supermarket. For the sake of the non-O’Mahoneys reading this I won’t spell out every food-stuff we’ve squeezed in, but suffice to say, if we were stuck on here for seven, instead of two, days, we would be fine.

********

We move from Illinois to Iowa by crossing a wide, muddy Mississippi and the air gets heavy and close. In the distance we can see the beginnings of what we are told are tornados. Pregnant bulges of cloud forming small spouts that begin to move towards the earth.

At dinner, we are seated with a father and son from Missouri who are doing the ride for the second time. The father has a heavy drawl and tells us all about his wife’s cooking, the healthcare debate and his home town whilst pointing out ground-hogs and other features of the passing terrain.

Dinner is taken in the dining car which has a waiter service. All the staff, waiters, cleaners and attendants are black. When we were in Chicago, we went to a down-town blues club, which is a speciality of the city. Despite it being more of a local place than a tourist haunt, the only non-white faces in the place were the band. I’m not sure what this means, or even if it’s so different to home, but it’s noticeable that most people in the lowest paid jobs are non-white.

********

As the night drew in, the small cabin with the increasingly blackened view seemed claustrophobic. The dining and the viewing cars are left open at night, dimly lit, so anyone panicking about being stuck inside can go for a wander. To be fair, I would probably be the only person on the train who felt this was, but at any rate, it was a relief to know.

Before we slept, our ‘cabin boy’, as he called himself, told us that breakfast would begin at 6.30am and helped us transform our tiny seats into tiny bunk-beds. I laughed at the idea of people getting up so early when, in all likelihood, we would all have terrible nights.

Throughout the night we were buffeted in small bunks as we winded our way through Nebraska. Long periods of blackness followed by short illuminations of a truck-stop or an air-base in the middle of nowhere. Mary kindly took the top bunk which was a lot smaller. We woke, maybe fifteen or twenty times last night, either with aches from being confined to small beds or through the constant jolting and whistling of the train. By 6.30am, I had been awake for some time, thinking about breakfast.

The food on the train is good. Not great, but good. You get three sizeable meals a day and a choice of three options. Mary asked the waitress about something called ‘grits’ this morning which, on being told they were ‘bland small things’ decided against them. I had thick French toast with fruit and honey. Again, their communal seating meant we met some interesting people: a couple from Michigan. They seemed to be moderate Republicans who were worried about appearing extremist as the anti-Obama camp had become so much more vociferous and audacious in their claims since his election. As usual, they were polite, courteous and charming.

********

We are now moving into Colorado and the Rocky mountains. The Zephyr has passed tepid green plains and is now dragging itself up sparse, rugged hillsides. Jostling in the viewing car is reaching Olympic proportions so Mary and I have retired to our roomette.

The Rockies are indescribable, so I’m not going to try. The train now rolling down the other side of the mountains, following the Colorado. To do so, the train cuts deep into ravened valley with craggy yellow rock face. You expect to see Indians (feathers not dots) stood atop the chimney stacked stones. But you don’t, because they’re all drunk in reservations or running casinos in Nevada.

At lunch we met another lovely couple from Colorado, Cherry and Brad (whoda thunkit?). He was a fairly standard, straight-talking American and she was one of those incredible caricatures that you would not believe unless you were in the US. A few of her phrases at random were ‘is your heart with the children?’ and ‘don’t you love trees?’ and ‘it makes me love the world to meet you’ - all with a whispered, wide-eyed openness that is charming if slightly terrifying.

Cherry had an obsession with Beatrix Potter and clearly believed England was still a place where ladies wore bonnets and moustachioed men rode Penny Farthings in top hats. When she leant over and asked me, with eyes as wide as saucers, if it was true that “in England even taxi drivers will tell you about the flowers in their gardens?”, even I, with my typically English cynicism, couldn’t pop that bubble so cruelly, and replied ‘I think it depends where you are’. I really hope she never visits Basildon.

********

We’re entering Utah now, following the Colorado through red, deep canyons. Utah is Mormon country and one of the most conservative in the States. This is the land of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Thelma and Louise, depending who you are. Marlboro style telegraph poles sit between us and the river, stringing eight thin phone-lines hundreds of miles across the country.

There are old Indian caves which have been dug out of the cliff face and wild turkeys scratching in the dry scrubland beside the tracks. People are kayaking and camping along its sides, taking a slower trip than ours. I’ve never seen anything like this.

After 240 miles of tracking the Colorado, we leave the river and enter the desert plains heading north-west towards Salt Lake City via some small mining towns left over from the Gold-rush day. The canyons disappear and a yellow, dusty plain takes it place, pot-marked with wiry pale-green shrubs. We pass through a ghost town which lies sad and decrepit. It was an old uranium mining community that peaked at a population of 5,000 and now has around ten inhabitants. Everything becomes yellow and dry so I decide to watch a film.

********

Good steak for dinner followed by ‘Peanut Butter and Chocolate Torte’. The Austrians would be proud. This time our dining companion was a small swarthy man from Florida who sells used furniture. In the USA, people seem to be able to become unfeasibly rich by doing jobs that would get you the minimum wage in the UK. He, like many other Americans, wanted to know about the NHS, as Obama’s healthplan is attempting, some believe, to offer something similar. We, like the dutiful socialists that we are, pointed out all the benefits, especially to the poor.

Unfortunately, it looks like the proposed American systems may well fall in the middle, retaining the waste incurred by duplicating healthcare administration and vast advertising budgets, whilst developing the burgeoning bureaucracy involved in any government enterprise. Anyway, I digress.

********

We’re ploughing through mining and cowboy country. Old towns were Doc Holiday and Ewart Earp made their names. Bed-time beckons soon and tonight we will fortunately sleep through the deserts of Nevada, to waken to the lakes and mountains of Eastern California. I believe we will sleep well tonight. Partly because we did not do so last night, and partly because we will down enough sleeping pills to pole-axe a moose.

I have, unfortunately, noticed a tightening of my waistband. I’m sure this has something to do with altitude and nothing to do with the gargantuan five-man portions that the Americans insist on delivering to your table if you ask for a snack. I believe that if I moved to this country it would be no time at all before I could not move anywhere else unless a fork-lift was involved. Of course, sitting all day in a train, plane or hotel room doesn’t help, but in some ways, coming home super-sized is all part of experiencing the American Dream.

********

After a fair night’s sleep we pass through Reno and enter California where the desert gives way to pine-wooded hills and an every-growing number of vineyards, lakes and circling birds of prey. It’s amazing to think of the first settlers who made it to California after crossing thousands of miles of plains, deserts and wide rivers, where all kinds of creatures, insect, animal and human were out to kill them.

Over breakfast we were seated with an English couple, both teachers, whose timidity and apologetic natures stood out in stark contrast to our previous encounters. From the train, there is little evidence of the poverty of the state, which has recently forced it to write IOUs to people expecting tax-rebates and pension payments.

On this journey, we have had several hours of commentary from ‘State Park Volunteers’ who give up their time to don green uniforms, give out leaflets and tell the passangers about the various features that we pass. Apparently, one in ten Americans are doing volunteer work at any one time. People we have met have done everything from running soup-kitchens to organising antique bike shows for schools.

In a country that is supposed to be driven by individualism, the extent of freely-given work for the community is striking. This may reflect the patriotism that holds America to be a great land, or perhaps the numbers of Christians in the country. A more cynical view might argue that the lack of state-funded social work makes a certain amount of voluntary activity necessary, just to hold society together. However, you get the feeling that there is something deeper at work here, something cultural and ingrained that prompts billionnaires like Bill Gates and George Soros to give away their fortunes to the poor and encourages school-children to bake and sell cookies for crippled soldiers. Whatever it is, it is hard to see it as a negative.

Met some interesting older men over lunch: talkative, interested and knowledgeable. A lot of people seem to think that with the arrival of Obama, the US is in the grips of a civil war. From inside a train, it has all looked pretty quiet. Arrival is a couple of hours away now. We’ve come out of the pine forests and are passing through what looks like wealthier areas of France. It’s been a great journey in both senses, partly due to the landscapes that the Zephyr has taken us through but also because of the people we’ve met. These things have made us feel like we’ve seen, heard and tasted the ‘real’ america. Much more so than if we had taken a three hour flight. The Zephyr is a fine piece of machinery.

Saying the unsayable

2008-03-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

The second reason I'm pissed with academia is that it's virtually impossible to say anything vaguely controversial without being bounced away from the good journals. Take you for an example. There are two main approaches to who you are in the social sciences.

The first, promoted by postmodernists, is that you only exist because people talk about you. What you believe to be 'you' is actually a mirage, a transparency that takes the multiple images of the talk that it encounters. Some postmodernists* are more sophisticated and throw in a bit of reflexivity (you think? really?) but none have really tackled the key objection which is, if you are just a 'mirage' that is created by social forces then how the buggery do you do manage to do stuff to change those forces?

The second, bigged up by the realists* out there, is that you do things because you, well, you exist. For a while they argued that we did what we did because social structures and institutions made us think and act in certain ways. However, faced with people who often do the opposite, they have come up with various ways of explain how these entrepreneurs and resisters can do what they do. However, explanations for how choice and innovative action come about are still pretty much in their infancy.

What I would like to add to this debate is that you (the actor, self, agent or - god forbid - person) when deciding to do something, are not simply governed by the rules of society but are also constrained and enabled by your psychological state and your biological architecture. In other words, when you chose to resist social rules or make an informed choice, these processes, whilst heavily influenced by society, can not be explained without reference to very real constraints that are inside you.

This simple statement is self evident to most lay people. Our conversations, assumptions and common sense are all geared towards understanding people that react differently in some situations because of their genes, their 'nature' or their current psychological state. Now, there will be two completely different reactions to this sentence. Lay (i.e. normal) people will not see anything objectionable here and will hopefully be wondering what all the fuss is about. Social scientists will have seen the words genes, nature and psychological, and be screaming essentialism, or, more likely, will have assumed this is a weak argument and turned to a different website.

How can it be so obvious to the lay person that their actions are, in part, explained by their biological and psychological states, yet so anathemaeic to sociologists? This is one of the many reasons, of course, why the public, 'proper' scientists and policy makers spend much of their time avoiding, if not laughing, at academics. I'm starting to wonder who the first person will be to notice that the (expensive) emperor's new clothes don't just fit badly....

* I've obviously simplified the pomo and realist positions somewhat but, seriously, their models of who you are are generally so theoretically unhinged and blatantly unrealistic that I'm not sure how they've got away with it for this long without being horsewhipped through town.

(Professor) Roger Irrelevant

2008-03-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

I'm increasingly frustrated with academic writing. There are many reasons for this but two stand out in reference to the research I'm currently doing - which, being in a business school, should be a thousand times more relevant than, say, someone studying the history of pockets.

First, there's the question of relevance. I've just completed a piece of work for the UK government research council examining the extent to which academics meet the research needs of industry. The answer, in a nutshell, is not at all. Don't get me wrong here - I'm not one of the children-of-Thatcher fascists who believe that academic research should be dictated by the economy. It's just that, if academia produces, for example 200 articles (funded by you) on management consultancy, it would be nice if management consultants actually read some of this research - but they don't.

The reason they don't is because our writing in inaccessible, elitist and needlessly complex. Another reason is that when you finally work out what an academic is really trying to say, it is either incredibly obvious (businesses exploit people; organisations make us think certain things) or too boring to warrant anyone else reading it.

Maybe one in every hundred articles I read will actuallyEven if one drops the 'relevance to the economy' criteria beloved of Thatcherites everywhere and seeks instead relevance against moral, social or 'progressive' (as if) criteria, we still fall short. be read by a policy maker and the odds are it will be ignored for the reasons already cited.

It appears that the sole audience for academic writings is....academics. There is a circle of intellectual masturbation by which academics write for other academics who then attempt to "improve" on their writing (more acurately, try to use it to get something published). The flaw in this entire incestuous orgy is that the knowledge social scientists create, unlike real scientists, is not cumulative - social scientists are no closer to understanding society, people or change that they were 100 years ago. They have simply splintered into a miriad of diverse groupings which talk past each other, babel-like, lampooning and misunderstanding in equal measure.

The cause of the problem is two-fold. The first are the funding bodies (and the RAE) which appear to rank highest those journals which are most inaccessible and irrelevant (Organization anyone?). The second is that, virus-like, post-structuralist have spread the theory (and practice) that, as no-one has 'real' interests, there is no point feeding the hungry, clothing the poor or healing the ill, because it is all socially constructed anyway - and it would be demeaning their identities to suggest they should not be happy with their lot.

I'm exaggerating to make a point here. But I think thirty years of postmodern writing has singularly failed to make a difference (or even wanted to). The old Marxists may have had a flawed ontology but at least they manned the baricades

The Chartered Institute of Human Being

2008-03-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Mission Statement
The Chartered Institute of Human Being© (CIHB) is dedicated to the development and promotion of being human. It is the sole global institution with certification authority for competence-based practice of LIFE© (Learning to Improve and Formalise Everything) and is responsible for setting standards, disseminating knowledge and certifying training centres with regard to the profession.

Code of Ethics
The CIHB is dedicated to the promotion of ethical values in the professional conduct of its members. The Council of the CIHB look to all members to promote the ethical values set out below. Members would are found breaking the code will be subject to the disciplinary process set out in Appendix A.

The CIHB is founded on a respect for (accredited) Human Beings regardless of sex, race, gender, ability, religion, political orientation, ugliness, smell or taste in music. Indeed, any form of discrimination, for example of Bach over Britney, Trollope over Telly or Holbein over Hirst, will result in membership being removed and disciplinary measures being applied.

Unless registered in one of the exempt professions* any member reported for violating the CIHB code of ethics will be subject to the following disciplinary process.

1. The charge will be recorded by the Ethics Committee

2. The member concerned will, in the case of genocide, torture and unlawful war, be subject to instant revocation of membership UNLESS that person is the US President, a good trading partner of the USA or in possession of an army which is armed with more than sticks.

* Law, Politics, Sales, PR, Marketing, Dictator of a Third World Country, Microsoft employee, Bishop.

Training and Certification

The Institute grants several certificates which enable a multi-skilled professional to undertake LIFE in all contexts. The following certificates are available:

1. Certification to Practice Parenting

You need to be certified to carry a gun or perform and operation - why should raising a child be any different? Exemptions are granted to modules based upon media celebratory status, membership of the Royal Family and wearers of Burberry caps.

2. Certificate in Common Sense™

With our licence to practice Common Sense™ you are Additionally, you are automatically entitled to £5 million public liability insurance should your practice of common sense result in damage to the health, well-being or reputation of other CIHB members.

3. Continuous Reflexive Assured Professional Development (CRAPD)

Being reflexive, or thinking, as it used to be known, is clearly a complex and dangerous activity. So much so that it needs proper management and systematization for it to be effective. With our CRAPD certificate, you will be free to think whatever you want (providing it falls within our professional guidelines and ethical procedures).

The Importance of Lying

2007-11-08T06:11:00.001-08:00

Liar is a dirty word. To be labelled a liar in one's personal life is a mark of distrust. To have the term used in a professional context, in one's relationship with the tax man, the police or the judiciary will, as Jeff Skilling discovered, quickly land you in prison.

To be upright and updtanding, we are told, one needs to be honest, transparent and equitable. This has, for the most part, form the moral underpinning of the government's push towards identification systems: the DNA database, fingerprinting, CCTV, retina scanning on passports et cetera. You have nothing to fear, the argument goes, as long as you have nothing to hide. The implication being, if you are that bastion of moral goodness you will not object to having your laundry exposed to the eye of government.

However, there are two weaknesses to this argument. The first, is that it is based on the premise that that the government itself is truthful, honest and upright. Those who are keen to stress the importance of safeguards, checks and balances and chinese walls in ensuring government probity (probably rightly) assume the the current government can be trusted not to abuse the power such information will undoubtedly give them. However, what they miss is that for 99% of human history governments have not been like the one which we have become accustomed to over the last fifty years. Pretty much any analysis of any government system outside the West from the 1950s onwards can be depicted as a struggle for tyrannical control over its citizens.

Most of our history has been dominated by a succession of communists, fascists, monarchs, dictators, priests and ideologues who have been united in using any means within their power to control the population. Are we so naive to think that increasingly scarce resources, exponential population growth and global warming will not lead to the possibility of our government reverting to its historical pattern, and using this highly personal and powerful information against the populations who submitted to have it taken from them?

This leads me to my second, more controversial, point: that the methods of laws should always enable the possibility of a crime escaping detection. The reason for this, is that, when faced with a tyrannical regime, the normal routes for change lay in people breaking the law. History is again brimming with examples of those who resisted tyrannical government having to act illegally. The ANC, the Indian Independence Movement, the PLO, Solidarity and hundreds of others all acted illegally before improving the systems under which they were ruled. The principle that emerges from this observation is that a system which is capable of omnipresent and omnipotent rule is one which can be impervious to change.

The current neoconservative government push to 'protect' us by achieving an all-seeing eye and an all-knowing mind implicity takes us towards a closed system which cannot be changed from the outside. When history teaches us that the outside is the very place where moral and democratic improvements originate we should not seek to eliminate it with too much haste.

Love work?

2007-10-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

I keep wanting to use the word "love" in something I'm writing and I'm not doing so. This may be because the term is inappropriate (i.e. it doesn't fit with what I want t describe) or (more likely) I'm a little scared of using this term when attempting to be a serious academic. Let me explain the scenario:

Mark is a fitter in a car plant. He has generally had bad experiences in work (sacking, demotions, ridicule from a previous boss) and so he tends to leave his "heart" (eek!) at the door when he arrives. This doesn't mean he's bad at his job, just that he doesn't really care about it. He's been taught not to care because, when he does, he gets hurt. One example should suffice:

Mark had noticed that it usually took him about 20 minutes to find spare parts because the Spares Room was always in a mess. He came in 45 minutes early each day for a week and tidied all the small parts into a big organiser that he'd built at home. He could now find the bit he wanted in seconds instead of minutes. When he told his boss about it, his boss:

a. said, "if you're going to come in early you should clear up that mess you leave behind you" - refering to the oil, full bins and waste that was not Mark's job to clear up but that always annoyed his boss.

b. mentioned to one of the directors that he (the boss) had told Mark to do this and that it represented a £xxx saving over 5 years

c. increased Mark's targets to occupy his time during the extra hour that this would save him each day.

d. (and this irritated Mark more than anything).... didn't say thank you.

So, Mark doesn't put himself into the job anymore. He doesn't come up with ideas, he doesn't care, and he doesn't love (there... I said it) his job. Mark now has a new boss but Mark's been hurt to many times to bother trusting this new boss any more than the last. And who can blame him?

Now this is, I believe, the central problem of millions of companies across the world. Demotivated workers who cocoon themselves against being hurt at work. These cocooned workers don't do extra work (unless they're paid for it), they don't come up with new ideas (because there's no point) and they have little enthusiasm for what they do.

The billions of pounds represented by the guru manager textbook market seem, to me, to all be focused on overcoming this fundamental problem: how do you make people love ? The irony is that all the great academics, businesspeople and thinkers miss the answer that any lovestruck 15 year old could give them, which is, "you can't".

Dragons!

2007-10-23T08:59:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd write this post as a few people have recently asked me what being on the Dragon's Den was like. For those of you who don't know me, my best friend and I started a company (StayMobile Ltd) a couple of years ago to build and install mobile phone recharging lockers for airports, gyms, festivals, conferences etc....

Anyway, rather than go into all the details about who was nice (Deborah!) and who was horrid (Theo!) which you can read elsewhere, two things caught me off guard. The first how naive I was in preparing for the whole thing as business instead of a showbiz. The contestants are, we found out quickly, treated like circus animals, and prodded, upset and disrupted as much as possible so to produce a show of emotion, be it nerves, anger or upset. I won't go into the details of how this is achieved, but needless to say that the CIA could learn a few tricks on breaking detainees (as they have come to be known).

The second is the speed at which the BBC transform from caring, excited and promising to cold and controlling. After your 2 hour gruelling interview (which many hardened entrepreneurs leave in tears) you quickly informed that any contact with the press must be via the BBC. My posting on Facebook of Something I Saw in the studios was (somehow!) found within hours of me posting it. I was telephoned and threatened with a visit from BBC lawyers if I did not remove it immediately.

The best thing about the whole experience was meeting other entrepreneurs who, with the odds against them and the cynics and told-you-sos at their heels, risk very public failure in pursuit of a chance. If I could do it all again, I certainly would. But this time I'd hit Theo.....

notes

2007-08-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

So here's a thought I had the other day. Those of an intelligent and sober nature may wish to skip this post......

The question of why music appears fundamental to human experience has, for the most part, remained unanswered. Philosophers of music focus their attentions on the mathematical relationships and ontological hierarchies that structure music whilst anthropologists pick out cultural resonances between the epiphenomenonal froth of songs and ballads, and the social and political waves upon which they are generated. Psychologists, on the other hand, treat music as an independent variable, to be correlated to human responses with little explanation of the black-box that connects the two, whilst neurologists have successfully identified the parts of the brain which create, respond to and remember music. However, few, if any, disciplines have provided any explanation of why music has the effect it does.

The reason this is important is that music that the relationship between music and the emotional states it creates in our minds reflects the biggest philosophical problem of history. That of the objective and measurable and the subjective and personal. Nowhere else is the impotence of mathematical modelling and scientific methodologies more obviously exposed than in the explanation of why music makes us feel. The difference between Smells Like Teen Spirit and Bach's first cello suite, in structure and form but also in emotional content and subjective impulse, whilst obvious to all humans, is virtually indecipherable to the scientific instrument. This is primarily because the ghost in the machine is unintelligable to objective knowledge and rendered meaningful only through encountering the subjective, personal and emotive self. In short, music is the food of love, not cognition.

Why is this? I believe it is because we are music. Humans, if we can be described in any essentialist manner, are the music of the universe. Now, hold the hippy horses. I am not, I would like to make clear, writing this having donned the hemp sandals and kaftan of the museli-munching chakra-chanter. Music, as its most basic, is a pattern of energy. In most cases, sound waves, but this is irrelevant. Epistemologically, music is knowable as a pattern, whether felt through the skin, cut into vinyl, imaged into magnetic memory or recalled from our very own synapses. It is the pattern, the structure of information, that govern the emotions not the CD, the tape or the record.

Humans also, cannot be defined (surely?) by their physicality. Surely, it is the pattern of life that we make over generations, the algorithm of being which makes us who we are. By this, I do not simply mean DNA or the evolutionary process, but the entire human froth that is generated on the waves of time, space, geographies, economies and the Number 24 bus which generate the phenomena which we call life. Putting it more simply, what makes us human is not our legs, arms, eyes or even brains but the temporal patterns that have generated these forms.

In other words, we respond to music, not due to some cultural resonance or social nicety, but because music is what we are. When we hear it, we feel it, when we feel it we move. When seen as meaningful patterns, music is life and life is music, and science, with all its objective power may describe, but can never understand this.

Worthwhile writing?

2007-05-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

So here's the deal. When you're young and idealistic you fantasize about all the ways you will change the world, solving hunger and disease, reading books to blind old ladies and doing all the things which the compromised adults around you don't. But then it would be rude not to do well at your GCSEs, but once those are out the way, THEN you will conquer the world.

Having done surprisingly well at these 'ere exams, you suddenly realise you might, contrary to Miss Simpson's expectations, get into the sixth form after all, and so apply yourself to your A-levels, knowing full well that they can only improve your chances of dong Good Things. And so it goes on, Degree, Masters and Doctorate until you find yourself owing The Man hefty amounts of cash so it would be rude not to get a job.

And so you find yourself in academia, surrounded by bureaucracy and administration, thinking how did this all come about? But, AND HERE'S THE TRICK, you convince yourself that you can actually do good here. That your moral crusade will be satisfied through your writing (after all, look at Karl Marx - or Carl Marks as one of my students called him) and by teaching the young (which is prac-tic-ally the same as helping blind grannies, isn't it?).

This delusion is helped, of course, not simply by all the other lecturers who have built up a moral culture which represents teachers and writers as the enlightened few, but also the philosophical bent of your subject (in this case Critical Management Studies) which claims the moral high-ground through occasional references to exploitation, ideology and work intensification....

What we miss in our moral bunker, of course, are two things. First, EVERYONE in academia, (apart from marketing, who lets face it shouldn't be here) thinks the same way. Economists believe their creating wealth for the poor, sociologist claim they're criticising social exclusion or deprivation and philosophers have the noble pursuit of truth as their own. Second, the writing which is prized in academia is, as one commentator below suggested, stripped of all (real) radical, emotional and purposeful intent through a peer-review process which makes vanilla anything which tastes too sharp. Whilst it is untrue historically to state that writing never changed anything, I think it will certainly be a charge levelled at academics in the 21st century.

Personally, I'm beginning to feel much more like a cog in the machine than even the slightest force for change. Sure, you might tell students about third world sweat-shops, but at the end of the day, they'll leave with their BA (hons) in Management and buy the goods that sustain those sweatshops. You may write a paper with the words exploitation or morality in the abstract, but you must know that the complexity of language preclude any such writing from reaching the eyes of decision-makers. In short, I remain (and hope) to be convinced of the value of what I'm currently trying too hard to be good at.

The pursuit of 'appiness

2007-05-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

The joke at school was to pay a visit to 'Curly' and ask "do you want happiness?". When the unfortunately bespectacled one replied "yes", we would yell "Curly hasn't got a penis!" and promptly batter him to within an inch of his life.

Without meaning to stretch (ha ha) the phallic metaphor too much, the acquisition of things large, shiny or new seems to be (as Marx predicted) the primary goal for humanity in their pursuit of happiness or meaning in life. Academics are unclear whether the accumulation phenomenon is, as the existentialists have it, simply a distraction from the gnawing angst of modern meaninglessness, a hangover from the resource-scarce time of old or the primary driver for the creation of wealth and, therefore, the elimination of poverty.

Regardless, it is clear that this object of desire has failed in both achieving the promise of happiness and in providing a sustainable strategy for the survival of the human race. A recent report from Princeton (so it must be true) found that poorer people were, on average, happier than the rich, because they spent more time doing things they enjoyed. It is evident that both the foundations for economic growth (such as flexible labour markets, weak labour laws and open economies) as well as some results of this growth (environmental damage, stress and a class divide) lead to instability, the destruction of communities and the encroachment of business into government. In short, it ain't working.

Many activists suggest that the only cure for this is a reversion to an anarcho-marxism in which local governance and public ownership replace corporatism and liberal economies. This is, of course, nonsense upon stilts. However, if this isn't the answer, then what is?

1968 and all that.....

2007-04-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

In May 1968 French students followed the example set in American Universities and protested against the encroaching powers of the universities and authorities. They were shortly joined by over ten million workers who bought France to a standstill.

The Sorbonne, one of Europe's greatest universities, was occupied and declared a "people's university", a state of emergency was declared and a 35% increase in the minimum wage was won by striking unions. As quickly as it arose, the strike dissapated, but anarchism has been born and a residual fear of the left was left in the minds of the authorites.

How tame we are now. The universities are in the grip of business societies, Pepsi-sponsored student unions and over-zealous administrators clambering for League Table success. Students have been rendered apathetic by a culture of individualism, the failure of their own institutions and the burden of debt which forces them to pursue "sensible" options.

Lecturers and researchers, for their part, lost all radical intent through the rise of postmodernism, the redirection of funding to business schools and the horrific effects of political correctness. Where there was once a vocabulary of exploitation, capitalism and alientation, now academics fall over themselves to describe the discourses by which all opinion is constructed as equally valid.

During the same period, our rights have been eroded, the world sits on the brink of environmental catastrophe and industry directs our politicians, universities and media stations. Both students and lecturers would do well to take note of the banner held on one of the 1968 marches which read:

"We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom".

Grrrrrrr.......anxiety

2007-04-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

After working 14 hour days for 3 years and being in a tough relationship for 5, I developed depression in 2003 and was put on a crazy antidepresant called Citalopram (recently found to be linked to increased suicide risk, insomnia, and nausea - so that'll make you feel better...).

Anway, whilst I'm much better now, I still get a lot of anxiety when I'm stressed or worried, which seems to happen more easily than before. It's frustrating because the happy, confident me of the past seems to be weighed down by this unpredictable stranger that can affect everything from your memory to your concentration, relationships, energy and moods. In short, when this thing is there, it's pretty rubbish.

When the anxiety is like that, on the outside I seem to appear entirely normal whilst on the inside, this irrational black hole of angst, fear and reflexivity taints every emotion, experience and thought I have. You can't help but feel duplicitous. Which, of course, makes it worse.

My (lovely) fiancé seems fine with it all, though I sometimes want to tell her that I'm not really like this, and if only that stranger would go away, I'd be a better, happier, more carefree me. When I'm like that, I feel like I'm cheating her of a person who's better than the one she's got. But to say this, sounds like an excuse, and an exercise in chest-beating woe-is-me so I try not to.

Anyway, it's here now, though this is mostly my fault from drinking a little too much in previous weeks. It will go. To those of you out there (and there are millions) who deal with this every day, I respect you more than anyone I know.

The 30 month article........

2007-04-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

Ok. So as a lecturer, I'm expected to write articles. Blogging doesn't count. There's an enitre, self-sustaining hierarchy of journals which we're supposed to publish in, which only ever get read because other academics want to know what to write. It's like a South Sea Bubble of 'knowledge'. And it hasn't burst.

Anyway, had an idea (almost three years ago now) about the way in which ideas spread like viruses and decided to send the paper to a top management journal. Let's call it the Journal of Management Studies. Because that's it's name.

So amazingly, they don't reject it (98% failure rate apparently) and the four (yes, 4!) professors who reviewed it gave me their comments to improve it for publication. Now, regardless of the fact that most of these comments were contradictory, I made the changes and resubmitted it. Now this pattern of resubmission, comments, resubmission has now been going on for almost three years and I'm starting to wonder what the point of it all is, especially now the reviewers are asking me to reinsert things (!) that two years ago, they asked to be removed.

And you, the taxpayer (gawd bless ya) are paying for this linguistic merry-go-round. Still, it beats stacking shelves at Tescos.......

Who am I?

2007-04-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

I drank too much whiskey and wine last night. Far too much. I woke up in my mum's dressing gown in my sister' bed (she wasn't in it). What was interesting was that I was woken by my lovely fiancé I not only was unsure as to where I was but also wasn't sure who I was. I even went to the mirror just to check.

It was a pretty horrible experience. For about five minutes I was a thinking thing, peering at a world that seemed alien and unfamiliar. I felt scared, unsettled and unsure. Why?

I think people carry round an illusion of 'me-ness' that provides a coherence to everyday life. It enables experience to be woven into a consistent story and allows a way of thinking where all you experience can be related to an objective "I". Without this, as Sartre showed, we experience an angst, an undermining, by which our trust in the world is shaken and all meaning is destabilised. For what it's worth, Giddens, Beck and others link this to with the modern condition: globalisation, change and instability.

For me, it's the amber alcohol. Anyway, it reminded me of a thought I had when I had depression a few years ago. That was, the experience of being depressed seemed entirely natural. I couldn't understand, given the world and our lives, why everyone wasn't consumed by a morbid, destabilising anxiety. Then I thought that if everyone did feel like this, most of them would (and do!) kill themselves. So maybe, we evolved "happiness" as a survival instinct. Maybe this concept of self, our love and happiness, is simply nature's way of keeping us alive long enough to reproduce. Maybe the depressed and anxious are just seeing the world with the rose-tinted spectacles removed........

Anyway, mine's a large one. Cheers x

Bath Ales Brewery Tour

2007-04-06T04:09:00.000-07:00

Last night our local organised a brewery tour to the Bath Ales Brewery. For £6.50 there was a vast amount of drinking and a talk by one of the Directors, Richard (pictured below). Richard was quiet, interesting man, who did his best to compete with the increasingly loud, and sometimes overbearing, audience.

Talking to people on the tour, it was interesting to see how they each got different things out of it. A few red-nosed glassy-eyed men were clearly focused on getting as much down them as possible, having calculated that the alcohol / price ratio made the tour a more profitable exercise than their local trip down the Dog and Duck. One guy who I approached was conducting his engineering analysis of all the structures and welding in the brewery whilst another seemed to be intent on setting up his own brewery and was fixated on the different recipes for the beers.

For my sins, I caught myself asking about the business. The margins, the market, the operations and distribution. At once I realised that my interest was, sadly, the least interesting of all those present, and decided instead to join the red-nosers in their pursuit of Dionysian bliss.

Conspiracy Theories

2007-03-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sat in The Cross Hands in Bristol (a fantastic place for food ever you're in Fishponds) chatting to the owner about 9/11, Diana's Death and the world at large. He, along with many, believe these, and other events, to be a conspiracy by the powers that be.

What's interesting about Conspiracy Theories is less whether they are right or wrong (who knows?) but the social purpose they serve. The existence of a conspiracy theory (for example, that the moon landings never occured) actually seems to me to actually undermine the resistance which, on the surface, they seem to represent.

By this I mean that the proposition that there is a all-seeing, manipulator of current opinion that is capable of consistently fooling all of the people all of the time, does little to support those who believe that the system can ever be improved. What seems to be the inevitable result of Conspiracy Theory writ large is a self-fulfilling cynicism that no matter what the media says, it is inevitably untrue.

"Could you please stop shouting and just kill us?"

2007-03-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

I've just watched the amazing story of the British Commando raid on St. Nazaire in 1941.

The most noticeable thing about the men was not their bravery, which was astounding, but their attitude. After raming their explosive laden boat into the Nazi port, 600 British Commandos tried to take on a defended fortress of over 12,000 Germans.

When 80% of the commandos had been killed and the rest had been captured, the bomb went off, destroying the port. The screaming German officer who told the men they were going to die was met with the response "well then, could you please stop shouting and just kill us?".

The survivors had no need to tell of their bravery, look for counselling or howl about the flag. Their modesty, humour and professionalism seem to set them aside from so many of the reports we now see coming out of Iraq. Is this because they knew they were in the right, or were people just different then?