(Professor) Roger Irrelevant

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

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The Importance of Lying

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?

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!

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

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?

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.