Bullying as a career

Some years ago, the Government tried to improve the recruitment of teachers with the slogan ‘You never forget a good teacher’. That may be true, but you never forget really bad ones either. Most of all, you never forget the school bully. Bullying at school causes absenteeism, illness, and even suicide. Even after leaving school, the pain can live on. I know of friends who have had chance encounters with school bullies years later, and felt the same daggers of pain, anxiety and humiliation.

School bullies are usually portrayed in fiction as thick and cowardly, who inflict cruelty because of psychological abnormalities. In fiction, they are defeated in the end. But this is wishful thinking. An alternative fictional school bully is shown in Michael Palin’s Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Here, the school bully enjoys the exercise of cruelty, but uses it to gain exceptional favours including access to cigars, whisky and the pleasure of attractive young Philippine women. In Tomkinson’s Schooldays, being a school bully is an important career, leading directly to the Cabinet.

Bullying has been a profitable career for many others. Those who enjoy personal power over others and exercise it cruelly will not only succeed in life, but will usually accumulate an adoring circle of cronies. This is because bullying serves many functions. Apart from the obvious gains of encouraging compliance, it can generate solidarity. In mediaeval Japan, the shoguns created a caste called ‘burakumin’, who were assigned the most inferior status in society. All others could share the joyful common task of bullying and humiliating them. The British Conservative Party has a successful history of building support by identifying groups of victims who can not fight back, from immigrants, to single mothers, to the chronic sick on benefits.

In some cases, bullying is a response to specific impediments to management. An example would be in universities, where many staff are on ‘open contracts’ and can not be dismissed except for gross misbehaviour. University leaders wish to enhance the prestige of their institution (and hence themselves) by expanding research. Research is deemed to be an exceptional intellectual skill, not available to people who are committed to lesser forms of scholarship such as teaching. University leaders therefore aspire to recruit researchers in place of teachers, and offload teaching to even lowlier staff. But if teachers are open contract with a full workload, they can not be made redundant. Bullying is therefore employed. This can take the form of denigrating their work and closing the courses they run, excluding them from senior positions, allocating them to inferior work spaces, and threatening disciplinary action for minor (or no) infractions.

Heaven forbid that you might think this true of my own dear university, led as it is by saintly figures thinking only of the welfare of the staff and students in their charge.

The generation of heroes and the generation of would-be heroes

I recently saw the film The Ipcress File on television. This was first distributed in 1965, the year I began living in London as a university student. The Ipcress File was a kind of antidote to the James Bond spy films, and emphasised the routines, the crowded working conditions and the everyday incompetences of working life. But the film had a special significance for me because of the profound influence its hero (played by Michael Caine) had on my life. When I was a teenager, no hero ever wore glasses. It seemed that wearing glasses (which became essential from about the age of 13) was therefore to be consigned to a secondary role in life: I would be behind the lines, in the backrooms, but never the hero winning the medals and the beautiful women. Michael Caine in The Ipcress File was the first ever hero on film to wear glasses. His character was from a working-class background, had a disrespect for authority, knew his classical music and was an excellent cook. He also succeeded with attractive women. He thus (I believed at the time) provided a template for my own life. I began to listen to classical music, and learnt how to cook. The attractive women came, although not quite in the numbers I had hoped for.

Seeing The Ipcress File also made me reflect on why I wanted to be a hero in the first place. Born in 1946, I was raised in the shadow of war. My parents and all the members of their generation had stories about the War. One of my uncles had been in the Eighth Army in Africa and Italy, and another in the Airborne forces from D-Day onwards. My father had been unable to serve on health grounds, but all civilians were on the front line when the air raids began. There were gaps in local streets where bombs had fallen, the centre of town (Birmingham) had ‘bomb sites’. A local wood was full of rubbish left behind by American troops who had been stationed there. Comics, films and newspapers were dominated by stories of the War. Heroes were everywhere. ‘Heroism’ was more than bravery in the face of the enemy: it meant endurance and stoicism, a sense of common purpose, and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others. Many members of my generation absorbed these values, even though there was no war left to fight. The substitute for some of us was politics: an heroic struggle against oppression and injustice which involved marching but no gunfire. We followed the campaigns in the USA against segregation as if it was our own battle. We marched against nuclear weapons, and when we came of age, we marched to support Dubcek and oppose intervention in Vietnam.

Of course, our generation of would-be heroes was pushed aside by younger people not raised in the shadow of the War and who responded to the peacetime values of self-enhancement, both financial and psychological. These new values became important in the later 1960s. Sexual hedonism and drugs were followed by searches for mystical enlightenment. Eventually, most people realised that financial and psychological enhancement could best be attained by an endless sequence of purchases. These values came of age politically in this country in 1979, and still dominate the political class. As a result, politicians still talk like members of rival firms seeking to persuade reluctant consumers to buy their products. When faced with real crises, like recession or global warming, they lack the skills or the understanding to mobilise mass support. There is once again a need for politics to be an heroic enterprise, but we have no heroes any more.

The Chaos in our High Streets

English high streets have become places of nomenclatural chaos. Visitors to this pleasant but damp island will have noticed that although the high streets of our cities and towns bear the marks of a varied history, they all contain much the same shops. The only exceptions are the small market towns not yet captured by the armies of Marks & Spencers, WH Smith, River Island, Greggs etc, as well as the specialist areas of large cities such as the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. Small local shops are usually explicit in what they sell (with the exception of hairdressers who usually use punning names like ‘Headmasters’, ‘Hair Today’, ‘Headstrong’ and so on). The real problem lies with the multiples. Here are some examples of misleading names:

▸ Currys. Despite my persistent demands at our local branch for a chicken tikka marsala, they insist that they only supply electrical goods.

▸ Boots. A series of mysterious stores which sell make-up, medicines, domestic goods and lots of other things, but no footwear.

▸ Thomas Cooks. The name suggests that these are either restaurants (staffed by people called Thomas), or shops selling kitchenware. All they seem to sell are holidays and foreign currency.

▸ Office. A recent arrival in my local high street in Worcester. Demands for stationery were not welcome, and all they stocked were women’s shoes.

▸ Bank. The most confusing of all. No savings facilities, loans or credit cards, just piles of clothes on sale.

This trend to name shops after things they do not sell must come to an end. Our government must act in the name of health and safety, security, or any of the other reasons they usually summon up to order people around.

The Laws of Information No. 3

The third law of information is:

3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.

First a confession. In the late 1980s, I worked as Director of Planning and Information in a mental health service in the NHS. One of my tasks was to organise the statistical returns on clinical activity for despatch to the Department of Health. At that time, these were based on a set of standard definitions called the ‘Korner system’ (after a woman who chaired a committee which recommended them). Our service included a brilliant and very hard-working consultant psychiatrist for the elderly. She believed that assessments of new patients should initially be in the patient’s own home (a ‘domiciliary visit’ or ‘DV’). Since she was an orthodox Jew, this meant a lot of walking when her duty days coincided with the Sabbath. Unfortunately, the Korner system required information about scheduled outpatient clinics but not domiciliary visits. Following the Korner rules would have meant that our most active consultant would appear as our least active. This was obviously unjust, so I modified the returns for her clinical activity to record each DV as an attendance at a (non-existent) outpatient clinic.

Paradoxically, my data-adjustment produced statistical returns which were a more accurate reflection of clinical activity than would have been the case without such adjustment. Nonetheless, they became an inaccurate record of inpatient clinics in the service in which I worked. I suspect that data-adjustment in the desired direction was and is rife in the NHS. Although this is dishonest, it can cause far less damage than changing reality to generate honest statistics. A well-known example of changing reality in the NHS is to make patients wait in ambulances outside A&E departments. This reduces the time the patient spends in A&E for the purposes of official statistics, and hence enables the hospital to meet a government target. There are many, many more examples in the NHS of how meeting centrally-imposed targets can damage patient care.

This is not a recent phenomenon. The whole technology of corporate strategic planning and management by targets owes its origins to Gosplan, the state planning commission in the USSR. Studies of the Soviet economy in the 1960s and onwards were full of examples of how rational responses by individual enterprises to centrally-determined targets could produce absurd results. These included the shoe factory that met its target number of shoes by producing shoes all in one size, and the steel factory that met it target for weight of steel by producing a few huge ingots.

The rise of the celebrity wedding

Last week, I did not attend a family wedding. To be more accurate, I drove my mother (who is almost 90) to the venue and picked her up afterwards, but was not invited as a guest. The wedding took place in a splendid castle rather than a church, lasted most of the day, and (according to my mother) was like a long enjoyable party. Many of the men wore kilts, while the bride had no need to blush since she has lived with the groom for several years. My mother had a wonderful time.

This kind of wedding is increasingly popular, and is modelled on the celebrity example. As social relationships within communities weaken because of commuting (for both men and women) and the domination of television, people take their guidance on how to live their lives from the examples of celebrities. Tradition, religion and morality become less important than an outward display of mimicry. The greatest celebrity events are weddings, held in private so that exclusive rights for photography can be sold to Hello or OK magazines. The event is therefore staged with the care that would be expected of a film or a play in the West End.

The celebrity example means that many people now regard a wedding as an opportunity to star in their own theatrical event. This has inflated the cost of weddings, which have become the largest single item of expenditure for many couples apart from buying their house. People can not usually afford such an event when they first live together, and so weddings are postponed for many years. This has a profound effect on the meaning of the event. A wedding of this kind is no longer a commitment by a man and a woman to live together and support each other through life, but is instead a party to celebrate several years of sustained cohabitation. It is no longer a union of two families celebrated in their presence, or for that matter in the presence of the public.

So church bells will ring less often across the fields of my village on a Saturday, and weddings will become private fancy dress parties for ageing couples.

The Laws of Information No. 2

Staff in offices, universities, schools and almost everywhere else are communication victims. The management in my own university is excellent at communicating to its staff. There are attractive magazines full of good news, regular staff meetings in which college heads present their challenges and achievements, all backed up by daily emails from an array of administrators to guide staff about their business. Yet a recent survey of staff has found dissatisfaction with ‘communication’. What could be the solution? More attractive magazines? More meetings? One answer that has not been considered is less (but more useful) information. As I noted in my posting on the First Law of Information, information is costly. Staff believe that all information emerging from senior management must be important, and therefore it must be read and understood. They do not have the time to do this in addition to all the other emails they receive daily, so messages accumulate in inboxes unread.

The cost of information is felt most acutely by staff when it is required from them. There are routine statistics to be completed, forms to be filled on staff and student progress (including one for every single meeting with a research student!), surveys of staff satisfaction, and one-off requests for information which have descended the management line (usually with shorter and shorter deadlines at each stage of transmission). Staff usually see these requests as a chore to be completed quickly, and do not therefore strive tirelessly for accuracy in collecting and recording the required data. This leads to the second law of information:

2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
Scientific texts emphasise the potential pitfalls in gathering data, and careful scientists have standard routines for checking its validity and reliability. Gathering research data from people is particularly troublesome because of their capacity to fabricate, to rationalise, to forget, and even to avoid telling the truth as an act of politeness. Even in a world where people did none of these things, there would still be lag between events occurring and data being collected, inconsistent application of rules for categorising data, and missing data. Yet these limitations are usually ignored when organisations collect and process information from their staff or from the public. Instead of using wide confidence intervals when reporting the information they have collected, organisations glibly report data to an exact percentage point. There are earnest debates about small changes in statistics from one reporting period to another, even though these are probably within confidence intervals.

Interpreting data would be difficult enough if it was simply a matter of general unreliability, but there is the far bigger problem of biassed unreliability. This is the third law of information:

3. Data that is collected to measure performance loses validity.
I will deal with this in the next posting.

The Laws of Information No. 1

After finishing my first degree, I worked for a summer in a typewriter factory. Typewriters are now so obsolete that it is usually necessary to explain to younger people what they were for. But this experience taught me a lot about information and how it is used in organisations. This was because I worked on what was then called ‘O&M’, reporting to a rather odd but very clever Welshman. The first law of information that I learnt was:

1. Information is costly. Back in 1968, there were no photocopiers, office computers, or emails. If you wanted a copy of a letter, the typist had to insert carbons and additional sheets of paper when she typed. There was a limit of about three or four copies that could be made this way. If you needed more, then a different process was required. The typist would type the report on specially-waxed ‘skins’, which were attached to the drum of a machine we called a ‘Gestetner’. The drum would contain thick black ink, which you always got on your hands. Both methods of copying were costly and time-consuming, and a major O&M task was therefore to reduce the amount of unnecessary information circulating round the factory. We did this by creating a flow diagram for all the routine reports generated by staff, and asking their recipients whether they found them useful. We found that many reports had begun as one-off requests by management to meet a specific need, but had then become routinised. Some reports went straight from the envelope to the waste paper bin.

This seems a lost world now because photocopiers, word-processing and emailing have successively made the production of multiple copies much easier. But this has had the effect of shifting the cost of information to the reader. People in offices now spend hours a week sifting through emails, most of which come from their seniors but are irrelevant to their work. Emails accumulate in inboxes, and the ones which require rapid attention are missed. Because the idea has taken root that information is cheap to reproduce, staff are required, often at short notice, to produce data and statistics for senior management. As in the past, these requests can become routinised even when the original need for the information has passed.

This indicates that organisations should revert to the O&M principle of reducing the flow of unnecessary information, to release staff time and speed up their response to the information that really matters. Without this, problems develop with the data we do have, which I will look at in a later posting.