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During a prolonged spell of voluntary unemployment in the 1980s , I was dragooned onto a Training Opportunities Program ; after a
crash course in commercial computer programming , a compulsory job came my way at an outfit called SYSTIME in South Leeds. It soon
became apparent that everyone in the company had been hired after doing TOPS courses and that few , if any , of them had any real
expertise in either the hardware or software this firm ostensibly dealt in. All of that , I was told , was being outsourced.
What they did here was to move quickly and look busy at all times , preferably carrying a clipboard or sheaf of computer output with
you on all occasions , even when going to the toilet. Any inquiries were met by the explanation that we were here to shake things up ,
cascade a positive attitude , help the company to go forward. “Like the light brigade ? ” I suggested. The whole enterprise
reminded me of a Sherlock Holmes short story , The Red-Headed League (1) . There the ruse covered an attempted bank robbery ;
in this case , it was a front for the modernising practice of massaging statistics such as the unemployment figures.
That primitive illustration of Managerialism was an early guide to future trends , whereby a manager required no expertise in the
process being managed but might move from one lucrative position of power to another in a completely different sector. Their brief in
every case was to reduce or eliminate unproductive traditions such as holidays , sick pay or compassionate leaves of absence while
imposing heavier workloads on their individual employees. In a book review of 1946 (2) Orwell likened the lot of such
employees as “always to be led or driven , as one gets a pig back to the sty by kicking it on the bottom or rattling a stick
inside a swill bucket , according to the needs of the moment”. When they paused from setting ever more punitive targets ,
innovative management was introducing wellbeing initiatives for their inferiors. Now the job market sought employees who
would be “very driven , highly adaptable and passionate about their work ” , even if this entailed stacking shelves or
packing biscuits all day long. Every employer across the land was “pursuing excellence” , when they weren’t busy
“putting the customer first”. The language in use doesn’t set out to represent any version of reality. Its purpose
is mere self-endorsement.
By the time I was nearing retirement I had worked for many years in that sector of commerce once known as Education and had witnessed
great strides away from promoting an elitist concept of scholarship. For every hapless teacher now standing in front of a room full
of texting students , a hundred managers had risen up in the background , as self-perpetuating as fungi spoors on a muck-heap. These
were the prescient men and women who realised this new service ethos had created a niche that enabled half-wits to proffer advice and
guidance to people who had previously required neither. For decades they had taught subjects on the basis of their own knowledge
of them and how it was best disseminated , before successive governments imposed a targeting mentality even where , as in the provision
of Public Services , Health and Education , it was inappropriate. The end result was a top-heavy layer of people whose work was
spurious but handsomely rewarded and an increasingly harassed body of lecturers.
Knowledge gained via systematic study (the original goal of the putative scholar) had been rendered suspect by the populist rhetoric of
the day. X marked the spot where the plummeting graph of academic standards was crossed by the rising gradient of New Labour’s
Learning and Teaching Quality Validations. The introduction of league tables in which positions were measured by final degree grades
encouraged widespread grade inflation via the continuous subtraction of content the students found difficult and a regular manipulation
of modes (even results) of assessment. The so-called knowledge economy was soon shaking things up , cascading positive attitudes and
helping the nation as a whole to go forward , as it devoted itself to the propagation of ignorance.
Wig.
(1) From The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) by Arthur Conan Doyle.
(2) James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution.
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