the future of 'change'

Much ink has been spilled reflecting on the authority of economists after the financial crisis and why so few predicted it. After all, if Milton Friedman is right, the fact that a given economic method rests on surreal and abstract presuppositions is irrelevant in comparison to its capacity to predict the future, but on this account economics failed. But what of those other economic analysts, whose claims operate outside of Popperian falsification, as quasi-existentialist statements about the way things just are? I speak, of course, of the business guru.

I have just been reading a publication from 1997, declaring that networked organisations are the future, stable employment relations are a thing of the past, hollowed-out or 'virtual' organisations are emerging to defeat bureaucratic ones. This, after all, was the era of change - change in organisational forms, markets, public sector; change that was getting ever faster; change that was destroying and consuming every poor mite that refused to bow down to it. My Work Foundation colleagues and I used to take great pleasure in a delightfully silly book that used to knock around the office called The Change Monster. If anyone had taken much 1990s business rhetoric literally, they would have viewed it as a small miracle that their spouse was still with them from one day to the next. Tony Blair captured this zeitgeist effectively in his war on the 'forces of conservatism', which seemed to be waged against everything from the unions, to the Conservative party, to bureaucratic structures, to, well, Iraq (remember the kaleidoscope that was shaken? It was the change monster I tells ya!).

The only sensible interpretation of all of this is that the era was characterised by a idiosyncratic, somewhat dysfunctional relationship to Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter identified that capitalism is characterised by waves of 'creative destruction', in which new business practices exploit new technologies (or techniques) to destroy previous ones. Real, radical productivity leaps do not occur within industries or within existing markets, but through the destruction of them.

The preacher's - and profiteers - of 'change' take Schumpeter's material-economic analysis and transform it into a discursive-cultural one. The gospel they sell their clients implores them to delay or out-source real 'creative destruction', and replace it with rhetorical, managed, normal 'change'. As Bob Jessop notes, the 1980s and 90s saw a pronounced attempt to internalise and normalise Schumpeterian principles in Western economies - a paradoxical venture, given the external, abnormal nature of the Schumpeterian entrerpreneur. But if change can be normalised and instated as the founding constitutional principle of an organisation, then, it is hoped, that organisation can avoid being destroyed by the very forces it claims to believe in. A weird bargain is struck: as long as change is worshipped, witnessed and celebrated everywhere, things can remain largely the same. Bosses, financial markets, charismatic Prime Ministers and other forms of hierarchy can all sleep soundly, as long as they constantly doff their cap to 'change'.  Attack 'the forces of conservatism', and Britain's 19th century power structures might make it through unscathed.

I am not so close to the 'new economy' literature as I was, so I don't know quite how the change fetishists are responding to the eruption of crisis. I note Michael Porter uses it as an opportunity to ramp up the urgency of an agenda he's been trumpetting for 25 years.

But even if this is all going strong, one wonders whether the appetite for such literature can survive this moment of real creative destruction. Things are evidently not the same as they were in 1997; but this isn't because of some vaporous change that engulfs us culturally. It's a material and political crisis that will be pored over, written about and taught by economic historians in 200 years time. The same could not be said of 'the New Economy'. Some sort of dialectic is at work, in which change rhetoric sustains institutions over time, while actual economic upheaval leaves - as Larkin observed of death - 'nothing to be said'. London's geniuses of financial innovation, praised to the rafters for their dynamism during the good years, have surely now excelled themselves when it comes to 'change'  - nationalisation, bankruptcy, riots, fiscal crisis - but for some reason nobody quite views it like that any more.

This is partly an issue about how we perceive the ingredients of crises, as I discuss here. Of course, new organisational structures, technologies, social forms and values will shape and characterise the next wave of industrial capitalism. And of course, most of those factors are already waiting in the wings, ready to be used to construct a new model. But viewed in the context of crisis, they appear plausible, realistic and with long-term utility; they do not appear like the ecstatic work of the change monster.

Take one example. When David Cameron declared the need for a new constitutional settlement recently, quite a bit of this was based on the capabilities of new technologies such as youtube and text messaging. Leaving aside the overall quality of his vision, I was struck by how credible and necessary this exploitation of digital technology suddenly appeared. Prior to this constitutional crisis, the e-democracy movement had preached e-this, e-that, cyber-parliament, the Big Conversation, a civic commons - none of which ever acquired any political plausibility. It operated in a rhetorical realm in which 'participation' and 'interactivity' could be celebrated to the heavens, without ever imperilling a decrepit parliamentary system. Now that the constitutional crisis has 'gone real' (a wonderfully Hegelian phrase I learnt from a derivatives broker whose colleague had accidentally found himself in possession of 1,000 tonnes of Russian sugar), we no longer have to speak participation, speak interactivity, but set about wondering what practices and procedures are needed to realise them.

So who's to say that the 'virtual organisation' and the 'networked employee' won't exist in the future. They will do, although without the adjectives to glamorise them. The prophets of change may turn out to be right after all. But that's precisely why we won't need them any longer.

Comments

[max]

Ah, the change monster. Happy days.

I'm not really surprised that Michael Porter is trying to attach the global crisis to his management model. One of the striking things about all that 90s change fetishism is how fear-driven it all was. In fact I remember one of our old bosses once explaining to me the 'F.A.R.T.' model of consultancy, where 'F' was 'putting the fear into your clients'. (Sadly I can't remember what the other letters stood for, but I don't think it worked out very well ... )

The other odd thing about the change literature is how familiar all the changes were, how unfearful. When some guru started going on about 'globalisation', 'chaos' or 'the network society', they were always talking abut something that had been in gestation for a good decade and a half, and where the essential parameters were already mapped out.

Right now, I'm not sure whether we're in a moment of massively magnified fear - unknown unknowns, basically - in which case Porter is surely going to be drowned by a wave of material reality. Or whether, as you suggest, we've worked out what the future will look like and need to set about creating it.

[Will Davies]

Agreed. The fear aspect would be an example of what Nigel Thrift calls 'affective' economic knowledge - stuff which performs in given managerial situations via its emotive, charismatic power. But you're right in suggesting that the empirical content of this knowledge is not so new. Really Daniel Bell's (1976) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society should have made the ensuing 30 years of rhetoric supurfluous, but the fact that it didn't tells you a great deal of the type of intellectual support that managers and policy-makers need or want - it must be recent, a little hysterical, emotive, scary and reassuring, and very often communicated face-to-face. On the last of these, it's worth rememberering that a great deal of the bullshit literature that emerged over the 80s and 90s existed primarily to secure the author vast speaking fees. I believe Tom Peters cost close to $100k a day at one point, which makes Premiership football look austere...