Age of Panic

Buzzing beyond the shock doctrine, floating far beyond cultural hysteresis. Welcome to the age of panic – the slew of instinctual, animal, responses to threat, real and imagined. Above our cities and towns, a vast industry learns exactly how to provoke specific activity in our minds. Mood music = mood response.

Panic ideology: “[…] It is the psychological fuel which produces a mass-based politics of emotional needs, referenda on happiness as the essence of electoral politics, and scapegoatism of vulnerable out-groups.[…] As the epicentre of the meeting of the outer anxiety and the inner anxiety, the bourgeois individual is envisioned as suffering a dramatic loss of ego and abandoning himself to states of fantasy, delirium, and illusion. […] Voting analysts now call this phenomenon “mood politics.””

Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” suggests, fundamentally, that the market-led solutions prevalent in our world are forced upon us by the carefully managed appearance of crisis.  I would argue a panic ideology demonstrates that these market-led solutions are both symptom and cause of crisis. Not only can a “good crisis” spark a desired response, the response itself can be designed to engender an even better crisis.

Just as, classically, human beings have inate responses – “fight or flight” as those evolutionary behaviourists would say –  so do our organisations and structures.

Universities in the UK, faced with instability, have reacted in similar stereotyped ways. Reale and Seeber (2011) described the behaviour of Higher Education Institutions during changes to the Italian HE sector using a range of theoretical concepts. Most pointedly:

• isomorphism – the tendancy for organisations to copy the activity of similar organisations in similar situations. This can be seen in the “peer comparison” activities that many UK institutions are currently undertaking. Whilst this activity can lead to the dissemination of appropriate practice, it is equally likely to lead to similar – and avoidable – mistakes being made.
•  Their reference to institutional theory makes me think of rational myths – the idea that phenomena are predictable and can be mapped to carefully designed mathematical or physical models. Similar to the myth of a rational market, which is still prevalent in some strands of c21st economics. The creation of a rational myth involves the gathering and analysis of a great deal of data, often of variable quality and completeness… and at substantial cost to institutional resources.
• To their grab-bag of approaches I would add the stereotyped responses – which are, quite simply, the things that HEIs normally do when faced with a crisis – namely to reorganise, abandon resources (staff, capacity…) without quantifiable short term value, and to offer the appearance of austerity by making highly visible but essentially (in a whole-institution sense) meaningless changes to terms and conditions.

Reale and Seeber go on to analyse the performance of individual research units faced with a funding crisis – it’s a fascinating little paper and well worth a look. But what they don’t do is examine the ways in which the behaviours above actually heighten the crisis.

• isomorphism and rational myths encourage senior staff to attempt to solve problems for an ideal institution in an ideal environment. The dissonance between the model and the actuality promotes demoralising comparisons between the two – and the gathering of data for comparison becomes an attempt to adhere to the imposed reality rather than reflect the perceived reality.
• stereotyped behaviours are doubly unsettling, both in terms of their signification of the state of crisis (“we are reorganising, hence we must be in a bad way”) and their effect on staff at all levels is one of upheaval and misery.

A demoralised, unhappy organisation is far less likely to weather any kind of crisis than one where organisational well-being is paramount. New entrants to a market know this, thus their modus operandi is to provoke the kind of behaviours described above. You can see this in some of the language around the Second Great Online Learning Bubble… “education is broken“, “college is too expensive” and the classic “employers are unhappy with graduates”. Each of these attacks is calculated to promote and accentuate a state of crisis. And the heavy hype around new models (even those that look in worse financial shape than the current ones) is another strand in the polyphonic educational mood music.

All of this plays upon insecurities within institutions – just as wily politicians play upon insecurities within voters. Even if you don’t want to believe the world works this way – what if it did, what then? Even the act of entertaining some of this nonsense is a self-inflicted wound.

I hate business books, specifically those ones that you see in airports that have titles that give away the “insight” you would get from reading all 400 pages of dribble. And I’ve seen this idea on the garish covers of several. So I’ll quote – as advice to all VCs who are in to Senser, and anyone else to whom the above hits home – from Douglas Adams:

“”Who said anything about panicking? This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I’ve settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I’ll start panicking!”