The Unaccountability Machine: Difference between revisions

{{Drop|W|hich brings us}}, finally, to Dan Davies’ fascinating new book. There is, he reports, a crisis of accountability in the modern commercial world: the relationship between “we” the general public and “we” the representatives and managers of the corporations which intermediate much of public life — many are on both sides of this equation, of course — his irreconcilably broken down. This is because modern corporations are designed to diffuse individual accountability for the actions a corporate legal entity takes, using what Davies calls “[[accountability sink]]s”. This is Davies’s example:

Someone — an airline gate attendant, for example — tells you some bad news; perhaps you’ve been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you’re brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can’t do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you’re told that’s not company policy.

The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.}}

One creates an accountability sink by delegating the administration of a human process to a [[playbook|rulebook]] and then not giving anyone direct power to override it. Airlines, banks and online retailers of course have no access to anyone whatsoever. But the crushing stasis that anyone who works in financial services will know is a variety of the same thing.