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The Unaccountability Machine: Difference between revisions
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==== Rogue apples, middle England and the grace of God ==== | ==== Rogue apples, middle England and the grace of God ==== | ||
{{drop|E|ither these are}} peculiar, localised problems — rogue gangs of [[Bad apple|bad apples]] — or the prevailing business administrative paradigm is in crisis and we need another theory of the game. | {{drop|E|ither these are}} peculiar, localised problems — rogue gangs of [[Bad apple|bad apples]] plague the innocent houses of commerce — or the prevailing business administrative paradigm is in crisis and we need another theory of the game. | ||
Because it relieves executives of accountability and leaves only a deniable residue of responsibility for hiring them in the first place, “bad apples” is always the preferred diagnosis. The paradigm being in crisis, by contrast, suggests senior executives take credit for all the good stuff, dodge the rap when things go tits up and live a charmed life never being honestly marked to measure for anything. They are a waste of money, in other words. | Because it relieves executives of accountability and leaves only a deniable residue of responsibility for hiring them in the first place, “bad apples” is always the preferred diagnosis. The paradigm being in crisis, by contrast, suggests senior executives take credit for all the good stuff, dodge the rap when things go tits up and live a charmed life never being honestly marked to measure for anything. They are a waste of money, in other words. | ||
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Watching their excruciating evidence, three things occur: first — The weave of life’s tapestry wouldn’t have needed to be that different for these witnesses ''themselves'' to have been sub-postmasters on the other end of this outrage. None more so than CEO Paula Vennells, a middle-English lay Methodist, who even ''looks'' like a sub-postmaster. | Watching their excruciating evidence, three things occur: first — The weave of life’s tapestry wouldn’t have needed to be that different for these witnesses ''themselves'' to have been sub-postmasters on the other end of this outrage. None more so than CEO Paula Vennells, a middle-English lay Methodist, who even ''looks'' like a sub-postmaster. | ||
Second — A montage of every utterance by every witness of “I don’t remember” would go for ''hours''. | Second — A montage of every utterance by every witness of the manifold variations of “I don’t remember” would go for ''hours''. | ||
Third — ''There but for the grace of God go I''. Post Office [[Inhouse counsel|in-house legal]] head Rodric Williams is a fifty-something expat New Zealander, whose career trajectory | Third — ''There but for the grace of God go I''. Post Office [[Inhouse counsel|in-house legal]] head Rodric Williams is a fifty-something expat New Zealander, whose career trajectory, in vector if not altitude, is strikingly similar to mine. In the halogen glare of cross-examined hindsight, his ineffectual interventions in an epic miscarriage of justice over an extended period are regrettable, but none of them resonate as ''odd''. Williams was adept at the sort of pencil-pushing, risk-averse [[buttocractic oath|buttocracy]] that is drilled by bitter experience into every single inhouse lawyer in the land. ''This is what inhouse counsel do''. This is how we behave. We should ask ourselves: knowing what ''he'' knew ''then'', ''would we have done any differently''? We should not kid ourselves here. | ||
==== Modern corporation as an unaccountability machine ==== | |||
{{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, by means of what Davies calls “accountability sinks”. | |||
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. | |||