It used to be that the newspaper report would say “The police were tipped off about the whereabouts of the gold bullion”. And in Evelyn Waugh’s, Scoop, that sort-of journalist William Boot, who hoped to go to Ishmaelia as a spy but ended up being sent as a journalist, finds that “Now he had something under his hat; a tip-off straight from headquarters, news of high international importance” (Waugh, 2003: 101), Boot might have found a red under the bed.

Tip-offs make the world go round; they are a flow of secret knowledge. Imagine this as a tip-off story: the police tip-off a bunch of journalists about the coming arrest of an ex-journalist for possibly having hacked a phone to get a tip-off to write a scoop. The police employ an ex-journalist who hacked a phone for a tip-off in order to better manage their public presence and this ex-journalist is mates with another ex-journalist who has the ear of the PM. The police know the journalists who know the politicians who know the police. They’re tipping-off to their hearts content, from behind the smokescreens of public relations who keep on saying no-one knows about this tip-off circle.

2. Strategic Ignorance

Murdoch, R., Murdoch J. and Brooks, R. appear before a Select Committee of elected MPs to explain phone hacking. The Chairman and CEO of NewsCorp, the Chief Executive of Newscorp and the Chief Executive of News International and former newspaper editor know nothing now and knew less then. They’re shocked and horrified, but they deny. They employing “strategic ignorance”, Linsey McGoey’s compelling phrase to describe the

“feigning of ignorance — whether deliberately or unconsciously, collectively or individually [which] answers the twin demands of appearing transparent while wielding control over the very information one has an interest in concealing.” (McGoey, 2007: 216–7)

There’s no unequivocal bliss to be had in ignorance though: responses on twitter either mock or are horrified by the vacuum of control implied by the NewsCorp/NewsInternational ignorance position.

3. The Art of Asking Questions

We’re used to interviews now. We’ve all been interviewed: by our future bosses, by our GPs, some of us by the police, and some of us by social scientists (see Mike Savage (2010) for a discussion of how respondents of early interview-based research projects seemed flattered to be asked to give their views). We’re used now to having our views and experience sought out, and there’s no doubt that Yates, Stephenson, Murdoch, Murdoch and Brooks interviewed in Select Committees yesterday have been questioned before.
Fewer of us have experience of asking questions, and not all question-askers are skilled – however many episodes of tv shows about sharp lawyers we might watch. Tom Watson MP and his short, sharp questions based on detailed preparation gave a masterclass in expert interviewing, of pushing the respondent towards revelation. Louise Mensch MP (for example) gave us words, lots of words, assertion and opinion: a grandstanding questioner doesn’t produce excitement .

References

1. McGoey, Linsey(2007)‘On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy’, Economy and Society,36:2,212 — 235.
2. Mike Savage (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method Oxford, Clarendon.
3. Waugh, Evelyn (2003 [1938]) Scoop</> Penguin.

These figures are disturbing, not just because of what they reveal about how much unpaid work is being done — and how badly carers are supported as they carry this out. It disturbs me that this discussion is presented as being about the figures: what sort of world is it where the work of care is press released as an issue of cost? I don’t blame the charity or the University of Leeds researchers for this. They understand that the language of cost and calculation is a language that makes sense to the policy makers who they hope to influence. The journalists and their audience too, might switch off at yet another personal tale of woe. Compassion fatigue, it’s called. And so a campaign strategy that avoids the emotive and goes straight to the calculation seems worth a try.

In “Why things matter to people”, Andrew Sayer discusses care, pointing out that people are at times vulnerable and at times capable; that is, they can care and they need caring for (2011: 112). A capacity for fellow feeling is as the core of being a person. For Sayer, “the ability to care does not rest on a calculation of rational self-interest, but is a common natural social disposition” (2011: 111) based in this relationality, or fellow-feeling, between people. Doing good, better better, doing right, these are central to understanding how we relate to each other.

Taking “why things matter to people” seriously must mean also asking why some things don’t seem to matter to people. Why it is that a public discussion of care cannot speak of feeling? Why does it look at value but not worth? Why calculate without an ethical compass? One possible impact of the focus on money money money is how hard it becomes for carers to speak up for why they deserve support through the benefit system because of the goodness of what they do, and not merely because they save the taxpayer money. I don’t want a world where the only form of knowledge that matters is the calculation, and the only way to win an argument is with numbers.

References

1. Buckner, L. and Yeandle, S. (2011) Valuing Carers 2011: Calculating the Value of Carers Support . Carers UK, London.
2. Sayer, A. (2011) Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life Cambridge University Press.

After all, he’s the man who faked his CV, laying claim to having studied at the University of Perugia, when really he’d attended the (fabulously named) ‘Universita per Stranieri’, a language school. He also did a few in-house nightschool courses at GEC Marconi, though these were spun as having attended “Dunchurch College of Management” on his CV. Is this legitimate creativity to produce distinction in an overcrowded labour market?

Although in Brilliant CV by Bright and Earl, potential employees are reminded that “lying about any aspect of your life during recruitment can be grounds for dismissal if uncovered” (2001: 246), it’s possible that under the new Duncan Smith regime there’ll be more scope for potential recruits to creatively embellish their job applications. After all, if the man at the top can do it…

References

Bright, J. And Earl, J. (2001) Brilliant CV: What Employers Want to See and How to Say it. Prentice Hall.

In the show customers (‘punters’) are shadowy figures: one walks into a café, later we see one of the sex workers being punched from inside a car. Steven Wright, the man eventually sentenced for all 5 murders is almost disembodied in the show; we see his car prowling, then we see his hands on the wheel, and eventually his face, his body, his voice emerge. This relative invisibility makes it easy not to consider who are the punters. If we did, we’d see that they are very ordinary men, they are men you know.

The other punter who appears in Five Daughters is Tom Stephens, the initial suspect. He lurks with flowers at the edge of a police cordon, later we see him driving away with one of the women, hoping to protect her from the unknown threat. The real Tom Stephens was interviewed by the Sunday Mirror:

Michael Duffy (interviewer from Sunday Mirror): You seem a smart, well-educated man. How is it that you can spend time with these people? How is it that you can find common ground with them?

Tom Stephens: I’m sad and lonely. I made compromises on my morals to go down (to the red light area) the first time, so I suppose getting involved with them isn’t a huge leap.

Michael Duffy, Sunday Mirror, 17/12/2006

Duffy and Stephens conspire to deny that punters play any part in the moral denigration that they easily ascribe to the prostitutes. For Duffy ‘these people’ are the inverse of smart and well-educated, they are abject. Stephens knows the red light district is a damned place, but it holds such an attraction for him. In this way, neither recognises what customers contribute to the moral status of those who sell sex. In my research into Punternet, a website where men write customer service reviews of commercial sex, this is quite common. Men speak of brothels as good when they are clean, safe and discreet and of prostitutes as good when they offer gifts beyond the formal contract. And they speak of each other as potential harmers, who could damage ‘good’ girls if they don’t treat them right. It’s never them who cause harm.

Wacquant says this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise us, it is “unexceptional” to say we all live in a moral world (Wacquant, 2002: 1472). Public discussions of prostitution tend to circulate a sterile debate between ‘free choice’ and ‘trafficked’ exploitation in a way which negates the complexity of prostitution by presenting it primarily as a question of worker’s agency. Addressing prostitution is impossible without addressing customers, and addressing customers requires understanding of how they constitute the market as moral and negotiate their own roles and identities within that.

References

1. Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton: Willan.
2.  Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6) 1468–1532.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/825/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:45:48 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=751 The hotel inspector Dawn met judges standards in B&Bs, making a virtue of cleanliness and ‘good’ service. B&B owners, in turn, judge and regulate their customers. Chris Grayling, currently shadow home secretary, thinks christian B&B owners should be allowed to turn away guests they consider to be sinners. Markets don’t just reflect (notionally private) moralities; they actively produce them, through ideas about what service ought to be like, or how customers ought to behave. Regulation intervenes to alter the market: to generate trust by awarding 4 stars, or to proscribe unequal treatment on the basis of sexual identity. Grayling implies that running a B&B is distinctly different from running a hotel, because it is ‘home’ as much as ‘work’, as I’ve argued here. But to participate in the public world of the market, the B&B owner must sign up to the liberal individualism that permits free sexual expression and conceives of the men in room 26 as customers above all else.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/751/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:45:55 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=708 H&M, the Scandinavian fast fashion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employees of a knitwear factory in Bangladesh which is subcontracted by H&M to make those cute stripy jumpers, and that really useful little black cardy.



My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/494#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:06:04 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=494 Nik Rose’s conceptualisation of the late modern self as being compelled to engage in the active governance of the soul has been provocative for those who study intermediary work. Internalising norms of self-exploitation, to work harder, longer, faster, to let work dominate ‘the social’ is seen by Angela McRobbie (2002) as characteristic of work in the speeded up culture industries. Incentives and self-discipline, not rules, procedures and a boss’s overt authority, regulate the work force when the soul is governed (du Gay 1996, Rose 1990).


Cary Grant as Walter Burns in ‘His Girl Friday’

This sort of interpretation could easily be made of a friend of mine who works as an economics journalist. He puts the hours in, and he seems to like it. An omnivorous cultural capital enables him to reference Keynes, Donald MacKenzie, Don de Lillo, Enron and The September Issue in the space of the 8 minute dissection he gives me of the current state of the financial crisis. This impresses me, because he has an explanation, and even a position on each of these things, and it amounts to a story worth hearing. It seems that the acquisition of the new is the dimension of governance which he has internalised, and its relentlessness is something quite demanding. Immediacy is one of the dimensions of the professional ideology of the journalist listed by Mark Deuze (2005: 447). To stop, or to slow down even, is to lose track, and possibly to lose status.

But we sociologists do tend to the negative. There might also be pleasure – and virtue — in this immediacy, this quest for knowledge and for novelty, and a satisfaction in using knowledge to produce knowledge. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes character as combination of role and personality. Some roles at particular historical moments embody the character of the age: the Prussian officer and the English public school teacher in the late 19th Century. For MacIntyre, such a character legitimates and embodies the moral order of the age. And I wonder, what if the journalist is the Character of our time? The person of virtue in the liquid modern world without grand narratives, filled with uncertainty and, would be the person who steps into the public spaces of incomprehension, masters enough of a story to tell, with quick words and references to now, and always has an eye out for the next tale.

References

1. Deuze, M. (2005) ‘What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism. 6: 442–464.
2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage.
3. MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
4. McRobbie, A. (2002) ‘Club cultures: notes on the decline of political culture in speeded up creative worlds’. Cultural Studies. 16 (4): 516–531.
5. Rose, N. (1990) Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self. London: Routledge.
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