British Worklife

Cripes! You caught me in a funny mood today! It's like the world's gone mad!

The main reason for my consternation is that frankly I'm not really a team-player. I really would just like to ask nothing from you all, get on with what I do, which I think I do relatively well in relation to others (there are better, maybe, but there are certainly worst, that's for sure). In return - please return the compliment and leave me alone - that means, don't inflict your problems and inadequacies on me. And certainly, God forbid that you should ever think about trying to manage me!

However, there comes a time when we can't go it alone any longer. This is when you are responsible for feeding in something you're doing to the greater whole. Your competence becomes one with the universal whole and synergy occurs.

This is why organisations have progressively moved away from the archaic, cumbersome, authoritarian structure to a skills and competences-based format.  I remember when I started teaching management theory to a bunch of people that didn't want to listen in the mid 1990s. The "Flat Organisation" was the topic of that week. No longer was the triangle supposed to have the acute angle at the top, with the rest of us at the bottom. No, customer facing was the order of the day. Flip the triangle and the management and their minions can support the newly-empowered front line to do the bidding -and spontaneously satisfy the needs of - the customer. Fantastic! Apart from it just became an excuse to strip out the middle support function and off load what they once did onto the front line.

Of course, this whole Post Office approach - that is take a bunch of people with the postal-worker mentality and dump them in the "for-profit" sector, empower them (that is get them to do your job and everyone else's) and then ask them to compete with other similar organisations would never work in Higher Education.

This is because, since the time of Aristotle, the craft of education and the discipline of scholarship has been fundamentally an altruistic one to the service and edification of our fellow men, not a profit-making function. If profit had been the motive, it's quite possible that the greatest scientific discveries of our time would never have been discovered at all.

How would it have been if Newton had failed to start his research because it wasn't considered profitable? Was Aristotle drawn along by the third stream? What about Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkins' study into the existence of DNA?  Did they do it for the dosh?

Scholarship, including teaching is not a business activity. It's therefore not an administration, or management-driven enterprise, the same way that retail, or the entertainment industry is. Otherwise, if it was, the customer would call the shots and their needs, wants and demands would need to be satisfied. This isn't the case either with Doctors and other Health Care professionals, who act in the interests of their patients, not according to what the patients think they want - and they would never rightfully be referred to in this context as "customers."

The university customer is not always right - but they do have a choice. I do believe they know quality product when they experience one though.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not expected to behave with an inefficient mentality where the object of the day is trying at all costs to make it look difficult, rather than actually doing what I'm paid to do. That would probably end me. I'm glad too that I'm not in the private sector. I'm glad that I am in an environment where true scholarship regardless of the price tag can be pursued in the interests of humankind, not of the profiteers.

(readers should note this post was written several months ago when things made me sense...)