The Ends of Office Politics

@cecildijoux blogs about enterprise 2.0 and the end of office politics

"One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this (i.e. office politics) may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt."

When I looked at the Wikipedia article on Office Politics, I found a link to an interview with John Eldred in Fast Company magazine (The New Face of Office Politics) which goes some way to answering his question as to how office politics may help the company achieve these three goals.

Clearly there are some unpleasant manifestations of office politics, but it's bad logic to conclude that all politicians are evil b******s.

If we accept the Wikipedia definition of politics as what people do when they don't have legitimate authority, and we recognize that most organizations fail to give people sufficient authority to innovate and use their initiative, then office politics may sometimes be a necessary and even healthy way of dealing with the legitimate demands of the customers and the workforce.

So the solution to bad politics is not crossing your fingers and hope that politics will go away (it won't) but replacing bad politics with good politics - which means open and honest negotiation around conflicting stakeholder needs.

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Wikipedia repeats a definition of Office Politics from a website called BigBadBoss.

"Office politics is the use of one's individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one's legitimate authority."

Having debated this topic further with Cecil, I think this definition is ambiguous and should be improved, because Cecil and I are reading it differently. When I see the words "legitimate authority" I think this refers to what a person is mandated to do according to the official management hierarchy and job descriptions - what Wilfred (later Lord) Brown called the Formal Organization. But I have never encountered an organization where the Formal Organization was completely aligned and consistent with the Real Organization. A lot of what occupies the gap between the Formal Organization and the Real Organization can be understood in terms of office politics.

But is that cause or effect? Is politics a destructive force that pushes the Real Organization away from the Formal Organization? Or is politics a potentially healing force that helps to manage the perceived inadequacy and inflexibility of the Formal Organization?

I tend to think that in most complex environments, the Formal Organization just wouldn't be viable. So I do not assume that the distribution of "legitimate authority" is completely satisfactory, or that activity that goes beyond one's legitimate authority is necessarily bad.

Meanwhile, Cecil focuses not on the "legitimate authority" aspect of the definition but on "obtaining advantages". But surely all purposeful action is aimed at obtaining advantages - a project manager strives to make his project successful, a department manager strives to preserve the autonomy and resources of his department and so on. Unless we assume an organization that is so bland and boring that there are no conflicts whatsoever, then this is just normal management activity.

The Power of Prediction

@andrewbolt gently mocks the apocalyptic predictions of elderly professors, as well as the way popular journalists can get sensational headlines from an interview that is largely composed of casual chatter. Our own extinction is forecast, but he's going by dead reckoning (Herald Sun, 19th June 2010).

Why do we treat the end of the world as a kind of entertainment? Andrew Bolt suggests that "when these scientists say the end of the world is nigh, they don't mean it, not literally, but are just scaring us for our own good. Or that they do mean it, but are frankly batty."

Batty or merely hopelessly unqualified? Frank Fenner, who recently predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years, is an emeritus professor of microbiology. Meanwhile, Nicholas Boyle, who has predicted a dramatic event to take place in 2014 and determine the course of the 21st century, is a professor of German literature. What qualifies these specialists to become general-purpose futurologists?

For the popular press, of course, one professor is as good as another.

• Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years', claims leading scientist (Daily Mail)
• 2014 will determine course of century, says Cambridge professor (Daily Telegraph)
• Why the world will NOT end in 2012: Nasa scientist debunks conspiracy theories (Daily Mail)
• Dementia may have been caused by the Second World War, says scientist (Daily Mail)

Studying Economics

@dgwbirch translates an American question "Does Studying Economics Make You More Republican?" into a British assertion "If you study economics, you'll end up a Tory".

Does Studying Economics Make You More Republican? (New York Times, 7 June 2010). See also Studying Economics In College Can Influence Your Political Affiliation, Fed Study Finds (Huffington Post, 7 June 2010). Original paper is by Sam Allgood, William Bosshardt, Wilbert van der Klaauw, and Michael Watts, "Is Economics Coursework, or Majoring in Economics, Associated with Different Civic Behaviors?" (pdf) Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 450

The study looked at students from four large public US universities. The authors discuss the possibility that the paradigm presented in most economics courses and textbooks might encourage students to see people as self-centred individualists and to behave that way themselves. However, the authors also discuss alternative explanations for a possible association between education and political affiliation, such as prior tendencies. They also mention previous research indicating that relationships between levels of education and voting behavior observed in the United States are not replicated in the United Kingdom, thus providing a caution against generalizing these results to the UK.

The question that intrigued me most, however, was why the Federal Reserve Bank of New York felt this was a suitable topic of research in the first place. Is there a political agenda involved in understanding the likely political affiliation of US economists? Is there an intellectual gap between the large public universities included in the survey and the elite liberal universities where Nobel prizes in economics are more likely to be won? Is there a need to rebalance the US university curriculum, to provide a better coverage of alternative economic paradigms? What is the purpose of studying studying economics?