2.4 Power And Control In Society

This Chapter is an exploration of how Power and Control manifests in the Western, developed world that I am (and, I’m sure, many of you are) familiar with.

The vast majority of people in prison come from so-called disadvantaged areas of our country, most of them (though not all, of course) in our cities and big towns.  Incidence of poor housing, poor health, low levels of education, crime and anti-social behaviour etc. are all higher in societies that are unequal.

This is posited in much literature but very well presented and explained in the book Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett which I referenced in the Chapter on the Focus Group earlier in this Section.

And the level of equality in any society is directly affected firstly by how power is distributed and secondly by the priorities of those who control society.

After writing the Chapter I wondered whether to include it at all.  To include, or not to include, that was my dilemma.  Why is an understanding of power and control important?  Is it relevant to supporting children in distress?  Or, is it just a hobby-horse of mine?

Well after much wondering, (and pondering), I decided that it was important.  I hope that the reasons why it is so important will be clear as the Chapter is read.

So here goes! 

The Chapter is divided into Six Sub-Chapters:

2.4.1 POWER AND CONTROL IN SOCIETY – INTRODUCTION

2.4.2 THE PARADOX OF ‘CORPORATE CLOSED-NESS’

2.4.3 POWER AND CONTROL IN SOCIETY

2.4.4 LINKING ‘CORPORATE CLOSED-NESS’ AND ‘POWER AND CONTROL’

2.4.5 A FEW INTERESTING PARALLELS!

2.4.6 POWER AND CONTROL IN SOCIETY – CONCLUSION

If you have read the previous Chapters (and you obviously have if you have arrived here – or maybe you skipped to this page just to have a look) you will know that I started my career in the helping professions as a street-worker.

And it was when I first started doing streetwork that I became aware of the real implications of powerlessness, how it affects us all, but in particular affects communities where many families are isolated from the mainstream as most of us experience it, i.e. are marginalised.

Even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was developing a systemic understanding of power and control. (There is a full Chapter on Systems Theory following; for now it suffices to know that systemic means how everything affects everything else).

For example in all the training that I have done, or books I have read on child protection, child development, community work, etc. over many years I have not come across it that much.  Or if I have, I considered the analysis to be weighted towards the Pillars’ perspective of power and control.

And as my understanding (and awareness) of it deepened I formed the opinion that not enough importance is afforded power and control in training in social work, social care, psychotherapy, youth work or similar disciplines.

I don’t believe that we are as aware as we could be, or should be of the historical origins and sociological contexts of inequality and poverty.

Yet I believe that many of us have a desire to be aware of not only the origins, but also the subtle ways that they are perpetuated and manifest in the modern world today.

And in this, I am talking about being aware, not rising up in arms!

In fact, in my experience, rising up in arms is not usually what vulnerable people – who we have put ourselves out there to help – want us to do.

Awareness on practitioners’ part is a valuable gift that we can give to ourselves, and by extension to families in the Focus Group. 

I believe that it opens our minds to what we can change, rather than 1): continually throwing our hands in the air (and our eyes, of course, to heaven) in frustration and desperation – blaming the system, or 2): spending vast amounts of time and energy trying to change something that we may never be able to change.

So here, for what it’s worth, is my polemic (there’s that word again) on Power and Control in Society – and – more specifically, how it influences community work and in particular the protection of vulnerable children.

In this Chapter I will be using some terms that I will describe briefly now.

Holism implies that we look at something in its entirety, and not just at one aspect of it. Emergence describes how from within, something new may emerge; (i.e. be created) with minimum (or no) external influence.

(We will describe holism, emergence and the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies emergence – in the natural world at least – in the Chapters entitled Systems Theory and Universal Theory of Change in Section Three in far more detail).

Also, in the Chapter on Systems Theory we will describe how living systems are open. 

For now, when I say open I mean that they are continually interacting with their environment, i.e. their sense of aliveness depends on their openness.  But their openness also makes the measuring (or the estimating, or the predicting) of anything within them, or about them, very challenging and full of uncertainty.

And we will also look at closed systems, and how in measurement, (for example in a laboratory) they remain closed, meaning that anything that will interfere with measurement is deliberately left outside, enabling much more certainty in predicting how they will behave under different conditions.

The quality of predictability that we associate with closed-ness will be important when reading this Chapter.

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state (or Government) exercises total and absolute control over everything (political life and discourse, the arts, sport, industry, the economy, health, education, even religion) within its jurisdiction.

For the purposes of our discussion I will call such a country closed.

People growing up nowadays in Ireland have an expectation that society will be open and free, but openness and freedom are, like poverty and wealth, relative terms.  For example, in the 1920’s, soon after the radio (in those days called the wireless) became popular, some clergy in the Catholic Church in Ireland tried to ban jazz, lest it corrupt our youth and dilute our Irishness – or more specifically – our Catholicism.  And when I was a teenager in the 1960’s many films and books were banned for the same reason. 

Now not many who were living at that time would really have described Ireland in the nineteen-sixties as a closed society, but looking back, in some ways, it was!

In the context of power and control, a human being can be considered to be an open system, as can, of course, a family, which is a collection of humans.  So communities, cities, countries and society (all just bigger groups of humans) also tend towards being open.

So, in terms of openness and closed-ness, true totalitarian regimes may be thought to be societal laboratories of sorts.  That is, they try to control, or predict with certainty, how their people will behave.

Rulers in such regimes try to concentrate power in the centre, and control their countries by making them closed, trying to get their citizens to conform, prohibiting them from leaving, forbidding visitors from other countries moving freely through their countries, and trying to ban foreign radio, TV, internet etc.

But, because human beings are open systems in their own right, and can grow in unpredictable ways, totalitarian societies have always proven to be unsustainable – and I would predict that current totalitarian regimes that are closed will either gradually become open, like ice becomes water when immersed in it, or suffer catastrophic implosion visited from the inside or outside. Unfortunately, the opening up of closed societies (in my lifetime anyway) has usually involved significant suffering, as those in power do not relinquish it without a fight.

However, it is not all one-way traffic.

Many societies that were thought to be relatively open, when under pressure in past times became closed.  Now, under different circumstances, they are open again. In what we now call the Western World, the fascist countries of central and southern Europe in the first half of the 20^th Century are the obvious examples here.

But I argue that while they appeared relatively open in, say, the latter half of the 19^th Century, true openness was not really embedded in their societies at that time.

I believe that it is difficult to go from true openness that an entire society embraces, with human rights checks and balances embedded both in the custom and the legal practices, to totalitarian closed-ness. But there are still powerful conservative forces (as there were in 19th Century Europe) who resist true openness, lurking in what we consider open societies.

For example, England and USA were two of the most open societies in the world when I was young, leading the way in the human potential movement, counter-culture, music, literature etc. Now they are far more closed than they were then.

But nowadays, generally, because of the speed and extent of communication, the world as we know it is more open than it has ever been in history.  This openness makes it increasingly more difficult for harsh, controlling rulers and regimes to impose closed-ness in their countries. 

Now – just a little thought for our consideration!

We in the Western democratic world are critical of other countries behaving what we might term to be a totalitarian manner, not having free and fair elections, restricting people’s access to foreign media etc.

But before we clap ourselves on the back because we have a free press it is good to remind ourselves that the news has always been managed (and massaged) by corporate-dominated media in the Western world to airbrush out horrifying stories of centuries-old western world cruelty and abuse that give us the standard of living that we enjoy today.

This will be dealt with more detail in the next Sub-Chapter when I describe corporate closed-ness.

The non-democratic totalitarian societies described in the previous post where leaders are obsessive about power and control will try to maintain their closed-ness by retaining power within an inner clique where all decisions are made.

They will then have very tightly controlled methods of disseminating these decisions to their citizens.  People who voice opposition, or disagree with the decisions will be silenced and if they refuse to stay silent will usually be punished severely.  This ensures that dissenting influences will not corrupt the minds of their population.

So through this process, a small number of privileged people within the clique will control the entire population using a rigid hierarchy and a mixture of propaganda and fear of punishment which is spread outwards to the general population.

The members of this ruling clique – the inner circle – will be largely unaccountable to the majority of the people.  If elections are held at all they are merely a facade to portray a veneer of democracy to the world.

So that’s how totalitarian states keep their countries closed!

In this Sub-Chapter I will argue that our Western democratic countries have a high degree of closed-ness also even though we don’t have restrictions openly placed on us like we would if we were living in a totalitarian country.

I will now introduce what I consider to be a very striking paradox – the paradox of corporate closed-ness.

Despite the openness of our modern Western democracies, in an environment where dissent and debate is allowed, where there is no apparent (or obvious) rigid hierarchy, and where we are free to make choices about what we do and don’t do, or what or who we agree or disagree with – the very opposite to what I have just described as the norm in the totalitarian state – relatively small numbers of wealthy, powerful and privileged people still seem to be able to impose their will on us all.

(I will be developing this theme further in the next post).

While we are on paradoxical matters, and looking at openness within the Pillars as we defined them already, one might intuit that the public service and the body politic would lean towards closed-ness, and the media and academia would tend towards openness.

However here are some examples of closed-ness in Media:

Editorial bias, and bias towards sensationalism – closed to the whole truth as it might not be exciting enough, but mainly, closed to points of view that challenge the ethos of the owners or the people/parties, or entities/industries etc. that the media outlet is there to support and the ideology that they promote.

And here are examples of closed-ness in Academia:

Closed to non-formal learning, bias in curriculum, lack of creativity, insistence on grading students in examinations, fixation on competitiveness, adherence to academic rank and ritual, sense of entitlement, sometimes superior attitude, to mention but a few areas that put a considerable brake on the ability or willingness for academia to be open.

Of course, like all collections of humans, all of the Pillars are open entities, interacting with their environment, changing it, and being changed by it.

However they usually make strenuous efforts to resist changes that they fear, or will disadvantage them, or that might be initiated by others, and they will normally close ranks when threatened by what they consider to be too much openness.

So – and this is important – because of this apparent contradiction, or paradox, between what the Pillars profess to be, and what they are, I believe that it is very helpful that we community workers – who protect vulnerable children in modern, open democracies – examine wider societal, sociological and economic factors both in our own country and globally and how these factors influence methods favoured by the Pillars in respect of alleviating the hurt of children who suffer a lot, and struggle to belong in mainstream society.

In doing this – as I stated above – we will develop awareness of where power and control lie in our Western democratic society where we pride ourselves on being civilised, having political accountability and transparency with free and fair elections at the core, on upholding universal human rights for all citizens, and on ensuring that all people are equal.

Personally, I find it impossible to do this kind of work without having a deep awareness firstly of the issues themselves and secondly the importance of the awareness of the issues to practitioners.

The Unpacking

I will now argue that the paradox that I described in the previous post (corporate-closed-ness) can be unpacked thus:

The corporate world with which we are all so familiar uses the openness that has enabled Western democracy to grow and flourish to firstly promote corporate closed-ness and then ensure that it prevails in our modern world.

I propose that it originated in Europe at the start of the Industrial Revolution – late 18^th or early 19^th centuries, and has been pursued vigorously, through our political, economic, social, educational and religious systems since then by those who had (and still have) most to gain from it.

This unpacking involves descriptions of what I believe corporate closed-ness to be, giving a few examples, so you will know what I mean.

Corporate closed-ness is the freedom, because of the amount of openness in our society and economy, that allows:

1. Giant multinational corporations draw up international trade agreements, so legalistic that they are almost impossible for ordinary people to understand, that give powers to corporations on a par with or even greater than powers that democratically elected representatives or public servants have.

2. Instant identification of a product through its logo – the logo being so familiar worldwide that it can be recognised by, for example, a person like me even if it is written in Cyrillic or Arabic characters. I don’t speak or read any of the Cyrillic languages, or Arabic but I still recognise the logos! Corporate closed-ness also exploits our love of the familiar or fear of the unknown, as we know that (for example in food and drink) certain brands taste the same all over the world.

3. A giant corporation to penetrate, with virtually unlimited marketing/promotion resources, the economy of a small country and swallow up indigenous companies that may be deemed to be competitors with little or no regard to the individuals or families affected by possible redundancies or the reduction in rights of workers that might follow such actions.

4. Ownership of vast media outlets, spanning print, radio, TV, satellite, internet etc. by commercial interests that very subtly but aggressively promote their own agenda – thereby reducing awareness of freedom of choice for listeners/viewers and consumers in general.  (Awareness is the important word here).

5. The pollution of our planet to the extent that, approx. 40 years after it became proven scientific fact, little or nothing has been done about global warming which is threatening the very existence of humanity in our only home, Planet Earth.

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So, in an open democracy, while we are free to choose, our ability to choose that which is good for individual, family, community and society is severely curtailed by the power of the corporate world to the extent that we don’t feel free to change that which we would like to change.

The corporate world promotes the belief that we have virtually infinite choice – and while in theory we do, in reality we don’t seem to exercise that choice for human-kind’s (which ultimately is our own, and our children’s) long-term benefit.

Part of the reason for this is what is good for us is not generally good for profit for the small number of people at the top who benefit from corporate closed-ness – as will become clear from the paragraphs below.

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Examples

It is always good to give a few examples of something abstract to illustrate how it shows itself to us, and I will chose some examples of what I consider to be corporate closed-ness.

Consider, in respect of 1 to 5 below, whether these examples harm rather than benefit humanity in respect of our long-term health and overall well-being, and/or who really benefits, we, the ordinary people or the top tier of the corporate world.

1. World Sport: Sport is universally thought to be good for us – so I’ll spend a little time discussing the corporate aspect of it.

Since its very early days professional sport has been used by the corporate world to promote its products.  However, the amount of money that changed hands was relatively human scale until the arrival of TV. (I will attribute this term to Kirkpatrick Sale, who wrote a book many years ago entitled Human Scale – a very interesting book on how to construct the world so that ordinary people will feel part of it).

The certainty of reaching global audiences of millions, or tens of millions, or nowadays even billions of consumers encouraged corporate sponsors to pour more and more money into sport to the level that it is at now.  Almost all sports, even our own amateur hurling and football, now depend on commercial sponsorship for their very existence.

Particularly immoral (in my opinion anyway) is the sponsorship of activities that are good for the health of children and young people by companies that promote activities that cause devastation to families, such as drinking alcohol and gambling and the fact that Governments who have responsibility for protection of children do nothing about it. As far as I am aware, and to their credit, sponsorship by alcohol companies has been discontinued by the GAA.  It would be great if other sports organisations followed suit.

2. The Motor Car: (I admit you have you be very open-minded to consider this one – but I’ll have a go anyway because as a cyclist it is a bit of a special interest of mine).

The human race got on fine without the motor car for thousands of years.  Now, a short 120 years after its invention, it would be almost impossible to imagine a world without it.  The combined corporate worlds of oil, steel, rubber and the motor industry itself have been hugely successful in exploiting our desire for comfort and convenience to market products that are highly dangerous to life both directly (car accidents) and indirectly (pollution that threatens our existence).

The motor car must be one of the greatest successes of corporate closed-ness ever! 

Why? 

Cars have destroyed the quality of lives of billions of people throughout the world in many different ways – undermining the integrity of towns and villages, destroying our clean air, causing gridlock (see below), raising anxiety, harming health and turning vast tracts of land into sterile tarmac. Building motorways and highways to accommodate car travel costs Governments far, far more, in the long run, than the equivalent public transport would cost. And we are happy to allow car manufacturers to make cars that can travel at more than 200 kmph despite the fact that there are an estimated 1,250,000 people killed on the world’s roads every year – more than all wars, epidemics, natural disasters, other transport accidents, and all other accidents combined.  (Imagine if a virus was doing this)?

Gridlock (and the usual solution to it) is a phenomenon that might help us in our understanding of how successful the combined industries have been in their pursuit of corporate closed-ness. It happens because too many cars want to travel on, or through roads and junctions that are too small. The solution to gridlock (in Ireland anyway) is almost always to build bigger roads and wider junctions. If someone suggested that instead of spending billions building bigger roads we spent a tiny fraction of those billions designing our cities and towns around cycling and public transport (say building sheltered, nicely designed cycle lanes and a wide variety of cheap and frequent buses) they would not be taken that seriously.

Then we would be dealing with the root causes of gridlock (poorly designed response to the challenge of moving large numbers of people relatively short distances) rather than the proximate cause (too many motor vehicles using roads that are too small).

Why is the common-sense, cheaper option rarely if ever chosen?  Is it because of:

The paradox of being human, (that is, the self-destructive quirk in our psyche where we always seem to harm that which could be of benefit to us), or, our planners/politicians bending to the will of powerful vested corporate interests.

3. Obesity in Children: About 10 giant corporations control the world food and beverage industry. They have virtually unlimited resources to push a high-sugar diet on children (and adults too of course). When countries try to impose restrictions on the promotion of foodstuffs that are bad for us the corporations spend tens of millions fighting for their right to poison us with sugar so that they can make more profit.

In a stark example of corporate closed-ness we now have a huge multi-billion industry promoting foods and beverages that makes us fatter and unhealthier and another huge multi-billion industry promoting various health foods, vitamins, supplements etc. that make us thinner and healthier!

Successive governments in developed countries have not managed to face down the power of the confectionery and sugar-drinks industry to protect our children’s health.

This would be a relatively simple thing to do – and would save the exchequer zillions in health costs that are downstream of the detrimental effects of a high sugar diet in childhood.

As I said about the points system in a previous post, Governments could easily ban advertising of sugar-based foods, and even ban the sale of some of them that are particularly high in sugar to protect our children.

And, while I’m on about food, is it not very interesting that it is only since bottled water became a consumer product that drinking a lot of water, sipping away all day, became beneficial to health. I’m not a nutritionist or doctor but surely drinking water when we’re not thirsty must be bad for us. When I was young we drank water from a tap when we were thirsty. And I have no memory of people being encouraged to do it.

Getting back to sugar, given the well-proven addictive nature of sugar-based foods, and the harm that they do to our health, I often wonder what the sugar industry has that the heroin industry doesn’t!

4. Violence in Society: Very relevant to this website is the increase of violence in our society over the past 50 years.  The reasons for this increase are varied and complex, and are rooted in many different societal and cultural factors.  One causative factor is the increase in violence on TV (and, latterly in games and other media played on what we nowadays call devices).

The corporate world of film and TV know what they are doing all right – they have been softening us up over many decades, pushing out the boundaries of the level of graphic, gratuitous violence that is acceptable on screen, knowing that we will watch it over and over again, as they pull in higher and higher fees for advertising more corporate products – all the while potentially harming our children.

If you have any doubt about the link between continual exposure to violence, and the incidence of violence in society, an interesting book to read would be ‘On Killing’ by Dave Grossman, whose research directly links exposure of children to violence in the media and the willingness of soldiers to kill in war.

Governments who have referendums on protecting children and bringing in mandatory reporting do absolutely nothing about this except (totally ineffective) encouragement of TV stations to put on programmes that contain explicit violence later in the evening, or ban children under certain ages from going to certain films.

6. The Military Industrial Complex: Finally, this is arguably the most harmful example of corporate closed-ness of all. I will not describe it in this post because I devote three posts to it in a later Sub-Chapter starting with this one.

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I propose that the ultimate aim of corporate closed-ness is to get us to part with money to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t (really) have, to keep us permanently in debt, and therefore insecure, and that, (to borrow a phrase from some reading that I’ve been doing) that ‘invention becomes the mother of necessity’ instead of the other way around. (I came across this phrase in a thought provoking and stimulating book by Jared Diamond entitled Guns, Germs and Steel.  Well worth reading if you are interested in the history of exploitation, colonisation and similar matters).

Another book (a bit older) ‘The Growth Illusion’ by Richard Douthwaite, is also worth reading if you are interested in the obsession that the modern economic world has with gross domestic product, inflation, economic growth, and such matters, at the expense of ordinary people’s well-being.

Richard thoughtfully challenges us to think beyond the world of economics and focus instead on what is real wealth – i.e. those matters which contribute to quality of life rather than quantities of consumer items sold.

Well – after the last post I must sound like a real spoilsport!

So what if we part with money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need.

And can’t we still enjoy watching totally unreal Reality TV, the money-sodden Premier League or Olympics, be entertained by ever more explicit violence in the privacy of our own homes, drive fast cars along immaculate motorways, or sit, stressed in traffic, for an hour on a journey that we could have cycled in 10 minutes?

And why should it matter to us that the top echelons of the corporate world enrich themselves as their corporations dominate the media, sport, politics etc. to the extent that they do?

All the above are individual choices.  And yes indeed we can and do choose all the above.

But the reason that I am introducing the concept of corporate closed-ness is to explore what connection it has to community leadership and child protection in families in the Focus Group, the subject matter of this website.

And in my opinion there are many reasons why it is very important to us (otherwise I wouldn’t have included it at all) and I will give just a few here.

1. The ethos of corporate closed-ness is profit at others expense – it has zero compassion and zero ethics in its dealings.  As is noted in the previous post, when I gave an example of the prevalence of obesity in children, it doesn’t matter if people who are harmed are vulnerable sections of society. (There are, of course, some large corporations that have global reach that have compassion and concern for others in their dealings.  They are, however, a small minority).

2. It strives to monopolise and control, rather than encourage diversity and appreciation of the wider talents of humanity.

3. Corporate closed-ness as manifest in the large multinational corporation depends on a largely docile, available workforce that it can hire during good times and fire even when profit is still being made – to maintain competitiveness – thereby in a very direct way causing poverty, debt, and hardship in families.

4. Corporate closed-ness, generally, dumbs us down [1] – reducing our ability to think critically about choices that we are making.

5. With, perhaps, some notable exceptions, its ethos tends towards manipulation, abuse and exploitation of ordinary people rather than encouragement to be involved as partners.

But most importantly – from our point of view:

6. Corporate thinking intrudes into the decision making processes of the Pillars so that that key staff within them adopt corporate type values.

This will be explored further in the next post.

[1]. On the surface, it might be assumed that dumbing down affects those who leave school early more than those with a lot of formal education.  There is a belief that education counterbalances the dumbing down.  This, I believe, is a false assumption.

Following on from the previous post, it is important to note that what I am referring to as corporate values are those of the giant corporate world, not the values of business as it is usually conducted by small and medium enterprises who, in fact, are the lifeblood of our economy (in fact, most economies) but who risk at any time being swallowed up, or put out of business by the corporate world, with (probable) general negative consequences for workers and ultimately consumers, as has so often happened.

It is also very important to note that not everyone in the Pillars subscribes to corporate values – as stated in previous Chapters there are many remarkable people who challenge them. However, in my experience, they are in the minority, and often plough their own furrow.  After all, if they weren’t, the world would be a different place.

Here are some of the corporate values that (from my observations) have filtered into the world of the Pillars.  I have 20 – which is a nice round figure – if anyone thinks of another one let me know; then I can increase it to an even rounder figure of 21!

1. Success will come from ensuring that humans are constantly competing, and compared with each other.  (This has unfortunately, also filtered into children’s education, as I mentioned when I critiqued the points system, and to a slightly lesser extent at the bottom of this post when I discussed STEM).

2. Preserving the institution is prioritised over truth – indeed, the institution must be protected at all costs.

3. It is better to cover up a mistake, (and/or blame someone else if something goes wrong), than to admit to the mistake and learn from it.  This in endemic in the world of the Pillars.

4. One way knowledge flow [1] is superior to any other.  That is, knowledge flows from one person who is an expert to another who is a passive recipient.

5. Things have to be done quickly because time is money.

6. Things have to be kept secret because knowledge is power.

7. If you pay someone loads of money the work that they do will be of a higher quality.

8. The bigger something is, and/or the more standardised the product, the better the service and cheaper it is to provide.  (The implementation of this in our Health Service has coincided with spectacular failure.  Can there be a link)?

9. The skills that technologists have are described as hard skills.  The skills that people in the caring profession have are described as soft skills. (I’m not sure what the relevance of hard and soft is when used in the context of work)!

10. Anger among the workforce or in the organisation in general, is a bad thing.

11. Looking good in the media is vital because it ensures that we have a good image.

12. Anger expressed rationally and coherently always trumps the irrational outburst.

13. Status, rank (and possibly money) are the most important things when it comes to decision making.

14. It is risky to cooperate and share expertise, work, resources, ideas etc. with others because they may be rivals. (See 6 above).

15. The smartest and fittest not only survive but thrive, and those who can’t keep up are dismissed as having nothing to offer.

16. (Closely linked to 15).  Humans who are needy have to be jettisoned because it takes too long to deal with their problems and they interfere with progress.

17. Ability to debate and argue is admired even if we don’t agree with what we are arguing for.

18. The smart comment often trumps the truth of a situation.

19. The term do-gooder has negative connotations.  (I smell the whiff of the corporate world mixed with disingenuous room values.  Surely it’s a noble and wonderful thing to do some good).

19. Because the working week in the corporate world is 39 hours – in Ireland anyway – those who support people – and are expected to be part of the process – who have the characteristics of the Focus Group are (usually) contracted to work 39 hours per week also. (See also this post)

20. And one of the greatest myths of all; the rising tide lifts all boats, an expression that links one of our most enduring, fascinating, predictable and beautiful natural phenomena (the tide) to the greedy and chaotic world of free-market economics.

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The corporate values above which abound in the Pillars inevitably filter down through the system to senior managers, junior managers, and ultimately staff on the ground, who often, though being idealistic and wishing to take a risk and/or be creative, feel powerless to differ from mainstream decision making processes.

And the consequences of this filtering or propagating of corporate values through the system of assisting families in distress and protecting their children include:

~ A greatly diminished service for families who need it most. In particular, promoting the values listed above to families who may be seeking guidance and direction in respect of their values.

~ Reduction in families’ confidence to trust themselves and over reliance on expert opinions.

And the most important one of all – and this is straight from the modern world of neuroscience:

~ To ensure maximum effectiveness we need to model, in our organisations, that which we desire in families. When we adopt corporate values, and we sideline, or even exclude those who can’t keep up or those who we deem to be making no contribution (or progress) we are doing the opposite of what we want parents to do – that is, to reach out to the hurt and vulnerable members of their families with compassion, understanding, hope and love.

To give an example of corporate values within community work, I note that in the recent past in Ireland, Community Development Projects (CDP’s) that had been initiated originally in local communities were, for some reason, amalgamated.

I have no idea why this happened – but I am fairly certain that there was some corporate influence.  What I do know is that the local CDP’s had a brief that people who never had much say in their destiny found attractive and while they may not have been paragons of efficiency when measured from a commercial perspective, they were largely inclusive of local people. 

I’m not sure if the amalgamated City-wide ones have the same sense of inclusion – they seem to me to be entities towards which the corporate world influenced Pillars are more favourably disposed.

[1]. I will use this term again and again in the website.  I stress that the word knowledge in this case encompasses our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions as is described here.

I find it interesting to ponder on how corporations have tapped into our desire to have a choice and, increasingly over the past few decades are getting us to do work that was traditionally not done by us, so they can earn more profit.

The supermarket is the obvious example.

Rather than handing a list of what groceries we need for the week to a shopkeeper who gets them from his storeroom out the back and then delivers them to us, as happened many decades ago – bread, milk, papers, coal/blocks and the weekly groceries were, or could all be delivered to our home when I was young – big business has tapped into our desire for choice to the extent that we are convinced that we are better off not only doing all the above ourselves, but also managing our money with no human contact, assembling our own furniture, filling our own petrol and doing several other tasks that we weren’t doing decades ago.

Another example is, of course, the automatic answering sequence.  Rather than employing telephonists to interact human to human, we hear a series of instructions and we do the work, and put up with the frustration when we dial a wrong digit in a series of 8 or 10 digits and have to start all over again.  And getting back to the weekly shopping, I bet no-one would be able to figure out the vast profits that supermarkets make by having bar-codes (where customers have to compare prices, weights and volumes, and then calculate accordingly, to see which item is better value) instead of individually priced items that was the norm up to 30 or so years ago.

And there are loads of other examples which you can have endless hours of fun trying to think of. But they are all very light and in a way, annoying manifestations of corporate closed-ness.

And anyway there are advantages for us consumers.  We can now eat tikka masala and pepperoni pizzas as well as spuds and porridge because we have a huge variety of foods from which to choose, from all over the world.  We can keep our money safe in banks and withdraw small amounts from a hole in the wall in a far-off country instead of queuing for travellers’ cheques and worrying about carrying large amounts of cash around.

I can bring this laptop almost anywhere in the world and it will work as well as it does at home.  We can zap our groceries through an automatic machine with the bar-code obligingly totting up each item quickly. And we can buy stuff on line.

(But no —– I can’t think of any benefits arising from the automatic answering machines)!

I don’t really want to turn back the clock.  I enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as anyone else.  And anyway advocating that social or technological advances are halted just to maintain some sort of traditional status quo which might be more human scale (there’s that term again) is well-nigh impossible.

But the reason I mention it is that it’s important to remember that the corporate world gains a lot more than the individual consumer from all the above.

In the next post I will discuss the impact of corporate closed-ness in respect of how it does real harm to our society – and in particular those who are struggling.