Customers? Universities and the market ethic

I remembered something that happened a couple of years ago. A colleague returned from a meeting about Freshers' Week* in which students were referred to as customers. If we continue the absurdity of calling students "customers", where do we end up? For a start, the Students' Union becomes the Customers' Union. Lecturers and Professors become Sales Assistants or Sales Staff. The IT Dept become Sales Assistants. The Library staff become Sales Assistants. Everyone in the University is simply divided into buyers and sellers. The whole complex institution of the University becomes a simple market, but a deeply dysfunctional one that lacks the opportunity of switching. Once you walk into this particular market, you pay over your fee, and you are more or less stuck, unless you cancel everything and walk away, which is your right. Indeed, before you choose a University, you are faced with a more or less uniform offering as every University is desperately comparing and measuring itself in relation to the others; never in relation to carving out a distinctive offering. Indeed, they are generally terrified of being different. This fear of being distinctive seems to be the first and most damaging consequence of the market metaphor. It works along the lines of worrying about "losing" customers to a "competitor". In principle, then, the market metaphor means that choosing a university has a lot in common with choosing a car park. It is a space you can occupy for a finite amount of time. In parallel with car parking vis-a-vis customers, the only way of exercising my rights in this marketplace ethic is to leave the employment of the University. If we extend the market metaphor, it falls apart. For example, why do we not refer to passengers, patients, prisoners, pupils, clients, voters, jurors, teachers, police, soldiers, tourists, migrants, refugees, drivers and cyclists, as customers? What is lost when all this glorious richness of the fabric of society is reduced to a series of mere transactions? The truth is that this has never been a zero sum game. The distinction between, say, Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University is real and important. They are not competing with each other.

 

*Fresher's Week, like everything else, has had themarketing airbrush applied and is now called Welcome Week. Where it was once a process of becoming a student

Review: The Muse

The Muse by Jessie Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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 I dreaded reading this book with its slapstick title. And from somewhere I got the impression that the author was now a comedian. It looked and sounded as though it was going to be awful. So I just downloaded the free sample to my Kindle and quickly read through it. It was truly obnoxious. Autobiographical, yes, but narcissistic, arrogant, self-important twaddle. And so offensive! I was appalled at the descriptions of patients as "bed-blocking fuckers". And that was mild compared to descriptions of female anatomy from an Obstetrics and Gynaecology Junior Doctor who seemed to treat patients as so much meat. It was horrible. I determined not to buy it so that I could avoid reading the rest of it. After a couple of weeks, in conversation about book club, someone asked me what we were reading this month and I felt a pang of guilt about not reading it; I read out a passage to her that was particularly obnoxious. She agreed. But then, I re-read the immediately preceding passage and wondered why I hadn't noticed the empathy and sensitivity in it. I looked again at what I had read and realized that I had ignored everything except the sarcasm and rudeness, having judged the book by its cover. I then paid for the whole Kindle book and resolved to read it. I soon got into the swing of it I found myself looking forward to reading it each day. While it was not a laugh-out-loud book there were a couple of passages that made me smile and one that actually made me laugh. His empathy for patients eventually shone through. I was constantly appalled by the conditions in which doctors have to work and by the dreadful way that management and politics conspired to continuously make the NHS worse, almost as if it were deliberate. It was an eye-opener. By the time I finished, I was glad that I had read it, but my brain feels ravaged and mangled. It is a raw and harsh book, but feels like an honest and frank account of what it feels like to work as a doctor in a hospital. Oh, and I learned more than I wanted to about female anatomy! Still, quite an experience to read it.

 

In 1993, The UK Government commissioned the Latham Report…

No, it didn’t. It is interesting and somewhat irritating to read this phrase over and over again in the construction management and construction law literature. It is a huge over-simplification, somewhat inaccurate, and completely misses the context of the events that lead to the Latham review of certain issues in the construction industry. 

First, as pointed out by Cahill and Puybaraud (2003, p146), this was a personal and independent report by Latham, representing his own views. Therefore, it would be more accurate to represent this as an independent review, rather than a government review of the industry. I need to chase down the magazines from the period leading up to the Latham Review, because my recollection is that Building magazine was campaigning for some years to get a new review of the construction industry carried out. Eventually, a group of industry organizations agreed that this was something that would be useful, and once they were on board, the Department of the Environment then agreed to contribute funding and support. In the Foreword of this report, Latham declares clearly, “This has not been a Government Review of the industry. It has been a Report commissioned jointly by the Government and the industry, with the invaluable participation of clients”. He goes on to say that this “is the personal Report of an independent, but friendly observer”. 

The full title of the report is rarely cited: “CONSTRUCTING THE TEAM by Sir Michael Latham. Final report of the government/industry review of procurement and contractual arrangements in the UK construction industry”. It is also of interest to review what was recorded in parliament about this review, on 5th July 1993, as reported in Hansard, Volume 228, Col 4: 

Mr. Baldry: I have today chaired a meeting of representatives of the construction industry at which it was unanimously agreed to appoint Sir Machael Latham to undertake a review of procurement and contracting arrangements in the construction industry. We want less litigation and conflict and more productivity in the construction industry. Sir Michael will begin work later this month and complete the review within 12 months. An interim report will be produced by the end of the year. Sir Michael will be assisted by a number of specialist assessors who will channel the views of their respective organisations. Where appropriate, groups of client and contracting organisations will stand behind the assessors and provide representative opinion on key issues. The review will be jointly funded by the Department of the Environment, the Construction Industry Council, the Construction Industry Employers Council, the National Specialist Contractors Council and the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group. It will be closely supported by a number of other bodies, in particular the British Property Federation and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply. The terms of reference of the review, which have been placed in the Library, require Sir Michael to consider the current procurement and contractual arrangements, and the roles and responsibilities of all participants in a contract. Sir Michael's objective will be to present recommendations to Government and other bodies about practical reforms to reduce conflict and litigation and to encourage productivity and competitiveness. 

So, after years of pressure from the industry, an independent review finally got the support needed to go ahead. Obviously, the participation and support of government was essential. But this does not make it a Government Report, in my view! 

References 

Cahill, D and Puybaraud, M-C (2003) Constructing the Team: The Latham Report 1994. In: Murray, M and Langford, D (eds), Construction reports 1944-98, Blackwell Science, Oxford, pp145-160. Hansard 

HC Deb. vol.228 col.4, 5 July 1993. [Online]. [Accessed 19 Aug 2020]. Available from: https://www.parliament.uk/

Book Review: The girl in the red coat

The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was difficult to get into this book. The opening Chapters seem to lack sufficient context and I struggled to get a feel for the story. A series of fragments are presented that are obviously going to be connected later, but the narrative was a little clunky. It was also extremely difficult to suspend my disbelief an eight-year old who spoke the language of an adult. The mother and the daughter seemed to have the same voice and that annoyed me quite a lot. Too many characters were briefly mentioned before disappearing. And the paranoia or anxiety of the mother, Beth, was rather too self-absorbed and introspective to be of much interest. The characters were not well placed in the world. As I got more frustrated with where this story might be going, I glanced at a couple of reviews online and some of the mentioned the “magical realism” that creeps into the story. I like magical realism in the hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I gritted my teeth and rushed through a lot of Chapters that seemed to move the story along far too slowly. I skipped along until I finally started to find it interesting, about half-way in.

I was glad that I stuck at it. The magical realism was not the colourful and vivid metaphor that Marquez does, but something much more subtle and a little creepy. Beth’s daughter, Carmel, had been stolen away on a foggy day from a book fair and spirited away to USA by a creepy old man who managed to persuade her that her mother had been killed in an accident and her father was uninterested in looking after her. He made out that he was her Grandfather. He had found out quite a lot about her, apparently from some of the things she had said when she had raised her hand and asked a question at a talk by an author in the book fair. Again, I found this rather far-fetched, but it worked as a device to reveal to the kidnapper some information he could use to mislead her.

There is a lot of emotional hand-wringing back home as the mother realises that she has lost her daughter without a trace. People do the usual things without much surprise, as more characters swim in and out of focus. Grudgingly, I begin to acknowledge that there is an inner consistency that the language and perspective is predominantly internal monologues, and these are crafted well to reveal how different our thoughts and actions appear to ourselves, compared to how they seem to others. So I started to get used to the differences between the internal voice of the main protagonists and how they might be perceived by their listeners. I realised that this was a sophisticated approach to the writing that was more absorbing than a lot of the superficial pap that gets published as novels.

In the USA, Carmel is encouraged to develop here apparent powers of spiritual healing. She is not really aware of being held against her will, but she does feel dominated by the man she believes to be her grandfather. It becomes less claustrophobic and more easy to accept the strange world that they have constructed for themselves once we get more into the nuclear assemble of Gramps, his partner, Dorothy, and Dorothy’s two daughters, who are a similar age to Carmel. As the story evolves through Carmel’s eyes, it gets more interesting and convincing. And the earlier Chapters now start to make sense. For example, when Carmel is going through the healing process at the command of Gramps, she imagines herself being inside the head of the person she is healing. This is just the same as how Beth imagined herself inside the brain or Carmel, looking out through her eyes in the first Chapter. And the maze where Beth lost Carmel at the beginning becomes a metaphor for the complexity of being inside someone else’s brain. Just as Carmel looked up to the sky at the beginning in the maze, seeing birds flying across in the narrow patch sky between the yew hedge that constructed the maze, so she got risked getting stuck in the maze of someone’s brain as she looked out of their eyes while trying to heal them. No wonder Beth thought of Carmel as her ‘little hedge-child’. This was because she sometimes looked as though she had been dragged through a hedge backwards, but it was intriguing that the first time she lost Carmel, it was in a yew-hedge maze.

From the middle to the end, I read the book avidly. The characters came to life for me and I enjoyed the fiction of spiritual healing being a real thing. I like the twig soup served to her by one of the Dorothy’s girls, as it exactly matched the twig dinners that Carmel had made in the first Chapter. So, ultimately, the structure of the narrative was revealed as an enjoyable circle as every aspect that was opened up at the beginning was closed at the end, coming full circle in a very satisfying way.

There was a lot of sadness in this book. A deep sense of loss runs through everything. Loss at the demise of marriage relationships. Loss of a daughter, loss of the estranged parents of Beth, loss of her friends and her future. The first half involves a lot of prolonged exploration of the sadness of loss and I found some of that a bit overcooked. The second half involves the transformation of Beth and Carmel into more resilient people, still desperately missing each other, but coming to terms with their respective sense of loss and making the most of their new lives as best they could. The climax of the book with the weird religious gathering, Carmel’s maturing into a young independent woman, Beth’s new career as a nurse, Gramps becoming progressively more unwell and useless, and the loss of the spirituality all round as the reality of the world finally gets in (police arresting religious extremists, ice storms creating mayhem, Carmel being turned away by some from who she seeks help). The cleverly sustained sense of hope throughout the whole story finally gets us the conclusion that must have been the only way to resolve this story as Beth and Carmel are finally reunited. Finally, the tears are for joy, rather than for loss and everyone is in a better place.

So, a classic story line, really, with all the loose ends tied up and some very carefully constructed narrative devices used to good effect. This is Kate Hamer’s debut novel. It will be interesting to see how she develops her style and approach to storytelling in her subsequent books. I like her.




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