The Past Speaks

As those of you who follow developments in UK Higher Education know, the British government is currently contemplating a hare-brained scheme a new system of monitoring and regulation designed to improve the quality of [undergraduate?] education in British universities.  The proposed system, which will be called the Teaching Excellence Framework if it is actually implemented, will involve a government agency, HEFCE, measuring and then ranking the performance of universities using a number of criteria. Funding will then follow to universities that do well on this system.

I understand that there are legitimate concerns about the quality of higher education in the UK relative to other advanced countries with similar levels of GDP per capita. These concerns have been highlighted by recent press coverage about academically superb British students who turn down offers from elite British universities such as Oxford and Cambridge to study in the United States. The Daily Telegraph, which is read by many people in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, ran an alarmist story on the subject last year. This story reported that more than 10,000 bright British students now study at universities in the United States and that they are attracted by the such things as generous financial aid packages, favourable faculty-student ratios, and the other forms of support that increase student satisfaction. The story also quoted the headmaster of a prestigious boarding school who said “There’s an allure about studying in America and having a broader, liberal arts approach with greater focus on sport, music and artistic prowess. It is a more generous vision of what higher education can be rather than the utilitarian approach we see in the UK [universities].”

If the British government wants to make the student experience in the UK more like that of the United States the correct response to this trend would be for the government to try to increase the percentage of GDP that is devoted to higher education.  (I’m not saying that making British universities more like American ones would actually be a good thing,  as the US student experience encompasses everything from great teaching at liberal arts colleges to racist frat boys in Missouri to crushing student debt loads to Mattress Girl to wonderful libraries to campus shooting sprees). More money would help. As everyone knows, the UK falls short on the higher education GDP table and just four European countries spend less as a proportion of national income. The British government could increase the resources that universities have to devote to students either by increasing public spending on higher education as a percentage of GDP. Alternatively, it could encourage private donors to give more generously to British universities, which would have the net effect of increasing the overall percentage of GDP devoted to universities.  (To his credit, a leading Conservative businessman Lord Ashcroft has given generously to the business school at the University of East Anglia).  Large endowments might allow British universities to close to perceived gap in student experience with the United States.  The British government might incentivize wealthy people to donate to universities through the honours system or  by making it known that wealthy individuals who fail to donate to universities will be exclude from social events involving the Queen.

However, the British government has done nothing of the sort and will continue to fund its higher education sector with a very slender slice of GDP. Instead, the laughable proposal contained in the recent Green Paper is to try to improve the student experience through a species of central planning. A vast and costly bureaucracy will be created to try to measure student satisfaction, which is apparently the best way of measuring the quality of education. (I would have said that retrospective graduate satisfaction, measured say three years after graduation is a better measure). To ensure that academics perform a variety of tick-box exercises, universities will be expected to devote resources to creating costly monitoring and reporting systems.

The proposed regulatory structure looks like this:

As Martin McQuillian notes, this proposal for a new bureaucracy is ironically being justified on the grounds it will somehow create a more competitive market in higher education.

There is a remarkable contradiction in all of this. The government is proposing a substantial apparatus of scrutiny, surveillance, intervention and interpolation, which will occupy untold hours of academic staff time.  It involves delegating new powers to the minister and to BIS and creating a new regulatory landscape that will take years to bed in. In total it represents a very substantial incursion of the state into universities, even if the paper insists that the TEF will be administered at arms length from government. In the name of creating a dynamic market the green paper proposes to build a glorious state bureaucracy.

Ranking systems (remember Consumer Reports product rankings for TV picture quality) do serve a useful service in any market economy as they help consumers to determine value for money before making a costly purchase. Rankings of universities, such as those produced by US News and World Report or the Guardian and Times Higher league tables, can serve a useful function in guiding prospective students to the universities that offer the best student experience. What the British government should do it encourage the development of a competitive market for university rankings.  The best rankings of university teaching quality involve extensive field research, which is very costly, since it involves sending well qualified, and therefore well-paid, academics into countless universities classrooms to do observations. For instance, when researchers at Teachers College of Columbia University and at Yeshiva University, tried to develop a way to compare the educational quality of courses across institutions, they sent observers to sample no less than 587 courses at four different universities.  Even then, there were serious questions about the representativeness of the sampling method and the method of evaluation.  My point is that while the field research needed to produce credible rankings of university teaching quality is expensive, the government may wish to subsidize the production of the rankings in some fashion. However, it should not try to rank university teaching itself, as such an effort represents an attempt to create what is close to a monopoly in the teaching-quality ranking business. Such monopolies are rarely good for the consumers.

The members of the European Business History Association have elected three new council members. They are Veronica Binda (Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University), Pierre-Yves Donzé (Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University), and Ben Wubs (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). Congratulations to them and thanks to all of the other people who stood for office.

AS: I’m forwarding this CFP.
Would you like to play a role in setting out an authoritative, academic history of retail banking in your country or a country well known to you?
Lafferty Group is embarking on a major project: chronicling the rise of mass market retail banking across the world from the early 1970s to today.

If you are interested in becoming a contributor, please get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to forward this web address to friends or colleagues – perhaps other practitioners or indeed academics.

We are concentrating on the last half–century in the initial instance, in order to create an online encyclopaedia. In time, an academic journal, The Journal of People, Money and Culture, is planned and a conference to develop the research further.

Please address your response to Fin Keegan, Managing Editor, email: fin.keegan@lafferty.com.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned the superb videos about its history that HSBC has placed on YouTube Channel, HSBC Now. (I discovered these videos by accident last week). These videos typically involve an HSBC employee travelling to a site and looking at artefacts related to an individual in the bank’s history who was their antecedent in some sense.

One of the videos focuses on the evolving position of Chinese workers in the bank. This video was particularly interesting to me as I’ve recently published an academic paper on HSBC compradors, the Chinese cultural and linguistic brokers who linked this British-controlled bank to the Chinese business system. (See abstract and link below to the academic article below).

In the video I’m sharing today, Eric Yu, Head of HSBC’s China Desk in Germany, learns about the stories of Peter Lee Shunwah and Zee Tsungyung, whose commitment helped the bank to earn the trust of Chinese customers in the 1920s and 1930s. The video discusses the challenges researchers face in trying to use limited archival materials to reconstruct what these early Chinese employees did. HSBC has a wonderful corporate archive but thanks to war and various other disasters not all of the documents we would want have survived.

Please note that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of these great videos.  If you want to read the paper I mentioned, the details are here:

Smith, Andrew. “The winds of change and the end of the Comprador System in the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.” Business History  (2015): 1-28.

Paper abstract: There was a marked shift in attitudes in the capitalist world in the 1960s. In Britain and other Western democracies, workplace discrimination became both illegal and socially unacceptable in the years around 1965. At about the same time, decolonisation accelerated. This article will show how the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation responded to this changing environment by reforming the way it treated non-British workers in Asian markets. Prior to the 1960s, workers had been assigned to ethnic layers, with ethnic Chinese individuals occupying the lowest group and British expatriates filling all executive posts. In the 1960s, this system was scrapped in favour of a less discriminatory one. This article, which is based on research in the company’s archive as well as other primary sources, will explore how the bank shed the cultural and institutional legacies of colonialism, which included the so-called comprador system.

Management and Organization History Cluster Winter School. University of York. Monday 7 December 2015.

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

― Donald Rumsfeld, 2002.

Towards the unknown

The historic turn in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) inaugurated nearly twenty-five years ago appears to have legitimated theoretically sensitive historical studies in a range of management journals, and has seen widespread use of organization theory within business history.

While the philosophical debate about the role of theory narrative, and memory related to method in historical work in MOS will surely continue, we have decided to turn our attention to new vistas, to continue the disciplinary voyage and to ask, simply, what’s next?

The purpose of this Winter School is therefore to identify, outline and discuss the unknowns (both known and unknown) in the field of management and organization history, broadly conceived.

What are the areas and topics about which we are ignorant? Why are they unknown? How might we know them? What new methods and disciplinary collaborations might be required to develop new knowledge? Where will the great disciplinary challenges lie in the coming years? And how shall we address them?

The workshop will be conducted via informal roundtable discussions. Contributions might include (but are not limited to) consideration of historiography, methodology, temporality, historicity, theory, sources, archives, argument(s) and interpretation(s), myths, paradigms, problems, puzzles, inter-disciplinarity, new empirical topics, public history and policy, history and the ‘business humanities’, or any topic which has the potential to open an unknown vista.

We intend that the workshop will lead to an edited volume consisting of short discursive chapters that continue and develop the workshop discussions.

If you are interested contributing individually or with others, or simply to attend, please contact Simon Mollan:

Simon.Mollan@york.ac.uk

The workshop is free. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

AS: I have just ordered this intriguing book by Shane Greenstein.

How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

In less than a decade, the Internet went from being a series of loosely connected networks used by universities and the military to the powerful commercial engine it is today. This book describes how many of the key innovations that made this possible came from entrepreneurs and iconoclasts who were outside the mainstream–and how the commercialization of the Internet was by no means a foregone conclusion at its outset.

Shane Greenstein traces the evolution of the Internet from government ownership to privatization to the commercial Internet we know today. This is a story of innovation from the edges. Greenstein shows how mainstream service providers that had traditionally been leaders in the old-market economy became threatened by innovations from industry outsiders who saw economic opportunities where others didn’t–and how these mainstream firms had no choice but to innovate themselves. New models were tried: some succeeded, some failed. Commercial markets turned innovations into valuable products and services as the Internet evolved in those markets. New business processes had to be created from scratch as a network originally intended for research and military defense had to deal with network interconnectivity, the needs of commercial users, and a host of challenges with implementing innovative new services.

How the Internet Became Commercial demonstrates how, without any central authority, a unique and vibrant interplay between government and private industry transformed the Internet.