Work Stress, Performance and Emotional Management A Review of Issues
"My suffering and my fellow-suffering- what matter about them! Do I then strive after happiness? I strive after my work!" Nietzsche
Stress: the Magnitude of the Problem
Stress, whatever it is, is a major problem. In October 2000 the International Labour Organisation, the United Nation's office with responsibility for labour affairs, issued a report which found that levels of anxiety, burnout and depression in the workplace are spiralling out of control. The study, which focused on stress and mental illness at work in the UK, the US, Germany, Finland and Poland found that as many as 1 in 10 workers in the 5 countries were affected. Depression in the workplace is the second most disabling illness for workers after heart disease. (This account is from the UK National Work Stress Network Newsletter.)
"Workers world-wide confront, as never before, an array of new organisational structures and processes which can affect their mental health" according to the report. In the UK as many as 3 in 10 employees experience mental health problems and at any given time 1 in 20 Britons is fighting off "major depression". "The self reported occurrence of anxiety and depression (in the UK) ranges from 15 to 30% of the working population" the report says. The result is a loss of 80 million working days a year costing £5.3 billion according to the CBI.
The problem is global. Something like 4% of the European Union's gross national product is ploughed into treating the stressed and mentally ill. Finland tops the bill - a half of the Finnish workforce is blighted with some kind of stress related problem and a high suicide problem but other countries are also severely affected - 7% of workers in Germany opt for early retirement because they are stressed and depressed and 2.3 million working days are lost each year. In the USA 1 in 10 workers suffers from clinical depression with 200 million lost working days.
Why?
According to the report the reasons are twofold:
People find it hard to adapt to new technology
They cannot keep up with constantly changing work practices
Since futurologists in great excitement tell us that technological change is going to speed up even more, while working practices are being changed at yet greater speed in consequence of globalisation the problems seem set to get even worse.
Before we go further however, we should pause and think about this way of describing the problem. The problem as stated here is people adapting to technology and keeping up with changes in working practices - the problem lies with the people. But we could restate the problem the other way round by saying new technologies and rapidly changing working practices are stressing people. In this case we would focus on the technologies and changed working practices and our strategies for dealing with the problem.
The different ways of describing and approaching the problem are two stress discourses.
The Stress Discourse
The ways we understand and describe issues is crucial for our methods and approaches to resolving them. But there is an issue here of who "we" are. There is an issue of who is defining stress for who. Managers, trade unions, individual workers and researchers may all have different agendas and approaches to dealing with the problem which is seen from different "points of view". Of course, as a layperson, when we know we have a complicated problem, for the first time we are likely to look for information about it and seek to understand it. Perhaps we go into a library to look for books or articles about it, or we might talk to an expert or surf on the Internet. In these places we find the media presentation of what the experts are saying or talk to the experts directly and/or read their books. The expert or popular discourse on stress that we find sets up a framework for our individual thinking. But if we pick up on the first books or articles we come across we may miss out on the fact that there are not one, but many ways of approaching stress.
As far as I know very few authors have looked critically at the different discourses on stress management, but it is, I think, crucial to do so, for they lead us to very different kinds of understanding and very different kinds of approaches. Three authors who have done this are Tim Newton, Jocelyn Handy and Stephen Fineman, who are all academics in the field of organisational psychology in their book "Managing" Stress. (Sage Publications 1995.) Tim Newton has followed this up later, in a chapter titled "Stress Discourse and Individualisation" in the book, "Controversies in Psychotherapy and Counselling", (C Feltham (ed.) Sage 1999). Much of the ensuing comments are derived from these writings though I have drawn some conclusions of my own and used other authors as well.
What Newton, and co-thinkers like Patricia Findlay, have very successfully done by tracing the academic history of the stress idea and surveying articles about stress in the popular media, is show that there are actually quite different ways of looking at stress, different discourses. They call attention, for example, to British trade union responses to stress, which see stresses as being derived from the work environment, from job design, from a lack of discretion of the worker at work, from contractual problems like unsocial hours, from job insecurity from poor relationships at work. However, this is not the most common discourse. In the academic literature and in the popular media there is a very different approach to stress which is predominant which, though often differing over details, has a number of common features.
One common feature is that it is the workers problem to deal with more than the management's. The articles and experts commonly talk about 'coping' with stress, which is not the same as removing it. Newton quotes a typical article on stress by psychologist Jenny Firth-Cozens in Good Housekeeping for 1992, where work overload is mentioned as a problem. He comments, "There is no suggestion in this article (or in most others like it) that you should see work overload as a legitimate grievance or say to your work superiors that your workload is impossible" (p 4).
Another feature of the common stress discourse is that while stress is recognised as a problem (for the worker) it also normalises it. Stress is quite ordinary the articles tell us. You shouldn't feel odd to be stressed unless stress reaches "abnormal" levels, which is when you have to get into your (individual) coping strategies.
Stress Fit Personalities - The Cult of Strength
At this point I think I would add some points of my own to Newton's argument. By focusing on how individuals cope with stress (which is seen as normal), and then identifying 'the problem' as what occurs when people are not coping, what this discourse does is reinforce a particular view of what 'mental illness' is. For mentally ill people are often defined as those who cannot cope with stress in the way other people can. In this model 'the mentally ill' are disabled by their 'lack of stress fitness'. It is this sensitivity that is defined as 'the problem' and not the stresses that they have to put up with. This then divides 'the mentally ill' off from the 'stress fit'. Instead of being united by making common cause about a variety of stresses, people who have had a mental health diagnosis are divided off as distinctively inferior beings when compared to the 'stress fit' individuals who proceed to adopt identities and ways of thinking about themselves which deny their vulnerabilities and susceptibilities to stress.
In various writings about psychiatric symptoms I have argued that these symptoms are only more extreme versions of what everyone experiences in everyday life, (e.g. see the article on Upbringing and Psychosis on my web site). However, rather than explore and admit this, most "mentally well" people instead prefer to emphasize their difference to the mentally unwell. Their wellness is identified in their self definitions as being unafraid of pressure, they are 'cool', they 'own their stuff', they don't whinge or moan but bravely face adversity without fear, they battle through. They feel the fear and do it anyway in a 'brave' world in which you name it, they can overcome it by strength of will - cancer, redundancy, homelessness, war, new job roles.....
However, those of us less blessed with such strengths are inclined to view the fear and frustration that one feels in stress, as an important aspect of human orientation and motivation. The experience of fear, for example, is telling us that we are in danger, we are at our limits, and must be cautious, perhaps we are out of our depth in terms of orientation and skills. It tells us we must consider withdrawing. To feel the fear and do it anyway can become a case for recklessness. Of course, to always give way to fear might be considered cowardice and disreputable, but we should remember Aristotle's notion that virtue is to be found in the mean between extremes - which meant that courage as a virtue is to be found mid way between timidity and rashness. This does not seem to be quite the view of Friedrick Nietzsche, the German philosopher, whose radical non-conformism contained an argument for recklessness carried to an ultimate philosophical standpoint. "If it doesn't kill me it makes me stronger" he claimed. He made the case out for the superman who ignored any feelings arising in weakness and vulnerability and who strove single-mindedly for power and then for yet more power. "My suffering and my fellow-suffering- what matter about them! Do I then strive after happiness? I strive after my work!" he wrote at the end of his "Also Spracht Zarathrustra." This inability to acknowledge limits and suffering meant a raving megalomania and from 1889 to 1900 Nietzsche was committed to an asylum. Adolf Hitler based his Mein Kampf policies on this same notion, carried his megalomania right through to the end. This is where the ultimate denial of limit leads to the denial of stress and to a cult of strength.
With Nietzsche the cult of strength might at least have a redeeming grace in that it prepares for the non-conformism that is going to lead to rejection by (intellectual peers) and therefore unhappiness. In other words, one can argue that it calls attention to the needed bloody-minded stubbornness that generates the necessary strength to carry through an unpopular personal work project. However, this is only to accept Nietzsche's case, that unhappiness should not be an argument against striving after his own work. But he wants to go further than this - to be indifferent to "fellow suffering" too. Where others are dragged into the drama, what typically happens is, that the rest of us, the ones that Nietzsche calls the Herd, are expected to suffer in the service of the superhero's work too. Typically this is because our betters take it as self evident that we should totally identify with their personal dramatic narrative, their mission. We are expected to assume that these narratives of theirs should give our lives meaning too.
Stress Fit Culture
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler was the ultimate example, but there are plenty of other less explicitly (and often implicitly) written down narratives in politics and business, where ideas become generally accepted which override and rule out any compassion or consideration for the vulnerability of self or others. Such ideas are viewed as unacceptably "wet" within the generally accepted culture. One then gets a "hard" or macho culture where it really does not matter, for example, whether you are a cop or a robber, because your real social status is dependent on how hard you are. There is no place in such a culture to acknowledge weakness and vulnerability, as this is to invite, at best, a condescending pity, at worse, hatred, persecution and scapegoating. (The sight of vulnerability evokes loathing as it carries the danger of reminding one of one's own fear and vulnerability, for example, of one's very first terrified experience of bullying as an infant. The antidote to fear is to be energised with rage, and thus, one loathes the vulnerable person as this loathing enables one to generate and channel that rage towards what would otherwise be a source of primary insecurity). In this kind of culture, stress becomes impossible to admit and therefore becomes impossible to do anything about. (The only allowable way out becomes, as with the Japanese hari-kiri, the most hideous form of suicide).
The Stress Dilemma - Why you can't walk away, the lack of apparent alternatives
This highlights what might be called the Stress Dilemma. Stress arises not simply in conditions where work is painful, frustrating or frightening - but where it seems that the stressed person (workforce) has no option but to continue to live with those conditions and cannot just walk away (get another job). A part of the stress situation are those circumstances, individual and collective, which reduce the options to leave, or, in which the predicted apparent and possible life stresses in leaving and changing look even worse and so not worth the risk.
To manage their life in a coping way adults need to hold in balance a coherent day to day and, usually, semi-routine, pattern of work, income, habitat and consumption in which they will have a variety of emotional and care relationships. Aiding them in this process of self-management, people will have more or less life skills, and they will have a general orientation i.e. a view of how things could be, including what might be described as life goals, values and aspirations for themselves and for others. Leaving work, or, short of this, trying to do something about work stress, will usually have knock on consequences for the other parts of their individual pattern - income, the ability to pay the bills and maintain domestic activities and emotional relationships (in and outside work), the progress towards life goals, living up to values etc.
Stress and the Laid Back Style - Pizzas, Work-a-holism and Net Slaves in the 'E' Economy
It is not only the adoption and identification with "hard" cultures that leave people vulnerable to stress. The evidence seems to be that some of the most stressed out workers are in the new 'e' business sector. Here the cultural vulnerability appears to be based in something else: an apparently casual, laid back, we're all pulling together, why don't we talk-about-your problems-over-a-pizza mentality. This culture works just fine in times of boom - but reveals its weakness in times when the high tech economy is in recession. In this business culture the firm appears, on the surface, like a community in which everyone is a stakeholder, everyone works and celebrates together and shares the same goals as missionaries of the new "e future" which is transforming the world. When times get rough however it leaves many workers defenceless against massive workloads. Such work cultures blur the distinction between the interests of the founders of the firms and the interests of their workers. (Interests of the workers here means an ability to self manage a life pattern that allows for age appropriate roles, experiences, growth, learning and creativity.) They end up working round the clock - with nightmare workloads in exchange for stock options which are valueless.
In this respect stress and work-a-holism can go hand in hand and become self- perpetuating. Employing firms can even take on some of the features to be found in cults and political and religious sects. If one works all hours one will end up having no life outside of work and all of one's relationships will be inside the firm. When one is at a loose end, idle and bored, and when one is lonely, the options for activity and relationships are to be found in yet more work. At the same time one's life orientation and goals collapse into being identical with those of the prime movers of the enterprise, with all one's skills and knowledge apparently of no value unless used by them. At this point, as with the political or religious sect, opting out becomes increasingly inconceivable and, as one has no life outside of work anyway, any amount of stress is then put up with - perhaps occurring in increasing unease and anxiety as one realises, albeit that one is unable to articulate it, that one is on a work treadmill from which there is apparently no escape.
The obvious fact that different workers outside of work have quite different life patterns, as I have described them here, largely explains their quite different levels of vulnerability and work tasks. For example, one person may survive a work task that stresses another person out because one has access to emotional support at home whereas another has not. It is this differential stress vulnerability which most stress management focuses upon - though often within a psychotherapeutic discourse.
Stress Management
Given this individualising focus on coping with stress what gets discussed is the stressed person themselves not the thing stressing them - thus their personality, their behaviour style, their coping patterns come under scrutiny.
For example a host of companies now offer stress counselling. Take, for example, the Post Office: "The Post Office has attempted to provide a service whereby the clients can be guided to discover or create within themselves the capacity to cope more effectively with their present problems, and ideally, with future problems." Often such counselling is aimed to clear the way for productivity improvements and, to this end, the methodology pressed into service by the employer's counsellors is that of psychoanalysis. What happens is that 'the presented problem' (grievance or stress) coming from the worker is not taken by the counsellor at face value as the real thing. Instead this presented problem is taken as s sign pointing to a deeper "underlying issue", often arising in childhood. Indeed for the employer, the problem is not the grievance at all, but the lack of acceptance or 'maladaption' of the worker. The counsellor helps the worker redefine what the problem is by finding other reasons why they may have got so upset about the presented problem.
The counselling often has many of the functions of a confessional. The worker reveals all to a counsellor they do not know, but who is actually a representative of management interests, lets out "irrational frustration" (emotional ventilation) and is counselled into different ways of interpreting their own feelings. This keeps emotional expression at work "off stage" in the counselling confessional and privatises it. The consequences for industrial relations in this regard could not be more clear, and were not lost on the earliest exponents of these stress relief approaches. As Newton et al. put it, "After all, if employees did openly express their feelings of anger, distress, upset or frustration in the workplace, they might be more likely to notice the commonality among their feelings, and even express collective grievances in relation to them." (p. 108)
What then gets blinded out are the social and power relations creating the stresses. Moreover, the process that would lead to a collective organisation to do something about the common problems is short-circuited. "Since stress is a product of the individual, the solution to the "stress problem" is also reliant on the individual rather than social/collective intervention."(p. 7) Never mind the fact that at Hawthorne, for example, no less than two thirds of the workforce were counselled out of their maladjustments.....
Naturalising Stress
In these discourses stress is also naturalised. The story goes that in the early days of humanity, when we had to go hunting and look out for the danger of sabre toothed tigers, we were equipped with a fight or flight mechanism which pumps adrenalin when we are aroused to help us survive. This biological response to stress is still with us to be triggered, even though, of course, the modern office is nothing like as threatening and dangerous as the bad old days in primitive society.
What is thereby subtly conveyed is an implied inappropriateness of stress responses. In fact, of course, anthropological evidence can find "primitive" societies whose social relationships are every bit as complex as the modern corporate office. Also, for example, many subsistence based tribal peoples, (e.g. in remote parts of India) work nothing like a 5 day week and spend a lot of the week socialising. There are good reasons to believe therefore that many earlier societies were often a good deal less stressful than our own! For example, workers prior to the discipline imposed during the industrial revolution would habitually start the working week on Tuesday. It was very common for labourers who earned a bit more than their usual pittance to enjoy their extra income in leisure (and alcohol) rather than rushing to the shops or saving up - i.e. they just didn't go in to work if they could afford not to (E J Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 1968, pp 66-68).
Emotion at home and emotion at work
Another crucial feature of the stress discourse is that it uses a different language and implies different understandings and responses from those used to describe emotion in domestic and personal relationship settings. To say that stress is the triggering of the body's fight or flight response is to say that stress is anger and/or fear. Anxiety is the clinical term for chronic fear.
Of course there used to be a statement that feelings were not to be displayed in front of the children, but nowadays the popular discourse and consensus about emotionality at home is that feelings are 'better out than in'. You need to be in touch with your feelings, and emotional relationships are about working with them together. Of course, therapists do not exhort enraged people to beat up those they identify as sources of frustration at home, but there is a greater tendency to identify domestic and personal emotional relationships as those in which feelings and emotions are appropriately expressed, including angry ones. It is people who suppress awareness of their angry feelings and do not express and work with them that finally end up losing control of themselves and killing people.
However in work a very different set of rules applies. In work there is almost always an expectation that people will not express their feelings. There are expectations of 'civility'. Give way to feelings of anger at work and one is liable to be subjected to instant dismissal. In work stress there is therefore an added dimension - the demand that one bottles up feeling. This is either damaging in the way one has to struggle to contain feelings or in the way in which one begins to lose touch with what one really does feel as one identifies more and more with the 'mask' of emotion as required by one's employer. Stress therefore arises as part of the implicit and explicit emotional management that goes on at work.
In a wonderfully graphical passage Newton draws this out:
"Stress discourse and practice appear as useful aids in ensuring that employees show appropriate civility and keep their cool. And stress writers rarely make any serious attempt to challenge emotional codes. For example, they do not tend to suggest that part of the problem of stress is that individuals are expected to maintain a tight emotional control at work. Whilst they may argue that stress should not be taboo, they do not generally argue for any radical alternatives - for example, that people should ventilate their feelings at work, that employees should be encouraged to share their feelings openly, or, (worst of all perhaps) that they should organise their grievances collectively. Part of the problem is that challenging tacit emotional codes also means thinking about power relations...a subject that stress discourse rather studiously denies...."(p. 75)
Sincerity - corporate style
Describing what it is like working as a air hostess one employee of a British airline (probably BA) told a researcher:
"You try saying 'hello' to 300 people and sound as though you mean it towards the end. Most of us make a game of it. Someone - probably a manager - said, 'This business is all about interpersonal transactions'. He was wrong. It's all about bullshit. If life is a cabaret this is a bloody circus." (Hopfl H. 1991 Nice Work Jim! Dissonance and emotional labour in a management development programme. Paper to 5th European Congress on Psychology of Work and Organisation, Rouen.)
In fact the entire world of work is structurally based on repeated demands that people hold back or act in ways contrary to their underlying feelings. Because "the customer is always right" and must be flattered and cosseted to ensure that they come back, employees are now routinely expected to feel well disposed towards people no matter how obnoxious they are. Newton follows the seminal work of Hochschild (The Managed Heart, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983) and calls this "emotional labour" and it is interesting that while therapists are busy telling us that emotional and mental health involves being clear about your real feelings, and being able to express them to negotiate your relationships, corporations in the pursuit of shareholder profits are expecting people to lie about their feelings, including to themselves. Newton quotes a study where cashiers at 6 major UK supermarkets are encouraged to smile "all the time and note that the customer is always right". The ability to maintain this emotional labour is monitored in a variety of ways, such as through supervisors 'who have a chat' when they detect that 'a check out operator is not smiling or even putting on a false smile'. In the UK, MacDonald's Restaurants uses a counter staff 'observation check list' which rates staff to whether 'there is a smile'; 'greeting is pleasant, audible and sincere'; 'looks customers in the eyes', 'there is always a thank you' and 'some pleasant parting comment is used and asks for repeat business sincerely." (Tim Newton and Patricia Findlay, Playing God. The Performance of Appraisal, Human Resource Management Journal Vol 6. No3.) In MacDonald's Hamburger University managers are instructed to ensure 'all American traits' are displayed by counter staff, namely, "Sincerity, enthusiasm, confidence and a sense of humour'. Disney world have a very similar policy.
What Hochschild, Newton and others show is how damaging this can be. The people who cope best are those who know that they are acting and develop a degree of cynicism - but this is itself emotionally costly, and when job demands are very intense the ability to act becomes very difficult. Another wonderful quote expresses this very well,
"A young businessman said to a flight attendant, 'Why aren't you smiling?' She put her tray on the food cart and said, 'I'll tell you what. You smile first, then I'll smile.' The businessman smiled at her. 'Good' she replied, 'Now freeze that for 15 hours." Hochschild 1983 127).
The people who suffer worse are actually those who take to heart the demand for 'sincerity' because they lose touch with their own feelings, and everyone loses track when others are acting - the very thing that therapists work hard to prevent....(except when they are employed as stress counsellors and find that people's real feelings always happen to do with their childhood or something else and never happen to arise as legitimate work grievances).
Who suffers from stress anyway - you or your loved ones?
The work of Hochschild reveals the complicated way in which work may have consequences for home and emotional life that are very far reaching and influence our very personalities. In psychoanalysis the idea of displacement covers such things as when feelings of aggression are aroused in one place by a powerful figure and expressed towards less powerful figures due to fear of retaliation. Scapegoating, finding fault with vulnerable people, to unload one's negative feelings on them, is a similar phenomena. All these may happen between work and home in which case, those who suffer from work stress are not only the workers. Of course those at home, children and spouses, may suffer as much from simple neglect. Amitai Etzioni, the ideologue of communitarianism, quotes studies from the US showing that parents spent 17 hours a week with their children in 1985 compared with 30 hours in 1965. (Quoted in turn by Will Hutton, "The State We are In" Vintage Books 1996 p 225.) Hutton draws attention to the explosive implications for the socialisation of children). One wonders how much it has fallen since.
Often people do not see what is happening until retrospectively. A colleague of mine who went to the doctor told him that she was suffering from stress because of tensions in her family but assured the doctor that there was nothing (i.e. unusual) at work. The doctor very wisely helped her see that the tensions in her family were because of her work. Even when she was with her family, like many of her, her mind was on work worries.
Emotional Management in the Caring Services
Very often then the resulting problems are picked up, sometimes at the time, but sometimes, as with neglected children, much later, in the official and not for profit care services. Of course, before those of us in the caring services become too indignant about child neglect, or about the all American way to sincerity, it is as well to stop and be aware that emotional management is occurring in all jobs where there are power and control. Work stress is very much a phenomena in the human services as well. Indeed the statistics seem to suggest that it is higher in these professions than anywhere else!
According to a United Kingdom Trade Union Congress Survey in the mid 1990s 89% of the safety reps in the voluntary sector cited stress as a major health and safety issue, the highest rate of all sectors. Education ranked second in the stress ratings, with 80% (1,459) of safety reps from the sector reporting it as a major problem; with concerns about rising class sizes, violence in schools, and the extra workloads associated with educational cuts and the introduction of curriculum reforms all being identified as major sources of stress for teachers. Union reports from members in the voluntary sector have highlighted poor management practices, bullying, and above all, the abuse of voluntary sector workers' commitment to their clients, as sources of significant problems in recent years. The TUC's biannual survey has been completed for 1999 and is now available. The Nov 2000 press release notes, "Bullying remains a significant cause of stress at work - mentioned by 30% of the reps who reported stress as a problem. Bullying is more prevalent in the voluntary sector (45%), banking and finance (43%), local (41%) and central government (41%).
To become a professional in the police, in social work, in psychiatry, probation, in religious orders, is virtually to take on an emotional work burden as your vocation. You don't work with concrete, steel or soil, you work with people and their emotions. All of these are expected in various ways to restrain or curb anger and/or to show compassion or sympathy where very different feelings may be at play. These are very stressful roles and, significantly, stress management programmes for such professionals rarely question the professional feeling rules or the power relationships in which those professions operate. With social workers for example the 'rational helping role'; the helper-client divide; the power and status in which the helper is supposed to be a powerful invulnerable coper, upon which the client can rely, means that feelings of disquiet, uncertainty and stress must be hidden and handled in such a way as to preserve the invulnerable persona of the social worker. What this means is that social workers disguise their stress on the one hand while, on the other hand, according to Newton et al, social work management often collude with sickness and absenteeism which is taken for granted. On other occasions social workers who actually cannot maintain 'professional distance' from clients because they develop genuine feelings (e.g. of protectiveness) get involved in elaborate supervision games about how much self revelation they will afford. Earlier I wrote that stress is particularly a problem where people find themselves in a stress dilemma which precludes an apparent opt out. In social work, nursing and other professions this is very much the case - because it is vulnerable people who will suffer if the worker opts out. Even if one gets another job, since the training is long and specialised, there are no other options using this training except somewhere else in the same role.
Sometimes, of course, whatever may be the official discourse about things, the feelings of workers who work with people are actually harnessed in the service of their real social role and what happens may be very different from the official account of how such workers should 'behave'. (A point which I think Newton et al. do not bring out strongly). For example, many employees have to deal with other angry, frustrated and frightened people in the social security field - and many end up feeling a generalised hatred and contempt for their "customers", emotions which are then used to fuel the enthusiasm for disciplining and checking up on them for the petty indiscretions that the underclass use to try to survive. Similar feelings of mutual loathing exist between the rank and file police and the criminal(ised) underclass.
Performance Management and Stress
Of course, we don't go to work so that we can feel good. It can be argued that different rules apply at home and at work because the organisation of our domestic life, and of our work life, has different purposes. The goal directed aims of work carry the need for performance control so that, in our pursuit of collective purposes, we can be progressively more effective.
New technologies and rapidly changing work methods are increasing and, in the normalising discourse, the stress is the inevitable and regrettable cost which we must learn to cope with as best we can as individuals. In the meantime what matters is increasing performance - on behalf of "the customers". In order to get increased performance what matters, in turn, is the continuous search to find the management methods that will enable the organisation on its "mission" to "pursue excellence', the best possible measurable outputs and outcomes in its work.
Good Enough Performance Standards and Excellent Performance
If one runs any organisation there do need to be certain minimal performance (and ethical) standards for how it works. When performance falls below a certain minimal standard that can itself be stressful for people who must work with the poor performers. If one is dependent on others, and if they do their jobs badly without good excuse, if one ends up having to do the jobs of these others, and nothing is done about this, one will inevitably feel angry and stressed about that. I know. It has happened to me.
When state or charitable money is put into a field of work there are justifications for measuring what one does against ballpark figures and trying to have some sense of whether one is moving forward or backwards in the quality of service. Otherwise one will get a bad reputation and justifiably so. But there is a case for 'good enough' performance standards instead of the excellence ones that will lead to burnout. There is also a case for recognising that in a continually changing world there are inevitably tendencies eroding the coherence of all joint human arrangements - i.e. that any management is building sandcastles that are always being washed away by changing markets, legal environments, exchange rate changes, colleagues leaving - frequently to the point of dissolution and chaos. Thus any saviour ideology of continuous quality improvement is going to need a PR spin to bridge the gap between reality and vision. And this lack of authenticity, having to live the lie, will then itself be a source of stress in working arrangements as one cannot tackle problems as they really are.
It is as well to be aware that performance management is one of many tasks for the management of organisations and at least one consequence of putting increasing resources into performance management is that one has less resources (time and money) to do the main job itself. The teacher doing the endless paperwork reports no longer does the after school club. Such losses of free time for discretionary contributions may undermine the very belief in what one was doing that was central to performance in the first place. It may be a source of stress because of this. Thus one can end up using performance improvement management methods which do not make things better, but make them worse, because by stressing people "in the pursuit of excellence" it reduces their productivity.
Greater Supervision leads to Lower Performance (The evidence)
The realities often look very different from what our betters tell us. One of the great ironies of this whole field is that the exponents of the ideological package of measurement, quality and excellence proclaim loudly about measurable evidence and yet the evidence if anything suggests that their approaches lead to a deterioration of performance, not an improvement.
The reason for this is absolutely simple and clear. When you crack a whip over people, when you monitor their performance, when you expect "continuous!" improvement and when you exercise more and more tight supervision of them they become unhappy, angry, frustrated and frightened. And isn't it rather obvious that unhappy, angry, frightened people are not in fact more productive at all? In quite a short space of time they become ill, their families fall to bits, they no longer do the things they did before out of good will, they start to sabotage surreptitiously what you are doing, they look for other jobs, they are distracted, everyone's time becomes more and more absorbed in trying to heal disputes and conflicts, they resent what is happening and they co-operate as little as possible.
In fact some of the earliest studies of work stress by the Survey Research Centre at the University of Michigan's Institute of Social Research found that "high performance groups were led by supervisors who were employee orientated rather than production orientated and who avoided close supervision". (Newton p.33).
The supervision that works is the minimal supervision concentrated on the people. Yet current trends are exactly the opposite. Are these performance appraisal systems appearing everywhere in the public services actually "improving" things then? (Whatever "improve' means here). It would be interesting to have some evidence. In fact they probably don't. For the private sector there is no evidence to suggest a link between the operation of a formal performance management system and improved organisational performance in private sector organisations. (Bevan. S. and Thompson, M. 1991 "Performance Management at the Crossroads" in Personnel Management, November: 33-36.) Also "appraisers and appraisees perceive that there are literally no consequences whatsoever for a good or bad appraisal" (Latham G.P. 1986 in CL Cooper and IT Robertson (eds) International Review of Industrial and Organisational Psychology. Chichester Wiley. This being the case these things being introduced into the public and voluntary sector probably will not improve performance either.
The Low Trust Society
Indeed they probably make things worse. Recent research on Teacher Stress carried out by Dr Geoff Troman from the School of Education at the Open University introduces what I think is a very useful concept. (Reported in the UK National Work Stress Network Newsletter). He speaks of stress as a component of a "low trust society". Troman defines a low trust society as one in which teachers now find themselves in and in which they are therefore subjected to constant observation and criticism. This creates individually experienced stresses, that are socially produced leading to a deterioration in relationships. There is a breakdown in trust because there is so much emphasis on accountability, regulation, audit and therefore an escalation of conflict. Just as with the University of Michigan research which found that close supervision around production targets was worse for performance, so increasing supervision of school teachers is making things worse.
The culture of imposition, loss of autonomy and explicit contractual obligation creates the low trust society. Troman identifies a low stress/high trust school in which there was openness, support, understanding, realism. For teachers in a high stress/low trust school there were alienations both in the workplace and in the home, in some cases violence and acrimony, the rewards from good working relationships were missing, there was a blame culture and a distinct lack of praise. All this undermined the collegiality of the school.
Bullying
It is interesting here to see how high stress/ low trust relationships are about the quality of interpersonal relations at home and work. By focusing on the culture of work places, in the quality of their personal emotional relationships, we can see that there is an intimate link between bullying at work and the other problems. For example, externally imposed performance control and tighter supervision is part of the pressure that pushes insensitive and/or anxious managers towards bullying of subordinates. Thus work overload or persistent disparaging remarks about another person's performance are examples of the form bullying takes. In recent years there has been an increased concern about bullying at work as a source of stress. Geoff Troman's research therefore needs to be seen alongside that of Professor Peter Woods, also of the OU School of Education. Woods identifies 4 categories of teacher bullying with head teachers being the worst and most frequent source. The categories are humiliation, torment, disparagement and work overload creating illness, low self esteem, negative trauma and identity crises. Significantly, teachers, nurses, social workers, and voluntary sector employees are the four largest groups of callers to the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line.
Measuring and stress
And yet it seems so obvious that having measurable targets to monitor performance against should improve things. How could one possibly argue against this most taken for granted feature of modern management? In his book, Newton draws on the writings of Foucault, to compare the power relationships of medieval society to modern power hierarchies. The medieval power structure was based on the ability of the monarch to terminate life (arbitrary execution) while modern power structures work through different processes. Social discipline and order is maintained today by the regulation of life through a host of observation and surveillance techniques. The techniques 'qualify, measure, appraise, hierarchise' (IQ scores; tests, examinations and qualifications; diagnoses; personality tests; performance appraisals; needs analyses etc). These methods of reporting on, and charting, the psyche and its products, have been developed by psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and social workers. As well as providing the concept tools with which these professions work, these measuring and diagnostic ideas are used by the population at large. They are internalised by individuals and form the language they use to describe themselves to themselves.
Now, irony of ironies, economists have come along and applied a model of competitive economics which subjects these professions to a dose of their own medicine - measuring up the measurers... as well as insisting that they in turn impose the same measuring process onto, and into, the community and voluntary sector.
One should not be opposed per se to measurement. That would be absurd. Sometimes new measurements can widen what is taken into account (taken into a count). For example, if we add different sustainability indicators ( like the number of children walking to school as opposed to being driven to school, or the count of wild birds), over and against national income statistics we get a different picture of "progress" (other otherwise). In this case we are taking into a count more things and we get a better view. Unfortunately, counting often reduces the view.
For all the improved focus and accountability that setting measurable targets and monitoring often gives, there is a counter argument. It should be relatively simple to grasp - measurement often reduces what is taken into account. When you measure things and make them into targets you are giving these things preference. You are saying that the measurable things 'count'. But in the process you often then turn resources and attention away from things which no longer 'count'. The improved focus at one place creates a blurred lack of attention in other places - which is where stress begins to occur, in the blind spots that our betters and vested interests don't want us to know about or look into. "There is no evidence that.." our betters say. Indeed there isn't, Because 'they' haven't collected any measured evidence and they don't want anyone to do so.
The measurements are on the things that matter to the people in power not to society's victims and even less when it comes to other species. The power structure has a priority view and a conceptual tunnel vision which focuses, not on overall orientation and feel for the whole, but only on what is measured - which is important to them. An illusion of progress occurs because resources have been shifted from non-measured things to measured things. The most important thing measured, is of course, money. Hobsbawm expresses this attitude rather well.
"Arithmetic was the tool of the industrial revolution. Its makers saw it as a series of sums of addition and subtraction: the difference in cost between buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest, between cost of production and sale price, between investment and return. For Jeremy Bentham and his followers, the most consistent champions of this type of rationality, even morals and politics came under these simple calculations. Every man's pleasure can be expressed (at least in theory) as a quantity and so could pain. Deduct the pain from the pleasure and the net result was his happiness. Add the happiness of all men and deduct the unhappinesses, and that government which secured the greatest happiness of the greatest number was the best. The accountancy of humanity would produce its debit and credit balances, like that of business." (E J Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire p 61).
We can hardly ask for a better description of current public policy - except that the people's pleasures is now quoted back at us as the indicators it suits politicians to quote and the people's pain quoted back as public expenditure and therefore our tax bill.
What this "calculating" attitude then does is actually render us blind to things which 'do not count' - the fact that failing schools are in areas of high deprivation with multi languages, the waiting lists for problems designated as non important which have resources taken away from them, the fear and discomfort of redundancy when people do not "measure up" to performance standards, the environmental damage that people have to struggle to get "taken into account".
Such trends allow a shift of power from local level discretionary decision making, based on a feel for the local situation, to decisions made at a higher, centralised level, based on the measures. Local decisions, which would have"taken more things into account", things which are visible locally, are replaced by higher level decisions which only take the official indicators into account. At the higher level of power structures, it is impossible to have the detailed knowledge for the full local decision. Power is therefore exerted instead through a set of general guidelines and indicators which, when applied rigidly, blot out the perception and adaption to local variations. The unmeasured local chaos, the stress, is not taken into a count. People reeling, and trying to cope, do not have the political or economic strength 'to get their concerns counted.'
It happens all over and in all sorts of situations. To use one example - the all purpose application form (e.g. for grant aid) which streamlines things for the higher level official into the narrow terms s/he uses to operates is, at your local level, a murderously stressful thing to fill in, as it does not match your local circumstances and what you actually do. Another example is, where social or health care workers are unable to help people in need - as they have lost their local discretion and must act to provide a package according to narrow definitions of need which their clients do not quite fit - leaving both workers and clients in a state of distress.
Total Quality and Totalitarianism - New Management Religions at Work
There is now a whole industry of "totally quality" anxious to increase the market for their product and world view, involved in measuring up things as part of new management styles to "improve performance". Whether private sector management consultancies or regulatory bodies, the people and organisations doing the appraising, quality improvement and auditing are often external. They are not around to experience the negative effects of their own influence but they do pick up a job and a nice income as a result. It is very rare that these evaluators are themselves evaluated. No one is asking, as they should be doing, for the proof that evaluator's interventions and their methods are actually improving things.
To ask for this proof, it can be argued, misses the point. You do not ask for proofs of religious belief, for such beliefs are actually matters of faith. And, managerial ideologies, like for example "total quality management", are very similar to religions in their styles and in their function in the (emotional) management of organisations. The word religion comes from the Latin word religare, meaning to bind, and religion is traditionally that which most deeply binds a society. In a similar way the new management creeds exist to bind organisations together and give them coherence using similar techniques and remarkably similar languages.
"Total Quality Management can be adopted at any time after executive management has seen the error of its ways, opened its mind and embraced the philosophy" the Institute for Quality Assurance tells us on its web site. "There are...several gurus whose influence on management thought in this area have been considerable....The wisdom of these gurus has been distilled into eight principles defined in ISO.9000:2000". After opening their hearts to the gurus with their 8 principles, in, one supposes, a conversion process, managements are sent up the mountain together for an away day or two. When they come back they come back with their 'visions', 'missions', 'values' and objectives. These enable them to exercise a unifying leadership to realign organisations towards 'satisfying all stakeholders' (what else?), introducing the tools and techniques that will "reduce stress, waste and friction" in the process of continuous (measured) quality improvement for "the customers".
Like any religion, we are assured that TQM is going to solve all the problems of everyone if only you embrace it, and pay the fee. The word "Total" in Total Quality Management means that the philosophy looks at the organisation as a whole. In other words, again like a religion, it has a total approach which takes into account everything before you start - including your stress.
By focusing on the culture, style and "soft" features management has tools which enable it to address issues of emotional management in this totality. One cannot create organisation merely by pursuing numbers. One needs an added dimension otherwise the corporations and public sector bureaucracies might appear interchangeable and anonymous with relationships merely based on the bottom line. This would never do. Competition demands companies have distinguishable identities and a friendly face. It is not only the individual employee that to be pleased to serve you - the corporation as a whole must appear to have a smiling face to its customers, to the public, to its employees.
Ideally one will get employees and managers to manage their emotions in a way that gets people to identify personally with this organisational identity. Here the promotion of the corporate style, the mission statement and values have their crucial function by creating an image of what the organisation is supposed to feel about itself. This is the function of the corporate identity which then is supposed to underpin everything from the little slogans on the headed notepaper, to the corporate donations strategy and the advertising images (which increasingly go together - what better way of advertising than to prove you care?).
You can get a deeper sense of corporate image statements and how they are part of an emotional management of management itself by tuning into and watching the adverts on the satellite channel for BBC World or CNN where business speaks to business on the world stage. My own favourite is the advert of the big man who flies off to a business meeting at the other side of the world and remembers to talk to his little daughter on the phone. This is an advert which is presumably supposed to be understood as showing the human side of the big important manager and, by implication, the company of which he is a part. However, it can also be read as a statement about how grown up and important the executive now is, a power display, arising in the continual need to overcome his own childhood created inferiority complex. To sum up the corporate missions, values and image statements helps the emotional management by creating a projected image of a powerful organisation, a world scale organisation and yet a caring organisation, an ethical organisation and a very rational organisation, one whose style is legendary (which may or may not correspond to the truth).
What is deeply worrying about this is revealed when we remember that the word 'total' is also to be found in the word 'totalitarian'. Totalising "binding" philosophies have a way of trying to make sure that nothing, nobody and no idea is allowed outside the direction set by the unifying rational leadership. Where it leads in politics is to organisations which, as George Orwell showed, have everyone's interests at heart - except those who cannot see the errors of their ways of course, because they have not opened their minds and embraced the philosophy. In Orwell's nightmare the thought police then work hard to make it impossible to have heretical thoughts (crime think) by adjusting the vocabulary - in our own time ensuring that words like "sincerity", have the meaning that the Hamburger kings wants it to have.
What remains inevitably unsaid, of course, is that the needs of the more marginal stakeholders in these totalising approaches are taken into account only to the extent allowed for by the "needs of the whole" as defined by management. The priorities for different stakeholders in the vision of the whole are inevitably weighted by the comparative (economic, social, linguistic, conceptual) power of the stakeholders involved. It is, after all, management whose leadership defines the overall mission, vision, and objectives. It is not the trade unions or consumers or public interest groups, even though these may be surveyed about management agendas. Organisational rationality inevitably always contains a ratio of how much consideration shall be given to different competing interest groups (in wages, work time, expected outputs, resources devoted to environmental cleanliness, etc, etc, etc). Measures have to be measured, so to speak, and unavoidably the measurement favours some more, and some less. This is partly hidden in TQM and other current management fashions by the adoption of the language of "empowerment" e.g. of the worker or consumers. Here "empowering" is given a hamburger meaning - it does not mean the worker being able to clarify his or her independent life agendas and using the organisation to develop these. It does not mean renegotiating their magnitude of their stake. It simply means being given greater discretion to pursue corporate agendas and targets as set by management, (putting it positively) or (putting it negatively) getting less supervisory support and being expected to find their own ways to meet targets (absentee management). Here again the language may seem to de-legitimise the perception of stress - for how can one feel aggrieved at being empowered unless one uses the words of a different discourse e.g. that one has been abandoned by the absence of management, absconding from their support responsibilities.
Globalisation - Working for Giant Organisations
What the reductionist trend to measuring things also does is makes them tradable and privatisable. In the place of the on-the- spot official, with discretion to exercise their judgement, based on a broad feel for all their patch, the common measures open up the market. They create tradable common packages of health, social welfare and education. So there are, in fact, two agendas in this process. By creating a competitive framework in which health, social services and education are delivered in measurable packages based on output targets and outcomes, the way is made clear for a wholesale privatisation of the health, education and social welfare sector, an agenda of the World Trade Organisation to open up this field for the multinationals. This is globalization at work.
Of course, the larger organisations are, the bigger the gulf between the top and the bottom of organisations. Bill Mollison, the inventor of permaculture, argues that 7 is the largest size that a work group can get which can operate in such a way as to take into account the feelings of all its members. In the vast transnational corporations, or the huge public services bureaucracies, it is impossible to organise things in such a way as to allow the senior managers to be in touch with the feelings and particular circumstances of all the many people who work in those organisations. These people are mere numbers, they are statistics. They are "Human Resources" to follow commands if they can, or be dispensed with if they can't.
We should be aware that the scale of business organisation in the era of globalization makes if difficult to do work supervision in the style of the 1960s human and employee centred approach. This might be possible in a relatively small family firm where the social gulf between employee, supervisors, managers and owner was not so great. However this is a long way from the giant organisations built up by big financial institutions and hostile take over bids. It is even more so when such companies have, as Will Hutton shows in his critique of the British economic structure, a very short term time horizon and planning frame, because of the lack of interest from big money interests in the financial system for anything than highly short term investments and returns, ("The State We're In" Vintage Books 1996). In fact, human centred supervision implies trust - but trust takes time to build up, and in many work environments the pace of change and personnel is now so great that good human relationships exist less and less to build human supervisory styles upon. The supervisor is almost inevitably someone you do not know and will be gone in two years.
Such trends have been compounded in recent years by downsizing or, as the corporations call it, "rightsizing". A mass lay off of middle managers and supervisors took place in the US and elsewhere in the early 1990s to increase stock prices. According to Kyle Hughes in the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought "The estimate of jobs lost from 1989 to 1996 range anywhere from 3 million to 21 million. The long range economic and political impact of the practice is not yet apparent". Yet is it arguable that one of the apparent impacts is increased stress. As global corporations get ever bigger, computer technologies have made it possible to transmit orders from the top, to the bottom, of organisations comprehensively, and reckon up the results of what is happening at the bottom, to the top, without the mediation of chains of supervisors. The elite group sets the ethos, mission, values of an organisation and gives out its commands - then it is left to those at the bottom to respond as best they can. This has been described as a split between command and response. Now of course you can describe this as "empowerment" if you want to put a positive spin on it, as I have already said. However, as LSE Professor of Sociology Richard Sennett argues, you can also see it as an absentee management operating on the principle of indifference. This practice, as he argues, has negative psychological effects. "For workers on the receiving end of the split between command and execution, what disturbs them most, I have found, is that they lose what could be called a work witness.... without a witness who responds, who challenges, who defends and is willing to take responsibility for the power he or she represents, the interpretative power of workers becomes paralysed... An essential quality of productive cognitive dissonance has gone missing: interaction with others in the environment so that difficulties, dissonances and differences can be renegotiated." His conclusion is that "There is a regime of power operating on the principle of indifference to those in its grip, a regime seeking to evade, in the workplace, being held accountable for its acts. The essence of the politics of globalisation is seeking to find ways to hold this regime of indifference to account. If we fail in this political effort we will suffer a profound personal wound." (Richard Sennett, Street and Office: Two Sources of Indentity in On the Edge, edited by Hutton W and Giddens A Penguin Vintage Books 2001).
The ILO statistics tell us that millions of people are already suffering 'profound personal wounds'. In the UK, according to the ILO some 14% of inpatient NHS costs and almost a quarter of the annual bill for drugs are swallowed up by stressed out, sometimes mentally ill, office workers. A recent survey found that a quarter of the UK population fear a "hopeless future"; 1 in 3 feels "downright miserable" and 1 in 10 thinks he or she would be better off dead. (Online Survey by Internet site NetDoctor.co.uk involving 400 men and women answering 80 questions to assess their emotional health.)
Of course, if governments are ever going to be able to act on this problem, they need first to question their own enthusiastic advocacy of these very same processes - as they are occurring in their own performance and quality reorganisations of the welfare state and of the voluntary sector. Inside the public sector, organisations are getting relentlessly bigger. For example, health trusts are merging and here too there is the expectation to provide "continuous" self monitored improvements in favour of "the customers" - although each year with the assistance of less resources than the one before to do so. Meanwhile we find that governments, of whatever political persuasion, have found it remarkably convenient to be able to use the performance measures to scapegoat, in turn, a variety of professions. By berating professions for their performance, government uses the statistics to prove it is working to increase standards and doing "more" for the electorate. Unfortunately, however, the resulting demoralisation and turnover then leads to a staff exodus. This leads, in turn, for example, to schools that have not got the staff for a full 5 day week.
The Voluntary and Community Sector
Let me not be too cynical! It is possible to have a passion for excellence. If one works for what one believes in. If one's work corresponds to one's values and life goals then one will work very hard to improve and improve again. Far from being stressful this hard work will be experienced as exhilarating and pleasurable and will not need a 'hard culture' or 'performance standards' to encourage it. To feel able to exercise one's creativity in this way is the very essence of good mental health. But the conditions for this happy state of affairs are that the effort is freely given. Likewise the essence of the best and most co-operative relationships, in which collective work tasks can be fulfilled, are that they are those in which trust prevails - because people share values and therefore practical goals.
Unfortunately, the very areas of society and economy in which there are opportunities for these kinds of work relationships to prevail are shrinking.
As Andrew Passey and Fran Tonkiss argue in "a changing operating environment - marked by greater regulation, competition, professional fundraising, corporate sponsorship and a 'contract culture' - means that voluntary organisations are increasingly governed by mechanisms designed to develop and maintain confidence. For instance, relations with the state are shifting from a focus on wider outcomes (trust relations based on shared evaluations of social good) to specific outputs (confidence relations based on target-driven contracts). A growing number of cause-related marketing links with business, meanwhile, is blurring the boundaries between the profit-making and non-profit sectors.
"Such shifts highlight the problematic and potentially contradictory relationship between the institutional nature of voluntary organisations, and their values base. We would argue that a primary means of understanding these processes is in terms of a movement away from trust to confidence relations between voluntary organisations and their various 'stakeholders', through institutional and contractual means. While a mode of trust linked to social values and to principles of voluntarism remains the foundation for voluntary organisation, its formalisation within institutions has the effect of transforming trust into a different set of relations - which, if necessary for the sector's 'efficiency', potentially undercut its resources of trust." ("Trust, confidence and voluntary organisations: between values and institutions" Fran Tonkiss and Andrew Passey in Sociology, May 1999 pp 257-274.)
The notion of "partnership" here needs a critical examination. It is now virtually compulsory that community and voluntary organisations work in "partnership" with private and public sector organisations if they are to get financial assistance and any recognition. This is the mechanism by which the larger swamp their much smaller voluntary and community "partners" with their different ways of working. The result is increasing stress because, put simply, one can no longer believe in what one is doing and/or one loses faith in (some of) one's bigger partners who are operating from a different value base, for different motivations, and with different methods, which one is forced to adopt. (I talk here of institution to institution relationships - in the other organisations one may personally know others who one does personally trust but they do not act as individuals). One is forced to adopt business, and corporatist, values and relationships and one is forced to adopt the new methods of working. The imposed measurement and contractual relationships in this voluntary sector field destroys it. The problems of increased supervision and low trust is that the goodwill on which things are done, when they are done voluntarily, decreases. In the voluntary sector many of the features of a low trust/high stress society are being imposed, often via local authorities - who are themselves impelled to impose best value and competitive working relationships.
Large parts of the voluntary and community sector are based on people's preparedness to work for free, or way over their hours without extra pay. For a relative pittance, for expenses and running costs, or part time wages, the state and grant givers get the gift of a lot of voluntary labour. It is a gift. Once you start measuring this up in return for your small grants of running expenses, once you start seeing this as the cheaper option to publicly funded provision, then something profoundly exploitative and profoundly manipulative is happening. It is not surprising, therefore, that many people in the voluntary sector are now very very angry, and very frightened, at current trends. It is not surprising therefore that they should be stressed. If there is one way to destroy the gift relationship, it is to insult givers by measuring the size of what they are offering - and then put them in a competitive relationship to one another, in order to get the tiny grant that paid their out of pocket expenses or the salaries of their support workers.
The ultimate here is that even voluntary work becomes stressful because public authorities, rather like the elite of the global corporations with their staff, start to assume that they can move around unpaid volunteers as their skivvies, without any consultation rights whatsoever. The very basis for a healthy civil society in unpaid giving to the community become unbearable - as corporate and public authorities try to grab hold of these activities for their own agendas and purposes. Earlier I mentioned that charitable giving has now become part of the marketing and identity-creation strategy of the large organisations. However as noted by Passey and Tonkiss, "A corporate discourse of mutual benefit should be qualified by evidence that, while business sponsorship of voluntary organisations has been growing by 12 per cent per year since 1994, this has not affected the overall level of income from the private sector (Hems and Passey 1998). In other words, business is shifting its support away from direct donation towards a model of sponsorship in ways which enhance its brand image without incurring any real increase in cost."
In Conclusion
"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well" Sheldon Kopp, psychotherapist.
I started this essay with statistics which demonstrate a huge degree of mass misery. In the conventional discourse on politics and state policy what "counts" are the national income statistics. Against national income stats performance measures for health, social services and environment come a poor second. Stress is conceptualised as a regrettable but inevitable cost of "progress" and progress is defined in terms of economic progress.
Yet other macro discourses are possible. It is perfectly possible to argue that "progress", as a macro discourse, would be better defined in emotional terms rather than income ones. This would mean that quality of life would be conceptualised as mental well being - to be improved by making stress reduction across society the thing that "counts". In this different agenda we would connect directly with people's subjectivity and see personal subjectivity as political. For years stress has been seen as that which we must accept for increased productivity but when people more and more choose to reduce their working week, or retire early, we are being told pretty clearly that many people are seeing it otherwise. They are organising their lives otherwise. Clearly, like the labourers before the industrial revolution, many people would prefer to trade in income and go for less stress instead. In this they are telling politicians that it is perfectly possible to have higher welfare with lower consumption because the stress reduction is more important. Life quality can no longer be exclusively defined in terms of consumption. It must also be seen in terms of the degree of psychological strain (or otherwise) to earn the income to pay for that consumption. Often enough consumption is like 'comfort-eating' writ large, a consolation for the misery at work. Trying to address these issues would also match the green environmental agenda of moving towards a low energy, low activity and sustainable society.
Important conclusions also have to be drawn about the organisation of work . Trade unions would clearly have a crucial role in organising around very different agendas than the past - focusing on the stress reduction agenda, and not in the manipulative discourse current used in most SM. approaches. Blanket prescriptions here are probably not very useful for part of the problem is that, as organisations get larger, their unifying philosophies of management, in fact, play insufficient attention to local and specific detail. This means that stress needs to be explored workplace by workplace and worker by workers - collectively and individually. The role of trade unions should be as an independent source of support from the employer to help both on the collective, and arguably too, help individual workers. The stress counselling should be a trade union health and safety role, not an employer one - and a trade union role here would provide the collective and individual focus, independent of the employers interest.
Individually workers need to be helped to develop a clarity about what their own life goals and needs are and how and to what extent these correspond with those of their employer, what temporary compromises they are prepared to make or when it is appropriate for themselves to move on and personal strategies for doing so. As collective responses, there are some cases where there is an argument that public services, and the private sector, need to be decentralised with greater delegation to lower levels, with more discretion to on the spot workers. Less reliance on standardised across-the-board measures would give a better service more sensitive to specifically different local needs. However the problem of absentee management also needs recognition - with supervisory support there for when people need it. To repeat, uniform solutions are to be avoided.
All of these workplace agendas would be helped by support for community development strategies which assist communities to develop their agendas and mutual aid at a local level, helping them to break away from the sometimes contaminating agendas of bigger players. The community and voluntary sector must work towards becoming a stress free zone.
Brian Davey
Voluntary Sector Mental Health Development Project
c/o 61b Mansfield Road, Nottingham, NG1 3FN
Brian@bdavey.freeserve.co.uk
© BRIAN DAVEY