tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11537111864483114312024-03-16T11:52:27.493-07:00Quiche straight from the BucketPolitical Science, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Hi Tech Poetry, Postmodern Citizenship, Critical Theory, Advance Guards, Universal Triggers, Neuters, Irk Tourneys, Dress Prints, Toblerones, Seaton Spotting, Intervention Materialism, Skim Writing, Nonlinear Intersectionalism, Constituent Geek Power, Recipes, Woad Agon, Praxis Dudes, Tachyon Farms, Attack Pluralism, Post BloggingLara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-10826987413949385892014-10-31T11:10:00.000-07:002021-10-31T11:27:07.860-07:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting (7)<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Over this series of posts, we have built up a pretty detailed picture of what the Big Four mean when they promote the “independence” of their assurance services.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The standards and regulatory mechanisms of independence are geared to the audit of financial statements.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The professionalism with which independence is entangled expresses a tension, as just characterised, between a bureaucratic rationality and a legal rationality.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Can this concept of independence cope with the assurance of CR reports? It looks on the face of it unlikely. In the late 1990s the Big Four’s involvement in independent social audit came under an intense scrutiny which effectively moved them out of the market. A 2002 report by the New Economics Foundation charged the Big Five (since become the Big Four) with “Concealment” and “Spin” in their social accounting work. Its authors commented, “In the long run, it is in the interest of the Big Five to see such [CR] regulation, as it provides a huge business opportunity, a fact recognised by some industry players. However, whether or not this means these companies are best placed to fulfil this role is seriously in question. The five brothers will still have to prove their independence and competence to comment on social and environmental issues.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><sup><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[3]</span></sup></sup></a> Assurance is somewhat different from social audit, inasmuch as the Big Four try to avoid presenting it as a certification standard, and tying it too closely to workplace inspections. It is nonetheless precariously close to certification, and the Big Four’s reputation as assurors could be lost in a few high-profile scandals, just as their reputation as certifiers of the SA8000 was lost. As Simon Zadek of AccountAbility sharply puts it, “They are not credible. And that is simply true.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Examining in-depth the pressures which independence comes under, in the CR assurance context, tends to corroborate this view. We can see these pressures first in relation to independence’s orientation to financial audit. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">At a very high level, we should be apprehensive that the assurance of CR reports is not the first priority of the ever-evolving standards and organisations which by default pertain to it. Here is a list of terms, loosely synonymous with independence but with an implication of political mediation, which do <i>not </i>appear in the IESBA Code: <i>neutral</i>, <i>impartial</i>, <i>disinterested</i>, <i>evenhanded</i>, <i>nonaligned</i>, <i>nonpartisan</i>, <i>nonprejudiced</i>, unbiased. The only term which could carry this implication is <i>fair</i>, which the document closely links with a sense of honesty. The term <i>bias </i>appears, but only as one part of a noun phrase containing conflicts of interest, undue influence or both those terms. Its alignment with these respectively economic and legal terms attenuates its political implications.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Moreover, the ISAE3000 and the Code are pieces of a larger regulatory apparatus which only partially accompanies them into the CR context. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The POB provides independent oversight of the regulation of the auditing profession by the recognised supervisory and qualifying bodies, and monitors the quality of the auditing function in relation to economically significant entities. There is no comparable oversight of assurance. Second, the professional basis of independence is placed under strain, by the necessity of dealing with the stakeholder concept. The bureaucratic-rational aspect of professional independence is thereby put under pressure, since methodologies for the identification and prioritisation of stakeholders and their needs, when compared with those for the audit of financial statements, are ambiguous, volatile and controversial. The legal-rational aspect of professional independence is also put under pressure, since the assuror is required to act as a moderator among a plurality of often contradictory demands. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Broadly speaking, the independence which migrates with the Big Four into the CR reporting context is being required to conform to a liberal ideal of neutrality. Rather unsurprisingly, it is failing to achieve this. How is it failing? Is there any hope, dear readers, of a remedy?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Let's talk about stakeholders. The term <i>stakeholders</i> gained currency in the 1980s. It is now deeply entrenched in CR discourse. But it is a notoriously contested term: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“In the hands of advocates and critics alike, stakeholder theory can be used as a basis for nearly any position that one wishes to defend or attack” (Phillips 2003:6).<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><sup><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">[4]</span></sup></sup></a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Let's not forget that the concept of stakeholders is not the sole property of CR discourse either. A division of stakeholder theory inherits the traditional commitments of shareholder theory to long-term competitiveness, but considers the good management of stakeholder relationships to be an important intermediary to this goal. This position is not necessarily amoral; it is typically associated with the conviction that the public interest is best served if organisations act in their self-interest within an appropriate legislative framework. The awful Milton Friedman (1970) offers an elegant and honest exposition of this view, replete with its characteristic exaggeration of the capacity and inclination of the state to administer such a framework. Various neo-marxist and neo-pluralist theories of the state can give more nuanced account of the likelihood that governments can or will maintain a regulatory regime that can justify the competitiveness-orientation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The upshot of CR discourse and competitiveness-oriented management studies sharing custody of the stakeholder concept is that corporations and their fiercest critics are usually quite happy to include the concept in their frameworks. But there is the risk that those interested in CR will consider priority stakeholders to be the most immiserated or disempowered of the corporation’s constituency, whereas those interested in competitiveness will consider priority stakeholders to be those who are most powerful – especially customers, suppliers and regulators.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Just as the concept of stakeholders is sutured together from two basic orientations, so is the concept of credibility. In the search of economic competitiveness, credibility is important inasmuch as consumer habits have begun to reflect ethical concerns. But in business ethics, credibility is important to guide the development of governance resources in touch with the needs of the disempowered. One small example of the anxiety which this twin character can generate exists in quotation from the Deloitte web site, “As the importance in and reliance of [sic] these [CR] report increases” (q.v.). The mistaken syntax suggests that the terms “importance” and “reliance” have been switched during an edit, a subtle shift in the priority given to the credibility-associated term <i>reliance </i>relative to the more generalised normative term <i>importance</i>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In a worst case scenario, an organisation could make only strategic concessions to empowered stakeholders (especially customers and suppliers), could conduct only superficial, reputation-oriented “dialogue” with disempowered stakeholders, and could authenticate misleading CR disclosure by partnerships with NGOs and CSOs and by commercially available social and environmental audits and assurance services from “business-friendly” firms. The state, private sector, and third sector could collude in continuing to exclude disempowered people who are affected by an organisation from that organisation’s decision-making processes. Drawing once more on Habermasian terminology, we can say that the credibility generated in such a scenario is pathological, that is, derived in very exclusive and highly unequal discursive settings. The consensus which is present is only consensus in appearance, and the power which is present is coercive and illegitimate, not based in discursively-accessible reason.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">So how much flexibility do the Big Four have when it comes to saying who or what is or is not a stakeholder? It is the reporting entity’s responsibility to identify stakeholders; it is the assuror’s responsibility to verify those identifications. Under the ISAE3000 alone, the extent of this verification is agreed between client and assuror, at their mutual discretion. This represents the greatest degree of latitude. The threat that the credibility accrued will be pathological is significant.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Where assurance is conducted in accordance with the ISAE3000 and the G3, the assuror still has considerable room to manoeuvre. The G3 requires the assuror to assess “the extent to which the report preparer has applied the GRI Reporting Framework (including the Reporting Principles) in the course of reaching its conclusions” (GRI 2006:39).<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[5]</span></span></span></a> The G3 Principle of “Materiality” makes several references to stakeholders, but there are no requirements as to identification and mapping (ibid. 8). The Principle of “Stakeholder Inclusivity” emphasises engagement, not identification or mapping. “For a report to be assurable, the process of stakeholder engagement should be documented” (ibid. 10). Of the four tests of the Principle, only the first relates to identification, and it only requires that the organisation “describe the stakeholders to whom it considers itself accountable” (ibid. 11). The other tests concern the relationship between report content and engagement activities carried out on the basis of whom the organisation “considers itself accountable.” The Standard Disclosures 4.16 and 4.17 (ibid. 25) reiterate this concern. The Standard Disclosures 4.14 and 4.15 require that the reporting entity identifies its stakeholders, and discloses its process for so doing and for “determining the groups with which to engage and not to engage” (ibid.). The client should therefore be able to acquire assurance in compliance with ISAE3000 and the G3, on the basis of a well-defined and documented stakeholder engagement process, whose outcomes are explicitly linked to other areas of the report. Its assuror need not consider the process qualitatively. It need not consider, for example, whether the process contributed to any long term goals supported by their client, such as those embodied in the UN Declaration of Human Rights or the Millennium Development Goals. See IAASB 2006:14<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[6]</span></span></span></a> for a consultation on the relationship of the ISAE3000 and the G3 in the context of stakeholders.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The AA1000AS (2008) reins in the assuror somewhat. To comply, the assuror must assess the responsible entity’s compliance with the AA1000APS (2008), including the principle of inclusivity (AccountAbility 2008:11). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">KPMG describe their use of the AA1000APS (2003) as a two phase process. Phase 2 considers whether the individual claims are accurate and complete. Phase 2 is a lengthy process of identifying and taxonomising material assertions. “This results in a detailed assurance plan (including a list of people to be interviewed and a list of the required documentary evidence) at corporate, business/regional and site level (if relevant), together with the selection of sites to be visited. The type and amount of evidence required varies depending on the type of assertion and the level of assurance being sought” (AccountAbility 2007:10).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Phase 1 considers whether the scope and materiality of the report is appropriate. During Phase 1, KPMG run their own analysis of scope and materiality. This consists of establishing five input channels: stakeholder engagement; media search; sector knowledge (e.g. peer CR reports, industry body guidelines); client knowledge; and prior year CR commitments. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">AccountAbility’s Stakeholder Engagement Manual (2005) and AA1000SES (2005) provide detailed guidance on identifying and engaging with stakeholders. It would be natural for assurors to rely on these documents in interpreting the principle of inclusivity. The AA1000SES (2010) Exposure Draft has also very recently become available as a wiki.<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[7]</span></span></span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Could the bureaucratic-rational aspect of independence improve stakeholder identification and prioritisation? That is, could the Big Four act as servile functionaries of collective goals, which are first generated in communicative action, in the thorough and comprehensive consultation and research processes which inform the AA1000 series, and whose prerequisites are laid out step-by-step in its provisions? The idea would be attractive, were it not for the extreme flexibility that is built into the AA1000 series. The AccountAbility Stakeholder Engagement Manual (AccountAbility 2005b), which is the most detailed in its stipulations and thus the most useful to a bureaucratic rationality, is a good source to interpret in this regard.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">AccountAbility (2005b:27) cites Freeman’s (1984) wide definition of stakeholder, as anyone who could affect or be affected by an organisation’s activities. The guidelines then suggest five “dimensions” to consider when identifying stakeholders: (1) legal, financial and operational responsibility; (2) influence (“people who are, or in future may be, able to influence the ability of your organisation to meet its goals”); (3) proximity (“the people that your organisation interacts with most”); (4) dependency (“the people that are most dependent on your organization”); and (5) representation (“the people that are through regulatory structures or culture / tradition entrusted to represent other individuals; e.g. heads of a local community, trade union representatives, councillors, representatives of membership based organisations, etc.”). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">These five dimensions are juxtaposed with a list, which is flagged as non-comprehensive, of suggested stakeholders. Stakeholders might include investors, shareholders, members, customers, potential customers, suppliers, business partners, employees, government, regulators, the media, trade unions, NGOs, pressure groups, etc. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The tone here is pragmatic and inclusive. It invites corporate policymakers to rack their brains both deductively within categories, and inductively from examples, to “identify” as many stakeholders as possible. The implication is that it hardly matters, at this early stage, if a few ineligible entities are identified; it is better to leave a margin of error and leave no-one out. Interlopers will surely be uncovered in the long journey that lies ahead: categorizing stakeholders, assessing their salience, and designing and implementing engagement programmes.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">But that’s not what’s really happening. The construction of an architecture of engagement has already tacitly begun. Compared with stakeholders identifiable under the wide definition, a great number of concrete individuals have already been declared ineligible. The examples of those who are likely to be “most dependent” are “employees and their families, customers who are dependent on your products for their safety, livelihood, health or welfare or suppliers for whom you are a dominant customer” (ibid.). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Moreover, the preferences of some concrete individuals have been multiplied throughout a variety of institutions. If I am an employee, a customer, and a member of an NGO, my voice has a threefold sonority.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The constriction and stratification of stakeholders is not procedurally mandated. But it is all the more pernicious for that. Any user of the guidelines who was to rigorously populate the genus “individuals or groups who affect, or are affected by an organisation and its activities” would feel gently rebuked by the guidelines’ abundant list of institutions. The user is communicated the threshold above which being affected by an organisation confers the status of stakeholder, not as a methodological point susceptible to critique, but as a prerequisite for even making sense of the guidelines. This insidiously communicated threshold is a qualitative one: the stakeholder is one in whom the effect of an organisation’s activities is discernible in a sufficiently coherent institutional form.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The next page suggests convening a cross-functional group to brainstorm a list of “stakeholder categories” (ibid.), now using a Venn diagram of three sets (again referred to as “dimensions”): “people you have legal, financial or operational responsibilities to”; “stakeholders who are affected by your organisation’s operations”; “people who are likely to influence your organisation’s performance (those with influence and decision makers)”.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Again it seems that those “who are affected by your organisation’s operations” is not intended quite literally, that it incorporates a certain unstated threshold. The authors have preferred the recursive “<i>stakeholders</i> who are affected by your organisation’s operations” (i.e., to identify those stakeholders, we must already know that they are stakeholders) over the consistent ‘<i>people</i> who are affected by your organisation’s operations’. Although it is possible to think of entities who would not be significantly affected by an organization, despite its legal, financial or operational responsibilities to them, or despite their likelihood of influencing its performance, they are exotic counterexamples. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The switch to three dimensions, from five, seems to have been influenced by Mitchell et al.’s (1997) Venn classification based on urgency, power and legitimacy respectively (although they are not cited). “Urgency” in Mitchell et al.’s usage conveys both a temporal dimension and intensity of privation. The correlation of “urgency” with “stakeholders who are affected by your organisation’s operations” tends to support the idea that the wide definition of stakeholders is treated as a locus of overarching ethical motivation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The experience of CR reporting in the 1970s, in which disclosures (e.g., on philanthropic activities) frequently failed to address critics’ concerns (e.g., supply chain ethics), damaged the legitimacy of corporate control of reporting agendas. Consequently the AA1000AS (2008) and the G3 guidelines require that the assuror provide a critical view of the scope and materiality of a CR report, which has as its basis the informational needs of the responsible entity’s stakeholders. Market forces recapitulate this stakeholder-centrism. What organisations want from assurance, as Big Four marketing language unequivocally demonstrates, is credibility in the eyes of stakeholders. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Is clarity and consistency important here, or is it a secondary matter compared with choosing and interpreting criteria of stakeholder identification and prioritisation? With regard to the role of the independent assuror, clarity is indispensable, since it performs the basic competence of recognising the constituents among whom it is supposed to be neutral. This competence should be seen as conceptually prior to any actual project of neutrality.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">The terms <i>stakeholders</i>, and <i>stakeholder groups</i>, <i>report users</i>, <i>identification</i>, <i>salience</i>, <i>priority</i>, <i>mapping</i>, and <i>engagement</i>, are all invested with a confusion that does not really conform to any one linguistic template. It's just all over the show. Nevertheless there is a sort of pattern to this confusion, of which AccountAbility (2005b) is exemplary. Its most consistent feature is a neglect of basic ontology of stakeholders. The wide variety of approaches to stakeholder identification and prioritisation has given rise to a substantial second-order literature, which classifies and compares different approaches and their rationales. See for example Steurer (2006). Rather surprisingly, what this literature tends <i>not </i>to address is the tendency to underspecify, within an individual approach, whether the stakeholders identified under its criteria are persons, groups, categories (e.g. “suppliers”), representative institutions, hybrids of these possibilities, or something else; as the analysis of AccountAbility (2007b) indicates, there can be opportunistic shifting among these possibilities.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Could the legal-rational aspect of professional independence improve stakeholder identification and prioritisation? Palazzo and Scherer (2006)<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><sup><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">[8]</span></sup></sup></a> argue that the basis for corporate legitimacy must shift from legal compliance and stable social expectations to public discursive networks. This certainly seems to be part of the Big Four’s self-perception. At an assurance discussion session organized by KPMG in Amsterdam, 4 October 2006, Simon Zadek spoke in favour of the use of stakeholder panels to monitor CR reports, instead of assurance by the Big Four. Part of Zadek’s argument was the Big Four’s “difficulty with grappling with the question of ‘what should count?’, rather than ‘are the numbers right?’”. The response of Wim Bartels, head of KPMG Sustainability, was to advocate a collaborative approach. “We talk to stakeholders, and we know what’s going on in the world. At the same time I can say I agree, because we are not the ones who decide on what’s material or not, what’s important or not, what should go in or not. That’s not our thing.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">[9]</span></span></span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The International Accounting Standards Board (“IASB”) defines materiality, in the audit context, as follows: “Information is material if its omission or misstatement could influence the economic decision of users taken on the basis of the financial statements. Materiality depends on the size of the item or error judged in the particular circumstances of its omission or misstatement. Thus, materiality provides a threshold or cut-off point rather than being a primary qualitative characteristic which information must have if it is to be useful.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><sup><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">[10]</span></sup></sup></a> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In this definition, judgements about materiality are to be founded on the rationality characteristic of the economic sphere. One might anticipate that for assurance of CR report, judgements about materiality should be steered by consideration of rational decisions characteristic of the spheres of social and environmental governance. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Indeed, the G3 defines the Reporting Principle of materiality as follows: “The information in a report should cover topics and Indicators that reflect the organization’s significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, or that would substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders” (GRI 2006:8). The G3 definition contains both elements – the triple bottom line, and the appeal to the decisions of users – but it stops short of combining them. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">This is unsurprising, since it is difficult to imagine models of “socially rational” or “environmentally rational” decision-makers which would not be torn apart by the plurality of norms, dispositions and interests constitutive of the former, and by the ideological conflict for the custody of the latter.<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><sup><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt;">[11]</span></sup></sup></a> Economic rationality, by contrast, can suppose a comparatively harmonious orientation towards the highest profits at the lowest risks. Even those who do not share this orientation will promptly recognize it as the basis on which they are addressed as economic agents. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The AA1000AS (2008) approach to materiality is entirely stakeholder-centric. But the legal rationality which characterises the Big Four’s professional independence is ill-equipped to deal with stakeholder conflicts. The lifeworld competencies upon which it draw concern the neutralisation of conflicts of interest, by appropriate escalation into a regulatory architecture, which with due consideration of liability may put in place safeguards or give the practitioner permission to break off the engagement. But the CR context requires that different interests be synthesised deliberatively, and resolved in favour of the public interest, not segregated from one another or backed away from under the imperative of undue liability.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The reluctance to recognise that there can even in principle exist necessary trade-offs between stakeholder interests, or between stakeholder interests and long-term economic competitiveness, is visible in the Big Four’s codes of conduct.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">These documents tend to repeat themselves, and to make use of overlapping categories and multiple, superimposed categorisation-schemes. They like to draw attention to affirmative relationships between various values, principles or goals, but they avoid explicit hierarchies, and the discrimination of ends and means. Various ethical virtues are presented as mutually supportive, and supportive of employee happiness, firm reputation, demand for the firm's services. The codes tend to assume that ethical courses of action will never come into conflict, and will seldom conflict with business interests narrowly defined, either of the firm or its clients. They thematize competitiveness as a manageable threat to ethics, but also as ethical in itself. They have a mixed emphasis on ethical disposition as a property of individuals and as a property of procedures.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">When making a decision or following a directive, the employee should ask questions such as “Does my action comply with the spirit and letter of the law?”; “Would I feel confident that I could explain my decision if it were made public?”; “Does my decision reflect the right thing to do?” etc. (Other firms include similar lists. Cf. Deloitte<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[12]</span></span></span></a> pg. 8, which includes “Would I be unwilling or embarrassed to tell my family, friends, or co-workers?”, and E&Y, which includes “Am I treating others the way I expect others to treat me?”). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Viewed sympathetically, the variety and vagueness of such questions may reflect KPMG's recognition that its employees' ethics must involve more than purposive-instrumental rationality oriented to compliance. KPMG rather relies on legal rationality, which includes normative faculties which employees bring with them from a variety of sociocultural backgrounds. With its sequence of suggestive, overlapping questions, the code seeks to activate and legitimate these faculties. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Viewed unsympathetically, such questions are on the one hand, formulated with such generality that they make an impractical basis for action, and on the other endorse an overly-narrow idea of ethics. Specifically, the only critical dimension endorsed is self-criticism. This dovetails elegantly with the approach to independence which requires the escalation of individual doubts to a regulatory architecture capable of making an assessment based around liability and installing safeguards or disengaging. One directive even requires consistency with “ethical or professional standards” (my emphasis). The connotation is not, as a very literal reader could think, that either professional <i>or </i>ethical standards will do, even if professional standards are unethical. But it does demonstrate the ease with which the code's authors move between “professional conduct” and “the right thing to do”. The expectation that these concepts approximate each other means that the ethical employee is one who rigorously self-checks against prevailing norms, not one who is critical of those norms themselves.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The reluctance to acknowledge the possibility of necessary trade-offs is not confined to the Big Four. It is a pervasive attitude in business, and even in government. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The DEFRA web site comments, “Good environmental performance makes good business sense. Environmental risks and uncertainties impact to some extent on all companies, and affect investment decisions, consumer behavior and Government policy.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[13]</span></span></span></a> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Drawing on our earlier analysis of legal rationality, and the ambiguity of the stakeholder concept just investigated, we can describe more precisely why the discursive integration of a plurality of interests is very likely beyond the legal rationality of the Big Four. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Following Habermas, we can say that legitimacy is only be generated through communicative action. Legitimacy contains an intentional quality, in the sense coined by Brentano (Brentano, 1874/1973:130-132), and just as there can be no administrative manufacture of meaning, there can be no administrative manufacture of legitimacy. Legitimacy can thus be considered as a limit condition of credibility. All legitimacy is also credibility, but most credibility is not legitimacy. Credibility is pathological legitimacy, pathological in proportion to the divergence of its discursive origins from Habermas’s ideal speech situation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">“The ideal speech situation [...] represents a communication situation in which potential conflicts of interest (and knowledge-claims) ought to be rationally evaluated by the participants through a mode of interaction which is free of manipulation and in which only the force of the better argument prevails. The participants are guaranteed the reciprocal and symmetric opportunity to apply all types of speech acts during interaction. It thus stipulates certain ethical ideals upon which knowledge ought to be constructed during interaction between the corporation and its stakeholders. Only when the force of the better argument, rather than various types of systematic distortion in the form of discursive closures, governs the interactions between the corporation and its stakeholders does the corporation facilitate genuine stakeholder representation within its internal knowledge-generating processes” (Jeffcut 2004:213).<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[14]</span></span></span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Assurance, by contrast, is supposed to address a shortfall in credibility. Hence the assuror must constitutionally validate a socially-integrated sphere of action. This sphere of action is to pool the lifeworld resources internal to the organisation with those of the organisation’s stakeholders. The assuror is supposed to anchor the systemically-integrated action of the reporting organisation in this new, socially-integrated multi-stakeholder sub-system.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Legitimacy is a limit condition of credibility. Legitimacy is generated in socially integrated spheres of action. It relies on appeals, which can be tacit or thematised in what Habermas calls “discourse,” to generaliseable interests. Credibility is legitimacy which is pathological to an unspecified degree. Based in the necessity of making a CR report credible in the eyes of all stakeholders, however, we can assume that it is pathological in an extremely high degree. The assuror is caught in the equivocation between stakeholders as affected persons and stakeholders as representative institutions, which may be systemically-integrated to some degree.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The representative institutions which are inalienable to the stakeholder concept make it fundamentally incompatible with the discursive generation of legitimacy. This is shown most dramatically by consideration of the stakeholders, “future generations.” In order to strictly meet its brief, the assuror must validate the constitution of unforced communication with the not-yet-born.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">So! We have analysed in depth the kind of independence which the Big Four bring to the CR reporting context, characterised the demands which are placed upon it, and given an account of its characteristic failures. To conclude, let's just WHIZZ through some of the more normative implications of this analysis. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The essential condition of critical independence is that the assuror acknowledge the partiality of its perspective. Rather than remaining outside a reporting entity’s nexus of stakeholders, attempting to impose upon them unrealistically egalitarian constitutions, which fail to acknowledge the representative institutions which they inalienably embody, the assuror should enter it as a situated participant, with the full privileges and limitations of its distinctive perspective.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Critical independence requires the Big Four to replace the orientation towards the audit of financial statements with an orientation to substantive, long-term global outcomes. The foundations of this orientation has already been laid in the Big Four’s codes of conduct, which for example state a commitment to the UN Declaration on Human Rights and Millennium Development Goals. At present, the Big Four include orientation towards such goals in their recognition that “subject matter experts” are necessary components of an assurance team. But it is not considered a question of independence</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Critical independence also requires a revision of the professionalism with which independence is entangled. As we’ve seen, this has aspects of both a bureaucratic rationality and a legal rationality. The reliance on bureaucratic rationality must be reduced. There are plenty of ways of motivating this imperative. I want only to highlight the comparatively conservative motivations which have already been expressed throughout these posts. The achievement a sustainable and just global system, in any plausible formulation, demands action from a huge number and variety of actors. The institutional conditions of possibility are not in place for the systemic integration of such action. Whether it is considered a necessary instrument to transition to such a global system, or a permanent feature of it, socially-integrated action is central to new paradigms of governance. The standards developed by AccountAbility and the GRI are too volatile and ambiguous to be considered functional instruments of systemic integration. They were not designed to carry out such integration. Their stakeholder-centrism admits as much, and corroborates their incompatibility with bureaucratic rationality. Thus to be critically independent, the Big Four must stop presenting themselves as neutral administrators of systems with sufficient steering capacity, and acknowledge the frail and provisional character of these systems, and their facility for polemical deployment.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">As regards legal rationality, critical independence means rethinking the structure of responsibility with which the Big Four relate to the state, to the market, and to society. A genuine orientation to substantive, long-term global outcomes should override the imperative to minimise liability. The Big Four should actively seek structures of liability which reflect disparities in their views and other actors committed to similar outcomes. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">First, the state. The KPMG Code of Conduct states, “We aspire to act in a manner that minimises the detrimental environmental impacts of our business operations.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[15]</span></span></span></a> Tacitly, the business operations still have priority over the environment. It is unfairly polemical to regard such statements as indicative of anomalism or ethical egoism. Rather, they reflect an assumption about the frontiers of private and public responsibility. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">CR concerns with business choices among options which are economically competitive, but to which are attached varying degrees of responsibility taken. Options which are responsible but are uncompetitive are ruled out in advance. These, it is assumed, must be legislatively mandated. I won’t argue that the Big Four, and businesses in general, make a mistake by drawing this line. We can accept that activity which is against the self-interest of private individuals or organisations, but in the collective interest, is the natural province of government (whilst also acknowledging that “self-interest” is complex and contested). I want to make a less contentious observation. That is, the fitness or even necessity that an area of governance have a legislative incarnation does not remove from the private sector its obligation to overcome the CR challenges which result if government does not properly enact or enforce such legislation. Government action is not only a normative issue, it is also an empirical one. Clearly, government lobbying and consultation would be among the private sector’s instruments in meeting these challenges. But where the Big Four dogmatically restrict themselves to these instruments, they show orientation towards minimising liability, not towards realising the public good. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In this connection, the Big Four would be able to draw upon their experience in consultancy and corporate finance. The Big Four have well-developed methodologies for quantifying uncertainty, and for developing strategies which incorporate base case scenarios, upside scenarios and sensitised scenarios. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Next, the market. “<i>Contentious content</i> [...] KPMG believes that a good report is one that reflects the company’s overall strategy and objectives, covers issues and topics that are material to the company and its stakeholders, and provides details on performance that does not leave out the ‘tough’ topics” (2008:27). However, in other documents, dedication to client service emerges as a dominant theme, in a tone bordering on servile. Client service has a legal foundation in the fiduciary relationship. It also has support in the marketing strategies of the Big Four. Client relationships are understood to exceed the aggregation of contractual ties; winning work may ultimately hinge on being liked more than representatives of the other Big Four. The Big Four regularly organise social events with clients. Pitches by the Big Four may include endorsements to the effect that a team is “fun to work with.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">As work is project-based, working hours are variable. The Big Four worker goes home at the client’s discretion. Gulzar Gill describes the experience of working in the audit department of a Big Four firm. “January-April is known as ‘busy season’. During these months expect to work from between 9am-8pm as the minimum and the occasional weekend. Personally, the worst that I experienced was when I worked for 10 days in a row mostly from 8.30am – 11pm and clocking up 16 hours on the weekend. Other horror stories that I have heard included working 8am-2am for two weeks (although no-one worked the weekend). After April, though, most people will work 9am-6pm but this depends on your clients. If you are booked on continuous year end audits you can expect to work 9am-7 or 8pm every night. Each audit has a deadline and it is essential that it is kept to avoid fines and ensure good relations are kept. This means that they you will work whatever hours are needed to make the deadline.”<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"> <a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[16]</span></span></a></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Big Four currently emphasise that their assurance solutions can be customised to meet client needs. Altering their obliging stance could significantly improve the quality and the comparability of their assurance engagements. Specialist assurance providers offer an alternative model, the “critical friend.” To be critically independent, the Big Four should abandon assurance engagements on the basis of ISAE3000 alone, and make compulsory the use of AA1000AS (2008), or more demanding standards if such emerge. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Assurance statements founded in an idea of critical independence would be understood from the outset to lay out a critical view of the reporting entity’s CR and CR reporting, according to a standard scope and basis which would not be adaptable to “client needs.” Power (1997:126) asks, “Do audit reports exist to produce certificates of comfort or are they essentially adversarial?” Critical independence would require the latter. There would be no “clean bills of health”. Instead, an adversarial would be laid out, together with detailed methodological documentation guiding readers on the level of trust to be invested in it. According to this model, assurors who can only think of something nice to say should say nothing at all. Adopting this approach may well make Big Four assurance less competitive on a strictly economic basis, so they should be prepared to sustain their market penetration by leveraging client access across various service lines.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In rethinking client relationships, the Big Four should also scrutinise the diversification of their services by industry. Benchmarking an organisation’s performance against industry rivals makes sense in the context of economic competitiveness. But it makes little sense in the context of CR. Here the Big Four should rely instead on their orientation to substantive long-term goals. “Progress” can be comparably pernicious. Current practice is to benchmark a reporting organisation’s CR performance against its historical CR performance, and its progress against that of its industry peers. There is a serious flaw in this approach. It does not set “progress” against the background of rising global inequality, and progressive environmental degradation. There are a set of more controversially theorised trends, such as deteriorating global security, which are also relevant. While an organisation may be becoming more responsible with respect to its past performance, thresholds above which its activity can be considered sustainable may increase at a faster pace.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Does all this seem feasible? Have I been too soft on them? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Finally, society. Under the AA1000AS (2008), issues which are “material” to the assuror must be those which are “material” to stakeholders. “Material” is here equivocal. The stakeholder is not obliged, as the assuror is, to subject the possible materiality of an item to a test of generalisabiliy. The stakeholder is not obliged, as the assuror is, to found upon the result of this test a technocratic judgement with a quantitative ingredient. For stakeholders, a material issue is simply one which “matters.” </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Stakeholder-orientation can leads to neglect or misuse of expert knowledge. It can lead to overemphasis on credibility and underemphasis on accuracy. Goals which cannot be associated with specific stakeholders may be ignored.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Moreover, stakeholder engagement does not simply “read off” outputs from a rationalising lifeworld, but participates in its constitution and transformations. Stakeholder identification and engagement can involve the malign transformation of the lifeworld. For example, it can involve the foundation of “symbiotic” stakeholder constituencies, which legitimate corporate activities in return for minor concessions, marginalise other stakeholders. Traditional democratic resources could be eroded by the emergence of corporate stakeholder constituencies. Improvements in CR could damage the identities of critics of the reporting entity. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">To be critically independent, the Big Four must not accept a given terrain of credulity, and a given set of representational institutions, as a structure in which to maximise their credibility and their clients’. Rather the Big Four must be able to occasionally propose unpopular views!</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">So where does all this leave us? The Big Four are auditors. The idea of independence which they bring to the CR context stems from their independent auditing of financial statements. The governance structures which they rely upon to protect this independence is oriented towards this activity.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">However, to assure CR reports, a different type of independence is required. Unlike financial statements, CR reports try to address the needs of all stakeholders in a company. Instead of being limited to financially material information, CR reports should cover the social and environmental issues which are important to stakeholders.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The assurance of CR reports requires a type of independence resembling the idea of state neutrality. They are required to arbitrate among a plurality of often contradictory demands. With only the independence inherited from the financial audit context, the Big Four regularly fail in this role. As a result, many stakeholders remain incredulous towards CR reports, and corporations themselves are confused about the levels of transparency they are achieving.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Big Four should rapidly shift to “critical independence,” abandoning many claims to disinterestedness, and acknowledging the specific place from which they speak. This could involve withdrawing from the challenge of adding credibility to CR reports, and focusing on traditional data-checking activities. Or it could involve emphasising the multidisciplinary and globally connected nature of the Big Four firms, organising these resources around substantive long-term goals, reducing reliance on bureaucratic rationality, and rethinking relationships with state, market and society.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">In elaborating critical independence, I have had to restrict myself to only general considerations which follow directly from my analysis of independence. I have not considered the clearly complex implementation issues. However, there are some encouraging signs. The impression which I received of the Big Four was of a system in motion, simultaneously the subject of multiple internally- and externally-driven reform agendas, enclosed within a horizon of hypersensitivity to reputation management. There are potentially several loci from which a shift towards critical independence could originate. The ICAEW are in the process of building a network of academics who research assurance of non-financial information; AccountAbility’s exposure draft of the AA1000SES (2010) is currently online as a wiki for the purpose of public consultation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Although I recommend a richer understanding of independence, I don’t suggest that it is a concept which could ever composite all the desirable features of assurance. In addition to independence, the Auditing Practices Board (APB) identifies integrity, competence, rigour, accountability, judgement, communication and value provision as prerequisites of successful assurance (APB 1994). The investigation conducted across these posts into 'independence' could be repeated for each of these terms.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The topic is bordered by some extremely contentious territories. Because the stakeholder concept is so deeply embedded in CR discourse, I stopped short of attacking the concept itself, preferring to demonstrate its deficiency in conjunction with the Big Four’s concept of independence. It is unclear however whether the concept is at all salvageable. The independence of the Big Four in the context to which it is oriented, the audit of financial statements, is also deeply questionable.<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.icaew.com/index.cfm/route/140074/icaew_ga/pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn2"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.4px;"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 12.2667px;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 12.2667px;"> American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 99, Consideration of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit (codified in AICPA Professional Standards -- U.S. Auditing Standards -- AU 316), par. 13.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn3"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> NEF, p. 28.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn4"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 8pt;">Stakeholder theory and organizational ethics By Robert Phillips, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn5"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.globalreporting.org/NR/rdonlyres/ED9E9B36-AB54-4DE1-BFF2-5F735235CA44/0/G3_GuidelinesENU.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn6"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.iasplus.com/ifac/0602g3assurance.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn7"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://accountabilityaa1000wiki.net/wiki/about/</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 8pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn8"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 8pt;">[8]</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 8pt;"> Palazzo, Guido and Scherer, Andreas Georg, Corporate Legitimacy as Deliberation: A Communicative Framework, Journal Journal of Business Ethics, Issue Volume 66, Number 1 / June, 2006, Pages 71-88.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn9"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.companywebcast.nl/webcast/player/v1_1/player.asp?id=695<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn10"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;">[10]</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;"> “Framework for the Preparation and Presentation of Financial Statements”<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn11"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;">[11]</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;"> In financial audit, the users of financial statements are modelled on the basis of economic rationality. While actual users may want to do more, or other, than maximise profit and minimise risk, <i>homo economicus</i> is sufficiently straightforward that users can understand the capacity in which they are addressed. [...] There are no corresponding model of social and environmental rationality sufficiently widely recognised to form a stable background against which to enact a plurality of values. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;"> </span></p></div><div id="ftn12"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/coeDeloitteLLP2008_08v2.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn13"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[13]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/reporting/<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn14"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;">[14]</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 8pt;"> The foundations of management knowledge, Volume 23 of Routledge advances in management and business studies, Author Paul Jeffcutt, Publisher Routledge, 2004<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn15"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[15]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> KPMG Code of Conduct - https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/11093/KPMG_Code_of_Conduct_5_06.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div id="ftn16"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 8pt;">[16]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt;"> http://www.thegatewayonline.com/article/137<o:p></o:p></span></p><div><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><br /></span></div></div></div>Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-85649215232103248302014-09-13T09:46:00.003-07:002014-09-13T10:15:15.208-07:00BBC remember me? Letter to BBC complaining about Robinson / Salmond editingHeyyy.<br />
<br />
Please note, I have of course seen the <i>existing </i>BBC response to different complaints relating to this report, which has recently appeared <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complaint/alexsalmondrbsquestion/">online</a> [...] I don't know the substance of those complaints, so I can't form an opinion on whether this statement responds adequately to them, but of course I'll assume it does. However it does not address my complaint, and I therefore kindly ask that you give my complaint separate attention.<br />
<br />
I must also apologise that my complaint is rather meticulous; however, this level of clarity is necessary to precisely state the way in which the report was in breach.<br />
<br />
The part of the segment which I am interested in ran as follows:<br />
<br />
VOICE OVER: [Alex Salmond] needs to reassure the voters at home.<br />
NICK ROBINSON: Why should a Scottish voter believe you, a politician, against men who are responsible for billions of pounds of profits?<br />
VOICE OVER: He didn't answer. But he did attack the reporting of those in what he called "the Metropolitan media."<br />
<br />
My complaint is best broken down into two parts.<br />
<br />
<i>1) The report is highly misleading about the question which was put to Mr Salmond. The claim that "he didn't answer" is therefore correspondingly highly misleading.</i><br />
<br />
In the unedited footage, it can be seen that what is shown in the report is actually the second part of a second question, which is itself a follow-on, closely related to the first. It is reasonable to assume these two questions are closely connected, in the absence of any wording along the lines of, "and on a separate topic," and in view of the similar subject matter. I will refer to the two halves of Mr Robinson's questioning as "the first question" and "the second question" for convenience, but it is clear that the second question does not stand alone, and that its meaning changes significantly when it is isolated and edited down as in the broadcast footage.<br />
<br />
When we watch the unedited footage, we find that the first question is, "Are you suggesting that the decision of RBS has no consequence, or do you accept that by moving their base to London, tax revenues would move to London, in other words, Scottish taxpayers would have to make up the money they would lose from RBS moving to London?" The follow-on is, "And on a more general point: John Lewis's boss says prices could go up, Standard Life's boss says money will move out of Scotland, BP's boss says oil will run out; why should a Scottish voter believe you, a politician, against men who are responsible for billions of pounds of profits?"<br />
<br />
It is conceivable that Mr Robinson believed himself to be creating a distinction with the phrase "and on a more general point," but if so he was mistaken, and the BBC should bear that in mind in formulating its response: the reasonable interpretation of the phrase "and on a more general point" is that it maintains a strong linkage between the two halves of Mr Robinson's questioning.<br />
<br />
Of course, no one can have any problem with the paring down of journalists' questions <i>in principle</i>. In most circumstances, we are not obliged to hear every word which went into prompting a politician to making some statement. A balance must be struck: meticulous, sometimes lengthy questioning for the politicians, and a snappy but not misleading version for the viewers back home. What was unusual in this case was the claim that the edited question was not answered.<br />
<br />
What did Mr Robinson actually ask as his "more general point"? Mr Robinson recognised that Mr Salmond was highly unlikely to accept that owing to RBS's relocation "tax revenues would move to London, and Scottish taxpayers would have to make up the difference," at least certainly not in such stark language. Mr Robinson's follow-up therefore asked Mr Salmond to make a case for the credibility of a politician's perspective, measured against the perspective of business leaders who warn of the economic consequences of independence. (Casting doubt on the credibility of those business leaders is thus certainly one of the strategies Mr Salmond was fairly explicitly invited to adopt). The main context in which Mr Salmond was being asked to establish his credibility was that of tax revenues from RBS, although it would certainly have been legitimate for him to pick up on the statements from John Lewis, Standard Life, and BP as well. Whether or not this is what Mr Robinson intended to ask, I believe it is the most reasonable interpretation of what he did ask. At the very, very least it must be construed as <i>one </i>reasonable interpretation.<br />
<br />
Mr Robinson was exercising his instinct for forceful, rhetorically effective questioning, and a laudable desire to go behind the comparatively predictable position-taking of political and constitutional debate and explore how such positions build and sustain credibility. In many circumstances such questioning can be very heartening to watch. However, we were not asked to watch it.<br />
<br />
In the edited report, the voice-over begins, "He needs to reassure the voters at home." This is the context in which we then hear the fragment of a question, "Why should a Scottish voter believe you, a politician, against men who are responsible for billions of pounds of profits?" Watching the report, the viewer is asked to believe that Mr Salmond was asked, in quite general terms, why he should be trusted over business leaders, and perhaps in particular asked to defend the legitimacy of politicians in offering reassurance to Scottish voters. Some might see this as quite a soft line of questioning, at least insofar as its generality would have permitted Mr Salmond a very wide scope in his response.<br />
<br />
The implications of not answering such a general question would be completely different, compared to those of not answering the specific questions which were actually put to Mr Salmond. Furthermore, the implications of using such a general question as an occasion to attack "what he referred to as 'the Metropolitan media'" would have been completely different, compared to the context in which Mr Salmond's comments actually arose.<br />
<br />
Above all, the question which appeared in the report is sufficiently different from what Mr Salmond was actually asked that the statement "he didn't answer" is necessarily incorrect. No one who watches only the unedited footage can be in any doubt that the second question is still very closely related to the question of RBS and corporation tax; and no one who watches the edited footage could have guessed that it does. In view of this difference, there can be no shared valid basis for making the judgment "he didn't answer."<br />
<br />
2) But I'd also like to consider whether the statement "he didn't answer" would have been correct, even if viewers had been shown the full two questions. <i>It is clear that, in view of any reasonable interpretation of the questions which were actually put to Mr Salmond, and of what reasonably constitutes an answer, Mr Salmond did answer these questions.</i><br />
<br />
First, there has been no question mark over whether Mr Salmond addresses the first question (and as a side note, it seems quite right that he should devote the bulk of his response time there).<br />
<br />
Mr Salmond also speaks very directly to the second question, which shifts the focus to trust in politicians and/or businessmen, on a number of occasions: particularly in sentences such as, “[...] there is clear evidence that while the Prime Minister was busy telling us what a wonderful nation we were, his business adviser was busy desperately trying to get any business he possibly could to say something negative about independence.” Whether or not one agrees with Mr Salmond on this point, it is a quite straightforward answer to the point which Mr Robinson raised. Mr Robinson draws a distinction between the credibility of politicians, in particular Mr Salmond, and that of business leaders, in particular those associated with the RBS, John Lewis, Standard Life and BP. Mr Salmond criticises Mr Robinson's distinction, pointing out the involvement of politicians in public statements made by business leaders. This is answering.<br />
<br />
As well as several such moments of exceptionally direct response, it is clear that Mr Salmond is tacitly tackling Mr Robinson's second question throughout, primarily in the context of RBS tax revenues. This is also answering. Identifying a false dilemma -- such as the supposedly exhaustive choice between categorically trusting business leaders <i>or </i>politicians -- certainly constitutes a valid answer. But Mr Salmond goes further than simply identifying a false dilemma. He discusses at some length how such a false dilemma is produced in the first place. This is where his discussion of the press comes in. As the perspectives of business leaders and of politicians are brought to the public through the press, the credibility of different aspects of the media is certainly centrally at issue in this question, and Mr Salmond is not at all off-topic to bring it up explicitly. I am aiming to be meticulous in my description here, but I think even on a relatively casual viewing, anyone will sense its relevance. Mr Robinson's second question is therefore also answered by the tacit argument that the Scottish voter's trust should not be apportioned fully either to politicians or to business leaders, and that the Scottish voter should consider (and do consider) the media context in which the views of politicians and/or business leaders appear. This may not yet constitute a comprehensive and satisfying answer for everyone, but it is certainly enough to falsify any claim that "he didn't answer."<br />
<br />
Mr Salmond furthermore answers the second part of Mr Robinson's question in a complementary way, which speaks to the question of trust in <i>him </i>specifically. The gist of this part of Salmond's response -- again, whether or not one agrees with it -- is fairly straightforward. He contrasts "scaremongering" and "evidence," and suggests that the Scottish voters can tell the difference well enough to move beyond the scaremongering and look at the evidence. The consolidation of recycled quotations, Mr Salmond argues, is suggestive of scaremongering: the time when these quotations really were news has long passed. By contrast, the RBS statement to staff released the same morning constitutes relevant evidence, which can help Scottish voters to form a judgment. The argument given is that this hypothetical Scottish voter should trust Mr Salmond for reassurance only insofar as Mr Salmond is able to provide clear evidence.<br />
<br />
Mr Robinson may have felt that Mr Salmond did not answer his question because he did not specifically bring up John Lewis, Standard Life, or BP. I don't feel this interpretation would be correct. Furthermore, the broadcast segment did not include Mr Robinson's mention of John Lewis, Standard Life, and BP.<br />
<br />
It is also not clear from any of the footage what Mr Robinson was saying during his later informal questioning; perhaps here he may have clarified, reformulated or stressed some aspect of his earlier question, which Mr Salmond did not answer. This may have formed Mr Robinson's impression that he had been stonewalled by Mr Salmond. Again, even if that is the case, it has no bearing on the inaccuracy of the report which actually went out.<br />
<br />
In summary:<br />
(a) The edited footage gives a misleading idea of the question which Mr Salmond was asked, and then goes on to claim that he did not answer it. Given that Mr Salmond was asked a somewhat similar but ultimately crucially different question, it is inevitable that confusion should arise. Whatever Mr Salmond said -- that is, whether or not he answered the question which was actually put to him -- he can hardly be expected to give a precise answer to a question which he was never asked. An apology and/or correction is therefore in order!<br />
(b) As it happens, the full footage shows Mr Salmond answering both of Mr Robinson's questions, under any reasonable interpretation, which takes into account the connected fashion in which these questions were presented, and the mention not only of RBS, but also BP, John Lewis and Standard Life. An apology and/or correction is therefore again in order!<br />
<br />
Three final notes.<br />
(a) It is perhaps worth establishing a general principle of extra diligence, when the claim is made that a question has not been answered, that this question is very accurately portrayed. A somewhat greater margin of error is perhaps appropriate if a question is edited down as a lead-in to the response.<br />
(b) Just as an informal litmus test, it is perhaps worth imagining whether anyone who was presented with the edited footage, and asked to speculatively and uncynically reconstruct the situation which gave rise to it, would be likely to come up with anything resembling what took place. I think that highly unlikely.<br />
(c) I am ambivalent about Scottish independence, but not about the BBC's independence. While I can see that such a report could go out with the best of intentions, it is not right that you should fail to apologise for it once you've been called out. We all make mistakes, but yours are more important than most.<br />
<br />
Yrs,<br />
xxxLara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-81262917899843344922014-07-14T19:00:00.002-07:002021-10-31T11:10:46.381-07:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting (6)<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Right lads, let's get serious.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hopefully by now, we have established that the
independence of the Big Four is organised within a system of laws, standards,
guidelines and compliance mechanisms which are directed towards financial
audit.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The AA1000 series and the G3,
which don’t pertain to financial audit, don’t extensively thematise
independence.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Code and other
instruments aligned with it, which do talk about independence in quite a bit of detail, pertain
both to assurance <i>and </i>financial audit.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So we can now look
at how independence is entangled with an idea of professionalism. There is a
long tradition of political and social thought which considers professionalism
a socially integrative force, with a coherent pattern of influence extending outside
its occupational specialisms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does the
element of professionalism give the Big Four’s independence, despite its
orientation to financial audit, some kind of broader applicability?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, objectivity requires the practitioner “not
allow bias, conflict of interest or undue influence of others to override
professional or business judgments” (IESBA 2005:100.4; cf. IESBA
2005:120.1).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Independence of mind is the
“state of mind that permits the expression of a conclusion without being
affected by influences that compromise professional judgment, allowing an
individual to act with integrity, and exercise objectivity and professional
skepticism” (IESBA 2005:290.8).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
recursive definition of objectivity by independence, and independence by
objectivity, is elaborated outward towards more substantive markers with the
mention of professional norms, in the phrases “professional or business
judgment(s)” and “professional skepticism.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">p</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">rofessional skepticism</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> appears throughout the IESBA’s Code
and the ICAEW Manual as something which ought not to be compromised, but it is
never directly discussed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discussion
of ISA (UK and Ireland) 240 is as follows: “The auditor should maintain an
attitude of professional scepticism throughout the audit, recognising the
possibility that a material misstatement due to fraud could exist,
notwithstanding the auditor’s past experience with the entity about the honesty
and integrity of management and those charged with governance.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">[1]</span></sup></span></sup></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">n the US, SAS 99 takes a similar approach: “Professional
skepticism is an attitude that includes a questioning mind and a critical
assessment of audit evidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
auditor should conduct the engagement with a mindset that recognizes the
possibility that a material misstatement due to fraud could be present,
regardless of any past experience with the entity and regardless of the
auditor’s belief about management’s honesty and integrity [...] in exercising
professional skepticism in gathering and evaluating evidence, the members of
the audit team should not be satisfied with less than persuasive evidence
because of a belief that management is honest.”<a href="file:///C:/Library/CSRCSR%20Monday.doc#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">[2]</span></sup></span></sup></a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">These
elaborations are reminiscent ICAEW’s more bureaucratic-rationalist formulation
of objectivity, as “the state of mind which has regard to all considerations
relevant to the task in hand but no other” (q.v.).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Their
appeal is to pedantically “doing the job” – that is, to a bureaucratic
rationality which rejects inductive opportunism, and the short-cuts offered by
networks of social capital, in favour of minute compliance with procedure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What manifests locally as a laborious
literalism is part of the profession’s collective self-constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this process a social form is created –
the unfailing agent of a stipulated practice<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>– whose utility should outweigh the aggregate utility of various more
pragmatic attitudes in their local contexts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Shall we be a little Habermassy for a moment? So far, everything suggests that the
professionalism of accountancy is a feature of systemic integration only.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The steering medium of power,
institutionalised in the regulatory standards and organisations that have been
mentioned, standardises practitioners in an instrumental-purposive
orientation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Compliance with this
professional template facilitates the coordination of action by the other major
steering medium, money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the extent
that different practitioners follow like courses in like situations they
facilitate the mediatization of those situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Correspondingly, the social substrate
of independence seems to be systemically integrated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is no accident that the institutional
forms of the independent auditor and corporation emerged coevally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Limited Liability Act (1855) capped the
potential loss of any shareholder at the amount subscribed for in shares.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar legislation soon appeared in the US
and Western Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Joint Stock
Companies Act (1844) permitted companies to incorporate without royal charter
or special parliamentary provision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Act also required that shareholders appoint auditors to arbitrate in the event
of insolvency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Initially, these auditors
were drawn from among the shareholders themselves (Strange 1996:136).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As corporations grew larger and more complex,
specialist insolvency practitioners diversified their services in order to fill
the role.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These two Acts are the institutional
foundation for the mediatization of owners’ relations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, nothing here bestows
professional independence with a suggestion of applicability outside the audit
of financial statements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we left our analysis
here, professional skepticism would consist at heart of purposive-instrumental
rationality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The appeal to the “reasonable
and informed third party” would simply be to the profit-maximising,
risk-minimising subject of economic interests.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But another aspect of professional
skepticism remains to be excavated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“An attitude of professional
skepticism means the practitioner makes a critical assessment, with a
questioning mind, of the validity of evidence obtained and is alert to evidence
that contradicts or brings into question the reliability of documents or
representations by the responsible party” (IAASB 2005 para 40).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This discussion recapitulates the tendency to
discuss the constituents and supports of independence with reference to what
they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there are also some hints here of
professional skepticism as an attitude of temperance and restraint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The practitioner is asked to be vigilant
against momentary lapses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
practitioner should also not set out to seek contradictory evidence, merely be
alert to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">IIASB (2005)</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> continues that the practitioner need not authenticate
documents, but should consider “the reliability of the information to be used
as evidence, for example photocopies, facsimiles, filmed, digitized or other
electronic documents, including consideration of controls over their
preparation and maintenance” (para 41).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Other discussions of professional
skepticism position it more explicitly as a virtuous mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> It's a Goldilocks thing. </span>Professional skepticism can viewed as the
contextually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">appropriate</i> amount of
suspicion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Canadian CICA manual
states that an attitude of professional skepticism “means that the auditor
makes a critical assessment with a questioning mind, of the sufficiency and
appropriateness of audit evidence obtained and is alert for evidence that
contradicts or brings into question the reliability of documents or management
representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does not mean the
auditor is obsessively sceptical or suspicious” (CICA, 2003, 5090.07).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This notion of moderation and
contextual appropriateness is the second aspect of the entanglement of
independence and professionalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
should be understood in relation to the ever-evolving ensemble of inferential
techniques used by assurors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seen in this
light, professional independence is the capacity to draw knowledgably upon the
precedent set in previous use of an inferential technique, while being alert to
the inimical features of the circumstances in which it is applied, and the
possible necessity of departing from tradition and forming new precedent.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The term </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">inferential technique</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> requires some unpacking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Independence presupposes that the assuror is
not directly familiar with the subject matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is thus invested in the feasibility of some kind of indirect
familiarisation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For assurance to exist
as a commodity, the assuror must have techniques to readily gain reliable knowledge
of whatever subject matter for which the market demands assurance.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The techniques
available to assurors to organise their investigations in particular areas, and
to infer further information, often generalising their findings across larger
data populations, have been historically variable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Block
tests, such as the detailed inspection of every transaction within a particular
month, were a commonplace audit technique in the late nineteenth century, but
now are seldom ever used.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the audit context, three main trends
in inferential familiarisation have taken place over the twentieth
century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is the rise in
importance of internal controls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Internal
controls consist of management procedures and the measures in place to ensure
compliance with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To take one
example, clarity and precision in the allocation of responsibilities and
reporting lines is considered a type of internal control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The segregation of duties is another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Supply purchasing may be divided into “initiation
(e.g. the works foreman decides the firm needs more lubricating oil),
authorisation (the works manager approves the purchase), execution (the buying
department order the oil), custody (on arrival the oil is taken in by the
goods-in section and passed with appropriate goods-in documentation to the
stores department) and recording (the arrival is documented by the goods inward
section and the invoice is compared with the original order and goods-in note
by the accountants department, and recorded by them in their books)” (Mill
champ 2002:87).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By the 1940s, the status of the
reporting entity’s internal controls also had assumed great significance in
determining the scope and methodology of individual audits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This remains the case.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The next trend is the rise and partial decline
of scientific sampling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to
Power (1997:73-75), statistically precise notions of representativeness first took
hold in the 1930s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, their
incorporation into audit practice was far from straightforward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clearly a scientistic idiom could improve the
eminence of accounting expertise, but it could also erode the exclusivity of
professional judgement, if audit were perceived as mechanistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See Gwilliam (1987), Elliott (1983) and Abbott
(1988) for more on the relationship between audit and statistical methodology.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The third and
most recent trend is the rise of risk-based methodology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
1980s saw a shift in audit from the principle of scientific representativeness
to one of selectivity based on risk (Power 1997:76).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An auditor will identify key risk areas on a
client-by-client basis – for example, allowance for doubtful accounts,
inventory obsolescence, accrued royalties, accrued trade spending,
classification of intangibles and useful lives, long-term debt classification
and revenue recognition – and concentrate scrutiny in these areas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An event is considered to be risky as a
function of both the likelihood of its occurring or having occurred, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> its magnitude, typically formulated
financially.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Risk provides a common
framework for considering both the value of assurance to the client, and the
assuror’s liability.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Each inferential techniques is historically
variable in the sense of what assurors do, in the typical consequences of their
practice, in the reputation attaching to the technique in various segments of
society, and in the legal duty of care associated with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This last point
deserves expansion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For it to be
worthwhile to accountants to provide assurance, the general level of liability
must not be prohibitively high in relation to the inherent limitations of the techniques
at hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, i</span><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">n the landmark ruling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">re
Kingston Cotton Mill</i> [1896] 2 Ch. 297, the courts decided that it was not
the auditor’s duty to take stock to check against management representations
which were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prima facie</i>
unsuspicious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“An auditor is not bound
to be a detective, or [...] to approach his work with suspicion or with a
foregone conclusion that there is something wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is a watch-dog, but not a bloodhound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is justified in believing tried servants
of the company in whom confidence is placed by the company.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inferential techniques which overlap
with threats to independence correspond with particularly fierce negotiations
of liability and regulatory responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For example, SOX now obliges US listed firms to rotate their auditors on
a regular basis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Long-term
auditor-client relationships, which arguably make it easier for auditors to
gather information, are recognised by this legislation as a threat to
independence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has specific bearing
on the technique of rotational testing, in which auditors work their way
rotationally through different client site visits and systemic emphasis over a
number of years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, consultancy
work arguably produces an epistemological advantage which can be carried over
into audit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SOX also proscribes the
provision of a variety of consultancy services by auditors.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The question which now arises is
whether the professional stewardship of this ensemble of inferential
techniques, and its relationships with state, market and socio-cultural system,
can be understood as systemically-integrated action, characterised by
purposive-instrumental rationality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
view is that it cannot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly the
audit process exists within an envelope of mediatization, insofar as it aims to
optimally prepare the audited organisation for steering by the
non-linguistified communication medium of money, in its various institutional
forms of taxes, fines, investment, loans and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The negotiation of liability is also
subordinate to a system imperative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
put it bluntly, the more the accountancy profession can reduce its liability
through the courts, the more lucrative its monopoly franchise on the statutory
audit commodity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But within these
territories circumscribed by steering media, communicative action of various
strengths plays a significant role.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
its market relationships, the accountancy profession is engaged in educative
and learning processes with each audit client.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In familiarising themselves with internal controls, auditors act
communicatively with management and employees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In testing them, important forms of evidence include oral discussion and
confirmation in writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On its frontier
with the state, the profession defends and reformulates its interests
deliberatively through the courts and various consultative forums.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In relation to the socio-cultural system, the
profession replenishes its head-count not only by training new accountants, but
by socialising them into a tradition of the contextually appropriate exercise
of an ensemble of inferential techniques.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The lifeworld resources which the
profession draws upon include a permanent regime of training, career
progression involving formal and informal mentoring, a tradition of
professional congeniality and discussion, a preoccupation with ethics, as well
as a relatively homogeneous pool of cultural and ideological norms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As well as the purposive-instrumentally
rational subject of economic interests, the Code’s appeal to the “informed and
reasonable third party” implies an appeal to an agent of this lifeworld.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Phew! This completes the analysis of
professional skepticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophical
skepticism with respect to a proposition concerns more than doubting the
proposition’s truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The philosophical
skeptic will not assent that the truth of the proposition is in principle
knowable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophical skepticism is
more than a variety of contrarianism, since there may be many technical and
normative implications which follow from a proposition being knowable or
not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A similar concept can be seen to
exist within assurance, inasmuch as techniques of inference are supposed to be
able to reduce the probability of misstatement, but never to zero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But the modifier “professional” of “professional
skepticism” does not indicate that the subject of the Code should be philosophically
skeptical in relation to a particular object set characteristic of the
profession, or that she should endlessly disperse any aura of indubitability
that may emanate from this zone of professional responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The two main connotations of professional
skepticism are rule-based consistency and moderation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus professional skepticism is held in
tension between a bureaucratic rationality, which emphasises rules, and a legal
rationality, which requires balance between tradition and sensitivity to
inimitable contexts, and which sediments a particular history of technological
development of inference, and the legal negotiations surrounding it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p></p>Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-80519750570124864152014-02-16T16:54:00.000-08:002014-02-16T16:54:21.275-08:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting (5)Okay, this completes the groundwork for our analysis of the concept of independence, as it applies to the independent checking of corporate responsibility reporting.<br />
<br />
There is a close link, within liberal political theory, between independence and autonomy, and so between independence and various debates around the ability of individuals to rule themselves, and the conditions under which self-imposed law can be considered authentic. Independence is also an important idea within constitutionalism, especially as pertaining to the separation of powers. There the focus is the insulation of government functions, especially the judiciary, from untoward influence. Appropriate constitutional form is seen by some constitutional thinkers as an important prerequisite of state neutrality. The problematiques of autonomy and constitutionalism are coextensive, inasmuch as questions about the sources of authentic self-imposed law resemble those about the legitimacy of judicial decisions which have regard to private interests.<br />
<br />
That very same preoccupation with a mode of non-compromising influence is shared by the literature around assurance. Independence is defined as “freedom from those pressures and other factors that compromise, or can reasonably be expected to compromise, an auditor’s ability to make unbiased audit decisions” (ISB, 2000); it is also described variously as “the conditional probability of reporting a discovered breach” (DeAngelo, 1981:186), “an attitude/state of mind” (Moizer 1994:19; Schuetze 1994:69); “the ability to resist client pressure” (Knapp, 1985).<br />
<br />
In this literature, and in the system of overlapping laws, standards, guidelines and compliance mechanisms I’ve alluded to in a previous post, independence is given a concrete discursive form. (Independence is also discursively entangled with a concept of professionalism. I’ll get into that in the next blog post). In this post I want to think about how elements of that concrete discursive form are geared towards the audit of financial statements. In other words, I want to think about how this independence is <i>not</i> really geared towards checking on corporate responsibility reporting, except insofar as there are one or two serendipitous overlaps between financial audit and CRR assurance. So I’m hopefully getting started unpicking some of the complex ways in which the Big Four sometimes have/use/want the wrong kind of independence for what it is they’re doing. Again, some of this isn’t exactly up-to-the-minute, so I’d be very, very interested in any updates from scholars, industry, assuror fandom, etc.<br />
<br />
The AA1000AS (2008) and the G3 (which are specific to the CR context and have no applicability to financial audit) had surprisingly little to say on independence. The G3 required that assurance be “conducted by groups or individuals external to the organization who are demonstrably competent in both the subject matter and assurance practices” and “who are not unduly limited by their relationship with the organization or its stakeholders to reach and publish an independent and impartial conclusion on the report.” The AA1000AS (2008) contained the same wording (AccountAbility 2008:14), and required disclosure of mechanisms which ensure independence, and of “any relationships (including financial, commercial, preparation of the report, governance and ownership positions) that could be perceived to affect the assurance providers ability to provide an independent and impartial statement” (ibid.).<br />
<br />
Big Four alignment with the AA1000AS (2008) requirement typically comprised just a succinct paragraph, noting that the firm complied with the Code and with internal independence mechanisms which exceed the Code’s requirements, but providing no further detail. (The ISAE3000 referred to the concept of independence elaborated in the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants (IESBA 2005, referred to hereafter as “the Code”). Two other key guidance documents for the Big Four in connection with independence, the IAASB’s ISA 200 (IAASB 2009), and the ICAEW Members’ Handbook, Section 3, were also aligned with the Code).<br />
<br />
The Code applies to financial audit as well as assurance. It divides independence into two necessary conditions: independence of mind, and independence of appearance. Independence of appearance exists if and only if a reasonable and informed third party would judge that independence of mind exists.
Independence of mind is considered to consist in a lack of prejudicial relationships. In particular, a professional accountant “should not allow bias, conflict of interest or undue influence of others to override professional or business judgments” (IESBA 2005:100.4). “Relationships that bias or unduly influence the professional judgment of the professional accountant should be avoided” (IESBA 2005:120.2). Independence of mind is characterised as the state of mind “that permits the expression of a conclusion without being affected by influences that compromise professional judgment, allowing an individual to act with integrity, and exercise objectivity and professional skepticism” (IESBA 2005:290.8). ICAEW (2009:283) follows this wording (save for a typo!).
The Code characterises objectivity, as it does independence of mind, by what it is <i>not</i>: “The principle of objectivity imposes an obligation on all professional accountants not to compromise their professional or business judgment because of bias, conflict of interest or the undue influence of others.” (IESBA 2005:120.1).
There are however a few touches of positive definition here. Professionalism is one, which I’ll be looking at in a later post. The Code expands a bit on “integrity” by insisting on the professional accountant’s “honesty and straightforwardness.” (IESBA 2005:100.4).<br />
<br />
<i>Straightforwardness</i> is undefined, <i>honesty</i> is only briefly mentioned again at 150, in the context of professional dignity in self-promotion. See ICAEW 2009:165 for the Members’ Handbook’s limited elaboration of these terms.<br />
<br />
We can try some scholarship here. Everett (2005), writing about the Canadian context, trace a shift in accountancy ethics from a Christian idiom based around the concept of a <i>calling</i>, to a scientistic idiom based around <i>objectivity</i>. They note that the chance was gradual and involved many intermediate “mixed” idioms. The unglossed appearance of “honesty and straightforwardness” could be a kind of vestige of this earlier idiom.<br />
<br />
The ICAEW Members’ Handbook also provides two definitions of “objectivity,” one using the same wording as the Code (ICAEW 2009:160), and the other that objectivity “is the state of mind which has regard to all considerations relevant to the task in hand but no other” (ICAEW 2009:165). Objectivity here strongly resembles aspects of Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucratic rationality, in its “exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks” (Weber 1960:421).
The Code identifies five non-exhaustive categories of threats to independence: self-interest; self-review; advocacy; familiarity; intimidation (IESBA 2005:100.10). The Code attempts ostensive definition because it is “impossible to define every situation that creates such threats and specify the appropriate mitigating action.” (IESBA 2005:100.5). Assurors are expected to use inductive reasoning to recognise threats to independence which are not among the examples, and those which don’t fall neatly into any of the categories. The examples given of self-interest threats are: a financial interest in a client; jointly holding a financial interest with a client; “undue” dependence on total fees from a client; concern about the possibility of losing a client; potential employment with a client; and contingent fees relating to an assurance engagement; a debt arrangement with a client (IESBA 2005:200.4). Self-review threats include: the discovery of a significant error during a re-evaluation; reporting on the operation of systems after being involved in their design or implementation; preparing data used to generate records which become the subject matter of the engagement; and having recently worked for the client (200.5). Advocacy threats include: promoting a client’s shares; and acting on the client’s behalf in litigation, or in informal disputes (200.6). Familiarity threats include: family relationships; gifts and hospitality; other threats (e.g. self-interest threats) pertaining to a family member (200.7). Finally, intimidation threats include: fear of dismissal or replacement; fear of litigation; pressure to inappropriately reduce fees or timetables (200.8). So there we go.<br />
<br />
Threats to independence of mind are not decisive, however, since many can be neutralised by appropriate safeguards. Examples of safeguards at the assuror level are “Chinese walls” arrangements, which isolate sensitive information through internal rules and controls, software, and physically secured working and storage spaces. PwC’s code of conduct states, “[w]e aim to avoid conflicts of interest. Where potential conflicts are identified and we believe that the respective parties’ interests can be properly safeguarded by the implementation of appropriate procedures, we will implement such procedures” (PwC 2008:8). Moreover, the threat categories are non-exhaustive.
<br />
<br />
Okay, I think we are now in a position to trace the orientation of this concept of independence to the audit of financial statements. In a way, this part of the argument is <i>a fortiori</i>, since we have already established that those sources with substantial things to say about independence are expressly interested in audit rather than assurance!<br />
<br />
However it could still be useful to develop a more detailed analysis, particularly for when I come to look at the entanglement of independence with professionalism.
The first thing to note is that in the Code, as in the GRI and Accountability formulations, independence of mind is considered essentially a privative quality, not a positive one. It is about something that is <i>not </i>there. And the thing that can’t be there is, roughly speaking, a relationship of interiority, or what you might call being “all up in” the client. Independence of mind is a relationship of duly-influenced <i>exteriority</i> with respect to the client (compare GRI definition q.v.).<br />
<br />
Various factors can be decisive in creating a relationship of interiority or undue influence. One type of factor, however, dominates. That is, independence of mind is threatened if the practitioner’s action is steered by money or power which either originates in the client or steers her client.<br />
<br />
This factor is exemplified by the first two threats to independence mentioned by the Code, the existence of a financial interest in the client or a financial interest held jointly with the client.
Financial auditing constitutes organizations as economic entities and economically specifies their continuity over time. Thus, the orientation to financial audit is expressed in the priority given to threats enacted in steering media. Complete causal isolation would obviously be an absurd construal of independence; there must exist <i>some</i> causal stream between auditor and audited organization! But so long as no economic forms supervene on the causal microfoundations of audit, they are likely to be considered insignificant.<br />
<br />
We can expand on this point by returning to the term <i>materiality</i>, which I think I previously treated as a loose synonym for <i>significance</i>. The International Accounting Standards Board (“IASB”) defines materiality, in the audit context, as follows: “Information is material if its omission or misstatement could influence the economic decision of users taken on the basis of the financial statements. Materiality depends on the size of the item or error judged in the particular circumstances of its omission or misstatement. Thus, materiality provides a threshold or cut-off point rather than being a primary qualitative characteristic which information must have if it is to be useful.”<br />
<br />
In this definition, judgments about materiality are to be founded on the rationality characteristic of the economic sphere. (What a surprise). One <i>might</i> anticipate that for assurance of CR report, judgments about materiality should be steered by consideration of rational decisions characteristic of the spheres of social and environmental governance, reflecting Elkington (1994)’s triple bottom line. The idea of independence upon which assurance depends would correspondingly be construed according to threats exceeding this materiality threshold.
Indeed, the G3 defines the Reporting Principle of materiality as follows: “The information in a report should cover topics and Indicators that reflect the organization’s significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, or that would substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders” (GRI 2006:8). The G3 definition contains both elements – the triple bottom line, and the appeal to the decisions of users – but it stops short of combining them.
This is unsurprising, since it is difficult to imagine models of “socially rational” or “environmentally rational” decision-makers which would not be torn apart by the <i>de facto</i> plurality of norms, dispositions and interests constitutive of the former, and by the ideological conflict for the custody of the latter.<br />
<br />
Economic rationality, by contrast, can suppose a comparatively harmonious orientation towards the highest profits at the lowest risks. Even those who do not share this orientation will promptly recognize it as the basis on which they are addressed as economic agents. The G3’s vague and inclusive definition is an indication of how difficult it is to reorient the materiality concept for settings which are not highly systemically-integrated; roughly speaking, for places that aren’t completely saturated with economic incentives and/or administrative power.<br />
<br />
However, certain of the exemplary threat categories, which I’ve just mentioned, suggest that independence of mind may also be sensitive to social integration factors. It’s not <i>all </i>about stacking paper and ticking boxes! For example, gifts and hospitality, and acting on a client’s behalf in informal disputes, imply some level of communicative action involving the assuror and client.<br />
<br />
But before we allow this to argue that the orientation to audit is not complete, we should see it in light of the relationship between independence of mind and independence of appearance.
An important corollary of “independence of mind” is that organisations do not have minds. The subject of the Code, and the basic unit of independence, is the practitioner. A threat to independence is thus first affectively disclosed. The practitioner is the first to know about it, and is responsible for escalating it into the regulatory architecture.
For example, if a Big Four practitioner has any doubts about her independence, she can speak to one of the partners in charge of her project or her regional service line, to a national risk partner, to dedicated in-house legal teams, to the anonymous ethics helpline which each Big Four firm maintains, to the ICAEW, to the professional body of which she is personally a member (for accountants whose training is Big Four-sponsored, usually the ICAEW or ICAS), or even to the AADB. Such appeals are practical approximations of the Code’s appeal to the “informed, reasonable third party.” The regard of this regulatory architecture cannot be principally to affective status of the practitioner, so it is again to <i>homo economicus</i>, the rational economic subject. Some of these mechanisms are punitively specialised, but the run-of-the-mill independence threat will not be met with investigative and disciplinary procedures. It will be resolved by the institution of safeguards, a change or clarification of engagement scope, the transfer of the practitioner to other duties out of the zone of risk, or in an extreme case the withdrawal of the organization providing assurance.
Independence of mind is characterised through a labyrinthine system of recursively-defined terminology including integrity, objectivity, professional, honest, straightforward, fair, bias, undue influence and conflict of interests. The most substantive elements of this system are its several exemplary threat categories. But these cannot straightforwardly determine whether or not independence of mind exists, since a safeguard may potentially neutralise each threat, and the Code does not contain criteria to arbitrate the skirmish of threat and safeguard. However, the Code assumes that margins of safety are cheap, and so the practitioner is directed to draw them generously. If the practitioner receives any hint that her independence of mind is jeopardised, there are abundant candidates, unambiguously economically disinterested, to fill her position. The Code gives an overall impression of great fungibility of practitioners. The assumption of easy disengagement is emphasized by the fact that “concern about the possibility of losing a client” (q.v.) is itself identified as a threat to independence. Because there is so much room to manoeuvre, so much opportunity to switch practitioner for another, it is appropriate to situate the mechanism for invoking regulatory oversight in the affective state of the very person whose judgment is potentially impaired.<br />
<br />
The orientation of this idea of independence to audit can be made clear by a comparison with the CR context. For the assurance of CR reports, by contrast, a far more claustrophobic topology of interests obtains. The typical assurance engagement is one in which nobody is disinterested. Social and environmental independence cannot be privatively formulated as feasibly as economic disinterest can. <br />
Were the Code’s concept of independence were oriented to assurance, rather than audit, it would probably have to relinquish the ideal of a materially disinterested assuror, and acknowledge that material threats to independence are ineradicable.<br />
<br />
It would have to accept doubt as a constant accompaniment of independence. It would have to address in far greater detail how threats to independence are exacerbated and mitigated in their interactions with one another and with various safeguards.<br />
<br />
Okay, it’s worth emphasizing that I’ve only been examining the discursive construal of independence in the Code. I don’t mean to suggest that assurors really walk about in a reverie of internal monitoring, frequently deferring to regulatory oversight as their independence of mind undergoes some questionable shift! Indeed, most evidence is to the contrary. The Big Four have enthusiastically taken to the principle of safeguards, and employ sophisticated computerized conflict check systems to automate the allocation of practitioners to projects. PwC’s code of conduct states, “[w]e aim to avoid conflicts of interest. Where potential conflicts are identified and we believe that the respective parties’ interests can be properly safeguarded by the implementation of appropriate procedures, we will implement such procedures” (PwC 2008:8).<br />
<br />
This may demonstrate professionalised preoccupation with independence of appearance over independence of mind.
Independence of appearance exists if and only if a reasonable and informed third party would judge that independence of mind exists. This stipulation may at first appear redundant. The factors which, to a hypothetical third party, could argue a lack of independence, are coterminous with the factors for which the subject of the Code is supposed to take responsibility. As the subject of the Code has responsibility for hypothesising the reasonable and informed third party, it is at first unclear what constraint the provision adds.
But the provision is not redundant. I think there are three reasons I can give for this. First, the term “informed” implicitly includes practical limitations to evidentiary completeness. The subject of the Code may have spent the day in a room with a snazzy pink folder containing sensitive information, and not have opened it; the subject knows that her independence of mind is not compromised, but fact that the subject definitely did not open the snazzy pink folder must be excluded from the information possessed by the hypothetical third party.
Next, the hypothetical third party provides any disciplinary interpreter of the Code with a ready-made cast to occupy and to control in response to situational political imperatives. Making the role of a reasonable and informed third party a decisive one gives a very free hand to the concrete institutions invested with authority to decide upon the Code. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of the recursive system of normative terms loosely associated with honesty. These generate an ambience of raised normative expectation without microfoundation in any concrete norm-governed practices. In favouring a “principles based” approach over detailed specifications, the Code concentrates powers in the hands of concrete authorities.
Most importantly however, the derivation of independence of appearance from independence of mind is not a one-way process. The categories of threat which the Code lays out are impersonal, public phenomena. They are not a phenomenology of independence. They do not suggest what it might <i>feel like</i> if independence were threatened. They belong, in short, to the sphere of appearance.<br />
<br />
The subject of the Code is thus as likely, or more likely, to use independence of appearance as a yardstick for independence of mind, as the other way around. Indeed, inasmuch as the Code requires the practitioner to escalate any doubt about independence, its basic cognitive mode it requires is one of dubitable doubting (in other words, of apparent doubts, which can be studied to determine if they “actually are” doubts), a mode difficult or even impossible to inhabit except via an imagined intersubjectivity.<br />
<br />
The assertion that independence of mind is foundational for independence of appearance is thus contradicted throughout the Code.<br />
<br />
The appeal to the reasonable and informed third party pervades the Code; in its pervasiveness, independence of mind, ostensibly a definiendum from which independence of appearance is derivative, actually emerges coevally with it.
I see two main ways of understanding this pervasive appeal to a reasonable and informed third party. Both of these confirm independence’s the orientation to audit, rather than assurance. First, it could be considered the Code’s positivist moment. “Reason,” in this interpretation, is regarded as unproblematically homogenous and accessible, and to be “informed” is merely to possess all the “facts.”<br />
<br />
While parts of the Code pay lip service to consensual, rather than objectively-given reality, their significance can be traced to this conviction that there is what you might call a transcendental givenness which conforms itself both to thought (“reason”) and to the world (“information”). This understanding is plausible, and is roughly the position taken by Power and Laughlin (1992:116): “the image of accounting as a simple mapping of an independent reality is naïve […] a more radical critique of the representationalist credentials of accounting would see it as a practice that was “creative” in a much deeper sense, i.e. not as a deviation form an objective standard but as a practice without objectivity.”<br />
<br />
The second understanding, which I prefer and will further develop, is that the appeal to the reasonable and informed third party is actually one of the places in which the Code most explicitly acknowledges its basis in consensus. “Reasonable” and “informed,” on this interpretation, must be understood as outcomes of socialisation, not positivist indexicals. The independent practitioner is the professionally reasonable and informed practitioner. As Power (1997:80) notes, “Auditability is a function not of things themselves but of agreement within a specialist community which learns to observe and verify in a certain way.” The consensual basis of independence is reproduced through professional practice, which will be the subject of the next installment!Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-84602456000413471362013-08-30T14:58:00.000-07:002015-08-25T14:59:54.404-07:00Notes on Hoke's BluffThere are these two fairly good jokes they always tell at the Edinburgh Free Fringe, and the one is about how it's free to get <i>in </i>to see the show but not free to <i>leave</i>, and then the other one is something about, "blahdy blahdy blah, boop boop boop, <i>fold </i>your donation into this hat [or bucket]." Well I have busy since mid-May with my little jeweler's saw and soldering iron and pathetic <i>kleinen </i>hinges, crafting my foldable tuppence to perhaps fuck up that latter gag for keeps, and tonight I finally went along to <a href="http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/361503-hokes-bluff/"><i>Hoke's Bluff</i></a> at the Forest Fringe (huorned over to the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, goodness) to debut my devious little comeback, and do you know what -- I had to give them a bloody fiver!<br />
<br />
Yes, cast and crew of <i>Hoke's Bluff</i>: the fiver was from me.<br />
<br />
Now I can't really do a proper review, but here are some discombobulated notes.<br />
<br />
<i>Hoke's Bluff</i> is a play about sports, and perhaps particularly American high school sports, and perhaps particularly especially about <i>movies </i>about American high school sports. There is a jock, a cheerleader and a ref. There is a lot of poppy dance music, and lots of getting the audience to cheer and clap. They sell you popcorn and then make you feel guilty about eating it by running up and down and doing star jumps.<br />
<br />
The sport in question is a sort of excellent synthesis of American football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and soccer, in roughly that order of precedence, but <i>really </i>we all know it's Calvinball:<br />
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<br />
As well as Bill Watterson, it's reminiscent of Don DeLillo: <i>Americana </i>and -- especially! -- <i>End Zone. </i>There was that sense of sports talk (commentary, smack talk, pep talks, etc.) as being its own proper oral tradition, with its own integrity and complexity. It wasn't just that the beautiful writing of <i>Hoke's Bluff</i> had transmuted sports talk into poetry -- yes, that happened a bit, but sports talk was also allowed to be whatever it already is when it is fully, extravagantly realised. Something akin to poetry, perhaps. The sister arts: ut playbook poesis.<br />
<br />
It is a crackerjack series of beautifully staged little spectacles. Detail, yes! And there was a steadiness to it, a confident occupation of attention which left me with the impression of the characteristic pacing of sketch comedy. Processes which sound like they should be boring to watch instead became the milieu in which little well-chosen details continually shifted.<br />
<br />
(Sometimes, when you say to someone, "You must be so bored of people asking you x," they say something like, "Oh, not really. Everyone says it in a different way!" And yes, everyone who says that says "Everyone says it in a different way!" in a different way).<br />
<br />
Given the deliberately archetypal and somewhat fragmentary storytelling, the characters conveyed a surprising richness.<br />
<br />
The artifice is so bright and straightforward it almost feels as if it is handed back to the audience to control. Feelings can operate more like thoughts: you can move around in feeling, choosing different branches, like you can move around in thoughts. (Although a film like Christoffer Boe's <i>Reconstruction </i>(2003) shows that drawing attention to a trope does not necessarily significantly change its emotional impact. (Perhaps it's different with Hoke's Bluff because when it comes to cheesy sports movies, we're <i>already </i>used to suspending disbelief in some particular way?)).<br />
<br />
Something else about <i>Hoke's Bluff </i>-- something about its hyperreality -- means if we choose to feel with the grain, we probably won't be distracted by the falseness, by tropes constructed to create a certain feeling. It is false <i>here</i>, but it's true <i>somewhere</i>. (Perhaps this is peculiar to small town sports obsessions).<br />
<br />
You know that hokey gag where an orator -- coach, say -- gets carried away in a speech supposedly about general and noble things, and inserts various personal hang-ups and/or uncomfortably intimate information? (I'm not sure if it really is a gag. It's seldom funny). Something like that happens in <i>Hoke's Bluff</i>.<i> </i>But the movement is not always from the general and proverbial to the specific and private. It is another mode of oversharing altogether.<br />
<br />
These epic lists! The names are funny, sometimes. There's that Chris Morris-y way of creating names. (I don't know, maybe they were all real). Is this perhaps the counterpart to Romantic irony -- to that sense that anything could always have been otherwise? A kind of Romantic bathos, or something? I don't know.<br />
<br />
That's it. I really liked it.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-28594585473991587892013-07-08T15:22:00.000-07:002013-07-08T15:22:14.591-07:00A review of Baxter's biography of JG Ballard
<i>The Inner Man </i>is a smart, supple and jolly biography. I particularly enjoyed the brisk but forbearing way Baxter dismisses info from the horse’s mouth – <i>no, he didn’t do that, no, he must have imagined that, nope, he didn’t read that then, I don’t care what he says</i> etc.. There are good anecdote – Ballard hated Sister Wendy and avoided going to events where she’d be present; the British Board of Film Classification screened Cronenberg’s <i>Crash </i>for eleven paraplegics to make sure it was all right; Ballard would pleasantly acquiesce to requests for references, but write separate letters to the reference recipients, warning them to disregard the references. There’s also a pretty good harvest of witticisms and wry remarks. Baxter doesn’t seem overly bothered about spoilers – but then again, for most of his life, Ballard is just sitting in his house in Shepperton, so it does make sense to focus on his writing. Avoiding fetishizing Ballard’s experiences as the meaning of his works, Baxter still manages to keep up a stream of plausible suggestions of persons, incidents, environments and atmospheres which may have been fictionalised. In terms of critical curation, Baxter’s preferred cultural contexts, especially for Ballard’s sf, are mostly visual art, and are generally quite convincing. He also emphasizes the importance of advertising – the born advertiser waging holy war against consumer culture is the closest Baxter comes to a summation of Ballard. Without conspicuously cheating, and without rendering Ballard any less idiosyncratic, Baxter renders him rather a lot less enigmatic.
A few reservations: I felt there was too much about movies. There were also a few too many arbitrary summaries of context: "it was 196X, the Beatles were in Tibet, opposition to the Vietnam conflict was growing, everyone was watching aliens on Star Trek, yoda yoda yoda."
More importantly, I’d have liked more emphasis on the gender and sex politics of Ballard, his work and his era. Baxter suggests that if Ballard’s young wife Mary had not died, he would have forever remained a second rate writer. The main implications of Ballard "knocking around" his girlfriend are apparently her changing her look and a hiatus in Ballard’s friendship with Moorcock.
Finally, I’m dubious of the handling of what you could call the critical moment in Ballard works. Baxter does Ballard a disservice by drawing so few comparisons with postmodern theorists, critical theorists and post-marxists – leaving him seeming to celebrate a rather drab brand of swaggering nihilism and butch self-fashioning.
Also, Colin Waters raises what seem to be some rather sensible points in his <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-and-poetry/reviews/john-baxter-the-inner-man-the-life-of-jg-ballard-weidenfeld-nicolson-1.1124187">review</a> for The Herald!Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-28492053269022556772013-06-19T07:00:00.004-07:002013-06-19T07:00:57.871-07:00Hai Drone Jin Sim Natter<i>An eensy bit terser version of this review appeared in <a href="http://ttapress.com/1485/interzone-243/">Interzone 243.</a> Of course it makes rather bittersweet reading now, especially the last bit. Iain Banks you were wonderful & you are missed.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The Hydrogen Sonata</i> tells the story of a crisis sparked by the
impending rapture (“Subliming”) of a major galactic civilisation (the
Gzilt) into a sort of extra-dimensional transcendental afterlife or
überlife thingamajig. As the blessed day draws closer, scores are
settled and secrets revealed; rules, manners and mores unravel;
meanwhile, scavengers push and shove on the perimeter, ready at the
first sign of a civilisation-wide, blissed-out puff of smoke to pounce
on whatsoever cool tech and well-appointed worlds that might be going
spare. Pretty swiftly everyone’s favourite super-advanced
post-scarcity utopian anarchists (the Culture) can’t resist poking
their smug pug noses (or hulls, I guess – many of the Culture
characters are, crudely speaking, space ships) into the affair.<br />
<br />
So I make that … <i>ten </i>Culture books now? Technically each one is
stand-alone, though some – <i>The Hydrogen Sonata</i> for one – will surely
bewilder the beginner more than others. That’s not to say <i>The Hydrogen
Sonata</i> is “a bad place to start” exactly – there are pleasures
peculiar to wandering in<i> in media res</i> and figuring out, detective
fashion, an already well-established world, and even to feeling the
weight of obscure presences you never fully descry. For Banks
aficionados awaiting a fix of courageously intelligent, consistently
droll, and sporadically pyrotechnically-savage space opera, <i>The
Hydrogen Sonata</i> can’t be said to short-change. The cool tech is cool;
the intriguing teamwork is intriguing, the gratuitously exotic
backdrops are exotic as ever; the grotesque revels are gross as ever
(a minor character can have too many penises, you know, Mr Banks); the
lovable sidekicks must needs be loved; and the Imperial pomp is
copiously pompous (though not technically Imperial). There are tense,
matter-of-fact, “one-hobbit-with-one-HP-survives” style military
set-pieces. There are pilgrimages to gurus. There is <i>pluck</i>.
There are some links to <i>Surface Detail</i> (2010) too, in which disputes
over the ethics of simulated Hell escalates into political and
military crisis. We’re also in <i>Excession </i>(1996) territory, with the Deep Space Natter novel form – you feel a bit like
you’ve stumbled onto a cosmic Wikipedia talk page <i>waaay </i>above your
security clearance.<br />
<br />
There’s really so much crammed into <i>The Hydrogen
Sonata</i> that it may seem an odd choice to dwell so carefully on the
wordy and prying committee of principled AI meddlers (whilst, for
instance, the thread about the murderous Septame Bangestyn felt
ever-so-slightly cursory). Still, I don’t think Banks was wasting
skill by selecting this focus and making it work.<br />
<br />
Here’s why. Culture novels have been getting good at extrapolating
around various sf mainstays (especially VR simulations, subjectivity
saved games, and dealings between AI and biological life) in ways
which could be catastrophic for storytelling and emotional investment
and pacing, but aren’t. For instance – can scenes ever-liable to
dissolve as sims, or sims-within-sims, be built such that readers
still care for their outcomes? Maybe not! Do readers care about
characters who can be restored off a disc if they die? Maybe not! What
can an author give a flesh-and-bones hero to do, if AI and snazzy tech
can obviously handle the heroism so much better? Maybe <i>nada </i>— “You
won’t be contributing, you’ll be jeopardising,” an AI avatar tells
Sonata protagonist Vyr Cossont as she insists on protagging along to a
climactic battle (p. 432). In general Banks has been admirably
reluctant to fudge these snags. Treated candidly, they can serve as
sources of strange energies and cathexes and seemingly-warped-yet-utterly-logical narrative structures (contrasting
with the flamboyant structural elegance of books like <i>Use of Weapons</i>
(1990), <i>Feersum Endjinn</i> (1994) and <i>Inversions </i>(1998)).<br />
<br />
I think that’s part of what’s going on in <i>Matter </i>(2008), <i>Surface
Detail</i> and <i>The Hydrogen Sonata</i>, and I think it’s part of a larger
struggle in many of Banks’ books between materialism and storytelling.
That is, between the obligation to the messiness of the universe, and
the obligation to freight history with meanings and values which might
distort and artificially neaten it.<br />
<br />
If I have a niggle – and how many fans will share in it, I don’t know
– I could happily have heard a little more overt moral chat!<br />
<br />
Sure,
various values are implicitly represented and tested – especially
those swirling around the themes of prediction (sims again), risk and
self-sacrifice (both pointless and pointed). But more explicit lines
might have been drawn, and/or a more contemporary aura invoked –
Surface Detail was about Hell, and one of its highlights was a
level-headed dispute with a thinly-veiled American theocon. <i>The
Hydrogen Sonata</i> in a way is about Heaven, plus the whole connected
secular caboodle of utopia, revolt and so on. Subliming offers the
opportunity to think about the operation of moral calculation and
moral instinct in anticipation of salvation, about the ways in which
vangardists confront sacrifices and terrible trade-offs (“to murder so
many so that so many more may one day –” yadayadayada), and about how
they may successfully solicit and/or delusively <i>project </i>such
sacrifices and terrible trade-offs, with stunningly complex outcomes.
We know Banks is capable of more in-depth and subtle interrogations of
eschatological psychology; so maybe he didn’t think we were capable or
inclined to attend to them?<br />
<br />
Well, I’m not wistful for <i>The Hydrogen
Sermon</i> or anything, and to be fair, whilst Subliming is prodigiously
fleshed out (ectoplasm’d out?) in that novel, plenty of new mysteries
and prospects are generated in the process. So perhaps there is more
about this whole Subliming business yet to come. Actually that's quite
an exciting thought.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-19960271380380153102013-06-19T06:24:00.001-07:002013-06-19T06:24:39.560-07:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting Assurance (4)Okay, a sort of interlude to peer into how the accountancy profession and other assurance providers hope to systematise CR reporting. My info here may be a little archaic (often to the tune of four or five years); I’ll try to bring it more up-to-date eventually, but in the meanwhile anyone who wants to chip in, <i>please do! </i><br />
<br />
<i>Standards</i><br />
<br />
Despite the mostly voluntary character of CR reporting and assurance, there are many signs of standardisation. Most of the largest 250 companies worldwide use guidelines developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (“GRI”), and they seem to try to keep pretty up-to-date.<br />
<br />
Look a little closer, and the full extent of this standardisation is difficult to decipher. The GRI guidelines are widely used in some form or another, but the guidelines are designed to be incredibly flexible. Compliance with the G3 version of the guidelines comes at three “Application Levels” according to how many CR indicators the company is able to report on; compliance can be self-assessed, or checked by the GRI or by a third party; reports can also be assured or not (the next iteration, G4 is likely to <a href="http://%20www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/global-reporting-initiative-updates">drop this feature</a>).<br />
<br />
Assurance may also be restricted to certain aspects of a report, and it may be either at the “reasonable” or “limited” level. This last distinction relates to the amount of work done to verify the subject matter. Reasonable assurance results in a positive form of the assurance statement (“is fairly stated”) whereas limited assurance results in a negative form (“nothing has come to our attention to suggest that it is not fairly stated”). Statutory audit of financial statements is always at the reasonable level. Limited assurance is used in a variety of other contexts, for example, in quarterly reviews of financial statements. A KPMG survey in 2008 showed that “the majority of the G250 (51 percent) obtain report assurance that is a ‘limited level’ of assurance—a lower level that requires less work from the assurance provider and therefore lower costs. […] From a company perspective, choosing a limited level is not surprising since assurance on corporate responsibility information is mainly a voluntary activity.”<br />
<br />
The most significant standard of assurance provision applicable to the Big Four is the ISAE3000, maintained by the International Federation of Accountants (“IFAC”) through the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (“IAASB”). For member organisations, ISAE3000 has become compulsory where there is no national alternative (such as the Australian AS/NZS 5911 standard). This applies to the Big Four through their memberships in ICAEW. Specialist assurance providers (such as SGS and Two Tomorrows) typically don’t use the ISAE3000. It is a very flexible, generic standard, applicable to a wide range of non-audit assurance engagements. It assumes that the scope of the assurance engagement will be set by the reporting entity. In the UK, the Auditing Practices Board (“APB”) has responsibility for implementing standards issued by the IAASB. It does not currently promulgate the ISAE3000. The APB has expressed the view that the ISAE3000 aims to address too broad a range assurance engagements.<br />
<br />
Then there’s the AA1000AS standard. The AA1000AS was developed by the non-profit organisation AccountAbility specifically for the assurance of CR reporting. The Big Four comply with this standard at their clients’ discretion. The AA1000AS (2008) seems still to be the most recent incarnation. <br />
<br />
KPMG describe their use of the AA1000APS (2003) as a two phase process. Phase 1 considers whether the scope and materiality of the report is appropriate. During Phase 1, KPMG run their own analysis of scope and materiality. This consists of establishing five input channels: stakeholder engagement; media search; sector knowledge (e.g. peer CR reports, industry body guidelines); client knowledge; and prior year CR commitments. Phase 2 considers whether the individual claims are accurate and complete. Phase 2 is a lengthy process of identifying and taxonomising material assertions. “This results in a detailed assurance plan (including a list of people to be interviewed and a list of the required documentary evidence) at corporate, business/regional and site level (if relevant), together with the selection of sites to be visited. The type and amount of evidence required varies depending on the type of assertion and the level of assurance being sought.”<br />
<br />
AA1000AS was developed to complement ISAE3000. For example, AA1000AS’s moderate and high levels of assurance, which the standard recommends for “new” and “mature” issues respectively, are intended to be consistent with ISAE3000’s “limited” and “reasonable” levels of assurance.<br />
<br />
One important difference between the AA1000AS series and the ISAE3000 is that the assuror’s consideration of “materiality” is not limited in a scope set by the reporting entity. Materiality is a crucial concept of financial audit methodology, that has been carried over into assurance. Very loosely speaking, material information is significant information. It’s what <i>matters</i>. (I may get more detailed elsewhere). Under the AA1000AS series, the assuror assesses the degree to which the reporting entity’s scope has correctly identified its stakeholders and their needs. In other words, the <i>assuror </i>must make judge the reporting entity’s choices about what is and is not significant, by appeal to its stakeholders.<br />
<br />
So those are the main standards used in the assurance of CR reporting. The Big Four have also developed their own tools relating to CR reporting, for instance Deloitte’s Sustainability Reporting Scorecard (2004), thirty criteria against which to assess a CR report. I’m not sure how much uptake there was of this.<br />
<br />
<i>Monitoring</i><br />
<br />
There is comparatively little independent monitoring of this assurance itself (well, you do have to stop somewhere, I suppose). The G3 includes guidance on satisfactory assurance, but compliance must be self-assessed. One GRI representative commented, “An organization should look at the definition on pg. 38 of the GRI Guidelines and make its own assessment in conjunction with the assurance provider as to how they wish to communicate their engagement publicly. We will not take a position on whether a given engagement does or does not constitute ‘external assurance’ as it is impossible for us to assess the full range of engagements put in front of us” (2009).<br />
<br />
AccountAbility don’t monitor the use of the AA1000AS (2008) to a detailed level. Each use of the AA1000AS (2008) in an assurance statement requires payment of a license fee to AccountAbility. AccountAbility pre-checks only the statement itself, although an acceptable statement must include a description of methodology. In partnership with the International Register of Certificated Auditors (“IRCA”), AccountAbility offers individuals training and certification in the use of AA1000AS (2008). AccountAbility also has an assuror membership programme (which includes all of the Big Four). However, neither of these are requirements to use the AA1000AS (2008).<br />
<br />
The accountancy profession’s self-regulation mechanisms monitor compliance with the ISAE3000. In the context of indepedence, it's worth pointing out that the organisations which embody these mechanisms scoop their members from the cream of the accountancy profession, including Big Four partners. A quick scan suggests that about half the members of the APB are current or former associates of the Big Four, with the remainder drawn from business, law or academic backgrounds. The Big Four are also well-represented on the IFAC board.<br />
<br />
High-level oversight of the ISAE3000 is provided by the Public Interest Oversight Board (“PIOB”), an extension of IFAC. In the UK, an infringement of the ISAE3000 would be reported to the professional body of which the firm or one of its employees was a member. All of the Big Four are institutional members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (“ICAEW”). The Financial Reporting Council (“FRC”) is the UK’s independent regulator responsible for the accountancy and audit profession. The FRC, through its Professional Oversight Board (“POB”) has a statutory responsibility to ensure that these bodies have effective arrangements in place to investigate complaints against their members and member firms. The FRC recommends that professional bodies escalate cases concerning the public interest to its Accountancy & Actuarial Discipline Board (“AADB”). The AADB may also autonomously initiate investigations. As noted above, the APB does not currently promulgate the ISAE3000. In 2009, Executive Director of the APB commented, “While the ICAEW have some sort of monitoring of all services provided by audit firms in the UK (Practice Assurance), in reality I think it is fair to say that there is no monitoring of compliance with it [the ISAE3000].” There is thus something of a regulatory gap; certainly there is less oversight of this standard than of comparable audit standards.<br />
<br />
<i>A few more bits & pieces</i><br />
<br />
In addition to all these standards and frameworks described, the Big Four aim to conduct their assurance work in accordance with the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants, maintained by IFAC’s International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (“IESBA”), as well as with their own codes of conduct and independence policies, and with appropriate national laws. <br />
<br />
Important national legislation includes SOX, enacted in the US in 2002 in the aftermath of a number of major corporate and accounting scandals, above all the collapse of Enron and subsequently of their auditors, Arthur Andersen. Among its provisions, it prohibits professional services firms from doing audit and certain consultancy work for the same client. SOX also extends the scope of statutory audit to a range of internal fraud-prevention controls. ICAEW comments, “The most effective way to ensure the reality of independence is to provide guidance centred around a framework of principles rather than a detailed set of rules that can be complied with to the letter but circumvented in substance.” The focus of these blog posts is the UK system, characterized by this “principles”-based approach. It should be noted however that in the US context, largely as a consequence of SOX, threats to independence are subject to far greater “bright line” legislative specification and governmental regulation. <br />
<br />
Finally, an there is the Audit Firm Governance Code, a code of best practice applicable to firms that audit more than twenty listed companies. This comprises the Big Four and four other large professional services firms. As far as I’m aware this doesn’t contain any provisions which are not chiefly oriented to the audit of financial statements.<br />
<br />
Okay! Onward!Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-44169621685048147042013-06-10T14:57:00.002-07:002014-01-24T02:32:32.484-08:00Rather dull note for Public Administration Select Committee about digital democracyThis is a note about the way forward for online participation of the UK citizenry in our government.<br />
<br />
Public consultations justly have a bad name. So indeed do stakeholder consultations.<br />
<br />
For a period of several years I was involved with private sector market research and, frequently, public sector consultations. Confidentiality forbids me from sharing specific examples, but I grew used to hearing the growing horror of stakeholders gradually realising how limited their scope of influence was, on issues on which they were more passionate, more informed, and more directly influenced by than whoever was driving policy, and despite the trappings of open and responsive governance.<br />
<br />
E.g.:<br />
<br />
(a) I think the government tends to forget that it has a responsibility to assess the invested interests of those who participate in consultations. In particular, there is a tendency to think that businesses are experts in their own affairs, and that they can therefore be expected to make the best decisions for the economy and the country on sector-specific issues. In fact we live in such an interconnected world that there is no such thing as a purely sector-specific issue; the government have a responsibility to be critical of these sources, and to try to work out what the big picture is.<br />
<br />
(b) I think stakeholder mapping is usually very badly done. There is often a slippage in sense from "anyone whom this issue affects" (a good definition of a stakeholder) to "those who are already influential in this area, and/or already present themselves as knowledgeable" (a poor definition).<br />
<br />
(c) My strong intuition is that no matter how hard government (or any organisation) promises to itself it really will listen to its stakeholders this time, the only way to genuinely drive policy change through stakeholder engagement is to delegate real power to stakeholders - or at least to allow stakeholders to impose penalties if, in their considered judgement, the engagement process has not been material.<br />
<br />
The issue, of course, is then whether you have the courage to delegate power to stakeholders who may disagree with you!<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
None of the following suggestions really make my heart leap, but I find it tricky to come up with anything better.<br />
<br />
I am slightly worried that such measures might be adopted and executed badly. They might then serve as evidence that online participation is simply impractical.<br />
<br />
So here are a few thoughts on online participation (apologies; they are slightly disjointed).<br />
<br />
The UK should be leading the way in online participation, not half-heartedly trying out experiments we know will probably fail, so that we can have the excuse, "Well, we gave it a bloody good shot!"<br />
<br />
I suppose a good principle to begin with is what the de facto citizen is like.<br />
<br />
We shouldn't romanticize the notion of the citizen. We are often: overworked, harried, short on time, money, patience, passionate about issues but also nervous and defensive about a lack of deep knowledge of them, willing to learn, but also distrusting of all information on topics of public interest, without necessarily the time nor the inclination to be critical of that information, and craving the security and simplicity of authoritative information sources, or of timeless truths (typically cynical and/or vague dogmatism).<br />
<br />
So "involving" us isn't just a matter of making government more permeable to the pre-existing knowledge, energy & deliberative resources of the citizenry. It is also finding ways to cultivate & nourish those things.<br />
<br />
The trouble about polls is that there are just so many of them. One avenue worth exploring is making participation in official polls a bit more like voting: for instance, you can only vote in these polls once per month, so you'll choose the issue that's important to you, and not feel guilty about the rest. (Twelve votes per year might be better than one per month, for the sake of flexibility).<br />
<br />
Letter-writing & petitions obviously have their place, but they feel rather dated. They take time and energy. The results are often discouraging (38 Degrees campaigns are a partial exception). They are only indirectly educative. We surely now have the technology to make the activities of government far more transparent, and to be able feedback on those activities at a fine grain, and for our government to be minutely responsive to that feedback. We have social networking and social browsing; why not social scrutiny of government?<br />
<br />
We need to think about the notion of the "popularity" of information, and how the effects of particular items "going viral" could be usefully included in the interface between public and government. Not everything can receive equal attention, but it is not for the government to decide what is and isn't important. Nor can we any longer trust the opposition and traditional media to make such a selection. We the public must also be directly involved in determining relevance. At the same time, this is obviously risky territory. Information can become popular based on shallow considerations.<br />
<br />
So in terms of online interaction, we also need to think about the relationship between the serious & official, and the casual, satirical, just-for-fun. Obviously not every tweeted joke, every "OMFG!" or ever photoshopped jpeg is an equally venerable and sacred exercise of a democratic right. At the same time, if you simply exclude the flippant, anarchic & playful side of things, you risk creating an arena for engagement which is dull, excessively hard work, and unrepresentative of the citizenry - being dominated by anoraks, humourless sorts, and special interests. You fail to cultivate & nourish the knowledge, energy & deliberative resources of the citizenry. (We also need to think about trolls. We also need to think about astroturf).<br />
<br />
I don't have any big answers, but a small example might point us in roughly the right direction. Scenario A is that there is a comments section beneath Parliament TV. It obviously looks rather like the thread of pretty much any YouTube clip, and it confirms everyone's suspicion that we, the British public, are idiots.<br />
<br />
Scenario B is that Parliament TV is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., as well as bespoke social networking sites. Users can comment on issues raised and share specific segments of the filmed proceedings, or transcripts thereof, and can filter the annotative activity of other users in a variety of ways. There is, for example, a "readers who liked this comment tended to also like these comments" feature, so it's not just a matter of what's popular or not - people with common purposes or ideas can find one another. There are incentives for independent fact-checking to flourish. Where jargon or specialised language appears, it is easy to click through to get definitions and explanations. Those readers who persevere on such a path can even find educative resources in the underlying theory. You may start your day seeing a funny photoshopped pic, proceed to the news story on which it is based, then find yourself enrolling in an online course in economics or environmental science. Openness is a guiding principle throughout. The online architecture has been designed with the frictionless experience of the end user, the citizen, kept firmly in mind.<br />
<br />
But at the same time, we learn what the culture of parliament is like. What is it like to be an MP or a civil servant? What restrictions do they feel upon their speech and action? What is it they think the public don't understand about their position? What is it they feel they are blamed for that is beyond their control? How do even those who are in government feel their ability to govern as they would like, to make the decisions they really want to make, is restricted by their party, by the markets, by the economy, by specific commercial interests, by existing statutes and case law, by the media, by the European and international context? It may sound paradoxical, but e-democracy isn't just about increasing and improving the participation of the public in governing. It's also about increasing and improving the participation of the governors in governing.<br />
<br />
To summarise slightly reductively: online participation needs to be frictionless, fun, and educative. It needs to imaginatively exploit cutting edge technologies, not just transfer pre-digital practices online.<br />
<br />
What have the more far-thinking and imaginative theorists of e-democracy proposed? Has the Public Administration Select Committee interviewed anyone who fits that description?Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-73720309375227900942013-05-21T02:19:00.000-07:002014-01-24T02:26:04.320-08:00J. G. Ballard's CONCRETE: thoughts on High Rise and Concrete Island<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 29.33333396911621px;">This originally appeared in <a href="http://www.bsfa.co.uk/vector-261-out-now/%E2%80%8E">Vector #261</a>. Thank you to then-editor Niall Harrison for helping it make some sense.</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1) <st1:place w:st="on">Paradise</st1:place><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">J. G. Ballard
died on the </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">19<sup>th</sup> of April 2009. <i>You</i> are the promising young angelic architect commissioned to
design his eternal paradise; time to step/flap up.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The seraphic refulgence
favoured by so many of your colleagues feels inappropriate. A scrunched-up,
half-hearted sketch of a cumulo-nimbus caryatid bounces from the rim of the
bin. Far too much like some nexus of crystallized flora and fauna from Ballard’s
1966 apocalyptic novel, <i>The Crystal World</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Unsettled, you tear
a new sheet and begin to explore an Edenic concept, but your garden reveries
are infiltrated by great, sail-backed lizards. Boiling malarial lagoons breach
the levees. You remember Ballard’s 1962 apocalyptic novel, <i>The Drowned World</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What about amenities?
Every intimation of luxury or convenience evokes <i>High Rise </i>(1975), <i>Cocaine
Nights</i> (1996) and <i>Super-Cannes</i>
(2000), novels in which ultra-comfortable, designer living arrangements become a
catalyst to ambiguous savagery, fetishism and sociopathy. “Over the swimming
pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence” (<i>Super-Cannes</i>, p. 75).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maybe he could
learn to love great slabs baked to a malevolent glitter? Their service pipes
and water towers exposed, as though every solicitous euphemism, and comforting
illusion, were fallen victim to weird evisceration? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oh boy. Did
Ballard <i>like</i> Brutalism? You’re not
sure. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place> could be rebuilt in the style of
Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” Ballard once wrote [1]. Was he
kidding?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brutalism thrived from the 1950s to the
mid-1970s. Its signature material was <i>concrete</i>.
It took its name from concrete, specifically <i>béton brut</i>, <i>raw</i> concrete. It took its cue, or its
cube, from the heroism of early High Modernism, except now all heros were
tragic heros. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Concrete, jutting,
rough-hewn stone, brick, glass and steel: Brutalism has always baffled me a
bit. It feels like anti-architecture posing as architecture. Serving the only nine
crisps you own at your dinner party, trying to pass it off as the principled minimalism
of an austere populist. I’m pretty sure that’s ignorance and prejudice on my
part. But it’s widespread ignorance and prejudice. Brutalist tower blocks soon came
to both embody and symbolise the failures of the welfare state. You know the
deal. Heroin tinfoil twirling, leaflike, in puddles of piss. In <i>High Rise </i>Ballard wrote, “In principle,
the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the buildings they
had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented
revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken
place at frequent intervals during the post-war years” (p. 69).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I guess Brutalism
should be seen against the background – literally – of its prehistory. Brutalist
structures seem less antagonistic where they rise against archictecture of a
finnickier and more coy sort. Where Brutalism is a sparse elaboration upon a
crinkle-crankle, tumbledown backdrop, its ahistoricism seems good-humoured – at
least, a tantrum we can indulge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Furthermore, in
the post-war period, impatience with frilly bits had a stronger rationale than
mere Enlightenment iconoclasm. Cunning, indirection, camouflage, nobility,
glory, ambition, cultural and traditional particularity and partiality – all
these were tainted by association with their equivalent martial “virtues.” The
prevailing spirit melted exhaustion with determination. The two world wars had
been <i>bullshit</i>. Openness,
accountability, stability, clarity, functionality, universality, neutrality,
democracy were “in.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That meant honesty
in materials. That meant that, in post-war <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region></st1:place>, Le Corbusier’s
multi-functional super-structures came more and more to resemble
Medusa-stricken Decepticons. In <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Britain</st1:country-region></st1:place>,
the gentle, humanist, compromise Modernism of the welfare state compromise was
increasingly confronted by the principled austerity of Alison and Peter
Smithson. At the same time, the Smithsons resisted certain trajectories of
continental Brutalism. Their chief beef was (ironically, in light of – well, in
the shadow of – <i>High Rise</i>) that urban
planning should foster community spirit. “‘Belonging’ is a basic emotional
need,” they wrote. “From ‘belonging’ – identity – comes the enriching sense of
neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious
redevelopment frequently fails.” [2]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Reyner Banham, the
architectural theorist and critic, dubbed the British Brutalism of the
Smithsons and their crew the “New Brutalism.” Banham characterised the style by
its formal legibility of plan, or memorability as an image; its clear
exhibition of structure (including exposed service features – “Water and
electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall, but are delivered
to the point of use by visible pipes and conduits”); and its valuation of
materials for their inherent qualities as ‘found’. And he added, “In the last
resort what characterises the New Brutalism in architecture as in painting is
precisely its brutality, its <i>je-’en-foutisme,
</i>its bloody-mindedness, and that the Smithsons’ work is characterized by an
abstemious under-designing of the details, and much of the impact of the
building comes from ineloquence, but absolute consistency, of such components
as the stairs and handrails” [3].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So we have an
architectural philosophy which prioritizes function and in some degree
aestheticises it. Though it is often received as anti-humanist, it has a
commitment to the human which is revealed negatively, like someone
painstakingly avoiding mentioning his or her big crush. Space and material are
enslaved to an implicit ensemble of human needs. Every autonomous flourish is
treated with the utmost suspicion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To entirely rationalise an environment
according to the real needs of its inhabitants requires you <i>know</i> those real needs, intimately. But that
implies the risk that unquantifiables will be shoehorned into categories, and
imperfection and idiosyncracy will be met with intolerance. Moreover, a utopia
designed for the desires of one kind of person could transform that kind of
person into a <i>new</i> kind of person, for
whom the utopia is – well, something else, un-utopian, perhaps <i>dystopian</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dystopia could
already be here. Current levels of
global inequality are vom-provoking, if you have anything in your belly. One
response to dystopia is to distinguish “real needs” from luxuries. (The term
“real needs” appears at least twice in <i>High
Rise</i>. “Real illusion,” another Marxist term, also pops up. I doubt whether
these were conscious allusions). Selecting some real needs is the first step of
the commonsense approach – more-or-less the Human Rights approach. Next you
struggle, righteously, to fulfil everyone’s real needs. Above all, you fight to
revoke any luxuries which are based on <i>denying
someone her or his real needs</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But commonsense
runs into problems. As Karl Marx pointed out, an axiomatic anthropological
division between “real needs” and luxuries could set us on the path to . . .
well, the Marxian version of utopianism. That’s utopianism in a pejorative
sense, implicated with false consciousness, especially with “ideology.” An
updated term for what Marx usually meant by “ideology” is “idealism” – a kind
of sublimation of class struggle, a transfer of its forms to the infinitely
hospitable media of language and thought. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In essence, if we
declare in advance what are “real needs” and what are luxuries, we’re likely to
superimpose abstract reconciliations on a material world still riven with
conflict, then look cross-eyed, constipated, <i>yet smug</i>. Our utopian
project, founded in dogmatic anthropology, would have no resources against an
equally dogmatic counter-anthropology, one positing domination as an
ineradicable feature of human nature. (“Domination” can use various proxies –
self-interest, will to life, or the propensity for people to form efficient
markets at the drop of a hat).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In fact, the first
move of such conservative opponents will be to point out how falsely conceiving
of material antagonisms as errors of thought – idealism – can exacerbate those
antagonisms, and raise their stakes. Battlemechs do not respect peace treaties,
only other battlemechs. This is political Realism through and through. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So “commonsense” and “ideology” are
joined at the hip, as are “utopia” and “idealism.” Marx’s response to this quandry was complex
and, let me be square, a bit over my head. It had centrally to do, I think,
with why Marx had to claim his approach was both dialectic and scientific. But more
urgently – for our purposes -- where does all this leave Ballard and Brutalism?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imagine you’re
strapped into a hair-cutting machine, which insists you’re an inch shorter than
you actually are. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brutalism inclines
towards anthropological dogmatism. It never lets you forget which bits of the
shebang are the humans. In Brutalism’s dogged insistence on serving those
humans, it crops anything jutting outside of its idea of what is human.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nobody, on the
other hand, could call <i>Ballard</i>
anthropologically dogmatic – and in the next bit I’ll say why. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(2) Soul<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So anyway, <i>which</i>
Ballard wings his way hither? In Christian tradition, resurrection is of the <i>flesh</i>, since the soul, which can’t die,
can’t be said to live again. Saints get special bod mods: impassibility, glory,
agility, subtility. But which Ballard – or <i>what</i>
of Ballard is on its way? Could it be Jim, the little squirt tearing around a
Japanese prison camp in WWII? Or the dashing young RAF pilot in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Canada</st1:country-region></st1:place>?
The <i>enfant terrible, </i>centre of a controversial
obscenity trial? The middle-aged father, sitting in Shepperton, watching too
much TV and writing out <i>High Rise </i>and
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place> long-hand? The dying Ballard?
Some strange council or admixture or Matryoshka? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his 2008 memoir
<i>Miracles of Life</i> Ballard wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“To return to <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Shanghai</st1:city></st1:place>, for the first
time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting
for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece
of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of
the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the
skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that
I had cycled around as a boy [...] I was on an errand, though I had yet to
grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the
boy in a Cathedral school cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his
friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the <st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Bubbling Well Road</st1:address></st1:street>,
smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my
shirt” (p. 266)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Was Ballard suggesting
that he had a deep authentic core, a private continuity underlying his life’s vicissitudes
and forgetfulnesses, which could be haphazardly accessed via an evocative taste,
or fragrance, or snatch of song? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If Ballard’s books
don’t exactly advertise a clear concept of paradise, then they’re even cagier when
it comes to “deep authentic cores.” Ballard was far too sensitive to how
authenticity today – like any moral concept – is mediated by representation, how
it turns and twists to suit the courses of swift flows of capital and glamour. Only
a lie for cash could be so convincing, so seductive, as <i>authenticity</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ballard fed his
characters to his themes. You can watch his characters writhe and transmogrify
in the guts of those themes. What survives from one phase of a character to the
next is often what the earlier phase would categorize as trivial, peripheral. In
<i>High Rise</i>, for example, when the
well-educated residents start to vandalise their luxury tower block with
quasi-tribal graffiti, their territorial sigils are witticisms, wordplays,
acrostics and palindromes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In a way, Ballard
probably <i>couldn’t</i> write “good”
characters – that is, “well-developed” or “believeable” ones. At least, he was
never too interested in those networks of corroborative detail from whose
densities could spring George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, or Henry James’s Isabel
Archer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Today naturalism
has completely faltered,” Ballard said in a 1990 interview. “You only find it
in middle-brow fiction.” [4]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rather, Ballard’s
characters are nailed to agendas as though to racks. The roboticist Masahiro
Mori coined the term “<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Uncanny</st1:placename>
<st1:placetype w:st="on">Valley</st1:placetype></st1:place>” to describe how
people respond more and more warmly to robots (and cute anthropomorphic animals
and things) the more humanlike you make them – until they’re near-perfect
facsimiles, when suddenly our responses swerve into disquiet or revulsion. (The
Valley itself is the steep plunge when you plot these responses as a line
graph). The inner lives of Ballard’s characters resemble the outer rictuses of those
overly-lifelike droids. These characters seem to experience in extended similes.
“Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding
airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in
its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep” (<i>High Rise</i>, p. 22). The bits of the
similes that “aren’t there” in the story – what linguists call the “vehicles”
or “figures” or “sources” – are so self-sufficient and suggestive, it feels
like they <i>are there</i>; and sometimes,
in <i>Super-Cannes</i>, say, they accumulate
so thickly as to compose the novel’s Unconscious. The characters’ casual drifts
of chat swirl into brutal prophesies, or miniaturised anthropological lectures,
as though some impatient Aspect of the authorial deity commandeered their
mouths. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Obsession with
pyschoanalysis part-substitutes for the carefully-evolved realist practices of
pysche-counterfeiting. Subjectivity isn’t patted into great homunculi like
Dorothea and Isabel; rather it gusts at the reader in huge flakes of human life,
which mix fragments of action and perception specified at psychoanalytic,
anthropological, architectural, biological, discursive and socio-cultural
levels, as well as at the level of the personality system, all arranged in
unpredictable proportions and configurations, and all constantly and
kaleidescopically disseminating and auto-dissecting. Characters are made into media
workers, doctors, pyschiatrists and architects, and into versions of Ballard (like
“James Ballard,” the protagonist of <i>Crash</i>)
to further mystify and enrich this reflexive, chaoplexic onslaught of psyche. Discourse
has never been so free and indirect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
counterintuitive fault-lines along which characters can shed characteristics are
pretty interesting. They comprise a poetics of startlement and discontinuity, a
kind of <i>memento mori</i> that isn’t
concentrated upon one terminal limit of a lifespan, but strewn throughout it. But
Ballard, as usual, was up to something more equivocal. The regressions which his
characters undergo also create <i>new</i> <i>continuities</i>. They re-establish
continuity with infantile drives, for example – drives which have been repressed,
or otherwise desultorily socialised. Sometimes, a psychic flyover springs up which
exceeds the individual lifespan. Racism, violence and perversity rescue
characters from modern <i>anomie</i> and isolation, and weave them into quasi-feudal
patterns of ingroup harmony. “</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For the first time it occurred to Wilder that the
residents enjoyed this breakdown of services, and the growing confrontation
between themselves. All this brought them together, and ended the frigid
isolation of the previous months.” (<i>High
Rise</i>, p. 60). </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sometimes – in <i>The
Drowned World</i>, for instance – these eruptive continuities stretch even further back, foaming freak
solidarity with prehistoric <i>homo sapiens</i>,
or with their hominid or even reptilian
forebears. </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The homologies
between Ballard’s childhood internment and his perennial themes – atavism, regression-sublimation,
hallucinogenic stupor, normalised violence, the State of <st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state>,
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Eden</st1:city></st1:place>, Empire
and entropy – are so absolutely in-your-face that they’re bound to attain
exaggerated significance in Ballardian criticism. My hunch is that most
quasi-autobiographical writing, especially writing as speculatively-spirited as
Ballard’s, works <i>precisely</i> by
minutely muddying its connection with experience. (When I brood on a fact of my
existence, it starts to suggest mutually incompatible modes by which it could
be processed. The fact is incorporated into me in <i>one</i> way, and sublimated into art or shouting in an incompatible way.
Experience also has a <i>uniquely</i> <i>misleading</i> relationship with the writing
it generates.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That caveat aside
. . . Ballard once described Lunghua internment camp as “where I spent some of
my happiest years”. That’s in an excerpt
from <i>Miracles of Life</i> published in <i>The Times </i>[5]<i> </i>– interestingly, the phrase disappears in the published volume (p.
270). In an 1982 interview his
expression is more circumspect: “I have – I won’t say <i>happy</i> – not unpleasant memories of the camp,” [6] remarking on the
casual brutality, and on the many games the children enjoyed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i>Drowned World </i>Ballard wrote, “For some
reason, however, this inverted Crusoeism – the deliberate marooning of himself
without the assistance of a gear-laden carrack wrecked on a convenient reef –
raised few anxieties in Kerans’ mind” (p. 48). In the 1994 novel <i>Rushing to Paradise</i>, as in <i>The Drowned World</i>, characters withdraw
from the wider world, pursuing a conscious – or quasi-conscious – agenda of
enislement. </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ballard’s characters are often seen to endorse or solicit
transformations which are – in a knee-jerk kinda way – <i>hideous</i>. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yet even
alienation, isolation and injury have a certain appeal. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i>Concrete <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i>,
Maitland constantly wonders whether he somehow, on some level, arranged to
maroon himself, whether in the shape of a primeval concrete succubus he seduced
himself. </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A quiet but clear echo of this aspect of <i>Concrete Island </i>can be heard in <i>High
Rise</i>: “It was here that Anthony Royal had been injured when his car had
been crushed by a reversing grader – it often struck Laing as ironic, and in a
way typical of Royal’s ambiguous personality, that he should not only have
become the project’s first road casualty, but have helped to design the site of
the accident” (pp. 36-7). </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The affluent, culturally-elite cave-dwellers of <i>High Rise </i>use their last vestiges of
civilisation to assure prying outsiders that everything’s all right, lest their
“dystopia” be confiscated. And of course in <i>Crash</i>,
well, these aren’t exactly car <i>accidents</i>.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the short
story, “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) (one of the prophetic ones – this time
it’s webcams, Skype and stuff), Ballard got his narrator to muse:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“True closeness, I now knew, was television closeness
– the intimacy of the zoom lens, the throat microphone, the close-up itself. On
the television screen there were no body odour or strained breathing, no pupil
contractions and facial reflexes, no mutual sizing up of emotions and disadvantage,
no distrust and insecurity. Affection and compassion demanded distance. Only at
distance could one find that true closeness to another human being which, with
grace, might transform itself into love” (p. 9).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i>High Rise</i>, the building begins to generate<i>
</i>a sinister new social type:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a cool, unemotional personality
impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs
for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral
atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit
in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and
wait for his neighbours to make a mistake […] people who were content with
their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal
steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by
government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed
these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people
were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They
thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with
others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were
never disappointed. // Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later” (p.
36).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One could draw
the lesson that any mode of human existence can develop the faculty to joyfully
authenticate itself. That would be good news for <i>you</i>, angelic architect – suggesting that every soul lugs around its
utopia like its snailshell. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But I don’t
think it’s the right lesson. Ballard was interested in what made abhorrent
subject positions appealing from the inside – what equillibrialised them,
harmonised them – but we don’t have to take these systems’ self-understandings
uncritically. For one thing, often Ballard was exploring a quite <i>recent</i> commodification of ontology. Cost-benefit
analysis (with a dash of Yippee-ish, gap year-vintage permissiveness) is how “<i>homo capitalist</i>” might articulate
encroaching violent rebirth to her- or himself . . . but it doesn’t prevail
universally over <i>all</i> such violent
rebirths. It’s only because we’re so accustomed to varying forms and levels of
alienation that we can coolly appraise extreme forms of alienation and
reconciliation like articles rummaged from a bargain bin. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Besides, even
when the multitude are content with their (parking) lot, there are outliers who
are <i>not</i>. “The Disaster Area” (1957,
originally “Build-Up”) is set in a probably-infinite urban space, the kind of
platform shooter Möbius would have designed if he hadn’t been into strips. Most
of its residents are down with that, but not the protagonist, and he grows
unhappily obsessed with the exotic concept of “free space.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
utopia-enabling scapegoat is a perennial theme of moral SF, of course. Check
out the New Testament (65-150), or Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas,” (1974). Sometimes not one or two, but whole swathes are brought under
regimes of torment. There are plenty of signs in <i>High Rise</i> that, for some residents, adaptation to a new way of life
is psychically harrowing:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Helen moved
silently around the apartment, barely aware of her husband. After the fit of
compulsive laughter the previous evening, her face was waxy and expressionless.
Now and then a tic flickered in the right apex of her mouth, as if reflecting a
tremor deep within her mind. She sat at the dining-table, mechanically
straightening the boys’ hair. Watching her, and unable to think of what he
could do to help her, Wilder almost believed that it was she who was leaving
him, rather than the contrary” (p. 60). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When the uneven
misery begins to follow contours of gender, class or race, questions of justice
creep into the picture. <i>Before</i> the
high society disintegrates into a freakshow of lonesome copings, it goes
through a period of explicit <i>class</i>
struggle. The top five floors wear fancy pants and balkanize the middle
twenty-five floors, guarding their own privilege by playing off class fractions
one against the other. The bottom ten floors are muddled scum, abused, sullen
and sickly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There are hints
that the sexual violence against the high-rise’s neo-cavewomen is only a minor insult,
that the cultural form of <i>rape</i> is
wrenched out of recognition . . . but Ballard didn’t come out and <i>say</i> that, and he was an author who could
unflinchingly come out and say things. I think that <i>High Rise </i>strongly implies mass war rape, experienced as such. I
think Ballard avoided first-person testimony (the book has three main
characters, all male) because the sexual victim, as a matter of cultural form,
invites pity, indignation, craving of custody and thirst for reprisal. These
responses are all part of the same system of gendered and sexualised violence
which <i>High Rise </i>is wrestling with on
the dissection table. There is a subtext to the high-rise’s pervasive all-women
groupings. In the world of <i>High Rise</i>,
those women who can live without men.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Justice, then, emerges
as an important makeshift division between utopia and dystopia. The idea of
justice lets that division go beyond determination by individual subjects. But
justice is part of bourgeois morality, and implicated in that morality’s indifference
to injustice. As such, Ballard seldom if ever introduces justice as clear-cut
concept. It is always peripheral, always vanishing, the lines to invoke it
coinciding with those to banish it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(3) <st1:place w:st="on">Islands</st1:place><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Could there be such
a thing as <i>just</i> <i>architecture</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As the security
situation in <i>High Rise</i> begins to
deteriorate, the hard-drinking film critic Eleanor Powell exults, “For the
first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference”
(p. 40).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Architecture in
a broad sense denotes more than buildings, more than physical <i>stuff</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Architecture is
about the structures which confront us and channel our lives down their various
courses. Those structures limit our free will, but they also play a part in
making free will something <i>worth wanting</i>.
They delimit the ways in which what we do can make a difference – or determine
that it makes “absolutely no difference.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imagine there
was a just architecture, an architecture which could ensure the virtue of its
residents. What effect would it have on their free will?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, the
networks of pathways which confront us all <i>are</i>,
in part,<i> </i>free will – the free will of
others. They are “built” out of the choices everyone <i>else</i> has made, in millennia or milliseconds gone by, or can be
expected to make. (For this reason, it’s often been thought that the terminal
unit of virtue is the polity, not the individual. Sometimes the architecture
enveloping particular person affords no opportunities for the good life).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I heard
the premise of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place>
– I was a kid, my dad described it to me – I had a quite different image of the
island. It was a tiny little thing, maybe enough to sustain one concrete
coconut tree. The marooned man stood in tatters waving his briefcase at an
endless torrent of traffic. Every driver saw him, every one sped grimly by. Eventually,
he sat down. His sitting down, I dimly reasoned, might be one of the best bits
of the book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A friend of
mine had exactly the same experience: heard about <i>Concrete Island</i>, envisioned the pared-down set-up q.v., years later
was both disappointed and dazzled when she read the book. Maybe Dad just went
around giving little girls misleading summaries of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place>,
I dunno. But I think that the distorted premonition does tell us something
about the emotional and thematic mush that inevitably bursts, like restaurant
waste from a black bag behind a mesh wire fence, when you change Crusoe’s
lagoon for a line of lorries. Hundreds of thousands of people queue up,
although only by chance, to confirm that <i>they
don’t care about you at all</i>. If they have nothing to gain in helping you,
then there is no natural sympathy, no moral law, which will compel them to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why <i>didn’t</i> someone stop for him? Could there
<i>really</i> be no break in the flow, 24/7?
Too weird. It manifested the precision of science, as humane affect was
subjected to rigorous physical demonstration and encoded as statistics. Percentage
love in universe: 0.000%. Simultaneously, mists of allegory enveloped the
fabled isle. Clearly, this could not be a realist work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Structural
flaws pervade this allegorical monument to modern nihilism and ambivalence. It’s
cemented together with its own counterfactuality. Its genre is not satire, but
nightmare. It relies for its force or the reader’s conviction that this is all
wrong, that one <i>should </i>stop, that she
or he <i>would </i>stop. Our moral universe <i>cannot</i> be so badly damaged. Even as it
denounces the isolation and heartlessness of modernity, it whispers, “Things
aren’t so bad.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The actual <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">island</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete Island</i></st1:placename></st1:place><i> </i>is quite different, a sunken
wasteground some two hundred yards long, cut off by steep embankments and three
massive motorways. Maitland’s injuries make it difficult and dangerous to climb
up onto the motorways. Most drivers don’t see him at all, or see him for only a
moment, like some subliminal image in a movie roll. Like the figure glimpsed
from a train in a Ford Maddox Ford memoir, he’ll take delivery of a multitude
of interpretations. He is perhaps the object of a small, faint calculation –
the possibility that “something is wrong,” weighed against the danger of
pulling over. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“He stood up
and turned to face the oncoming traffic. Three lines of vehicles sped towards
him. They emerged from the tunnel below the overpass and accelerated along he
fast bend [...] His jacket and trousers were stained with sweat, mud and engine
grease – few drivers, even if they did notice him, would be eager to give him a
lift. Besides, it would be almost impossible to slow down here and stop. The
pressure of the following traffic, free at last from the long tail-backs that
always blocked the Westway interchange during the rush-hour, forced them on
relentlessly” (p. 17).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Kitty
Genovese effect is also in play. Every individual driver judges it absurd that <i>no</i> driver would stop – there are
thousands! – so no driver does. The physical architecture, in short, integrates
with the psychic architecture in such a way that Maitland’s neglect does not
entail an unrealistic world of ethical egoist sociopaths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If it is
rational, is the architecture around the island then <i>just</i>? The walls of concrete and conventions of traffic safely
channel the potentially lethal machines and their occupants. The architecture
rationalises the behaviour of the motorway, in the sense that it forcibly aligns
private and public virtue. Whoever endangers another in this hum of high-speed
metal also endangers her- or himself. Yet clearly this architecture is unjust for
those who fall outside its remit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One boingy spring-board for utopian
(and counter-utopian) thought is the premiss that when archictectures of action
prove themselves unjust, all their contingencies could be imaginatively cleared
away, and they could be rebuilt from scratch. Somewhere on the continuum
between cobweb and support strut, you draw a line. You chuck away what is
contingent, mere convention, the product of evolutionary eccentricity. You keep
what is essential to the human condition. In the society of bare bones, in this
State of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place>,
is there such a thing as justice? Is there “natural law”? Are there trade-offs
between potential moralities? Can we create, and not just evince, virtue?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Whatever the State of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place> is, whatever laws it sports or lacks,
it can be used to benchmark <i>real</i>
societies, to detect where they are malformed and could be healed, or to
recognise the limits of reform. </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The tradition linking the State of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place> with tales of island adventure is
long and illustrious. But the priority
which Ballard gave to the mediatization of experience led him to contest the
reality of reality and the naturalness of nature. It’s odd, therefore, that his
books should invest so heavily (if seldom explicitly) in this tradition. Power
relations in Ballard’s (quasi?) State(s) of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place> are complex, certainly irreducible to
“hard” power (direct control of resources), and probably irreducible to hard
and “soft” power (charisma, tricks). Power is intricately bound up with
identity-formation and maintenance. “Real needs” are dubious, since even the
will to life needn’t underwrite all possible subjectivities. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place>
thematizes the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, probably. Maitland’s successes
in subduing the other inhabitants are somewhat incongruous. He is injured,
crazed; he relies on them for food and mobility. He uses sex and money, and
piss and booze, but it always feels as though he achieves more than he ought
to, that there is a discrepancy between his resources and his status. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was deftly summarizing <i>High Rise</i> for someone – it’s like, this
TV executive, he’s covered in lipstick warpaint, his camera is practically a
mace, catching sight of his own heavy, brown penis in the mirror calms him
down, he can only grunt, it’s been like a <i>month</i> or something, – and this
person asked me, quite reasonably, what happens to seal the high-rise off. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I drew breath.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Because that’s the template for these
stories, right? Seal off a dinner party of anesthetists, social workers, <i>et
al</i>., give it ten minutes and <i>voila</i> abattoir with yetis. Sealing off
the nice people, or stranding them somewhere, does two things. It separates
them from abundance (Capitalist abundance, typically), and it separates them
from state institutions of law and order. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Everyman is a gory savage, and his
latent violence is closer to the surface than we think” – that’s the moral, or
the cliché, which this genre trusts us to anticipate and rewards us with in the
end. We are Them. We are Them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is the convergence of science and
pornography. Although it is, by itself, not <i>exactly</i>
an authoritarian sentiment, it sports flanges serrated to dovetail perfectly
with the ass-dags any charismatic demagogue who happens to goose-amble by. Because
if Man (and it usually is “Man” by this point) is inherently a juggernaut of
atrocity, his civil manner, but a dissembling gauze, then we <i>need</i> strong leadership to keep us in
check. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Only the Hobbesian formula of
protection-obedience will do. We are Them. But for the Grace of omnipotent
authority, there go I. Never mind, like, separation of powers, checks and
balances, constitutionalism; that never happened. Justice (or, second-best,
security) must be built into a governmental architecture, since the “sealing
off” experiment has shown it is not a natural feature of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Man.</st1:state></st1:place> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i>High
Rise</i>, <i>nothing</i> seals them off! Nothing
<i>triggers</i> the regression; initially
there are some tensions about dog-owners, and a bit of a question mark over
when kids should use the pools. This is our clue that Ballard was up to
something quite different.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Are We, according to Ballard, Them? Almost.
Leap to the lead in the <i>hic et nunc</i>
cocobananas carousel, and you’re one of them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Almost, but I think, <i>not quite</i>. Ballard
was abstemious in laying the causal foundations of the high-rise tribalism. In
Brian Aldiss’s <i>Non-Stop</i> (1958) it takes several generations aboard a
dodgy starship to regress. But <i>High Rise </i>is gently, and deliberately
underdetermined. It requires of its readers a suspension of disbelief something
in excess of what <i>The Portrait of a Lady </i>wants,
though not quite the level demanded by, “In the Mirror Universe, the
shapeshifter Odo is the supervisor of the mining complex at Terok Nor. He is a
brutal taskmaster over Terran slaves there [...]” etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some folks – the feminist political
theorist Carol Pateman is a good’un – have criticised the State of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place> as a myth which
legitimates existing power relations. But Ballard combined the State of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Nature</st1:state></st1:place> with cutting
criticism of existing power relations. Rather than showing us the dystopia
which underlies and legitimates the <i>status
quo</i> (like Hobbes – or like John Locke, showing us the minimal model which
clarifies the <i>status quo</i>’s
rationality), Ballard’s States of Nature showed us the weird dystopian-utopian
spaces which <i>already exist</i> within the
<i>status quo</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ballard wasn’t just interested in what the
contrived spaces of a lab experiment, or the aftermath of a disaster, can tell
us about human nature and big social trends. For Ballard, they weren’t just allegories,
thought experiments, or models. He was also interested – I really think there
is a difference here – in <i>the spaces
themselves</i>, which he suspected appear more frequently and pervasively than
we care to admit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Though Ballard’s work is cautionary, it
has a lot of good things to say about utopia. Especially if you think how
relatively unpopular the concept has been recently: the concepts of utopia and
dystopia are <i>fused</i>. It is quite
impossible to speak of a radically better world without alluding to the
utopianisms of Hitler and Stalin. You
can argue, again in a Marxist vein, that it is Late Capitalism itself that has
grotesquely glued gulags, artifical famine and Aushwitz all over the pure and
sweet concept of universal justice. You can argue that It does so to protect Itself
from criticism. You might be right, but this stuff is nonetheless <i>still objectively glued together</i>. Utopia-dystopia
is a “real illusion,” like the commodity form – it is an illusion we can’t
dispel by piercing it through thought and exposure with language, since the
“illusion” is invincibly reiterated every moment by our lived social relations;
it is reborn from everywhere, it is more logical than logic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet. Utopia
has been a dirty word for so long . . . it’s sort of cleaned itself, a bit. Like
dirty hair which they say secretes its own shampoo, or an abandoned piece of
laundry that’s ambiguously wearable again. Ballard never treated this
utopia-dystopia hybrid as a weird limit condition, or latent dynamic, or
bogey-man. With a science fiction novelist’s perogative, he showed it as
something that was already here. He submitted its events to standards of justice,
however problematic, and he traced possible trajectories of subjectivity
through it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Every time utopian
thought is criticised for ignoring some latent real need, we slightly enlarge
our idea of what it is to be human. Have our ideas of real needs simply needed
more paranoia and more imagination? Nothing could be more dogmatic than ruling
out utopia forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Post-script: Manaugh<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So I’ve made three
small suggestions about Ballard. First, his work is supremely conscious of the
dynamic connection between environments and their inhabitants, and thus
critical of efforts to “perfect” environments on the basis of a particular idea
of the human. Second, despite his disdain for received notions of intrinsically
superior modes of life, Ballard resisted moral relativism, and submitted the
flux of subjectivity he depicted to standards of justice. Third, Ballard was
drawn to segregated, normatively autonomous spaces, but not <i>only</i> as experiments, or models, whose use
lay in extrapolation or generalisation or allegory. He was also fascinated by
the possibility that much of society already takes place in such spaces. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It would be nice
to get some closure on the J. G. Ballard’s celestial resting place question
q.v., even if it <i>was</i> just a thought
experiment gradually revealing its own patent absurdity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Did Ballard <i>like</i> Brutalism? Bollards, ballustrades,
pallisades, flyovers, cloverleaf junctions, on-ramps, traffic islands, artifical
lakes, storm tunnels, multi-storey car parks, business parks, military camps, edge-of-town
mega-malls, abandoned cinemas, opulent, derelict hotels, ruined swimming pools
quarter-filled with yellow water, an Alsatian bobbing, or bone dry and piled
with human bones. Stairwells barricaded with chic utilitarian furniture,
shadows moving behind them; did Ballard <i>like</i>
this stuff? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My friend Posie
Rider told me a joke; she told it wrong (Posie could fluff the punchline of an
e-mail forward), but using Habermasian reconstructive science, I think this
East German guy is applying to emigrate to West Germany. This state bureaucrat
says, “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Listen,
why do you want to emigrate? Here, you have a large, well-serviced apartment
overlooking the park. Will you get such a nice apartment in the West?”</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It may be an old
joke. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
would-be emigrant says, “Oh, can’t complain.” “And you finally got that car you’ve
been applying for?” “Oh, can’t complain.” “And you have a good, safe job at the
shoe factory!” “Oh, can’t complain.” “So why do you want to move to the West?” “There
I can complain!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">OK, so it’s about freedom of expression
and of political dissent. But I imagined hyper-democratic authorities in West Germany taking those complaints seriously. I
imagined them reconstructing the mortified immigrant’s old situation around
him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some subjects are deeply invested in
resisting their own conditions of possibility. It is a deep problem for progressive
politics of all kinds. It is the kernel of truth in the conservative slur that
grassroots activists and other political volunteers are troublemakers and attention-seekers.
By the end of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place><i>, </i>Maitland seems to be this kind of
subject. Crudely, he doesn’t want to escape from the island, he wants to be
someone trying to escape from the island. (This explains the apparent hypocrisy
of hiding from a police car and then, a paragraph later, thinking with delight
of imminent escape). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The social critic, the cautionary
visionary, implicated with his subject matter, is similarly constitutively
conflicted. Did Ballard like this stuff, well, yes, in a terribly complicated
iterative way, it was what he loved to hate to love to hate to love to hate . .
. etc., with new cognitive angles materializing with each iteration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So I guess if I
were the angel architect (I’m not – it’s <i>you</i>)
I might build Ballard a limitless flux of only-ever-provisionally-distinguished
subjectivity and environment, in intricate and glorious iteration, more or less
<i>laissez-faire</i> but with safeguards
against the evolution of infinite loops and other cul-de-sacs of dei-diversity.
Plus bunting because that would kind of be my signature thingy. A cop-out based
on free market indifference and fetishization of choice, you say; I say, the
bunting’s not; also Plan B is consult with other mortals. Nic Clear and Simon
Kennedy have started a course on Ballardian architecture at the Bartlett School
of Architecture in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>.
Maybe Geoff Manaugh is the mortal for the job. He has recently published a
book, <i>The BLDGBLOG Book, </i>based in
part on his speculative architecture blog, BLDGBLOG (<a href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/">bldgblog.blogspot.com</a>). The
project is probably way too big for any one of us. But if we collectively came
up with a utopia good enough for Ballard, I bet it would be good enough for any
one of us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Works cited<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Brian
Aldiss(1958): <i>Non-Stop</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>: Faber & Faber
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (1957): </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">“The
Disaster Area,” (a.k.a. “Build-Up” / “The Concentration City”) in </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%;">The Complete Short Stories</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%;">, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>:
Harper (2006)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (1962/2008): <i>The Drowned World</i>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>:
HarperCollins<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (1973/2008): <st1:placename w:st="on"><i>Concrete</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i>,
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>: HarperCollins<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (1975/2006): <i>High-Rise</i>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>:
HarperCollins<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (2006): <em>Super-Cannes</em>,
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>: HarperCollins
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J. G. Ballard (2008): <i>Miracles
of Life: <st1:city w:st="on">Shanghai</st1:city> to Shepperton, an
Autobiography</i>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place>:
HarperCollins<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">J.G. Ballard (1977/2006): “The Intensive Care Unit” in <i>High-Rise </i>“P.S.” (q.v.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">George Eliot (1874): <i>Middlemarch
</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Henry James (1881): <i>Portrait
of a Lady</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Ursula LeGuin (1974) “The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas” in <i>The Wind's Twelve Quarters</i>,
<st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>:
Harper & Row (1975)</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Endnotes</span></b><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[1] J. G. Ballard (2006): “A Handful of Dust,” </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The
Guardian</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, online at <<a href="http://ballardian.com/jg-ballards-handful-of-dust">http://ballardian.com/jg-ballards-handful-of-dust</a>><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[2] Alison and Peter Smithson, CIAM Congress 1953
(over-cited sound-byte)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[3] Reyner Banham (1966): “The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic?” in <i>As found: the discovery of
the ordinary</i> (2001): ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger,
Springer, p. 130<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> [4] Jeremy
Lewis interviews J. G. Ballard, </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Mississippi Review, </span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Volume 20, Numbers 1 & 2</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">,
published 1991 by the Centre for Writers, The University of Southern
Mississippi, online at <<a href="http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jeremy_lewis_1990_interview.html">http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jeremy_lewis_1990_interview.html</a>><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">[5] Excerpted in <i>The
Times Online, </i>20 January 2008, <<a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3215270.ece">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3215270.ece</a>><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 14.2pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <span lang="EN-US">[6] Quoted in BBC obituary,
online at <<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm</a>><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-57976227413833439322013-04-01T05:13:00.001-07:002013-06-10T15:02:29.974-07:00An open memo to Daniel C DennettVery much enjoyed listening to you on BBC Hardtalk this morning - and nice to hear your voice after years of reading your words!<br />
<br />
(1) Stephen Sackur spent quite a long time on "absolute certainty." I wonder if that emphasis is peculiarly British - or even a peculiarly Church of England? It seems to me that in the UK there is quite a fierce fight over, as it were, the final 1% of faith. Perhaps secularism in the UK is shaped by a kind of anti-secularist who is prepared to concede a great deal and then <i>dig in</i> - a kind of opponent less common in the US (and elsewhere?).<br />
<br />
I see that final 1% as a territory in which, for the anti-secularist at least, there is an enhanced role for tact, and a reduced role for dialectic steered by evidential claims. Does the secularist necessarily need to dispute that priority?<br />
<br />
I am trying to picture those secular practices you talked about replacing religious institutions. Do you think, I wonder, they might still use religious language and ideas, but in a euphemistic way? I'm not sure! But I'm sure there are human institutions whose self-understanding involves propositions which <i>everyone knows, when it comes down to it, aren't strictly true</i>. Their truth is not their <i>point</i>. (So maybe, "We can usefully regard human life from an Inspirational Stance . . .").<br />
<br />
The disjunct between what is ritually professed, and what comes out in an anonymised and/or scientistic context, is pretty suggestive. For instance: not too long ago a survey of Church of England clergy suggested that only roughly half believed in the immaculate conception. (OK, I must be careful not to caricature the C of E - it is certainly <i>not </i>already a secular replacement for a religious institution, and belief in the power of prayer, for instance, is widespread and often extremely strong. But still).<br />
<br />
Related: right at the start when you mentioned "replacements" I thought it was a <i>caution</i>, rather than a <i>hope</i>. In other words, the decline of institutionalised religion could provide a space for the institutionalisation, or informal flourishing, of other forms of irrationalism. I soon found out what you really meant. But it is intriguing how certain superstitions may act as checks on others.<br />
<br />
So perhaps the atheist's job, in this context, is to tactfully nudge and rearrange evidentially unsupportable thoughts, language, practices, rather than try to expunge them. To compartmentalise them, in other words, so that religion and/or its successor superstitions don't compromise us as epistemological and as ethical beings. (I think of Don Cupitt in more or less-this-mould (though perhaps he asks the traditional Christian to concede only 90%, not 99%)).<br />
<br />
You mentioned religious scientists who can compartmentalise their mental life, so that their belief in the impossible doesn't compromise their studies. The White Queen in <i>Through the Looking Glass </i>believes in six impossible things before breakfast, very rigorous and extreme compartmentalisation!<br />
<br />
The kind of transitional arrangements to a form of rationalism in which superstition resides as a commensalistic or mutualistic presence would have to be much subtler. In this regard, the atheist may need to start being a bit more of a theologian, dwelling in mysteries.<br />
<br />
Sometimes fairly literally a theologian: when there is a fierce fight over the last 1% of faith, atheists have an obligation to intervene, with great tact and imagination, in theological debates. They have an obligation to demonstrate exegetical acuity and a kind of intellectually-developed empathy with the experience of revelation and its aftermath. They thereby both earn their authority and have a chance at recovering the rationalist elements of institutionalised irrationalism. (I know this because it came to me in a dream).<br />
<br />
(2) Your Intuition Pump (/Pomp) about religion and music is really excellent! What if a scientific consensus told you music was bad for you, that you can allow yourself a little of it (like drink or drugs or delicious food, perhaps), but no more? Perhaps that's what it feels like to be a person of faith confronted with secularism.<br />
<br />
Except . . . don't you think it's cheating a little to allow yourself those few bits of music? I just think losing one's faith tends to be a more dramatic shift.<br />
<br />
Perhaps a closer analogy would be if all recorded music, all rehearsed music and all music involving instruments were bad for you. You would have to learn to hear a different music: bird song, the cadences of the speaking voice, the music of the wind in the leaves, the song of the cityscape, etc. It sounds pretty awful to me. Or perhaps the analogy should be, you can <i>only </i>listen to Bruce Springsteen (not including the Seeger sessions). OMG, I think I'd have to start a cult!<br />
<br />
Best,<br />
L<br />
<br />
<br />Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-81115746703841960552013-02-01T09:34:00.000-08:002013-04-25T08:12:59.375-07:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting Assurance (3)What is assurance anyway, Lara? Ha! I'm glad you asked.
<br />
<br />
OK, so let me introduce assurance and begin to analyse the concept of independence on which it depends. The contemporary assurance market is rooted in an explosion in social accounting experiments in the 1970s (Hess 2001). CR reporting declined and theoretical interest waned during the recession of the early 1980s. Environmental auditing and reporting picked up in the 1990s, and then underwent a steady expansion of remit. See Elkington (1994) on the “triple bottom line” of economic, social and environmental dimensions of organisational success. CR reports characteristically address all three dimensions.
<br />
<br />
In 2007 nearly 80% of the largest 250 companies worldwide issued annual CR reports, compared to about 50% in 2005 (KPMG 2008). I'm unsure where we are today, although I have a horrible feeling CR and CR reporting has slipped down the list of priorities since the most recent global financial crisis. CR shouldn't be one of a set of priorities: it should be the most important aspect of every priority a firm has.
<br />
<br />
CR is a highly complex and divisive concept. CR disclosure, especially in the form of annual standalone CR reports, is seen as one way of improving the deliberative setting in which the concept is contested.
<br />
<br />
Whenever there has been growing interest in CR reporting, there has also been a rise in independent assurance of CR reports. This is unsurprising, given the “growing body of social and environmental accounting research that finds corporate posturing and deception in the absence of external monitoring and verification” (Laufer 2003:254). Surveys regularly show public distrust of statements of business leaders (see e.g. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/2508889.stm">BBC 2002</a>). In 2007, about 40% of companies of the largest 250 companies worldwide used some form of assurance in their reports.
<br />
<br />
Before we go any further, we need to settle on a stipulative definition of assurance. As used by accountants, it is a very broad term covering the audit of financial statements, as well as various due diligence, attestation and agreed-upon-procedures engagements, and customised services which may or may not result in a standard form of report.
<br />
<br />
In the context of CR reporting, assurance sometimes refers to any tactic intended to add credibility to a corporate disclosure. This may include those which bear no obvious relation to accounting methodology. SustainAbility (2005:1) offer four categories of assurance unrelated to accounting methodology: evaluation, certification (e.g., against the SA8000 standard), expert statement (e.g., from NGOs or academics), and stakeholder commentary.
<br />
<br />
To further confuse matters, academics sometimes use audit as a broad term encompassing certification, consultancy and assurance activities which the accountancy profession would categorise as non-audit. This use is characteristic of Critical Management Studies; there “audit” emphasises the financial origins, and ostensibly mathematically-reductionist presuppositions of a positivist governance paradigm, for example Power and Laughlin (1992).
<br />
<br />
There is some inconsistency in the way the term assurance is used by the Big Four. Generally speaking, audit of financial statements is recognised as a sub-type of assurance. But since it is the main sub-type, referring to assurance rather than audit can imply that services other than financial audit are meant. PwC, for example, calls its core service line “Audit and Assurance,” tacitly differentiating the two.
<br />
<br />
In these blog posts, except where noted, <i>assurance </i>refers only to the assurance of CR reports in a manner that is “systematic, documented, evidence-based, and characterized by defined procedures” (GRI 2006:38), not to any of the wide range of engagements identified above. <i>Audit </i>refers only to the audit of financial statements.
<br />
<br />
The Big Four and a few other large accountancy firms dominate the assurance market. Technical or issue experts and specialist assurance provider firms have a sizeable minority share. Many companies use stakeholder panels and other third-party commentary to add credibility to their CR reports, but few firms combine these methods with formal assurance (KPMG 2008).
<br />
<br />
In addition to financial audit and assurance, the Big Four offer their clients a huge variety of consultancy and certification services. Assurance needs to be provisionally distinguished from these services. In assurance, there is a subject matter, a set of suitable criteria, and a tripartite relationship between assurance practitioner, entity responsible for the subject matter, and intended users of the subject matter. This standard break-down can be seen for example in IAASB 2004:283. A case in point is: the Vodafone Corporate Responsibility Report 2008/09 (subject matter); GRI’s G3 Guidelines and AccountAbility’s AA1000APS (criteria); KPMG LLP (assuror); Vodafone Group plc (responsible entity); Vodafone’s stakeholders (intended users of the subject matter).
<br />
<br />
The intended users of a subject matter often include the responsible entity itself, but to speak of “assurance” implies that the responsible entity is not the only user. This distinguishes assurance from consultancy. Assurors are “third parties,” positioned between the responsible entity and the intended users of the subject matter. The assuror applies the criteria to the subject matter, and issues a statement summarizing its findings. The assuror thereby advises the intended users on what level of trust they can place in the subject matter.
<br />
<br />
This assurance statement is usually included in the CR report itself. The statement is often of the form that the subject matter is “fairly stated.” The statement usually also includes a high-level summary of methodology, and sometimes includes areas in which the responsible entity could show improvement. A formidable liability statement is the final piece of the assurance statement.
<br />
<br />
This liability statement points to the difference between assurance and certification. Assurance is characterised by a comparatively low transfer of liability to the assuror. If the subject matter proves, contrary to the assurance statement, to be misstated, the assuror is fairly well-protected from torts initiated by those who have relied on it.
<br />
<br />
Liability is roughly correlated with reputation. In other words, if a certification agency only had the degree of confidence implicit in assurance when it issued its certifications, they would probably lose their credibility. However, the correlation is more exacting in the business world than in the wider public domain. In the case of financial audit, the transfer of liability to the auditor is consistently beneath public expectations. Audit has a reputation as certification against fraud – but is not considered so by auditors or by the law. Ha! See Millichamp (2002:2). This disparity is known, in a rather smug and patrician and euphemistic sort of way, as the “expectation gap.” Humphrey et al. (1992:57) argue that the expectation gap allows the accountancy profession to “convey an impression of responding to public concern; to reaffirm its independent and selfless image; to assert the validity of its own perspectives on the nature of the audit function; and to direct questioning away from the existing audit system to the limits of proposed reforms and solutions for closing the expectations gap.” For empirical work on the expectation gap see e.g. Monroe and Woodliff (2009).
<br />
<br />
Indeed, the boundaries of consultancy, certification, and assurance are in practice often blurred. There is an iterative quality to assurance, such that the responsible entity is advised periodically what steps are necessary to acquire an assurance statement. KPMG comment, “Once we receive a reasonable draft of the client’s sustainability report we can check whether the identified issues are covered and whether the information on a material issue is balanced. This is usually the start of a lively debate with the client about what different parties may perceive to be material for their organization, which is more difficult to define if the client’s own stakeholder engagement processes are not fully developed” (AccountAbility 2007:9).
<br />
<br />
In this way, assurance <i>may </i>drive improvements in CR reporting and underlying CR policies. However, Big Four descriptions of assurance accentuate how their independence can generate credibility, not how it can drive organisational change.<br />
<br />
This is our first indication of an orientation to the audit of financial statements. A brief history will help to explain. The link between audit and consultancy has been by far the most publicly contentious issue relating to auditor independence. In the late 1990s fierce criticism and a string of court cases persuaded all of the Big Five except Deloitte to sell or spin off their consultancy businesses. Deloitte also initially announced its intention to split into separate audit and consultancy firms. Following the collapse of Arthur Andersen (producing the Big Four from the Big Five) after its provision of dubious consultancy and audit services to Enron, a raft of tighter regulatory measures, notably the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 in the US (“SOX”), seemed to take the problem of the relationship between audit and consultancy out of the Big Four’s hands. Deloitte thus elected to retain its consultancy business, which proved extremely profitable throughout the next decade. The other Big Four firms have quietly rebuilt their consultancy businesses. The issue remains a senstive one, however, and the Big Four seldom seek to thematise any complementarity of audit and consultancy.
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But as Bendell (2005) argues, the link between CR consultancy and assurance is not so obviously problematic. Declining to assure a CR report does not lead to a dramatic loss of investor confidence, as is typical when an auditor refuses to sign off on a set of financial statements, or challenges a company’s “going concern” assumption. Similarly, “shopping around” for an assuror of CR reports is unlikely to make investors nervous in the same way switching auditors tends to, so ideas for organisatonal change can be drawn from a larger pool. Such advantages may outweigh the risk that assurors exaggerate the success of systems which, wearing their consultancy hats, they helped to design. See Beattie and Fernley (2003) for a literature review around auditor independence and the provision of non-audit services, and Cragg (2005:96-97) for examples of independence issues arising from consultancy in the context of CR report assurance and social audit.
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The Deloitte web site offers a typical Big Four rationale for assurance: “As the importance in and reliance of [sic] these [CR] reports increases, there is a growing trend to add credibility to the information presented through assurance. The benefits include greater transparency, increased stakeholder confidence and enhanced regulatory compliance.”
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The appeals to “greater transparency” and “increased stakeholder confidence” confirm that in Deloitte’s view, the point of assurance is credibility. “Enhanced regulatory compliance” whispers at organisational change, but it is an oblique phrase in need of some interpretation. Corporations in the UK are not legally obliged to undertake CR policies. The Companies Act 2006 requires that publicly listed companies include information in their annual report on “environmental matters,” “the company’s employees” and “social and community issues” (Section 417, Para 5). Assurance thus neither constitutes, nor falls under, any kind of state-mandated compliance regime. Listing “regulatory compliance” <i>simpliciter </i>as a benefit would make mandatory activities appear to depend on discretionary ones, and the main function of “enhanced” is to neutralise this connotation.
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But there is also a ubiquitous expectation that CR will be increasingly legalised, and that reporting will be an early focus of this legalisation. For example, France has required publicly listed companies to publish annual environmental and social reports since 2001. A European Parliament resolution in 2007 recommended the revision of the Fourth Company Law Directive to include social and environmental reporting alongside financial reporting requirements. “Enhanced” thus also carries a sense of “ahead of the game” – organisations which assure their CR reports will find the transition easier when CR and CR reporting are inscribed in law. In this connection, “enhanced regulatory compliance” also imparts a sense of “enhanced standardisation”; that is, of compliance with widely-recognised standards like the G3, even though such guidelines are not regulatory in any straightforward sense.<br />
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That typo - a botched edit, actually - is exemplary of the kind of anxiety and confusion surrounding the purposes and priorities of CR reporting. It is likely that the phrase was originally “the reliance in and importance of these reports”; <i>reliance </i>connoting <i>de facto </i>market realities, <i>importance </i>with just a hint of idealism about it. The importance was deemed more important, but the editor left traces of his or her work.<br />
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Elsewhere Deloitte (2009:3) are confident enough to set a date on legalisation. “2015-2030 – Increasing legislation, regulation and tax policies force reactive organisations to adopt sustainable behaviour which now becomes a license to operate as unsustainable supply chains seem increasingly outdated. A few popular sustainable approaches and quality stamps emerge as standard, allowing benchmarking and greater consumer visibility. Increasing collaboration between non-competing organisations emerges as the main route to sustaining competitive advantage.”
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From the Big Four’s perspective, responsibility for the economic, social and environmental impact of business is migrating inevitably from the public sector to the state sector, driven by ratcheting public expectations. Good CR policies, such as the assurance of CR reports, have their value in positioning businesses advantageously in this shift, and allowing them to shape a few of its specific characteristics.
Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-71920380082938676312013-01-31T09:14:00.001-08:002013-06-10T15:03:45.580-07:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting Assurance (2)First, a little caveat: some of this could be dated. At the time when I pulled most of this material together, I did a kind of close reading of "independence." I checked out Big Four’s web sites and other marketing materials; I examined the assurance and general ethics standards promulgated by the International Federation of Accountants (“IFAC”) and by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (“ICAEW”), the popular AA1000 standards developed by the non-profit organisation AccountAbility, the G3 standards developed by the non-profit Global Reporting Initiative, and some of the assurance methodology recommended by audit text books. I also tried to get a sense of the self-regulatory mechanisms of the accountancy profession. I did this by looking at the web sites of various entities, and corresponding with very nice representatives from IFAC and the Financial Reporting Councial (“FRC”) - though not, if I remember rightly, from the Big Four? - to further clarify this regulation architecture. This close reading exposed how the concept of “independence” is constructed in close relation with two others, “professionalism” and “stakeholders.” So I also engaged closely with primary sources which articulate these concepts. This was all about four years back though; a lot may have changed since then. If something has changed, or I'm wrong about something, I'd love to hear from you.<br />
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Second, a quick digression. It's a funny world, corporate responsibility. And corporate responsibility reporting is a funnier world inside it. The funniest little world is corporate responsibility reporting assurance.<br />
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Or perhaps it's corporate responsibility reporting awards-judging. It's that time of year again: <a href="http://corporateregister.com/">CorporateRegister.com</a> wants you to vote for your favourite CR report (AKA sustainability report or CSR report)! You have a chance of winning cash prizes if you vote! What's that? You don't <i>have </i>a favourite CR report? I'm sorry, I don't understand.<br />
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Perhaps those incentives are there because so few people will trouble themselves reading one, let alone two, let alone <i>many </i>CR reports. And even if you did read one, how are you supposed to say if you like it? We like the CR reports that are the most true. Which are they?<br />
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Yet a company's CR and CR reporting are really the only things about that company that matter to most sensible people.<br />
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There needs to be more journalistic mediation between places like CorporateRegister and members of the public. At the very least, there needs to be an accessible, one-stop-shop that summarises the assurance processes which have gone into each report.<br />
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CorporateRegister: you in particular, for your "credibility through assurance" category in particular, need to rejig your layout so that information about who the assuror was, if GRI criteria were used, etc. appears on the <i>same page as you cast your vote. </i>That allows for a quick comparison, and energetic voters can still do depth research if they need to (which one of our two tomorrows does Two Tomorrows <i>really </i>support? etc.).<br />
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Third, an introduction to one or two concepts from political sociology. (I didn't really need them to do this analysis; in fact, I think it would have been a lot stronger had I proceeded without formal methodology, and only that sense common to the humanities / liberal arts. But as it happens, I did use them, and at least the history of these concepts being applied is enriched (if only enriched with my bungling)).
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It is difficult to invoke Habermas with a clear conscience in a blog post about anything other than Habermas. His core preoccupations undergo constant and nuanced revision throughout his <i>ouevre</i>. I've elected to take concepts from <i>The Theory of Communicative Action</i>, but their application here also points to successors in later and precursors in earlier works by Habermas. One point I'm going to make later on - that organisations seeking a “license to operate” from society are systemically hampered, in harvesting credibility, by the disparities between genuine sources of legitimacy in the socio-cultural sub-system and the representative institutions open to those organisations - recalls <i>Legitimacy Crisis</i> (1975). In characterising the accountancy profession’s structure of mixed orientation to success and to understanding as legal rationality, I'll be parallelling one core idea of <i>Between Facts and Norm</i>s (1996), that law derives its legitimacy from networks of communicative power, and thereby expresses the tension between the claims of reason as concretely specified and their context-transcending idealizations (Habermas 1996:449). Furthermore, there are parts of <i>The Theory of Communicative Action</i> which I have only cursorily engaged with here. The concept of legal rationality constitutes abbreviated and speculative reconstruction of aspects of knowledge embodied in accountants’ everyday practices, whereas Habermas’s theory of reconstructive science provides a comprehensive framework within which the concept could be more rigorously linked to empirical fallibilistic enquiry.
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Power and Laughlin (1999) also apply Habermas to the accounting profession, suggesting that “the nechnical neutrality of accounting practice is illusory and that accounting is a potentially colonizing force which threatens to ‘delinguistify’ the public realm” (132). To suggest a model of the entanglement of independence and professionalism, which can operate outside both concrete discursive connections and a sociology of the professions, I'm going to draw on categories developed by Habermas (1985), especially socially-integrated and systemically-integrated action settings. Habermas develops these to contest Max Weber’s “identification of instrumental reason with the rationalisation characteristic of modern life” (Power and Laughlin 1999:121).
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Habermas’s analysis of modernity proposes two parallel processes of rationalisation. In the domain of instrumental-purposive action, action is oriented to success. Rationalisation here consists in the optimisation of success. Action can be optimally integrated by steering media, that is, non-linguistified communication media such as money and power. These steering media relieve the participants in complicated regimes of action of the burden of achieving linguistic consensus, while preserving and extending the integrity of their action networks. Each actor is steered according by the contours of incentives and disincentives which confront her, not motivated by her linguistically-attained intersubjective understanding. This is what is meant by “systemic integration,” contradistinguished from “social integration.” Since action in this domain is oriented to success, its systemic integration by steering media is considered non-pathological.
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In the domain of communicative action (the “lifeworld”), however, action is oriented towards understanding. Rationalisation in this domain consists in the accumulation of intersubjective moral-practical understanding. This process is identical with the increasing generality of that understanding, which Habermas understands as the gradual uncoupling of the institutional, cultural and personality symbolic structures which together comprise the lifeworld. To make sense of this triptych, we need to consider that social integration consists in the reciprocity of socialisation (the internalisation of cultural values by the personality system) and social control (the internalisation of cultural values by institutions). As the lifeworld rationalises, and the three symbolic structures float apart from one-another, their interpenetration coming more and more to depend upon the interpretive accomplishments of actors, who reciprocally raise and redeem the validity claims inherent in their communicative practices. See Habermas (1985:146).
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Socially-integrated action in this domain is non-pathological. But systemically-integrated action is associated with the distortion of communicative rationality. The tendency for this to occur is what is meant by “the internal colonisation of the lifeworld.” It is this tendency – and not rationalisation in either the dimension of purposive-instrumental action or of communicative action – which is the closest correlate to Weber’s understanding of rationalisation as the expansion of formal reason to ever more domains of social life.
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Is that OK? Does that seem about right to you?<br />
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Now, in my view, the professional independence of auditors means that audit <i>cannot </i>be reduced to the internal colonisation of the lifeworld. In line with Habermas’s thesis that purposive-instrumental action remains anchored in communicative action (1985:196), I'm going to argue that the systems rationality embodied by auditor independence relies on the lifeworld resources of the accounting profession, including: a permanent regime of training and mentoring, a tradition of professional congeniality and discussion, a preoccupation with ethics, as well as a relatively homogeneous pool of cultural and ideological norms. Professional independence straddles both system and lifeworld. It contains a mixture of strategic and communicative action. Somewhere in the coming posts, I'll analyse this mixture, in its institutional specification in the accountancy profession, as that profession’s <i>legal rationality</i>.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-32199789197878722152013-01-31T09:01:00.000-08:002013-01-31T09:14:47.257-08:00Corporate Responsibility Reporting Assurance (1)Okay Fawks, in the next few posts I want to talk about the independent assurance services provided by the world’s largest professional services firms, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and E&Y (“the Big Four”) on their clients’ Corporate Responsibility (“CR”) reports.
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The Big Four’s core business is audit. All publicly listed companies are legally obliged to publish financial statements, informing shareholders and the general public of the company’s financial position. They are also legally obliged to have these financial statements verified by an external auditor. The Big Four perform this role for the world’s largest corporations. In the UK market for example the Big Four audit all of the FTSE100.
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The Big Four’s reputation for independence stems from their auditing of financial statements. The governance structure which they rely upon to protect their independence is also oriented towards this activity.
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However, to assure CR reports, a different type of independence is required. Unlike financial statements, CR reports try to address the needs of all stakeholders in a company. Instead of being limited to financially material information, CR reports aim to cover all the social and environmental issues which are important to these stakeholders.
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The assurance of CR reports thus requires a type of independence resembling the liberal idea of state neutrality. The Big Four are required to arbitrate among a plurality of often contradictory demands. With only the independence inherited from the financial audit context, the Big Four regularly fail in this role. As a result, many stakeholders remain incredulous towards CR reports, and corporations themselves are confused about the levels of transparency they are achieving.
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The Big Four should shift to “critical independence,” abandoning many claims to disinterestedness, and acknowledging the specific place from which they speak.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-17028806406024591942012-12-17T07:23:00.001-08:002012-12-19T07:13:25.766-08:00Guns - my alter (massive!) ego, Leary Buckarootown, weighs in!<br />
Yup, it’s been a tragic few days ... as the media erupts in an apocalyptic display of outrage and hand-ringing at the senseless murder of 20 children and 6 adults by yet another mentally unhinged individual intent on creating as much havoc, distress and support for gun law reform as possible.
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Whatever his warped motives, one thing is clear – he sought revenge on society and his actions were designed to leave a permanent mark on those who had in some way offended his twisted sensibilities.
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Chances are we will never know what drove him to wish for the death of fellow citizens or how he came to the conclusion that children could in some way be anything other than innocent in the demons that were tormenting him.
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Whether we like it or not, the issue of gun ownership is raising its ugly head, yet again as calls go out for the population to be disarmed. Before I begin the defence of the individual to own a firearm, I would like my readers to understand the very reason that American citizens maintain the right to bear arms.
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It is for protection against the State and the right of self-defence.
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Most Americans do not own guns to shoot children, gangster rappers or wild bears! They own them in the knowledge that if a deranged lunatic decides to invade your property to settle whatever mental health issues he has with you or society in general, he can quickly and permanently be subdued.
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A pistol in the bedside table is standard in many American homes because that is how they choose to protect their nearest and dearest.
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Whilst we in the UK debate the legalities of being open to prosecution for merely <i>owning </i>a baseball bat to fend off the drunken chavs breaking down the front door because you dared to criticise them for pissing in your garden, the average American knows that an armed society is a polite society.
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Certainly, the ease at which a psychopath can obtain weapons is a concern, but lest we forget, Timothy McVee ended the lives of 168 innocent Americans, including children, with nothing more than fertiliser to form a bomb.
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Religious zeal caused four demented bigots to fill rucksacs with chapatti flour and destroy the lives of 54 innocent human beings on the tube, yet calls for Mosques to be closed or chapattis to be banned are strangely silent. The issue is not with the weapon, but with the motivation. It’s like blaming spoons for obesity or petrol for reckless driving – illogical.
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Those who cannot obtain guns will simply find other mechanisms to wreak havoc on the society they hate. From a transit van driven at crowds in Cardiff to a machete-wielding fruitloop entering a Birmingham nursery school, or a whooping American GI remotely sending an Afghan wedding party to their drone-inflicted deaths, the means are but a way to an end.<br />
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I don’t know about you dear reader, but I and many of my peers refuse to frequent areas after dark for fear of being robbed, beaten, stabbed or maimed by a new type of feral youth out of control on the ease at which they can inflict violence on an innocent public.
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Not a day passes without one of us being beaten to death for “looking at someone a bit funny”. Further disarming that public will not result in crime falling, just more victims for the evil and the warped to prey upon.
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Sadly, this is not the last massacre we will see because we have not cured the wish of the psychotically violent to inflict terror on others. Until we bridge the gap between the insane, the oppressed and the downright mad and bad, the banning of spoons or cricket bats in a built up area will serve no useful purpose other to facilitate yet more violence against the innocents.
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UPDATE: Having had one or two slightly puzzled responses, I feel obliged to append the caveat: Alas, This Is A Parody! I thought the use of "hand-ringing," "rucksac," "mental health issues he has with you," and "the means are but a way to an end" should have made that abundantly clear ... <a href="http://larabuckerton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/guns.html">my more po-faced response, which is not dogmatically "pro-gun control," can be read here.</a> Oh dear, perhaps I'd better leave this sort of thing to Posie. (But then I can never be sure when <i>she's </i>being serious!)Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-57341033283908047852012-12-15T09:05:00.003-08:002015-08-24T13:34:47.049-07:00GunsWhat should "the right to keep and bear arms" look like in modern America? You sometimes hear the glib suggestion that, because the government now has Stryker APCs and M1 Abrams tanks and nuclear submarines etc., citizens need these things too - y'know, scowling proudly on your front porch in your rusty-but-feisty Black Hawk, "Betsy."<br />
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This is usually intended as a reduction to absurdity: since citizens can't hope to resist contemporary military, the Second Amendment is more-or-less meaningless. Right? The debate then often drifts into a comparative statistical realm, where the anti-gun movement has a firm case, albeit a case pretty effectively countered with unsubstantiated contradiction. Here's <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html#ixzz2F92YOPE7">Adam Gopnik in <i>The New Yorker</i></a>:<br />
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After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies [...]</blockquote>
If you want to get into the deets, the <a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/">Harvard Injury Control Center</a> is a great gateway. A gun-toting society <i>is</i> a more murderous one: that correlation is pretty clear across high-income nations. You can "guard with jealous attention the public liberty" (Patrick Henry, 1788) in the abstract, but people - <i>children </i>- are indeed dying today because of it.<br />
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So is the Second Amendment really irrelevant, except as a thorny anachronism, a relict legislative tangle that we have to just cut through somehow? Could there be some way of giving America the equivalent of a Black Hawk on the front porch?<br />
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In short, if Americans have the right to "keep and bear arms," what should "arms" look like today?<br />
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Well, we all also know that military strength is more than just weaponry. Your weaponry is useless if you don't know how to use it. It's pointless if you don't know where to point it. Military strength is also supplies and other materiel, intelligence, infrastructure, doctrine, training, ideology, culture, experience, loyalty, morale, oversight, adaptability, mobilisation, deployment, reputation, procurement capacity, capacity to <a href="http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/02/19/all-your-brain-are-belong-to-us/">militarize emergent technologies</a> and technological conjunctures, and numerous other interconnected dimensions of organisational capability. It is true now more than ever that <b>there is no purely military realm independent from its civilian substrate.</b><br />
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Military strength is also <i>relational </i>in the sense that it depends on the degree and type of threats to itself and/or its objectives. Consider the existence of a well-regulated militia equipped with javelins and cowhide shields, and trained in fighting against similar forces. Of course, such a militia is eliminated if it loses its javelins and cowhide shields or various crucial organisational capabilities. But it is also eliminated -- practically eliminated, that is -- if the threats it faces evolve sufficiently. Such a militia effectively ceases to exist when its enemies drive around in Strykers carrying combat assault rifles etc. It becomes immaterial, negligible.<br />
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America is armed. But is it bearing arms?<br />
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The chief concern of the Second Amendment is a deterrence to tyrannical government, and the intersection of positive law with the natural law right of revolt. <b>So what kind of civilian military counterweight ("militia"?) could exist, even in principle, to a potential USAF-backed tyranny by the US government?</b> I don't know, but I have two strong hunches:<br />
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(1) Its protection overlaps with protecting other civil and political liberties which are not typically considered in connection with the rights to arms, in particular law concerning privacy, due process, habeas corpus and freedom of speech. In other words: military operations have changed such that their outcomes increasingly depend on the way they are embedded in contexts traditionally considered non-military, and a corollary of these shifts is <b>a possible Second Amendment rationale for protecting activities traditionally considered "non-militia."</b> I'm thinking, of course, of developments such as Title II Enhanced Surveillance Procedures and indefinite detention under NDAA. (At the same time, I should be careful of defaulting to controversies as they have already been delineated in other debates, simply because that requires less imagination). In short: intelligence is the core of any military operation, so the Second Amendment cannot be separate from issues around privacy.<br />
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(2) It couldn't just be about what lies <i>outside </i>the USAF; it would have to be about US citizens' broad participation in, and influence upon, the governance and operations of the USAF itself. <b>The vast resources of the USAF shouldn't ever be dominated by a partisan interest bloc.</b> Nor should it (this in the spirit of the famous Federalist No. 10, against faction in government) be dominated by a broad but non-universal consensus which can afford to ignore minority perspectives. In other words, the Second Amendment requires the broad access (though in what sense "access," I'm not sure) of the nation's citizenry to that which comprises its military strength, even those ingredients which can't be conveniently stashed in a drawer or safe or slipped into a shoulder-holster. Bearing arms is about access to truly democratic institutions, and it's about the kinds of positive social rights that enable true broad and diverse participation in the democratic processes.<br />
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Closely connected questions are of course, <b>how should "tyrannical government" be interpreted in the context of privatization and outsourcing on a vast scale?</b> What does outsourced tyranny look like? What does unbundled tyranny look like? How should tyranny, or its threat, be interpreted in the context of Halliburton and other long-term, multi-administration contracting relationships? (Compare Hamilton, in Federalist No. 26, pondering how "Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution").<br />
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I don't have a lot of answers. But should the unlikely occur, and the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20738998">recent horror in Connecticut</a>, or the next few in-principle-foreseeable similar horrors, transform the pipe-dream of gun law reform into a serious political reality, then these questions need to be at the forefront of the debate.<br />
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I'll leave you with Jeremy Scahill's ever-so-slightly sensational account of the atmosphere in certain sections of American society the last time a Democrat president was elected for a second term, which gives one or two hints about the kind of revolutionary militia the USA might realistically be expected to produce, what might regulate such a militia, and the kind of freedom they might be prepared to defend:
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In November 1996 - the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won reelection - the main organ of the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus's journal First Things, published a "symposium" titled "The End of Democracy?" which bluntly questioned "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." [...] A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the "regime," at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities "ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution." Erik Prince's close friend, political collaborator, and beneficiary Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays of the issue, as did extremist Judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. [...] "Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have," asserted the symposium's unsigned introduction. "This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word 'regime' we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy." It declared, "The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed. . . . What is happening now is the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people."
The editorial quoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia saying, "A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life." [...] Colson's essay was titled "Kingdoms in Conflict": [...] "[E]vents in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime," Colson wrote, adding that a "showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare." He asserted, "[A] 'social contract' that included biblical believers and Enlightenment rationalists was the basis of the founding of the United States. . . . If the terms of our contract have in fact been broken, Christian citizens may be compelled to force the government to return to its original understanding. . . . The writings of Thomas Jefferson, who spoke openly of the necessity of revolution, could also be called upon for support." [...] Colson stopped short of calling for an open rebellion, but he clearly viewed that as a distinct possibility/necessity in the near future, saying, "with fear and trembling, I have begun to believe that, however Christians in America gather to reach their consensus, we are fast approaching this point."</blockquote>
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PS: Of course, my two hunches up there are fairly Living Constitutionalist in spirit, with a dash of Originalism. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," them's the rules. Hmm. You know, that could also be read as a <i>conditional </i>clause. "So long as a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, then the right of the people to keep and bear arms shouldn't be infringed" ...<br />
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UPDATE: They thought of that. The Supreme Court opinion in<i> District of Columbia et al. v. Heller</i> [2008]:<br />
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The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose. The Amendment could be re-phrased, “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”</blockquote>
PPS: There are Second Amendment concerns <i>other </i>than tyrannical government: to do with hunting, quelling insurrection, the relationships among states, guarding against foreign invasion, etc.<br />
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Here's part of the Supreme Court opinion in<i> <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf">District of Columbia et al. v. Heller</a></i><a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf"> [2008]</a>:<br />
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It is therefore entirely sensible that the Second Amendment’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia. The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting. But the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens’ militia by taking away their arms was the reason that right—unlike some other English rights—was codified in a written Constitution.</blockquote>
The Framers were suspicious of a standing army, even those who broadly supported making provision for one. So the right to keep and bear arms wasn't just or even chiefly a counterweight to official military power, so much as a hopeful restraint upon its emergence: a provision to mitigate the need for a standing army - which for the Framers would probably have implied proto-PMFs like Blacke Death Water and Thrice Canopie, BTW - through reliance on, in George Washington's exasperated language, "Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestick life" (1776). But we are where we are.<br />
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PPPS: My spellcheck suggests "hallucination" for "Halliburton"! Bliss!<br />
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PPPPS: Just for the heck of it, here's a TLDR copy-paste of Hamilton's<i> Federalist No. 29</i>, concerning militias. I haven't checked it out properly yet, he probably thinks Occupy Oakland was one or something. Personally I never trust these pseudonymy types. What are they, zany?
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<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">To the People of the State of New York:
THE power of regulating the militia, and of commanding its services in times of insurrection and invasion are natural incidents to the duties of superintending the common defense, and of watching over the internal peace of the Confederacy.
It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects, whenever they were called into service for the public defense. It would enable them to discharge the duties of the camp and of the field with mutual intelligence and concert an advantage of peculiar moment in the operations of an army; and it would fit them much sooner to acquire the degree of proficiency in military functions which would be essential to their usefulness. This desirable uniformity can only be accomplished by confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority. It is, therefore, with the most evident propriety, that the plan of the convention proposes to empower the Union "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, RESERVING TO THE STATES RESPECTIVELY THE APPOINTMENT OF THE OFFICERS, AND THE AUTHORITY OF TRAINING THE MILITIA ACCORDING TO THE DISCIPLINE PRESCRIBED BY CONGRESS."
Of the different grounds which have been taken in opposition to the plan of the convention, there is none that was so little to have been expected, or is so untenable in itself, as the one from which this particular provision has been attacked. If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security. If standing armies are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia, in the body to whose care the protection of the State is committed, ought, as far as possible, to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions. If the federal government can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies which call for the military arm in support of the civil magistrate, it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind of force. If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter. To render an army unnecessary, will be a more certain method of preventing its existence than a thousand prohibitions upon paper.
In order to cast an odium upon the power of calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, it has been remarked that there is nowhere any provision in the proposed Constitution for calling out the POSSE COMITATUS, to assist the magistrate in the execution of his duty, whence it has been inferred, that military force was intended to be his only auxiliary. There is a striking incoherence in the objections which have appeared, and sometimes even from the same quarter, not much calculated to inspire a very favorable opinion of the sincerity or fair dealing of their authors. The same persons who tell us in one breath, that the powers of the federal government will be despotic and unlimited, inform us in the next, that it has not authority sufficient even to call out the POSSE COMITATUS. The latter, fortunately, is as much short of the truth as the former exceeds it. It would be as absurd to doubt, that a right to pass all laws NECESSARY AND PROPER to execute its declared powers, would include that of requiring the assistance of the citizens to the officers who may be intrusted with the execution of those laws, as it would be to believe, that a right to enact laws necessary and proper for the imposition and collection of taxes would involve that of varying the rules of descent and of the alienation of landed property, or of abolishing the trial by jury in cases relating to it. It being therefore evident that the supposition of a want of power to require the aid of the POSSE COMITATUS is entirely destitute of color, it will follow, that the conclusion which has been drawn from it, in its application to the authority of the federal government over the militia, is as uncandid as it is illogical. What reason could there be to infer, that force was intended to be the sole instrument of authority, merely because there is a power to make use of it when necessary? What shall we think of the motives which could induce men of sense to reason in this manner? How shall we prevent a conflict between charity and judgment?
By a curious refinement upon the spirit of republican jealousy, we are even taught to apprehend danger from the militia itself, in the hands of the federal government. It is observed that select corps may be formed, composed of the young and ardent, who may be rendered subservient to the views of arbitrary power. What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government, is impossible to be foreseen. But so far from viewing the matter in the same light with those who object to select corps as dangerous, were the Constitution ratified, and were I to deliver my sentiments to a member of the federal legislature from this State on the subject of a militia establishment, I should hold to him, in substance, the following discourse:
"The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.
"But though the scheme of disciplining the whole nation must be abandoned as mischievous or impracticable; yet it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should, as soon as possible, be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia. The attention of the government ought particularly to be directed to the formation of a select corps of moderate extent, upon such principles as will really fit them for service in case of need. By thus circumscribing the plan, it will be possible to have an excellent body of well-trained militia, ready to take the field whenever the defense of the State shall require it. This will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist."
Thus differently from the adversaries of the proposed Constitution should I reason on the same subject, deducing arguments of safety from the very sources which they represent as fraught with danger and perdition. But how the national legislature may reason on the point, is a thing which neither they nor I can foresee.
There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia, that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious offspring of political fanaticism. Where in the name of common-sense, are our fears to end if we may not trust our sons, our brothers, our neighbors, our fellow-citizens? What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits and interests? What reasonable cause of apprehension can be inferred from a power in the Union to prescribe regulations for the militia, and to command its services when necessary, while the particular States are to have the SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE APPOINTMENT OF THE OFFICERS? If it were possible seriously to indulge a jealousy of the militia upon any conceivable establishment under the federal government, the circumstance of the officers being in the appointment of the States ought at once to extinguish it. There can be no doubt that this circumstance will always secure to them a preponderating influence over the militia.
In reading many of the publications against the Constitution, a man is apt to imagine that he is perusing some ill-written tale or romance, which instead of natural and agreeable images, exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes "Gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire"; discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents, and transforming everything it touches into a monster.
A sample of this is to be observed in the exaggerated and improbable suggestions which have taken place respecting the power of calling for the services of the militia. That of New Hampshire is to be marched to Georgia, of Georgia to New Hampshire, of New York to Kentucky, and of Kentucky to Lake Champlain. Nay, the debts due to the French and Dutch are to be paid in militiamen instead of louis d'ors and ducats. At one moment there is to be a large army to lay prostrate the liberties of the people; at another moment the militia of Virginia are to be dragged from their homes five or six hundred miles, to tame the republican contumacy of Massachusetts; and that of Massachusetts is to be transported an equal distance to subdue the refractory haughtiness of the aristocratic Virginians. Do the persons who rave at this rate imagine that their art or their eloquence can impose any conceits or absurdities upon the people of America for infallible truths?
If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia? If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people? Is this the way in which usurpers stride to dominion over a numerous and enlightened nation? Do they begin by exciting the detestation of the very instruments of their intended usurpations? Do they usually commence their career by wanton and disgustful acts of power, calculated to answer no end, but to draw upon themselves universal hatred and execration? Are suppositions of this sort the sober admonitions of discerning patriots to a discerning people? Or are they the inflammatory ravings of incendiaries or distempered enthusiasts? If we were even to suppose the national rulers actuated by the most ungovernable ambition, it is impossible to believe that they would employ such preposterous means to accomplish their designs.
In times of insurrection, or invasion, it would be natural and proper that the militia of a neighboring State should be marched into another, to resist a common enemy, or to guard the republic against the violence of faction or sedition. This was frequently the case, in respect to the first object, in the course of the late war; and this mutual succor is, indeed, a principal end of our political association. If the power of affording it be placed under the direction of the Union, there will be no danger of a supine and listless inattention to the dangers of a neighbor, till its near approach had superadded the incitements of selfpreservation to the too feeble impulses of duty and sympathy.
PUBLIUS.</span></blockquote>
PPPPPS: See <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8rMYyegT5Y">Charlie Brooker on coverage of the school massacre in Winnenden in 2009.</a><br />
<br />Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-73879029761829405792012-12-04T04:45:00.002-08:002012-12-04T04:47:21.481-08:00TLDR BBCIncredibly boring & obvious letter to BBC World Have Your Say!!! YAAAA (crying) WWWWNNNNN!!!!<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Dear BBC,</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I watched several hours of your US election coverage. I thought it </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">generally excellent, with Dimbleby superb as ever. However I was </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">disappointed not to hear any mention of the third party candidates, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">especially Stein and Johnson. While no one disputes this was a two </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">horse race, there are plenty of reasons to bring them up:</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(1) In a race so tight, third party voting patterns could have had a </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">bearing on the outcome.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(2) Regardless of any direct bearing, votes for third parties can help </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">us form an impression of why a state or county is voting the way that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">it is. (Of course, making distinctions within the third party vote </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">category would be crucial: the catch-all category "other" tells us </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">very little).</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(3) A bit of variety! There were plenty of long stretches where </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">nothing was happening, nor was likely to happen. These shouldn't be </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">exclusively used to reiterate the major themes. Some viewers are </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">dipping in and out, but the lucky ones are in for the long haul. (I </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase, "No surprises </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">there." SO SURPRISE ME).</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(4) The BBC can play a particularly strong role in interpreting the US </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">election for an international audience. For a viewer more familiar </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">with UK politics, for example, it is tempting to make lazy and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">misleading identifications between the GOP and the Tories, and the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Dems and Labour respectively. Talking about third parties is a useful </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">way into a more nuanced and contextualised view of the American </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">political landscape (particularly this time round, when the narrative </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">of voters disliking both options was so strong).</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(5) Likewise, the BBC can play a particularly strong role in locating </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">the US election within an international context, and its issues within </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">as broad as possible a spectrum of political opinion, geographically </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">and historically. If some mainstream feature of European political </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">life would appear radical or fringe in the USA, or vice-versa, I'd </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">like that to be teased out. It makes your coverage more relevant, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">interesting and true.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(6) Even if third parties get little or no discussion, I would count </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">it a valuable service to have the 1% or so of "other" votes further </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">broken down on your infographics. (Perhaps this would be prohibitively </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">administratively complex -- but it's certainly worth investigating, if </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">you haven't already. Perhaps it would be possible on the BBC web site, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">if it isn't possible on the telly).</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">(7) Someone close to me who has dual US/UK citizenship, and had just </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">voted for Stein by absentee ballot was similarly dismayed. Third party </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">voters often make the morally difficult decision of declining a </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">tactical vote, on the basis that a vote of conscience may raise </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">awareness, influence debate and help to shape the political climate. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">But it is less likely to do this if it is ignored by organisations </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">like the BBC.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">It was of course not an omission unique to the BBC: throughout </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">election night, and even today, the day after, it is extremely hard to </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">find any discussion whatsoever of third parties. I write to you only </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">because my expectations of you are a little higher.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Kind regards,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Lara Buckerton</span>Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-18588537157513480932012-11-02T08:47:00.000-07:002012-12-04T05:00:20.864-08:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voters 8 to infinity!Okay, I’ll just finish this up quickly. I mean, God, right? God!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpaZ5KG_wlIFxjGmfqin3A1wHsc8gp2AQJSFXrMpx1IxPFXjn2uVEmMwWsZhMgeonhdUcASLqHgJINTjSsSp13EqKhN0q3gY_i8qPren4YoJtQcbQ9UnboJbmLnLJIPFpCyLC-HlHh5Ris/s1600/1-Blown-Face-420x280.jpg"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpaZ5KG_wlIFxjGmfqin3A1wHsc8gp2AQJSFXrMpx1IxPFXjn2uVEmMwWsZhMgeonhdUcASLqHgJINTjSsSp13EqKhN0q3gY_i8qPren4YoJtQcbQ9UnboJbmLnLJIPFpCyLC-HlHh5Ris/s320/1-Blown-Face-420x280.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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Voter 8, <b>THE WE-NEED-THIRD-PARTIES-TO-FLOURISH VOTER.</b> “Third parties are our best shot at creating a more varied and open political landscape. We have to do everything we can to support them.”<br />
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Well, okay. So long as there isn’t at bottom a dogmatic dream that somehow Jill Stein is actually going to be elected prez. It has to be part of a broad and detailed strategy which admits its risks and trade-offs, not hand-waving in the direction of raising consciousness, appeasing conscience, and matching funds.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVFpGqBJT9eWG91MilQJ5ctedScoe-7QF0lHfQ78rxzGGGBGvTZ-nYPJxUVP9SRrWNk8qQqZW-G1HEfgxNdYLYWXX2DJZK_s-F57A5PgVXXoTM5iYnrBp5WM3s9rYQdp2cmZ2U-jd1D9vV/s1600/Grumpy.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVFpGqBJT9eWG91MilQJ5ctedScoe-7QF0lHfQ78rxzGGGBGvTZ-nYPJxUVP9SRrWNk8qQqZW-G1HEfgxNdYLYWXX2DJZK_s-F57A5PgVXXoTM5iYnrBp5WM3s9rYQdp2cmZ2U-jd1D9vV/s1600/Grumpy.jpg" /></a>
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Voter 9, <b>THE LESSER-OF-TWO-EVILS, FIGHT-THE-SYSTEM VOTER. </b>“Obama’s not really a progressive, in the sense that he’s not facing in the way we need to go. But if you draw a line from where Romney says he, is to where Obama says he is, that line is pointed in the right direction. That’s important. There is value in selecting the candidate who presents, even deceitfully, as the relatively more populist, the relatively less mesmerised by doctrinaire neoliberal ideology; that’s the happier outcome within the long, awful blow-out wrangle that the US’s population is trying to have with itself down the years. Furthermore, with Obama in the White House, it’s slightly easier to see the systemic nature of our present peril – at least, to see that things are complicated, rather than blaming it on the personalities of a few supervillains at the top. And finally, on the balance of probabilities, the pitfalls which Obama would create for real progressive political struggle will be less dangerous than the ones Romney would create, though we mustn’t be complacent in that crude evaluation of less danger, and try to work out how the dangers will specifically be different.”<br />
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It goes without saying, I hope, that voting is never enough. We are knight-errants, darlings, born into this world to redress wrongs, and the ballot booth is but a shady grove where we betimes do water our palfreys.<br />
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How does this translate into voting behaviour? Vote Obama anywhere with a hint of swing.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilmfS8MYhdXk2roXIWweM_CRAOAWi897pBe1qek44XHnyeABs2PE4S9FnSwFBL8KJC_RX-6DcCrqpxzzlPfa6fWuch9HONVVdJrARaFXNvOU9-ZQou_1sF8OkoZVeRgaAVqX3Mh_MBmxo2/s1600/Ozymandius+3.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilmfS8MYhdXk2roXIWweM_CRAOAWi897pBe1qek44XHnyeABs2PE4S9FnSwFBL8KJC_RX-6DcCrqpxzzlPfa6fWuch9HONVVdJrARaFXNvOU9-ZQou_1sF8OkoZVeRgaAVqX3Mh_MBmxo2/s1600/Ozymandius+3.jpg" /></a>
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Voter 10, <b>THE SUPER-GENIUS, ITERATIVE-PATH-TO-SOCIAL-JUSTICE VOTER. </b>
“Every administration contributes to the conditions under which the next is established (nudged and strafed from the sides, of course, by factors external to this development). If Obama wins the next term” [this is just for example – I can’t really do the super-genius forecast!!!], “disenchantment will be so acute by the end of his term, we’ll get far-right theocrat Republican trolls in the White House for the next two to four terms. Whereas if Obama loses, Romney won’t be much worse than he would have been, and in four years’ time true centrist Democrat candidates will have a real shot at it.”<br />
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I’m pretty suspicious of this kind of thinking, because it risks being just a bit mad and self-mesmerisingly idealistic, but we should at least train for it, try it out speculatively – with multiple pathways, flow-chart thingies – and then perhaps borrow a smidge of those results for a more pragmatic, incrementalist, "who-knows-what-the-future-holds" kinda approach. At the very least, we should assume that the 2016 and 2020 elections are probably (hopefully not, and it’s probably worth fighting tooth and nail to prevent it, but probably) still going to Republicans and Democrats, and try to map various pathways of ratcheting real progress which take into account specific shifting patterns of control involving changes within the state apparatus, corporations, capital, the big parties, the media and the electorate, and to the relations among them, <i>pace </i>the non-starter non-strategy of hoping that minimal gains made during a period of Democratic ascendancy will not quite be wiped out during a period of Democratic ebb. I don't know how this would translate into voting behaviour.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcvwQUHkgRJyd4TMIVmh94DFKHPShfiURjsviDFiqUIUBl81xFTcArjk871RWqtBQ2f5sRmCJP82iGoCJe8iFKQmTerC4m25_NIpi-OnRpRx8S526nILqSfTooDOo6r4xryTkjn1u0NuQ/s1600/60744_508003799209938_604154761_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcvwQUHkgRJyd4TMIVmh94DFKHPShfiURjsviDFiqUIUBl81xFTcArjk871RWqtBQ2f5sRmCJP82iGoCJe8iFKQmTerC4m25_NIpi-OnRpRx8S526nILqSfTooDOo6r4xryTkjn1u0NuQ/s320/60744_508003799209938_604154761_n.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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Voter 11, <b>THE SUPER-DUPER-COSMOPOLITAN VOTER. </b>“I’m not just concerned about 300 million Americans. I’m concerned about seven billion people, plus those yet to be born. We don’t have time to play the long game, to struggle for a permanent shift in electoral politics. All we can do is hope to elect the enemy who will destroy us more slowly.”<br />
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Hmm. How does such a position translate into voting behaviour? Wow, it’s tricky. You’d prioritise aid, trade and war. There’s even an argument (I think a weak one) that once in power the porous Romney could become permeable to ideas from foreign states and transnational institutions. You might be swayed a little by that infographic that’s been doing the rounds, about how practically the whole world outside the US is rooting for Obama over Romney. The exception being Pakistan. No max score for you, because: murder drones? At the risk of excessive anchoring, I think I might focus on the energy policies of the two candidates. So again, if such a voter believes the election hangs in the balance, it should probably vote for Obama if it lives in any state with a smidge of swing. In super-safe Democrat states it should vote for a third party. However, if it’s confident of a Democrat victory, it should vote for a third party wherever it lives.<br />
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Bonus (non-) voter:
<b>THE I-AM-NOT-EVEN-A-US-CITIZEN NON-VOTER</b>. “For some reason I just write lengthy blog posts about the US elections. LOL.”
Yours truly! See the earlier blog post, WHY I AM NOT VOTING.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-51796785459417270522012-11-01T10:21:00.000-07:002012-11-06T10:22:11.530-08:00A Bestiary of Voters - Voter 7<b>THE I-DON’T-HAVE-A-CRYSTAL-BALL AMBIVALENT THIRD PARTY VOTER.</b><br />
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“I’m not indifferent because I really believe it won’t make any difference, or only a ‘small’ difference, who wins the election. I’m ambivalent because I don’t want to contribute to, or can’t even start to understand, the kind of difference it will make. I’m ambivalent because I’m in an epistemological grapple-hold. It would take all my energies to fight it, and I still might not get out.”<br />
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Hmm, seems a little convenient, but okay. I think it’s still no reason NOT to vote – only a reason to vote for a third party. (Even if you don’t really much like that third party).<br />
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Cf. Stephen Squib on n+1’s Election Preview: “Someone once wrote that you shouldn’t confuse the process of writing somebody’s name on a piece of paper once every four years and dropping it in a box with emancipation. Voting has a part to play in political life, but a limited one, small compared to the importance of fostering communities based on mutual aid, deploying direct action, and practicing solidarity. In this respect, those who loudly insist on not voting or proclaim its meaninglessness are committing the old misty-eyed mistake in reverse: not voting will no more free you than voting will. And the energy spent asserting that the two parties are identical is only well-spent if it leads directly into building some further form of institutional counterpower. Voting is not an overly difficult or time-consuming process—neofascist suppression tactics notwithstanding—at least when compared to planning a march, a boycott, or any other kind of organizing. It’s really closer to making an excellent banner or attending a meeting, activities that probably have a similar return on investment, as individual expenditures, as a trip to the polls does.”
Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-85396539334829183422012-10-24T10:12:00.000-07:002012-11-06T06:40:44.243-08:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voter 6God this is dull!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeSB9i3mtsDyTTpDub5JSZml1yLHThLH4DEbwBT5Y_fe5kqoSaQJhXz24h_riF_YQtbJtyVgiF7S9g5hCBNjBz8D91rCsk-cC2S_tyJ5eNuPKYl6A_MSOQ6i5tYkc54MEMNgmG7HvNYsQD/s1600/Sasha+Vinci+-+L%2527Eterna+Attesa+-+with+Erl+Kktn.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeSB9i3mtsDyTTpDub5JSZml1yLHThLH4DEbwBT5Y_fe5kqoSaQJhXz24h_riF_YQtbJtyVgiF7S9g5hCBNjBz8D91rCsk-cC2S_tyJ5eNuPKYl6A_MSOQ6i5tYkc54MEMNgmG7HvNYsQD/s200/Sasha+Vinci+-+L%2527Eterna+Attesa+-+with+Erl+Kktn.jpg" width="146" /></a><br />
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<b>THE GREATER-OF-TWO-EVILS, DEMOCRATS-CAN-CHANGE VOTER</b>. “The Democrats need a wake-up call. They need to lose this election. The next time round, maybe they’ll field a candidate we can believe in.”<br />
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Yikes. Sounds suspiciously like a position born of pampered privilege, but from my perfumed palanquin I don’t have a problem with that <i>per se</i>. I’d be interested to hear the details. Presumably the associated voting behaviour would be third party in swing states (“the Democrats need to see they’ve lost the election because their supporters have gone to third parties”), and perhaps even Romney in safe states.
Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-71320084314141065922012-10-22T17:30:00.000-07:002012-11-06T07:15:08.866-08:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voter 5Okay, those are the really annoying ones out the way, yippee! Now here are literally millions of voting positions I can just about get on board with. I’ll start with the weaker ones though:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic4PQVzz9aL4fA7YKgJ0Zj_LZ7PmqIBdDXYZSVc-J19dvzmG0YjbV7xfCGtdE7t8Dj4j0DKQMR-7h2v2GD3HXp8HYbjN_4BZrzvAFP7Mb7eY0pss4n3WGRTKdxsUfvsyu9GOezzSeiShMy/s1600/541998_290541297717722_1295947561_n.jpg"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic4PQVzz9aL4fA7YKgJ0Zj_LZ7PmqIBdDXYZSVc-J19dvzmG0YjbV7xfCGtdE7t8Dj4j0DKQMR-7h2v2GD3HXp8HYbjN_4BZrzvAFP7Mb7eY0pss4n3WGRTKdxsUfvsyu9GOezzSeiShMy/s320/541998_290541297717722_1295947561_n.jpg" width="213" /></a>
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<b>THE LESSER-OF-TWO-EVILS, DEMOCRATS-CAN-CHANGE VOTER.</b> “So the Democrats are a right wing party. But they’re still to the left of the Republicans. And if the Democratic Party can hold the White House for another term, and the one after that, and the one after that, and win back Congress, perhaps it can make the slow crawl from the hinterlands of the right back towards the centre, dragging the Republicans behind them. Perhaps it can start to redefine the language and conceptual and emotional repertoire of American political life, and even start to reconnect it with reality.”<br />
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Okay, this was nearly in the other category. I find it vastly implausible, but at least it’s a roadmap. How does the lesser-of-two-evils, Democrats-can-change position translate into voting behaviour? If such a specimen believes the election hangs in the balance, it should probably vote for Obama if it lives in any state with a hint of swing. In super-safe Democrat states it should vote for a third party. However, if it’s confident of a Democrat victory (as if), it should vote for a third party wherever it lives.<br />
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UPDATE: For an example of a thorough development of such a position, cf. Christopher Glazek at the n+1 <a href="http://www.nplusonemag.com/election-preview">Election Preview</a>. Here's a longish excerpt:<br />
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"Frustrating though it may be, this election is about the past four years, not the next four. It’s about ratifying the hope of November 2008, protecting the change enacted in March 2010, and rolling back the counterrevolution unleashed later that year. These goals may appear modest, but the effort has cost billions of dollars and has left almost no room for error.
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On foreign policy, could Obama have ended the drone program or brought American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan with greater haste? Not without blunting the Democrats’ newfound national security edge, an advantage that would have delivered the White House to John Kerry in 2004 if he’d had it.
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During the financial crisis, could Obama have nationalized the banks, as he did the auto companies, instead of bailing them out? He couldn’t have. TARP was unpopular enough at the time, but not nearly as unpopular as the government’s purchase of GM and Chrysler. The auto rescue, though, is now bearing indispensable electoral fruit; nationalizing the banks would have risked transforming Romney’s image from greedy financier to hero of the resistance. Could Obama have done more to prevent climate change? In fact, the administration’s new fuel efficiency standards for cars do more to combat global warming than anything done by his predecessors—and the achievement depended on circumventing the legislative process through executive order. Could Obama have done more to transform Americans’ views of social justice? The President can’t flip a switch to end bigotry, but polling suggests he did roll back prejudice in the one place he really could: support for gay marriage has increased among African Americans.
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On these and other issues, from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to mortgage modification to Palestine to the Supreme Court, the electoral evidence suggests that the President has pursued the correct priorities with nearly as much vigor and almost as much success as our system allows. If this realization leaves the left feeling deflated after four years, its discouragement may recede after eight, when a new—and probably worse—regime will come to power. We do not live in the best of all possible Americas, but we do live in a country whose politics, despite our disappointments, are getting better with each painful victory."
Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-87495860964184680632012-10-20T03:00:00.000-07:002012-11-06T04:40:30.505-08:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voter 4 <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgofQVYL-MuR6qvK62tIiFuNI5KRRlcEryuGA5FiK7mr9gbjcPBob37WIeqL6HyTBr1LeFXP9m8R621obI1wm5eiRSXAdOsJaCJ-J3aYSUj4GJYdd7BBJgQfmlNc-rjBm3sewWF3krlfG6B/s1600/Slugs+via+Michael+And.jpg"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgofQVYL-MuR6qvK62tIiFuNI5KRRlcEryuGA5FiK7mr9gbjcPBob37WIeqL6HyTBr1LeFXP9m8R621obI1wm5eiRSXAdOsJaCJ-J3aYSUj4GJYdd7BBJgQfmlNc-rjBm3sewWF3krlfG6B/s320/Slugs+via+Michael+And.jpg" width="320" /></a>
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<b>THE PEOPLE-CAN’T-HANDLE-PARADOXES NON-VOTER / THIRD-PARTY VOTER</b>. “Wake up, fellow Americans. The founding fathers didn’t foresee the rise of mass membership parties. They didn’t count on the domination of elections by money and by modern media technologies. The American Constitution just doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. [Or some variation thereof.] This is true, but it’s hard! It’s a big leap for most folks to believe it! How will folks ever make that leap if the person who’s telling them goes ahead and votes anyway? Me, I put a premium on the exemplary quality of my actions! People won’t believe me that the electoral system is broken, that there’s no real difference between the main candidates, if I go ahead and vote for one or the other anyway.”<br />
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Okay, so this is a little better. But I think we all have a tendency to overestimate the wider social power of the norms we apply to ourselves as individuals. If you really are placing a premium on the exemplary power of a certain principle, you ought to consider how those around you may reinterpret and adapt that principle. You ought to consider the implications of that principle moving through myriad minutely-differentiated social, cultural and institutional contexts.<br />
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That sounds a bit obscure! Maybe this is better – you ought to ask yourself, “Who, specifically, am I hoping to persuade? Who have I persuaded so far?”<br />
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And of course, you have to have interim goals. For example, in the case of a no-vote or a spoiled ballot, and urging others to follow your example, sometimes the strategy seems to be to erode the duopoly’s democratic mandate. Okay, you may admit, the ways in which elections are funded, covered in the media, and finally determined fully demonstrate that there already is no mandate – but perhaps a mass no show, if it were ever achieved, would . . . what, exactly? UPDATE: Well, <a href="http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1172">this</a> is a start I guess! <br />
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It wouldn’t stop government, that’s for tootin’. If you need an example of laughingly easeful governance without mandate, examine the UK over the past two years. The Coalition has treated government like some horrid little Oxbridge picnic-cum-swimming expedition, and democratic mandate like the swimming cozzies they forgot to pack on purpose for that extra fruity frisson. With respect to education, for instance, the British public incontrovertibly elected many more MPs promising to oppose tuition fees than promising to support them, and yet the British public now must pay tuition fees. With respect to healthcare, the Conservatives, despite not even holding a half the House of Commons, have managed to do literally the opposite of what they pledged to do during their campaign – and they haven’t even had to rely on some kind of specialist expert mandate (the medical profession has on the whole fiercely opposed the reforms), to plead changed and extenuating circumstances, or to look awkward or abashed.<br />
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I don’t mean “what exactly?” as a snarky rhetorical question; it’s a genuine plea for super-specificity. Who stops voting first? At which elections? What happens next? How do the big, well-funded parties understand what’s happening? How do they respond? Who stops voting next? Etc.!<br />
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More later!
Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-27378446024166781542012-10-19T14:00:00.000-07:002012-11-06T03:52:38.503-08:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voter 3<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9u3c_p0bgf1Cv7oQIdk3Fv0jVpJXZgHoPKFqxtyLqj5Lo9pe13J8Jb9hyBQyFeptftLuOLcxnyoGWf8qfw5jcpn427oXnvlCIltKoUeDQjia6psrR3eQDfzzkv2FogornoFXPvaqmD8Rd/s1600/Gemma.jpg"><img border="0" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9u3c_p0bgf1Cv7oQIdk3Fv0jVpJXZgHoPKFqxtyLqj5Lo9pe13J8Jb9hyBQyFeptftLuOLcxnyoGWf8qfw5jcpn427oXnvlCIltKoUeDQjia6psrR3eQDfzzkv2FogornoFXPvaqmD8Rd/s200/Gemma.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
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C’m’ere, li’l’ voter, Lara won’t say anything bad about you . . .
HA! GOTCHA! <b>THE GREATER-OF-TWO-EVILS, FIGHT-THE-SYSTEM VOTER.</b> “Elections aren’t a mechanism for change. That’s what grassroot movements are for! America needs a wake-up call. We’ve suffered under Obama, but we’ll really suffer under Romney. The worse things get, the stronger our movement will grow.”<br />
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I have no sympathy whatsoever for this little voter. It seems to me to rely on a romanticised and uninterrogated idea of immiseration. But immiseration does not encourage solidarity, let alone the growth and co ordination of a mass movement, except under specific circumstances which do not prevail in the US today. That’s obviously a little sketchy and dogmatic but I don’t want to waste too much time on this one!
PS: Ya wanna make somethin’ of it, huh buddy? Send me the link & I will endeavour to respond judiciously & with shrewd charm and perspicacity.<br />
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UPDATE: Cf. e.g. Marco Roth at the n+1 <a href="http://www.nplusonemag.com/election-preview">Election Preview</a>, considering then ditching such a motive: "A little demon of an old leftist located in some attic of my mind whispers to me that a Romney win might, after all, be the very thing needed to galvanize a true socialist revolution in this country. If the non-union white working classes, or white formerly-working classes, who will continue to vote for Romney in flocks could finally be led to some kind of consciousness of how they screw themselves, time and again, through their continued immiseration, it might be better than four more years of Obama’s faux-liberalism. But the “it must get worse before it gets better” argument comes too easily to those who don’t really have to fear they’ll suffer the worst. I’m not on food stamps. I don’t live in a coastal flood zone, or on land earmarked for gas drilling. Instead of the old line, I’m trying to cultivate something I’ve started to think of as “post-democratic” subjectivity: my meaningful political actions will not occur in the voting booth."Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-90728889395011684582012-10-19T01:00:00.000-07:002012-10-24T10:49:36.800-07:00A Bestiary of Voters – Voter 2<b>THE EXPRESSIVE VOTER / NON-VOTER.</b>
“I’m not going to take up some kind of instrumental stance about my vote. I’m going to vote the way I vote [/I’m not going to vote] because that’s the kind of person I am. It’s how I roll. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it any other way. [For instance: I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a murderer.] [Sometimes add: witty and irreverent justification for candidate preference.]”
I suspect all these people may secretly be assholes.Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1153711186448311431.post-23246714128661301912012-10-18T00:30:00.000-07:002012-11-06T03:45:18.721-08:00A Bestiary Of Voters – Voter 1Hiya, my apes with apricot eyes!<br />
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I’ll start with <strike>three</strike> four positions I can’t really get on board with:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6iFvbhkJEz0yVjXU8FCrHQ_9V3HNqkSnmc1ujA-sxUy2BD3NOFzNYGwmmexFKfBp2sRBtCx0e-wWgGaXdtdi4GDpaAP476JUzLdZa_Rbn4QIDFR1JVkkMPNtXUnYEaVocK23wQ90Bn3qs/s1600/Snail+Finger+Puppet.jpg"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6iFvbhkJEz0yVjXU8FCrHQ_9V3HNqkSnmc1ujA-sxUy2BD3NOFzNYGwmmexFKfBp2sRBtCx0e-wWgGaXdtdi4GDpaAP476JUzLdZa_Rbn4QIDFR1JVkkMPNtXUnYEaVocK23wQ90Bn3qs/s200/Snail+Finger+Puppet.jpg" width="200" /></a>
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<b>THE AMBIVALENT NON-VOTER / THIRD PARTY VOTER</b>. “Obama and Romney are both as bad as each other. I don’t want either of them to be my president. So there’s no way I’m voting for either of them.”<br />
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See my last post. I think this specimen is all kinds of dumb. Neither candidate is offering to fight for what we deserve as human beings. But who wins has implications for the conditions in which we conduct that fight ourselves.<br />
<br />
Preferring one outcome over the other need not undermine fierce opposition to both those outcomes, and to the system which insists on them as the only legitimate outcomes.<br />
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Nor should such a preference be conflated with “oh well, at least he’s not as bad as the other guy” defeatism, nor with closing down the imaginative and organisational space in which the really meaningful alternatives ought to flourish.
In fact, I suspect the really meaningful alternatives become more meaningful, more minutely concrete, when we develop them in the context of the highly probable triumphs of the status quo in the medium term – when we don’t stake too much on rhetorically downplaying the probability of those triumphs.
A kind of simplified, sloganish way of putting all this might be: if I have a chance at influencing who one of my arch-nemeses is going to be, I should take it.
More later!Lara Buckertonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08731612969599648811noreply@blogger.com0