Plural Identities

A last resort for dimwits

The Economist article on the April 30th Joseph Rowntree Foundation report into the link between ethnicity and poverty chose to focus on the decision whether to be employed or work for oneself, although it did not make any assertions about the link, if it exists, between self employment and poverty, only noting that in contrast to America, in Britain graduates consider self-employment as the last resort for dimwits, which I suppose may account for my perception that after my Oxford/INSEAD education, my parents think my self employed status is somewhat shaming.

Parental influence may be the key here.  It is well known that Chinese parents and Indian parents are keen on their children becoming doctors, accountants or lawyers, which may be why the percentage of self employed Chinese and Indian origin British has fallen over the past 15 years.  Zia Haider Rahman points to parental influence for Bangladeshi origin people too.  Having lived and been politically active in Bethnal Green for five years or so myself, I agree with his comment that the persistence of poverty is no surprise to those who have been involved in the civic life in such communities.  His point about the influence of Sylheti history and cultural background is key too.  He says:

"But what distresses me the most is not the material deprivation but the lack of aspirations that parents in this community have for their children. This lack of aspiration is not just a consequence of poverty, though poverty certainly doesn't help, but is actually embedded in the culture of many East End Bangladeshis."

White parents can be prone to this too though, particularly with regards to educational aspirations.  I remember a boy at my state grammar school who was certainly bright enough to stay on for A levels, as the teachers wanted him to, announcing that he couldn't because his father would not support him, and wanted him to help out and then take over the family ironmongers.

Shining examples

I mentioned in a previous post that there are shining examples of people who were in some way an outsider or 'excluded' at critical points in their lives, but instead of then joining groups trying to destroy society, have achieved great success.  Two profiles from Saturday 13th January's Financial Times caught my eye:

Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, schools minister:

The son of a Greek Cypriot former waiter and postman, he was put into voluntary care by his father after his mother walked out. He lived in a council children's home until he was 11. His lucky break came when the local authority paid for him to go to an Oxfordshire boarding school. It was this experience that sparked his "obsession with education as a life transformer". He subsequently earned a place at Keble College, Oxford, where he read history. After completing a PhD on the British aristocracy of the late 19th century, he spent three years as an Oxford don before joining the Financial Times as a reporter.

Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer Chief Executive

By his own admission, he was a drifter in his youth. He grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked for the Colonial Office. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but he was not naturally academic. He worked at the BBC for a bit and then landed a place on the M&S trainee programme when he was 23. He says it was his mother Margaret's suicide just a year later that helped focus his mind. "My mother was fiercely ambitious for me and she taught me, if nothing else, one thing: she taught me to value myself and my philosophy."

But his rise to the top was not as linear as Sir Terry's, whose card was marked at a very early age. Mr Rose, who quit M&S just before he hit 40, having decided that he was not going to get into the senior ranks, followed a more haphazard route. He did stints in the Burton Group, Arcadia, Argos and Booker before his homecoming.

"I was never a favoured son of the business," says Mr Rose, looking back on his days under Lord Sieff, chairman from 1972 to 1984. "I was never one of those people. I sat on the edge of the plate. People couldn't decide if I was half-genius or half-mad."

One general point I see links these two - both Adonis and Rose seemed to have gained strength rather than resentment from early experiences of being an outsider which has helped them in later years to weather general disapprobation or rejection or charges of eccentricity or betrayal.  Maybe one could even say that they gained the strength or bloody mindedness to do the things which caused them to attract disapprobation or rejection.

The more specific point I take from the Adonis background, which is one that I have made many times when discussing with people about whether Oxbridge is still deliberately biased towards private school candidates is that often potential state school candidates don't even apply to Oxbridge, because they cannot imagine themselves going there, but often all it takes is one tenuous moment of contact - a visit to an Oxford or Cambridge college and meeting people there, a solitary teacher at the school who went to Oxbridge and believes in you, or, as it would seem in Adonis' case, actually living near Oxford.

Labour fallacy

I was more incensed in 2002 that Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports than that he refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, and I am now far more likely to tear up my Labour Party membership card over Blair's pressure on the Serious Fraud Office to stop the investigation into the BAE Al Yamamah defence contract  than I am over the invasion of Iraq.  I am well aware this is not a stance shared  by most on the left,* which is why I don't spend six hours a month at Labour Party meetings the way I used to in the 1990s. 

It's conventional to say terrorism emanating from and unrest in the Middle East cannot be dealt with unless the Palestinian issue is resolved, but I believe the Saudi regime to be just as much of a canker or even cancer - a view which Samuel Brittan seems to share (from the Financial Times yesterday):

"A precedent has been created for giving in to blackmail. British foreign policy has been revealed once more as based on supporting a Middle Eastern dynasty notorious for its disregard of human rights and support for the Wahabi form of Muslim fundamentalism."

Brittan goes on to make a further point, which is also the other reason I am so strongly opposed to what has happened:

"Mr Blair does not realise that support for competitive market capitalism is not the same as the pro-business agenda with which he feels most at home...The heart of the matter is the belief among the business and political establishments that exports are worthwhile for their own sake, irrespective of how much they have to be subsidised – or in this case how many principles of law and good government have to be cast aside...The basic mistake is known as the “lump of labour fallacy”. It is implicitly assumed that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in each industry and that workers displaced by technological progress or shift in demand are doomed to the unemployment scrap heap. It is not asked whether there can be other purchases at home or abroad to make up the difference...It is clear that arms exports now make a very limited contribution to the British economy. So one is not requesting a great exercise of moral heroism in asking a government to stand up to the blackmail of a dynastic state with an execrable human rights record." 

The contradiction between the mercantilist, narrow definition of national interest that Bush and Blair have demonstrated and their (Ibelieve) sincerely held internationalist views when it comes to promotion of democratic values worries me.  If we want to promote the latter, we have to demonstrate that we apply such values to our own policies.

(*A condemnation from Oliver Kamm, along similar lines, a week before Samuel Brittan...)

Roots and wings

'Transcultural manager' is a better term than 'global manager, says Karl Moore, professor* at McGill University, Montreal, in an article for World Business (subscription required).  He argues, and I agree, that a 'global manager' who operates sucessfully across different cultures and has a 'global management style' does not and cannot really exist.  A transcultural manager, however, who is at home in two or more cultures, does exist but is a "living paradox" who has roots and wings; roots in their own home culture but wings that have taken them elsewhere and allowed them to develop a real comfort in one or more different cultures, in effect having multiple selves.

Moore says this idea of multiple selves is not new, and refers to William James**'s1890 Principles of Psychology, in which James suggested that rather than a unified self concept, people have multiple selves that they demonstrate in various situations.  Apparently this view has been expanded by post modern psychologists.

This comes as a relief to me, as I have had feelings of resistance towards all the personality and team building tests that I have taken in my career, including Myers Briggs, TMI, Insight etc.  This started with the graduate trainee test at Unilever ("are you warm hearted or cool headed?") and more recently one which tried to deduce whether I preferred working alone, logically and analytically or was more convivial and spontaneous.  This was impossible to answer, because as a person running a training and consulting business from my own home, there are times when I enjoy working alone, logically and analytically doing the accounts and growling at anyone who interrupts, and when I am at a client's running a training session, I am Ms Conviviality (I hope).  I even had a Myers Briggs tester tell me I must have been lying or mis answering questions to have switched from Extrovert to Introvert over the years, when to me it seemed quite understandable that as a rare high profile non-Japanese woman in a Japanese company I was more extroverted, and then when I ended up running a software development team in a British company full of pushy, aggressive people (the company, not the team), I was more introverted.

*Moore is professor of strategy and leadership at McGill, and yet in today's Financial Times, Henry Mintzberg, professor of strategy at McGill, denounces the teaching of 'leadership'.  Must make for some interesting faculty dinner table discussions.

**Another coincidence - William James is a brother of Henry James, who has been the focus of much of my mother's research into the meaning of clothes in fiction - clothes being one of the ways we express our multiple selves, I would say.