Secrecy and Tradecraft in Educational Administration

The covert side of educational life

Eugenie A. Samier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138284913
• eBook ISBN: 9781136698361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

During the last couple of decades, there has been an expansion in a number of related and overlapping fields producing evidence of covert activities: toxic cultures, destructive leadership styles, micropolitics, ethical problems in organisations and administration, abusive power and authority, and many other topics of dysfunctional management and leadership studies that frequently make reference to secretive and deceptive behaviour.

In this book, Eugenie A. Samier draws on a range of disciplines including education, psychology, administration and management studies and organizational theory to provide a comprehensive examination of the ways in which organisational leaders and administrators carry out their roles in a secretive or deceptive manner. Samier presents a theory of covert administration that can be used to:

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• provide an analysis and interpretation of secretive and deceptive activity

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• inform decision-making both theoretically and practically

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• offer a means of diagnosing errant management using secretive and deceptive practices

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• provide a general set of guidelines for determining when clandestine activities may be legitimate and moral.

Alongside a detailed presentation of the theory of covert administration, the book explores covert administration in practice, factors leading to it, and the results of attempts to combat its many forms. It will be key reading for researchers and postgraduates with an interest in the field, as well as administrators and policy makers.

Chapter 1 Introduction Through the looking glass

DOI: 10.4324/9780203387085-1

As the saying goes, espionage is practiced sometimes by spies and all the time by neighbors, relatives and colleagues.

(Sheldon 2003: 8–9)

The back story

Wherever one looks these days, covert worlds are in fashion and prevalent in the creative media. Feature films with espionage themes are regularly released, although many are highly unrealistic and reflect little of the grinding, and often monotonous, nature of the clandestine world (see Scott and Jackson 2004). As Cherkashin, a retired KGB officer explains in his memoirs, these popular exploits were not the normal part of an intelligence officer’s work, which ‘consists chiefly of workaday routine and, with luck, rare successes’ (2005: x). Television series, also ranging in quality, have acquired renewed popularity, like the United Kingdom’s Spooks and the United States’ Person of Interest. The UK series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister focused on

politicians and bureaucrats alike seizing the moral low ground; of appearances routinely manipulated to produce a convincing semblance of substance; of compromise, duplicity and ambition; of government as theatrical performance and public relations sleight-of-hand … the series became known for its linguistic inventiveness, particularly the arias of bureaucratic doublespeak, boilerplate dissimulation, and nonsense.

(Borins 2011: 64)

The BBC also created the television series Spy, which shows volunteer recruits being trained in espionage techniques, accompanied by a handbook that distils the training information in a guide (Ferguson 2004). And there are dozens of novelists plumbing the covert. Secrecy dominates popular culture.

It has also emerged in the popular management press through titles like The Secret Handshake (Reardon 2000), Covert Persuasion (Hogan and Speakman 2006), Covert Processes at Work (Marshak 2006), and Office Politics (James 2013) that describe a broad range of activities, conscious and unconscious, carried out in relative secrecy in the workplace. Some, like Hogan and Speakman’s, are a compilation of ‘tactics’ and ‘tricks’ to manipulate the decisions of others, with little contextual, valuational, or ethical discussion. Spycraft manuals for the person on the street or office worker are also available. There are popular introductions to the field, like Melton’s Ultimate Spy (2002) and Melton and Piligian’s The Spy’s Guide: Office Espionage (2003), which teaches one ‘how to bug a meeting, booby-trap your briefcase, infiltrate the competition, and more’, replete with ways to spy on one’s co-workers, secure one’s briefcase, trash, and computer, gather intelligence from the competition, transmit clandestinely, and ‘neutralise’ various emergencies, including how to appear injured at the office. Davies’s Streetwise Spycraft (2007) is also a small tradecraft manual, but aimed more at informing the general public of the basics of spying and surveillance. Houston et al.’s Spy the Lie (2012) provides information on detecting deception in everyday work and personal life, and ACM IV Security Services’ Surveillance Countermeasures (2005: 1) has broadened its ‘target audience’ from ‘security professionals’ to ‘virtually everyone’ to enhance personal security. More professional manuals are readily available, although written by those in the private security sector and requiring access to higher levels of technology, such as Davies’s The Spycraft Manual (2005) and Jenkins’ Surveillance Tradecraft (2010). A number of books have examined the burgeoning world of corporate intelligence, for example de Pierrebourg and Juneau-Katsuya’s (2009) account of foreign agents and internet thieves operating in Canada in Nest of Spies, Brown’s The Grey Line (2011), which covers espionage and counter-intelligence internationally, and Javers’ Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (2011), a discussion of secretive activities in the corporate world, preceded by Penenberg and Barry’s (2000)Spooked, on the increasing corporate espionage carried out against US companies, often by foreign governments.

We are now in an age of surveillance, referred to by some as the ‘surveillance’ or ‘security’ state, in which ‘security has become itself a key objective of public policy’ (Omand 2010: 9; see also Hennessy 2007; Webster et al. 2013), that is at odds with expectations of transparency enshrined in many constitutions and in democratic systems. In both the United States and the European Union in the past twelve years, the spread of government secrecy, known as ‘ORCON creep’, the application of ‘originator control’, has expanded significantly, leading US Congressman Daniel Moynihan to comment on the ‘hidden, humongous, metastasizing mass within government itself’ (in Curtin 2011: 9), producing an unworkable classification system, reducing necessary information-sharing even within government (Aftergood 2009).

Priest and Arkin (2011) have examined its growth in the United States, which they call the ‘intelligence-military-corporate apparatus’ they regard as a parallel government (ibid.: 52), to proportions and budgets that are not tracked nationally (ibid.: 134) and that beggar belief: in addition to approximately 3,984 counter-terrorism units at all governmental levels (ibid.: 133) that are overt and unknown to the public, there is a massive growth in the privatization of intelligence capacity. This has been enhanced by the Echelon system of information collection in international communications involving the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which operates at least 120 satellite systems, including heavy collection in the economic sector — in other words, industrial espionage (Keefe 2006: 190–1). Ambinder and Grady (2013: 19) report that as of 2009, 2.4 million people held some level of security clearance. Even the superstructure of the US intelligence community embraces a large number of military-intelligence agencies, the independent intelligence agency the CIA, and intelligence departments in other agencies like the Department of Energy, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Justice (Johnson 2012: 17), each with its own set of methods or tradecraft.

Even the corporate world is increasingly becoming equipped with espionage and counter-intelligence capability (see Brown 2011; Wright and Roy 1999). In addition to the amount of security work done through contracting out to the private sector, covering many key areas of intelligence gathering, technological development, satellite systems, linguistic ability, and hardware and software systems, increasingly larger amounts of information, at least in the United States, are being classified (Priest and Arkin 2011: 182, 269).

This growth is so large that it has even had an impact on education in the Washington, DC, area, where a large proportion of professional intelligence officers are concentrated, many of them with high levels of education and demanding a high quality of schooling for their children. Some schools teach ‘children as young as ten what kind of lifestyle is required to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior will disqualify them from one’. Local universities have curricula that cater to this growth industry, offering degrees in ‘cybersecurity, emergency management, advanced IT, geographic information systems’, and many secret training academies and programmes using a significant proportion of research funding (Priest and Arkin 2011: 163).

Covert administration in ordinary organizations is much more than managerial surveillance of employees by reading their emails or incoming and outgoing mail. It is a phenomenon that is far more widespread, infecting the culture and politics of an organization, and one that exacts a heavy human price. For Keefe (2006: 80), ‘on the institutional level, secrecy can corrupt bureaucracies and mask mismanagement and incompetence. On the individual level, it can corrupt identities, creating a profusion of secret lives and leaving nothing free of its taint’. This can be seen in the burgeoning literatures on bad and toxic leadership, and the growing problem of academic bullying and mobbing (see Westhues 2005, 2008). In some fields, such as organization studies, Chris Provis (2006) has argued for the need for more theoretical work on covert politics and the types of covert group action. However, generally the field of educational administration has paid only passing attention to what I argue in this book to be a pervasive and growing problem.

To some extent, entering the covert sphere of educational administration is ‘stepping through a looking glass’ into a world in which people may not be who they appear to be, decisions and actions may not be what they seem, and knowledge is disinformation. Most of our understanding about this world comes from informal academic activities: hallway chats, conference coffee klatches, and social occasions like receptions. Much of it is spoken of quietly or behind closed doors, or safely away from home at conferences. Often one’s interlocutors look over their shoulders to make sure no one else, or even particular individuals, is within hearing distance. When the politics of the organization are bad, many do not want to be seen talking with others but will arrange to meet somewhere away from their offices, in other buildings or at cafés some distance from the university. Lengthy experience with faculty meetings, and the hallway or office ‘post-mortems’ and anecdotal evidence, demonstrates to anyone just how much of it there is: the common types of covert activities one finds referenced in the literature, such as corridor meetings and ‘dirty tricks’ like indirect slurs and sabotage, are all too common. And since most faculty members are not trained or professional intelligence officers, much of this activity, intended to be covert, is sometimes painfully obvious. This is the world of micropolitics — the ‘organisational underworld which we all recognise and in which we all participate. We acknowledge it when we speak of “organisational mafias”, “hidden agendas”, “playing politics” and “Machiavellianism”’ (Hoyle 1982: 87).

There are many areas of legitimate secrecy in educational life, such as that maintained in research ethics; confidentiality when serving on committees on a broad range of activities from research applications to promotion applications, healthcare issues, and disputes with students; the secrecy maintained in the peer review process; protecting student grades and other personal information, contract negotiations; and classified research for the military-intelligence complex. Some of these are highly contested or violate precepts of scholarship, as in research that could potentially produce a commercial product that might be unsafe to future clients, as in the Olivieri case, where a moral duty to medical subjects concerning pharmaceutical research was involved (Baylis 2004). Increasingly, academics are practising secrecy and withholding of research results as a consequence of ‘new sources of funding’ and commercialization of research developments, actively stimulated by many universities (Hellström 2004: 517).

The main point of this book is that secrecy is ubiquitous; it permeates the very fabric of organizational life. It can occur at a low level in healthy and open organizations or at a high level when dysfunctional individuals are perverting normal practices or when the organization has gone toxic through internal and/ or external pressures. At some level, involving at least some individuals and activities in one’s professional life, it is always with one, at least tacitly or unconsciously. Everyone has experience of the covert in organizational life; the signs are not hard to find or to read. Furnham regards office politics as an essentially clandestine world:

[I]t is the secrecy, the covert agendas, the underhandedness of it all. Politics conducted in smoky rooms, behind closed doors, in private clubs, on the golf course. There are the insiders and outsiders: the players and the pawns; those in the know and those in the dark. Office politics are about processes, procedures and decisions that are not meant to be scrutinized. Politics are about opaqueness, not transparency.

(2010: 150)

Additionally, Furnham explains, its impression management involves disguise, conducted ‘with forked tongue’: what you see, hear and read is not what you get’ and ‘internal communications … are half truths, little more than management propaganda’. Self-interest operates by ‘hijacking activities, processes and procedures’ and ‘covert groupings of individuals’ cooperating to ‘obtain an unfair share of the resources’ (ibid.: 150).

Every professional can recall occasions when a colleague’s authority and responsibilities seemed to be circumvented, when that person is cut out of the loop for political reasons. Or when someone appears to be in trouble yet there is no reliable information, only gossip in the hallways. When alliances and factions form, and when too many surreptitious discussions in the hallways are taking place. When people avoid common or habitual places of congregation in order to relay information in a confidential manner. When hard information is jealously guarded, and only spurious information is circulated. When colleagues refuse to engage in discussion during departmental or faculty meetings, instead hurriedly retreating afterwards behind closed office doors. When meetings seem to have a hidden agenda or an undercurrent of latent conflict. More serious signs include the discovery of deception in a colleague or administrator, seeing decisions being made behind closed doors, selective recording of minutes, leaking of confidential information, and alterations in documents.

There are also those colleagues about whom the air of the clandestine is thick, and who seem persistently to be forming networks and alliances — those few who are the ‘political animals’ of an organization. It is the medium in which they move, informing all of their thoughts and actions, even resorting to leaking confidential information to bolster their importance or give them strategic advantage. At their most egregious, these types attempt to lever information and support, trade favours in soliciting help in swinging votes or condemning a colleague, and trawl for negative information on colleagues and/or administrators or recruit colleagues into active, although often covert, roles in the micro-politics. In intelligence terms, these types are regarded by Allen Dulles (2006), an early (and the longest-serving) Director of Central Intelligence in the United States, as ‘fellow travellers’.

The covert is known by many names — resistance, sabotage, subterfuge — and has many adjectives applied to it — clandestine, hidden, covert, secret. It exists on many levels of awareness from the tangible to the intangible, from the implicit to the explicit, and from the observable to the tacit. It can take a number of relatively benign forms — a survival technique to hide some aspects of one’s identity that is discriminated against, such as sexual orientation; a necessary activity among allies to protect themselves against oppressive or aggressively damaging maladministration — or be pursued in a more questionable manner to illegitimately gain power and privilege.

For the majority, it tends to become part of their organizational behaviour when the micropolitics become intrusive, sometimes under a toxic leader or dominating faction. But when it is a subject of analysis, one is often faced with colleagues who prefer denial, or repressing their awareness, rather than having to contemplate its role in the subverting of teaching, administration, and scholarship. Somehow, they seem to suggest, if one ignores it, it will go away or one will become immune. However, there seems to be little evidence in the literature on bad and toxic leadership that hiding ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: through the looking glass
• PART I Foundational theories and critiques
• PART II The structure of the covert: operationalizing clandestine activities
• References
• Index