Neoliberal Industrial Relations Policy in the UK

How the Labour Movement Lost the Argument

C. Cradden

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137413802
• eBook ISBN: 9781137413819
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From attempts to control inflation in the 1970s, through the reforms of the Thatcher years, to the rise and fall of New Labour, this book shows how different theories and conceptual models have been critical to the development of industrial relations in the UK.

1

The Warp and Weft of Ideas and Political Action

Abstract: The relationship between ideas and policy development remains a woefully underdeveloped area of research in industrial and employment relations. This introductory chapter sets out a simple framework for approaching the question in terms of the public justification of the use of coercive power. The chapter proposes that the embedding of power in the law and other social institutions can only be based on a plausible argument that the use of that power will be in the public interest. It explores the intellectual context of the industrial relations policy debate in the UK in the late 1960s, setting the scene for the analysis of the changing argument about power at work that will unfold in the rest of the book.

Cradden, Conor. Neoliberal Industrial Relations Policy in the UK: How the Labour Movement Lost the Argument. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137413819.0003.

Power and justification

As the political philosopher Jon Elster has observed (1998), democratic politics is such that even the most blatantly political measures demand formal public justification in terms of the general interest, whether that interest is conceived as carried by a particular class or as something that transcends social and economic cleavages. Even though policies may in reality be the result of the pursuit of self-interest and calculations about the balance of electoral and economic advantage, the expectation in democratic societies is that publicly defensible arguments of fact or principle will be put forward to justify them. No politician has ever openly argued that reducing taxes on wealthy individuals is justified because it will enable them to buy even larger houses or even faster cars. Rather, we are told that tax cuts for the rich are justifiable because the rich are those who create economic prosperity for everyone and the more of their income they can keep to re-invest, the more prosperity they will create. Even the most transparent acts of raw power, such as the recent annexation of Crimea by Russia, are provided with a legitimising cover story. In the Crimea case, Vladimir Putin was inadvertently helped by the Ukrainian Parliament where a law restricting the use of the Russian language was proposed. This gave some minimal substance to the claim that Ukrainians of Russian origin were under attack and that coming to their defence was a legitimate act.

The use of power, whether physical, economic or administrative, involves constraining the choices of others by some means other than what Habermas calls “the peculiarly constraint-free force of the better argument” (1984, p. 24). Rather than seeking to convince an actor that she ought to take (or refrain from taking) some action, those who wield power do so by creating a link between a particular action and an incentive or sanction that they are in a position to apply. The response of the actor subject to the ensuing power relationship is not based in the first instance on what she believes to be the right thing to do in the circumstances. It arises instead from a reaction to the foreseeable consequences of the different choices open to her. If she knows that refusing to obey her employer will lead to her losing her job, then she is likely to obey regardless of whether she is convinced that she should do as she is told. Habermas argues that this kind of constraint is perfectly acceptable in a democratic society as long as those who wield power could, if required, show that those whose choices are constrained would under ideal circumstances accept the rightness of the restrictions placed upon, or requirements made of them. The institutionalisation of executive power in law, politics, public administration and business stabilises societies, protecting important social systems from the risk of disruption or breakdown. Yet, it is only acceptable where there is good reason to believe that participating in these systems is genuinely in the common interest. From the perspective of democratic politics, then, the crucial question is how to show that the common interest is served by certain policy choices that, if adopted, will ultimately be enforced using the financial, administrative and legal apparatus of the state.

This need to relate (potential) coercion to the common interest means that except in the case of naked violence or other forms of criminal action, the use of power is necessarily mediated by ideas. Exercising power demands certain physical, economic or administrative capacities, but exercising power without the subsequent risk of going to prison, or without the risk of strikes or without the risk of protests or riots or election defeat also demands that those who exercise it are able to make an adequate argument that their use of power is justifiable. The facts, values and theories on which the arguments that justify power are built are therefore not epiphenomenal or merely superstructural. Rather, they define the boundaries of the space within which those who have access to power are able to claim that they are owed the compliance that in practice may only come about because of their capacity to coerce. Hence, relationships of power or relationships of forces are at the same time relationships of ideas.

The claim that compliance with rules and with executive authority is owed in some normative sense is crucial to the exercise of power for two reasons. First, making an argument that a policy or course of action is in the common interest permits actors to use their capacity to coerce, including avoiding formal legal sanctions for abuse of power where these exist. Those in possession of the capacity to coerce are limited in their exercise of that capacity by the possibility of justifying coercive force on the basis of publicly defensible reasons. A government in a democratic, secular state, for example, could not introduce a law requiring public employees to be adherents of a particular religion and expect to have that law obeyed. Second, if those required to comply with a particular policy, law or directive are convinced that the argument in favour of that action is valid, then the quality of their compliance will be much greater. This is Weber’s well-known argument that “[a]n order which is adhered to only from motives of pure expediency” is much less stable “than an order which enjoys the prestige of being considered binding or, as it may be expressed, ‘legitimacy’ ” (1947, p. 125). If the use of power in a particular case is recognised as legitimate by those who are bound to comply, then the subjective experience of that compliance is not the experience of coercion and will not give rise to resentment and resistance. If the argument that justifies the use of coercive power is convincing from the perspective of those potentially subject to it, it will not need to be used.

The evolving social context of argument

While none of this is to deny the importance of the empirical capacity of different actors to coerce each other, the ‘argumentative turn’ in political science and policy analysis (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Fischer and Gottweis, 2012a) has brought into sharp focus the enormous significance of the public justification of the use of power through overt and implied argument: “Policy making is fundamentally an ongoing discursive struggle over the definition and conceptual framing of problems, the public understanding of the issues, the shared meanings that motivate policy responses, and criteria for evaluation” (Fischer and Gottweis, 2012b). The sense in which discursive exchange is intended here is not limited to face-to-face interaction, of course. Rather, it involves the full panoply of active and passive engagement with arguments and ideas, whether written, spoken or embedded in cultural practices and institutional structures. As Schmidt argues, the ideas that form the substantive content of discursive exchange “may be developed through cognitive or normative arguments; may come at different levels of generality, including policy, programs and philosophy, and in different forms such as narratives, frames, frames of reference, discursive fields of ideas, argumentative practices, storytelling and collective memories” (2012).

Most authors working in the area of discursive public policy use a conception of justification that divides the content of argument into implied or background and overt or foreground components. There are many ways of conceiving this distinction arising from a range of distinct philosophical and theoretical positions, but for our purposes Habermas’s conception of the ‘lifeworld’ represents a useful means to proceed. Participants in social action approach the situations in which they operate with a host of already-formed interpretations and assumptions about the world that condition how they interpret what they see and hear from other actors:

If the investigations of the last decade or so in socio-, ethno-, and psycholinguistics converge in any one respect, it is on the often and variously demonstrated point that the collective background and context of speakers and hearers determines interpretations of their utterances to an extraordinarily high degree ... [T]he literal meaning of an expression must be completed by the background of an implicit knowledge that participants normally regard as trivial and obvious. (Habermas, 1984, pp. 335–6)

Although there are idiosyncratic elements to each individual’s view of the world that mean that no one person’s perspective is precisely the same as another’s, the concept of the lifeworld applies principally to groups. A lifeworld could be described as a social group’s ‘dictionary’ of accepted or established interpretations of particular phenomena and experiences. As Habermas puts it, the lifeworld “stores the interpretive work of preceding generations” (ibid., p. 70). It represents the interconnected and mutually supporting set of background convictions drawn upon by actors in the course of interpreting the situations in which they find themselves. Put simply, a lifeworld is a socially accepted definition of reality.

For Habermas the relationship between this normally unquestioned contextual background and the overt foreground context of explicit argument is quite simple. At any point, actors can ‘thematise’ elements of the lifeworld, bringing them into the foreground for explicit questioning and argument. Successfully challenging the validity or accuracy of some element of the background knowledge that makes up the lifeworld will change it. Although the lifeworld acts as a kind of ontological anchor, it is not static. Ongoing processes of public and private argument – in the broad sense outlined above – mean that the lifeworld is constantly evolving in a process that Habermas characterises as social learning.

Winning the argument

Learning, of course, demands that there is a measure of agreement about what will count as true facts and legitimate norms. It demands, in other words, that someone win the argument. The question of what counts as an adequate argument in support of the possession and use of power in any given set of circumstances is highly complex and highly contested. There is no unambiguous definition of what it is to win an argument, nor is there even any guarantee that what would conventionally be called a strong case will in practice necessarily win out over a weak one (Mercier and Landemore, 2012; Mercier and Sperber, 2011). At the same time, however, the arguments that can be made in support of the use of power by actors in any given situation are limited. Not just any argument will do. The manager who tries to put a professionally qualified accountant to work cleaning windows rather than performing the technical role for which she was recruited cannot argue that this was justified by a contractual clause giving the employer the right to assign ‘any other reasonable duties’ to the employee. On the other hand, a defensible argument could be made that the accountant be obliged to take on some bookkeeping duties during the unforeseen temporary absence of a junior colleague.

The “discursive struggle over the definition and conceptual framing of problems” that Fischer and Gottweis (2012b) describe is therefore a struggle about the definition of the limits of the justifiable. Over the long term, the simple fact of having access to coercive power is not enough to permit effective, stable control over social and economic life. Rather, those who seek to control the actions of others by using the threat of their coercive power must also seek to influence the background consensus in such a way that arguments in favour of the legitimacy of their use of power are, prima facie, publicly defensible. Those who believe that coercive power is being misused will be able to stop that misuse only if they can influence the background consensus in the opposite direction, so that arguments that power is being used in an illegitimate way appear plausible. If this can be achieved, then using counter-power such as strikes or violence to resist coercion can be interpreted as a defence of basic rights rather than a subversion of legitimate authority.

A basic contention of this book is that, although it cannot be defined precisely, ‘the better argument’ is not a meaningless concept in politics. Although there are many ways in which discursive struggles can be limited, manipulated and distorted, in the end it remains possible that the ‘peculiarly constraint-free force of the better argument’ be felt. If the right facts, values and principles are deployed in an effective way, the argument can eventually be won – if it is winnable. This is to say neither that it will always be won, nor that winning and losing represent a binary opposition. We cannot accurately map the boundaries beyond which the threat of coercive power together with the instrumental use of argument in defence of that power stop being an effective bulwark against resistance born of the experience of injustice. Indeed, it seems likely that there is no clear line between an argument that is convincing and one that is not. Winning or losing an argument is a question of degree. However, the most effective articulation of injustice demands the best possible demonstration of exactly why the policies, laws or directives in question are unjust and what better alternatives are available. Attempting to amplify an inchoate sentiment of having been wronged is unlikely to lead to sustainable opposition to the illegitimate use of coercive power unless it is built on a defensible analysis of how and why some wrong has been done and of how it can be corrected.

Arguments, events and institutions

I have argued above that power relationships are necessarily also relationships of ideas. If this is the case, then if we adapt Poulantzas’s idea that social and political institutions are “material condensations” of earlier relationships of forces (Kannankulam and Georgi, 2014), we can say that institutions are condensations of earlier relationships of ideas. Like any enforceable norms, the formal rules and informal conventions and interpretations that make up institutions as governing structures demand justification. As such, institutions reflect or embody certain policy arguments that at some point in the past were publicly defensible and that were used as a basis for institutional design or reform.

Habermas’s concept of the lifeworld, however, suggests that a gap may open up between the ideas condensed into institutions and publicly defensible policy argument. Broadly speaking, this may happen for one of two reasons. The first and more straightforward of these is historical contingency or, as Harold MacMillan may or may not have put it, “events”: The basic facts of the situations that institutions are intended to govern may change. For example, the United Nations Security Council could not defensibly be constituted today on the basis of the same division into permanent and non-permanent members that seemed logical in 1945 because too many of the economic and political facts that made it logical at the time have since changed. Another example might be technological and scientific advances that open up possibilities for policy intervention and institutional design that were not previously available.

The second reason a gap may open between institutions and defensible policy argument is change in the normative aspects of the background consensus. For example, as deeply embedded beliefs about the role of women in society changed over the hundred years up to 1970, the argument that it was in the common interest to exclude women from participation in the institutions of democratic governance became less and less publicly defensible. Over the more than 25 years during which Switzerland was the sole remaining country in Europe without women’s suffrage, the gap between political institutions and defensible argument became very wide indeed.

This is not to say that institutions are entirely static. The character of institutions is far from immutable given the degree to which formal rules leave room for interpretation. Nevertheless, rules impose limits on this mutability, if only those of the ordinary meaning of words. If the ideational topography of the lifeworld changes to a sufficient extent, it may be that publicly defensible arguments in support of the basic structure and purpose of existing institutions become hard to construct, whereas arguments that those institutions are obsolete become easier to make and more plausible.

I do not want to claim that social and political institutions necessarily reflect a perfectly coherent and harmonious set of ideas at the point at which they are established. The role and purposes of institutions are frequently contested and institutional structures themselves may embody conflicting normative approaches. However, it still makes sense to argue that institutions have a certain normative inertia that means they are vulnerable to being ‘left behind’ by change in the background convictions and beliefs that characterise societies.

Drawing attention to the existence of or contributing to opening up this kind of gap is precisely the goal of participating in policy debate. The aim of participants is to establish the validity of some justification for reforming or abolishing institutions, whether because they no longer fulfil their function, or because that function is no longer necessary, or because they embody values that have become objectionable. Participants may of course also participate in opposition to such arguments, but those who believe that institutions reflect currently valid ideas are unlikely to start such a debate, participating only in reaction to the claims of other actors.

Avoiding ideas: instrumental participation in policy debates

The charact...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Warp and Weft of Ideas and Political Action
• 2  Institutionalist Pluralism and Public Policy
• 3  Industrial Democracy
• 4  The End of Institutionalist Pluralism
• 5  Post-pluralist Collective Industrial Relations
• 6  Where to Now?
• Bibliography
• Index