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Writing

Anti-bureaucratic romanticism and Line of Duty

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Line of Duty returned last week with its sixth series. The programme is phenomenally popular with each series opening to higher ratings than the last, with the first episode of the new series last week reaching 9.6m people. Despite these record viewing figures, the series arrives at a time when there are several controversies over policing and active protests against proposed increased powers for the police nationwide. In this short essay, I want to think about the cultural politics of Line of Duty: a TV programme that putatively turns the investigative eye on to the police themselves but is itself a reactionary product of austerity Britain that taps into the anti-bureaucratic, anti-political correctness sentiment of its time.

The format of Line of Duty is nothing extraordinary, it is one of the most tried and tested formats on TV: a police procedural drama. It locates policing in a post-9/11 – and post de Menezes – world filled with anti-terrorism priorities. It creates its own ‘mythology’ and ‘big bad’ arcs which are commonplace in 21st century TV drama and features some fantastical action sequences. Even the conspiracy elements surrounding ‘bent coppers’ and endemic police corruption were key features of The Bill almost twenty years ago. The true innovation of the programme is in seeing the theatrical potential of bureaucratic procedure. The interview scenes are now a hallmark of the programme: the long, dialogue heavy scenes – usually anathema to an action drama – have become the key theatrical set pieces in the programme. Ultimately it is this focus on the minutiae of bureaucracy that makes the drama of the programme more generally and lends credence to the idea that the show has a particular attention to detail. The drama of a character being delivered a ‘reg 15 notice’ – due process in action – or the demand for questions only to come from an officer one rank higher – following the chain of command – or the various acronyms – highlighting the impersonal rules and procedures – that are used to the point of annoyance. 

Despite the bureaucracy itself being the star of the show, the show is at best ambivalent about its star if not entirely anti-bureaucratic. The programme has characters add commentary to create a level of social commentary which ultimately highlights how the bureaucracy itself is failing people. In the earlier series two particular characters served this function – PC Karen Larkin and Neil Morrisey’s DC Nigel Morton.

PC Karen Larkin’s role is a fairly minor character, restricted to one series and the role she performs – the social commentary function – is seemingly displaced in later series as the programme moves to a more action orientated direction. Larkin is portrayed as an obstructive figure, tired of filling out forms and arguably a cipher to the screenwriter’s own thoughts about the state of policing, bureaucracy and political correctness more generally. Much of her dialogue involves saying such a procedure will result in ‘more forms to fill out’ or reminding her partner of the rules and regulations. That her role is to restrain the more noble or pure instincts of her novice partner – and arguably the instincts of the audience in general – lends to the anti-bureaucratic feel of the show. The implicit point of Larkin’s character is that the bureaucracy is getting in the way of good old fashioned community policing. This looks like developing into an essential plot point too by the conclusion of Series 5 when the child ‘failed by the system’ returns. 

DC Morton is one of the original ‘bent coppers’ who has been a member of the initial star performing but ultimately corrupt unit investigated in the first series. Morton walks with a limp and cane but as events transpire in the series, it is shown that he is in fact ‘on the take’ and pretending to have a disability in order to increase his earnings. The series continually reminds us in the epilogue of each series that he is close to or claiming ‘a full pension plus disability benefits’. It is important to highlight the particular ‘conjuncture’ within which these characters arrive and what they speak to in the wider political context. Line of Duty debuts in 2012 at a time when David Cameron and George Osborne are speechifying about ‘hard working families’ and the Coalition government is engaging in the greatest public sector retrenchment since the Second World War. The creation of a character like DC Morton is a deliberate attempt to reflect the political context and it too reflects other important formats to emerge at this time, especially the ‘poverty porn’ Reality TV genres. These programmes create an ‘anti-welfare commonsense’ and have been used to show us the undeserving benefit claimant draining our now ‘scarce’ national resources. This is reinforced in these ‘high end’ dramas – not just in the benefit cheat Morton, but also the broken family trope too that is explored in PC Larkin’s story. Moreover, these stories ultimately argue that our bureaucracies are being taken advantage of by scroungers, fakers and the like. 

Is it fair to say that the programme is specifically anti-bureaucracy?  After all, the work of the anti-corruption units is portrayed as a good versus evil story and the implication is that once the corrupt are found the bureaucracy will be saved. The drama does make a point of highlighting the dangers of the informal aspects of organisation, which have often been held in management theory as things you would want more of in your organisation if your bureaucracy is failing. Despite this, the implicit message of the TV show is that the bureaucracy itself is either allowing people like Morton to take advantage of the system or that removing or foregoing bureaucracy might improve the quality of policing. The overall ‘anti-bureaucratic romanticism’ is itself very of the time given the populism of anti-bureaucracy and anti-political correctness messaging that dominates the British public sphere before, during and particularly after Brexit. 

Exploring and critiquing the limits of bureaucracy is a key theme in any crime drama too, whether the modern versus ‘pre-modern’ policing in Life on Mars or the trope of a cop who breaks all the rules to get the bad guy. More generally, TV critiques of bureaucratic dysfunction are in themselves not new either. The Wire is perhaps the most comprehensive examination of bureaucratic dysfunction on TV, a sociological study of city administration masquerading as a police procedural. Each series of the programme examines how the values of the police, education systems and even journalism have been displaced by a numbers driven, instrumental rationality. The difference though between the sources of The Wire and Line of Duty’s critiques are perhaps similar to the ‘social’ and ‘artistic’ critiques that Boltanski and Chiapello identified in The New Spirit of Capitalism. The Wire is more representative of the encompassing ‘social critique’ examining the multiple sources of injustice that contribute to the failed life chances and cycle of violence that themselves produce the dysfunctional policing and bureaucracy we are presented. The implicit idea in the first series of Line of Duty is that if policing is just freed from a domineering and suffocating bureaucracy, then there will be a return to a golden age of community policing. 

That Line of Duty reappears now when there are ongoing protests surrounding a bill to give police greater powers is telling. In America, the  ‘progressive’ Brooklyn 99 cop sitcom was delayed in light Black Lives Matter with the creators acknowledging that there are problems with striking a balance between comedy and real life police brutality. Line of Duty has had no such issues and its reappearance has been celebrated as a bit of good news in these Covid times. The programme that would see itself as ultimately critical of the police and therefore exempt from similar discussions to Brookyln 99. And why should a TV show that is seemingly critical of police corruption think twice about the ongoing protests around policing? Ultimately the programme that celebrates confusing viewers with bureaucratic processes gives us a paper thin critique of corruption with an underlying commentary that taps into the ‘authoritarian populism’ of our time: law and order, anti-political correctness and ‘anti-bureaucratic romance’. 

Writing

Season’s Greetings: Bourdieu at Christmas

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I’m assuming that at some point with this blog all the disparate threads will eventually give a good idea of what my PhD was all about and what I found. While this blog is mostly about my research, I also want to write about different ideas that I have and use them to explain some of theory that I use So this week I’m going to talk about Christmas and introduce a little more Pierre Bourdieu!

Now, in terms of this conflict between instrumental and substantive rationality that I’ve talked about over the last couple of blogs, Christmas can be seen as losing its substantive rationale. The means of achieving Christmas (presents, food, Black Friday) have perhaps got in the way of the original ends of Christmas (Christianity, gifts in their truest sense, goodwill to all men/not chokeslamming old women in shops). So to hopefully illustrate the commercialisation of Christmas in more depth – and in a way that helps illustrate some of the theory used in my music research – I turn to Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu’s key work Distinction (1984) outlined how consumption habits (taste) are linked to social class. #middleclassproblems is probably the most Bourdieusian of hashtags on Twitter, where people explicitly link their humorous consumption problems to their class position. To illustrate consumption in better detail he relied on his concepts of capital. Rather than simply economic transactions, for Bourdieu social life is the exchange and accumulation of various forms of capital. Of particular note is his notion of cultural capital which exists in three forms and very generally describes tastes (embodied form: appreciation of art, food, etc.), qualifications (institutional form: school grades and degrees), and cultural goods themselves (art, books, films). In addition people have social capital (relationships that gain access to other capital) and symbolic capital (social honour and prestige).

Bourdieu’s use of capital is a helpful way to expand on what I talked about last week with “disinterestedness”. Rather than people only being interested in money, people are interested in various forms of capital – artistic works that increase their cultural capital, friendships and networking that increase their social capital, etc. (While this is an improvement on simple economic interest, I’ll talk about some of the problems with this as well next time). Anyway, the point of bringing up Bourdieu is that it is useful to use his forms of capital to illustrate the ways gift exchange becomes economised:

‘For example, when, instead of giving a “personal” present, that is, a present adjusted to the presumed taste of the receiver, one gives, through laziness or convenience, a check, one economizes the work of looking, which assumes the attention and care necessary for the present to be adapted to the person, to his or her tastes, to arrive at the right time, etc. and also that its “value” is not directly reducible to its monetary value’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 99)

A while before Bourdieu, Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism argued that under capitalism the use-value of things is being displaced by seeing things in terms of what people can get for it (exchange-value). Bourdieu I feel takes this a step further by introducing the forms of capital to explain these differences. In this very interesting quote, Bourdieu is saying that the exchange value of a gift is incommensurate with the use-value. Someone who simply gives money as a gift is using the money to replace not just the value of the gift but the time and care to find a gift suited to the tastes (cultural capital) of the receiver. As these practices become more and more common, you could argue that this economic relationship replaces the original spirit of Christmas giving. Certainly this is what Bourdieu observed when he “created” his concepts of capital, when the Kabyle people in Algeria saw their gift-based economy progressively replaced by money as colonial Algeria was progressively industrialised (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990). In recent years we’ve seen the rise of Black Friday (black because of the colour of a positive monthly balance sheet), we’ve seen how politicians and economists have hedged their bets on GDP figures breaking even based on Christmas spending…all things which show the prevalence of economic exchange over the more symbolic gesture of gift exchange. Or even the act of giving itself superseding the Christian origins of gift giving during the festive period…

Bourdieu is really useful in helping illustrate some of these debates between value and values – whether this is in musical production or even Gaelic language. His quote there provides a good example of the commercialisation of Christmas. Well, either that or he is making a desperate plea for no more gift vouchers.

 More thoughts after the New Year.

Writing

Cultural Value, Gaelic and Bourdieu

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So, I ended the blog last week with the example of education and a video from Stewart Lee. I used the excerpt from him to illustrate his point about how education in itself was a goal in itself – it was substantively rational in the most Weberian meaning of the term. Yet another thing Stew said was the difficulty in defending the value of education or art in itself in terms of future financial gain. For those of you that didn’t see the video here’s the important quote, where they’re discussing Thatcher’s dismissal of the value of a student’s PhD in Norse Literature:

Interviewer: It’s wrong commercially though isn’t it? Because if you look at the Lord of the Rings, those films wouldn’t exist without Tolkien…

Stewart Lee: Well, yes, that made a lot of money didn’t it… But you know what, the problem of that is… then you’re being drawn into fighting the war on their terms

This is another key thread that’s occurred in my research thus far. I conducted research into Gaelic during my Masters year and I have continued to think about this research and the issues with the language ever since. As a person brought up in the Hebrides, I like most people was never far away from Gaelic whether you loved the culture or resented it. My only resentment with the language when younger was the amount of time it took me away from subjects that I was more interested in at the time (contrasted to my resentment with my younger self for rejecting it). Yet most people resent the language in terms of the money spent on it – especially in years of recession.

Over the past decade or so the Creative Industries (or formerly Cultural Industries) are now seen as the future source of economic value in the economy. Most prevalent is the “Creative Class” thesis promoted in academia by Richard Florida and advocated politically by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in the UK. Here the creative industries are described as:

“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 2001: 5)

DCMS (2014) estimates a sector of the economy that employs over 1.7m people and contributes £71.4bn to the UK economy. Employment includes various occupations within the arts, advertising, film production, performing arts, software development, etc. Tied to this “discovery” of a “new” creative economy, there “has also been increasing interest in the whole question of language, culture and diversity as a motor for economic change” (Chalmers and Danson, 2011: 95). Instead of seeing culture as a value in itself, cultural forms (visual art, minority languages, etc) have increasingly had to be justified in terms of the potential economic benefits it may bring.

Stewart Lee: “They talk to these people as if the only point of the art were to make money for shops in the West End because people on the way to the West End were buying crisps…”

Pierre Bourdieu (someone who’ll be a recurring character in this blog) argued that the dominance of these rational action theories – or economic explanations for social behaviour – within society has seen all value-judgements (interests) assessed in terms of this economic reasoning. For Bourdieu it is illogical to consider interest in something other than money as essentially “disinterested”. Instead, to address this, Bourdieu famously adopted some of the language of economics in order to argue that social life is a game where individuals act to maximise their capital. Rather than only acting to increase their monetary capital, people act to increase their stores of cultural capital (knowledge, cultural taste and appreciation, linguistic abilities), social capital (relationships, networking) and symbolic capital (specific types of honour and prestige), etc.

Now this may seem like a slightly obvious point that people have non-financial interests – but when it comes to Gaelic, revival initiatives have been argued in terms of the economic gains it can make through tourism and Gaelic jobs. Out with language, we see how we maybe change our opinion on our favourite bands changes based on how big they make it – or rather, how more “interested” in money they seem is related to how they lose prestige and honour in our eyes. A key part of the research I’ve done has been to examine the relationship between symbolic value of recorded music or Gaelic language and more commercial concerns. I’ll come back to both subjects repeatedly over these blog posts!

More thoughts next week.

Writing

Substantively Rational: What’s in a name?

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The hardest part of starting a blog to discuss my academic work and interests has been coming up with a name. It’s fair to say I’ve said to plenty of people that I am working on a blog but, rather than writing, it’s been waiting for a suitable name that’s taken the most time. In the end I’ve decided to go with Weber’s term Substantively Rational (with a question mark) as the title for the blog.

For those unaware of the term, substantive rationality refers to one of Weber’s four types of social action and describes actions:

“…determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success” (Weber, 1968: 24-25)

This is contrasted with formal or instrumental rationality which describes a system (economic, legal, bureaucratic) where the means (rules, procedures) are often considered over the ends they achieve. The conflict between these two forms of social action is often described in terms of “means justify the ends” and the “ends justify the means”.

Though the terms are infrequently used within my academic writing, it is this contrast that has been the overall guiding principle for my research interests. As a young undergraduate I was fascinated by my first encounters with Weber and the contrast between the means and ends of social actions. When applied to the bureaucratic effectiveness of the Holocaust through Bauman or McDonalds’ Fast Food through Ritzer, I was both fascinated and then depressed.  With an avid interest in music it didn’t take long for me to see the instrumental rationality in X-Factor. When I applied for a PhD scholarship, it was initially to examine the art-commerce conflict in pop music and written in terms of instrumental/substantive action. Though I’ve moved on from Weber explicitly within my research, that spirit is there implicitly throughout – my number one hero, Pierre Bourdieu, was always a Weberian at heart (see Bourdieu, 1994; 1998; Bourdieu et al, 2011).

The reasons then for founding a blog named Substantively Rational? are two-fold. The purpose of the blog will firstly be for me to write about and publicise my research – a lot of public sector money has gone into my research and certainly this seems like one suitable means for its dissemination. But secondly, the blog allows me to talk about things that interest me that broadly fit within this theme of substantive vs. instrumental rationality – be it, art-commerce conflicts in cultural production, education, language, etc.

To illustrate, I’ll use the example of education that is continually in and out of the news. I’m always quite reflective of the education I’ve received: with a business management degree I have arguably one of the most instrumental of undergraduate degrees on offer. Similarly, I was always told in careers advice that I should go for a degree that has a job at the end of it (starting in Computer Science and rebelling to Business Management). Recently, we’ve seen this instrumental/economistic view on education itself being reaffirmed with an elected official for education apparently downgrading the “value” of arts and humanities education. But this value is always explained in terms of skills gaps or employment prospects. Is there any value in education for its own sake?

In that spirit I always found this video from my favourite comedian Stewart Lee articulates best what the purpose of my research is but discussed in terms of education (rather than art, music, language, etc.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDEZ2h41t0I

More thoughts next week.