We now come again to this subject which we mentioned in a post in the Sub-Chapter on the Civil/Public Service.
Due partly to the penetration of the corporate world into civil society, organisations supporting the Focus Group often find themselves having responsibility without power – surely a very debilitating thing for any worker.
A typical manifestation of this is the knee-jerk reaction to a crisis.
This often involves the quick setting up – usually because of media pressure to do something, or some new panacea promoted by academia – of an ill thought-out, facile, often very expensive solution, with insufficient and untrained staff while ignoring, hiding and/or doing nothing to challenge the structure that caused the crisis in the first place.
(I will give an example of this in a post in the Chapter on Research And Evaluation).
Further pressure is then brought to bear on the senior staff to get results under the guise of didn’t we give you ……. to solve it?
Low morale ensues from this pressure which filters down through the system to the junior staff and people working on the ground.
I come across examples of the downstream effect of this very often.
I have often attended meetings where committed, enthusiastic people around a table grapple with really difficult social problems. As frustrations rise, a tendency to blame partner organisations who should be doing something can creep in, whereas the reality is that all around the table are struggling with morale anyway because they are expected to do far more than their resources allow.
Responsibility without power is a particularly harmful aspect of corporate penetration and arises from shallow thinking and values that are not too far removed from those of the disingenuous rooms that I referred to previously.