31 March 2026. Business | Change [2]

Quick, shallow, and over-confident: business books, management and politics // The early cultural signs of change [#661]

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1: Quick, shallow, and over-confident

There was a period in my life when I read too many business books. Eventually I realised that most of them were padded versions of an article, so I could save some time, and that many of them were vacuous. Looking back I’m surprised how long it took me to get to there.

So Joxley’s recent post on business books resonated with me.

He starts in the familiar territory of the airport bookshop’s business section:

A few token classics cling on in one corner, but most of the space is given over to glossy paperbacks promising transformation: sharper habits, better decisions, faster success... Half will be about personal development, the other half about business. They might channel a historical figure or an inspirational man of the moment. “Stop giving a damn and start WINNING!”, “The 6-7 rules to live by”, “Business Secrets of the Pharaohs“, that sort of thing.

(At Gatwick Airport. Source: WH Smith)

Such books sit somewhere between snake oil and common sense repackaged as a business insight. The successful ones can catapult their authors into a lucrative world of keynote speeches and other forms of frothy media. Some become buzzwords, at least for a moment. For the readers, they offer a chance to sound current, to pep up the slide deck with something that is of the moment, to seem more thoughtful than they probably are.

But, as Joxley points out, what we learn from this is the type of thinking that gets valued:

They cultivate a taste for compression over depth, for transferable lessons over context, for confidence over uncertainty. They attract people who want the world to be legible in a handful of rules, who prefer inspiration to explanation, and who mistake momentum for understanding.

Joxley describes this as “Airport Book Brain”.

Readers who have spent time in large organisations will recognise that these are also behaviours that get valued by them: we’ve all been in the meetings where a quick and confident but clearly shallow understanding of an issue gets rewarded when it really needs a lot more consideration, analysis, and depth.

And you can maybe see why this is. Just as humans individually prefer not to think too hard if they don’t have to, hence short-cuts such as rules of thumb or heuristics, so it is for organisations.

Joxley’s argument is that this kind of business thinking has now spread to our politics:

It’s a consequence of how our political system discourages deep thinking and values novelty above substance, fetishising approaches that are simplistic and en vogue... After all, many MPs and ministers aren’t too dissimilar from those middle managers browsing the shelves of Gatwick’s WHSmith. They are ambitious and time poor.

They are also generalists who don’t have time to get into detail, sometimes because they don’t get to spend time in a department before they are moved on.

Politicians looking for a shortcut buy into hype. If an idea is legible, reasonably presented, and gels with their priors, it tends to gain traction. It is the same instinct that drives the posting-policy pipeline. Visibility becomes more important than validation, and narrative coherence matters more than what lies behind.

The heuristics that are being used as a proxy to validate the idea are about confidence and narrative, rather than coherence and rigour. This means—as in those business meetings—that critique and ambiguity are pushed out of the discourse. And as Joxley argues, “institutions trained to operate this way lose their capacity for genuine evaluation.” He picks up an example from the Labour Government’s Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, talking about social media policy for under-16s, drawing on the ideas of the American academic Jonathan Haidt:

Much of [Haidt’s] work, especially his popular work, is built on overconfident, sweeping claims – conjecture, rather than proof. Within academia, many of his conclusions remain actively debated. In politics, however, those caveats tend to evaporate. What travels is not the uncertainty, the methodological disagreement, or the limits of the data, but the clarity of the headline claim and the moral urgency of the diagnosis.

Similarly—and this is taken straight out of the airport business book—politicians will talk about importing the idea of “start-up culture”, 20 years after the idea of moving fast and breaking things became a sardonic cliché in the business world.

Transposed into the state, however, the metaphor quickly collapses. Governments do not get to pivot their legal obligations, abandon unprofitable citizens, or fail fast without consequence. They operate through accumulated institutions, political consent, and irreversible commitments. Yet the language persists precisely because it is legible, optimistic and morally energising.

And AI is now performing the same role as “start-up” in political discourse, conveying the idea that something magical can happen without anyone having to do any real political work:

The danger is... that the system gradually loses the capacity to recognise what a good idea even looks like. When legibility becomes the primary filter, anything that resists compression — institutional reform, behavioural change, long-run capacity building — begins to feel faintly suspect, even dull. Serious policy problems start to appear insoluble not because they are intrinsically so, but because the political imagination has been trained to look only for solutions that arrive neatly packaged and rhetorically complete.

As it happened, I read this article at about the same time as I dipped into a 1997 collection of articles from the American magazine The Baffler called Commodify Your Dissent. Bill Boisvert has a 1994 essay in there called ‘Apostles of the New Entrepreneur: Business Books and the Management Crisis’. The Baffler generally has a good ear for a cultural moment, and Boisvert captures a moment when business became performative.

His essay contrasts the business books of the 1950s, which were basically guides to good administration (such as The Practice of Management) with those of the 1990s (Workplace 2000, The Age of Unreason, Thriving On Chaos, Liberation Management). Sobriety has given way to panic and nihilism:

[J]ust when you’d think business writers would be toasting the death of Communism, instead you find them staring into the abyss, vying with each other to evoke images of havoc and doom.

And looking back at the literature, Boisvert caught a moment, because the 1990s was basically when the typical business book transformed itself into the lightweight self-help nonsense that we see today. And perhaps this was an example of the return of the repressed. The 1990s was the decade in which business owners decided that the only purpose of business was to make profit (as opposed to making profit through delivering products and services that customers wanted. In the UK some fine businesses were destroyed as a result (Halifax, ICI, for example).

We’re still living with the aftermath of that decade—in business and in politics. But it’s hard to get out of bed and look yourself in the mirror in the morning if you’re going into work in the morning to maximise shareholder returns, with all of the grim consequences that has for everyone else. It’s not surprising that the business books that succeeded told their readers a story about change, inspiration, innovation and re-invention.

(Thanks to Ian Christie for the link)

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2: The early cultural signs of change: Structures of feeling, Part 2

In my first post on Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling’, I reviewed the underlying argument, and how cultural forms create space for new forms of politics. In this second half, I explore this further—and compare the idea of ‘structures of feeling’ to Graham Molitor’s emerging issues analysis.

Williams argues that the extent of the reach of mass communications means that the gap between “alternative” and “oppositional” effects of culture has narrowed. I struggled a little with Williams’ distinction here, and I’ll return to this shortly. But, in brief, they blur because, well, culture behaves in complex and emergent ways.

(Raymond Williams, sketched by Leandro Gonzalez de Leon. CC BY-SA 3.0)

Broadly though, if my understanding is right, “emergent” speaks to the appearance of new forms of culture, and “alternative” and “oppositional” speak to their positioning in relationship to dominant culture. Some emergent cultures remain separate, detached, from dominant culture for relatively long periods of time (grime, for example).

The distinction between “alternative” and “oppositional” is harder to get to. Williams writes them together a lot of the time (as in, “alternative or oppositional”), and the reason he does this is because the definition partly depends on the response of the dominant culture, and partly by the nature of the social institutions (or “formations”) they generate. But my best reading here of his analysis, using music examples—mine, not his, obviously—punk seems oppositional, in that its lasting political legacy was Rock Against Racism.

In contrast, “alternative” structures of feeling connect to the creation of alternative forms of social institution and organisation, even while being partially recuperated into dominant culture. My best example here is the cultural thread from electronic music to disco. If this seems like an odd example, I have written about it here: it is the point that crystallises the fight over values that is still the dominant political conflict of our times.

These examples also underline Williams’ point that there are limits as to how completely a dominant culture can absorb or recuperate elements that come from outside of it. Sometimes this is done as pastiche (“facsimiles”).

The notion of class runs through the book—it is called Marxism and Literature for a reason. But Williams’ reading of culture owes as much to the Italian theorist Gramsci as it does to Marx. The problem he is trying to solve here is about the relationship between the ‘base’ in Marx’s writing—the economic relations in society—and the ‘superstructure’, which references the forms of social and cultural structures that emerge. Marx saw this relationship as largely deterministic: base determined superstructure.

But if this is the case, how does change happen that can lead to changes in the base? Gramsci’s answer to this was to develop his notion of ‘hegemony’, in which particular classes were able to rule through social consent rather than depending on force.

Williams argues, similarly, that the superstructure is not simply determined by the base.

[T]here is always other social being and consciousness which is neglected and excluded: alternative perceptions of others, in immediate relationships; new perceptions and practices of the material world. In practice these are different from the developing and articulated interests of a rising class.

In this formulation, these represent two different forms of the emergent. The first is class, the second is “the excluded social (human) area.” They can travel together: “political practice” is shaped by both. But they are not the same thing.

The final, and critical, point about emergent culture is that it is not just about practice. “[I]t depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of forms.” [126]

One of the elements of this that connects it to the way that futurists think about emerging issues is Williams’ argument that initially these new “semantic figures” can seem isolated, which is why they start as “hypotheses”. It is only later that we can connect them up as a form of social or cultural change.

The example he gives is from the mid-19th century.

“Early Victorian ideology”, Williams writes, “specified the exposure caused by poverty, debt or illegitimacy as social failure or deviation.”

In contrast, Dickens, Emily Bronte, and others created new semantic figures. These

”specified exposure and isolation as a general condition, and poverty, debt, or illegitimacy as its connecting instances”.

A new “structure of feeling” can therefore also be thought of as a new structure of meaning. He also stresses the importance of specificity:

A specific structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions,... and particular deep starting points and conclusions. [134]

In the case of debt, these fictional representations were early signs of a new ideology that coalesced only later, based on a different explanation of the social order, in which elements of social protection were developed initially by trades unions and the co-operative movement, and later codifed into law by the reforming Liberal government of 1906-11.

In other words, what happens here is that these “new semantic figures” describe “a pre-emergence, active and pressing but not yet fully articulated”. In turn, this creates an initial tension, which is articulated by cultural representation. This tension reduces over time as new institutional forms, and social and cultural forms, emerge to solidify this new social explanation.

As an aside, I wrote about something a little similar in an article that discussed, in the context of Carlota Perez’s technology and finance model, the “pre-installation” conditions that could be seen in the period before a new technology surge started.

Futurists have become more interested in the nature of weak signals and emerging issues over the past two decades, as methods have come into the mainstream that were less interested in structural factors of change. It happens, and perhaps this is not a coincidence, that Graham Molitor’s pioneering article on emerging issues analysis was also published in 1977.

To be sure, Molitor’s approach was very different. When he wrote his short article, he was Director of Government Relations at the large American foods company General Mills, and he came to emerging issues analysis through a public policy lens. He was also interested in improving the quality of forecasts, in a relatively positivist way, rather than understanding the relationship between cultural change and social and political change.

His S-curve approach has become standard in futures work now, but what is interesting in this context is the way that he analysed the sources that could be signs of early stage change. Early in the short article (1977, 7) he argues that “isolated events, often viewed at first as bizarre or unique, eventually are pulled together, ans also how aggregation of the events prompts analysis and the identification of trends.”

Part of analysis is, specifically, about literature, as we see in his Figure 3 (1977, 9).

(Source: Graham Molitor, 1977.)

In his description, Molitor says of Figure 3 that

Various classes of literature emerge at different times — lead-lag times of up to 100 years can be involved — therefore, “early warnings” about emerging problems can be obtained from careful literature search.

At the left hand end of the S-curve, which is approximately where we would expect to find Williams’ structures of feeling, Molitor’s list of sources seems narrower—“artistic poetic works, science fiction, fringe media, underground press.” Perhaps his positivism is getting the better of him here, since Williams would certainly argue that fiction in general—such as Dickens and Emily Brontë—is just as capable of analysis for “structures of feeling”.

In later work (2009), Molitor characterised this early stage as ‘Framing’. I’d say that he saw this as a research stage, where researchers were making sense of a policy issue, but I would read it as messier than this: that stage where ideas are floating around but are not fully understood, and therefore there are arguments about what they mean and how they might evolve.

I don’t think the two men would have got on, had they ever met. Molitor came to General Mills after two periods working on policy in the White House, for Presidents Nixon and Ford. Williams was a founding figure of New Left Review and had edited the May Day Manifesto 1968. But the differences between the two men were bigger than this. Molitor wanted to build a forecasting machine; Williams wanted to change the world.

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j2t#661

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