The Happiness Industry Read online

  Just as Mayo’s emphasis on dialogue created an opening for a more thoroughly egalitarian critique of business hierarchy, the study of stress in the workplace achieved something similar for a while. Work carried out by the psychologist Robert Kahn and his colleagues at the University of Michigan during the early 1960s highlighted the various ways in which power structures and work design impact upon the health of employees.33 Badly designed jobs and lack of proper recognition in the workplace were clear contributors to physical and mental ill-health. Lack of any influence over where and when one carries out a task is a stress factor, which takes its toll on both mind and body. A number of clear routes, between the injustices of hierarchical business and the vulnerabilities of the human body, were becoming apparent. One of the most important of these was the discovery that stress leads to the cortisol hormone being released into the bloodstream, hardening the arteries and increasing the risk of heart attack.34 Despite the high-profile obsession with executive burn-out, this form of stress is far more common for those lacking power or status at work.

  By the 1980s, the non-specific syndrome that Selye had first identified in his lecture hall in 1925 had become one of the most pressing problems confronting managers in the Western world. Workers were no longer reporting straight-forward physical fatigue of the sort that Frederick Taylor might have understood; nor were they simply unhappy in a way that Elton Mayo might have recognized. They were now exhibiting a generalized deflation of activity, a form of psychosomatic collapse that we have come to identify with the concept of stress. In the UK, stress overtook repetitive strain injury in 2012 as the leading cause of absence from work. This is not easily classified as either a physical illness or a mental illness. What prompts it may include work but may equally include other types of social, psychological or physical demands that the individual simply can’t cope with.

  The science of stress was of the utmost importance for managers worrying about the depletion of their workforce. It became one of the main preoccupations of the human resources profession, who sought out rudimentary wisdom on a wide panoply of ‘bio-psycho-social’ complaints. The sheer breadth of contributory factors to stress – some tangible, others intangible – made it extremely difficult to achieve any control over it. This is in addition to the graver psychosomatic risks faced by those in precarious jobs, who move in and out of work, without even managers to support them from one month to the next. One conclusion to draw from this would be, as per the occupational health studies of the 1960s, that the fundamental politics of work had grown dysfunctional and needed a more wholesale transformation, and not simply piecemeal medical treatment. But would this be the lesson that was learnt?

  Taylor’s revenge

  When the young woman in the Hawthorne plant informed Elton Mayo in 1928 that she was hoping to visit Norway for a wedding, this would have represented an unusual level of intimacy, had Mayo been her boss. In the early twenty-first century, managers in large corporations pursue a very different form of intimacy with their employees.

  Consider Unilever, the global manufacturer of food, beauty products and cleaning products. In 2001, its senior management demanded a programme to help them personally manage their own energy levels, as they feared the consequences of executive working lifestyles.35 Being in the industry they were in, there was ample expertise to help them design this. The ‘Lamplighter’ health and well-being programme (named ‘Ignite U’ in Australia) was the result, tailor-made to help senior management keep up their performance levels and offset the risk of stress. The business benefits for Lamplighter quickly became clear, with evaluations suggesting that every £1 spent on the programme yielded £3.73 in return. It was quickly rolled out across dozens of Unilever offices around the world before being extended to cover the rest of the workforce.

  Programmes such as Lamplighter are becoming more and more common. They seek to identify a wide range of health and well-being risks in their workforce, including the sporting activities of employees and their ‘mental resilience’. Lamplighter requires Unilever employees to be formally (albeit, confidentially) assessed in terms of a range of ‘behaviours’, relating to nutrition, smoking and drinking, exercise and personal stress. The state-of-the-art workplace of today has taken on features of the doctor’s surgery, just as the doctor has been required to take on skills of the motivational manager. What are referred to as ‘Health 2.0’ technologies for the digital monitoring of well-being are often indistinguishable from productivity enhancements. The iPhone 6’s Health app, launched in September 2014, was celebrated as another example of Apple’s reimagining of our everyday lives, without much pause to think who it had really been designed for. Needless to say, employers, health insurers and wellness service providers are amongst the main enthusiasts for the phone’s constant measurement of bodily behaviour.

  Many ‘best practice’ employers now offer free gym membership to their most valued staff, and even free counselling. Business services, such as Virgin Pulse (a telling name, seeing as pulse rate represents life in its most quantifiable form), offer an integrated suite of psychosomatic programmes aimed at optimizing their physical energy, their attention span and their ‘true motivations’, through extensive digital surveillance and coaching. As the physical and the psychological character of work – and of illness – start to blend into each other, notions of ‘health’, ‘happiness’ and ‘productivity’ become ever harder to distinguish from each other. Employers end up treating all three things as a single entity, to be maximized via a range of stimuli and instruments. This is the monistic philosophy of the twenty-first century manager: each worker can become better, in body, mind and output.

  The political hope that perhaps the human benefits of dialogue and workplace empowerment might be more thoroughly recognized turns into disappointment, as performance management and health care are fused into a science of well-being optimization. And yet there are radical political economists for whom the de-materialization of contemporary work represents an opportunity for a whole new industrial model.36 The shift towards a ‘knowledge-based’ economy, in which ideas and relationships are key sources of business value, could be the basis of entirely new workplace structures in which power is decentralized and decisions taken collaboratively. There are good reasons to suspect that such models might produce fewer psychosomatic stresses; in that sense, they may be more efficient than the status quo. If dialogue in the workplace is a necessary factor for productivity – as Mayo recognized – why not grant it some real influence over how decisions get made, right up to the highest level? Rather than ironic management speak, which twists words to manipulate emotions in the expectation that this will yield greater output, a more honest reflection on the problems of occupational ill-health would question the hoarding of status and reward by a small number of senior managers. Instead, traditional forms of management and hierarchy are rescued by the new ubiquity of digital surveillance, which allows informal behaviour and communication to be tracked, analysed and managed.

  Rather than the rise of alternative corporate forms, we are now witnessing the discreet return of the ‘scientific management’ style of Frederick Winslow Taylor, only now with even greater scientific scrutiny of bodies, movement and performance. The front line in worker performance evaluation has shifted into bodily-monitoring devices, heart-rate monitoring, and sharing of real-time health data, for analysis of stress risks. Strange to say, the notion of what represents a ‘good’ worker has gone full circle since the 1870s, from the origins of ergonomic fatigue studies, through psychology, psychosomatic medicine and back to the body once more. Perhaps the managerial cult of optimization just needs something tangible to cling onto.

  5

  The Crisis of Authority

  In recent years, Britain’s Conservative Party has viewed its annual conference as a PR disaster waiting to happen. These meetings, traditionally held in seaside towns such as Brighton and Blackpool, see thousands of delegates from local Conservative clubs cong
regate in search of leaders finally willing to throw off the scourge of political correctness and modern values. Whether it be low-level racism emanating from the conference platform, the bland male greyness of the figures in the spotlight or the sight of elderly supporters expressing their disgust with same-sex relationships, potential embarrassment lurks around every corner.

  But in 1977, two years into Margaret Thatcher’s leadership of the party, a dose of youthful and unexpected colour was injected into proceedings. A sixteen-year-old schoolboy with a thick Northern accent, William Hague, took the platform and elicited hoots of approval from the otherwise staid conference, including from the woman who would go on to be prime minister for eleven years.

  In between tearing into the ‘socialist state’ of the Labour government of the day, the teenager gently ribbed his audience: ‘It’s alright for most of you – half of you won’t be here in thirty or forty years’ time’. He proceeded to identify the nub of the socialist threat. ‘There is at least one school in London’, he announced, ‘where the pupils are allowed to win just one race each, for fear that to win more would make the other pupils seem inferior. That is a classic illustration of the socialist state, which draws nearer with every Labour government.’

  Twenty years later, Hague was the new leader of his party. He never got to taste the electoral victory as leader that his heroine had over the course of the 1980s. But he would no doubt have been delighted with how British society had developed in the meantime. After twenty years of Thatcherite policy-making, the ‘socialist state’ was scarcely discernable anywhere, least of all in Tony Blair’s recently elected Labour government. A pro-business, free-market creed had taken hold across the Western world. And in keeping with the teenage Hague’s vision, the political appeal of competitive sport had never been higher.

  During the long economic boom that lasted from the early 1990s up until the banking meltdowns of 2007–08, sport was the great unquestionable virtue for political leaders everywhere. Attracting international sporting contests, such as the FIFA World Cup and Olympics, to particular cities became a cause célèbre for political elites who hoped to bask in the reflected glory of successful professional athletes. As prime minister, Tony Blair took to the sofa of the BBC’s flagship football programme to chat informally about the skills of his favourite midfielder. His successor, Gordon Brown, tried to get in on the act, using his first day in 10 Downing Street to give a speech citing his school rugby team as his abiding inspiration. And when his authority was tottering in the summer of 2008, Brown returned to Hague’s original theme, throwing his weight behind more competitive school sport. ‘That is the spirit we want to encourage in our schools,’ he declared, ‘not the medals for all culture we have seen in previous years, but more competition’.

  Meanwhile, there was little sporting metaphors couldn’t apparently justify. Every further inflation of executive pay was explained in terms of maintaining a ‘level playing field’ in a ‘war for talent’. When pressed by an interviewer in 2005 about the rising inequality that his government had overseen, Tony Blair responded that ‘it’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money’, despite the fact that football had nothing to do with the question.1

  Even after the epic failure of the neoliberal model of 2008, Britain’s political class has returned to this rhetoric, announcing that the ‘global race’ requires that welfare is slashed and labour markets further deregulated. The need to entrench ‘competitiveness’ as the defining culture of businesses, cities, schools and entire nations, so as to out-do international rivals, is the mantra of the post-Thatcher era. A science of winning, be it in business, sport or just in life, now brings together former sportsmen, business gurus and statisticians to extend lessons from sport into politics, from warfare into business strategy, and from life coaching into schools.

  But as the teenage Hague imagined the future thirty or forty years hence, there was one defining trend of the new era that neither he nor anybody else could foresee. It transpires that competition and competitive culture, including that of sport, is intimately related to a disorder that was scarcely discussed in 1977 but which had become a major policy concern by the end of the century. As the 1970s drew to a close, Western capitalist countries stood on the cusp of a whole new era of psychological management. The disorder at the heart of this was depression.

  One way of observing the relationship between depression and competitiveness is in statistical correlations between rates of diagnosis and levels of economic inequality across society. After all, the function of any competition is to produce an unequal outcome. More equal societies, such as Scandinavian nations, record lower levels of depression and higher levels of well-being overall, while depression is most common in highly unequal societies such as the United States and United Kingdom.2 The statistics also confirm that relative poverty – being poor in comparison to others – can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money. For this reason, the effect of inequality on depression is felt much of the way up the income scale.

  Yet there is more to this than just a statistical correlation. Behind the numbers, there is troubling evidence that depression can be triggered by the competitive ethos itself, afflicting not only the ‘losers’ but also the ‘winners’. What Hague identified as the socialist fear, that competition makes many people ‘seem inferior’, has been proved far more valid than even left-wing 1970s schoolteachers could have imagined; it also tells them that they are inferior. In recent years, there has been a flurry of professional sportspersons confessing their battles with depression. In April 2014, a group of prominent ex-sportsmen in the UK penned an open letter urging ‘sporting directors, coaches, and leaders of development programmes, to attend to the development of “inner fitness” alongside “athletic fitness”’, to protect professional sportsmen from this epidemic.3

  A study conducted at Georgetown University found that college footballers are twice as likely to experience depression as non-footballers. Another study discovered that professional female athletes display similar personality traits as those with eating disorders, both being linked to obsessive perfectionism.4 And a series of experiments and surveys conducted by the American psychologist Tim Kasser has revealed that ‘aspirational’ values, oriented around money, status and power, are linked to higher risk of depression and a lower sense of ‘self-actualization’.5 Wherever we measure our self-worth relative to others, as all competitions force us to, we risk losing our sense of self-worth altogether. One of the sad ironies here is that the effect of this is to dissuade people, including schoolchildren, from engaging in physical exercise altogether.6

  Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a society such as America’s, which privileges a competitive individual mindset at every moment in life, has been so thoroughly permeated by depressive disorders and demand for antidepressants. Today, around a third of adults in the United States and close to half in the UK believe that they occasionally suffer from depression, although the diagnosis rates are far lower than that. Psychologists have shown that individuals tend to be happiest if they credit themselves for their successes, but not for their failures. This might sound like a symptom of delusion, but it is arguably no more delusional than a competitive, depressive culture which attributes every success and every failure to individual ability and effort.

  Hasn’t America always been a competitive society? Isn’t that the original dream of the settlers, the Founding Fathers and the entrepreneurs who built American capitalism? This myth of society-as-competitive-sport surely dates back far earlier than the late 1970s; and yet it was only in the late 1970s that the epidemic of depression first took hold. It seems extraordinary now to consider that, in 1972, British psychiatrists were diagnosing depression at five times the rate of their US counterparts. And as recently as 1980, Americans still consumed tranquilizers
at more than twice the rate of antidepressants. What changed?

  From ‘better’ to ‘more’

  The sixteen-year-old Hague had taken the conference platform at a turning point in the history of economic policy-making in the Western world. According to the most respected measure of income inequality, Britain has never been more equal than it was in 1977.7 But at the same time, the case for market deregulation was becoming increasingly credible, urged on by corporations that felt that they had become victimized by regulators, unions and consumer pressure groups.8 Persistently high inflation had led a number of governments, including Britain’s, to experiment in ‘monetarism’, an attempt to control the amount of money in circulation but which also threatened economic growth and jobs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were waiting in the wings to usher in the era that would become known as ‘neoliberalism’.

  One way of understanding neoliberalism is to examine how things progressed from there: the spiralling executive pay, the unprecedented levels of unemployment, the growing dominance of the financial sector over the rest of the economy and society, the expansion of private sector management techniques into all other walks of life. Analysing these trends is important. But it is also important to understand how and why they were possible, and that involves turning in the opposite direction, to the twenty-year period which preceded young Hague’s call to arms. It is during those two decades that many of the critical ingredients of neoliberalism would shift from the outer margins of intellectual and political respectability to becoming the orthodoxies of a new era. Among these were a renewed reverence for both competitiveness and the management of happiness.