Coping with the Future

Rethinking Assumptions for Society, Business and Work

Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen, Halvor Holtskog, Richard Ennals

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351363747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Coping with the Future has been written in response to widespread international awareness that the future is not predictable. In political and economic terms, we are in unknown territory, with daily developments around Brexit and the Trump Presidency, and "Kodak moments" in business. On the other hand, business leaders demand certainty, which is not available.

This book redefines the nature of modern business. In contrast to recent trends, it has a focus on human-centred manufacturing and on decision-making which goes beyond a focus on short-term profit. The liberal capitalism of the USA and the UK is not the only current variety of capitalism. Business is not just about managers, but requires participation and engagement by workers.

Since the financial crash of 2008, there has been much talk about the need for fresh approaches to business, but little has changed. This book pulls together current research and practice and poses new questions based on case studies. There is no one simple best way, but an uncertain future can be addressed, drawing on diverse past experience and cases.

The book addresses an intended audience in business and universities, including business schools, around the world. The debate takes a broader approach, involving research in the social sciences and approaches from philosophy. The world has always been unpredictable, but we have allowed ourselves to be comforted by convenient myths. It is time to wake up.

PART I

Future political, social and institutional landscape

1

COPING WITH POLITICS

From post-nationalism to re-nationalism

Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen and Jon P. Knudsen

The re-emergence of the nation-state

Is the nation state on its way out, and are we moving gradually towards an ­international order? There are many arguments for a post-national future. Foremost among these, perhaps, is the need to address issues wider than the border of a nation, such as pollution and environmental change, and peace. The ambition to have closer collaborations, and more open borders between nations, has increased over a long period, hence the term post-nationalism. Lately we have seen a revival of nationalist ideas and a reduced willingness to go into deeper collaborations across borders. The clearest example is perhaps Brexit.

Box 1.1 UK and Brexit

The UK electorate, in a referendum in June 2016, voted to leave the European Union (EU), which the UK had joined in 1973. This had not been expected by social scientists or by any of the leading protagonists. The implications of “Brexit” will be important and far-reaching. Detailed negotiations have begun, but the UK government is divided on many key issues. The Prime Minister called a General Election, seeking a strong majority and a personal mandate. Instead, she leads a minority government and faces the prospect of an imminent further General Election. The EU can be forgiven for not understanding what the UK wants.

Business decision-makers had not expected the majority for Brexit. They now call for certainty on key issues, but the negotiations will run until March 2019. There is now controversy over what will change in 2019: Will there be a cliff-edge, or a prolonged period of transition? Could the referendum decision be reversed?

Banks and financial services based in the City of London are making contingency plans to relocate their operations, typically to Dublin, Paris or Frankfurt. European agencies based in London are to be relocated. The value of the pound sterling has fallen, with implications for imports, exports and foreign travel. UK employers who have come to depend on EU migrant workers, such as hospitals, restaurants, hotels and fruit pickers, are considering how they can respond if there are new tight restrictions on immigration with the end of the free movement of labour.

International businesses are reconsidering where they should invest if tariffs are to be charged on exports from the UK to the EU, for example with automobiles and aerospace. UK withdrawal from the EU is to be followed by complex and lengthy trade agreements with countries around the world, such as the USA and India. There is likely to be a substantial period of uncertainty.

There is discussion as to whether the UK should follow the model of Norway, which remains in the Single European Market but is not a member of the EU. However, Norway pays a substantial financial contribution, complies with EU directives and respects freedom of movement. Trade unions are ­concerned with the future of working conditions and workers’ rights, which have been protected through the UK’s membership of the EU.

Those who voted in the June 2016 referendum had to choose between “Leave” and “Remain.” Typically, voters understood few of the detailed issues, and they were subject to pressure from politicians, with misleading claims being made. The UK government had made no preparations for a decision to leave.

Issues at present include:

•There will be vigorous debate in all political parties.

•EU migrants will consider whether to return home.

•Currency values will fluctuate.

•UK universities worry that they will lose EU students and research funding.

•Productivity is likely to fall, together with real wages, while inflation rises.

•Ford, Nissan and Toyota plan to launch new models of cars, for the European market. Should these be made in UK factories, facing tariffs on exports and restrictions on recruiting overseas skilled workers?

•How should UK universities plan for the future, as they lose EU research and exchange links and risk losing EU students?

•To what extent do companies need to change their legal status and business strategies to maintain an active presence in the EU?

It is premature to declare that the nation state is a phenomenon of the past only. We exist in a political landscape where different entities of identity and decision are present. This complexity of political entities and identities is something we need to comply with, to avoid further disruptive political changes.

Historical traits

The tension between universalist and ethnically based states has played a major role in the political landscape of the Western world for centuries, dating back to ancient times. A well-known historical example is the trial of Jesus, in which Pontius Pilate, the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36, declined to interfere, as he thought it was an internal Jewish matter. Greek city states in antiquity and Italian city states in the Renaissance are early examples of political organisation based on local entities and identities. The modern nation-state was not fully established until around 1800. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established a landscape of proto-nations in continental Europe, but the Vienna Peace Congress after the Napoleonic wars is perhaps the modern manifestation of a Europe predominantly based on nation-states.

The Scandinavian countries offer important insights into the development of the nation states. They have a shared ethnic, linguistic and religious history based on a patchwork of Germanic tribes, which, in the medieval age, evolved into three distinct states fighting for hegemony in wider parts of northern Europe. Between 1397 and 1523, these states, as a function of dynastic mechanisms, merged into the unstable Kalmar Union. When it dissolved, Norway, with its subsidiaries in the North Atlantic, remained a part of Denmark. The modern frontier between Denmark and Sweden was fought over in the mid-seventeenth century and then again in the Great Nordic Wars between 1700 and 1721. During the Napoleonic wars, Sweden and Denmark were on different sides, and after the wars, Sweden forced Norway to join it in a union. This union lasted until 1905, when Norway again became an independent state. The wider Nordic nation-building processes followed suit. Finland gained its independence in 1917 and Iceland in 1944, while the Faroe Islands and Greenland are on their way to loosening their bonds with Denmark. Following lasting tension between Sweden and Russia, the entirely Swedish-speaking Åland Islands were never accorded a return to Swedish supremacy after the downfall of the Russian empire in 1917. Instead, these islands gained a semi-independent status under Finnish rule, which a large part of the population would like to see developed into full independence. Today, Denmark, Finland and Sweden have joined the EU, while Iceland and Norway are not members.

The modern nation-state tried to identify consistency between ethnicity, language, religion and territory. It succeeded in some places, but not in all. The Nordic case is instructive, in that the subsequent shifting of territories between Denmark, Norway and Sweden has resulted in reorienting national identifications with the different conquered populations, as far as these were Scandinavian-speaking in the first place. As such, Nordic nationalities display a high degree of plasticity. The Åland case illustrates this constructionist point from another angle. Under the right institutional circumstances, a small archipelago, otherwise doomed to become yet another periphery under a strong nation state, is reinventing its own nationality before our eyes.

Non-territorial states were also tested, and in some sense, were successful. The Hanseatic League, between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century, was such a construction; it established juridical links between cities, and its activity did not refer to a particular territory, but rather to a network of geographically linked entities. The Spanish throne at one point in time consisted of dots of territory scattered around Europe as a result of inheritance. However, it was a fragile construction, and this fact led to the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1715).

After the Vienna Congress in 1815, the German question remained “unsolved,” creating later enormous conflicts in Europe. In later years, the Balkans was the scene of a brutal war, re-establishing national boundaries. Ireland’s independence from Britain in the early twentieth century, the struggle over Northern Ireland in the post-war period and the recent Scottish independence movement, further encouraged by Brexit, as well as the call for independence for the provinces of Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain, are reminders of the fact that the nation-state idea is not only history. Some of these processes point to the blurred line between nationalism and regionalism. In a continent with as many identities as Europe, and with these identities undergoing as many processes of heterogenisation as of homogenisation, the potential for nation states seems to be legion.

Parallel to this line of nation-state constructions, universalism represents a strong strand in European political thinking. The Roman Empire was based on an idea of a universal order. This order was largely inherited by the Roman Catholic Church, which established a universal cultural order in Western Europe in the middle ages. This order was challenged by the Reformation, which was used in mobilising the independence of nation-states. The Code Napoleon was an attempt to re-establish a Roman Empire kind of order in Europe. It failed, and the modern European order was founded on the idea of the nation-state. European wars, which escalated into two world wars, kept the dream of an international and universal order alive.

The League of Nations was founded in 1920, following the Versailles peace conference after World War I (WWI). In 1935, it had 58 members. The United Nations was established in 1945, with World War II (WWII) as its background. Still, these international orders, even though they tried to establish some universal principles, were mostly based on nation-states. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris in 1948 and starts by declaring “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” is based on the nation-state. In article 2, it says:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

(UN 1948, art. 2)

The key phrase here is “the country or territory to which a person belongs,” although the following examples attenuate the ideal-typical role of the national state as its sole possible form.

Over the last generation, we have seen attempts to play down the role of the nation-state. The European Union, the fall of the Iron Curtain and globalisation in general have paved the way for an international order where the nation plays a lesser role. Post-nationalism has been used by some as a term for this development. Others point to the fact that the strengthening of the European Commission in the 1980s and 1990s came with the help of an alliance between Brussels and what was declared a “Europe of regions.” Supra-nationalism depended on the embryonic forms of nationalism found in regionalism to be able to prevail. Parallel to this, Porter’s (1990) reformulation of the economic world order as a global economy is built on a recognition that the real engines of economic growth and innovation are regional and not national in nature, though Porter ignores the political potential of his insights. However, these developments have been challenged, with Brexit being the most recent and strongest manifestation. We therefore need to revisit the issues of the foundations of the present political discourse. Along which dimensions should this discourse be constituted, the local/regional/national or the general/universal? This is a key tension that confronts us as we try to find our way to the future.

We argue that the modern idea of the political is historically founded in the nation state. This nation state has been challenged on several occasions, and is challenged again in the post-national area by globalisation, by migration and international cooperation and by regionalisation. An important back-drop to this challenge can be found in the roots of modern political thinking, that is, in the Enlightenment, which involves an inherent contradiction. This contradiction is exposed in the concept of modernity. By modernity we understand the socio-temporal category that is brought about by the merger of the modern and its contradiction. By modernism we understand the deliberate theming of modernity as it appears in symbolic forms, mostly in art, thinking and in cultural sciences. The future of the political is dependent on our ability to live with this contradiction, that is, to live with modernity in its various forms and to embrace it. The alternative could be the threat that the political degenerates and retreats to archaic, pre-modern forms. We reject the notion of “post-modernity” as a useful concept; we prefer the term “late modernity” to depict our present and future condition. Post-nationalism can then be seen as a pressing political concern, ready to be examined in the era of late modernity. As argued by Habermas (2001), one way ahead could be to re-establish polity and its related discourses in a post-national context that could draw on the historical virtues and past experiences of geographically secluded polities, while at the same time opening adequate arenas for discourses involving international actors and relations. This transformation from a national to a post-national political order has shown to be much more complicated than was perceived only a decade ago.

Box 1.2 The future of Europe

The European Commission has published a White Paper wherein it presents five scenarios for Europe’s future. The five are:

Carry on: This scenario implies an incremental development along the path that is already in place, making different policy areas work better, expanding the euro zone and moving towards a more unified foreign policy.

Nothing but the single market: This scenario rolls back the EU to the economic aspects of the union, leaving the other political areas more or less up to the nation states.

Those who want more do more: This will open the door for a two-speed Europe, increasing and deepening co-operating between some states, while leaving others with a less integrated relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: A disruptive world and ways of knowing
• PART I Future political, social and institutional landscape
• PART II Knowing the future
• PART III Future technology, organisation and work
• Conclusion
• References
• Author index
• Subject index