THE UK’S INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY is a holy trinity of efficiency, jobs, prosperity. A sugar, salt and fats hit to the national bloodstream. But industry is not a magical answer to communities. And putting to death the manufacturing mirage is Rasputin-like. New manufacturing requires eye-watering complexity, beyond the UK’s capability. Our favourite nemesis, due to its manufacturing endurance, Germany, is now running into a bureaucratic quagmire, its conservativism resisting transition to new economies.

But hope springs in returning to adjusting other national strategies, not least developing management executives with an improved blend of the symbolic and literal. Our pragmatism, in the shape of urgent-dogmas, like efficiency, over and above strategic vision, has produced recipe-mindsets. Belief in ‘evidence-based technique’, like the Russian mystic himself, will not die easily.

The global dominance of US firms is one thing, but what marks out the ‘US organisation’ is its longevity. Its ability to manage performance over long cycles. This is not due to the absolutism of any dogma, but rather long-term investment in strategic management and leadership. This well-recorded skills gap in UK boardrooms has left us nursing a 120-year decline.

The need to speak into the difficult, the complex and the contradictory remains. The UK’s technocratic boardroom requires re-balancing. Cyril Connolly, critic, might have put it that this mixed approach is a ‘pollen fertilising a new generation’. Anti-long-termism is deep-seated in the English psyche. But a new élan vital will be necessary to transcend performance-politics and its failure to craft a UK grand economic strategy.

For a diverting example of the tension between the symbolic and literal, the stage ruckus at last year’s Oscars echoed two forgotten incidents. Live on British TV, in 1963, Desmond Leslie struck broadcaster Bernard Levin. Levin’s tabloid review of Leslie’s wife’s stage show, Savagery and Delight, was unflattering. 

The other ugly moment was John Grigg emerging from London’s Television House on an August evening in 1957, and Philip Burbidge slapping him across the face. Grigg had written that Queen Elizabeth II was: “priggish… captain of the hockey team, a prefect”. Burbidge, a reactionary patriot, argued these criticisms injured British post-war recovery. There was scorn for Grigg, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Australian Prime Minister.

But Grigg was no anti-monarchist. He was Lord Altrincham, distinguished WWII Guards officer. Thirty years later the Queen’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, thanked Grigg publicly for his remarks. It nudged monarchy to adjust.

Grigg wrote it was tradition that demanded his voice. “Shinto-style” worship of monarchy is a popularist phenomenon, undermining legitimacy.  Here was an interface between the ancient symbolic and modern literal. Grigg’s writing carried a marriage between literal and symbolic worlds, seeing little separation; versus Burbidge who planted a country flag in modern territory. Out of the two stark moments who was fully participatory in a changing world, and conscious of its complexities?

Cyril Connolly asked at the end of the 1930s what new literature would stand around for the next ten years. What qualities will carry ‘the good’ into the future, and what are we “unnaturally” praising that will not stand the test of time?

The answer from tradition is action which has the literal and symbolic mixed within them. The ability to see the microcosm and macrocosm in a relationship. He spotted T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats were a good bet. We ask now what speech, mood, worlds provide a genuine context.

The ordered and apparently coherent worlds of Old Diplomacy, the pre-war period, and the statecraft of post-war reconstruction, contained the seeds of our world of scrabble-politics and recipe-management. The rules-based American establishment was caught in similar frenzy to Britain. Britain saw re-ordering of its social-contract, its top-tier aristocracy and establishment-religion sliding out of mainstream influence. As such we have gradually shifted to the modern literal where an expertocracy narrow channels of thought.

This has meant opportunism fights strategy; ‘the professional’ pokes mandarins; the technocrat bars intellectuals. America’s old guard termed this an ‘attack of the primitives’. Literary criticism has disappeared as a halter on hack-journalism. The commentariat give little space, moving from one trench to the next.

These are tussles of geopolitical sentiment. New Zealand writer Gordon McLauchlan, in The Passionless People, attacked his own people as “smiling zombies, the living dead but happy enough about it, even smug”. Literal hopefulness misses the arcane world. New leadership inserts the humanness of leading, necessarily, but does not join it to grand doctrines.

The current UK political class is difficult to satirise. When satire no longer works, unthinking deference to small ideas has been at work for too long.

There are major reforms pending in the UK, from health to welfare, but we do not know yet what ‘big ideas’ will underpin. Politics suffers from its shrunken vocabulary. Literalism has made it harder to speak into the complex.

The doctrine of the literal says it is alright to act without any commitment to understanding our place in the universe. And this is where much pain arises, as the literal modern acts with full commitment but not from where they think they are in the universe.

Grigg, and his type of private conscience, has been overwhelmed by the noise of popularist opinion. Despite Britain’s ancient and modern governance being unique amongst liberal democracies. At stake currently is our participation in the universe. Can we locate ourselves properly and fully, in order to engage with sufficient confidence?

The British admixture of medieval monarchy and modern nation-state make Britain a royal republic (old and new). The English ‘revolution’ was 140 years ‘ahead’ of France’s. Monarchy was conceived in a mythic space, where notions of time and space as territory were little known. Medieval minds were also occupied with heavenly cosmologies, imaginations.

Enlightenment thought, along with modern map-making, offered new images of the world from the 15^th century onwards. The emergence of international sovereign territory, with its boundaries, came to offer physical space as more real than imagined. The modern nation-state emerged out of a medieval fog of ambiguous authority, city states and village clamour.

Burbidge was really slapping Grigg with a territory map. Grigg appealed to tradition’s multipolar transcendent reference points, beyond geography. And the doctrines that emerge from modern literal consciousness can take on a life of their own.

Western business has suffered similar challenges of imagination and boundaries. The tradition of trading exchange (mercantilism), floating values, porous boundaries, has gradually fallen under the growth of institutional regulation, bureaucratic fixity and Fordist hierarchy.

We sometimes refer to these tensions under the amorphous term: Globalisation. Badly defined it means internationalisation of trade. This underplays its usefulness. A more compelling development is:

Modern globalisation is the spread of two contradictory aspects of modernity, solid and liquid. The term ‘modernity’ (modernité) was first used in Charles Baudelaire’s essay The Painter of Modern Life in 1863. Society no longer ‘tattoos’ us with its traditions; we wake, paint ourselves as we choose. The Latin root of modern is modus, meaning now, used in the fifth century to mark the Christian-era as emergent from a pagan world. So ‘the new’ is always popping up in the ancient. It is not new.

So what of solid modernity? This is a perception of progress through replacing tradition’s symbols (mythology) with an administrative logos (rational literalism) e.g. rules-based economies i.e. nation-states and their first agents, institutions. With their consequent reduction in the participation of the citizen.

Our primitive pre-logical intuition formed from immediate participation with the world, gradually was replaced by the state’s agents framing our exchanges with each other. The chaos of modernity, ripping up the agrarian rhythms of natured time and space, replaced by the legal state (nations as a collection of laws). The world of demarked time and space, required categoric language: category speechness, we might say.

Liquid modernity? Erosion of national boundaries so institutions and communities can by-pass solid modernity’s vertical structures and interact. In fact, a cry from tradition, to restore a multipolar mix of the symbolic and literal. A neo-medieval appeal.

We can put aside the notion of post-modern (loss of shared meaning, and thereby end of participation in the world) as people are participatory in modernity. They desire its technology, and, no longer wish to exit shared consciousness, but rather re-enter as participants. They are wedded to domesticated lives. The post-modernists’ view of language as dis-locating has received an interesting rebuttal. That language works well within boundaries e.g. cities. Wherever we go we pull down shared meaning which allows us to enter into participation.  

What has this meant for firm strategy? Solid-modernity has gradually, and unwittingly, produced the doctrine of The Efficiency State. Modern management focused on progress as speed and scale. Language as functional rather than structural. Meaning it is partly language that drives institutional separations of activity. Economics prefers its vocabulary-set, and gets confused when sitting down with foreign policy’s lexicon.

From solid-era cottage-industry, to factory, to Ford’s production line, to lean integrated extended global supply chains, the efficiency fly-wheel has spun faster, not least in literal and categoric minds, susceptible to solid modernity’s reductions. Modernity requires its officer ‘to see’ activity, and map it, often ponderously.

You will recall the doctrine of critical mass and economies of scale that dominated the industrial era up until the 90s. The acquisition-as-growth, asset stripping, shareholder-value of the 80s.

And the ultra-lean philosophy of the 21^st century. The latter driven by the astonishing spread of liberalising democracies and willingness of China et al to serve as factories-to-the-world, taking care of the labour-intensive low value activity.

Business models have tended to remain imagined as left-to-right transformation models, from the 19^th century. Raw materials arrive, executives determine how value is increased, with the consumer at the end of the process, who may or may not choose to buy. Speeding this continuum is inevitable.

This was the Era of Modern Management. Observable movement of capital, its deployment. And management had a quasi-religious status i.e. the executive as oracle and arch-functionalist.

The doctrine of efficiency, super-integrated supply chains, the world as an ever-expanding open space, now had its educated executives, with analytical philosophies promoted by scientific management from the American school.

The left-to-right model, with management oversight, started to change with the advent of the Internet. Relatively quickly the consumer no longer appeared only at the end of the supply chain.

They started to know more about products than the sales team, with inventories visible online. Amazon’s retail website meant consumers were interacting with product before it was manufactured. The consumer entered the creative process without executive control (in overplayed jargon, co-created).

Coupled with capital flowing at the speed of light, markets moved from observable managed processes to increasingly biological ecosystems. Imagined more than plotted. Management as a concept has yet to catch-up.

The traditional balance between labour and capital is being lost, as globalised capital disproportionately gains higher returns. Adam Smith did not envision monopolies and the modern money society, but conceived a natural moral effect of free markets.

The steady erosion of national boundaries following the Berlin Wall’s demise freed up liquid-modern globalisation; an appeal for a neo-medieval world, a network society, ambiguous, boundaryless, dis-integrated. This is the tug of tradition, the desire to root time and space back into the domestic dullness of ordinary life, free from modern order.

As a result we are in an economic re-set. But critically how does firm governance react to biologically behaving markets, and the loss of ‘managed economies’. Britain finds itself at this interesting crossroads. The extreme limit of solid modern progress, and planned economy has been reached, embodied in the European Union. It was meant to be a supranational entity (organic sharing across member states), but became The Super State, and ran into the ‘collective intuition’ of the hi-sea-faring, globally-minded, provincial English.

The future then is a re-entry of the non-participatory citizen and business into the fray of politics and geopolitics.

What is interesting is that the shadow of our working-class communities, their enduring cultural features, are that they mixed the literal and symbolic more naturally than the still nascent middle-class. The working-class is an enduring culture. It is really still there, not as a collectivised body, or movement, but in cultural linguistic terms. The middle-class has no culture to speak of. No natural language-set. They have capital, equity, aspiration of a kind, but no criss-crossing cultural roots; so draw on working-class legacy, to borrow symbolic meaning.

The middle-class populate technocratic roles. It is a syncretic class, borrowing from ‘all over the place’ to establish itself. The British middle-class to some degree is arriving into the American middle of the 1960s. As Britain adopts America’s money-society, narrowing its class-ladder, it has also adopted its: “bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development…” (Herzog, Saul Bellow’s creation, explores the educated middle space of 60s America, with its multiple paths.) Such is the nature of ‘excessive rationality’, leaning us towards the literal and visible, at the cost of wider meaning.

Philip Roth, recorder of American provincialism, offers also the interface between modern educated characters and their small-town settings. Britain has borrowed its post-war consciousness from American optimism without spotting the US is a “frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard…” (The Human Stain). What the British middle has missed is this process led to depoliticisation, and a loss of the symbolic. Grigg’s arguments about change were located in a 1950s Britain that had still, then, a grand synthesis. His remarks could be located within a whole. Any new synthesis can only be established locally. The patchwork of institutions that oversaw and managed British decline has to enable differently, and allow its communities to construct new syntheses.

Having drawn on odd voices of Connolly and Grigg, risking fogey-eccentricity, they need odd balancing with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s. He countered directive voices with a recognition that for all their good, he remained in favour of concepts that included: “freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges”, than urgent ‘mobilising forces’. The rational force to ‘get there’ has meant popularism. This brought in leaders tempted to participate in “monolithic lie-structures”, but for no obvious purpose. The long-term value of “time-lagging” symbolism against the over-rationalising industrial ‘advanced countries’ is worth our re-engagement. Literalism gets people into a knot.